Difficulty Levels in Games

I enjoy a good challenge, but I don't like losing.

Most console games, e.g. platformers, have relatively low death penalities. Whether it's save points or infinite respawns, dying only sets you back a few minutes -- the time to run back to where you were before. Really challenging games might require that you re-run an especially difficult gauntlet -- the biggest setbacks might be ten or twenty minutes.

The Lego games -- Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones -- are prime examples. "Dying" means you lose some points, but you can get them right back most of the time. The biggest setback in the game is realizing you skipped a level, that you went through a one-way door and now have to replay the entire level to get back to a previous screen. Which is only relevant if you're trying to get all of the secrets/treasures/etc in a level.

I used to enjoy playing the Hardcore difficulty levels on FPS games, but the single-player portion isn't usually a skill challenge; it's more often annoying and time-consuming than challenging. I just want to see the content. After playing a few levels of Doom 3 on the highest difficulty setting, I decided to go back and play on a lower setting, just to breeze through it.

One of the side effects of that choice was that the game was much less scary. When the spooks and scares didn't suggest that I'd actually die, then I didn't need to fear them. It was actually fun, in a horror-movie sort of way, to conflate the fear of getting your progress thwarted conflated with the fear of the demons. Turn the lights on, play during the day, and crank the difficulty level down, and the game loses any emotional impact it might have had. If you like horror movies, you probably know seeing one late at night is the best time. When the house (or movie theater) is quiet, every little creak and groan can make you jump.

But the Lego games aren't about scares. They're about content. You get to play through the movies, which is fun, and you get to spend time looking for hidden secrets. Both are great fun, and neither one is the sort of challenge that can even have setbacks. I remember playing the old Sonic games, and Mario, and whatnot, and in those, death was a threat. But you only died while you learned a mechanic; after a while, death wasn't so much an ever-present threat as it was something to keep you on your toes. Ratchet and Clank, Banjo Kazooie, and Sly Cooper are similar. Dying (at least, dying several times and losing all of your Lifes) could set you back a good bit, maybe fifteen minutes, but you didn't die that true death very often.

As I mentioned in my previous post (about train tycoon games), I've been playing Railroad Tycoon 2 again lately. I bought RRT3 and Railroads! (aka RRT4) at the same time, and I'll go through them again later, but for now I'm playing through this high-rated classic game.

When you screw up in RRT2, you lose the mission. You don't have to win the mission. In fact, you could just Resign your way through the game and see what each of the levels is about. There's no content block -- the entire game is open to you as soon as you buy it. So what's the challenge? Somewhat like a toy, the challenge is up to you. You don't have to get gold medals, but it's the highest reward the game offers. So you've got a few choices -- play all the missions through, win or lose; win all of the missions; or win all of the missions with gold medals.

For me, getting the gold medals was my goal. It was a bit of a pain, because I had to learn how to make money. I played through all of the Canada mission (#6) and lost -- I had nowhere near enough money to win. I wasn't really sure why. I looked around a bit, and from the comments I saw, I realized that I needed to focus more on long-distance hauls, be less focused on getting strictly to each coast (going to Halifax early is a waste of time), and to spend more time supplying and exploiting the industries available. Another change I made in my second run-through was to be more careful where I laid tracks, exploiting terraforming and avoiding congested routes.

A lot of learning is required to do well. Unlike, say, Lego Indiana Jones, I can't just plow my way through an RRT2 mission and win. The game makes it hard to pay attention to elevations, but I can't just ignore them. The game makes it hard to mind consists and stations, but I can't ignore them either.

When I lost the Canada mission the first time, I felt like it was out of my control. I didn't know what I was doing wrong. When you lose a life in a platformer, it's usually pretty obvious what you did wrong -- there's lava there (oops, didn't see it the first time); you have to fight this boss a different way (and a few minutes of trial and error usually shows you how); or you need to time your jumps and swings and whatnot better. There are skills in some of those games, timing related skills, and usually practice is a trivial way to increase your skills.

In RRT2, I found out that it takes six years (about ninety minutes of real time) to send a train from Halifax to Vancouver. Geez! I started a year too late. Figuring out how long it'd take to send a train that far... is not really possible. The best you can do is to spend a half-hour testing and measuring, and that's a horrid waste of time. F that.

Platformers are often safe exploration games. Or, if you have good combat skills in the game, the challenge isn't too onerous. Once you defeat the foes, they stay dead, then you can go explore without hindrance. Other games force you to explore the mechanics -- how do you make money in RRT2? You have to tease the profit equation out of the game.

And here we get to what I ranted about in yesterday's post: the feedback loop for figuring out that equation is slow. Deadly slow. "F this, I quit" sort of slow. Lose the mission enough times and you go hunt down a FAQ. Why bother solving it by yourself? I kept losing the Whistestop Tour mission as my train ran out of sand, and I thought, wtf?! There's only one way to get the gold medal, and it requires (as the game often does) to ignore the help that the game offers. (That Whistlestop mission offers you an upgrade if you get to a town in time, but there's no way to get there -- none of the engines are fast enough to get close enough before you run out of sand.) These are trial-and-error lessons, but the downside is that you have to error a lot, and spend a lot of time doing so, before you move on.

Games should calibrate themselves to players. If a player doesn't have the skill or the knowledge to get a gold medal, platformers give them silver and bronze medals. They say, "thanks for playing, here's your twinkie" and tell you you did a good job and let you move on to the next game, brag to your friends that you finished, and score a few achievement points.

Telling the player "ha-ha! You lose! Now you have to do that all over again!" sucks. And it sucks in builder games where you build this big cool rail empire... then never see it again. You throw it away. As awesome and profitable and elegant as it was, it's gone. Oh, and cuz you lost? Yeah, you're throwing it away with nothing to show for it but some bruises and an admonition to try harder next time.

The skills you gain when playing sports and lose, at least, are something. Throwing away my cool rail empire and the hours I spent building it just to gain skill at beating the remaining levels -- that's not really a skill I want to be proud of. I can't say "I accomplished nothing last night but learning how to beat this game that I'm gonna play for a couple more weeks then never touch again." Who cares? Getting better at shooting baskets, or pitching, or hitting, and saying "well we lost and I sprained my ankle, but I think I learned a lot about the sport" is worthwhile.