Yesterday I talked about why some games don’t need a constantly rising difficulty level. But if difficulty doesn’t keep rising throughout the game, it’s really important to choose the right difficulty level. Too hard and players just give up, too easy and they breeze through it without the sense of achievement of beating the game.
You can’t really trust players to choose the difficulty level by themselves because they don’t know what difficulty is appropriate for them until they’ve played the game. The best solution is to adapt the challenge level to the player’s skill automatically. Here are a few ways to achieve this:
- The Algorithmic Approach
The most sophisticated way to have dynamic difficulty is to analyze how well the player is doing and tweak the difficulty based on this. In a shooter you could analyze how much damage the player inflicts and receives, how often he dies and so on. Max Payne used this approach pretty successfully. It can be tricky to do properly, potentially requiring a lot of development time to tweak and tune for some types of games. Some games lend themselves to this approach though: racing games often give a speed boost to cars lagging behind the player and a handicap to cars ahead — simple, but effective. The advantage of this method is that you don’t need extra content some players may miss. - Open Selection
The Mario 64 approach: you let players choose which challenge to face. For this method to work you must give the player a wide selection of challenges and let him cherry-pick which one to try (like selecting which star to get in Mario). Individual challenges can be harder than those in a strictly linear game because players won’t get stuck at a specific level they can’t beat. The problem with this approach is that you need content that some players will never see — a problem if your development budget is tight. You also can’t quite control the player’s experience as much as in a linear game. - Optional Goals and Side Quests
If you want to keep players on a linear path, you can give them optional objectives to achieve along the way. The player must find the Amulet of Whatsitsname to progress in the game, but they can go look for the princess’ brooch she lost in the swamps if they feel like it. Optional side quests like this can be more challenging than the main path because they won’t block the player from progressing. More skilled players can try them while unskilled players will just walk on. Note that side quests don’t have to be explicit: a challenging side path to reach a powerful weapon in a FPS doesn’t need a cutscene and explanation to be an optional goal for players.