Somewhere in the last decade, game designers have forgotten a very basic and crucial part of game design: challenge. Challenge is a difficult thing to understand, and something that's even harder to create. There are certainly many levels of challenge, and just as in life, the greater the challenge you overcome, the more rewarded you feel. Back at the birth of gaming, from the arcade to the early consoles, designers used challenge to their advantage, crafting almost cruel products like Contra or Battletoads. Games so intricately designed you were truly considered a god among your peers if you could complete them. To be fair, a lot of this design came from a desire to make money - the harder the game, the more times you'll have to attempt it and therefor the more money you'll spend. But along the way, as our medium began to reach a wider and wider audience, developers began to ease back on the difficulty, and thus was the "difficulty level" born. Outside of the cover system and regenerating health, the difficulty level is one of the most abused and misused devices in gaming ever. Now, I'm not a game developer, so this opinion is only my own, not a professionals, but the following is what I believe the problems are, and what solutions I believe can be found.
Problem Number 1: Lack of Direction
To create something, the creator has to have a lot of things in mind. What audience do I want to market my product to? What skill ability will be required? How much do I intend this to cost? Where will I release it, and when? Every design decision needs to be carefully thought out and crafted with clear answers to these questions in mind. However, with more and more developers focusing on the widest audience, the clear, directed approach is becoming non-existent. How can you design a focused experience when you have no idea who is going to play your game? This also leads to the "voyeur" problem, that feeling that you are only a casual observing in everything that's going on, rather than a participant. But how does this affect difficulty, you ask? Quite simple, in fact. How can you design a game's difficulty and challenge when you have no idea what type of person is playing it? You want it to be easy enough so that as many people can play it as possible, but challenging enough so they don't become bored. Hence, the "difficulty level". However, the "difficulty level" almost always leads to lazy, and plain awful game design. I'm going to use Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 as a perfect example. When reviewing games, I like to play them through first on the easiest difficulty, and then the hardest. I find at the easiest difficulty you find the experience the designer wanted you to have, and at the hardest all the games flaws become perfectly evident. So let's talk CoD. At the easiest difficulty, you can eat bullets for breakfast without even flinching. You are a walking immortal God and can sprint checkpoint to checkpoint without breaking a sweat. Perfect example of the voyeur problem right there. Barring a few critical moments of player interaction, you can just run from checkpoint to checkpoint without shooting anyone and the AI will handle everything. It's a joke. So let's switch it to Veteran. And of course, the only way to make something harder is to reduce your health and damage, and increase the enemies damage output. So most enemies will one or two shot you, while you have to empty half a clip into people unless you get a lucky headshot. So you play cautiously, sticking to cover and slowly picking enemies off one by one. Thankfully, you have three men at your side at all times, watching your back. Or at least, you'd think that. Unfortunately, their too busy standing in front of your shots, blocking your escape from the endless tirade of grenades, or shooting uselessly in any random direction. Or my favourite, calling out clear when there is clearly at least one guy left shooting at you. So the flaws are revealed, just as I thought. But the real problem, and the real point I want to make, is that the enemies in CoD don't play by the same rules as you. They can lock into cover, blindfire, lean and shoot, roll onto their backs and pull out an infinite ammo pistol when shot. They never run out of ammo, they have wicked good aim and they don't react to being shot at all. In fact, the only person stuck playing by your rules is you. Your partners act just like the enemies, while your left awkwardly crouching behind flimsy cover, occasionally standing up to be oneshotted by some guy blindifring from behind a solid steel wall. To juxtapose that, let's use an example of perfect challenge: Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, every enemy plays by the same rules as you. They have a health bar, they have stamina, they can only make the same movements that you can, they have the same openings and weakness that you do. They can be learnt, outsmarted. They require skill. CoD on Veteran falls down to a simple game of luck, chance and memorization. Enemies always spawn at the same spots, always move the same ways, always do exactly the same thing. They are scripted, entirely devoid of AI, carrying out the same routines over and over.
Problem 2: Not Seeing The Curve for the Peaks
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The difficult curve is a concept as old as games itself. The idea of ramping the challenge to match the player's increase in skill, providing a consistent challenge throughout the experience. This used to be achieved through clever level design, new enemy types and other clever design decisions. Now, it's achieved one way and one way only: more enemies with more health. Almost every single developer is guilty of this. Bioware is an especially good example. Why have clever boss fights when you can just have a massive enemy with a stupid amount of health that instantly spawns smaller enemies until it dies. It's bad design, and worse, it's lazy. It requires no thought, no creativity at all. To bring up Dark Souls again, The Tomb of the Giants, one of the hardest levels in the game, barely has any enemies compared to other enemies. There's maybe 20 proper enemies in the whole area. However, it's almost entirely dark, filled with perilous walkways and clever enemy placements. Each encounter is a tense affair as you try to maneuver around the tight terrain and the pitch dark. And yes, the boss has a lot of health and has an immortal army of followers, but if you have a divine type weapon, which is very easy to get, you can wipe out his army without breaking a sweat, and his big heavy attacks are easy to evade.
Problem 3: Player Error versus Cheap Design
This is probably the biggest problem in modern games. Cheapness in place of challenge. A lot of this results from the first two problems, but together they form a massive problem. If I die in Dark Souls (barring one or two rare areas), it's because I messed up. I mistimed my strikes, I wasn't paying attention, I rolled when I should have blocked. You get angry, you get frustrated, sure, but at yourself, not the game. You got outsmarted by a computer, how dumb does that make you look? However, when I die in CoD because the guy standing next to me was to busy running into a wall to watch my sides while I engaged a swarm of enemies running at me so I got oneshotted by a dude who spawned behind me, I get frustrated at the broken AI and shitty level design.
The Solution
So what can we take from this? Is this ranting leading anywhere, you ask? Well, maybe. I don't know. The solution seems simple, but I can't see developers willing to put in the effort. There are two options. Option one, ditch the difficulty level entirely and design games with one difficulty only. Think back to games like Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Contra. Not a difficulty level in sight, right? So what you get is an experience uniquely crafted with a clear vision of what challenge they want to present. Option two, make each difficulty level unique. The Devil May Cry team and Platinum Games (especially with Bayonetta) are really good at this. Want to play it on easy? Then you'll encounter less enemies, or less challenging enemies. Want to play on the hardest difficulty? Then your going to encounter enemies that were mini bosses before as regular enemies, new harder, smarter enemy types, maybe some new bosses even. Replaying Bayonetta on Hard achieves this perfectly, mixing in late game enemies right form the beginning, giving them new move sets and more dangerous combos. But both of those require a lot of effort and a clear design vision, something modern developers seem to be uninterested in. Instead, by focusing on appealing to a wider audience, they are alienating the very people they want to include. Casual gamers feel pandered to, and alienated by the harder difficulties, whilst more skilled gamers feel cheated by the lack of challenge and cheap excuses for difficulty. Outside of the indie scene, and the Souls series, the seems to be no sign of a return to this kind of intelligent design and it's somewhat horrifying to see. Where never going to be taken as a serious artform when we don't have the courgae to stand by our decisions, to take risks. Where so busy holding hands and constantly reminding gamers of the most basic activities. I should not need to be told "press R1 to shoot" in the last fucking level. We are the generation of "press X to win" and it's a joke. Splinter Cell: Blacklist confirmed this for me. Punch one guy in the face and then you can kill every single guy in the area with one button press. No challenge, no user control required. Just two button presses and you win. I honestly hope we're all not as stupid as game developers think we are. I really do.
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