On difficulty

In a recent post over at Parallel Context, Redbeard mentioned that he doesn't like playing a "godlike character."  His main point is that he finds it immersion breaking from a story perspective, and I completely agree with that.  However, that and another recent incident in SWTOR got me thinking about difficulty in MMOs more generally. 

There is a difficulty balance a MMO has to hit for me to stay engaged.  I play MMOs mainly to relax, so they can't be too hard.  If I get stressed out whenever I play a game, I won't play it for long.  What I do for a living is engaging and I am lucky, but it also gives me about all the stress I can handle.  At the same time, I also hate it when a MMO is too easy.  If I do something really stupid I deserve to die.  If it's almost literally impossible for me to get killed doing anything I normally do in the game, that feels too easy and kind of pointless.  

For example, the last time I played retail WoW, it was overall way too easy.  It wasn't a total deal breaker for me because I had Classic "right over there" on another server if I wanted it.  However it did mean that I got bored after very short stints doing overland quests when I was in Retail, and actually needed dungeon runs to break them up.  That is a strange way for me to play. Normally running around doing quests and soaking up storylines is my favorite activity in a MMO.  Becasue of this, during my last stay I spent most of my playtime in Classic.  To my tastes Classic gets the difficulty balance just right. Quests are rarely a huge challenge, but if you head into Murloc territory and start pulling solo, or do something similarly reckless, you will end up either going down in a blaze of glory or running for your life.  

EQ II, TSW and a few others with fixed difficulties also manage that tightrope walk using one challenge level for everyone and well balanced classes.  However, for the most part MMOs that get the difficulty "juuuust right" to my tastes are ones where you get to adjust the difficulty yourself.  Some older MMOs, like DAoC and EQ do it indirectly by simply having classes that vary wildly in the situations they can handle well when questing solo.  If I want slow but safe I can pick a melee class with good defense like a Paladin or Shadow Knight.  If I want something faster paced but risky, I can go with a squishy bolt caster like an Eldritch or Wizard.  And so on.  

Another tack that some MMOs have also started playing around  with is letting players actively and directly adjust the difficulty as they play.  For example, SWTOR does this in an really interesting way.  When questing solo you always have a companion out, and you can have your companion act as a healer, a tank or a DPS.  If you set the companion to healer, the game becomes very easy and you really have to go out of your way to get killed doing any but the hardest content.  At the opposite extreme, just normal questing can keep you on your toes if you set your companion to DPS (particularly once you get past the launch era content).  A DPS companion will merrily get killed right alongside you if you overpull. 

The MMO that has taken this to the greatest extreme, at least among ones I am familiar with, is  Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Every quest in the game has a variety of difficulty settings you can choose when you begin the quest.  If you want a challenge, you can crank the difficulty all the way up to Reaper 10 and get one shotted by trash mobs even on a very strong character.  At the opposite extreme, on Casual you could clear most quests with terrible character build while wearing pajamas and using an unenchanted club.  There are 12 difficulty setting in between those, so if you can't dial up the challenge you prefer you just don't know what you are doing.  

Of course DDO is also a weird edge case in a lot of ways.  Due to the extreme flexibility of the character creation system,  PCs can easily vary by close to an order of magnitude in terms of defenses, hit points, and DPS output.  Add to that the ability to create characters that do monstrous damage out to LoS or that do terrible damage outside of melee range, and that can either locate and disarm traps or have to disarm traps by setting them off with their face, and you have a game that nearly necessitates the ability to set your own challenge level. Regardless, DDO does makes me wonder why scalable difficulty isn't a thing in more MMOs.  LotRO, the other game from the same studio, apparently even figured out how to implement a similar system with landscape mobs somehow.  If these two mid-tier games with tiny development teams can figure it out, why isn't everyone doing it?

Beyond my preference for the difficulty of normal content,  another issue is difficulty spikes.  Now some variance in difficulty is to be expected, and an occasional challenge can be a nice way to punctuate major story beats.  That is not what I am talking about.  I am talking about a game that has one range of difficulty for the first 100 hours, and then throws in a random five minute segment that is way way outside of that range.  I am talking about something that feels like a turn based RPG with a Street Fighter II Bison fight jammed randomly into it.  Bonus points if  the difficulty spike involves forcing me to play some NPC with completely different mechanics from my normal character.  Double-triple bonus points if getting through that segment is the only way to progress the main story line.   A few nights ago SWTOR hit me with all of those.  

There is an era of content that has aged poorly compared to most of the game, roughly Knights of the Fallen Empire through the end of the traitor flashpoint arc.*  I have a whole post coming on that content from a personal historical perspective, so I won't go into detail here.  But towards the end of it, there is a fight where you are stuck controlling  a walker instead of your actual character.  This walker has completely different controls from not only your character, but also every other walker in the game.**  After having the difficulty variance of the game pretty much exactly where I enjoyed it for more than 100 straight hours of playtime, this fight kicked my ass for close to a solid hour.  After try five or six, I was so ticked off that I almost rage-quit on the spot.***  

Regardless of any other consideration, I think if there is one golden rule of difficulty it's this:  always give your players what you have trained them to expect.  If a player spends 100+ hours in your game experiencing one range of difficulty, that is the level of difficulty they enjoy.  You can have more challenging content available, but you need to warn them that it's coming and give them a way to avoid it if they wish. In other words, make it completely optional. If your game is lovely path wandering its way through forests, fields and meadows, you can't just have a random brick wall in the middle of it.  Even if you hand players a sledgehammer and say "Just grind your way through this to progress, more lovely sights on the other side!", you will have damaged player trust at best and lost them altogether at worst.  

I am continually baffled to see so many game designers screw up this one thing that seems like common sense.  Now I can certainly think of at least ten reasons why this is easy to do without meaning to.  For example, player skill levels vary, and one player's molehill is another's mountain.  But holy cow, in a live service game when you see a ton of players complaining about something, maybe consider addressing it?

*In fact, there is an option in game that will let you skip all of it just by taking a quest on your ship.  It's never a good sign if that many players need a way to skip a big hunk of your game!  I guess adding the skip option is easier than going back and polishing any of it at this point.  Regardless, on my most recent playthrough, I didn't skip the "Knights of" content because I wanted to see how it played differently if you were dating one of the main characters in it.  I could have skipped that fight at any time, but it would have broken the part of the story I was working on and started me out a few months later assuming choices different from the ones my character would have made. While I don't regret playing it all one more time, I will certainly be using the skip option from here on out.  

**For some insane reason there are actually four different segments where you are forced to play a walker instead of your character in this era of content.  The last one is by far the worst of them, and thankfully the last that they ever did.

***I did get it on try six or seven.  The walker has six abilities.  One ability makes the fight fairly easy.  The other five will get you killed over and over again if you try to use them for anything except filler while you wait on the cooldown for the "good ability."  These abilities exist almost entirely as newb traps in the modern game.  To add to the stupidity of it all, you will never encounter mechanics like this anywhere else in the game.  Some game designer lost their damn mind, a team looked at it and said "This is fine", and it remains in the game to this day.