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[killatopak]

So I've recently come across this year old video of someone talking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFv6KAdQ5SE&t=29s

Basically the game adjusts it's difficulty depending on how well or how bad you play the game. They do this in order to get to a sweet spot called the Flow wherein game difficulty and player skill intersects one another to make your gaming experience not hair pulling frustrating but not too easy that you get bored.

There's an example that he illustrates where if you play well enough in Resident Evil 4, as you get to the infamous water room where you need to cross a bridge using Ashley, you get welcomed by 9 Zealots consisting of 7 ground ones and 2 ones using crossbow on a balcony. However, if you die a few times during the encounter, those two crossbow zealots mysteriously disappears. Of course there are more stuff in the game that adjusts depending on your skill level like aggressiveness of the enemies and the loot you obtain from dead bodies. It's amazing how I didn't notice this until I watched the video. Now it makes me understand why I thought the game was perfect in terms of difficulty during my first playthrough.

It made me surprised since I never come across of them talking about dynamic difficulty being applied in the game at all nor do I know that there's such a thing as well. As talked about in the video, it probably helped the game a lot since it didn't patronize you nor told you that so you could exploit it or else you would just kill yourself a couple of times just to make the game easier.

There are other games talked about in the video such as Max Payne, Left 4 Dead, Zanac, Kid Icarus, Smash, Flow and Xevious.

The video tells that it's best that it's not told or that it's subtle enough that you don't notice it and I agree. It gives player satisfaction if you get to finish something you failed a couple of times. On the other hand, we have those that prefer the games not to adjust the difficulty as it lessens the challenge which people who have played the soul series especially like.

I'm curious about your thoughts guys. Do you guys know any other games that perform this function perfectly well like Resident Evil 4? Do you prefer a game having dynamic difficulty?

 

[Modoru]

Godhand did this. I loved that game.

I mean, it was straight up a counter in the screen based off you not getting hit, and also landing a lot of damage, but yeah

pardon the low-res image, but I mean this:

 

[muteki]

As long as it's not rubber banding its fine.

 

[venom473]

Not sure if it counts but in Metal Gear Solid V the enemies adapt to your playstyle, e.g. if you go for a lot of headshots, they are more likely to wear helmets in future missions. Also if you tend to do your missions during the night, they might wear nightvision goggles the next time.

 

[LAM09]

God hand is the best example I'm aware of and is shown in the video. I personally like the idea when it's implement right.

Not sure if it counts but in Metal Gear Solid V the enemies adapt to your playstyle, e.g. if you go for a lot of headshots, they are more likely to wear helmets in future missions. Also if you tend to do your missions during the night, they might wear nightvision goggles the next time.

I know it's slightly different, but PES 2017 has adaptive AI as well. Guess that's one the Fox Engine's key features.

 

[DreamedLint]

I don't know how I feel about it. It's a really cool idea, but when I'm struggling with a spot in a game, I don't need it to make things easier for me. I want to get better, myself. It's less patronising than games that ask you, but the result is the same. I find it just as frustrating.

 

[derFeef]

Remedy did a similar thing with Alan Wake.

 

[danmaku]

Tons of arcade games did that, to make the game harder for expert players. It's usually called ranking system.

Battle Garegga is one of the most extreme examples because a viable tactic to 1CC the game is to get extra lives with points and then suicide to decrease rank. If you don't do that, the game becomes basically impossible.

 

[Skrams]

Not as hidden as RE4, but I think Killer Instinct lowers the difficulty on the regular arcade mode if you lose? I remember watching a Maximilian video of his Boss Rage where he had to reset when he lost as to keep the difficulty on the highest one, "Kyle," difficulty.

I wish a lot more games did this considering it's been 10+ years since RE4 and it's not a common idea yet.

 

[Bl@de]

Not sure if it counts but in Metal Gear Solid V the enemies adapt to your playstyle, e.g. if you go for a lot of headshots, they are more likely to wear helmets in future missions. Also if you tend to do your missions during the night, they might wear nightvision goggles the next time.

That's a great way to do it. It mixes up the gameplay, adds challenge and is realistic. I wish more games would take this approach to difficulty.

 

[kotodama]

I've never been a fan of the concept as it was used in Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3, in which once your character became over powered then all the enemies were too, even in the beginning areas, etc. It was immersion breaking retarded.

Surprised that Resident Evil 4 had it, and more surprised that it worked so well. I guess when it is done right, like a lot of things, it really shouldn't be noticed at all. Still in general, I'd probably prefer it not to happen at all. Fixed difficulty is simpler programmatically.

 

[ieptbarakat]

Killing Floor 2 has it where the next wave of zeds could be either tougher/faster or weaker/slower depending on how long it took your team to finish off the previous wave of zeds.

 

[Couleurs]

MLB The Show has dynamic difficulty that works really well. During games it'll gradually adjust pitching and hitting difficulty depending on your performance, which mostly alleviates previous problems with standard difficulty settings. For example, previously if a player was on All Star setting and was dominating at pitching but didn't want to bump it up to Hall of Fame difficulty since they sucked at hitting (as HOF would make it even harder to hit); now with dynamic difficulty that player could have his pitching difficulty automatically increased while leaving hitting alone (or decreasing hitting difficulty if they're really struggling).

 

[Remmy2112]

Homeworld 1, I believe, had a dynamic difficulty instead of a difficulty slider for its campaign. All your ships and resources carried over from one mission to another. The game based the starting forces of the enemy on the total value of your active ships. If you had a large enough fleet in some of the later missions you could get hit almost out of the gate by massive enemy fleets.

Recycling some of your ships and harvesting all the resources on the map prior to clicking to go to the next map was a viable, if seriously time consuming strategy. Otherwise you could get annihilated.

 

[killatopak]

I've never been a fan of the concept as it was used in Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3, in which once your character became over powered then all the enemies were too, even in the beginning areas, etc. It was immersion breaking retarded.

Surprised that Resident Evil 4 had it, and more surprised that it worked so well. I guess when it is done right, like a lot of things, it really shouldn't be noticed at all. Still in general, I'd probably prefer it not to happen at all. Fixed difficulty is simpler programmatically.

I hated oblivion for that. All the time I spent leveling up and it all went the drain. I believe skyrim fixed this. They still have scaling levels but they have a cap depending on what monster it is.

 

[Gaz_RB]

Trails in the Sky lowers difficulty on subsequent retries of battles. Which is funny because it's so easy to begin with.

 

[Mupod]

Godhand did this. I loved that game.

I mean, it was straight up a counter in the screen based off you not getting hit, and also landing a lot of damage, but yeah

pardon the low-res image, but I mean this:

God Hand did it the way it should be done. If you play well, the game gets harder and your score gets higher.

I hated RE4's dynamic difficulty. I want to overcome a challenge, not have the game take pity on me. I remember I died a few times on a part with a Garrador, and right as I'd figured out a strategy the game responded by removing the Garrador. I just reset the Gamecube because I wouldn't have felt right progressing that way.

 

[w0s]

I hated this in oblivion. If I grow more powerful let me decimate earlier areas don't bring the dungeon to my level.

 

[HStallion]

How in the world has no developer just straight lifted God Hand's difficulty scaling? It was so simple and straight forward but so damn brilliant. The better you play the harder the game gets and if you fuck up and take a bit too much damage it drops you decreases until you bump it back up again by playing well. You get more and better rewards for the higher difficulty but also face more aggressive and damaging enemies. Brilliant stuff!

 

[jimboton]

Don't like dynamic difficulty, be it level scaling in a RPG, rubberbanding in a racing game or encounter tailoring in L4D or RE4. Also the game not asking you or even telling you it's doing it is more patronising, not less, like the game doesn't even trust you to choose the difficulty level you want to play at? I think it's just a bit dishonest, really.

 

[DeadPhoenix]

Thinking about this topic a while back I came up with an idea for a tactical rpg where the game would judge your performance, and depending on how you played the game would grant you rewards that would try and make that style of play... not necessarily easier, but more supportive of that type of play. Like say, if you just send out a bunch of tanky damage dealers to smash the enemy as quickly as possible, you would get more experience to level up faster, get more damage and hp to suit that play style. Great for people who just like overpowering people. But if played more 'tactically' making sure you lose as little hp as possible and complete special objectives on the map(like, kill the enemy leader first to throw off the enemy party) you would get more JP or AP or whatever that would let you pick up more skill that wouldn't necessarily be more powerful, but would give you more combat options. So one player could just smash though enemies with a group of T.G. Cids, but the other would be re-positioning them to set up special combos where if one thing goes wrong they could end up with the tables turn against them completely.

Maybe not the place for that, but I do find this topic interesting. I'd like to see something like this used more, but not necessarily for difficultly in all cases. Like a dark souls game that bends around the players playstyle would be cool, but making the game 'easier', not so much.

And enemies leveling scaling is fine, if(like anything) its done right, and Bethesda didn't(much like everything else since morrowind).

 

[Gotchaye]

I think it often doesn't feel good as a player to get punished for doing well. This isn't a big deal in games that don't have certain kinds of persistent features; Halo's campaign could have dynamically scaled and it would have been basically fine. But lots of games (RPGs in particular) try to encourage you to play a certain way by offering you long-term rewards (items or experience) that are potentially relevant all the way to the end of the game. The whole point of this kind of game is that playing well should make it easier than it would otherwise be, going forward, and so there's a huge difference between picking Hard Mode up front and being kicked into higher and higher difficulties just because you're doing well. Dynamic difficulty can destroy the main reward loop - doing well doesn't make you stronger.

Now, if a game can reward a player in ways that aren't just making the game easier - if you can give the player fun new mechanics to play with - then the two can live alongside each other, I think. Then the increased difficulty feels more like the price you pay to have access to more of the game, and it's rewarding to compete on that level.

Edit: If players are never actually aware of what's going on, it can work regardless - ideally, you feel like you're just barely keeping above water, and you feel like you're doing a great job managing to save up just enough ammo to complete the next section. But this can backfire really quickly. If players realize that levels are just always dropping enough ammo to keep them at half-full, regardless of how much they use, the game just seems dumb.

 

[ced]

Whatever RE4 did was excellent, as a lot of us had no idea it was going on. I still remember that games' difficulty being perfect.

 

[Adaren]

This might not be as explicit as the OP was looking for, but I've always thought of the Dark Souls leveling system as a sort of dynamic difficulty slider.

In most games, when you die, you reload at a checkpoint and lose any items / experience you had gained since then. In Dark Souls, you keep any items you found, and you actually have the opportunity to keep your experience as well as long as you can get back to the point you died at (since you already did it once, this is mostly a matter of patience, consistency, and keeping your wits about you).

Thus, a player who dies frequently will actually end up at a higher level than a player who clears a level on the first try. Players who die are basically tricked into grinding and practicing the level, but it doesn't feel like grinding (to the contrary, retrieving your souls is often when the game is at its most tense, and getting them back is a huge relief).

Now, you could argue that this sort of dynamic difficulty system isn't as "potent" as it should be. Levels in Dark Souls are almost always less important than gear and knowledge/awareness. It's almost a bit of a placebo, so that a player who dies continuously can tell themselves "Well, at least I'm leveling up!". But I still think it's noteworthy for how organically its built into the game, and how it acts to encourage the player instead of feeling like it's taking pity on them.

 

[pantsmith]

Godhand did this. I loved that game.

I mean, it was straight up a counter in the screen based off you not getting hit, and also landing a lot of damage, but yeah

pardon the low-res image, but I mean this:

Great first post!

Yeah, so for anyone who has never played Godhand: basically you have a meter that fills up the better you are doing and depletes the worse you do. The game is still the same game through and through, same level layout and "sandbox", but it tries its best to keep you in the zone by matching pace with you.

"The difficulty of the game can fluctuate between Level 0 and Level Die (or 6) based on the player's performance. Taking significant damage or dying will lower the meter, which will drop the level down. The more the player avoids damage while continuing to make progress, the higher the level will rise."

"The level of difficulty affects two things. First, it affects how aggressive the AI is. The lower the number, the less likely enemies will counterattack, attack in groups, or use their stronger attacks with the opposite more frequent at higher levels. The second detail is that at the higher levels (specifically Level Die) more (and more difficult) enemies will show up in the levels, forcing the player to adapt. Going back to the initial difficulty level at the start, the only things it determines is the starting level of the meter and how high it can go."

"Playing God Hand, the game attempts to match the player's skill level by raising or lowering the difficulty. Both a novice player and a skilled player are going to take the same path through the level, but what a novice player will be facing will be different compared to someone who is consistently performing well."

 

[BadWolf]

Overall God Hand handled it best, it effects everything in real time in the middle of combat.

They even gave Gene a special move where he begs the enemies to take the difficulty meter down a notch and they laugh at him lol.

Not sure if it counts but in Metal Gear Solid V the enemies adapt to your playstyle, e.g. if you go for a lot of headshots, they are more likely to wear helmets in future missions. Also if you tend to do your missions during the night, they might wear nightvision goggles the next time.

That was such a nice, and logical, touch.

On my second play through I made sure to vary things up often and had an easier time overall since the enemy couldn't adapt to what time of day I would do missions or where I would shoot them.

 

[killatopak]

I guess it's more of a game by game basis then. I don't think I would appreciate dynamic difficulty in a turn based rpg. Though at that point as the poster above me said, I think levels themselves function as a dynamic difficulty setting in which you just need to grind stuff in order to breeze through a particular instance or push through it without grinding for added difficulty.

A good example of what I mention is FFX. Most enemies and bosses could be beaten as long as you have progresses through the sphere grid. The difficulty and level of strategy needed is inversely proportional to the extens of your sphere grid. I can literally kill bosses just by pressing attack if I completed the sphere grid. On the other hand we have those who do the no sphere grid runs and the level of preparation and strategy they need is leagues above the earlier case.

Although you could argue that the dynamic-ness of the difficulty is controlled by you and not the game itself and at that point the difference between doing that and just implementing another difficulty setting and becoming less pronounced.

 

[Waylon Drums]

I remember being both annoyed and relieved when I noticed RE4 doing that. It was nice to be able to complete whatever section I had been having trouble in...but I felt like I didn't really "beat" it if the game made itself easier for me.

 

[Portman]

Homeworld 1, I believe, had a dynamic difficulty instead of a difficulty slider for its campaign. All your ships and resources carried over from one mission to another. The game based the starting forces of the enemy on the total value of your active ships. If you had a large enough fleet in some of the later missions you could get hit almost out of the gate by massive enemy fleets.

Recycling some of your ships and harvesting all the resources on the map prior to clicking to go to the next map was a viable, if seriously time consuming strategy. Otherwise you could get annihilated.

You're thinking of Homeworld 2. The tactic you described was viable in the original game where you could sit at the end and build up a huge fleet since everything was static for the next mission. Relic's counter to that in the 2nd game was that the Vaygr were an "overwhelming force" and would always be more prepared than the Hiigarans. This translated as the AI getting a scaled up force based on what you loaded each mission with. So if you sat and built a massive force then went to the next mission they would out number you but I believe if you kept the resources you could build without it stacking the deck against you.


I've always liked the idea of dynamic difficulties and especially as I've gotten older and have less free time. I enjoy a challenge but when you've had to restart something 10 times or more and it's just frustrating it is nice when the game is able to boost your abilities or lessen the enemy for that specific encounter. The way Resident Evil 4 was described earlier in the thread would be something I'd appreciate seeing as an option in games. Perhaps if they have set difficulties with an option for dynamic in case people don't want help? Or it could be optional like the golden leaf in Mario or the Chicken Hat in MGS V (I'm thinking that later one would offer it).

 

[hodgy100]

crash bandicoot "?" crates have different contents depending on how well the player is doing.

 

[Stoze]

I think for most players it feels worse when the game clearly starts catering to you as you die more. This was a fairly common complaint with The Last of Us, if you start dying a lot you'll get treated to gratuitous ammo packs. Not only does it feel like the game is pitying you, it tends to break immersion once you realize the scaling is there.

If you're never aware of what's happening though it can work very well. In my replay of TLoU I totally forgot the game even had a scaling mechanic, because I never did too bad in any one section. Ultimately I think dynamic difficulty or scaling can be a great mechanic, but it's incredibly hard to implement well and works in some genres better than others. The more undetectable devs can make it the better.

 

[Regiruler]

Not a particular fan of this, I don't mind struggling a bit.

 

[AtomicShroom]

Not as hidden as RE4, but I think Killer Instinct lowers the difficulty on the regular arcade mode if you lose?

Yeah the game got noticeably easier each time you Continued. Mortal Kombat did the same thing.

It's kinda like crane games. They're designed to not let you win until enough money has been put in.

 

[jroc74]

I remember a thread on here before about something similar.

I like it. But I like level scaling. Not adjusting the level down if you are struggling. With scaling you can still go back to earlier levels and be OP.

And level scaling can be exploited once you know how it works within the game. I like how Borderlands does it.

But in Borderlands AFAIK if you go and visit every area at your current level it wont scale to higher levels. That can work in your favor depending on what you want to do. Doing that will yield weaker loot, lower money but it depends on what you wanna do.

If a game wants to do that, give me a warning. Let me decide if I actually wanna do it. Like in Xplosion Man, a simple XBL arcade game, die too many times and it asks you if you wanna skip this level. I like games that give me the option of choosing to play at a lower level vs doing it unknown.

 

[Anteater]

I think there were actually areas where you get more enemy spawns if you're on level Die in playing on normal mode in god hand but I don't remember for sure, because I know for certain you get an extra wave of enemies on hard mode in a few places because it's always level die, but yeah God Hand did it the best imo, I love/hate getting into those situations where I'm out of health and I level up from all the dodging because I need to stay alive, then a fucking demon spawns lol

also a nice touch that you can use a roulette move to lower the level

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Bosses in the House of the Dead games move slower if you play poorly in the stages themselves.

 

[InfiniteCombo]

Whatever RE4 did was excellent, as a lot of us had no idea it was going on. I still remember that games' difficulty being perfect.

This.

As for people bringing up the point that it's patronizing or whatever, RE4 also has a saving system (i.e., the typewriter). If you feel that you're not getting the true challenge because the game removed crossbow zealots or a Garrador, then just reload your most recent save and try again.

 

[Modoru]

Great first post!

Yeah, so for anyone who has never played Godhand: basically you have a meter that fills up the better you are doing and depletes the worse you do. The game is still the same game through and through, same level layout and "sandbox", but it tries its best to keep you in the zone by matching pace with you.

are you making fun of me? ;___;

thanks for elaborating though, super busy at work

 

[Tagyhag]

It's weird but, during the Halo 2 campaign on Heroic. I've had a few times where I've died 2 to 3 times on the same room and the next time I respawned there were fewer enemies appearing.

I don't know if that was an actual system that they had or if it was just a bug.

 

[Trigonometrize.]

It doesn't sound particularly appealing to me. Being able to mid-game change your difficulty setting all around is game design-breaking enough, but having that process integrated into the functions of the game is just all the more cheese. At least with the former you're having to manually feel the humiliation of not being able to accomplish at the difficulty you thought you could at.