Should there be an option to swap difficulty mid-game?

[Delphi Sage]

I really couldn't find Lunatic or Lunatic+ either humanly possible or fun to play. Normal was almost as easy as FE8. Hard was very functional, though, but difficulty REALLY falls off after grinding, and not enough enemies have skills.

What I was thinking of was to give the game an option to alter the difficulty level of a file mid-game, like with FPSs. It wouldn't be hard to program, you know. There could also me a marker for what difficulty every level was completed on that'd stay there for the rest of the file. If FE14 did this, I'd be pretty happy.

Casual and Classic can stay as fixed decisions, though.

Edited February 11, 2015 by dalphage

[Florete]

This could work. It might have been awkward for FEs without grinding because the experience formula changes, but when grinding exists (and I expect it to return) that's not really an issue.

[Jedi]

I actually dislike when games allow you to switch difficulty mid play through, because people will abuse the option to reduce difficulty regardless of skill level.

I prefer games change difficulty depending on how a player does, if there isn't a difficulty setting. However that would be impossible to scale in FE unless you did it by the old rank system.

[Topaz Light]

I actually dislike when games allow you to switch difficulty mid play through, because people will abuse the option to reduce difficulty regardless of skill level.

I prefer games change difficulty depending on how a player does, if there isn't a difficulty setting. However that would be impossible to scale in FE unless you did it by the old rank system.

If you wanted to be lazy about it, you could set the enemies' levels/stats to scale with the player army's average level.

Or the average level of the player characters who participated in the last two or three maps or so.

...Actually thinking about it more it would be remarkably difficult to make auto-scaling enemy strength work in FE.

Edited February 11, 2015 by Starlight36

[Peppy]

I'd be a good feature. What I'd do is this: Say you beat Chapter 1 on Hard. I'd make Chapter 2 unavailable to play on Lunatic until Chapter 1 is beaten on Lunatic. (preventing players from skipping the harder chapters on harder difficulties. there would also need to be an implementation to replay a chapter with the stats you had when you first played that chapter).

Edited February 11, 2015 by Peppy

[Melissa]

Changing difficulty? Sounds like something IS would do to draw in beginners

[DeadGame]

If anything, you should only be able to make it easier instead of harder.

[Jedi]

If you wanted to be lazy about it, you could set the enemies' levels/stats to scale with the player army's average level.

Or the average level of the player characters who participated in the last two or three maps or so.

...Actually thinking about it more it would be remarkably difficult to make auto-scaling enemy strength work in FE.

Yep! Just imagine with that, if you decided oh I'm gonna use the Est. Suddenly by that virtue alone, the average is scaled down.

Although scaling in a way like that sounds like something Arch, Cam or Klok would try with some hacking tools..

[Dragoncat]

I made my Awakening file on Hard and many times I've wished I could change to Normal. I suppose it could work, but idk.

[BrightBow]

This option should definitely exist. It irritates me that we still don't have that. Two reasons:

1. Games cost tons of money. It's a ridiculous audacity of the developers to prevent their customers from playing it the way they want to. Especially if it's only about something as simple and basic as a difficulty level.

2. But more importantly, in a new game it is impossible to say what difficulty levels even mean.

Like, what does "Normal" even mean? Is "normal" to easy for me or to hard? There is no way to tell besides playing first. But games force you to make that choice a the very beginning, when you don't have the necessary information to make an informed decision in that regard. It will take you at least like a few hours to figure that out and you shouldn't have to restart the entire game just to make the necessary adjustments. Especially for a game as long as Fire Emblem.

Edited February 11, 2015 by BrightBow

[Rukathesoldier]

I like the idea of bumping up the difficulty once my units have become so powerful the game becomes too easy.

[Box]

There's a problem with adding more options like this that I think tends to get overlooked. More options isn't always better depending on how the options are presented.

I think most people understand the difference between an official difficulty mode and a self-imposed challenge. For the former, the developer is taking responsibility for the experience, but for the latter it's your fault if you make it too hard. In an official difficulty mode, there's a contract between the player and the game that the challenge is valid way to play the game. In a self-imposed challenge, you can wonder if you've made things too hard or frustrating on yourself. You can lose confidence in the efficacy of the difficulty easier when the game doesn't legitimize it.

This is why classic exists as an option. Technically, classic isn't needed as an option at all. You could just not deploy a unit for the remainder of the game if it dies as a self-imposed challenge. If you do that and ignore any future dialogue/epilogue with that character, you've recreated classic mode. But it's not the same because by putting in an actual classic mode, the game gives that otherwise self-imposed challenge legitimacy. It tells the player that permanent death is the way the game is meant to be played.

So what does that have to do with dynamic difficulty modes? Well, depending on the way it's presented, it could communicate to the player that the developers weren't confident in the efficacy of the difficulty so they let you figure out what the difficulty should be instead. In many games with dynamic difficulties, the game doesn't really care what difficulty you play at. It doesn't acknowledge you for completing the whole game on hard because it lets you cheat and switch back to easy whenever the going gets tough.

Granted this is a pretty easy fix, you could just select an option at the beginning of the game about whether you want to play with static or dynamic difficulties and/or the game would only unlock stuff when you complete things when using static difficulties or when you keep the same difficulty the whole way through. But sometimes these subtleties get overlooked when trying to provide lots of options.

I think the reason that many developers don't include lots of options is because they spend a lot of time trying to balance things for the ideal user experience. Part of the developers' job is to curate your interaction with the basic systems of the game. As an experienced player, you may think you know better than the developers how the game should be and you might be right. But for most people, having more options would lead to them disrupting any of the fine-tuning that the developers tried to do.

The real shame is that with these console games there's no modding support. Mods are a really good solution to this problem when people think they know how to fine-tune the game better than the developers and provides way more options than you ever see in a game.

[Knight Falchion]

As long as the game doesn't belligerently ask me/ force me to lower the difficulty if I'm having a spot of trouble, I wouldn't mind such a feature.

Edited February 11, 2015 by The Legendary Falchion

[Respite&Nepenthe]

I like being braggy about beating FE:A on Lunatic+ difficulty--on Streetpass, passing by me, you can see Lunatic+ and the little star to show I've completed the game on that difficulty.

So, what if I'm a jerk that decides to start out on Normal or Easy, and then decides to grind and on the very last level, I bump my difficulty up to Lunatic? That's not fair.

[DeadGame]

I like being braggy about beating FE:A on Lunatic+ difficulty--on Streetpass, passing by me, you can see Lunatic+ and the little star to show I've completed the game on that difficulty.

So, what if I'm a jerk that decides to start out on Normal or Easy, and then decides to grind and on the very last level, I bump my difficulty up to Lunatic? That's not fair.

As I suggested earlier, if anything, it should only be possible to lower the difficulty mid-game.

[BrightBow]

Truly, the freedom of the players should be restricted for the benefit of certain individuals who like to brag to strangers about the length of their e-penis like it actually matters.

It's not like this is a particularly complicated issue anyway. The game could easily remember what the lowest difficulty was that has ever been selected by the time that the final chapter was completed. No biggie.

Edited February 12, 2015 by BrightBow

[feplus]

There's a problem with adding more options like this that I think tends to get overlooked. More options isn't always better depending on how the options are presented.

I think most people understand the difference between an official difficulty mode and a self-imposed challenge. For the former, the developer is taking responsibility for the experience, but for the latter it's your fault if you make it too hard. In an official difficulty mode, there's a contract between the player and the game that the challenge is valid way to play the game. In a self-imposed challenge, you can wonder if you've made things too hard or frustrating on yourself. You can lose confidence in the efficacy of the difficulty easier when the game doesn't legitimize it.

This is why classic exists as an option. Technically, classic isn't needed as an option at all. You could just not deploy a unit for the remainder of the game if it dies as a self-imposed challenge. If you do that and ignore any future dialogue/epilogue with that character, you've recreated classic mode. But it's not the same because by putting in an actual classic mode, the game gives that otherwise self-imposed challenge legitimacy. It tells the player that permanent death is the way the game is meant to be played.

So what does that have to do with dynamic difficulty modes? Well, depending on the way it's presented, it could communicate to the player that the developers weren't confident in the efficacy of the difficulty so they let you figure out what the difficulty should be instead. In many games with dynamic difficulties, the game doesn't really care what difficulty you play at. It doesn't acknowledge you for completing the whole game on hard because it lets you cheat and switch back to easy whenever the going gets tough.

Granted this is a pretty easy fix, you could just select an option at the beginning of the game about whether you want to play with static or dynamic difficulties and/or the game would only unlock stuff when you complete things when using static difficulties or when you keep the same difficulty the whole way through. But sometimes these subtleties get overlooked when trying to provide lots of options.

I think the reason that many developers don't include lots of options is because they spend a lot of time trying to balance things for the ideal user experience. Part of the developers' job is to curate your interaction with the basic systems of the game. As an experienced player, you may think you know better than the developers how the game should be and you might be right. But for most people, having more options would lead to them disrupting any of the fine-tuning that the developers tried to do.

The real shame is that with these console games there's no modding support. Mods are a really good solution to this problem when people think they know how to fine-tune the game better than the developers and provides way more options than you ever see in a game.

This is a brilliant post.

From a design perspective, options aren't an absolute good. They take up development time, for one, time that might be better spent polishing the experience. For two, options can go against design philosophy.

Here's a classic example: Would Dark Souls be improved with an easy mode? No. The game was designed with challenge in mind: it's integrated into the atmosphere, into the narrative, into resource management and resource locations... Dark Souls was created with high difficulty as a fundamental building block. Including a bastardized version of the experience sacrifices design integrity for accessibility, a disastrous trade-off in my mind.

(Incidentally, this is the same trade-off the Fire Emblem series made when introducing Casual Mode. Glad it contributed to financial success, but both FE12 and FE13 would be better off without the mode.)

Bringing this back to the opening post, dynamic difficulty wouldn't work well. Especially in a strategy game, it's better to have a cohesive, well-designed set of options rather than a wonky fluctuating difficulty curve that rewards failure rather than encouraging improvement.

Box's post also highlights why a well executed ranking system is such a positive. FE4, 5, and 7 are balanced around / provide expert players legitimate (and brutal) difficulty without the need for hit-and-miss, player-sanctioned challenge runs.

[BrightBow]

This is a brilliant post.

From a design perspective, options aren't an absolute good. They take up development time, for one, time that might be better spent polishing the experience. For two, options can go against design philosophy.

But greater accessibility helps to make more money, which allows one to hire more programmers so that you can both polish the game and add more modes in the same timeframe. Everyone wins.

Here's a classic example: Would Dark Souls be improved with an easy mode? No. The game was designed with challenge in mind: it's integrated into the atmosphere, into the narrative, into resource management and resource locations... Dark Souls was created with high difficulty as a fundamental building block. Including a bastardized version of the experience sacrifices design integrity for accessibility, a disastrous trade-off in my mind.

An easy mode wouldn't improve Dark Souls for a certain type of player. There is no inherent reason that alternate modes need to ruin the experience for those players.

But it is very important that the game still communicates how it is is supposed to be played, so that people know which mode provides the most polished experience if they are up to it.

(Incidentally, this is the same trade-off the Fire Emblem series made when introducing Casual Mode. Glad it contributed to financial success, but both FE12 and FE13 would be better off without the mode.)

Not really. The mode is selected at the very beginning of the game, so you can't just decide mid-chapter that you would like to undo the death of a certain character without completely restarting a map. As a result, playing on Classic is the same experience as it would be if Casual wasn't even an option at all.

It just makes the game accessible for more people, something I see no problem in this particular case as the game still communicates how the game is supposed to be played. Some people might find the term Casual mode demeaning, but as I said I think it's still important to emphasize what mode the game is designed around and that players have to make a deliberate decision to play by their own "houserules".

Bringing this back to the opening post, dynamic difficulty wouldn't work well. Especially in a strategy game, it's better to have a cohesive, well-designed set of options rather than a wonky fluctuating difficulty curve that rewards failure rather than encouraging improvement.

Considering we are talking about the players themselves getting the option of deliberately changing the difficulty level, I don't see how this applies here.

Edited February 12, 2015 by BrightBow

[feplus]

"More programmers = more polish" is fallacious. Polish is a product of smart planning, attention to detail, and focused design. More programmers are necessary for complex, technically demanding games, but many titles in the pantheon of classic games were made by skeleton crews.

The problem with a Dark Souls easy mode (or Fire Emblem casual modes, etc.) is not in communicating intention; it'd be easy to slap a big disclaimer on such modes, easy to say at the outset that THE GAME WAS DESIGNED AROUND THE STANDARD DIFFICULTY SETTING. (And some games go so far as to mock players who pick easier options, like DooM and I Wanna Be The Guy. I like this approach.) No, the problem is that the modes are bastardized, included merely for accessibility.

Here is a crude analogy. Suppose Tolkien got into literature for the money. Suppose he wrote his Lord of the Rings saga and decided it lacked accessibility. Suppose he divided each book into two sections: first, the normal text; second, a simplified reinterpretation of events. In this second section, word choice is dumbed down, complex images and metaphors and soliloquies are axed, the characters speak more crudely, and some of the main themes of the work are lost in translation. All published copies of the book include both sections.

Is the saga better or worse off for including a bastardized version of itself to sell more copies?

[Delphi Sage]

Is the saga better or worse off for including a bastardized version of itself to sell more copies?

That applies just as much to 12 and 13 as it would to any other game.

[Azz]

I agree with FierceRanger you should not be able to up the difficulty but lower it.Upping the difficulty is cheap for stuff like Respite&Nephenthe said.

It's the same with casual and classic.Here is a scenario:

>Plays game Lunatic+ on Cas

>Gets to final boss

>Switches to Clas

>Beats final boss

>Updates streetpass

>Shows that he/she beat game on Luna+/Cla when he/she did not

[Rukathesoldier]

Really I would prefer being able to up the difficulty but maybe beating it by upping the difficulty at the last chapter wouldn't count or something?

[Gradivus.]

"I played HM from C1-19 and completed the game on Lunatic"

tbh that would invoke like too much mess and I don't think that the reason "challenge drops upon grinding" is enough to justify said mess, and I'm pretty sure most players would keep playing a fixed mode.

Edited February 13, 2015 by Gradivus.

[Irysa]

If they stick with Awakening's scaled stats for recruits depending on difficulty then this won't work. Theres also very likely going to be grinding in the next game anyway since its half of what FE13 sold itself on involved that, and that in itself basically counts as an ability to lower the challenge. I disagree with the current reasons presented for UPPING the difficulty (and honestly, grinding, but whatever), mostly because it means the developers can't actually create an intended curve of difficulty which is detrimental to the point of having a difficulty setting in the first place. Each difficulty setting in FE is internally designed in its own curve in terms of the amount of enemies, the amount of exp you get, weapon uses, what kind of characters you'll be able to use and so forth. Being able to just swap that around willy nilly means that the concept goes out the window and theres less cohesiveness in the game as a whole.

An easy mode wouldn't improve Dark Souls for a certain type of player. There is no inherent reason that alternate modes need to ruin the experience for those players.

I have to disagree. Dark Souls is just fundamentally worse as a game if you added a difficulty setting. The difficulty of Dark Souls is a thematic element to the oppressive nature of the world. Dark Souls' difficulty is often overstated anyway, and sure, the game would be more ACCESSIBLE with difficulty settings. But you'd have fundamentally changed the vision of what FromSoft (and primarily Miyazaki) wanted to create, and art as a medium isn't just about what's neccessarily what the player wants. The developer's intent to craft a specific type of game is basically directly at odds with the view that all games have to be enjoyed by everyone. Not all forms of media have have to be enjoyed by everyone, and games are no exception. There is absoloutely NOTHING wrong with that.

[Ryo]

I don't really care because I never used this feature even in games that have it. To be honest, I also don't think that the devs would spend extra time implementing it anyway.