Alright, lets get to it.
Resident Evil 4 Difficulty Settings Analysis: Part 1 - Changing simple stats
I. General talk:
As I already stated in the OP, the best and most common example for this is a simple health or damage increase of the enemies. Vice Versa you could also see the enemy health increase as player damage decrease and the enemy damage increase as a player HP decrease. This is pretty synonymous, but the actual game/UI setup might still tend to get the player to think its one way or the other. For simplicities sake(though completely taken out of my ass), lets just assume that the starting amount of max Healthpoints (green bar to the left) is 100HP, so that it can be divided into 5 bars of 20HP each:
The problem with "RAISE STATS TO MAKE IT HARDER"-approach is that its very easy to get the player to feel bored by this task, instead of providing an additional challenge. Imagine an RPG with a boss that requires you to do 3 things alternatingly in 3 turns.
1st turn - Cast Elemental Resistance
2nd turn - Attack Enemy
3rd turn - Heal
Now doing that for 50 times instead of 10 is neither original, nor fun. Other genres fall into the same trap of repetitive tediousness rather easily as well. However, changing the balance of power in a game definitely IS a pretty powerful tool if applied properly. So how does RE4 handle this issue?
II. The Test Subject
Before talking about how RE4 approaches this and how it effects the player, lets get some stats first. I only have the starting savegame atm, so further testing might need to be done later, but I am pretty sure it should be at least somewhat representative. Lets all greet our test subject:
Be nice to him. He is the first enemy you meet ingame, and I am going to kill him again, and again, and again to get some data on how the games base stats change depending on the difficulty. I also killed the enemies that spawn right after this first encounter quite often. After a bit of testing, its very clear that they all are the same "type" of zombie and dont differ in damage or health from each other, so I used them for testing purposes too.
III. The Data & Discussion
Damage to the player (from 100HP):
Code:
Easy | Normal | Hard
Axe Attacks 5 5 3
HP Damage 21 24 45
%DMG 87,5% 100% 187,5%
This is pretty straight forward. From this one enemy, the player can take up to 5 axe attacks, depending on the difficulty before dying. The HP numbers are completely made up, but somewhat representative of the damage the player is receiving from his 100 start HP. I based them on the % that was chipped away from the life bar, under the assumption that all the enemies attacks were completely identical. I ran the test about 25 times and always got the same amount of life taken away. This has not changed in either difficulty. The amount of damage an enemy is dealing is static for that current difficulty setting, probably to allow the player to judge correctly whether he might be able to survive one more hit or not, which makes this an immediately fairer game, as the enemies cant "randomly" kill you. Despite all odds, if you are always aware of the surroundings, you can always know what damage to expect and whether you should take that healing item now or not.
As you can see from the table, this means that the damage rises ~12,5% from easy to normal and a staggering ~87,5% from normal to hard. This might raise a few eyebrows as 12,5% dont really sound like anything to make a game much "easier". I'll assume that other aspects of the difficulty setting are more pronounced in the differentiation of easy to normal, than normal to hard to make up for that. I'll get back to this question later. (Highlighted to remind me)
Damage by the player:
Now this was a bit trickier, as I dont see any life bar of the enemies and therefore cant put up damage estimations. I settled on shooting at the different hit zones the enemies have (arm, leg, body, head) and counted how many times it took to actually kill the enemy. I then did the same for all combinations I could up with, including extra attacks like the kick and the knife attack, giving rough (very rough) estimates how these attacks are in relation to each other powerwise. This has been done ~100 times and I also noticed that the attacks by the player dont have any damage fluctuation. He'll always need 3 shots to the body to kill this enemy on normal. There is one exception: Critical hits. Those are rather rare (estimation based on the amount I encountered: 5%), which will immediately kill the enemy. The following numbers are the amount of attacks needed to kill those first enemies (Everything non-kick and non-knife is a pistol shot):
Code:
Easy | Normal | Hard
Body 3 3 4
Legs 3 3 4
Arms 3 3 4
Head 2 2 4
Head+Body 1+1 1+2 1+3
Head+Kick 1+1 1+1 3+1
Knife 2 2 3
Knife+Body 1+1 1+2 2+2
Knife+Head 1+1 1+1 2+2
Knife+Kick 1+1 1+1 2+1
In addition to the rising damage of the enemies, the amount of damage the player does is severely cut down (or the enemy HP going up), as you can see from this elusive mess of numbers. However, there are a few other things I noticed.
A few findings in bullet point form for improved readability:
- Body, leg and arm are identical hitzones damage wise throughout all the difficulty settings, despite having differing "effects" (head shot allows Kick, leg shot lets the opponent tumble, arm shot disarms the enemy)
- Hitting the head ONLY does more damage than hitting other body parts on easy and normal. Headshots damage = Other body shot damage on hard.
- Knife attacks do not have hitzones on normal enemies, Knife to the head is exactly as effective as Knife to any other body part
- Damage ranking: Body Shot < Head Shot < Kick < Knife (with the aforementioned exception of Headshots=Bodyshots on hard)
- Normal difficulty is way closer to Easy difficulty than Hard when it comes to how much damage is being dealt to the enemy, restating the earlier assumption that Easy->Normal might have other aspects/more changes than Normal->Hard (still needs to be tested)
- Static damage (with the exception of Critical hits), meaning no percentage of fluctuating damage each shot
When he was lying on the ground, I had the habit to to knife him in the head due to pure speculation that this must do more damage. Wrong. I even learned something practical from this statistical Odyssey
IV. Final Thoughts
To summarize, we have the most basic of all difficulty changes here too of course - Enemy damage + Enemy HP increase. Additionally, the overall changes in this game are far from a simple stat change. As I mentioned already before, these changes will NOT lead to the player doing the same thing over and over again, but this is hard to prove without looking at the other aspects that need to be considered here as item placement, enemy behaviour, enemy count, etcetc.
However one concrete example I can give from the issue at hand: this game even changes a core aspect of a playthrough on normal just by the "simple stat" change alone - The reliance of headshots doing massive damage. On normal you always try to shoot the head first, and ask questions (or distribute kicks) later. If headshots dont do any more damage on hard than a normal body shot, it might even be advisable NOT to go for the risky headshot (wasting ammunition if not hit), but also to consider other hit zones like legs that immobilize the opponent for a short bit instead. Last note about this: Please keep in mind that the numbers provided are only tested myself but not "official" numbers and still might be a bit off. Since there is no random element involved in any part of this, I feel pretty good about the findings though.
I hope this was somewhat interesting to read, and I look forward to taking a closer look at the other aspects as well
No clue how long it will take, but ah well.
