On Difficulty in Games
I’ve come a long way since I was a kid, when I used to choose “easy” every time I could. My first forays into gaming were on the SNES. Obviously, there were few opportunities, back then, to choose how hard it was. That changed when I got a Playstation. As my PS1 collection grew, I came across more and more games with a difficulty select screen, before starting a new game, or in the options. It was truly a revelation for me. When I was very young, a game suddenly spiking in challenge was kind of terrifying, for lack of a better word. A sudden swarm of enemies could ruin my session instantly. This mostly only applied to horror games, but I was somewhat of any game, when it got too hard. It gave me security in a time before I knew how to beat a game at all. This extended well into the PS2 era, but things were already changing.
By that point, many designers had swung back, downgrading a difficulty-selector from game-design necessity to choice. As the Youtube legend Videogamedunkey points out, having only one difficulty is great because it’s a definitive experience. There’s just less urgency to playing, no feeling of having had a “false” gaming experience, because there wasn’t enough “challenge.” On the other hand, there are certainly benefits to tweaking the difficulty exactly to one’s liking: An easy game is great when you just want to unwind and feel like a badass, and the hardest experience is there when you want to hone your skills. Ultimately, I feel the genre has a lot to do with how difficulty is arranged. I aim to go through the genres I am most familiar with, pinpoint specific games, and describe what difficulty means for each of them. I will also offer critiques where they apply.
RPGs and their (mostly) built-in difficulty
RPGs pose an interesting challenge to this analysis, because they are probably the easiest genre to adjust the difficulty while in development, but also one which gets it wrong quite often in execution. In part, it’s easy, because most of the actual difficulty tends to be in how well the player-character’s statistics stacks up against the enemy’s. “The wolves in the starting area are easily killing a level-1 player? Let’s tone their attack power and health down.” Even so, that kind of simple adjustment can be buried by disproportionately powerful or feeble enemies later on.
Disclaimer – Unless I state otherwise, assume I’m playing these games on “Normal” difficulty.
Oblivion and Skyrim
These two are the RPGs I’ve spent the most time playing, and also the ones with the strangest dynamics when it comes to their respective challenges, so I have written quite a bit more for them than the others.
There are few roleplaying games that immerse me like The Elder Scrolls series does (shocker). Since I first got Oblivion, I was fully invested, my imagination captured. That’s pretty impressive given I was a teenager by that point, and thus had lost much of that “lose yourself” feeling from childhood. Since then, I have come crawling back to Oblivion and Skyrim (and Fallout 3 and New Vegas) for more adventures, over and over. Naturally, I have had some time to reflect on the way it structures itself, including its difficulty.
As I stated before, a perk when designing most RPGs is that, as your character progresses, developers can make the hardening of future enemies feel somewhat organic, because the story advances at the same time. It “stands to reason” that in your fantasy world, there are more dangerous areas to traverse than others, with nastier baddies. Eventually, you will have to venture there to advance the plot. Since Oblivion, Bethesda Softworks has instead implemented a system which beefs up enemies throughout the entire in-game world, with mixed results.
In Oblivion, the scaling was well out of wack, with enemies becoming as durable as T-1000s. As a result, you’d have to slash, and slash away at them before they went down. Because the game had weapon durability, it was vital to bring a golfing-bag full of weapons just to get through a dungeon. The only way to avoid this was to deliberately avoid leveling up, working on “minor” skills for while. Skyrim, on the other hand, attempted to rectify this, but perhaps a little too much.
The issue I always run into with Skyrim is becoming too powerful. At around level 10, enemies are dangerous, and certain ones actually put the fear of the eight (nine) divines back into me. I remember when I first came across a snow-troll guarding a mountain pass on my first playthrough. It took several tries, some running away, lots of swearing, but I defeated it. That experience will always stay with me. Fast-forward to my character reaching level 30 or so, and a Draugr Deathlord fails to present a truly harrowing fight, even with its cronies bursting from other coffins to fight you.
There are a few causes for this dissonance. Mainly, the scaling is still broken. To me, it feels like Bethesda crafted the experience to cater to shorter-lived characters, which do a few questlines and finish with the main storyline. You could probably finish with a character comfortably by the time you reach your mid-20s in level.
Also, there are a great deal of “outs” for the player. The meme of eating twenty potatoes mid-fight rings quite true, and that’s a huge flaw. A game like Dark Souls makes you think twice before you heal, as drinking your Estus takes time and leaves you vulnerable. Heck, even Fallout: New Vegas featured a “hardcore” mode which made stimpaks heal slowly. I’ve mitigated this a little with mods which require you to eat to live, so food is too valuable to heal with. Still, potions can be chugged instantly, as usual; In a flash, I’m relatively out of danger. Few enemies drink their own potions, though a decent number try to heal themselves (mages and spriggans, for example).
Certainly, it’s possible to choose the difficulty in the settings (I used to do that for Oblivion when the scaling got too out of wack). The problem is those just make the scaling even worse at times. Make it easier, and you become indestructible, while the enemies turn into paper. Make it harder, and you’ll swing that sword forever just to kill a common bandit.
Finally, the game is simply an “action-RPG,” and there’s just so many ways to “cheese” enemies. Some enemies can’t follow you if you stand on a tall rock, so why not just shoot arrows at them until they die? Shot an arrow at someone while sneaking? Well, be sure to fire from far off and crouch-walk as far away as you can. Eventually your mark will decide they were impaled with an arrow that was whipped around by the wind. In a cave. Yup… This is the fatal flaw of many games like this. In giving the player more control over their movement and so on, they open the door to exploitation, which breaks immersion, something Bethesda RPGs do so well otherwise.
***I must add, certain zones of Fallout 3 and New Vegas (with its “hardcore” mode) were genuinely challenging, and their overall experiences are better for it. From the supermutants on the DC Mall, to the Deathclaw Matriarch in the quarry of the Mojave, there were places that felt genuinely dangerous for a low-level character. The games still scaled their enemies, but it was a nice balance, I thought.
Knights of the Old Republic/Dragon Age/World of Warcraft
Conversely, “classic” RPGs like these take a good deal of control away from the player. You’re much more reliant on your build and its associated statistics, abilities, and equipment. There’s much less “cheese” to work with. It’s more about building your character than your own skills. In turn, the enemies you face are generally difficult in an “upfront” way. You will know very quickly whether you have what it takes to win the fight.
That’s not to discount the entertainment value of such games. It’s certainly a gratifying experience reach a point where you can defeat those enemies, and secure their more valuable loot. Still, that “grind” can be such a drag. One of my most distinctive gaming memories was my decision one night to grind through the final segment of my XP bar in “Vanilla” WoW to reach level 40 (nevermind my lack of funds to get an actual mount and training to ride it…). For a sixteenth or so of that accursed bar, I had to absolutely depopulate Stranglethorn Vale of its Mistvale Gorillas. It felt like I was in Purgatory. I can’t say that was fun. That was work.
The other pitfall in games like these is the higher potential for a sudden difficulty spike. Bioware has been, in my experience, quite guilty of this. It seems like every bossfight in Dragon Age: Origins was a steep grade of a climb. It didn’t help that my party members were impossible to wrangle, casters running into melee range, with minimal scripting to keep them away. Still, it always felt like such a disparity from the mobs you fight along the way to the end of the quest. Knights of the Old Republic, to a lesser extent, had this problem as well. Unfortunately, I can’t offer an honest opinion on that game’s difficulty, as I’ve replayed it enough times to breeze through it, even the unfair duel with Darth Malak at the end.
That does get me thinking, however, on what can make or break the “fun” of an RPG playthrough. In KotOR, I can power through it easily because I have learned to optimise my character and my companions’ builds, maximising their effectiveness in combat. I know what powers and moves work best, and what base stats are most useful. The first time through, there was a real challenge, but I made it through, running in circles away from Malak and healing myself. I must admit, however, I have yet to beat Dragon Age. That initial playthrough’s challenge has left me stuck. I built my character incorrectly, choosing to be a “tank,” when I should have probably went with “DPS” instead. Sadly, I’m so far along now that I just don’t feel like starting over. It’s a real shame. Maybe one day I’ll finish it, but I’ve been so far removed from it that it seems unlikely. This unforgiving nature is what makes me most hesitant towards trying other “classic” RPGs.
Mass Effect
To me, the gameplay of the Mass Effect series was never seriously challenging at any point, and that’s okay. This may be especially true for me because I’ve played a great deal of shooters in my time, and that certainly makes it easier. Just like Skyrim, it is very action-y, though in different ways. The movement is distinctly “Gears of War,” while keeping some RPG progression intact, upgrading weapon damage and effectiveness of powers. Still, at the end of the day, the enemies maneuver quite slowly, with no real tactical prowess whatsoever, so it’s a pretty simple task to orient yourself safely and unload on ‘em.
Really, what drew me into that game in the first place was its amazing universe, plot, and intriguing characters. The dialogue choices and determining the fate of the galaxy had genuine wait to them, and the fleshed-out societies and species felt at-once realistic and like an artistic extension of the human condition. It’s a universe I’d want to live in (minus the harvesting people every 50,000 years part). It doesn’t really matter how challenged I felt while playing, so long as I experienced rich character arks and plotlines along the way. This bleeds into games like Skyrim too, where immersion is a major factor.
Darkest Dungeon/XCOM
As a quick aside, I wanted to touch on the use of brutal difficulty to heighten the narrative, aesthetic, and overall gameplay of an RPG. Yes, that applies to a certain game we all know and love/hate, but I am purposely leaving that one out of this part of this series.
Darkest Dungeon is unbelievably difficult. Fighting ghouls, monsters, and other hellish beings is nothing new, but the game’s Lovecraftian aesthetic is taken beyond the superficial. In the game, you are the unfortunate heir to an aristocratic estate, built over a newly reopened portal to Hell. As your hapless sell-swords are exposed to more and more horrors, they aren’t just injured and infected in the depths. As expeditions get more dire, the mental state of any adventure-party begins to deteriorate, and it’s difficult to recover from mental wounds, even after the action is over.
This can cause a situation to go from bad to worse very quickly. If one of your party suffers a mental breakdown, it will wear down the psyches of their compatriots, as they scream insults to them, or bellow portents of doom. It can snowball quite quickly. DD is the first game in a very long time that I’ve had to try on an “easy” setting (“Radient,” instead of “Darkest”). Still, that brutality the game seems to express towards me is what makes it feel endearing. Its “unfairness” is perfect for the setting.
The same goes for a game like XCOM, which, while mostly a strategy game, does include some RPG elements for its characters. It’s common for players to form an attachment towards their soldiers as they make their way through a campaign. Sometimes, the RNG just doesn’t give you the shot you need to land, even on normal difficulty, and that can cost your soldiers’ lives. If you’re someone like me, who tries to roleplay a little and take losses seriously. It’s a pretty solemn thing to lose a soldier in that game, and the game’s unpredictability can put stakes quite high.
"Good Ending/Bad Ending"
Truthfully, I wish I had more experience in other types of RPGs to make this entry a little more well-rounded. There are so many sub-genres I have yet to explore, and I have been meaning to branch out for some time. Still, I hope this was a decent window into what gives me satisfaction in playing games like these. The next entry in this series will be on stealth games. Thanks for reading!
