Great article. I agree with you, though from the polar opposite point of view.

I despise how easy games have become. I'm a masochistic gamer - I like to be flogged into a rage repeatedly, and if I'm not, then I rapidly lose interest in the game.

Difficulty levels are so arbitrary as to be mostly infuriating to me.

A comparison I like to make is one between System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I played through System Shock 2 on Impossible. Wow, what a freaking NIGHTMARE experience. And I loved every minute of it.

Along comes Bioshock, a game which is so well crafted I feel guilty complaining about it, but as soon as I loaded it up I cranked the difficulty and then proceeded to complete the entire game with maybe 3 or 4 deaths. To me, Bioshock lacked the essence of what made System Shock 2 so tense and challenging, and I was left feeling disappointed.

Worse is when a game forces me to play through on an easier setting before unlocking the most difficult mode. This drives me batshit insane. I don't subscribe to this new design philosophy of delivering less content in the understanding that it'll be played multiple times. I want my first play through to be challenging, and therefore rewarding (or what I define as rewarding). I despise having to complete a game in a mode I find relatively dull, only to finally get the challenge I desire but on a second play through that lacks all of the mystique and originality of the first play through.

I've seen too many cases too of developers appeasing the more casual gamers at the cost of us psychotic self-punishment types.

I remember Farcry being an AMAZING experience, cranked right up to "So stupidly hard that your eyeballs will bleed". Part of that was the checkpoint save system, where every move was a careful choice or a decent chunk of gameplay would be lost. Then along comes a quick save (despite the game being ridiculously easy at the easiest settings) in a much needed patch and suddenly all tension is gone.

Some would argue - don't use the quicksave. But the challenge then becomes the player having to punish themselves, versus overcoming a punishing game experience.

I'm all for games offering an easy setting for people who prefer a more relaxed experience. But not when, as has been the case over the last few years, it costs those of us who want a more challenging experience the option to have that.

Easy should be easy. It shouldn't be frustrating. It shouldn't require backtracking or replays. It should allow for a fluid and uninterrupted gaming experience.

But conversely, hard should be damned difficult. It should be the setting that makes me wish I wasn't so bullheaded. I should walk away from it feeling like I really did accomplish some great feat, because that's what keeps me playing games, and that's what I really miss.

Agreed, for the most part. I sometimes get sick of games where difficulty gets disconnected from actual game flow and just becomes an illogical time sink. If I'm learning something or it's part of a gradual, ramping curve, well great. If one section has been dropped in that's just ridiculously hard for no good reason other than making it a time sink or it's just "supposed to be hard" (I'm looking at you, last-boss-in-a-fighting-game) without even being fair...

Lewis, if you cannot play and enjoy "Thief" on the easiest setting, I think it has ceased to be the designers' problem and started to be yours.

If there were an "Easy Enough for the Pathologically Incompetent" setting in "Thief", I cannot see how that game would still be "Thief" in a meaningful sense. The game is about the tension of creeping about and the constant threat of discovery and death. It is also about terror. If there were a setting easy enough for you to play through the game, how could the game even approach that level of tension? If the game is so forgiving of your mistakes and so gentle with its challenges, it's no longer the same game. The intensity of the experience is lost, along with much of its value.

I agree that there is a line between a game being challenging as opposed to irritatingly difficult, but I also don't think it's desirable to make every game easy enough that every interested gamer can play it regardless of his skill.

My fear is that in making a "Thief" game that is easy enough for you, it will lose much of what made me love it. I suspect that difficult is scalable only up to a point, after which you begin compromising the experience.

I totally get that, Rob (and really, the example's just there to illustrate a point), but no one would force you to play it on "Easy enough for Denby's incompetence" mode. It surely wouldn't detract from the normal and difficult settings if the level of challenge on the lowest setting were to be decreased, right? Or if an entirely new "Denby" difficulty were added?

My fear is that it would detract from the game as a whole if there were a "Denby" mode. I don't have a fully fleshed-out argument on this point, but my a priori view is that a game can only be made so easy before you begin fundamentally changing it.

To continue using the convenient "Thief" example, "easy" and "hard" give you the same basic experience. However, on easy the game is far more forgiving of your errors, and your objectives are less demanding. On hard, you cannot kill people and you have to loot practically everything in sight.

Nevertheless, both the "hard" and "easy" players get the "Thief" experience. Be stealthy, fear discovery, and plan carefully. One tolerates your mistakes and doesn't make your job as difficult, and the other is quite exacting.

How much easier can the game be without altering things like mechanics and level design? Because a super-easy mode where the guards are all deaf and blind weaklings does not sound like much fun for anyone, no matter how terrible a thief he might be. So to make the game even easier, but still interesting, we might get simpler level designs and a fast, easy way to hide from the guards (such as the rooftop gardens in "Assassin's Creed"). Now the game is being altered to suit you, but the changes are beginning to affect my experience.

I think the "Bioshock" and "System Shock 2" comparison is handy here. "Bioshock" was designed with ease of play in mind. Unfortunately, I would argue the gameplay itself became less interesting. Where "System Shock 2" posed hard choices about character development and equipment, "Bioshock" never did. "Bioshock" is a fairly simple game, and on "hard" it remains just as simple. The only difference is that now I have to shoot enemies a lot more before they finally die. So you have your easy game, but I have something that's never quite as interesting to me as its predecessor.

What a despicably whiny sense of entitlement this man has. This joker can't even play games, and he thinks he gets to have an opinion about DESIGN? I mean, sure, if he wants to just blog about how hard games aren't fun for him, he can go right ahead. But no, he has to say things like, "a great deal of games are simply too difficult, no matter how you look at it," talk about "artificially lengthening the experience," show his ignorance of the adventure genre (I'll bet he thinks old-school fans LOVE mazes, too), and describe things that he's too incompetent to overcome as "idiocy."

His mention of grinding is irrelevant (tedium does not equal challenge), and can anyone even name an FPS where finding the right door is remotely difficult? This chucklehead can't even come up with examples that aren't vague generalizations, but he still wants to talk about design, lol.

Oh, and dynamic difficulty is always retarded. The player should never be punished for doing well. Boon Cotter probably won't agree with my tone, but he's got it mostly right in his comment above.

The main problem with the article is this phrase right here: "As games become more and more about the experience..." Basically, Denby does not really like video games. He likes some of the shiny stuff in them, but doesn't really understand them or what makes them good. He is of course free to enjoy them however he wants, but designers shouldn't listen to him any more than you or I would listen to a man who ranks board games according to how good the pieces taste.

Here's a good read about games and "the experience:"
http://scarsofwargame.com/blog///index.php/2009/01/11/getting-the-experience?blog=5

I'm actually against Denby generally speaking here, but...

"can anyone even name an FPS where finding the right door is remotely difficult?"

Pretty much all of them. The only time I ever get stuck in a linear FPS game is where there I've missed where the route forward is.

I disagree generally because resources aren't infinite. Do we want to spend money and time on a Denby mode or something else? Mostly, I'd go with something else.

KG

I'm going to be the odd one out here then. I'm with Lewis all the way.

Kieron, apologies for this but I'm going to twist your point around a bit.

"Do we want to spend money and time on a Denby mode and open up our games to a much wider audience and invite more players in to the party thus growing the market and thus making more money from our titles or something else?"

There's a massive amount of people out there who want to play games, who want to enjoy our games and we kick them away, shun them as undeserving or unskilled and the sooner that gamers, designers and publishers stop this the more we can let these people play.

It doesn't have to come at the expense of the died in the wool gamers who like to die in a pit of spikes 500 times to feel a sense of accomplishment.

It should complement that.

Make games configurable as much as possible, make easy mode bloody well easy, let God mode be an option in every game at a bare minimum. Throw in autofire options. Offer streamlined controls (although y'know, stopping using so many buttons would just be lovely generally). Give those who can't a chance.

It does make a massive difference to the amount of people you let play if you add this stuff.

We're not in the 1990's anymore, let's move this thing along and stop being so bloody precious. It achieves nothing.

I have to disagree here with the article. The main reason is that the insidious cheapening of the gaming experience is becoming ever more pervasive.

A prime example is WoW, where the game has been reduced to triviality in its attempts to pander to the masses. I can just about accept a 'Denby' mode for single players games, where no one is forcing you to play that, I simply worry that it will affect those games where you have no choice about the difficulty (particularly multiplayer games and especially WoW).

I don't think this is particularly elitist, its just that people want different things from gaming. It has been and should remain the case that the people who are better at the game and are prepared to put more effort (note: not time) in to improve themselves, receive the greater rewards.

"I disagree generally because resources aren't infinite. Do we want to spend money and time on a Denby mode or something else? Mostly, I'd go with something else."

I'm not sure what mr. Gillen is saying here.

It comes over a bit like trying to make a purely personal opinion ("I don't care much for the proposed thing") sound more valid by making it sound as if it'd go at the cost of some completely undefined, phantom feature that is supposedly better.

"It has been and should remain the case that the people who are better at the game and are prepared to put more effort (note: not time) in to improve themselves, receive the greater rewards."

Actually, that is pretty elitist, man.

As an avid gamer, I have thought about game design from time to time, and one of the things I've always come back to is just how we define difficulty levels.

As evidenced in the comments to this very article, for some people, the fun of a game is emergent in the total experience; the completion of the story. For others it is entirely in the conquering of extreme challenge. And I would argue that for others, and I believe I fall into this category, is a blend of the two. I like overcoming challenges, but not to the point of ruining my experience of the game if they're just that difficult.

But this isn't exactly the standpoint of how easy/normal/hard are handled in the industry. People see easy as an entry-level difficulty rather than something long-time games might actually still be drawn to. And it seems more often than not that each successive difficulty merely ends up coming down to simply tuning up the numbers rather than figuring out the differences people want from these difficulties.

My idea would be to implement difficulties as 'cinematic/heroic/survival,' rather than the standard 'easy/normal/hard.'

Cinematic would incorporate ideas such as Bioshock's respawn tubes which essentially preserve all progress at the expense of a tiny amount of travel time; regenerating health where, if you severely screw up, perhaps you have to retreat for a moment and re-evaluate your plan but ultimately doesn't break the flow of the game.

Heroic would push it up a notch, maybe including an actual health bar but with a slow level of regeneration and dispersed but fairly regular auto-saves. Meaning there is some loss to failure and overall difficulty is amped up a notch, but setbacks are still fairly minor. There is challenge, but you will overcome it with a little effort.

Down to survival, which is true to its name. This could be as diabolical as it wants to be. But, following along the same ideas, you might have no health regeneration at all, only regaining it at key checkpoints. Checkpoints would be few and far between, perhaps only at the beginning of an entire chapter/level.

Ultimately it comes down to: how much punishment comes from failure? Bioshock failed at this because, while enemies hit harder and took more hits on the hard difficulty, death was still next to meaningless, and most of the time you could simply run back over and over until you succeed. Other games fail at this from the other perspective, preventing people from completing the game and thus experiencing the entirety of the story because they have to start back at square one every time they fail.

Jeremy, while the idea of having three separate game modes with very differnt mechanics for varying skill levels is a wonderful one, and one that I would very much like to see implemented, game studios only have so much time and resources, and it would be well-nigh impossible to have those three modes in a single game. Difficulty modes as they currently exist tend to simply consist of changing some variables, which is fairly easy to implement. While exceptions to the rule do exist, such as Thief, its difficulty levels simply consist of adjusted win/loss conditions as well as the above changes.

In short, it is a wonderful idea, but one that will probably not be implemented outside of dreamland.