Balancing Act: Making Great Difficulty Levels in Video Games

The current monster title laid out on the table in my office is Folklore: The Affliction from Greenbriar Games. It’s typical of my solo gaming tastes – a messy cooperative fantasy adventure dripping with theme, with an often-vague ruleset and plenty of bookkeeping.

As big fantasy board games go, there are better options out there – Gloomhaven, Hexplore It!, and Shadows of Brimstone, just to list a few. So Folklore: The Affliction hasn’t hit my table very often. 

But the game still has good aspects – notably deep and interesting character progression and a fairly original setting. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed my time with it enough to keep it in my collection.

Where Folklore most fumbles the ball is in its difficulty and scaling. Playing with more characters is simply easier. This means that, as a solo player, I’m stuck with handling the bookkeeping for a full party of three or four characters rather than a more manageable one or two, if I’m looking for an optimum experience.

The primary difficulty scaling adjustment Folklore makes is in the health of enemies. More players means you’ll have to grind through bigger bags of hitpoints to win a fight. 

Yet there is no adjustment to the number of enemies, as in Gloomhaven’s hand-crafted scenarios, or – most critically – any adjustment to the action economy. Folklore’s combat is decisively old-school. Your characters all go, and then the enemies all go. 

Many modern board game designs, like the excellent Dark Tower reboot, give the “enemies” a chance to make a move for each player in the game. If there are four players, the game system will do four things in response. While additional scaling adjustments are typically needed, board games that start with that approach are more likely to scale well with more players out of the gate.

By contrast, a lot of video games are solo experiences or competitive multiplayer. But there are plenty of cooperative video games out there that have to tackle the same design problem of scaling.

At the same time, the modern player’s expectation is that a video game will offer several levels of difficulty, allowing a dialed-in and customized experience. Indeed, that’s more often how stat scaling is used in video games – for a range of difficulty settings appropriate for a wide variety of players.

Unfortunately, difficulty levels are where a lot of developers take shortcuts – sometimes to their design’s detriment.

Grading the Curve

Let’s say you’re a junior designer. It’s late days on a project, and your boss drops a new task on your plate. Suddenly, the team realized that no one’s thought about how to implement difficulty levels.

Depending on the game’s genre, you might adopt different approaches to the problem. For something like an action RPG, a basic scaling curve for enemy health or damage might suffice. If it’s a strategy game, production bonuses for AI opponents might give them an edge.

Before you even get to that point, though, you’ve got to figure out the baseline. What is “normal” difficulty? How did the team settle on the shared definition – playtesting, metrics, or their own gut feelings? Are the game mechanics finalized enough so that a difficulty pass won’t be wasted work? 

It’s easy to understand why so many teams postpone working on difficulty options until late in the process. It’s also easy to see why tried-and-true fallbacks like health and damage curves and production bonuses are the most common approaches to scaling difficulty.

But there’s risk in treating difficulty levels as an afterthought. I know of games that have shipped where only the “standard” difficulty was adequately tested. I know of games that have shipped where the hardest difficulty level couldn’t be beaten by any of the developers.

It’s okay – and highly logical from a production standpoint – to implement difficulty scaling late in a project after core mechanics have been finalized. But there’s an opportunity for more creative teams to think about how their game’s design is going to approach difficulty before they get to implementation.

Games that go beyond simple stat scaling and get creative with their difficulty levels have an opportunity to pull off deeper, more interesting, and more satisfying experiences.

Back to the Wasteland

In the continued Fallout game binge I was on after Amazon’s excellent adaptation aired, I dove into something I had never touched before – Fallout 4’s Survival mode.

Survival mode is not just the hardest difficulty; it changes fundamental game mechanics. It has the higher damage scaling of the hardest standard difficulty level while adding in sleeping, eating, and drinking needs that, if not met, will reduce the player’s maximum action points. 

Diseases are significant challenges, and can only be cured by a doctor or antibiotics. Ammunition has weight, and the player’s already-limited carrying capacity is halved. All healing items slowly recover hitpoints, rather than instantly healing. Fast travel is entirely removed from the game, other than the Institute’s teleporter and the Brotherhood of Steel vertibirds.

And crazily in a game – especially one that still suffers from periodic janky physics moments and pathing problems – only a single autosave (and two recent backups) are allowed. A temporary save is made on exit, to let you pause at any time, but that save is deleted next time you play. And finally, the game only saves when you sleep.

If you’ve played a bunch of Fallout 4, this probably sounds dreadful to you. My pattern of “normal” Fallout 4 play involves a lot of quicksaving and constant fast traveling. And to be honest, I can’t imagine playing through Fallout 4’s sometimes-tedious main story in survival mode.

But if you’re looking to do what Fallout 4 does best – wander around the wasteland, build up settlements, and check out cool points of interest – Survival mode feels like a completely different and much better game. At times, it approaches the tension of games like Stalker and Escape from Tarkov; a single misstep means losing twenty minutes of progress or more.

This forced, intense mechanical stress – though I’ll acknowledge it’s not for everyone – changes everything. I was constantly on edge in survival mode. I had to use all my knowledge of the game’s systems to bring every advantage I could to every encounter. A pair of low-level raiders was suddenly dangerous again; a pack of feral ghouls, absolutely terrifying.

I’ll admit to spending half my Survival mode time replaying sections after dumb deaths. In survival mode, I replayed the early Deathclaw fight in Concord probably four times before I got through it – an encounter that I could sail through with a little judicious quicksaving in normal difficulty. 

So again, it’s not for everyone. But as a difficulty option, it’s bold, it’s genuinely creative, and it extended the life of Fallout 4 for me significantly. On normal difficulty, Fallout 4 is a great open-world RPG in the Bethesda tradition. In Survival mode, it’s a white-knuckle tension-filled survival game that I can only play for about half an hour at a time before needing a break.

Communities get Creative

In today’s world of community-driven solutions, hardcore difficulty modes of various stripes are all the rage. 

In an even bolder move than Fallout 4’s limited Survival mode saves, Baldur’s Gate 3’s Honour mode has only a single save. If your party dies – that’s it. Game over.

Hardcore modes are nothing new; action RPGs like Blizzard’s Diablo have long had options for hardcore characters. But for a hundred-plus-hour choice-heavy RPG like Baldur’s Gate 3, Honour mode sounds insane. 

Yet fans have risen to the challenge – fully dissecting the mechanics and content, then coming up with optimum paths through the game’s complex story arcs that minimize risk.

It’s not a challenge that most Baldur’s Gate 3 players are interested in – including me. Though I was willing to dive into Fallout 4’s Survival mode, BG3’s Honour mode is a bridge too far.

But Larian didn’t just throw in Honour mode and call it a day. They took the time to make all of the game’s difficulty options interesting and unique. 

In my latest run, I stepped up from the default difficulty to the next highest, Tactician. It changes the game dramatically.  

Larian’s approach for Tactician is a far cry from just doubling the hit points of enemies or increasing the damage they do. Enemies have new abilities and behave in different ways. Encounters that I previously stomped are now significant challenges. 

Not every title needs a full spectrum of unique difficulty levels. Many games get by just fine with simpler stat scaling approaches. But Bethesda and Larian’s brand of game-changing approach to difficulty is something I hope more developers invest in going forward. 

For developers who pull it off, designing difficulty levels that feel like fresh, unique challenges is a great way to breathe life into a replayable experience that would otherwise be “the same thing, just harder.”

New Scree Games blogs appear on Tuesdays.