Game Difficulty Settings

hi everyone it's me Tim and today I want to talk about game difficulty specifically I got a question from Noah Calder 4279 who asks I'd love if you could share your thoughts on difficulty in RPGs do you think customizable difficulties such as settings and Sliders work well in RPGs which are the best methods of making RPGs difficult and should RPGs get easier or more difficult the further a player advances through the game that is a set of good questions that all fall under game difficulty so I thought okay time to do a game difficulty video so just up front I do like customizable difficulty settings I think anything that makes a player turn the game into something they'd like more I'm not against frequently in my career I've had arguments with people designers programmers who think that every time you put an option in a game it's because you couldn't make a decision and I see where they're coming from there were sometimes I couldn't decide what was better and I thought maybe I'll make an option and you can flip back and forth between these two but their argument and I see their argument is also it's hard to make your game good when you get to the balancing fun stage because you have to balance it against all these possible options that the player May set however I also view it as an accessibility thing like I said I have a friend who likes to play games because he's a level designer and he always sets the games difficulty to easy because what he wants to do is see the game not necessarily get stuck on a particularly difficult combat encounter and I agree with that that's a perfectly valid way of playing the game so that's how I view game difficulty sliders it's something that people want to adjust to their level of personal you know Comfort playing the game now there's a whole bunch of ways you can make the game more difficult ult um I have an entire video on enemy progression and how I like to do it so you may want to go watch that I'll put a link below but one thing you can do to make a game harder when you set it to be I want this game to be more difficult is whatever your algorithm is for that enemy progression which is probably based on the level of the player just push it up a little maybe when you when an an a combat encounter occurs you pass in the player's level plus five if you're playing on a hard difficulty or maybe the player's level minus three if you're playing on an easy difficulty if you really want to make like a super hard level you could pass in the player's level times two because then the game would start off just a little bit harder than it would normally be at level one and two but it would quickly become much more difficult which is what some people want so that is one way you can do it um and that's an easy way if if you do enemy progression the way I suggested that's a pretty easy way to implement a game difficulty slider another thing you could do is numerical changes those are the easiest things like the player has less hit points or the monsters have more the player has slower Health regeneration or maybe they don't have any health regeneration in combat or maybe they don't have any health regeneration outside of combat maybe you have to sleep uh rest somewhere to get your health back and rest requires you know food and camp supplies or you can only do it in a particular place or maybe you can only do it someplace like an inn where you pay for so now Health regeneration is gated behind something which makes the player really question can I keep going forward with the health I'm at now it makes the game harder you can also as a purely numerical thing say every skill check in the game on hard mode is a little harder so I I talk about at one point where you set skill checks as a um instead of having everyone who puts a skill check in saying I'm checking against 70 or I'm checking against 80 they Mark skill checks say this is an easy check this is a medium check this is a hard check this is a very hard check which then transfers via a table to how difficult the skill checks are going to be tested actually in the game I said you could do that in order to when you get to the final balancing phase you may want to adjust maybe a medium check isn't checking against 50 maybe it's checking against 60 you can do that that that's one reason that table exists but you can also make a separate table for separate game difficulties so a hard check in Easy Mode might be 50 in normal mode might be 75 in hard mode might be 85 and in difficult mode might be 95 so that's a good way of of making combat difficulties with no code changes whatsoever so there's also a lot of non-numerical things you can do that make a game more difficult you can add food the the requirement to eat food to drink water and to sleep um that only occur when you're playing in harder difficulties we did that in the outer worlds you got hungry you got thirsty you got tired and you had to do those things and those things cost resources cost money so the game is that much more difficult because of that you also can do things like let's get rid of fast travel you have to walk everywhere in outer worlds we said you can only fast travel back to the ship so if you wanted to ever stop for the day you could just fast travel back to the ship but that was the only valid fast travel location in Supernova difficulty you when you left the ship you had to walk wherever you wanted to go which took time meant you had to go through encounters again makes the game that much more difficult now some people are going well this just makes the game more it adds friction almost any difficulty that that you can imagine that's harder is friction to some people while it's difficulty to others um so that's going to be true for all of these so if that's if that's your um argument against doing these I don't really have a defense because it's true for everything you're going to do now many RPGs mine included only had difficulty sliders for combat even though there are other ways of playing the game stealth dialogue those are really common other play ways of playing the game now a lot of those say those get more difficult with higher um difficulties setting by just making the skill checks higher which is what I talked about you know you can say these skill checks are higher based on the difficulty mode but there are other things you can do you could say for stealth in more difficult settings that the detection radius for being seen by enemies is bigger or the when you're being VI viewed the detection rate in other words somebody sees you and some bar goes like this and when it hits the bottom they've seen you and they come after you that that falls down the rate at which it collapses is faster at higher difficulty levels you can do that similarly with dialogue in addition to skill checks you could just say whatever you need to have a successful dialogue statement remember I've talked about maybe M dialogue should involve getting evidence for things we did that in Fallout you couldn't just walk up to the master and say all of the mutants are sterile you had to prove it and you had to prove it by talking to a Brotherhood of Steel scientist name V and getting a hollow dis of that data of that evidence so one thing you could do is you could say evidence that you need to support dialogue statements in conversations are harder to reach maybe you can Mark some of the evidence and it moves to a location that's more difficult or it moves to or if it's in a container the lock on that container becomes more difficult or if it's somebody that you have to talk to maybe they move to a more difficult place or maybe there's an alternate person who is farther into an area maybe you have to do quests to reach that person maybe you have to talk to more people or sneak past people that person is just harder to reach for some reason these require more work but once you set them up then they just automatically change when you change the difficulty settings so those those things you can do to make the game more difficult not just in combat and then finally there are some things you can do that are neither numerical or non-numerical I I consider them less handholding and these are things you can literally revert to how games used to be when they were harder some people will never want this they view it as we gave up we stopped doing these in older games for a reason but other people miss it these include things like when you get a quest there is no Quest marker the person will tell you where to go or tell you roughly where to go I think the Bandit's hidden up in a cave up North but you have to go find it you don't get a marker on your map saying well there's the cave with the bandits in it maybe you don't have Maps there were a lot of older games that didn't have Maps they might have had a world map but no local map they might have had a town map but no dungeon map some didn't have maps at all those are something that came later people like making Maps themselves or writing down what they needed to do it's basically less handholding for the player and makes the game more difficult you could also get rid of the quest log if you really wanted to go hardcore you could say you have no Quest log if someone tells you to do something you got to remember remember what they told you to do and what they want you to get and who it is who asked and where they're located because that makes the game some people argue it makes the game far more immersive it's a trivial thing to implement you can say on super difficult hard difficulty Quest log doesn't exist you hit L for log and nothing happens so it can be done but for all of these the reason I recommend making it an option is that goes too far for some people that's too much friction even though you're making the game more difficult and they say they want the game more difficult for some people difficulty and annoyance they separate that out and that may be too annoying so the question about what is the best way to do this it's hard to answer it really depends on your game depends on what you're trying to make what kind of game you're making what what what difficulty Factor you're trying to hit what options you want to open up to the players what you don't um what you have time to code what you don't so I would say of all the things I just mentioned on how to make a game more difficult you're going to have to decide for yourself which ones you can use and then for the final question about should RPGs get easier or harder as you play them I have a trick it's a trick question because I have a trick answer they should get both easier and harder as you play because as you play through the game and you get higher level you want to feel more powerful you want to be able to stomp on some things that's why I don't like level scaling places you've been before before that you that were a little difficult for you to get through should be easier when you go through on higher level things you run into before like maybe those Bandits down by the bridge that you that would always stomp you when you were lower level it's fun to go back when you're higher level and stomp them however if everything just gets easier as you go up a level the game just gets easier and easier until finally the end you have hear the common complaint of nothing is nothing's challenging I have tons of money and nothing to spend it on so I think new places in the game should become harder that's why I talked about why I don't like General enemy scaling I do like making it so when you enter into an area that area's level is set to your current level so as this new as your player character gets higher level when he goes into new places he finds challenges there but when he goes to Old places he finds them easier because he's more powerful so that's kind of my answer to that it's kind of I I hope you don't think it's ducking the the question because I do think it's a good question but the answer isn't that RPGs should become easier or harder it's they get easier in some places and harder in others so I think that's all my thoughts on game difficulty many of which I did in my games some of which I never did but I wished I had and so I hope that answers your question Noah Calder 4279

Channel: Timothy Cain

Views: 12,689

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Id: wUI6LZaCKCg

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024