Difficulty is one of the hardest things for a modern game to get right. Because games are catering for a much wider range of players than they were even ten years ago, deciding what level you should pitch your game’s difficulty at is very tricky and potentially very risky. Make it too hard and you’ll alienate the coveted “casual” gamer market that makes up the bulk of game sales these days; too easy, and you’ll piss off the hardcore gamers who are most vocal about their hobby and generate most of a game’s buzz. Either outcome hurts sales, and pleasing both camps is nigh-on impossible. This is why the difficulty setting exists.

Difficulty settings are theoretically very, very useful tools for developers. Not only can they provide the best of both worlds by accommodating both extremes of the ability scale, but they’re also incredibly valuable in their pedagogical aspect. Taking the most generic example of an FPS, these will typically start the player out with a simple pistol fighting some weak enemies and gradually introduce more weapons and more enemy types with more complex behaviour that require complex responses. What started as a very basic matter of moving forward and pointing and shooting ends as something that requires the player to think and react very quickly, juggling two or more weapons plus grenades and a melee attack and constantly repositioning to respond to new threats.  There’s a definite difficulty curve involved, and getting the shape of this curve right is half the battle. Most games manage it. Some games don’t. This is bad news for them since nothing will kill a game faster than a poorly-judged difficulty curve, but even games which dodge that bullet can end up being immensely frustrating experiences if they balls up the other half, which is the difficulty level.

Difficulty levels exist as a way of allowing players to choose what point of the difficulty curve they enter the game at. What they shouldn’t be is a simple multiplier that shifts the curve up or down; this is the laziest implementation of difficulty and it’s something that FPSes have been getting wrong for years. With difficulty levels, new players can be eased into the game at the very start of the curve, while veterans can skip all that tedious learning crap and get straight to the meat of the thing, starting the game halfway up it and ascending to greater heights than the average player would normally experience. Even that isn’t the best way to implement difficulty, though; in my opinion, the most important thing about difficulty levels is that they should keep things interesting.

Lets take the FPS example again. Shooting a bad guy with twice as much health as usual isn’t particularly interesting. Fighting a wider variety/larger number of enemies is, since you’re facing a different challenge to the one you did before. Running through the same level you did the first time you played the game isn’t particularly interesting. Having to complete additional objectives that force you to explore and go places you normally wouldn’t is. I’d go so far as to say the key to difficulty is to provide a challenge that is not only harder, but substantially different from the one the average player experiences; this rewards them for taking on that challenge in the first place and provides an incentive for those who might otherwise feel that trying to play the game on Hard is just asking for trouble.

There’s a number of ways to approach this. Some work better than others.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Otherwise known as How Not To Do Difficulty. Picking a harder difficulty setting in CoD doesn’t make the enemies smarter, it doesn’t add more varieties and it doesn’t even increase their numbers. What it does is turns all the baddies into the terrorist/commie Russian equivalent of a Terminator who has combed the phone book for the player’s name and address. They target the player mercilessly, ignoring NPC allies who are stood right next to them blazing away in favour of picking on the squishy meatbag. They are super-accurate; sticking your head out of cover even for a second is just inviting the veiny red screen of death. And they never, ever die. Watching AK-toting goons get back up after you fired eight rounds from an assault rifle into their torsos reaches the point of absurdity at times, and – worst of all – utterly shatters player immersion. It becomes clear that you’re not fighting people; you’re fighting robots with intrinsic advantages that you can never hope to match. And that’s no fun at all.

Halo.

Bungie have always had an unorthodox approach to game difficulty (see the article on Myth for more info) and Halo was no exception. It had an advantage in that the sci-fi game universe allowed for enemies that were difficult to bring down but which didn’t seem implausibly tough, but Halo at least paid lip service to the idea that playing on Legendary should be a fundamentally different experience from playing on Normal by varying the enemies you’d encounter at specific points in a level. On Normal you’d go into a room and face down a blue, moderately tough Elite and some grunts. The same room on Legendary would contain lots of grunts, some jackals, multiple blue Elites and a single, very tough gold Elite commander who’d probably be armed with an instant-kill weapon like the plasma sword.  This changes the way the player perceives the game in three different ways:

• The player can see from the extra enemies and the gold Elite that the game is very visibly different on Legendary.
• The extra threat of the gold Elite is accentuated by contrasting him with the same blue Elites the player fought and beat before. Their toughness hasn’t been increased and they’re no more accurate than they were the first time around. It’s just that this time they’re flunkies of a bigger, badder Elite.
• The enemy AI isn’t necessarily better, but the increased number of bad guys means it’s more likely that one of them will throw a grenade or flank the player, making them seem smarter.

Unfortunately while every subsequent FPS stole Halo’s regenerating health, two weapon limit and dedicated grenade and melee buttons, they largely ignored the steps it took in making playing FPSes on a harder difficulty setting compelling.

Goldeneye.

A half-and-half mix, here. Playing on 00 Agent in Goldeneye could be immensely frustrating since it goes with the tried and tested method of making all the bad guys really really tough (so much so that my defining memory of Goldeneye is walking an entire magazine of AK fire along a closely-bunched line of Soviet guards at head height that didn’t kill a single one), but unlike CoD’s approach 00 Agent was a setting you wanted to play on. This is because the difficulty settings gradually ramped up the complexity of what you had to do in a mission. To complete the first dam level on Agent you simply had to jump off the dam. Completing the same level on 00 Agent required you to plant a bug in one part of the level and then access a computer withing the dam structure itself while shooting out all the alarms, and then jump off the dam. Again, a substantially different experience to the one you’d have on Agent.

Hitman: Blood Money.

A game that allowed an astonishing amount of freedom in the way you could approach (most) missions. Walking in the front door guns blazing was almost always an option, and doing this made the game very easy even if the gunplay was a little bit stale. However, Blood Money was a game that had some very, very creative ways to kill people — none of which involved guns except for the one in the opera where you swap a fake pistol for a real pistol, causing an actor to inadvertently murder his co-star –  and which it encouraged you to find by breaking down your performance in excruciating detail at the end of the mission. Here, I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

If the player, during a mission, gets caught on CCTV or is witnessed committing murder, Agent 47′s notoriety will rise.^[3] Conversely, if the player executes the mission perfectly with none of the aforementioned events occurring, 47′s notoriety will be minimal. … The higher Agent 47′s notoriety is, the easier it will be for NPCs to identify him. Players may use the bribery system to negate accumulated notoriety.^[3] Notoriety gained in early missions will affect later missions. Earlier missions in which 47 has gained notoriety in can be replayed in order to attempt to reduce notoriety in later missions. The notoriety system is not enabled on “Rookie” mode, the easiest difficulty setting.

At the end of each mission, a newspaper article is displayed regarding the hit, in which the content varies depending on the investigation results and the player’s notoriety. It will detail the weapon most frequently used, how accurately it was used, the number of police, security, and civilians killed or injured, and if there were any witnesses. Any injured people will be counted as witnesses, who affect your notoriety. Sketch drawings are also sometimes visible of Agent 47′s face, which grow progressively more accurate as 47′s notoriety grows.

You see? Killing the crap out of everyone with guns may be easy but it also creates notoriety and potentially makes future missions more difficult. The newspaper headlines you got at the end of each mission were a little generic but were on the whole a very creative way of communicating just how much commotion the player had caused. And the best part is that all this stuff is entirely plausible within the game’s universe. Of course you’d want to do it quietly. Of course you’d want to leave as little evidence behind as possible. You don’t have to, but you’re strongly encouraged to. Using scoring systems to reward good performance like this is fairly common, but the way Blood Money went about it and meshed it with difficulty was rather unorthodox. I really liked it.

Starcraft II.

How do you make a strategy game more difficult while keeping it interesting for the player? There’s the Civilization approach – which I don’t necessarily agree with – of giving the player bonuses on the earlier difficulty levels, but then penalising them on the later ones and giving a boost to the AI. Civilization usually pitches its difficulty levels so that being able to win reliably on one means you’re ready to step up to the next one, but it always sticks in the craw to see the AI marching over your border with a huge stack of troops that you know it didn’t have to pay for. Most RTSes have a highly accentuated version of this problem, where continually having to fend off huge streams of units that a human player couldn’t possibly have built starts to feel more than a little bit artificial – much like the CoD example described above.

Starcraft II’s solution to this problem wasn’t original, but it was unusual. Choosing the Hard difficulty setting would mean facing tougher enemies, yes, and there’d also be more of them, but there’d also be more advanced/harder unit types mixed in you had to deal with and you’d encounter bad guys at a point in a level where there were none before. Additionally the AI was much more aggressive on Hard, and playing missions that were deliberately asymmetric – like the colony defense mission, or the zombie mission – meant that the frequency and ferocity of the scripted attacks were increased. You couldn’t beat the computer by just playing more efficiently than you did on normal; you had to change the basics of your strategy.

Covert Action.

The old Microprose games all had roughly the same approach to difficulty. When you finished a game, you’d see your total score tallied up. This number was essentially meaningless on its own, but it’d always be paired with a verbal equivalent of how the game rated your performance. A low score would invite insulting comparisons with Dan Quayle or Ethelred the Unready, while scoring highly would see you retiring as a Governor in the Caribbean or going on to become President of theUnited States. The highest scores weren’t possible unless you played on the harder difficulty settings; this was a crude but effective way of incentivising the player to do better next time.

However, there’s also Covert Action. Covert Action is a game that casts you as a spy who is out to foil a series of randomly generated plots by terrorist groups, and it wasn’t really possible to make this more or less difficult by giving hardcoded bonuses to the AI. There was no AI. Instead, playing the game on an easy difficulty setting would give you a very, very simple plot to unravel – there’d be no more than three or four conspirators who would be easily identified, they’d use simple ciphers and their phone systems would be trivial to tap. Upping the difficulty level would increase the complexity of the plot, adding more layers, more conspirators and making the puzzles much harder. Often the Mastermind – the guy you were trying to catch – would go into hiding before you managed to work your way up the chain to him, so even though you stopped his bomb plot you’d have to live with knowing he was still at large. Probably the earliest example of a game that was measurably different as you made it harder.

Looking at these examples, the reason why developers often plump for the lazy CoD solution is fairly obvious: going beyond that is a whole load of extra work and you’re cutting a large number of people who have bought your game off from a lot of its content, which I understand is a big no-no in today’s game industry. It’s much easier to just have them play the same game with tougher bad guys and no-one gets left out in the cold! Still, I’d argue that if you’re going to do that you might as well not include a difficulty setting at all. These days you might be able to bait people into grinding their way through your game on Hard with achievements, but unless they’re of a certain masochistic mindset (hi Jim) they’re not going to have fun doing it. Remember the gnome challenge in Episode Two of Half Life 2? Where you had to carry the gnome through the entire game from beginning to end? Nobody really enjoyed doing that because there wasn’t a huge amount of creativity involved in transporting the gnome; you just had to remember where you’d dropped the little bastard when baddies turned up. It was an additional, pointless chore that players who really wanted all the achievements had to carry out. That’s how I feel about playing games on Hard these days. If there’s no additional challenge — if it’s not interesting — then I’m just not going to bother.

The post The Difficulty Of Difficulty. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This finishes up my history of Bungie during the pre-Halo years; the first part can be found here.

Part Two: Myth.

Myth is a game that is remembered for all the wrong reasons. I suspect this is at least partly down to a marketing misstep on Bungie’s part, as it was the first ever 3D strategy game and that was the element they subsequently played up in all the previews. This was a mistake; the 3D in Myth is kind of janky and horrible and doesn’t really add much to the gameplay, and what’s more the game uses 2D sprites to represent its units which doesn’t exactly help it in the looks department. As a result the first Myth game was critically panned¹ as a failed experiment. Some of that criticism is fully deserved – Myth’s gameplay is, to me, a fascinating tactical challenge, but I can easily see how it would have provoked feelings of revulsion in reviewers used to the Command & Conquer RTS paradigm – but I would be willing to bet a fair amount of money that those critics didn’t get too far into the game before dismissing it out of hand. Because, once again, Bungie have turned what is otherwise a merely fairly solid game into far more than the sum of its parts through the addition of a well-told story.

The story isn’t even that original this time around. Myth draws heavy inspiration from Glen Cook’s Black Company novels²; the backstory at the start of the game is actually summed up in just three short paragraphs:

In a time long past, the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West.

In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen.

Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the wars which followed, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten.

There’s a bit more background to be found in the manual, but for the most part this is all the scene-setting the game bothers to do. While it’s got a certain ring to it, a certain gravitas, you might think there’s only so much you can do with so brief an intro.

You would be wrong.

Ignore the intro that comes afterwards; it’s one of the more baffling design decisions in Myth to have all the cutscenes be drawn in this bright, cartoony style that’s completely at odds with the rest of the game. Those sixty seconds of narration should be all you need to convince you that Myth is going to be something special, and showcase the game’s two parallel masterstrokes in telling its story.

The first is Marty O’Donnell’s wonderfully haunting and mournful musical themes. Bungie were extremely fortunate to have O’Donnell on their staff during the Myth and Halo years because he is hands down one of the best composers working in video games today, and his score for Myth remains probably his best work. The main theme — The Fallen Lords — is a desperately evocative lament for a civilization driven to the brink of extinction, while tracks like The Five Champions emphasise the acts of heroism mentioned in the prologue and The Last Battle effectively communicates the grinding, implacable terror that is the undead horde of the Fallen. And then you’ve got The Siege of Madrigal, which was so good Bungie put a variant of it into every single Halo game they made.

By itself, the music is great. What makes it particularly effective is the way it works together with the second masterstroke, which is to tell the story through this fantastically world-weary narrator; a soldier in the Legion (the elite of the rag-tag army still resisting the Fallen Lords) who narrates his journal entries at the start of every mission. The particularly clever thing here is that the identity of the narrator is never stated, or even hinted at. All you can tell from his narration is that he’s not particularly high-up in the Legion – he could be anybody, any one of the soldiers you command during the missions. By telling the story from the perspective of one of the rank-and-file soldiers – somebody well-informed but who by means knows everything that’s going on, and who is completely at the mercy of the eddies of war – Myth really gets across how badly the battle against the Fallen Lords is going. At the start of the game the Legion has been pushed back all the way to the coast with only a tiny scrap of unconquered territory remaining, and unlike most contemporary games that’d have you taking command of the good guys and magically winning the whole war, this situation basically never changes.

As a result, no game before or since has done such a fantastic job of communicating just how hopeless the scenario facing the player is. The entire game is a constant struggle not for victory, but for basic survival. The narrator – and by extension, the Legion – doesn’t seriously expect to win the war against the Fallen Lords, but he keeps on fighting anyway because the Fallen are an enemy that will give no quarter and accept no surrender. He has no other option but to fight, and so the various missions are a series of daring raids and desperate rearguard actions fought against impossible odds. This bleak, oppressive atmosphere is one of the hallmarks of all the early Bungie games (and even the first Halo) but Myth is the one that pulls it off the best, and it’s all down to the narration and music.

Not to say that the gameplay doesn’t play a part as well. Myth is what today would be called a tactical RTS – that is, you’re sent into a mission with a certain number of troops, and you have no way of getting any more unless the mission happens to give you reinforcements at a set point. If you lose a man he cannot be replaced and you have to continue on with a diminished force. The soldiers you are given are a cut above the average undead Thrall that makes up the bulk of the Fallen forces, but there’s normally three or four Thrall for every soldier in your tiny group, and they’re mixed in with other enemies that can easily wipe out your entire force in one attack if you’re not careful. The relative fragility of your men really works well together with their finite supply; you will lose troops during a mission, and every single loss hurts.

This aspect of the game is made even better by the persistent character veterancy. Every soldier in Myth, when you click on him, will display one of several in-universe quotes describing the soldier type along with the soldier’s name. This name is randomly picked off of a list, but once assigned to a soldier it becomes fixed. That soldier then permanently carries the name through that mission and – if you keep him alive – through all subsequent missions in which he appears.  The game also tracks the number of kills he has as shields displayed next to his name; once a character gets a few kills under his belt he’ll become a veteran and become slightly better at killing things. You end up carefully shepherding this small core of elite veterans through the game – just like the Legion is supposed to be – and while any losses incurred during a mission will be made good at the start of the next, the replacement soldiers will be fresh-faced recruits with none of the experience or shared history of the guy who bought it. That man is gone forever, and nothing’s bringing him back.

I hate to be banging on about world-building the whole time, important though it is, but Myth also excels in this regard. Backstory is explained both explicitly and non-explicitly in the journals and incidental details throughout the game; the flavour quotes for the soldiers hint at the world’s history and just how long this cataclysmic war has been going on for. Myth wisely leaves a lot of this story untold, with the various leaders of the Legion and the Fallen referred to by the narrator as if the player should already know who they are by their reputation alone, and this allows the player to fill in the gaps with their imagination. The geography and character types are a mishmash of different cultures that somehow works; you have medieval Warriors mixing with Nordic Berserkers, aboriginal Archers and Tolkien-esque Dwarves that love to throw explosive molotovs, and they come from disparate locations with names as diverse as Covenant, Myrgard, Bagrada and Muirthemne. This constant use of words and concepts that sound vaguely familiar to us makes Myth very, very good at conjuring up a mental image of something from the name alone.

When the time came for Bungie to make the sequel, I imagine they ran into problems at the initial design meeting when they realised they wouldn’t be able to pull off the same trick twice. After the defeat of the Fallen Lords at the end of the first game (yes, Myth doesn’t depart from genre convention so severely that that doesn’t happen, although it keeps up the illusion almost until the very last mission) the ravaged cities of the West have rebuilt their civilization. Peace has reigned for sixty years with nary a single Thrall raising its ugly head. Given this scenario it’s a bit difficult to reproduce the same feeling of being completely screwed, so Bungie decided to do something a little different. Myth II: Soulblighter starts with the narrator as part of a small company of soldiers patrolling the countryside. They run into zombies at a village called Willow Creek, and further investigation leads to a Baron with some very unsavoury habits. Things snowball from there as the situation rapidly grows beyond the ability of the patrol to handle it, and their focus switches to simply surviving the undead onslaught while making their way back to the capital to get word to the King (the sole surviving member of the group of sorcerers that led the Legion in the first game).

Myth II uses the same storytelling method as the first game – it even uses the same narrator, although he’s clearly supposed to be a different person —  and despite the setup being different the game still manages to create the same impression of events spiralling beyond the player’s control. What seems to be a problem affecting a single village soon blossoms into a full-blown undead invasion that sorely outclasses the narrator’s group, and even when they make it back to the apparent safety of the capital city the chaos follows them and rips it apart with astonishing ease. The first nine or ten missions of the game are absolutely cracking as the narrator stumbles from one bad situation to another; unfortunately the game then takes a bit of a dip in quality as Soulblighter (the main bad guy) was one of the flunkies of the leader of the Fallen Lords in the first game, and the second half of the game feels a bit second-rate as the armies of the Light get their act together and focus solely on dealing with what used to be a second-rate baddie. Still, even after it lost the atmosphere of menace it was still a perfectly solid game.

I am not going to talk about Myth III. Myth III was made by a completely different company after Bungie got bought up by Microsoft and it is terrible; uglier than the first two games and with a character-driven plot (ugh) that screws with several crucial elements of the mythology.  Instead I’ll spend the paragraphs I should have spent talking about a hypothetical awesome third game that rounded off the trilogy talking about the Myth series’ approach to difficulty instead.

The Myth games were somewhat unique amongst RTSes at the time for even having a difficulty setting. You fire up Command & Conquer or Red Alert and you won’t see any difficulty setting there; even the games that did bother merely gave the AI ridiculous bonuses to its unit production and left it at that. Since you can’t build units in Myth Bungie had to take a much different and far more thoughtful approach to difficulty. Lowering the difficulty meant you faced less bad guys in a mission, and the ones that were present were easier to kill. Raising it both increased the number of enemies and introduced more dangerous types of enemy, as well as making them harder to kill. Completing a mission on the very hardest difficulty setting, Legendary, sometimes meant taking on an enemy force that outnumbered you ten to one, but – crucially – since the number of troops on each side were fixed, overcoming the Legendary difficulty setting was simply a matter of mastering the control of your units to the point where they became very, very efficient killers, somewhat in the manner of a very hard platformer. It was a challenge I found far more satisfying than the ones offered by other strategy games since it required some actual thought on the part of the player as how best to use their units rather than just being able to crank out more tanks than the enemy, and was just another area where a Bungie game was some way ahead of the curve. You know what the next RTS game I played that took the same approach to difficulty was? Starcraft II. It took fourteen years for somebody to pick up that torch and run with it, strategy-wise.

Happily Bungie themselves know a good idea when they see it and used the same difficulty system when making the first Halo game – even going as far as to recycle the name of each difficulty level (Timid, Simple, Normal, Heroic, Legendary) – but Halo was a troubled beast that I could easily write a whole post on. For now, though, I’ll simply say that it seems like the product of a team that wanted to carry on the same themes they explored in Marathon and Myth, but which was now stymied by having to appeal to the mass market. This explains why Halo 2 – and to a lesser extent, Halo 3 – were almost totally devoid of those themes, instead preferring to focus on big-budget spectacle at the expense of any kind of textured world or nuanced storytelling³.

And that’s the story of Bungie software in a 5,000 word nutshell: they’re one of the classic examples of an extremely talented development studio that lost its soul to a corporate buyout. If you are interested in Myth’s story at all the Myth Journal website has all the journal entries, narration tracks and various bits and pieces of art, and full videos of the journal entries as they appear in game are available on youtube; there’s also a Let’s Play that runs through the first game from beginning to end in excruciating detail. Sadly I think tracking down the games themselves isn’t an option — I’m certainly not aware of any freeware/digital/budget versions, although if you did manage to source a copy there are some fan patches at Project Magma that will make them compatible with modern versions of Windows.

These articles are turning out to focus on what games can do besides good gameplay to make themselves particularly compelling experiences, so next week I’ll probably talk about something they can add that’s not even part of the actual game itself: a decent manual.

1. Or at least it drew review scores averaging about 60-65%, which amounts to the same thing.
2. I have read these, and the first three books are actually pretty good – for fantasy. Everything after that is absolutely dire.
3. Please do not talk to me about ODST or Reach because I haven’t played those yet.

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