How Should Developers do Difficulty Levels? - RaychelSnr's Blog

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RaychelSnr's Blog

How Should Developers do Difficulty Levels? Stuck

Posted on November 7, 2012 at 04:41 PM.

(21)

One thing that has always been apparent in sports gaming is that people prefer different types of experiences with their games.

For instance, while one guy might tweak sliders and play on All-Pro, another might leave the game on the default Pro setting without touching a thing -- perfectly content with the game they have.

One thing that I've been wondering lately is how does everyone see their games' difficulty and how do you think it should be done.

For instance, developers can choose to simply give the AI attribute boosts to make the game harder. Where a guy has 90 speed on default, he's actually a 99 while your guys are still 90 on the top difficulty level. This type of difficulty level philosophy has been around forever: juicing the AIs ability but not it's smarts.

Obviously, the other type of difficulty enhancement is to actually make the 'I' part of AI intelligent moreso. This obviously comes with great benefits, as the game will play smarter and more like a human the further up the difficulty chain you go. You'd go from an AI running predictable plays to mentally confusing you and even anticipating your next call -- if at all possible.

The most common type, I suspect at least, is a combination of both of these. When difficulty level is determined by both how smart the AI is but also by certain boosts in attributes.

Each has their positives and negatives, personally I like a balanced approach to add real difficulty to the game -- especially given existing AI limitations and a lack of a desire to feeling cheated.

So OS, what is your idea of difficulty level? How should it be handled? And even more importantly, which game do you think most accurately models this?

Comments

# 16 hanzsomehanz @ Nov 9

My favorite difficulty system was for Madden 05/06. They had the training camp drills and that was top notch. I prefer a method of training over a difficulty slider overhaul. If we're given the freedom to adjust sliders though, I prefer we use minimal ranges, like 1-10 and now 0-100.

# 17 Valdarez @ Nov 14

A game should be challenging, without being frustrating. A game of football, specifically, should take into account not only individual player abilities, but real life offensive/defensive strategies and scale both accordingly, something no football game (to best of my knowledge) has done to date.