Also, this is something we've talked about internally and I just wanted to know what your guys stance on it is.
Imagine a game tracks how well you play the game. We track how often you take damage, how often you die, how often you have to heal up, which enemies you have the most trouble with and we adjust things accordingly:
That means that if we see that an area is very difficult for you, more health drops would spawn. If enemies are too difficulty for you, instead of 3 enemies that you have to defeat to follow the critical path, there'd only be 1 or 2. Once you get better at the game, we could play the same game in reverse: If you leveled up a lot and just blaze through areas and enemies, we could raise the difficulty back up again.
Would you feel offended by an approach like that?
I'm never quite sure about how I feel about dynamic difficulty systems. On the one hand I think they're great at pitching the game difficulty to the player's skill, but on the other I find it a little frustrating when I take multiple tries getting slightly closer each time, but then after the tenth death (or whatever) suddenly the dynamic difficulty kicks in and there's one fewer enemy - at that point, a little me
does think "And now I've failed"; I've
lost the chance to keep trying at something I was getting close to beating.
But on the other hand, if it's
purely opt-in, I'm stubborn enough about that to never actually pick it. Which perhaps isn't the best solution either. I think the only place I can think of where I consciously felt it best to reduce difficulty was after two levels of Halo where I had to concede that Legendary wasn't
quite for me; I was succeeding, but the constant retries weren't that enjoyable, although the occasional success was. In short,
I generally cannot be trusted to pick the best difficulty option for myself.
I think what I
want is:
* Dynamic difficulty that's more nuanced than "Player fails encounter N times". Something that uses metrics to see also how
long you're surviving in the encounter and how close you're getting to the 'success' condition. If you're making
any progress compared to previous attempts, don't trigger.
* If it
does trigger the difficulty adjustment, do it
very subtly and gradually; I don't want to know you've done it, because that'll make the eventual victory feel tainted. Don't remove enemies, that's easy to spot. Don't give enemies half health, give them just 2% less. And let these changes accumulate over repeat tries, so the changes are ultimately quite subtle from one try to another.
I have a game idea of my own knocking around my head, and it's using a similar-ish notion, albeit from a puzzle-solving point of view; you'd have to develop a solution to scalable task and then your score would depend on how
difficult a version of the task it succeeds on, loosely speaking.
Edit: In the further "Mea Culpa" linked from the RPS article there's some commentary on the obtuseness of indicating where it's best to play next that resonates a little with something I'd written beforehand:
I think the *big* problem is that, for the player, it's impossible to distinguish between "Stuck because you've missed/haven't figured out what to do next" and "Stuck because the game has failed to give you adequate information on what to do next". Both are frustrating, but the first is a challenge for the player to solve, wheras the latter requires either a guide or luck.
The risk, though - and it's a trap I've fallen into - is that if you can't tell between the two of them, the average player will assume it's the latter. You need to have a lot of trust in a game to consider the possibility that the problem lies with you, and many games simply fail to earn that faith. And as soon as a player looks at a guide once, the path's open for them to keep looking, potentially ruining later puzzles even before they've given them proper consideration.
From a game design point of view... do you *assume* that a player will trust you? It's a brave move; it might produce better games, but it also produces *riskier* games. Not least because, of course, you as the designer may have judged your clues wrong, they might be much harder than intended (it's very difficult to step back and judge a problem you've created objectively, since you'll inherently already know the solution). It's a much safer option to err on the side of caution and be a bit too obvious.
I love how condescending it is towards anyone who didn't find Hyper Light Drifter the most frustrating thing ever like he did.
