Overview #
The topic of difficulty can be a rather contentious conversation, often breaking down into a debate over the developer’s intended experience vs the player’s experience. However, no consumer wants to purchase a product they can’t use. Inversely, if a player is breezing through the challenges presented they may feel it’s too easy to feel rewarding and may get bored by the lack of challenge.
This is why several games introduce sneaky mechanics that coerce the challenges of the game to adhere to a player’s capabilities based on their performance. The benefit of this that you don’t need to tailor numbers to a preset range of “easy to hard” difficulty settings - rather, you can send the player down the intended experience and make adjustments to that experience using a variety of other systems and techniques.
If a player is getting repeatedly stuck in a particular area, start removing the element that is causing them to get stuck. If they just can’t solve a puzzle, move pieces/clues to more obvious locations for them to “discover on their own”. If the enemies they’re encountering are just too easy, give the enemies a slight buff or spawn a stronger enemy to mix up the challenge.
Common Solutions #
Altering Enemy Behavior / Spawn Rates #
Example: Resident Evil 4 #
If the player is accurate and takes only a few hits, the enemies will automatically become more aggressive and deal more damage, but if the player is missing a lot of shots or getting hit too many times and dying, the enemies will become more passive, deal less damage and sometimes not even spawn.
One example for this is during the gondola area in the village, if Leon takes enough hits at this part, the two archers will not spawn at the water room. This dynamic difficulty is turned off in Professional modes and the enemies are on a set aggressive manner that cannot be changed.
Taken from the Resident Evil 4 Wiki Page
Altering Damage #
A way to help make gameplay consistently more exciting in tense situations without nerfing all your enemies permanently is to alter the effects of damage on the player’s health. The most common approach to this technique is to change how health is depleted due to damage as the player’s health gets lower. Alternatively, you could also increase the amount of damage the player deals when health is low1.
Example: Bioshock #
In Bioshock if you would have taken your last point of damage you instead were invulnerable for about 1-2 seconds so you get more “barely survived” moments.
Level Scaling #
Level scaling is actually a pretty contentious topic, with some players opting to bypass the feature by avoiding conflicts or situations that would result in leveling up. This in turns prevents the game’s enemies (and other systems) from also leveling up and becoming more difficult.
See “The Leveling Problem” section from the Oblivion Wiki’s page on leveling as an example
A specific form of Anti-Grinding, usually seen in RPGs and Roguelikes, though it could potentially be used in any game with Character Levels. Level Scaling is where the world (or specific areas) levels up with you to provide a constant challenge, primarily by upping your foes’ stats.
There are three kinds of foe level scaling systems that are commonly used. One is where enemies simply have their stats and/or equipment improved. Another is a system where the number of enemies are increased. The third is a system where weaker enemies are replaced by different, stronger ones.
Taking an encounter with a 25 hitpoint wolf in its den as an example - In the first system, the same wolf may have 100 hitpoints at a later level. In the second system, an entire pack of wolves will be encountered at higher levels. In the third system, the wolf will be replaced by a dire wolf or a bear after a certain level is reached. There may also be a combination of the three, so you may encounter wolves that progressively get stronger and increase in number, up until a certain point, where they’ll be joined by dire wolves (with dire wolves growing more common at higher levels) or replaced by bears who also progressively get stronger as you level up. Most games employing level scaling also make use of a level cap for certain enemies and/or certain areas, so the cellar in the first tavern you enter isn’t going to filled with level 100 rats when you return later.
Taken from TV Tropes Wiki: Level Scaling
Example: Elder Scrolls: Oblivion #
A key aspect of Oblivion is that when you level, the strength of most opponents increases: the level of many NPCs will be higher, and you will encounter more difficult creatures. On the other hand, there are many advantages to leveling. Maximizing these advantages will allow you to keep ahead of the enemies.
Taken from Oblivion Wiki: Leveling
Example: Final Fantasy 8 #
The levels for most enemies scale with your own. That is, they will become stronger as you become stronger. Furthermore, they improve at a higher rate than you, so while a level 5 character can take on a level 5 enemy rather easily, a level 30 character will have a lot of trouble defeating a level 30 enemy. You can compensate for this somewhat through junctioning, but it can still present a challenge.
Taken from r/FinalFantasy: why keeping a low level is important
Additional Resources #
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Some games will even surface this as a “perk” feature or introduce a “last stand” mechanic. ↩︎