Game design Analysis: Difficulty settings

Calling anything “bad game design” is a bit touchy since a certain design decision might be inadvisable in some circumstances, but be the right thing to do in others. For instances, many role playing games have very slow starts, and that is often considered a cardinal sin of the genre, but in a series like Persona, the slow start is actually a good design choice as it serves the purpose of presenting a cast of characters that is integral to the story as well as setting the general vibe of the game’s world. However, there are a few things in game design that simply cannot be excused in any way. One of those irredeemable design choices is unlockable difficulty settings.

To better understand the issues tied with such a feature, it is important to understand how difficulty and skill is inherently tied in the equation. Each person begins their play through at a certain skill level. One person could be an experienced gamer who has played similar games in the past, or just be naturally skillful at games in that genre. The other might be a newcomer, or simply not be very experienced at this particular type of game. Each player starts at a different skill level and with a different baggage of experiences and traits. This variety in player aptitude is something that can be simply known as “base skill”.

The other element to take into consideration is the rate at which individual skills are built. While there is no such thing as a hard skill ceiling where a player has reached perfection and can no longer improve, players do go through very different learning curves. Some learn very quickly, while others learn at a much slower rate. Some might reach roadblocks that others won’t, and some might breeze through everything. This individual difference in learning speed and potential is what I often call “Skill growth”.

Each individual starts at a different base skill and have a different skill growth curve. As such, someone could already be very highly skilled but still have much room to grow, one could alternatively have high skill, but have less room to grow. In Fire Emblem terms, that would be the equivalent of Oiffey and a Jagen. In other words, there are two continuums to consider:

Low base skill <---------------> High base skill

Low skill growth <--------------> High skill growth

Anyone can lie anywhere on those two continuums for an endless amount of combinations of skill varieties. Furthermore, that is only a per-game basis thing. An individual might place in far different places on those two continuums depending on their past gaming experiences and familiarity with certain features for example.

With all of these things taken into consideration, it is safe to assume that a game with a single arbitrary difficulty setting is bound to not be capable of fully capturing the challenge needs of every single player. If a game is too hard for someone to grasp at first, it might be hard for them to keep going long enough for them to understand its appeal. Furthermore, if a game is too easy for a player, it might become a slog to play through and interest might be lost. To account for that, many developers have added multiple difficulty settings, which can go a long way to aid people of different base skills getting the challenge they are seeking. However, this method does not take skill growth into account. Perhaps someone will start on normal but eventually grow to surpass this difficulty mode’s challenge level. Maybe someone will begin his adventures of hard, but the challenge will rise faster than they can keep up with. In both of these cases, difficulties set in stone would no longer be adapted to their current skill level. One potential solution would be to simply allow players to switch settings on the fly, or something akin to the Kid Icarus Uprising mechanic that actually suggests incremental increases or reductions in difficulty levels based on your performance.

The biggest mistake that developers make with difficulty settings, however, is making them into unlockable rewards. Let us take this scenario as an example: “An enthusiastic Legend of Zelda fan who has played every single prior games in the series decided to pick up “A Link Between Worlds” for the first time. Let us call him “Sir Armando the third” for simplicity’s sake. Sir Armando has quite a bit of experience with the Zelda series and sees that he can only start up the game on normal mode. Sir Armando decided to play through the game and beats it with little to no effort, wishing he could access Hero mode on his first play through. When he finally unlocks it, our dapper aristocrat begins his Hero mode play through and spits out his tea in despair. “My word!” he exclaims as he realizes that he is breezing through the game once again. Wiping his tea-stained silk garments, as well as the warm tears streaming down his face, he comes to this dark realization: “My skill with this game has grown on my first run through! Hero mode has been rendered pointless! Oh, misery, why could I not pick it when it would have once mattered!”.

Locking a difficulty setting only serves on purpose: To frustrate highly skilled players like Sir Armando the third into playing through a game that is far too easy for them, only to unlock a mode that may have become too easy as a result of their accumulated experience. It also makes the initial experience of such players so uneventful that it negatively colours their initial experience. It makes them wish that they had experienced the game’s plot while they were having fun with the gameplay as opposed to wanting to rush through it to get to what they consider to be the “good part”. Locked difficulty settings are one of the only features in games that I can safely say, without a shadow of a doubt and without exception, is bad design.