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Maybe its just me but I never liked the games who adjusted difficulty ie as I leveled. That's lazy design. Completely demotivated me to try to do sidequests / o

Maybe its just me but I never liked the games who adjusted difficulty ie as I leveled. That's lazy design. Completely demotivated me to try to do sidequests / other ways to improve myself before moving to more difficult quests/areas. I mean what would be the point? Just facing more difficult enemies. Compare it to the game who gets the difficulty balance just right with static setup, and every gain makes a bit of difference and game is never frustratingly hard nor too easy. Areas of initial struggle become walk in the park. To me that's rewarding. Maybe some middle road where enemies can get a bit harder, but still they become more defeatable as player progresses would be ideal. Or even better - make it tweakable in the menu (but that's a mammoth effort to do and test)

brodie 6y ago
Puzzle games seem like the perfect example of an entire genre that strives to get the difficulty level “just right.” I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be my absolute favorite recent example of this. The Talos Principle and the Witness are also other great recent examples. Also, to your last comment about adjusting difficulty in the UI: many, many single player action/adventure games have this. It’s been a commonplace thing for quite a while now. It also enables cool things like maximal-difficulty speed runs. I recently had a great time watching someone speed run Metal Gear Solid 2 at its absolute highest difficulty level (that I don’t think the game even offers to players until the first play through is completed). I believe it was a recorded speed running-for-cancer event or something like that. I’ll have to try to find the YouTube video. Actually, here it is: https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc. Obviously not something to watch if you ever want to play the game and haven’t yet. Another excellent one for MGS3: https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA
- petepete 6y ago
  I found The Witness perfectly balanced. None of the puzzles were insurmountable but some took plenty of headscratching. The way that if you get stuck you can go and try a different area of the island made it - I might have lost interest if I'd been stuck with no room for manoeuvre.
simion314 6y ago
I think depends on the implementation. Skyrim does dynamic leveling and this has the advantage you are not stuck in the beginners zone where you have to do most of the quests so you can get enough levels and money to be able to exit this zone. I also like Gothic series did the static enemy levels and enemy would respawn only on Chapter changes, this gave you a god feeling when you could finally access a hard area and defeat the guys that were impossible to scratch at start. So IMO both Skyrim and gothic work because they feet the game and the player base that is targeting and give a different feel of the world, there is no better system IMO. Also in Skyrim the stronger enemies differ visually too, is not just a hidden number that is increased, stronger enemy types with stronger gear is spawn.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  I think this is the optimal model, set the level of enemies to wherever you’re at on arriving and then leave them at that level going forward. That way as you progress through the game you’re always being challenged by new areas, but you can always go back to earlier areas if you just want to unwind and stomp low-level enemies.
  - simion314 6y ago
    It depends on the implementation, I do not like how in witcher 3 the quests,weapons,NPCs,creatures have a level so a cool sword is garbage after 1 hours and a some random NPC will drop a rusty ugly sword with a better number. I prefer the games where you don't have a level printed over the enemy head, all low level bandits are the same level but you can find in other areas a different NPC camp with different gear that can defeat you in one heat.
moomin 6y ago
There’s grey area. For example: Half Life 2. Every so often there’s a downtime area full of boxes. The amount of loot in those boxes is enough to get your ammo up to the levels the game thinks you need for the next challenge. Is this dynamic difficulty? Depends on how you view it. The worse you were at the previous section, the better your rewards, but maybe the challenge is just “get to the next area by any means necessary”. Either way it’s pretty invisible to the player.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Half-Life 2 also bumps up the health points of the civil protection soldiers in later chapters, counterbalancing the player's improved firepower. https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection

brodie 6y ago

Puzzle games seem like the perfect example of an entire genre that strives to get the difficulty level “just right.” I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be my absolute favorite recent example of this. The Talos Principle and the Witness are also other great recent examples. Also, to your last comment about adjusting difficulty in the UI: many, many single player action/adventure games have this. It’s been a commonplace thing for quite a while now. It also enables cool things like maximal-difficulty speed runs. I recently had a great time watching someone speed run Metal Gear Solid 2 at its absolute highest difficulty level (that I don’t think the game even offers to players until the first play through is completed). I believe it was a recorded speed running-for-cancer event or something like that. I’ll have to try to find the YouTube video. Actually, here it is: https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc. Obviously not something to watch if you ever want to play the game and haven’t yet. Another excellent one for MGS3: https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA

petepete 6y ago
I found The Witness perfectly balanced. None of the puzzles were insurmountable but some took plenty of headscratching. The way that if you get stuck you can go and try a different area of the island made it - I might have lost interest if I'd been stuck with no room for manoeuvre.

simion314 6y ago

I think depends on the implementation. Skyrim does dynamic leveling and this has the advantage you are not stuck in the beginners zone where you have to do most of the quests so you can get enough levels and money to be able to exit this zone. I also like Gothic series did the static enemy levels and enemy would respawn only on Chapter changes, this gave you a god feeling when you could finally access a hard area and defeat the guys that were impossible to scratch at start. So IMO both Skyrim and gothic work because they feet the game and the player base that is targeting and give a different feel of the world, there is no better system IMO. Also in Skyrim the stronger enemies differ visually too, is not just a hidden number that is increased, stronger enemy types with stronger gear is spawn.

jon-wood 6y ago
I think this is the optimal model, set the level of enemies to wherever you’re at on arriving and then leave them at that level going forward. That way as you progress through the game you’re always being challenged by new areas, but you can always go back to earlier areas if you just want to unwind and stomp low-level enemies.
- simion314 6y ago
  It depends on the implementation, I do not like how in witcher 3 the quests,weapons,NPCs,creatures have a level so a cool sword is garbage after 1 hours and a some random NPC will drop a rusty ugly sword with a better number. I prefer the games where you don't have a level printed over the enemy head, all low level bandits are the same level but you can find in other areas a different NPC camp with different gear that can defeat you in one heat.

moomin 6y ago

There’s grey area. For example: Half Life 2. Every so often there’s a downtime area full of boxes. The amount of loot in those boxes is enough to get your ammo up to the levels the game thinks you need for the next challenge. Is this dynamic difficulty? Depends on how you view it. The worse you were at the previous section, the better your rewards, but maybe the challenge is just “get to the next area by any means necessary”. Either way it’s pretty invisible to the player.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Half-Life 2 also bumps up the health points of the civil protection soldiers in later chapters, counterbalancing the player's improved firepower. https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection