The Perfect CRPG: Difficulty

You can encounter these guys on Level 1...for about a second.

This is the first of a series of postings in which I want to discuss the various elements that make up my GIMLET. Not just the 10 categories that make up the GIMLET, mind you, but each of the individual elements among the categories. I want to milk this for a while.

Today's topic concerns the difficulty of the game, one of the elements I include in my final "Gameplay" category. Like many of the elements, it often feels like this factor ought to have a category of its own. A game that's too hard or too easy can ruin many of its other positive elements. But character development throws a complicated factor into the issue of difficulty: how do you make the player feel that the characters are growing more powerful without making the game too easy?

There are, to my mind, two ways to handle this paradox:

1. Make a very wide range of difficulty immediately available to the player at the beginning of the game. As the characters grow, they are able to explore areas where they had their asses handed to them a few levels ago.

2. Keep the difficulty essentially static but introduce new options (perks, skills, feats, tactics, spells) as a reward for leveling. The game never gets easier but it gets more fun as you explore these new tactical options.

A game can have both, of course, and most of them do. But usually one of them is the primary mechanism.

I prefer games that handle difficulty primarily via the first option. In my limited experience, the best exemplar of such games is the Might & Magic series (I haven't played IV or V yet, but I assume they're similar in this to I, II, VI, VII, and VIII). The moment you start the game (or shortly thereafter), you can travel to all of the game's maps. In VI, you can challenge yourself by exploring Gharik's Forge or Castle Darkmoor early in your career, or you can play it safe and come back on a higher level. Just as notable, you can return to the New Sorpigal map when you're Level 50 and wipe out an entire map's worth of goblins in about three minutes (in my recollection, all maps re-spawn roughly every 6 game months). This allows you to palpably experience the effects of character development while still keeping things difficult as you progress through the plot.

Arch-nemesis at Level 1 becomes an ant to stomp on at Level 20.

The first option is only possible, of course, in games with relatively open worlds. But they need not be sandboxes like Skyrim. Wizardry qualifies. You could charge down to Level 4 immediately upon entering the dungeon if you want, but you'd soon regret it. Earlier levels remain quite available and accessible even as you explore and map new ones. Pool of Radiance restricts you at the outset, but after a few quests, you can explore the entire game world whether you're ready or not.
 

Dragon Age: Origins is a good example of #2. Enemies level with you, there are a fixed number of enemies in the game, nothing respawns, there are no random encounters, and for plot reasons you can't return to many areas after clearing them. The difficulty remains essentially unchanged throughout the game, but to keep up with your enemies, you have to make effective use of the talents you choose as you level up.

I haven't been telling you, but in the midst of all of my other gaming and blogging, I've been continuing to play Skyrim on and off. I finished the main quest a few months ago, and I recently started over with a new character so I could explore the two quest lines I hadn't yet: the Dark Brotherhood, and the war from the point of view of the Stormcloaks. When you think about it, these two quest lines add the most replayability to the game. They are the only ones that offer alternatives that allow you to cut off your ability to access them: the Dark Brotherhood by killing Astrid when she first kidnaps you, and the Stormcloaks by joining the Imperial Legion instead. You're free to ignore the Thieves' Guild, the Companions, and the College of Winterhold, of course, but not if you want to end the game with an empty quest log.

During the last three Elder Scrolls games, we've watched the creators struggle to balance difficulty amidst the openness of the game world. Morrowind, though a great game, is ultimately too easy. Creatures as diverse in strength as mudcrabs and daedroths populate the game world from the outset, and it's fairly easy to wander off on the wrong path and encounter something you're nowhere near ready to face. But because creatures don't level with you, you can kill even the toughest creatures with a couple of hits well before the end of the game, even on the highest difficulty setting.

Oblivion goes too far in the other direction. To keep the player from over-leveling, the creators have nearly every enemy in the game level with you. There is no dungeon that is undefeatable from Level 1 (and indeed some fans like to win the game without leaving Level 1), nor is there any moment that you can just casually brush past goblins or bandits. As you increase in levels, enemies not only also level up but acquire absurdly advanced equipment, and it's not unusual to find some hedge bandit demanding 100 gold pieces from you while displaying enough daedric armor to buy a mansion. To counter this, most players engage in leveling strategies that keep them significantly more powerful than the foes, again rendering the game too easy.

You realize you could buy Skingrad for the price of that armor?

Skyrim, in my opinion, achieves a near-perfect balance. Encounters continue to level with the player, but not all of them do. In a dungeon where you might have found 16 regular draugrs, two "restless draugrs," and a draugr wight "boss" at Level 3, you'll find two regular dragurs, eight draugr wights, and a draugr overlord boss at Level 18. Encounters are context-specific, so a nest of skeevers doesn't suddenly turn into a nest of chauruses at Level 20, and you can enjoy firebombing them all at once. A number of wilderness encounters don't level with you at all, so you feel suitably powerful as your high-level character hacks, slashes, bashes, and shouts his way through a Stormcloak camp or Thalmor entourage. But a Forsworn Briarheart or an Arch Cryomage still might kill that same character in one hit. The game does a great job of giving you plenty of badass moments while still offering a challenge.

I'm at level 50, and these guys still haven't gotten easy.

Encounters are only one aspect of a game's difficulty. There are two others that are worth covering: difficulty settings and frequency of saves. Unfortunately, the trend has been to render both of these factors too simple, requiring some self-imposed (and thus artificial) restrictions on the part of the player.

I admit that beyond Skyrim and Dragon Age, I don't have a good grasp of the current CRPG market, but my impression is that essentially no modern games offer the same save game limitations of early CRPGs. I'm talking about games like Might & Magic, where you can only save upon return to the town, or NetHack, which destroys your saved game upon every re-load, or Wizardry, which immediately writes deaths to your character file. These limitations render even "easy" games somewhat perilous; in NetHack, you can win 98% of your battles and still never get past Level 10. Naturally, the difficulty level of a roguelike is an inseparable part of its challenge, and I wouldn't expect permadeath in Skyrim. Still, the ability to save at any point does remove a significant part of the challenge. Death should have consequences in a CRPG--it should make you fear it, and scream in frustration when it happens--and forcing the player to replay a significant part of the game is a fair consequence.

I therefore prefer the only-save-in-towns approach to Might & Magic, but I concede that this feature has been essentially lost forever. The only way to approximate it is to force yourself to only save every X minutes, or to only allow reloads from the last autosave, which is the approach I've taken since Baldur's Gate.

I may be wrong, but I don't think I've encountered a game with a "difficulty slider" on this blog. I've encountered them in the Black Isle/Bioware/Interplay D&D games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale), Dragon Age, and the last three Elder Scrolls games, and I've only ever used them in the latter. Typically, all they adjust are aspects relating to hit points: how many your foe has, how much damage he does, and how much damage you do to him. I wish they adjusted more, like the types of foes you encounter, the likelihood of succeeding at certain tasks and, most importantly, enemy AI. I've never played a game in which the difficulty slider affected the enemy's intelligence, but it should. Imagine if instead of just giving them more hit points, a "master" setting in Skyrim made bandits chug healing and buffing potions, or made them more likely to flee. Imagine if it made dragons say "screw this" and fly off when they realize you're just going to hide and snipe at them from a tower.

"Insane" level in Baldur's Gate makes monsters do double damage.

I typically find that in games with "closed" combat systems (e.g., the Gold Box games, Dragon Age), adjusting the slider upward is an exercise more in punishment than in challenge. In games in which the combat system is more integrated with the game world--specifically, in games where you can flee, regroup, and return--the difficulty slider is more fun to play with. I've played Skyrim with it set to maximum from the very beginning. In a game that offers so many combat options--sneaking, spells, poison, sword-and-board, summoning allies, getting enemies to fight each other (I love leading dragons to giant camps), luring enemies into traps, shouting them off cliffs--putting the difficulty at max ensures that I explore all of these options.

The problem is that, as with my self-imposed restrictions on saving, I know that a difficult combat can be won by simply ratcheting the difficulty slider back down. When I played Dragon Age with Irene, she was only really interested in the dialogue and story. Because I got sick of dying, I (shamefully) put the slider at "novice" and just blazed my way through the game, missing out on most of the joy associated with mastering tactics and carefully managing inventory. I'd rather I didn't even have that temptation, and I wish games forced you to choose the difficulty at the outset rather than allowing you to continually adjust it. I think maybe one that does is Icewind Dale, where you can permanently lock "heart of fury" mode after winning the game once on a normal difficulty.

In summary, then, the "perfect" CRPG would:

• Never get so easy you're bored or so hard that you're infuriated.
• Make enemies of all levels of difficulty available from beginning to end, whether or not the average difficulty "levels" with the player.
• Force limited saves (or at least allow the player to select an option for this when starting a new game), or employ some other mechanism to assign a "cost" to saving and reloading.
• Include a difficulty slider that a) remains fixed after beginning the game; b) has more complexity to what it adjusts than simply hit points and damage.

There are plenty of CRPGs that I haven't played, so I ask you: are there any that have all three of these features?