What makes a good/fair/well-done difficulty?

[Junkhead]

I think I've made a topic about this before, but whatever.

So yeah, what makes a difficulty good, fun and challenging? Just throwing in a bunch of overwhelming enemies at you isn't what I'd call day. IIRC, FE6 & FE10 sort of did it well. Not exactly sure, I need to check again.

EDIT: Would you consider strategies that can be repeated and reproduced the same way to be something bad? It's something I find a lot, and I don't have problems with it...but I think some people complained that it gets easy once you get to that point.

Edited March 14, 2014 by The Boss

[Roivann]

Players want to feel in control of the situation. If they lost, they should feel like it was their fault, not the game's for being unfair. Therefore, difficulty should be based on the game itself.

[Nicolas]

Difficulty should require using your resources and using unclassical tactics. You must be creative to beat game.

Also it shouldn't be RNG based. IMO random activation chance in skills is very bad thing.

[VincentASM]

It's hard to find a right balance, that's all I'll say.

However something that definitely isn't fair is FE13's Lunatic+, where you can get totally screwed by the enemy's random skills. AKA what Rollertoaster mentioned about the situation being out of your control.

Edited March 14, 2014 by VincentASM

[Marston]

This depends on the game and the person. If I just take a look at Fire Emblem, FE 7 and FE 9 on normal mode are probably the most balanced ones in the series. FE 8 was to easy were FE 10 was to hard. I think Advance Wars did a much better job regarding difficulty. Often you are in a disadvantage in the beginning and you have to use your units - who are not vastly more powerful like overlevled characters in Fire Emblem - right to be successfull.

Difficulty should definitly be more about skill then about stats, but as soon as you can grind or in the case of Fire Emblem create one single powerhouse who can solo whole chapters, it becomes extremely difficult to balance things out. Just take a look at various games. In World of Warcraft, once your group has received better items, your stats increase and you can ignore mechanics completely. In Fire Emblem (or pretty much any tactical RPG), you can just feed most/all of the EXP to a few units so that they start to castly overpower all enemies to the point were they don't even take damage. On the other hand we have something like Dark Souls, which of course was designed to be hard, but it's not unfair hard (like Lunatic+), it just kills you if you don't pay attention. And while higher stats help, if you don't take your enemies seriously, you just die, no matter how strong you are.

[Dwarfishh]

In these games, especially the early ones, being able to repeat a strategy was good, on account of the AI being pretty predicable. But as AI technology develops, it should be more about reacting to the AI and trying to outsmart them.

Dark souls is a good example of this (Though it is VERY unforgiving).

[ZemZem]

Personally I thought FE7 HHM did things right.

[Roivann]

Personally I thought FE7 HHM did things right.

HHM is probably the closest the series has gotten to getting it right. It was a little on the easy side, IMO, but everybody is different. Speaking of, since everyone has different tastes and skill levels, there really won't be a "perfect" difficulty. Only one that pleases most people, which I think HHM did.

[Ciarre]

FE10 did dumb things like removing enemy range. I liked the difficulty itself, but that's something I'd consider unfair. It's not making anything harder, just making us put more effort into something we shouldn't have to.

[Cowboy Karimov]

A difficulty should be based on ramping up the AI and nothing else. But not ramp it up so much that you've got a newborn puppy going up against Deep Blue.

Edited March 14, 2014 by HeavyBrawlsGuy

[X-Naut]

Difficulty should require using your resources and using unclassical tactics. You must be creative to beat game.

Also it shouldn't be RNG based. IMO random activation chance in skills is very bad thing.

I agree completely on the second point. Enemies with skills like Astra would present a good challenge if their activation weren't up to random numbers.

[arvilino]

A difficulty should be based on ramping up the AI and nothing else. But not ramp it up so much that you've got a newborn puppy going up against Deep Blue.

I'd question if that would be an effective way of providing difficulty since it depends on how the game is originally. If for example they had a mode which just scaled the AI up to some Fire Emblem equivalent of Deep Blue the relatively weak enemies in normal/easy mode from many of the games aren't going to stand a chance against a good player using the best characters.

Edited March 14, 2014 by arvilino

[dondon151]

Personally I thought FE7 HHM did things right.

lol FE7 HHM is the easiest hard mode

the two critical components of difficulty are enemy layout and enemy vs. player strength. the former is more important when it comes to designing a scenario that requires thinking to play around. the latter isn't as important, but it needs to be in a goldilocks zone where the enemies aren't too easy as to make positioning wholly irrelevant, but not too difficult as to make the game frustrating or unbeatable with poor luck.

it actually seems like the enemy vs. player balance is much more difficult to achieve. it's highly subject to play style due to stat growths, and there hasn't been a single fire emblem game thus far that has gotten it perfectly right.

Edited March 14, 2014 by dondon151

[PM ME MARIANNE ART]

lol FE7 HHM is the easiest hard mode

Easier than FE8? I think not

And he's saying it's the perfect difficulty for most people

I think difficulty should be more based on the AI rather than stats.

[Cowboy Karimov]

I'd question if that would be an effective way of providing difficulty since it depends on how the game is originally. If for example they had a mode which just scaled the AI up to some Fire Emblem equivalent of Deep Blue the relatively weak enemies in normal/easy mode from many of the games aren't going to stand a chance against a good player using the best characters.

Still, a Deep Blue Reverse Plus mode would be the best thing ever. You'd be convinced the game can read your mind.

[arvilino]

Easier than FE8? I think not

And he's saying it's the perfect difficulty for most people

I think difficulty should be more based on the AI rather than stats.

Still regardless of how the AI is if their stats aren't high enough like Dondon said it won't be that much harder than the lower difficulties. If in FE8 Difficult mode just improved the AI and enemies had Normal mode stats I couldn't imagine it would even remotely compensate for the strength of the player units especially in the case of Seth since the AI isn't going to be able to compete with a character who's facing single digit damage(if at all) and hit rates below 50%.

[XeKr]

Bringing up this topic again totally ninjas my massive post in the ‘How to improve Fire Emblem Awakening” thread. Anyways…

Good, fun, fair, and challenging are firstly pretty subjective for each individual and secondly aren’t necessarily aligned (but often are to some extent). They can actually lead to vastly different design philosophies. Though, personally I’d say ‘fun’ by far trumps all of them.

imo difficulty levels should be designed to address different subsets of the intended player audience (wrt to manpower, development time, etc of course).

EDIT: Would you consider strategies that can be repeated and reproduced the same way to be something bad? It's something I find a lot, and I don't have problems with it...but I think some people complained that it gets easy once you get to that point.

This is arguably a consequence of how (un)sophisticated current AI is. And how it is likely purposely designed to be, in FE at least. This also clashes with the RNG factor.

Also it shouldn't be RNG based. IMO random activation chance in skills is very bad thing.

RNG is quite important to add tension, replayability and such. RNG is also crucial to decision-making and game theory (always following a single given strategy is often a losing strategy versus a competent opponent). Dealing with RNG variance, in a reliable way, is also a skill. FE is inherently an RNG based game between hits, crits, growths, etc.

If however, near the highest level of play, RNG remains an overwhelming or the sole factor in victory or not, well that can be more frustrating/annoying than anything else. (Somewhat) Amusingly, some successful/popular PvP games end up subject to this. Yet people do play and enjoy them (and typically do recognize potential issues where they arise).

For the most part against the AI though, this can become an easy excuse overused by players who just don’t understand or want to figure out the mechanics and a rigorous plan. And just want to deflect blame from their own strategizing ability or self-imposed “scrub rules” to an external factor. Sorry, not directed toward you in any respect, but I see it a lot. >_>

Edited March 14, 2014 by XeKr

[Florete]

lol FE7 HHM is the easiest hard mode

FE7 EHM being the obvious response, there's also FE9 HM, and possibly FE8 HM (been a long time since I played FE8, though).

As far as the topic, Rollertoaster's response is the core of a good difficulty. Cheating and/or unfair enemies is not good difficulty. There's a fine line, though, and that means it can be very hard to find a good balance such that the game is fair but also very difficult, because ramping up stats isn't always a good solution, but everything being easily deduce-able isn't going to be very hard.

Applying it to FE, it would definitely require a better AI, particularly one that doesn't just send weak units to the slaughter. If you consider their "goal" to just kill any single unit no matter who (potentially with priority on the Lord) and no matter how many of their own die, they would need some way of determining which unit they have a highest chance of dealing high damage to. Being able to team up would be nice, as well, so if one unit gets an effective bonus and the next will be able to kill after that (and assuming this is otherwise a pretty defensive unit, like a General), they don't have that second unit move first and attack some other enemy, and stuff like that.

Given that it's Fire Emblem, there will necessarily be some random chance, but the key would be ensuring that you never leave a unit in a place where they can potentially be killed, because a good difficulty would be able to take advantage of that no matter how it would need to be done. I've seen Awakening's Lunatic be pretty good about this, and that's probably the closest the series has come. Eliminating chance-based skills would also help.

[dondon151]

Easier than FE8? I think not

no, i actually think FE8 HM is more difficult than FE7 HHM.

[ZemZem]

HHM is probably the closest the series has gotten to getting it right. It was a little on the easy side, IMO, but everybody is different. Speaking of, since everyone has different tastes and skill levels, there really won't be a "perfect" difficulty. Only one that pleases most people, which I think HHM did.

Pretty much this.

lol FE7 HHM is the easiest hard mode

I thought it was good. I thought it was fair. And I thought it was well-done, too. It wasn't too easy, and it wasn't too hard. I liked it.

[X-Naut]

I certainly didn't like how they depleted early-game inventories, and FE6 did the stat bonuses and extra enemies much better than FE7 did. And don't get me started on CoD.

[Baldrick]

Horses for courses. In my very first playthrough I found ENM to be brutal, so...

My ideal difficulty level is something similar to Thracia. The enemies were fairly weak, it was the circumstances that had all the difficulty. Of course, this means in repeat playthroughs with extra knowledge the game becomes a lot easier. For difficulty that has replayability, you could have something like Lunatic+ random skills, but

1. Increase the number of skills in the pool, as long as they're interesting and non-random. This means more unpredictability and less chance of encountering really nasty skill combinations (unless they create more, but combos should be weighted so that not too many bad ones occur in a given chapter.)

2. Reduce enemy stats, or at least have a second such mode where enemy stats are reduced. You don't need mega buff enemies in order to have a challenging game, you just need to make the player think.

[Refa]

A difficulty that keeps me actively engaged without ragequitting. I'll leave the specifics to the blokes who get payed to design the games.

[chococoke]

no, i actually think FE8 HM is more difficult than FE7 HHM.

I don't think I've heard anyone say this before

[PKL]

HHM is a chump difficulty. Everyone always points to Cog of Destiny, but if u played HNM before like youre supposed to, you know how the map works by now, just add magic users that are actually pretty chumpy and u just win the mode. It's pretty easy. I don't agree that FE8 is harder though. Perhaps it is easier for dondon because of 0% growths.