[Koji]

I've been playing Contra 4 the past few days, and though I feel it has some poor design choices in some places, I'm beginning to understand why I'm liking the game so much: every level is approximately just as difficult as the rest.

We've become accustomed to think of difficulty as having to increase as the player progresses, and consider difficulties that do the opposite, in general, to be poorly adjusted. The challenge is supposed to escalate as we get better at the game, keeping us interested and entertained through this balance. Contra 4, on the other hand, punishes you hard on the first stage if you're not prepared for it: the hardest Contra first stage yet? (I haven't played that many games in the series to know.) But then you try again, and manage to get a bit further into the level; again another time, and you are now able to avoid getting hit for the entire first stretch of the level. As you progress, you can see that the new stages are no more difficult than the first, so they will punish you, but you will try again and overcome the obstacles eventually. It's a slow progression, but it goes at a steady rate: every time you play, you feel like you've learned or achieved something.

Contra is not a game about learning to adequately use your avatar's abilities: it's a game about learning the level. This is what makes this particular form of difficulty progression (flat) so perfect. Every obstacle will demand the same from the player, so, as the player progresses, he will never become stuck at a difficult point; but since every obstacle is difficult the first time around, the challenge is always keeping the player entertained, like fresh new puzzles to solve. In addition to this comes the rewarding feeling of mastery of the earlier levels, and, ultimately, of the game itself. A moderately experienced player will know the most effective route through the first few levels, and will reach the levels he's still unfamiliar with faster, thus also reducing the amount of tedium that might arise from 'solving' the same 'puzzles' again and again.

Older Contra titles, and other similar action games, do not use this style of difficulty progression. The reason, I believe, is because it's not one that will maximize the amount of coins inserted. Yes, it all started in the arcades. An easy first level will let the player know enough about the game for him to become interested and willing to spend more money on it later. After that, since he's already hooked, he will use more money to reach the latter levels, which become harder and harder in order to extend the amount of time the player will be interested in the game (i.e. before he beats it.) Arcade games do not want to be beat: let's remember that the first few arcade games didn't even have an ending, they just looped right back to the first stage. But on consoles, it makes little sense to keep the player from achieving a satisfactory conclusion, especially if it means to make him frustrated and to sour his last moments with the game until he gives up on it. So I applaud Contra 4's particular brand of difficulty progression for its genre.
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The Ants Parade.

[Rya.Reisender]

Although I haven't played Contra I have to disagree on the difficult issue.

I still think that it's better if a game starts of easy and is getting harder. Although, I think that the hardest difficulty should already be reached after the first third of a game and then remain static.

So let's say difficulty can go from 1 to 9 then I'd suggest something like this:
1,3,5,7,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9

Or likewise for a player who wants it easier:
1,2,3,4,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5

A fully linear increase isn't really so good because then the difficulty could eventually get over the potential of the gamer and it's suck so much if you are 30 hours into a game and then can't continue anymore, because you tried 50+ times and always died and then lost motivation.


Of course this is only assuming that there really is a fixed difficulty. There can be many alternatives. For example you could make the first stage really really difficult, but if the player dies, the game doesn't penalize you. Maybe if you die early in the first stage, the game continues differently with an "easier" path, but if you manage to survive the first stage, you'll get the "hardest" path.


The reason why I'm against strongly punishing the player already at the beginning of the game is that it will cause many players to quit. Not everyone thinks "Woah this game is really hard, I like it and I'll try 50+ times to finish this dawn stage.", many will quit if they died 3 times in row without even progressing much in the game.

I personally totally hate it for example when I start an RPG and the very first battle in it is already so hard that you can die in it. There are quite some RPGs I played where I died multiple times on the first 5 battles of the game and which I never wanted to touch again after that.


The way you describe Contra reminds me of a game I played lately where you are in a dungeon and the dungeon is full of instant death traps which aren't visible. You walk around, step into a death trap, and die. Then you restart, knowing where this particular death trap was, so that you can get around it the second time, then step on the next death trap. Restart, going further, death trap. Restart, going even further, death trap. Eventually I was so frustrated that I quit it.
So I can't really support this "You die often but each time you'll get a bit furher into the game" system. It might sound good, but in practice it just didn't work out for me...

Though I guess it totally depends on the genre and how good the game is.
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Push Eject.

[M. Croche]

i'm going to agree with you koji, a steady & gradual increase in difficulty lacks a certain drama.

if a game gets harder as you get better, isn't progression awfully static.

[Ratoslov]

Y'know, a steady staircase up is very... boring. It lacks drama. Why not steal some from dramatic theory and make highs and lows in the experience?

[M. Croche]

[Koji]

Evidently, difficulty is not completely linear, not in my case nor in most games, but if you average the highs and lows of each stage you'd get roughly the same for each. There are valleys and mountains in the progression of each stage, of course, as this comes from basic level design know-how: you can't have the whole stage crammed with hazards, a few oases must be left in between at least in order for the difficult parts to be effective. But if you apply that theory to the broad scope of the game you'll find that players will get stuck at random spots and then get bored with comparatively plain levels.
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The Ants Parade.

[Gin]

Difficulty should be tied into the narrative. Things should be as hard as the player expects them to be. What that means is that the bigger the boss, the higher the suspense, the more that is at stake, the harder the game should be.

But it's not that simple, because at those moments the most absolutely vital thing is to maintain momentum, and what this requires is that during the peaks, the game should be as hard as it possibly can be, without actually killing the player, or setting them back. The bigger the high the harder the crash.

It's hard to say more because it's such a narrow topic of discussion, difficulty shouldn't be anywhere in the source of the design, where the game comes from, but it's a variable that arises out of it and has to be eventually tweaked to smooth out the bumps. Not that bumps aren't occasionally useful.

In the very best games, the designer predicts the player's every action, and responds accordingly, guiding the player forward, pulling them through the game, but it's important to have a very good control of when the player is actually aware of this. Difficulty is just a tiny piece (ok maybe a medium sized piece) of this interaction.

[haze]

interesting idea.

but no, I disagree with all this naysaying. I've enjoyed plenty of well-made games that ramp up in difficulty. the arcade comparison is such a cliche... my having fun never has anything to do with paying more money into a machine.

I've nothing against punishing the player from the start, either. some games can work with that (I've played La Mulana). but it sounds boring and repetitive if a game doesn't raise the stakes as the player progresses and improves.


so what's especially bad about ramping up difficulty anyway? from how it's described here, Contra 4 sounds geared towards those obsessive-compulsive "one credit only" types of gamers.
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[Gin]

I don't know why there hasn't been a more meaningful interaction between psychology and games.

[Toptube]

I enjoy it when I first play a game and it brings the heat immediately.

ok, so this button does this---and this butt---oh...WELL, I guess I'd better do this with a little more purpose eh?!

Instead of yawning for the first few hours of the game until it finally turns into the reason to actually play it.
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[Toptube]

and then maybe it gets a bit easier as I get better, but I always know that If I relax a little bit the game will be there to kick me in the face.
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[SplashBeats]

[Toptube]

[Eudaimon]

I definitely agree with Koji's analysis of Contra 4. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it's true. It's especially evident in the challenge mode: some of the challenges throw you straight into the later areas of the game, but you can beat them just as easily as you can the first stage (although the challenges themselves eventually ramp up in difficulty).

I found it pretty enjoyable, and I think the idea needs to be explored further.

[Duckzero]

Many shmups have a difficulty that lack a "staircase" pattern, and contra 4 is no exception. Just trying to convince Joe Gamer to keep track of the bullets and your avatar remains a task too difficult for most. Heck, you could even say that's one reason why the genre is having a hard time being remotely popular.

I'm all for making the game harder as you go, but not too hard in the first 1/2 of the game. DMC3 would have been a touch better if the grand scale of your enemies somehow made a bit more sense with their respective difficulty .... In other words, I don't mind mixing it up now and then.

Alien Soldier might be a better example, where how hard the game is depends on who you fight, rather than how far or where you are in the game. Honestly, for me, I have a hard time killing the first boss for some strange reason more than the others later on at times.

so for me, it's fine to have: 1,4,2,6,3,3,6,7,8,5,9.
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Keepin' it real like Oatmeal

[Chris B]

[Adol]

[bleak]

Guys I think God Hand's difficulty curve is pretty great.

[doitintheroad]

While I agree that "staircased" difficulty can become boring, I much prefer that to the "die a lot and then just memorize where the obstacles are" method. I think a great example of properly metered difficulty is in the single-player mode of Call of Duty 4. The game varies from pretty hard (First level) to pretty easy (the bombing run mission), to just plain crazy (the TV station raid) back to slower-paced sniper levels. I had never really put a good deal of thought into the game in this respect earlier, but now that I am thinking about it, it REALLY works, and I think this is exactly why.
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"Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

[spinach]

Guys, what's difficulty?

[Infernarl]

... it is a series of tubes!

[Koji]

Before we go into any further empty discussion, let's get on the same page regarding one thing: There is not one way to solve the difficulty curve issue for every game. So, many might enjoy one kind of difficulty progression (escalating, decreasing, flat...,) but if they used that approach in a fundamentally different game, it would likely not work quite as well, if not downright terribly.

This particular case (flat difficulty progression) was interesting to me because I had never really thought that it could be so enjoyable. I too would have considered it to be a boring, 'lacking in drama' way of handling difficulty, but in practice, in this particular brand of game, it works remarkably well to keep me interested and coming back. It just clicked for me, no one can deny this personal fact; it works better than the escalating variety, which is used in previous games of the same saga. But it would not work in Tetris or in Super Mario World.
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The Ants Parade.

[Baines]

[chompers po pable]

Kid Icarus has a pretty even level of difficulty throughout the game, though the leveling of your character makes the last half of the game really easy. i'd like to run through the game, trying to maintain the lowest possible level for kicks sometime.

[Chris B]

Just to be clear, I'll only relate to a game's explicitly presented challenges (no player imposed ones e.g. speedrunning), when talking about difficulty.

@Koji:
I think the key issue to understand why and how flat difficulty progression works so well for you in Contra 4, is to understand what kind of challenges the game throws at you.

I haven't played the game, so pls excuse if I'm wrong..
As far as I've heard, the challenges seem to demand both hand-eye coordination and puzzle-solving.
If it weren't for the latter, I guess to have flat difficulty progression would be less enticing. I think we can relate this to point & click Adventures whose difficulty often behaves similarly.
It would be less suited for most games of pure hand-eye coordination, cause of a greater influence of a player's improving performance/skills on perceived difficulty (although this argument kinda loses importance when we're nearing the natural limits of human perception and motoric expression).
On the other hand, the hand-eye coordination part is beneficial for replayability, as it often offers a greater margin for improvement than the strict right or wrong of puzzles. Furthermore, flat difficulty might also be helpful in this regard, as replaying undemanding parts probably isn't as exciting.

Another random thought (kinda obvious, but still..):
Flat difficulty progression demands that the game better be really hard, to motivate and entertain competetive players from beginning to end.

[bleak]

the thing that I like about God Hand is that you can pick the difficulty, to an extent. you've got the side challenges, and the little demon challenges (beat up the car within the time limit... WHILE 4 DUDES WAIL ON YOU WITH SLEDGEHAMMERS! fuck you.) and you can also opt to entertain yourself and beef up using the shop/casino. I haven't really been patronizing the casino, but I did enter one time and instantly won 10,000 G. That helped a bit. Anyway I guess what I'm trying to say is that variable difficulty is sweet and I like God Hand. :)

[Chris B]

@bleak:
That's something I love too (as mentioned in a few other topics).
I like it when a game's goals are less explicit i.e. like what you're describing (player-imposed challenges that are only suggested and not enforced).

Nice thing is that a game could then give the player an overview (items used, enemies killed, time played) at the end of a play session, as to see what self-imposed challenges he undertook and to what degree he fullfilled his goals.
This could suggest playing the game in different ways and ease keeping track of your performance while playing the way you like.

If only God Hand would've had a control scheme better suiting its overall arcade-like appearance.. I really tried to like it.

[bleak]

you know, it would have really helped if there was a dodge button. another game that had that sort of self imposed difficulty was metal gear solid 3! it even gives you a breakdown and a ranking at the end of the game.

[Koji]

[Ben Reed]

It seems to me that 'flat' difficulty progression, like every other model of difficulty, is inherently subjective, and is mostly a function of the player rather than the game itself.

For example, Player A, a fighting game player with really quick and sharp reflexive abilities related to discerning thousands of different animation frames, may find a graphic adventure game or a puzzle-based game surprisingly challenging due to its appeal to different mental strengths. Since he has little experience and/or accuity with resolving strange situations that don't demand a fast lateral-thinking reaction component, and he may get stuck for a while on one or two puzzles that his mind isn't really trained to approach. In the end, he rates the game as "progressively harder" as the puzzles get weirder and weirder to him as the game progresses.

Player B, conversely, may suck at fighting games due to the demanding reflexive components of those titles, but his mental strengths lie mostly in quickly discerning the contextual mechanics of puzzle games and determining solutions to bizarre puzzles with great speed based on what he attributes to highly developed common sense. The progression and structure of the puzzles in the same title that perplexed Player A make perfect sense to B, and while he finds them interesting enough, he doesn't find one or two particularly harder to approach than any of the others, and in the end he declares that the difficulty progression is "pretty flat".

Bottom line, difficulty progression is subjective as hell no matter how you slice it. I guess the only thing about it that's really important to game DESIGN is understanding how difficulty arises from the structure of your game, and understanding the ways in which you can rearrange the structural elements (i.e. when to hit the player with your lateral-thinking puzzle versus your complex multi-piece gearbox puzzle, or even just when to flood the screen with bullets and in what pattern) to achieve a desired general perception of difficulty.

Personally, I really wouldn't consciously worry about difficulty in my game design -- I'd just concentrate first on understanding the various subtleties of the system and how the player might exploit them, and then tune the difficulty based on what I've learned about what the player can/will do within the system I've created.
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SelectButton.net -- Let the games begin.

[diplo]

[Chris B]

[Koji]

Of course, Ben Reed; difficulty is subjective, as most things in life: it doesn't mean that we can't quantify it, though. Don't forget that we're talking about relative, not absolute, difficulty, so you can do a survey and ask 'which level do you think is the hardest among these?,' and you will get a pattern. Also, all that your example indicates is that it's not simple to define how pronounced or uniform a difficulty curve is, which is not the subject in question here. I don't think you can tell me that if player A finds stage X from a Contra game difficult, and stage Y easy, player B won't at least find them to be in the same relation (X more difficult than Y.) Major discrepancies in the opinions of different players would only arise if the stages require essentially different abilities.

In short: I do believe it's possible to define a difficulty curve, as do game developers (most arcade titles, as I mentioned originally, have easier levels at the beginning and harder levels toward the end, which proves that it's possible to gauge the curve.)
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The Ants Parade.

[Hot Stott Bot]

guys i'm a fan of something proportional to sin^2(t)+t where difficulty curves are concerned

[Interstellar Dinghy]

bott are those parentheses really necessary
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"I hope I get a girlfriend someday so I can take a picture of her dirty knockers in 3D" - Zach DenzerOscar Wilde

[Hot Stott Bot]

probably not but i think they make it clearer

[Chris B]

So something like that?
Well.. awesome, think that isn't as dumb as it sounds especially when we divide a game session into smaller parts.
Like how we often have peaks and valleys i.e. continuous alternation between escalating tension and relaxation inbetween a level. Has sth to do with pacing I guess..

Btw your avatar makes me press Esc everytime I see it.

[haze]

multiple climaxes instead of a single one
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[Rya.Reisender]

Many boring JRPGs have that. Totally easy random battles, hard boss, totally easy random battles, hard boss, etc.
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Select Button
Push Eject.

[falsedan]

[Loki Laufeyson]

wasn't there an rpg that ends by revealing you've actually been controlling some guy who was playing an rpg?

also, the arcade versions of golden axe and altered beast had awesome endings:
golden axe: the characters come out of the arcade machine or something
altered beast: it was a movie, and all the monsters were actors in suits
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