Difficulty in video games is such an interesting topic balance in challenge versus reward which demands the highest level of empathetic awareness, careful balancing and ultimate understanding of one's games systems to master. And yet it's so often tossed out the door as the last-thought mechanic hardly ever given more than the slightest modicum of attention as though it doesn't even matter. And gamers are no real help in this matter. Half demand that a game bend over backwards to accommodate their unwillingness to struggle, the other half want the very prospect of 'tutorials' to be abolished in a fire. I think there are degrees of medium, as always, but there are also developers who muddy their waters by having absolutely no understanding of what a 'challenge' even means, as if they've never picked up a game in their lives. (And recently I'm starting to wonder.)
Having recently picked up Assassin's Creed Valhalla, expecting it to be a bit more engaging than Far Cry 6 which I'm struggling to care about, I've come across my first gigantic hurdle right away- Ubisoft don't know what difficulty is. That is to say, they seem not to understand how balance works to increase danger without reducing fun- the two key most parameters of balance in gaming. Ever since some utter ass told the AC devs that their game would make a half decent RPG, the franchise has been deadset on proving that wrong with dreadful RPG after dreadful RPG fed to an audience so battered and abused they starting to accept the gruel and believe it's caviar. And nowhere is this more painfully apparent than in they way they designed their 'difficulty' levels. Would it shock you to learn that it's entirely damage and parry timing sliders? You know- the single laziest possible way anyone could handle difficulty balancing whatsoever? Laziness? From Ubisoft? I'm shocked!
Valhalla has two metrics. One which balloons up damage received and taken and another which... wait, breaks the level scaling so that enemies are always 30-60 levels above the player? Wait- How can Ubisoft be this- what is the point of level scaling? It's supposed to be an artificial gate blocking players off from areas of the map they aren't ready for, at least that's the function in open world games. It should also provide a feeling of subtly and steady curving difficulty as the game progresses. Keeping it constantly higher than the player totally erases all semblance of balancing. And the fact that Assassin's Creed offers several options to handle level scaling that can be switched at any time tells me the team had no idea how to handle it themselves and simply asked the player to balance the game for them. Shameful User Experience, is what it is. Simply shameful.
Baldur's Gate 3, on the otherhand, has a more clever approach to difficulty. There are a few blanket 'number increases'. Certain checks get bonuses and others get negatives depending on your difficulty scale, but the real point of note is the clever reworking of certain arenas to be more dangerous on higher difficulties. A fight on even ground on one difficulty will feature strategic archers in another difficulty. A basic brawl will find itself smothered with explosive barrels in higher modes. This is an excessively careful and thoughtful design into exactly what it is that makes difficulty and stoking it individually for each encounter, this is the kind of design dedication that most teams couldn't dream of replicating simply for how much content they need to manage. Still, Baldur's Gate 3 sets an example for how difficulty modes should be treated.
The Souls Games lack any difficulty modes whatsoever, because the game allows the player to decide when they feel ready to take on the game's challenges. A diligent grinder can feasibly go away and come back with the levels to trivialise any fight in the games, but even someone who faces each challenge as they come won't ever be overwhelmed by a one-hit kill enemy unless they actively try to underpower themselves because of the intelligent curve in difficulty present in the games. That's partially why the 'cry' for an easy mode is largely redundant in the Souls game's case, they're every bit as easy as you're willing to make them. Apart from Sekiro, that really is just a challenge no matter what you want out of it.
Bethesda titles lean towards the lazier end of difficulty modes, relying entirely on 'sliders' that buff up damage received and reduce damage dealt; usually to perplexingly bad results. Legendary-difficulty fights in Skyrim are dances of dodging for 5 minutes and taking miniscule slashes of damage before hiding and healing. There's never any flow of gameplay and every enemy turns into a relentless bullet sponge because these games are never designed with higher difficulties in mind but just mindlessly scaled up on the way towards production wrap up. Oblivion's was so bad that a starting dungeon rat would be more powerful than the final boss of the game on hardest slider settings. Starfield has been the only game with a less than awful hard mode so far, which is perhaps that game's only gratis over all the other Bethesda properties.
MMOs have a very interesting approach when it comes to it's bigger difficulty Raid dungeons, all of course inspired by the approach that World of Warcraft popularised. Tiered difficulty options with scaled rewards- players are incentivised to push themselves to the higher tiers, making lower levels something of 'practice difficulties'. In this case you'll still see sliding scale difficulties, but for a genuine design reason rather than just rank laziness. Players are meant to train on how to avoid damage, how to counter arena effects, when to start performing burst damage, all so that they can be effective and reliable for the gear that matters, on the real difficulties where the really good loot is on the line. It's a winning formula that has been recycled time and time again.
Being 'Difficult' does not need to be such a dirty and despised concept. Difficulty is just a manner of enriching a game to feel rewarding and substantive rather than just vapid and fantasy fulfilling. Creating achievement through strife will always feel more real than what's simply given to you. which is why games of ultimate carnage like Just Cause have such little shelf life, the brainless appeal of watching digitised explosions go off can only excite you so many times before it becomes trite and overdone. Difficulty needs to be thought about in a new light, and developers need to start taking it into account as a valid part of the development process. When that starts becoming the norm, maybe then we can put to rest all the stupid arguments about nothing this topic engenders.
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