The balancing act of game difficulty

Difficulty is a good thing in video games for a number of reasons: it keeps the player invested, provides a sense of progression, and in some cases can expand upon the game world, making exploration and overcoming the challenge that much more rewarding. The caveat to this difficulty is that it is, ironically, difficult to achieve, a veritable tightrope where one side is disappointingly easy and the other is frustratingly hard with only that balance in the middle that is a satisfying challenge that elevates a game onto another level.

Of course, difficulty is quantified in different ways in different games, for example the way a real-time strategy game provides a challenge would be different to how a first person shooter does, but there are basic principles that can be applied to anything which revolve around fairness. The basis of a good challenge is making sure the player still has a chance, even if the odds are stacked against them; it's easy to put someone up against nigh-impossible odds like surrounding them with a hundred enemies that sponge damage, or introducing a puzzle with no clues as to how it works, but these aren't interesting scenarios, they're dense walls designed to induce a fail state. There are times when a forced failure can be used for gameplay or story reasons to exemplify the power of an enemy or the near hopelessness of a situation, however if it's a situation that the player is expected to beat then it just becomes frustrating.

The other side of the coin can be equally as bad, since an event or enemy built up for a while falls completely flat if it's too easy and can be passed with little-to-no effort, which has the inverse effect of making the world feel shallow and attempting to be more than it really is. A game that is consistently too easy or has no difficulty curve gets boring, if the player is never given a proper challenge then they are never properly engaged. This is difficult to get right, as each person is different in what they view as a sufficient challenge and what they view as too difficult.

This can be remedied somewhat by difficulty sliders, which can encompass several different levels of difficulty and therefore include a range of different people who enjoy different levels of challenges, but this then comes with its own problems of how changing difficulty affects the game; in a lot of cases this can just make enemies tougher while making the player weaker which feels like a cheap way of making things harder. The games with the best options for this are ones that affect how the game works rather than simply buffing opponents, for example the recent entries into the Hitman series ramp up the difficulty by changing how many saves and hints the player gets, as well as putting in more ways for the player to get spotted and, at the toughest difficulty, having disguises be unusable if they get bloody. All of these additions encourage more careful and throrough play, rewarding the player's knowledge of the game and levels by giving them a challenge worthy of that knowledge.

For examples of difficulty done well and poorly, you need to only look at the series renowned for its difficulty, Dark Souls; in the first game, probably the biggest leap in difficulty is the Ornstein and Smough fight which comes at around the middle of the game. This fight pits you against two opponents, both of whom are highly lethal and can seem like an unfair challenge to anyone on their first playthrough. On closer inspection they actually choreograph their attacks well, with both of them opening themselves up to attacks and giving the player space to heal between their barrages, it's an exercise in cautious play but it isn't as unfair as it might seem. Conversely, Dark Souls II features the Belfry Gargoyle bossfight which throws six gargoyles at the player in packs of at least two at a time. Unlike Ornstein and Smough, the gargoyles don't coordinate attacks, barraging the player with combos that are nearly impossible to avoid or survive; on most playthroughs of Dark Souls after my first, I've managed to defeat Ornstein and Smough by myself, on subsequent playthroughs of Dark Souls II, the Belfry Gargoyles are so annoying I don't even want to try.

I'm a big fan of difficult games, and I will always tend towards the harder difficulties if it's an option, but I also don't like having my time intentionally wasted as a substitute for a good challenge. A game intended to be difficult can be a tedious slog if not done well or built up to gradually over time so that players are ready for it when they reach it. In this regard, there is no easy substitute for a challenge that is well designed and thought out to the point where it isn't easy, but the player has numerous opportunities either to circumvent it or tackle it head on.