Oftentimes, when starting to play a new game the player is faced with their first challenge — selecting the difficulty level at which they would like to play the game. Far too often this question is very vague — Would I miss out on some of the fun if I select the easy difficulty level? What if I get stuck halfway through playing on a hard difficulty level? A player cannot know what level of difficulty is best suited to them before having played the game for even a second.
While the approach many modern games have taken today is to give the player the ability to change the difficulty level as they wish at any point during their playthrough, I myself feel that this is a somewhat lazy solution and there have been many innovative takes on the difficulty level conundrum.
One very interesting approach is DDA, which is short for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment. Some games at the beginning of the early 2000s popularized it with Resident Evil 4 at the helm. DDA means that the game will balance itself according to the player’s performance at the game, in order to try to keep the game as challenging to the player as possible while at the same time making sure that they never reach a point at which they cannot progress further into the game. DDA is usually hidden from the player, after all, you wouldn’t want to know that you only succeeded to defeat that last boss because the game gave you a leg up in that umpteenth attempt. One game, however, was shamelessly advertising their DDA. That game was God Hand.
God Hand, created by Resident Evil’s legendary director, Shinji Mikami, displayed the current level of DDA right there on the screen, with the possible levels being levels 1,2,3 and level DIE. If you did well in the game, your level will increase and the game straight up told you — things are going to get tougher now. If you got hit a lot, the level will decrease and the game goes — what’s the matter? Can’t handle level 2? Ok, here you go, back to level 1, I’ll go easy on you. Furthermore, if you accidently got to a high level and don’t want to get your butt kicked, you could make Gene (the protagonist) get down on his knees and beg for mercy, at which point the game would immediately lower the level back to level 1. When you finish the game the end screen shows you how much time you spent on each of the difficulty levels.
This balancing act is fantastic, on the one hand, even a less skilled player would be able to finish the game and experience the story, while staying on level 1, but the more skilled players would push themselves to play as much time as possible on level die. This also pushes the player to hone their skill and push themselves to be on the highest difficulty they can each replay. As for me, honestly, I could never play too long on level DIE, hovering over 2–3 was my best, but this challenge is what keeps me coming back to the game, over 15 years after I first played it.
DDA aside, I couldn’t talk about difficulty levels and challenging the players without mentioning Hideki Kamiya’s Bayonetta (Side note: Interesting fact, Mr. Kamiya has also directed a Resident Evil title under the tutelage of Mr. Mikami in his early days as a director).
While Bayonetta doesn’t have any DDA, it uses its difficulty settings as a way to enhance the player’s experience and encourage replayability. On the first time a player loads up the game, they can choose between 3 difficulty levels: Very Easy (Automatic), Easy, and Normal. While playing on the first two levels the game will almost play itself, and allow the player to enjoy the story, the normal difficulty setting is where things begin to get more interesting.
Before I delve more into the difficulty level journey that Bayonetta takes the player on, I must explain one crucial mechanic that exists in the game, and that is Witch Time — When an enemy attacks Bayonetta the player can dodge out of the way of the attack by pressing a button, if the player waits until the absolute last moment to dodge, they activate Witch Time, all of the enemies on screen will start to move in slow motion for a few seconds, and the player can unleash their barrage of attacks almost uninterrupted. This mechanic rewards the player for learning the enemy patterns and reacting with precision.
Now having explained that, back to the topic at hand. Upon completing the game on the Normal difficulty setting, a new difficulty setting opens up — Hard. This difficulty settings remixes the enemy locations, making the player face bigger adversaries early on, and fight against more deadly enemy combinations. So far it all sounds pretty standard, but when completing the Hard difficulty settings, the final difficulty opens up — Infinite Climax mode.
Arguably, I feel that this setting is the one that the developers intended the game to be played on, and the two easier settings are training wheels for it. At first glance, infinite climax mode plays the same as hard mode, but there is one key difference, in infinite climax mode there is no witch time! Now the player must use their understanding of the enemy patterns and defeat them without any help from the game. You can still dodge with precision, but you must now follow up on it with precision as well, the game will not help you at all. On a personal note, I’ve played and replayed Bayonetta more times than I can remember since it came out back in 2009, and I’ve yet to master it, yet it always seems that the game has another trick up its sleeve that it can teach me.
Overall, I feel that games that use their varying difficulty as a means of training the player and pushing them to get better, as opposed to making the game easier and more “approachable” is a very important thing to have in the gaming world. I am by no means condemning people who only play as a hobby and want to experience an incredible story playing as an angel slaying witch, or any other badass character, but I greatly appreciate the effort that the game designers went through to make the game both easy for those “casual” players and provide a never ending challenge to those who pursue perfection.
I think that these ways of implementing difficulty progress teach a very applicable life lesson that can be applied outside of gaming as well. Taking on smaller challenges in order to practice and train for a harder difficulty level is an admirable approach in my eyes, and a good way to improve in everything you do, gaming related or otherwise.
