The world of video gaming is a diverse one, welcoming in a variety of folk from every corner and walk of life. Thus is the appeal of entertainment, as anyone can theoretically take part without having to succumb to worries about what they physically capable of or qualified to do. Of course, disability aids are only just starting to hit the main stream, but that's not what this blog is about. You see, as I have mentioned before, one of the most universal tools for generalizing game audiences to as many folk as possible is the inclusion of a difficulty selection. Which just so happens to be the topic which I intend to delve into with today's blog.
In the age when games began hitting the home market, there started a shift in the development priority of those games. Previously, as many games were designed for the arcade, developers had to strike a careful balance between games that were fun enough to keep folk coming back and difficult enough for them to not be able to beat it easily. Through this method developers could maximize profits for the arcade, therefore increasing the marketability of their software. In fact, some games were specifically designed to be unbeatable for this very reason, hooking players on the promise of an impossible task. Although, this wasn't as deceitful as it may sound, as this was how video games existed back then; there were no endings, just brief fun-packed play sessions.
Obviously, that dynamic had to change once video games started entering the home. Now people no longer had to pay per session and only had to buy the thing once, meaning that developers could create a finite experience for people to enjoy. Now they just had to ensure the game was good enough to keep their name in people's mind for the next time that they're game hunting. (A philosophy that survives to this very day.) It was somewhere along the evolution of this particular development method that the question of 'accesibility' began to crop up in the Dev room. Games were still rather difficult in general and that realistically limited the potential customer base for the budding medium, meaning that it was in everyone's best interest to start to open up gaming.
The home market ushered in many quality-of-life improvements to gaming as well as broadening the scope of games that could be made. Now games no longer had to be designed for quick play sessions but could be long form and require multiple sessions in order to complete. (hence the advent of the 'save' functionality thanks to 1986's The Legend of Zelda.) It is hard to determine exactly when difficulty settings were 'invented', so to speak, but we can see their blueprints as early back as 1980 with 'Adventure' for the Atari 2600. In 'Adventure', players were presented with three dungeons to go through, each larger than the last. Through this concept, players who were unfamiliar and not confidant with this new type of game could ease into it with the easier dungeon before diving into the harder ones once they got a footing. A very simple premise but one that would shape the development of video games significantly for the next few decades.
Once the Xbox and Playstation had begun to hit the market, coming up to the turn of the millennium, it was starting to become a common practice for video games to always have the 3 standard choices of difficulty. 'Easy, Normal and Hard' became as common a site to the average gamer as 'press any button to start', for difficulty settings had grown from a quirk into a development requirement. On a positive note, this opened up gaming to lower skilled individuals and allowed everyone a chance at the fun, however there were a few repercussions. Anyone who was an active gamer in the early 2000's knows the stigma that was attached to playing on the 'easy' difficulty, as it is the same sort of stigma that lingers around any activity with slight skill-based leanings. Now, I'm not about to discuss the folly of 'skill-based' worth-assignment in communities, I haven't got the patience, but I will summarize that this divide caused a whole lot of senseless noise for no real gain. (Good job, early 2000's gamers.)
There is a conversation of relevance to be had there, however, regarding whether or not one is playing the 'full experince' depending on the difficulty that they choose. And I mean that in regards to lower and higher difficulties. Modern games are, afterall, meticulously balanced in order to ensure that players can enjoy themselves without becoming too frustrated whilst simultaneously not breezing through everything without a care in the world (at least in the generally accepted theories on standard game design) which makes the task of creating difficulty settings a very daunting one. Devs are required to mess with the game's balance whilst maintaining balance to ensure that all players have a comparable experience, it's like handing weights to a tight rope walker, eventually somethings gotta give. During this age it became a common criticism to accuse Devs of lazy difficulty settings, wherein they just cranked up/ down a setting as seemed necessary, creating a dull or frustrating experience for those on any difficulty other than normal.
Some developers combated this uneven difficulty disparity by throwing in some more clever systems into their games such as Dynamic Game Difficulty Balancing or DGDB. One such team who worked on these mechanics was the world-famous Capcom team on their weird horror/action hybrid 'Resident Evil 4'. As many will likely know, Resident Evil 4 did not shed the series patented difficulty settings, but they did update it with a smart dynamic twist. As the player derives much of their supplies from crates, as well as the environment, and isn't lingering in areas, as was the status quo with earlier games, the team could use the map to spawn in supplies as they were needed. Therefore, if you are struggling or dying a lot, you'll find more ammo and curatives at the next item spawn point. These systems are so useful, in fact, that you'll find RE4 speedrunners intentionally plunging themselves off of cliffs in order to trigger the extra supply drops and make the run easier. Through this, the team allowed players to play how they wanted whilst relieving the potential frustration that could occur, all without telling the player what was happening. (Very sly, Capcom!)
Of course, at some point the entire concept of 'diffculties' became a little bit outdated as we moved into the modern age. Developers were growing sick of having to fine tune their fine tuning and gamers were bored of being constantly ridiculed for their difficulty choices, and so the whole system started to be slowly faded out. In the modern age we only really see those systems pop up in heavily skill-based games wherein people would be absolutely eviscerated without a 'training' mode, such as racing games and strategy games. But the action/adventure genre, which is a genre that is now totally owned by the triple A, tends to shirk such systems altogether. that being said, there are still some Developers who stubbornly stick to their ways, such as RPG Devs, but little effort goes into the actual development of 'diffculty' modes and they usually just end up being very arbitrary additions.
Personally, as a self-confessed masochist, I have always selected the hardest difficulty of any game I play for my first time. (Afterall, If I'm only going to play through this game once, I might as well experience everything.) As such I find myself a little saddened to see difficulty settings slowly phase out of gaming as we moved towards more homogenized experiences. Some of my favourite gaming memories have been about pushing against an immovable wall of difficulty until it eventually gave way, and I feel that something in that has been lost in the current regime. At least we'll always have RPG's difficulty settings, that's one system that traditionalists will never let Devs kill.
No comments:
Post a Comment