Are all difficulties similar?

A couple of things before we start: 1) I'm a gamer and don't claim to know anything about game design. 2) There might be some spoilers in this post, you have been warned.

One of my pet peeves in gaming is how difficult games are and even more importantly, how is that difficulty made happen. I'd argue that two games can be equally difficult but in very different ways and in this article I wanna explore a few approaches to difficulty.

I've played video games since before I knew how to read. I absolutely love gaming and this pandemic has given me a lot of free time and I've spent that time mostly playing a lot of video games (around 85 and counting right now). It has also sparked me to think about gaming a lot more.

Arcade Difficulty

In the early days of gaming, games were played in arcade halls and paid per run. Due to the technical limitations, games weren't long but to make money, companies needed players to play their games and keep them hooked.

One solution to that was to make games very difficult so that you'd play it over and over again before completing it. And then there were high scores so even if you did complete a game, you'd then replay it to beat that score and get your initials saved to the history books.

While technology has then improved a lot and games are becoming incredible media experiences, sometimes, especially retro style games take the arcade style of difficulty. If a game is difficult because of janky controls or overly punishing bounce backs, I think it's a bad kind of difficulty.

Dark Souls / Hollow Knight Difficulty

The hot take in this post is this section. I think games like Dark Souls or Hollow Knight, often celebrated for their brutal difficulty, are not good kind of difficult. Your opinion and preference may be very different but hear me out.

While the bosses are not easy by any measure, I don't think they are the most difficult part of these games. My perception of difficulty and biggest frustration is how reaching those bosses is implemented. Once you die (and because they are not easy, you'll die a lot), you can't just retake the fight. No, you're sent to somewhere rather far away and most of the time is spent travelling from the save point into the boss fight over and over and over and over again. And most of the time, it's not very exciting.

I believe that if you'd have a chance to fight those bosses back-to-back, you'd clear them much faster and they'd feel much easier than they are now. And that kind of artificial difficulty of adding inconsequential grinding is something that I think is bad game design.

Pokemon Difficulty (feat Dark Rising)

On the other end of the spectrum, which frustrates me in how it's easy are Pokemon mainline games. I know they are aimed for children and are not meant to be super challenging, the way they are implemented, especially in Sun & Moon generation games, is also frustrating.

When a game has fighting, training and capturing mechanics like Pokemon, it gets frustrating when there's no challenge. Youtube is full of people creating their own challenges to make the games more interesting: Nuzlocke Challenge, "don't heal", "no gained experience from fights", "magikarp only" and other challenges add different angles but they also show how easy the base game is.

A side example worth mentioning is Dark Rising, which is a Pokemon romhack that I played a while back. It started like your usual Pokemon game, just a tiny bit more challenging. And then they absolutely wrecked the difficulty curve by adding a super challenging fight early on:

You'd be around level 12 or so and you get into an unskippable fight with a Pokemon that's around level 40 (it's been a while, the levels might be bit wrong but they are in the same ballpark) with Wonder Guard ability that only takes damage from super effective moves.

Then as a player, you end up grinding against low level opponents until you're a match to that monster after which you're wildly overpowered and suddenly the game became way too easy and uninteresting. Until they repeated the same thing and I decided to completely stop playing. Sadly, I never learned the end of that story.

Kaizo Mario Difficulty

Reading me complain about "difficult" games might make you think that I'm just bad at gaming and blame games for it. Sure, I'm not the best at games but it's not that I don't like difficult games.

Case in point: Kaizo Mario romhacks. These are brutally difficult games built by fans on top of Super Mario World engine. They are games where even experienced players might spend hours to finish a single level and I have spent hours and hours getting through a single series of 3 jumps.

The reason I absolutely love these games is that I can practice those difficult parts over and over again. They skip all the "travel through the world to get to that single point" and let you try over and over again until you become good at it.

What I love about super difficult games is that they require 100% focus, 100% of the time. That intensity is the best way to relax and forget the real world. There's no time to stress about work and life when losing your focus for a microsecond ends up in failure. And the satisfaction when you succeed in those tricks, it feels so good.

If you have never heard or seen about these, I recommend checking out Invictus playthrough from Games Done Quick marathon. It looks easy but getting through even the first level for a mere mortal like myself is a huge challenge. But a welcome one.

No Difficulty

There's also the interesting case of games with zero difficulty. Games where you just can't fail. One can argue if these should be called games rather than interactive graphic novels but I think there's enough gaming to be done to make them games.

My favorite example of this is one of my all time favorite games, Firewatch. I don't think there's any way to fail in that game. I learned later that you don't even have to do all the stuff I did in the story and the story will still continue and take you to the end.

But having no difficulty is different than game being too easy. Because when you take away the concept of difficulty, you are able to make a lot of different decisions. One concept that games in general struggle, is how to keep the game, its characters and its world running even when a player fails at something.

Game Maker's Toolkit had a great episode about that concept that I recommend watching called Playing Past Your Mistakes. My dream is that gaming will reach a point in the near future where you start a game and you play it until it finishes. You can save to take a break but you can't save to go back when you fail.

One interesting approach to that is Detroit: Become Human. It's a story-driven game that will go on even if your main characters die.

Conclusion

What I tried to say through these examples is that not all difficult games are difficult in a same way. Different players enjoy different type of difficulty and for me, the Kaizo Mario is the perfect type of challenge. And on the other end of the spectrum, games like Firewatch or Detroit: Become Human show that you can build very fulfilling games while making games that could be called easy.