>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. <- This is actually magic sauce and could be the topic of a whole talk.
Please never do this. This deceptively looks smart to a game designer, but actual players read this like a book and then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them.
This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse.
But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
The Alyx example is interesting, because I see that system as being designed to avoid breaking immersion. Specifically, to avoid entering an "unwinnable" state i.e. where the player restarts from a save/checkpoint. I do understand how noticing the underlying system can pull you out of the game though.
Agreed. Something like Dark Souls where an enemy is an enemy and it'll smash you if you're underleveled is so much more satisfying than something like Oblivion where enemy health inexplicably goes up based on your level. It also gives you the satisfaction of going back to earlier areas that were scary and laughing off the puny enemies.
Totally different when it comes to multiplayer matchmaking, though. There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level. Nothing worse than casually sitting down after work for a quick multiplayer PVP game of any sort and getting totally annihilated by a streamer who plays 20 hours per day.
In Factorio, you build an automated factory on an alien world whose native inhabitants hate air pollution.
If you spend your time gathering resources manually or with a humble-sized factory, there'd be very little alien hostility. But the better you're playing, the grander the factories, the more you're polluting, the more aggressive the aliens attack you.
Furthermore, trees soak up CO2, so if you preserve them you reduce alien hostility, but if you go fully industrious and build on top of them you invite more alien aggression.
I think this concept is delightful and far from deceptive. It makes the game suitable for players of all levels and it meshes with the game mechanism rather than working behind your back.
hnews folks would also probably enjoy the cellular-automata-like mechanism of the pollution. Essentially the world is divided into cells and each cell has a pollution value. Pollution dissipates to nearby cells on regular intervals. Cells with trees soak up some pollution, cells with machines produce some pollution. A pollution map is available in-game.
IIRC, the playtime is also a factor in Factorio. It's nice that the trees soak up pollution, but the inability to plant more of them is actually the only thing I really dislike about the game. I want to have a choice to be even greener and even less disruptive to the local inhabitants in the base game, not as a mod "hack"
It's often a very bad idea. One example is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Players are punished for leveling, and many players simply give up and have to do everything on level 1.
It's essentially punishing players for playing well, and often could be gamed by playing badly intentionally.
Oblivion's problem is even worse than that. You can level up entirely from improving non-combat skills, so the enemies are harder and you're only better at jumping.
Hard disagree. All of my favourite games of all time have dynamic difficulty systems.
Not stupid stuff like levelling up enemies in Bethesda games - but actual skill based games that get harder depending on how good you are at it: Resident Evil 4, Battle Garegga to name a few.
Games that unlock more content as you reach skill gates are the most memorable.
I think it strongly depends on how it's done and how it plays into the feeling of the game. Certain kinds of level scaling can feel pretty cheap, for example, because they kind of work against the feeling of progression you get in the game. Similarly a game obviously making things easier for you can feel like it's cheapening the satisfaction of improving at the game, though how important this is varies from person to person.
But done well, it can much more reliably create the feeling of being just on the edge of failure but pulling through, which is really satisfying in a lot of games. L4D did this, but Helldivers 2 for example also has a lot of game design focused on creating this kind of feeling.
> then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them
Or even blocks them, in games that have dynamic leveling. Oblivion is the ur-example, but I've ran across at least two more:
1. Been playing Tyranny and there are mentions in the faqs/forums that you should disable leveling of skills you don't use if you do the new game+ thing where there are no level caps.
2. And one that happened to me personally a year or two ago: was playing Grim Dawn and hit my character's incompetence ceiling. This is a gear based ARPG/Diablo clone so the solution is to get better gear. But you can't go back to an easier area to improve your gear because they're all auto scaled and every map is the same - too hard now - difficulty. So there goes the uninstall and the lost DLC sales...
My go-to example is Homeworld 2, where the dynamic difficulty scaling was IMO very poorly hidden. It was as if the player is being punished for doing the legwork to preserve and expand their fleet across missions even though the game's lore and mechanics encourage them to do so.
Crash Bandicoot did this well. In the original game, you needed to finish without dying and get all of the boxes to get the gem. In future games, some levels would have a “death path” that would only be available if you got to a certain point in the level without dying.
The good way of doing this is to ask the player if the difficulty shall be lowered temporarily just for that level of they keep dying. Then it is transparent and the choice is theirs.
"actual players" as opposed to other people who just, what? "use" the game?
Sorry, but it's hard to take this comment seriously when it reeks of "git gud".
So I'll just point out that a lot of people play games, and that there are well-documented instances of games with dynamic difficulty as early as the 80s.
As opposed to the game designer who came up with an idea that sounds convincing but barely ever tested it. My comment had nothing to do with "git gud", it's poorly worded perhaps.
Of course there's a ton of this, which is exactly why I complain. Level scaling is probably the easiest to justify because it solves legitimate issues (that are often caused by other poor decisions), but other types are usually much worse.
Left 4 Dead handled this pretty well in my opinion (i.e. mob spawning behind if you're playing too slowly or a tank in front if you're going too quick). I absolutely hated the dynamic adjusting in games like Mario Kart, though.
in games like wow where the more powerful you get the harder the enemies become, this reduces incentive to get more powerful. its a simple consequence so im not sure why they do it - probably to keep "time played" metric hovering at the desired level. which imho backfires when time played becomes 0.
You're only looking at one side. Dynamic difficulty also allows players to progress by lowering the health of a boss they've failed to beat for over two hours.
Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
I like when your character or your party feels like superheroes for a little while after leveling up, then it gets harder to really test your new ability, then keep repeating that cycle.
This will depend on the game of course, but the best is when you can adjust the difficulty of mechanics individually.
City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.
I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it. Few things things in gaming piss me off more than a memory or Simon Says puzzle in an MMO or similar. If I wanted to play puzzle games, I’d be playing a puzzle game, not your game.
This works for sandbox or simulation type games, but otherwise I think difficulty sliders are like going to a restaurant and getting all the cooked ingredients in separate plates for you to combine. While that can be fine and cater to the maximum number of people, it's a safe approach that wastes good opportunity cost of a great plate of food catered by someone with the skills to do it.
If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.
I’m not suggesting you hit a new player with a wall of configuration options. Guide them into the gameplay experience as you intended it, but also allow them to make changes to settings as relevant to the game.
I liked when games used to include cheat codes or debug commands. Let me trivialize the game if I want to. I paid for it and it’s my time I’m spending. Not once did I ever play The Sims as intended. And enjoyed it enough to buy another version or two. I used cheats all the time in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft single player.
And when games don’t include that, almost always someone will create a hack or mod that does do that, because there is a demand for it.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a good example of lots of difficulty settings. You can turn off some annoying parts of the game, set enemy tactical difficulty, disable some survival aspects of the game if you don't care about them, and adjust the amount of on-screen information in several steps. For the latter part, you can have a minimap that shows the location of enemies once you've seen them, or not, and you can have waypoints that show the direction of some objective, or not. With all of the on-screen stuff disabled, there would be an awful lot of searching required to find objectives. It's pretty cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire.
> You can turn off some annoying parts of the game [...] cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire
Depends on the type of game, but I'd generally prefer those decisions be made by the game designer. If there's frustration I want it to feel like overcoming a concrete obstacle, rather than it being self-hindering that accomplishes nothing and that I could've just avoided.
I remember there were some complaints about the puzzle sections in a recent-ish God of War game where they had clearly tried to avoid this problem but by essentially having NPCs spontaneously tell you the solution to the puzzle at some point, which then just annoyed people who wanted to solve the puzzle themselves.
I've been watching a lot of let's play content on YouTube for incremental games (it's like an ASMR thing) and after watching a lot of these games it is clear that pacing a video game is a challenge. Sometimes the player finds a sneaky way to increase their progress that busts the game, other times they miss the correct path and get stuck in a painful grind. It is also very obvious when the game dev has targeted a play-time metric and forces the game into that metric. Incremental games really expose this dynamic since they are generally pure upgrade mechanic attached to some kind of dopamine generator (flashy lights, rhythmic sounds, etc.)
Oddly specific niche jumpscare. Which games? Cookie clicker and universal paperclips are the household names, but reactor idle based off of ic2 has been my favorite gameplay-wise. The 2D adjacency bonus mechanics scratch the same itch tactical games have but without the stakes of messing up strategy.
Each game itself is mostly throw-away (although a few have some impressive graphics bling which must have taken some effort). I've been watching a channel called "Idle cub" [1] and he posts a new game every day (well, almost, sometimes he'll play a demo and then later the full game).
Seeing a massive stream of games that all surround the same 12 or so mechanics has been eye opening. The games range in duration from ~2 hours all the way to several days of content, although most premises seem to get old at around 4-6 hours.
At first I was doing research for my own game ideas, now I'm kind of mesmerized by the variety and the general relaxed atmosphere of these idle games.
I haven't seen this connection made, but difficulty curves in video games seem to resemble Campbell's Hero's Journey. There is an initial call to adventure, then some kind of mentor, then confronting the shadow, then a return of the shadow, etc.
If the game industry wasn't so myopic about recreating reality in graphics, the larger AAA titles could be exploring this more in depth. I think this would hit the jackpot of immersive experience as it could tap into the same psychological mechanisms.
That's because the hero's journey is an attempt to study the physiology of story telling, so it's not restricted to the typical written romance. Games just like books and movies are often trying to tell a story and it'll eventually follow Campbell's book, even if unaware or not trying to.
I'd say that writers do know about this a lot, the problem is that games are becoming progressively more expensive and riskier to make, so money will push new titles to be safer and more boring, which could be why you perceive them as unaware of this, because why not wouldn't they want to make a good game?
Difficulty settings, though. He mentions them only briefly (in this incredible article).
Normal varies so much.
As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.
What is ‘normal’ is unfortunately subjective and can mean a lot of different things to different people. Also often what is listed as ’hard’ is often normal, because most people will see ‘normal’ and decide they’re better than that and have a miserable old time.
This reminds me of UX. Seems like it could be a subdomain.
I think I disagree with your basic point, though what you say about normal vs. hard is funny. I'm fortunate enough to work with a UI/UX pro, and these things have right answers; they're incredibly obvious after they've been explained to you.
There's nothing wrong with opinionated design. The dev has set the bar this high and chosen this thing to represent difficulty levels, either you like it or you don't. Catering to everyone is impossible.
Relevant: I'm just sad that most turn-based JRPG's nowadays start off with you thinking about which move is appropriate for each situation, but halfway through they end up to making you use the same 3-4 moves over and over again.
Trails games are even worse because there's tons of them who feel like they never gotten properly play tested. Killing a level 120 boss with a level 60 squad because you can delay the opponent's turn just isn't satisfying, especially when the boss is meant to be (narration-wise) so much stronger than you.
maybe i’m in the minority of gamers overall.. i much prefer when there’s no difficulty setting (like dark souls, for example) but rather an enormous amount of tools the game gives you to solve a problem.
i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason
Unrelated to the article, but keyboard scrolling is not working on this site. It seems to be deliberately disabled with a script called t1.js. I wonder why. Please, don't mess with keyboard navigation on a blog.
>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. <- This is actually magic sauce and could be the topic of a whole talk.
Please never do this. This deceptively looks smart to a game designer, but actual players read this like a book and then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them.
This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse.
But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
The Alyx example is interesting, because I see that system as being designed to avoid breaking immersion. Specifically, to avoid entering an "unwinnable" state i.e. where the player restarts from a save/checkpoint. I do understand how noticing the underlying system can pull you out of the game though.
2 replies →
> But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
Sounds like the design is working as intended?
1 reply →
Agreed. Something like Dark Souls where an enemy is an enemy and it'll smash you if you're underleveled is so much more satisfying than something like Oblivion where enemy health inexplicably goes up based on your level. It also gives you the satisfaction of going back to earlier areas that were scary and laughing off the puny enemies.
Totally different when it comes to multiplayer matchmaking, though. There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level. Nothing worse than casually sitting down after work for a quick multiplayer PVP game of any sort and getting totally annihilated by a streamer who plays 20 hours per day.
11 replies →
It doesn't have to be deceptive!
In Factorio, you build an automated factory on an alien world whose native inhabitants hate air pollution.
If you spend your time gathering resources manually or with a humble-sized factory, there'd be very little alien hostility. But the better you're playing, the grander the factories, the more you're polluting, the more aggressive the aliens attack you.
Furthermore, trees soak up CO2, so if you preserve them you reduce alien hostility, but if you go fully industrious and build on top of them you invite more alien aggression.
I think this concept is delightful and far from deceptive. It makes the game suitable for players of all levels and it meshes with the game mechanism rather than working behind your back.
hnews folks would also probably enjoy the cellular-automata-like mechanism of the pollution. Essentially the world is divided into cells and each cell has a pollution value. Pollution dissipates to nearby cells on regular intervals. Cells with trees soak up some pollution, cells with machines produce some pollution. A pollution map is available in-game.
A big advantage of this system is the transparency. You understand the logic behind it so it doesn't feel like someone is trying to trick you.
IIRC, the playtime is also a factor in Factorio. It's nice that the trees soak up pollution, but the inability to plant more of them is actually the only thing I really dislike about the game. I want to have a choice to be even greener and even less disruptive to the local inhabitants in the base game, not as a mod "hack"
1 reply →
It's often a very bad idea. One example is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Players are punished for leveling, and many players simply give up and have to do everything on level 1.
It's essentially punishing players for playing well, and often could be gamed by playing badly intentionally.
Oblivion's problem is even worse than that. You can level up entirely from improving non-combat skills, so the enemies are harder and you're only better at jumping.
Hard disagree. All of my favourite games of all time have dynamic difficulty systems.
Not stupid stuff like levelling up enemies in Bethesda games - but actual skill based games that get harder depending on how good you are at it: Resident Evil 4, Battle Garegga to name a few.
Games that unlock more content as you reach skill gates are the most memorable.
I think it strongly depends on how it's done and how it plays into the feeling of the game. Certain kinds of level scaling can feel pretty cheap, for example, because they kind of work against the feeling of progression you get in the game. Similarly a game obviously making things easier for you can feel like it's cheapening the satisfaction of improving at the game, though how important this is varies from person to person.
But done well, it can much more reliably create the feeling of being just on the edge of failure but pulling through, which is really satisfying in a lot of games. L4D did this, but Helldivers 2 for example also has a lot of game design focused on creating this kind of feeling.
> then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them
Or even blocks them, in games that have dynamic leveling. Oblivion is the ur-example, but I've ran across at least two more:
1. Been playing Tyranny and there are mentions in the faqs/forums that you should disable leveling of skills you don't use if you do the new game+ thing where there are no level caps.
2. And one that happened to me personally a year or two ago: was playing Grim Dawn and hit my character's incompetence ceiling. This is a gear based ARPG/Diablo clone so the solution is to get better gear. But you can't go back to an easier area to improve your gear because they're all auto scaled and every map is the same - too hard now - difficulty. So there goes the uninstall and the lost DLC sales...
On the other hand, the whole Director system of Left 4 Dead works like this and it’s incredible.
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2009/ai_system...
My go-to example is Homeworld 2, where the dynamic difficulty scaling was IMO very poorly hidden. It was as if the player is being punished for doing the legwork to preserve and expand their fleet across missions even though the game's lore and mechanics encourage them to do so.
Crash Bandicoot did this well. In the original game, you needed to finish without dying and get all of the boxes to get the gem. In future games, some levels would have a “death path” that would only be available if you got to a certain point in the level without dying.
It's a pretty well proven design pattern.
The adage is that the customers never know what they want, and it's doubly true when it comes to video games.
Yes feels like this can easily be "gamed"
For example, if I want friendlier lobbies in arc raiders, I will spawn in with no loadout and purposely surrender.. I can game my difficulty lower
Ooh very much disagree. Like so many things, when it’s done right, it works real well, it feels good. See Deathloop for a recent example.
The good way of doing this is to ask the player if the difficulty shall be lowered temporarily just for that level of they keep dying. Then it is transparent and the choice is theirs.
"actual players" as opposed to other people who just, what? "use" the game?
Sorry, but it's hard to take this comment seriously when it reeks of "git gud". So I'll just point out that a lot of people play games, and that there are well-documented instances of games with dynamic difficulty as early as the 80s.
As opposed to the game designer who came up with an idea that sounds convincing but barely ever tested it. My comment had nothing to do with "git gud", it's poorly worded perhaps.
Of course there's a ton of this, which is exactly why I complain. Level scaling is probably the easiest to justify because it solves legitimate issues (that are often caused by other poor decisions), but other types are usually much worse.
1 reply →
Left 4 Dead handled this pretty well in my opinion (i.e. mob spawning behind if you're playing too slowly or a tank in front if you're going too quick). I absolutely hated the dynamic adjusting in games like Mario Kart, though.
in games like wow where the more powerful you get the harder the enemies become, this reduces incentive to get more powerful. its a simple consequence so im not sure why they do it - probably to keep "time played" metric hovering at the desired level. which imho backfires when time played becomes 0.
You're only looking at one side. Dynamic difficulty also allows players to progress by lowering the health of a boss they've failed to beat for over two hours.
Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
7 replies →
This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop.
> This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop.
This is interesting to me; can you explain please?
1 reply →
I like when your character or your party feels like superheroes for a little while after leveling up, then it gets harder to really test your new ability, then keep repeating that cycle.
Do you really hate Breathe of the Wild so much?
This will depend on the game of course, but the best is when you can adjust the difficulty of mechanics individually.
City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.
I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it. Few things things in gaming piss me off more than a memory or Simon Says puzzle in an MMO or similar. If I wanted to play puzzle games, I’d be playing a puzzle game, not your game.
This works for sandbox or simulation type games, but otherwise I think difficulty sliders are like going to a restaurant and getting all the cooked ingredients in separate plates for you to combine. While that can be fine and cater to the maximum number of people, it's a safe approach that wastes good opportunity cost of a great plate of food catered by someone with the skills to do it.
If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.
I’m not suggesting you hit a new player with a wall of configuration options. Guide them into the gameplay experience as you intended it, but also allow them to make changes to settings as relevant to the game.
I liked when games used to include cheat codes or debug commands. Let me trivialize the game if I want to. I paid for it and it’s my time I’m spending. Not once did I ever play The Sims as intended. And enjoyed it enough to buy another version or two. I used cheats all the time in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft single player.
And when games don’t include that, almost always someone will create a hack or mod that does do that, because there is a demand for it.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a good example of lots of difficulty settings. You can turn off some annoying parts of the game, set enemy tactical difficulty, disable some survival aspects of the game if you don't care about them, and adjust the amount of on-screen information in several steps. For the latter part, you can have a minimap that shows the location of enemies once you've seen them, or not, and you can have waypoints that show the direction of some objective, or not. With all of the on-screen stuff disabled, there would be an awful lot of searching required to find objectives. It's pretty cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire.
> You can turn off some annoying parts of the game [...] cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire
Depends on the type of game, but I'd generally prefer those decisions be made by the game designer. If there's frustration I want it to feel like overcoming a concrete obstacle, rather than it being self-hindering that accomplishes nothing and that I could've just avoided.
I remember there were some complaints about the puzzle sections in a recent-ish God of War game where they had clearly tried to avoid this problem but by essentially having NPCs spontaneously tell you the solution to the puzzle at some point, which then just annoyed people who wanted to solve the puzzle themselves.
seems like this is more of a personal taste issue. I rather enjoy little surprise minigames like this.
I've been watching a lot of let's play content on YouTube for incremental games (it's like an ASMR thing) and after watching a lot of these games it is clear that pacing a video game is a challenge. Sometimes the player finds a sneaky way to increase their progress that busts the game, other times they miss the correct path and get stuck in a painful grind. It is also very obvious when the game dev has targeted a play-time metric and forces the game into that metric. Incremental games really expose this dynamic since they are generally pure upgrade mechanic attached to some kind of dopamine generator (flashy lights, rhythmic sounds, etc.)
Oddly specific niche jumpscare. Which games? Cookie clicker and universal paperclips are the household names, but reactor idle based off of ic2 has been my favorite gameplay-wise. The 2D adjacency bonus mechanics scratch the same itch tactical games have but without the stakes of messing up strategy.
Each game itself is mostly throw-away (although a few have some impressive graphics bling which must have taken some effort). I've been watching a channel called "Idle cub" [1] and he posts a new game every day (well, almost, sometimes he'll play a demo and then later the full game).
Seeing a massive stream of games that all surround the same 12 or so mechanics has been eye opening. The games range in duration from ~2 hours all the way to several days of content, although most premises seem to get old at around 4-6 hours.
At first I was doing research for my own game ideas, now I'm kind of mesmerized by the variety and the general relaxed atmosphere of these idle games.
1. https://www.youtube.com/@idlecub
I haven't seen this connection made, but difficulty curves in video games seem to resemble Campbell's Hero's Journey. There is an initial call to adventure, then some kind of mentor, then confronting the shadow, then a return of the shadow, etc.
If the game industry wasn't so myopic about recreating reality in graphics, the larger AAA titles could be exploring this more in depth. I think this would hit the jackpot of immersive experience as it could tap into the same psychological mechanisms.
That's because the hero's journey is an attempt to study the physiology of story telling, so it's not restricted to the typical written romance. Games just like books and movies are often trying to tell a story and it'll eventually follow Campbell's book, even if unaware or not trying to.
I'd say that writers do know about this a lot, the problem is that games are becoming progressively more expensive and riskier to make, so money will push new titles to be safer and more boring, which could be why you perceive them as unaware of this, because why not wouldn't they want to make a good game?
I'm talking about the gameplay experience though. So applying Hero's Journey to the player through game design. I see what you mean though.
Difficulty settings, though. He mentions them only briefly (in this incredible article).
Normal varies so much.
As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.
What is ‘normal’ is unfortunately subjective and can mean a lot of different things to different people. Also often what is listed as ’hard’ is often normal, because most people will see ‘normal’ and decide they’re better than that and have a miserable old time.
This reminds me of UX. Seems like it could be a subdomain.
I think I disagree with your basic point, though what you say about normal vs. hard is funny. I'm fortunate enough to work with a UI/UX pro, and these things have right answers; they're incredibly obvious after they've been explained to you.
There's nothing wrong with opinionated design. The dev has set the bar this high and chosen this thing to represent difficulty levels, either you like it or you don't. Catering to everyone is impossible.
1 reply →
Relevant: I'm just sad that most turn-based JRPG's nowadays start off with you thinking about which move is appropriate for each situation, but halfway through they end up to making you use the same 3-4 moves over and over again.
Trails games are even worse because there's tons of them who feel like they never gotten properly play tested. Killing a level 120 boss with a level 60 squad because you can delay the opponent's turn just isn't satisfying, especially when the boss is meant to be (narration-wise) so much stronger than you.
Experience curves are just as important.
However, this article reminded me of this meme
https://imgur.com/gallery/eve-online-learning-curve-jj16ThL
I never liked this kind of games - skills are locked depending where you are at the stories.
Multiplayer FPS, strategy games, and sport games are still very enjoyable without these mechanisms.
I use the "saw" stepped difficulty curve (it's a very Nintendo thing) in my recent game BELTRUNNER (Web, Wii, Linux handhelds) https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2026/07/30/beltrunner-game-d...
maybe i’m in the minority of gamers overall.. i much prefer when there’s no difficulty setting (like dark souls, for example) but rather an enormous amount of tools the game gives you to solve a problem.
i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason
an old school monster hunter gamer feels the same, and being stuck is part of the fun
This is an okay introduction, but it shouldn't be considered prescriptive.
As with most art forms, the very best and most interesting examples treat rules like these as starting points, not end points.
Unrelated to the article, but keyboard scrolling is not working on this site. It seems to be deliberately disabled with a script called t1.js. I wonder why. Please, don't mess with keyboard navigation on a blog.
Steam reviewer attitude haha!
steam reviewer attitude difficulty curve seems pretty accurate!
You missed the Terra Invicta "you think it's easy, but you'll be dead in 40 hours because you are underperforming" curve.
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