Difficulty curves in games

The Game Room
1

Most video games ideally follow a somewhat linear learning curve. As you progress through the game, it gets progressively more difficult. The “last boss” is ideally the “hardest boss” to make winning the game feel like a true accomplishment.

I’ve been noticing a pretty significant exception to this rule lately, however. In Free to Play, mobile and Indie Games (off Steam, in my case), programmers seem to delight in making games with an ‘inverted’ difficulty curve. What this means is that starting the game out is FREAKING HARD, you are as helpless as a one-legged deaf and blind kitten initially. As you progress (or pay) your way through the game, you develop more tools, resources, and versatility to make the game more and more manageable. By the end of the game, you are a virtual powerhouse with godlike power in comparison to the beginning of the game.

In a Free to Play model, this kind of makes sense since you can sell players ‘boosts’ and ‘premium items’ to help ease the difficult parts of their progression. But as a whole I think its kind of counterintuitive because the initial difficulty will turn off a lot of players. If it feels like you can’t get anywhere in the game, what’s the point of banging your head against the wall? And in competitive multiplayer games, you run into situations where you will be badly outclassed by opponents for quite some time. In addition, when you reach the endgame, the game becomes boring. Why? Because while it took so much thought and effort initially, you can easily breeze through much of the content once you are maxed out.

Some games can find a balance in difficulty, and make progressing through the game challenging yet rewarding. Having a good difficulty curve builds replay value for the game, and makes it not only worth attempting to beat once, but many, many times in the future.

2

There’s a bit of an issue however you do the game. If the game starts off easy and gets harder, it generally makes for a better play experience, but it sort of fails from a logical perspective. Why am I more powerful, yet having more difficulty defeating enemies? If it’s because the enemies are all that much more powerful, why didn’t the big bad send his most powerful enemies at me right from the start? If we’re making enemies more powerful to try to keep the game from getting too easy, why not just level off the difficulty and remove the powerups instead of trying to balance it all.

If they do it the other way, it makes a lot more intuitive sense, but it generally makes for poor gameplay. If the game is ridiculously hard at the start, what’s my incentive to keep playing? Why would I spend money on a game that doesn’t have me invested yet because I get stuck 5 minutes into it? Yet, it does make sense that the game should get easier as the hero gets stronger, but then the end of the game is anticlimatic.

Really, I think there’s a few ways to approach this that help solve these issues. One thing I really like is the idea of optional paths of progression. In some games, there may be a final boss, but he may not be the most difficult boss in the game. They can make additional content that isn’t part of the main story and is mostly there just to challenge the completionists and can be balanced around having everything from the main story. Or they can do difficulty modes, like implemented in a game like Diablo or World of Warcraft, but that doesn’t offer the same kind of reward since you’re not seeing new stuff. I think the best approach, though probably the most difficult to pull off well, is the concept behind games like Metroid, where the powerups are more about giving you access to new areas rather than having a linear progression, and the ones that do make you more powerful, they specifically design bosses and obstacles to still require increased skill or otherwise not make the additional power make it too easy.

3

The proper difficulty curve for F2P is: start easy then gradually get moderately hard. But the moderately hard section should be peppered with occasional very hard levels. The very hard levels are there as triggers to monetize.

4

The ideal difficulty curve, I think, is one that times the introduction of new challenges so that they appear just as you master the old ones. “Portal” comes as close to nailing this as any game I’ve ever played. Virtually two-thirds of the game are essentially an extended tutorial, albeit one that is heavily story-driven, which gradually introduce you to the game’s core mechanics and the complex ways in which they can interact. The final third is when the game really starts throwing puzzles at you that integrate these mechanics in bundles, leaving you to figure things out on your own. It all adds up to an experience in which you are constantly challenged, frequently perplexed, but almost never frustrated.

“Portal 2” does a pretty great job of this, as well (especially in the co-op campaign), but its difficulty curve is a less tight than that of its predecessor, likely due to its significantly increased length.

5

I honestly can’t say I’ve encountered what you describe; Can you name some titles that have this ‘reverse difficulty curve’?

Also, in answer to Blaster Master, the correct answer, I think, is to have a ‘complexity curve’; The game should get more “difficult” only in the sense that you need to do more things, rather than in the sense of being objectively harder. You might need to cure status effects as well as keeping healed, or whatever, but since ‘keeping healed’ should be a trivial task at this point, adding another layer of complexity means the ‘difficulty’ stays near the sweet spot.

Also, the “why didn’t the badguy just…” argument is a straw man, since it gives no account to the actual narrative of the game. The random orcs that set fire to the Generic Hero’s village weren’t sent there with intent of even encountering the “protagonist” because the enemy doesn’t even know who he is yet. The random wildlife the hero encounters on his quest isn’t even evil, let alone set in his path by an enemy that wants him dead, etc. And in general, most people’s response to a problem is to use “enough” force to deal with it without swatting a fly with a buick. :stuck_out_tongue:

6

I can think of a couple of games that had this issue. It was my major gripe with the first Dead Space. The first hour or so of that game is the most challenging part of it since you have no supplies. But by the time you’re out of the medical bay you’ve got enough med kits, ammo, and credits to fly through most of the rest of the game, even on hard. There’s a tiny difficulty spike in the last couple of chapters when they start throwing lots of beefed up enemies at you, but even then it felt a lot easier than the opening to me.

It’s also a problem in many of the open world RPGs I’ve played. Your character only gets more powerful and better equipped as you go on, and enemy auto scaling is often iffy. In Skyrim for instance the difficulty starts low, spikes a bit heavily for certain builds, but then drops like a rock and you suddenly become an unkillable/undetectable walking god.

7

I’d put Morrowind forward as a good example of ‘reverse difficulty curve’. Walking to Balmora fresh off the boat was an exercise in frustration as virtually all random monsters could kill you. My first mission for the fighters guild was to kill some rats in an attic. I lost count of how many times I had to save scum to do it.

By level 5 or 6 I only died if I faced multiple enemies at once.
By level 10 death only happened if I made a significant mistake.

By about level 20 I could probably have taken down Vivec himself if I had wanted to.

8

Witcher 2 had this problem too - I think I remember reading one of the Penny Arcade guys dying dozens of times in the Prologue. The basic human enemies didn’t change much as the game progressed but Geralt got more and more powerful.

I have to say I haven’t see this at all, though. I’ve dabbled a bit in various freemium games lately and they tend to start by showering you with tons of free stuff and holding you hand a lot through the first few levels.

Only F2P game with inverted difficulty curve that comes readily to mind is Planetside 2, which drop pods you in the middle of a big fight. I spent the first hour dying repeatedly without getting any kills but I could see the potential and soldiered on. A friend of mine who tried it after I told him how awesome it was gave up pretty fast, on the other hand.

9

Psychonauts had a terrible curve, mainly due to the game being pushed at the end of development.

When you get to the Meat Circus level, you will find yourself cursing many times and not for good, challenging reasons. It just sucks and the camera is nuts.

Otherwise, the game progresses rather nicely.

10

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is like this. You start out with a pistol and a knife and no armor (unless you know where to find the hidden stuff). You’re given a mission to help some guys take an outpost and you die… a lot. You’re so weak and fragile and don’t have any health kits yet that every time you see an enemy, it’s equal odds that he’ll kill you.

Once you get established, you at least have some armor and health kits. When you get ambushed, you at least have time to formulate a response, even if it’s to flee. Early in the game, someone gets the jump on you and you just die.

11

I always thought the Donkey Kong Country games had a great difficulty curve, to the point that it made them superior to Super Mario Bros. games. At first, I thought it was because they were easier, but when I compared what I had to do, they really weren’t. But the difficulty curve inspired me to get better without even knowing it. Mario Bros games seemed to make you “grind” to get better. I find that only works for me for the level I’m practicing on, so I just wind up being really good at the early levels but then horrible at the rest.

I also have been playing Earthbound, and I notice that it has a screwed up difficulty curve. The hardest part of the game seems to be right before you get your second party member. The biggest problem is your extremely limited inventory, which includes a bunch of stuff you can’t temporarily get rid of. So you can’t stock up on healing items. I’m so much more used to the game being easier early on, I died in some pretty easy areas. I didn’t realize I’d have to grind, especially so early on.

I’m surprised that Psychonauts never got the end patched. Everyone admits that the last level was not supposed to be that difficult, so you’d think they’d offer a fix. And it’s incredibly hard to mod, save for editing your save file.

12

The version on Steam is fixed - it’s a lot easier to get through because you only use a portion of health when you fall off the difficult bit (on the tightropes with the rising water), and not a projection layer, so you get a lot more attempts before you have to start over.

13

I’m really of the view that games should have an “auto-difficulty” function. If I’ve died in the same spot ten times in a row, the game should take note of this and adjust itself accordingly; maybe the enemies get a bit dumber, or the gap between platforms closes slightly. If it’s done right, it should be imperceptible to the player, but would eliminate a huge amount of frustration.

Ideally you’d be able to turn it off for the hardcore folks. Me, I’d welcome it in every game.

14

All of these examples just sound like BAD design to me, rather than an intentional case of making the game hard at the beginning and easy at the end. Either they just couldn’t agree on scarcity levels (Dead Space) or didn’t scale themselves properly for increasing player power (Open world RPGs).

Of course, I get the impression that people who play open world RPGs (I am not one of them, generally.) tend to LIKE the sort of “OMG, I did this build thing with this other thing and the item thing I got from the merchant guy, and I just raaaar, destroyed everything!” (That’s a rough paraphrase of conversations that were happening in my office within a couple of month’s of Skyrim’s release.) So that might not be bad design after all.

Of course, none of those titles fall into the Free to Play/Mobile/Indie categories that the original poster thought tended to suffer this problem, so I think I’m going to wait for him to reappear and explain before thinking too hard about this.

15

Some Feemium/IndieRetro examples:

Navyfield: Navyfield is an addictive little Korean MMO where you pick from one of 4 (6 now I believe) nations, start with a little Frigate and level up your crew to bigger and bigger ships. The carrot on a stick in this game is getting the bigger, cooler ships (Like Aircraft Carriers!). The game is 2d, above-view, and you point/click to steer your ship but use the keyboard to manually aim the guns. More on this part shortly. As you level your crew up, you get access to bigger and better ships/guns. Over time you gradually specialize your sailors, and the ships you can access are on a “tech tree” meaning you have to choose whether to pick one path or another (generally one path leads to battleships, and the other leads to carriers).

Here’s the problem: Ships Do Not Scale. Frigates and Destroyers, with the exception of a few gimmick builds only viable on specific nations’ ships, are pretty much useless at anything beyond fighting other Frigates and Destroyers. So when you are in a battle, you are up against much stronger ships. Your guns are too weak, too slow firing, and too short ranged to really be viable at anything other than fighting other lowbies. The problem is that the role of a Frigate or Destroyer in this game isn’t significant. Because most of the players are veteran players who have been grinding for months/years, the majority of battles will have PRIMARILY maxed-out Battleships that can pretty much one-shot any non-max tier battleship from all the way across the map. At low levels there are a few options: Destroyer-only maps that give you an opportunity to join a “kitten pile” of other low level players as you plink each other to death to level up, and “Blitz” which is basically “Everything but Battleships or players above level 49”.

Even those options don’t help much, though. There are few DD only maps because, again, the majority of the players have graduated out of using DDs, and there aren’t enough benefits to using one at high levels. I initially thought you could use them for AA screening to protect Battleships/Carriers, but it turns out AA is pretty much useless for the first 60 or so levels; only a few AA guns are really reliable and some countries are relegating to relying purely on CAP because their AA guns suck. Blitz is really the only other option but that’s an uphill battle filled with torpedo spamming, griefing, and constantly being the only sub-level 40 player while you continue to get outmatched.

Eventually you claw your way up to the Cruiser tiers, and it gets a little better, because now you have the firepower and range to fend off Destroyers and only have to worry about heavier Cruisers, Carriers, and Battleships. But once you hit level 50 you are too high to stay in Blitz, and stuck with the big fish. And when the majority of the fleets are made up of Battleships, even having a Heavy Cruiser is almost useless; the range difference between the two is so significant you’ll get blown out of the water before you even get a shot off; even if you are in a position to trade shots you have much less survivability.

My method of coping was to grind tediously up to Aircraft Carriers, which are actually fun since there are less CVs on a map (and thus less likely there will be a much bigger/stronger Carrier/air wing to threaten you). Once you get to the level of Carriers or Battleships the game starts to gain parity since your opponents don’t have as massive of an edge against you, and its fairly easy to annhilate anything smaller than your own class of ship.

In summary, the reason this game has a reverse difficulty curve is because the minority of the playerbase is near the lower levels, there’s too many situations where you are up against enemy ships FAR stronger/tougher than yourself, and there’s FAR too little roles for a frigate or destroyer to have in a mixed fleet to keep using them longer than you need to. If I had designed the game I would have balanced the AA better to allow a player to have a dedicated AA Destroyer so at least you could escort high level players and level up from shooting down/drawing away enemy aircraft.

16

Again though, that doesn’t sound like they set out to make the game difficult at the beginning, it just sounds like the planned poorly for how beginner ships would interact with “endgame” ships when the game was mature enough that most ships would be “endgame”.

Bad design and/or planning, certainly, but it doesn’t sound an intentional reverse difficulty curve.

17

I remember when I created my Mage in the original Baldur’s Gate it took about a dozen tries just to get into the first Inn that kicks off the adventure. Armed with one or two spells and a staff it was nearly impossible to defeat the mugger that attacks you on your way inside.

18

Well, the most obvious way to keep progression without making it an illogical storyline is to not have it be a personal conflict with the villain from the get-go. Either the player starts off as a D&D-standard generic adventurer or random survivor of the apocalypse that the villain wouldn’t have any reason to go after initially, or perhaps the villain slaughtered the hero’s village or whatever, but it was a “For me it was Tuesday” moment.

Any quality evil dictator type probably has hundreds of wannabe heroes gunning for his head, most of which won’t get past the orcs or trolls. Save the balrogs for the ones that actually might be a bit competent.

19

One of the weirdest difficulty curves I’ve ever seen was in Oblivion. In that game, the enemies scaled to your level, but your character’s power / effectiveness wasn’t entirely dependent on your numeric level.

It’s entirely possible to get halfway into Oblivion and essentially no longer be able to effectively kill anything. Or you can, at that point, be easily powerful enough to easily walk through almost any encounter the game can throw at you.

20

Not an action game, but Simpsons: Tapped Out is like that.
We have a thread for it here and a other message boards have their own threads as well. All the threads that I’ve read seem to be very similar. A bunch of people that have been playing for a month or two that are absolutely struggling to get anywhere and keep up with what the game keeps throwing at them and the other group of people that have been sitting at the top for a while twiddling their thumbs waiting for the makers to throw down a new level (which the finish very quickly).

So, it’s a slightly different scenario, but the same idea and the same endgame. The new people can put their IRL money into the game to help themselves along. IME most people eventually hand over ten or twenty or more dollars. Considering it was a free game and you’ve gotten months worth of enjoyment out of it, it doesn’t seem like that bad of a deal.