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orbital-decay 11 hours ago [-]
>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.
sph 10 minutes ago [-]
On the other hand, the whole Director system of Left 4 Dead works like this and it’s incredible.
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.
ragequittah 10 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 10 hours ago [-]
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.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
> There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level.
PvP involves sandbagging and a variety of fragile gimmick strategies. (Oh, and cheating. For slow enough turn-based games, players can cheat with a separate physical device, which can't be detected.)
The system can't measure skill level accurately against a player base that's actively antagonistic to such measurement, so of course it can't match players well on that basis.
Even abstract games of perfect information, like chess and Go, have this problem online.
AussieWog93 7 hours ago [-]
I used to really enjoy this aspect of older games like Warcraft 3 and TF2.
You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.
Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.
Scene_Cast2 10 hours ago [-]
There's a trade-off between how long you wait and the skill spread of the team. IIRC at the very top, for DOTA2, the pros complained enough for the devs to make a "wait longer" matchmaking mode.
para_parolu 9 hours ago [-]
SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed. Random matchmaking gives them chance to win.
But SBMM means having sweaty games all the time.
I do prefer SBMM but I’ve seen people upset about it
TulliusCicero 7 hours ago [-]
People who complain about SBMM being "sweaty" are typically stronger players who want to dunk on casuals. For them, it's true that non-SBMM is sweaty, because if you're even a top 10% player, you're gonna dominate most other people.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?
orbital-decay 7 hours ago [-]
That depends on the game I think. Games like Battlefield have no problem with players of all skills playing the same match - some are trying hard, some are chiling out, some are doing something silly, either way the scene is so large you can usually choose what you like the best, it all organizes itself naturally. BR games like PUBG always have very different players in one high-ish level match (as it's not possible to pick that many players of a matching skill) and that's completely fine.
Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.
TulliusCicero 4 hours ago [-]
If the game has a sufficiently large group of players then yes that's not as bad. But you'll still end up with weak players fairly consistently having a bad time.
mpyne 6 hours ago [-]
> SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed.
That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.
Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.
10 hours ago [-]
safwat-halaby 1 hours ago [-]
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.
hlynurd 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
nottorp 3 hours ago [-]
> 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...
atoav 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mock-possum 9 hours ago [-]
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.
wingmanjd 8 hours ago [-]
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.
globalnode 10 hours ago [-]
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.
gertop 9 hours ago [-]
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").
PetitPrince 4 hours ago [-]
Resident Evil 4 famously had a hidden dynamic difficulty setting that made the game easier if the player struggled. I think it worked because RE4 is a linear / ambiance based game. The game designer wants the player to progress in the story, and getting stuck on an impossible doesn't make sense except if the player chose a challenge mode. Contrast with Morrowing where it makes no sense having common bandit on the road carrying god-like equipment.
orbital-decay 9 hours ago [-]
How is it a problem? Giving up is absolutely fine. Different games are made for different types of players. Who cares what the others think (or you think they think). By trying to cater to everyone you satisfy nobody.
onion2k 4 hours ago [-]
If a game is so hard that the player gives up, they won't buy your next game. That is an existential threat to your game studio.
Worse though, if your game is deemed 'unfair' rather than just 'hard', then even the hardcore gamers will avoid it. That's enough to kill the business before you even start the next game.
Some studios pick the 'hardcore' market, especially once they've built a reputation and a following, but everyone else needs a more general appeal in order to stay in business.
orbital-decay 3 hours ago [-]
If your studio's only goal is to make money and games are a byproduct then it makes sense, but in most of the gamedev it leveled itself out some 10-15 years ago - very few studios outside of mobile gaming target the lowest common denominator audience, most seem to understand that opinionated design adds flavor and sells the game as well. Certain target audiences simply never cross under any circumstances, it's not even necessarily "hardcore vs casual".
ozgrakkurt 9 hours ago [-]
Just make it a concrete option then. What is the point of being sneaky about it?
mpyne 6 hours ago [-]
Probably because some people want to feel like they're succeeding in the 'actual game' and not the 'Fisher Price version of the game'. For those people the solution is ultimately to make their reality appear to be that, even though it isn't.
TulliusCicero 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Hades did this with God mode and it worked very well.
bob1029 3 hours ago [-]
This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop.
lelanthran 2 hours ago [-]
> This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop.
This is interesting to me; can you explain please?
pharrington 4 hours ago [-]
Do you really hate Breathe of the Wild so much?
nkrisc 12 hours ago [-]
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.
chihuahua 9 hours ago [-]
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.
stillpointlab 10 hours ago [-]
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.)
willis936 10 hours ago [-]
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.
stillpointlab 8 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
teamonkey 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ComputerPerson 13 hours ago [-]
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.
orbital-decay 11 hours ago [-]
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.
teamonkey 2 hours ago [-]
This is true, but you don’t want people to bounce off the game immediately, so they have a bad time and refund it before giving it a proper go.
This can happen if they feel it’s easier or harder then expected.
Thanemate 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
rnjesus 10 hours ago [-]
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
satgo1546 9 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2009/ai_system...
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.
PvP involves sandbagging and a variety of fragile gimmick strategies. (Oh, and cheating. For slow enough turn-based games, players can cheat with a separate physical device, which can't be detected.)
The system can't measure skill level accurately against a player base that's actively antagonistic to such measurement, so of course it can't match players well on that basis.
Even abstract games of perfect information, like chess and Go, have this problem online.
You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.
Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?
Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.
That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.
Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.
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.
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...
Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
Worse though, if your game is deemed 'unfair' rather than just 'hard', then even the hardcore gamers will avoid it. That's enough to kill the business before you even start the next game.
Some studios pick the 'hardcore' market, especially once they've built a reputation and a following, but everyone else needs a more general appeal in order to stay in business.
This is interesting to me; can you explain please?
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.
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
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.
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.
This can happen if they feel it’s easier or harder then expected.
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.
However, this article reminded me of this meme
https://imgur.com/gallery/eve-online-learning-curve-jj16ThL
Multiplayer FPS, strategy games, and sport games are still very enjoyable without these mechanisms.
i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason