Dynamic Difficulty - good or bad?

[dumpster]

I've been playing Resident Evil 3 a lot. I was initially put off by the short running time, but it's an absolute cracker, and there's loads of replay value in the challenges and achievements.....

 

Except.... There's a hidden value that makes a massive impact on the game-play, and you'd never know it's there until you see a weird quirk that makes you realise something is not right.  Like, when you quickly kill a boss with a grenade and you're thinking "it took me ages last time!"

 

The title screen offers you a choice of difficulty and you pick a difficulty level you feel comfortable with. In Resi3 there's Assisted, Standard and Hardcore with further difficulty levels unlocked by completing these. By selecting a difficulty level you would think you get the same experience as every other player that chooses that level, right? So

 'easy' is surely easier than 'normal'.

 But it isn't.  Well, not always.  It depends.

 

Because the difficulty is represented by an ever changing hidde  value between

 1 and 20,000.  When you pick a difficulty setting at the start, all that happens is that this hidden DA value is allocated a start amount and has a  minimum and maximum based on the selection you made. Your gameplay increases and decreases the value constantly within these limits.

 

 

If you play on Assisted (easiest), you start with 2,500 DA points.  This can adjust between 0 and 3999.  On Standard you start with 5,500 and this can drop to 3,000 or raise to 8,999. You can see that there's a 1000 overlap there.

 

A perfect dodge, a headshot, or just killing zombies increases the difficulty.  But if you die the score drops by 500. If you shoot and miss the target, the number drops too. The overlap means a strong player could tip over 3000 and be fighting against a higher skill level than they chose. Your lack of skills can bring that figure back down, but it's all contributing to giving you a different gameplay experience.

 

 

The higher the DA score, the more damage a zombie attack will do, and the less damage your weapons do. Zombies lunge at you, but if you're playing well they may lunge twice in a row and surprise you.

There is a maximum DA for each setting (so you won't find yourself going all the way from from Easy to Inferno), but there is that overlap. You might play on Normal, but be so bad the game drops to easy, but it didn't tell you so you feel proud to have completed the game on normal.  If you start the game on Inferno a whole new can of worms opens up as the variance allowed is wider still.

 

Expert Inferno players can manipulate this difficulty, so it's worthwhile firing off a load of your bullets at the wall, to make the boss in the next room easier.

 

The reason I started researching this is that I was trying to get an achievement by beating the game in under 2 hours on Inferno.  If you die and choose "continue" the timer carries on.  But if you die then quit and reload the previous autosave the timer doesn't include the last part of the previous session.  This is an important distinction because if you are trying to beat Inferno difficulty in under 2 hours to get the S rank you can't save your game manually more than 5 times.  Quitting and restarting from an autosave makes this do-able, but effectively you are fooling the game into thinking you never saved and never died.  It's very apparent then, when you get to the last boss that the game is absolutely insanely difficult.  Initially on the games release, players were complaining that Capcom obviously had not playtested the higher difficulty levels because the Inferno bosses were almost impossible.  But when you realise that the game is automatically upping the difficulty, it seems unfair.  You've put in the hard work, become an expert at the game, and for you, personally and individually, the last boss is being a twat.  Your mate who bumbled through the game killed it with a few grenades. 

 

It just seems weird to me, although I get that DA has gone on in the games industry forever, but it feels very obvious in this game  - perhaps DA is a good thing when it is so well done you don't notice it. Ironically the first time I heard of this was in Resi4, when I played the Wii version with a Ocarina Cheat Code, there's a boss whose health is always a percentage of your own, so with a cheat entered the boss fight becomes an unbeatable dead end.

 

Ultimately It leads to a situation where your "elite skillz" throughout the main bulk of the game sends the difficulty of the end bosses through the roof and the only way to defeat them is to use a few continues to get the difficulty back down. Or I need to start again and be less accurate with the shots , save more  and allow the DA to drop naturally.

 

Anyone else got experience or thoughts on this ?

 

 

[Soulstar]

I haven't got much experience on this but I remember reading this about Resident Evil 4 on a Youtube video a few years ago, so they have been using this technique for a while. I don't know how prevalent this sort of thing is across the whole industry. I'm personally not a fan of the idea if it's enforced in a way that you can't get around. The more I think about it, I'm sure I might have seen this mentioned in something else I've played too. Maybe Evil Within 2, or something, not sure. I remember playing something that mentions it before you start and I haven't yet played RE4 so it's not that. 

[jonamok]

I have nothing of value to add, just wanted to thank @dumpster for a really interesting opening post.

[smac]

I've been here too long. I’m sure we did this one before. But don't let me stop you, I'm not complaining. Just feeling really, really jaded...

[Ravern]

The best solution would be offering a choice of difficulty options but also offering a choice to turn on/off dynamic difficulty, or to simply go down the "Would you like to temporarily turn down the difficulty?" prompt that you find in numerous games. What's the point of offering different difficulty settings but then not respecting what the player wants from the game?

[Monkeyspill]

The Last of Us seemed to do this with items. When I was playing well, I’d be rifling through cupboards and drawers and turning up nothing. Die a few times in the same place and it would bump up your health or give you extra stuff.

 

I can understand why they do it but it’s annoying when you notice it. It feels like you’re either cheating or being cheated.

 

It’s the same with rubber banding in racing games.

[James Lyon]

It didn't do Sin Episodes any favours.

[dumpster]

There is one positive that is is that I don't think it's possible to get stuck. I've played games which only allow one save slot, and you might save just before entering a boss room and you just don't have enough ammunition to kill it. There's no way to get back out to find more ammunition so all you can do is wipe your save file and start over. At least I've never had that in resi 3.

[Down by Law]

Max Payne advertised this as a feature iirc

[Nick R]

I'm not a fan of the concept. I like the idea that a given difficulty setting is a specific challenge, with specific rules and conditions, laid down by the developer, and it's the player's job to meet that challenge. I don't like the idea that it might be tweaked partway through without my knowledge.

 

Also, as in @dumpster's RE3 speedrun example, once players have figured out what factors affect the difficulty scaling, then ideal time/score attack play becomes a slightly ridiculous exercise in playing artificially badly in order to game the algorithms. So you get dumb-looking actions like those missed shots in RE3. I'm not a fan of the idea that perfect, optimal play should involve intentionally poor play!

 

 

 

But I recognise it's hard to distinguish "adaptive difficulty" from other behind-the-scenes variables that involve RNG or react to player status. I'm not sure where I'd draw the line. For example, there are probably loads of enemy AI routines that "telepathically" read the player's condition in some way (what your HP is; which direction you're facing) and use it to determine enemy behaviour. Does that qualify as "adaptive difficulty" of some kind? If I'm ruling all that out, I'd be destroying a lot of what makes many games fun!

 

Imagine a game features a set-piece where I open a door to trigger an ambush by multiple enemies. Here are four possible ways that the game might take my current HP status and use it to affect the encounter, and how I would feel about each of them:

1. The game's logic says that if I have >50% HP they should attack me aggressively, but if I have <50% HP they should wait an extra 0.2 seconds after seeing me before they start shooting at me.
   • That 0.2 seconds might be enough to make a significant difference to my survival, but it's not something I'm likely to notice. But if I was told that it's going on, it'd bother me!
2. The game's logic says that if I have >50% HP the enemies should shoot with standard accuracy, but if I have <50% HP their randomised bullet spread should be widened so I get hit slightly less often.
   • Again, not something I'm likely to notice (because in normal gameplay it would be indistinguishable from completely randomised gunfire spread). But if I was told about it, I'd wonder afterwards if I only survived that section thanks to its help!
3. The game's logic says that if I have >50% HP the enemies should be armed with SMGs, but if I have <50% HP they should be armed with pistols.
   • I really don't like this because it's affecting things that are spawned in the environment; if I quickload my previous save and reach the set-piece with a slightly different amount of health, I will instantly see the difference.
4. The enemies in the ambush room are not affected by my HP at all. However, the preceding room contains medikits and ammo supply crates, and (like Half-Life 2) their quantities are adjusted based on my status.
   • Like (3), this is also a form of adaptive difficulty that affects how things are spawned in the environment... but this one wouldn't bother me, because the enemies are what I consider the primary challenge, and they are left unchanged.

 

So I think that my rule of thumb is that I don't mind an adaptive difficulty system based around the likelihood of being given support items; but I'd be more bothered by one that affects how much of a threat the game's enemies are.

 

36 minutes ago, Down by Law said:

Max Payne advertised this as a feature iirc

 

Yeah, I can't think of anything I've played since the original Max Payne that has prominently advertised adaptive difficulty as a desirable feature.

[MrPogo]

I think I read the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games do it, changing the enemies you’ll encounter in a new area based on your current level. That I don’t mind, and I appreciate any game making it easier to progress after I’ve failed something a few times, but I like to eventually feel I’ve mastered a game, so for me there needs to be a limit to how high the difficulty level will go, and I’d at least like each level/area to stay fixed once I first enter it instead of it being a constant increase.

[LeighCb]

It's been a thing in the series for a while. 

 

Good for players who enjoy games when designed well. I guess it sucks for hardcore, high score players or something. Billy Mitchell, it sucks for Billy Mitchell. 

 

Left 4 Dead did this too, right?

[Mr. Gerbik]

5 hours ago, MrPogo said:

I think I read the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games do it, changing the enemies you’ll encounter in a new area based on your current level. That I don’t mind, and I appreciate any game making it easier to progress after I’ve failed something a few times, but I like to eventually feel I’ve mastered a game, so for me there needs to be a limit to how high the difficulty level will go, and I’d at least like each level/area to stay fixed once I first enter it instead of it being a constant increase.

Oblivion did it in a way that completely turned me off the game. Everything scaled very obviously to your level, and I mean everything - enemies and loot in all the areas of the game. Which meant that at level one you could leisurely explore the entire land mass with hardly any opposition but also no interesting loot to be found.

 

In Morrowind there were no go areas with scary high level creatures that you'd avoid for a long time, and finally being able to go there felt like a huge victory. Also, sneaking into such a dangerous area to steal some high level armour early on felt exhilarating - impossible to do in Oblivion because universal level scaling meant that instead of a set of high level armour, you'd find two potatoes and a wooden spoon in that spot.

 

On top of that it felt very rewarding to return to earlier areas and one hit kill everything once you became powerful. In Oblivion, those starting areas were suddenly filled with high level enemies and you never reached a point that you felt really stupidly powerful, robbing the endgame of that satisfying feeling after all your hard work.

 

It also completely broke immersion with silly stuff like a raggedy bandit camp just outside the city - they always tried to rob you for 100 gold or attack you if you didn't pay up. When you had levelled up a bit, those very same bandits would run up to you each wearing high level ebony armour and shit, worth a bazillion gold give or take. Enough to buy six houses in the richest district in the city. Yet here they still were, living in a scruffy small tent and robbing you for a hundred gold pieces.

 

Thankfully it isn't as obvious or in your face in their other games.

[BeeJay]

I'm not a fan of adaptive difficulty, in most situations. I like my games to be a set challenge, that I choose to encounter in my way.

 

But I do understand that adaptive difficulty can improve some games and that's why I think games should have a clearly indicated difficulty called 'adaptive' just like a lot now have a 'story' difficulty. Maybe most of the story difficulties have adaptive difficulty built in.

 

The cynic in me suggests that creating a non-adaptive difficulty setting, that is balanced well, is much, much harder to implement than adaptive difficulty.

 

Like a lot of trends in gaming, there is a movement toward techniques that are low on man-hours to implement and test. Adaptive difficulty is another example of a system that can be much quicker to implement and test. A test that asks 'when a player misses a shot, does the accuracy of the enemies decrease?' is a lot, lot easier to test than, 'is the enemy achievable to beat?'

[Timmo]

 

God Hand did a very similar thing back in 2006, although the difficulties were Level 1, 2, 3 and Level Die (shown at the bottom left at all times).

 

Personally I hated it, I'd be getting into a flow, then the difficulty would up automatically and I'd get hit and the level would drop back down. Rinse and repeat.

[Alex W.]

I've always thought it was the sort of thing that's essential if you want the player experience to be consistent regardless of how good, or simply lucky, the player happens to be. At least, as far as these authored, fairly linear experiences go.

 

People talk about how dynamic difficulty means you're not having the same experience as the next person, but there's no ISO standard game difficulty. You're going to be getting a set-piece that's balanced to the average of the playtesters and if you're better than them it's going to be too easy, and if you're worse than them it's going to be too hard. And even if you do play at the level they expect, depending on the RNG or how good a day you're having, some important challenge in the game might be a complete cake-walk, or some trivial little exercise might be a complete nightmare. So fixed difficulty doesn't necessarily lead to a consistent experience - I think it can mean quite the opposite. Dynamic difficulty is a tool that can help you give everyone the intended experience.

 

Where it can be implemented, it has to have a lot of inertia and granularity built in to it so that it's following your average level of ability and not just how you're happening to perform at any particular moment, and ideally there should be a lot of levers for the system to pull to adjust the difficulty without the player noticing.

 

Random drops are a great lever. RE4 did a great job of balancing the health, ammo, and money drops to ensure you had one-and-a-bit magazines of ammo of each weapon and 2-3 healing items, enough to encourage you to make decisions. And you got that regardless of how good you were at actually shooting at things. It only adjusted the enemy layouts - a very big, conspicuous tweak - in response to some fairly large-scale changes in how well you're doing, large scale in both level of performance and how long the player was at that level.

 

Yet when you get to the really linear side of the continuum, games no longer have levers you can pull to tune this sort of thing. What are the difficulty levers in something as aggressively linear as Bioshock Infinite? How do you fine tune the difficulty of an Uncharted platforming section to ensure the player really does feel tension and anxiety and doesn't just flop through it, but conversely doesn't spend an hour falling to their death?

 

Of course if you have games that aren't heavily authored, where hour 10 of the game doesn't have a specific experience associated with it, something heavily systematic, it's maybe less important a tool.

[therearerules]

Dark Souls has pretty much changed my way of thinking on difficulty levels, but essentially it’s just Playtest your game so the difficulty level is the one which is the most fun.

 

And possibly have a super easy setting for people to skip parts, although if this is needed than that highlights poor design.

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

I appreciate that it can be done well, but ultimately it's not for me. If I enjoy a game enough to want the experience of taking on the higher difficulties, I want to adapt to that challenge, I do not want the challenge to adapt to me.

 

With hindsight I completed Resi 3 remake on the highest difficulty and didn't think it was that bad, but I died a lot so now I know why.

[RubberJohnny]

In Ocarina of Time if you defeat enemies or cut grass you'll get hearts when low on health, mana potions when low on mana, or coins otherwise. Half Life 2 did a similar thing, spawning ammo or health in crates based on what weapons were low at that moment.

 

It's weird to see so many people in here moaning about such systems and insisting they should be removed out of some sort of masochist purity - all over the forum people drop games the moment they run into something too hard and moan about not having enough time these days, and now you want to remove systems you're probably relying on without knowing out of some sort of gamer cred? Give over.

 

I never knew RE4 had dynamic difficulty until being told 10 years later, and then was similarly surprised it was still being used in RE7, so seamless it was.

[Mr. Gerbik]

4 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

In Ocarina of Time if you defeat enemies or cut grass you'll get hearts when low on health, mana potions when low on mana, or coins otherwise. Half Life 2 did a similar thing, spawning ammo or health in crates based on what weapons were low at that moment.

 

It's weird to see so many people in here moaning about such systems and insisting they should be removed out of some sort of masochist purity - all over the forum people drop games the moment they run into something too hard and moan about not having enough time these days, and now you want to remove systems you're probably relying on without knowing out of some sort of gamer cred? Give over.

 

I never knew RE4 had dynamic difficulty until being told 10 years later, and then was similarly surprised it was still being used in RE7, so seamless it was.

If it's seamless, then it's a good thing. If it's overtly obvious and negatively impacts the player's enjoyment, then it's to the detriment of the game - see my Oblivion example. It's not by definition a bad thing. It's remarkable that Resident Evil got it just right so many times, and suddenly completely fumbles it in Resi 3 Remake. Probably tells us something about how rushed and unpolished the entire project was. 

[dumpster]

What I'm getting since I wrote the OP is that it's probably a good thing but it needs to be implemented well enough that it helps the player enjoy the game and doesn't cause attention to itself. I think the problem with Resident Evil 3 is that the last two bosses haven't been play tested well enough. In order to complete the game on the hardest difficulty settings most players seem to be utilising the DA deliberately which is obviously not the intention. If you watch an expert play the game on YouTube they are deliberately using up ammunition and keeping control of the DA so they don't hit a brick wall at the end. Although I appreciate that the last bosses in the game on the hardest difficulty setting should be a challenge, it seems that the DA just takes them over the line making them impossible. 

 

Since each selectable difficulty level has a maximum and minimum figure, the current DA should always remain within the window of the difficulty you wanted, but I think in Resi3 there's too much variance in the hardest difficulty settings.  So now I think I don't have a problem with dynamic difficulty per se, I just think it's badly implemented in the nightmare and inferno levels of Resi3.

[Meers]

I suppose Mario Kart's rubberband AI is some sort of dynamic difficulty as well?

[Vorgot]

I didn't know RE4 had it at all but it kind of explains how I was able to get through it when I am pretty poor at action games. I'm all for the challenge adapting to my skills if it means I get a constant challenge thats at a decent level. People seem to have an issue with it making things easier but it will also make things more difficult if you are just breezing through.

 

Saying that though, it should be an option. And it would be one I use almost every time unless I was looking for a specific challenge

[Rsdio]

10 hours ago, Nick R said:

I'm not a fan of the idea that perfect, optimal play should involve intentionally poor play!

 

Certain shooters are probably the poster children for this, or at least turn it on its head by making 'poor play' optimal. Battle Garegga's rank system is probably the most famous but funnily enough I mentioned in the shmups thread the other day that I'm playing its sequel, Battle Bakraid, at the moment and that seems even more mental at first glance. As far as I can tell, dying extends the timer for the chaining of enemies so high level players are constantly killing themselves then earning the lives back via the extends earned by points, manipulating the rank all the while. This isn't him, but apparently the record holder in Japan suicided over fifty times setting his high score:

 

 

Otherwise, it's a really boring and obvious take but as with most things it depends. Depends on the game, depends on how well its implemented. In an ideal world having a set 'intended' difficulty and a well thought out dynamic mode would probably the solution which would satisfy everyone, even in something as contentious as the Souls games, but doing one of those things right isn't easy, never mind nailing both.

[RubberJohnny]

I recall Silent Hill 2 had the final boss kill itself if you were out of ammo (it was on the ceiling, so you couldn't attack it otherwise, but emptying all your guns beforehand became the optimal strategy).

 

I imagine these solutions are even more advanced now, and there's a reason a lot of these examples are older from when they were a little more obvious. Who could really tell if a modern game was dialing enemy accuracy up or down 10 or 15%? Or adjusting their AI behaviour so they spent a little longer exposed out of cover?

[Fry Crayola]

Games are absolutely chock full of little features that intend to improve the experience - the tailored loot drops, the courteous enemies who won't attack as often from off-screen, the health bar that seems to last twice as long as it should when it's nearly empty. Done right, they serve to reduce frustration, amplify the fun, and give you a shot of adrenaline as you fight back from near certain defeat.

 

Dynamic difficulty falls into the same category and is subject to the same pitfalls - if you're going to do it, you need to do it well. We've all played racing games where the rubber banding is so obvious that it seems nothing you do until the final lap truly matters, and the example in the opening post suggests a system that reveals itself too readily and can be gamed. I echo Mr Gerbik's comments about Oblivion, a poorly thought out system that completely ruined immersion. Toying with difficulty in real time is one of the trickiest things to get right.

 

But there's another aspect at play. I vividly remember a scene late in Metal Gear Solid where Liquid chastises Snake for thinking that he was able to achieve everything by himself - that his entire effort in the game to this point had been a manipulation by the bad guys to help achieve their aims. And a little part of me felt gutted. It's a daft thing to feel in a game that reduces stealth to a slightly more elaborate Pac Man, and even dafter considering the game set bite-size challenges of increasing difficulty that I clearly overcame, but that line seemed to steal a little joy from me. I felt cheated.

 

We don't like being told that our achievements in a game are not entirely down to us. It's one thing to be silently and obliviously guided towards success, another thing to have it revealed through intention or sloppy design. It's that feeling when you score an amazing long range goal in a football game, then find out it's just a sweet spot where the game just can't deal with it. Everything is cheapened.

 

I'm in favour of the concept of dynamic difficulty, but it's one of the things that runs the finest line between improving the experience, and absolutely fucking with it.

[Mawdlin]

As mentioned level scaling is the one that bugs me. I don't mind so much if these things are hidden well but it's hard to hide this.

 

I much preferred Assassins Creed Origins over Odyssey because in the former you could go back to previous areas and feel badass. Conversely, you could attempt to stealth your way through a fortress that was a couple of levels beyond your abilities and get a different kind of thrill. In Odyssey, when everything is levelling up with you at the same rate, it breaks the illusion of real world power, progress and purpose. In a similar way to what was mentioned with Oblivion, what sense of improvement am I getting when a peasant is just as difficult to beat at level 41 as at level 1? It became so ridiculous in Odyssey that bog standard guards needed to be peppered with arrows in the head till they looked like porcupines just to get their health half way down.

 

Also, I love the feeling of going into a cave in an RPG and getting the willies because I know there's a creature (or creatures) in there that are going to kill me with one attack. "I'll come back later when I've found the armour of kickass," is one of the best motivating mission factors in a good videogame.

[SozzlyJoe]

In an interesting twist on this, Demon's Souls made the game HARDER when you died, because it just wanted to fuck with ya, presumably.

[Pob]

2 hours ago, Mawdlin said:

I much preferred Assassins Creed Origins over Odyssey because in the former you could go back to previous areas and feel badass. Conversely, you could attempt to stealth your way through a fortress that was a couple of levels beyond your abilities and get a different kind of thrill. In Odyssey, when everything is levelling up with you at the same rate, it breaks the illusion of real world power, progress and purpose. In a similar way to what was mentioned with Oblivion, what sense of improvement am I getting when a peasant is just as difficult to beat at level 41 as at level 1? It became so ridiculous in Odyssey that bog standard guards needed to be peppered with arrows in the head till they looked like porcupines just to get their health half way down.

 

That's interesting. So apart from the issue of guards being arrow-sponges, what you're saying is that the levelling may as well not even be there, and is just a way to gate progress? So, does that not just make it similar to a game without levelling (e.g every Assassin's Creed game before Origins)?

 

I realise it's more nuanced than that. In a game without levelling, weaker enemies usually look weaker. Little critters vs hulking beasts, guys wearing cloth caps vs armoured heavies etc. Screwing with that with an arbitrary levelling system does break immersion, but that seems to go with the territory with RPGs.

[alex3d]

16 hours ago, Soulstar said:

I haven't got much experience on this but I remember reading this about Resident Evil 4 on a Youtube video a few years ago, so they have been using this technique for a while. I don't know how prevalent this sort of thing is across the whole industry. I'm personally not a fan of the idea if it's enforced in a way that you can't get around. The more I think about it, I'm sure I might have seen this mentioned in something else I've played too. Maybe Evil Within 2, or something, not sure. I remember playing something that mentions it before you start and I haven't yet played RE4 so it's not that. 

 

@dumpster Thank you for this post.

 

RE4 was my first experience in this matter too. It worked quite well but I definitely prefer to choose a proper difficulty setting from the start and expect the game to stick to this. Sometimes you just want to speed through a game on easy to get the story.