Hear me out... Playable difficulty select

Design
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You start a game, and it asks you if you want to play on easy, normal, or hard mode. But you’ve never played this game before. What do you do? Guess hard was the difficulty the developer playtested and balanced the game around instead of normal even though hard could have been designed as a bullshit super challenge mode? Hope the modes are given indicative names like “Challenge Mode” and “Normal Mode” and “Story Mode” instead of “Dawn” and “Dusk” and “Twilight”? Pray there’s an immersion-killing comment from the developer like “I don’t even know if this one can be beaten” or “Play normal mode first if this is your first time playing this video game”? Pick one difficulty and then replay the game from the start if you’re having a time that’s too easy or hard, even though replay knowledge can make the game easier, or make it harder if Hard Mode changes more than buffing enemy stats?

Or we could do what one of the greatest games of all time did… The Matrix: Path of Neo for the Playstation 2.

Survival challenge. Battle against wave after wave of enemies who get stronger and more numerous, testing the player’s knowledge and abilities. The further the player gets, the harder the difficulty becomes. Could also be built so each turn tutorializes another important mechanic, like how the opening chapter of Fates showed Dragon Veins and Paired Attacks and Pair Up and Post-Battle Debuffs and other stuff. Tutorials, we teach them in the opening chapter, then test them in the opening chapter and subsequent chapters. So when the player does another survival map later on(perhaps the moment the protagonist was dreaming of?), this time, the player’s grown and can win by using the game mechanics better. And maybe the protagonist can use allies he didn’t have in that vision, too.

“But what if the player characters die?” It was a dream or flashback or flash forward or something, or the cutscene where you nearly die then your father or father figure who dies later/your rival who turns evil saves the day doesn’t play until the Lord takes a near-fatal wound with all allies dead. Or the Lord is a boy far away from the fighting as throwaway characters all die early and the cutscene triggers when the Lord’s protectors are dead. There are a million great story and gameplay things that could be done here, really. Let’s discuss them and more!

3 Likes
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Just pick normal man.

3 Likes
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Shadow Dragon levels of difficulty.

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Go hard and prevail.

1 Like
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Videogame Dunkey has an excellent video on videogame difficulty selects.

The tldr is that handcrafted difficulties are better than formulaic ones, but even so there’s the issue of communicating to the player which difficulty to play.

He also points out that most video games usually have a “best” difficulty that feels the most polished and generally has the best sense of game balance.

Personally, an “easy mode” is way less of a hit to my ego as a gamer than when a prompt appears asking the player if they want to enable “assist mode” every time you die.

Iirc the original Lego star was had a toggle-able option for adaptive difficulty. All it did was apply a function which adjusts how many studs you lose on death in proportion to the frequency of your deaths, but it was still a neat feature nonetheless.

Starfox 64 also has a very novel implementation of adaptive difficulty. I can’t remember off the top of my head right now, but there’s another late 90s early 00s game where the number of enemies you face and their spawns is directly linked to your performance earlier in the level or in previous levels.

8 Likes
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lowest level of “playable difficulty select” is in quake where the difficulty select is a door that you walk through and has obstacles in front of it. and also nightmare is actively hidden.

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Uh, don’t we have most of these things already?

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→ hovers hardest or normal difficulty
→ dev note that reads “Intended difficulty” or something similar

Like, I get the concept of being tested in order to be forced into a specific difficulty mode, but I think Fire Emblem games would do better with gradual difficulty (narrative based decisions) over arbitrary difficulty selections, be it player hand or not.

2 Likes
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I’m never really that fond of these, since they usually come with a character aspect that ends up driving me towards one or the other regardless of how high I want the difficulty. If an option is obviously tactically superior, I, not liking playing an idiot, am probably going to go for that option. Just due to the roleplaying aspect. So having to choose between “enjoying the character I am playing” and “having a level of challenge I enjoy” doesn’t really appeal to me.

1 Like