Summary
- Modern games allow changing difficulties at any time, improving the player’s experience.
- Granularity of difficulty settings is a newer feature that enhances gameplay.
- Adding a locked difficulty option to prevent players from lowering difficulty impulsively could improve the experience for some.
When it comes to accessibility, modern games are better than ever. No matter what your skill level, you can usually tune the difficulty to give you exactly the experience you want—who could complain about that? Not me!
Well, maybe I have one teensy-weensy complaint…
Modern Games Let You Change Difficulties Any Time
Having a choice of difficulty settings isn’t all that new. While early home video games were basically arcade ports with one level of difficulty—take it or leave it—even 8-bit consoles like the NES had a smattering of games with limited difficulty settings. In the 90s, it was perfectly normal for games like DOOM to have various difficulty settings.
The big difference with modern games is that you can change the difficulty after you’ve started playing. This is important, because games have difficulty curves no matter what overall level you’re playing at. That is, the game starts easy, and then ramps up the challenge as you progress. So, while you might have no issue playing the first few hours of a game on hard, you might hit a wall that you just can’t cross because your skill level isn’t there. By letting you change the difficulty whenever you like, you avoid having to start a new game, losing hours of progress.
A more recent addition to this is the granularity of difficulty settings. So you can now tweak specific aspects of gameplay when it comes to difficulty in games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and DOOM: The Dark Ages.
If you’re great at action, but awful at puzzles (or just hate them), you can leave the combat on hard but make the puzzles easy. In DOOM, if you don’t like the parry window or game speed on a specific level of difficulty, you can just create a custom difficulty setting.
This Is Awesome
I am all for giving players this type of control. After all, we paid for the game, so let’s enjoy it as we like it. It’s no different from letting people use cheat codes or mods. As long a you’re having fun, that’s what matters. It’s why you play video games. Challenge is definitely a big part of why games are fun in the first place, but too much of it (or too little) can strip all the joy from it.
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But I’m Always Too Tempted to Do It
The problem is that I’m always tempted to temporarily lower the difficulty in a game if I get stuck. This happened to me most recently when I finally got around to finishing Horizon: Forbidden West. I’d been playing through the whole game on the default difficulty level, which is what I always pick when playing a game for the first time, and I was having a perfectly good time—right up until the final boss.
I kept getting the boss within a sliver of their demise and then snuffing it. I knew if I just tried a few more times, and just paid attention, I’d win the fight. Generally, if I get stuck on a boss, I just wait until the next day and get them on the first try, but I was tired, and I just wanted to finish the game already. So I lowered the difficulty to “story mode” and the boss basically beat itself to death while I watched.
So Give Me the Option to Lock In My Difficulty
I immediately regretted doing this, because it felt empty and pointless. I’d basically ruined that last bit of the experience because I was tired and impatient. Yeah, it was my choice, but honestly I wish I didn’t have the option in the first place.
Which is why I think we could use just one little bit of additional choice—locked difficulty. Basically, I want the choice to lock my chosen difficulty level when I start a new game and remove the option to change difficulty at any time. I don’t want to take that option away from anyone else, but I want the option to stop myself from doing it.
I want to have that feeling back when I finally beat the final boss in Metal Gear Solid Revengeance even though it took me hours of trying again and again until I had it all down perfectly.
I’ll Always Choose the Easy Way, So Give Me a Challenge I Can’t Refuse
I’m always going to be my own worst enemy when it comes to taking the easy way out when things get hard in a game. The only reason I’m going to overcome that roadblock is because I have to. I’m the sort of player that will cheese every boss and encounter or grind until my character is a walking nuclear weapon, but at least that’s fun and satisfying. Flipping a switch to let me pass a difficulty gate isn’t, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
So, developers, give me one extra switch to flip and we’re all going to have a good time.