difficulty

Ryan Creighton, veteran indie graphic adventure designer (and father of the girl who made Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure with his help), discusses common recurring mistakes in the adventure game genre. At one point, while expounding on how easy it is to make a game difficult in poor ways, he questions whether it’s necessary to make them difficult at all.

Another interesting way to handle this is to design your game such that the player can never get stuck. You just plod through the game, missing cues left and right, until you crash into the inevitable, unsatisfactory ending. But if you're keen and clever and aware, you can strike out off the beaten path, do all the difficult things, and get a much better ending.
One year at GDC, I heard a woman speak who was an advocate for female gamers (if you know her name, speak up!) Her heartfelt conviction, ladies, is that if you buy a game and you can't access all of the content on the disc because the designer won't let you, take the game back to the store and ask for your money back. Years ago, this struck me as utter blasphemy ... and yet here i am, developing Spellirium so that all of the challenges are no-fail, and you can sail through the game from beginning to end without the game requiring you to be awesome. It's awesome-optional. But for those players who DO excel, there are treats and rewards.

(That bit about demanding your money back? I know of one casual game company that ported one of their PC titles to the iPhone and was deluged with negative feedback about how a challenge mode was locked until all normal mode levels were beat — so much so that they felt compelled to issue an update that unlocked all modes from the get-go. This game had existed on PCs for over a year. This complaint was nonexistent from customers on that platform.)

Tevis Thompson has a different take on difficulty. He would like the Zelda series to actually have some again, as one of many changes needed to restore playability to that franchise.

It’s been equally so ever since [the first two games]. It’s not that certain encounters or sequences in Ocarina or Twilight Princess aren’t challenging (the silent realms are a Skyward Sword highlight). But they are separate, repeatable, often asking me to merely hone a skill or discover a weak point (a strategy, they call it) before getting whacked too many times. Failure occurs, but with little penalty. And given the often incoherent controls, with little responsibility either. The games themselves, piecemeal affairs, are not difficult. It’s never a matter of if I’ll succeed, only when.
Don’t get me wrong: modern Zeldas are not simple, only simpleminded. Some of this comes from convention and repetition, both within and across games. The path through each is laid down with paternal care. One senses at every turn that the experience has been carefully crafted by someone who surely knows best. His guiding hand remains on the gameflow spigot so that it drips steadily; meanwhile, you won’t be tempted to get ahead of yourself or go out of order. The first time you play Zelda, it’s no surprise that this tasteful staggering of content and gentle guidance of the player comes off as masterful game design.
For veteran players like myself, though, the profound conservatism at Zelda’s heart feels more patronizing with each repetition. Why bother paying attention to the old man when I can just tune out and coast? The game will do all the fretting for me. It won’t let me fail. I don’t even have to get good; I just have to get through. Zelda asks nothing, demands nothing, except that I play along.

I’m reminded of the video of someone surviving the entire first level of Call of Duty: Black Ops at one difficulty setting higher than Regular without needing to fire a single shot.

It’s a touchy topic — touchy enough to trigger a mass harassment campaign against one of BioWare’s writers based on out-of-context and fabricated quotes that exaggerate and overgeneralize her stance that making combat scenes skippable might widen a game’s potential audience.