Video Game Difficulty is Hard (But It Doesn't Have To Be) | Extra Credits Gaming

Now, this might seem like a totally normal thing to say, but I find it hard to admit, however, easy to explain that those traditional difficulty settings in games kind of suck. And they suck for a very specific reason. Because often, they demand the player choose a hardness seconds after they boot up a game for the first time. But how are we supposed to know what difficulty level is best for us when we haven't even played the game yet? What if the direction the game goads us towards is just plain wrong for the experience we're going for? And how might our egos be feeding into all of this jazz? Well, what if I told you that there are actually better design strategies for difficulty settings, and that you've already probably played games that use them?
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Thanks so much to Nebula for continuing to be the best deal in streaming. Kick off your New Year's right by treating yourself to all of the ad-free goodness Nebula has to offer, including our two weekly long-form gaming series, Design Club Live and Games for Breakfast. Real quick, Up Top, please welcome video

essayist, streamer, and my favorite person to tier rank Hyrulean abilities in front of a live PAX audience with Jenna Steeber, who guest wrote this episode. Thanks for flipping this to easy mode, Jenna. Today, we think of difficulty settings as being about letting the player control their own experience. But that, my friends, has not always been their purpose. The earliest difficulty settings were totally out of reach for the player. And if you think this means we're going to go into a video game history portion, you are absolutely correct. Back in ye old arcade days, some machines had internal hardware called dip switches, which were only accessible by the cabinet's owner. This allowed them to alter things like the number of starting lives, or swap between a hard mode and easy mode. And if a game was a hit, they could even increase the number of coins required to play, monsters. But another phenomenon that would forever be entwined with a game's difficulty was also born under the smoking neon lights of a local arcade. I'm talking about, of course, competition. In the public arena of an arcade, the leaderboard was an official document

proving who the most elite gamers in town were. Conquering a game, especially something notoriously punishing like Ghosts 'n Goblins or Sinistar, meant you were the best of the best. So, if you told a player that there were difficulty settings that they might have benefited from an easier challenge than their competitors elsewhere, they'd be hurt and angry, their egos bruised. Now, hold that thought for a moment. We're going to circle back to competitiveness in a minute. Meanwhile, in the home market, the Atari 2600 also had hardware difficulty settings, this time in reach of the player. By flipping the AB switch, two players could compete at different levels, like a pre-made younger sibling mode. For single-player games like Adventure, flipping the switch would slow down the boss fight or even skip it entirely. This was on top of the skill levels Adventure already had. Level two was the base game, level one simplified the layout design, and level three randomized the location of items, refreshing the game for even expert adventurers. And these options were often as much about adding replay

value as they were about difficulty. Then, by the early '90s, easy, normal, and hard became standard options in video games, though they still weren't the same difficulty settings that we know and have some mixed feelings about today. Because many of the games in this era actually weren't beatable on easy. Titles like Twisted Metal 2 and Sailor Moon gated you out of about half the game in easy mode. You would have to take the leap into normal if you wanted to see the rest. But this locking off of content wasn't really to punish the player for choosing a difficulty setting the developers didn't like. Rather, easy mode functioned like a tutorial in an era where plenty of games didn't have one. Double Dragon 2 actually made this explicit. Its easy mode, which only takes you to stage three, is literally called practice. Now, this era of gaming also did see a lot of arcade addicts turn into developers, some of whom, like the bad boy devs at id Software, brought the competitiveness of arcade culture with them. But soon that pride of accomplishment seemed to curdle into the desire to shame others for not enduring

the same pixelated hardships. Difficulty levels seemed to be begrudgingly offered and implemented in kind of humiliating ways, decrying that folks who played on easy were wusses, wimps, tourists, and babies. Although Wolfenstein: The New Order ironically retained these settings, most studios gave up on this schoolyard bullying vernacular by the mid-2000s. Difficulty settings started to be about the experience a player wanted to have, rather than how skilled they were. Long-running franchises shifted their terminology, like Mass Effect changing their casual setting to be called narrative, allowing gamers to lust after characters reads Garrus without the pressure of action. Baldur's Gate 3 and recent Assassin's Creed games also offered things like explorer or discovery modes that opened up the incredible world building of these titles to people simply uninterested in combat. Then, bucking that trend, the Souls games came along and denied players the relief of a traditional difficulty setting. Instead, they

allowed players to experiment with different builds and weapons to find a balance between challenge and frustration. Different technique, different implementation, but still the same desired effect. It was all in the player's hands. Of course, this did lead some FromSoftware fans to deputize themselves sheriffs of gameplay, determining what the right way to play was. But you know, for more on that, you cowpokes can check out our last episode on Soulsborne possum building. Yeehaw. So, [clears throat] clearly, not everyone engages with a game's difficulty in the same way. And if a studio spends millions of dollars and years of development on a project, they really need as many people as possible to play it and enjoy it, which means acknowledging different skill levels, play types, and accessibility needs. And on the surface, classic difficulty settings seem like a great solution for this Goldilocks problem. What's just right for, say, Baby Bear might be boring for Mama Bear and stressful for Papa Bear. So, Baby Bear stays on normal

while Papa Bear moves to easy and gets a stronger bed or something. And Mama Bear plays on hard to get tougher porridge, I guess. Okay, but then what if Papa Bear is embarrassed to play on easy mode? What if Mama Bear finds hard mode too intimidating? And really, the big question here is how are any of them supposed to know what difficulty setting they should be on when they are just simple woodland bears and dear god, a rune bear is behind me right now, isn't it? Okay, let's move on. This isn't just a hypothetical. In a recent update for the first Berserker Kazan, creative director Junho Lee explained that they thought players would switch difficulty if they were struggling, but the data told a different story. Players would rather quit than change to easy mode. The devs report that when they asked, players said they would, quote, "rather quit with dignity than drop it down to easy." Or to put it another way, a player would rather deny themselves a game that they paid for than admit they'd overestimated

their skills. This is why traditional difficulty settings actually do suck. The settings menu usually pops up the first time you crack open a new game around the same time you're turning on the subtitles and adjusting the brightness. That is when a player knows the least about the challenges a game contains, which really makes it the worst time to have a player commit to that. Also, easy, normal, and hard are totally opaque terms. Different folks, those all could mean very different things. What if a developer thinks fewer enemies is easier when I just want more ammo so I can take more shots? Or like a boss with more health could be harder, but I think we all know that also just might mean it's longer, and that doesn't always translate to more fun. Without additional information, most people, like myself, will default to normal. And if that's too tough, many times my only option is to retreat to easy, if I even remember that as an option. Which, if I am being honest with myself, also never really feels right to me because I have that little voice inside my gamer head

saying, "You've been playing video games since you were eight. There is no way you should be playing on easy." And I know that is not logical, but I don't think I'm alone here. So, what is a bean to do, right? Well, luckily, game design is all about fixing problems like this, and devs have created some pretty cool practical solutions. Like recently, a few games have skipped offering a difficulty setting, instead offering difficulty settings. That's right, they put an S on there. Celeste's assist mode offers micro adjustments that can be made right in the settings menu, from infinite stamina and invincibility to smaller tweaks like slowing down gameplay. Instead of one big immediate choice with unclear consequences, finding a satisfying balance is as easy as lowering the music. Okay, so the Celeste-type solution is giving players complete agency, right? But what about a difficulty settings solution that completely robs the player of their agency? Now, when I hear this, my lizard brain is once again screaming, "I don't want that!" But it is possible

it might be one of the most effective solutions. And chances are, we've all played games that use this option without us even knowing it. Enter adaptive difficulty. Adaptive difficulty, or dynamic balancing if you're nasty, is when a game secretly changes mechanics, like enemy health or ammo drops, in response to how a player has played previously. While it's not very common, it's actually in more games than you probably realize. For instance, did you know that 2025's surprise mega success Blueprints had a secret setting? Ooh, yeah. Veteran player mode, or V-mode, activates when a player on a new save file drafts three rooms in under 35 seconds. In this mode, luck and room rarity were boosted to where they would be around day 21, making it much easier to reach room 46 in a single day. Of course, if you haven't played the game, that probably sounds like productivity software run amok, but basically what blueprints is assuming is that if you draft quickly, you must already know

what the rooms are and adjust the gameplay to fit that type of player. And it might seem like it made the game easier, but it's more accurate to say it changed the pacing to match the speed of an advanced player. Resident Evil 4 has a hidden feature named game rank that tweaks levels based on how the player has played so far. If you get hit or miss an attack, your rank decreases, causing enemies to slow down, do less damage, and have lower health. Whereas killing enemies or evading attacks increases your game rank, spawning more enemies and making them more evasive. This is also relative to the actual difficulty the player chooses, acting as a subtle gradation between things like easy normal and normal hard. Early works from Insomniac Games featured what the devs called automatic challenge tuning or ACT. Like in Ratchet & Clank, did you know that more Nanotech crates would spawn for players that died a lot, providing additional ammo and boosts? And it worked well enough that they added more tuning in later Ratchet

games. But to be clear, ACT wasn't conceptualized as a way to make the games easier or harder. Rather, they wanted it to be used to make the games just right for every kind of player that might play the game. Then for our next example, we go to one of my favorite games of all time, zombie shooter Left 4 Dead. It had what lead designer Mike Booth called adaptive dramatic pacing. Booth found that in Counter-Strike games, unpredictable peaks and valleys of intensity made for the best experiences. Because like constant combat was exhausting, but inactivity was boring. So, he created a system that tracked the expected feelings of a player with a metric called emotional intensity. In Left 4 Dead, emotional intensity increased when things went bad. If a player took damage, it increased proportional to how much damage they took. If an infected died nearby, it increased based on how close that call was. Then another adaptive system called the director used this metric to cycle through different action

modes. So, like if the intensity for the team got too high, the director would take note and back off, removing big threats from the field to let players find their footing. Emotional intensity then decayed when there was no activity, like a heart rate slowing down after a sudden burst of fear. Once the metric stayed at a minimum threshold for a round 30 to 45 seconds, that sucker ramped right back up. High tension was then balanced with relative calm, paced according to how skilled the players were. And before Jenna dove into this, I had known about the director system, of course, they used that on the box, but I hadn't really conceptualized how that would function around the relative skills players were displaying while playing the game. So, it's just fascinating stuff. Of course, Left 4 Dead 2 took this idea even further, having its actual maps change in response to player activity. For instance, the placement of gravestones in the cemetery and the pathing in the mall alter based on how well a team is doing. Skilled players get longer routes and more challenges thrown in their way. As with Adventure back in the Atari 2600

days, these dynamic elements were meant to increase the game's longevity, preventing veteran players from memorizing levels and stash placements and feeling like the game got stale. Okay, so if dynamic difficulty works so well and feels so good, why don't more games implement it? Well, first of all, it is technically very challenging, but it's not really just that. Actually, you might have noticed that all the examples I just gave do have one specific thing in common. None of them are called difficulty settings by the devs, despite the fact that they operate in similar ways with similar goals. That is just how difficulty settings are. Even internally studios don't want to use that vocabulary. And a really good microcosm of this issue was actually on the useless podcast, where former Insomniac devs Mike Stout and Tony Garcia recounted breaking a lot of hearts while pushing for act. Fellow game devs were surprised to hear that Ratchet & Clank had dynamic difficulty.

They were devastated to learn that the game might have helped them specifically. Granted with dynamic difficulty, they might also not have received help, but just the idea that they possibly benefited from act kind of hurt their feelings. Meaning dynamic tuning can feel unfair or even patronizing if a player notices it. But I think the more important thing is this. If any of us have played these games and didn't know it was helping us out, I think I'd like to push the lizard part of my brain that screams when learning about this sort of stuff just deep deep down and consider being impressed at how well these games were made to deliver us the most optimal gameplay possible for us specifically. You know, rather than feeling tricked or fooled. So in summation, some people want to believe in a meritocracy, where a specific game is the same difficulty for all players and nobody has an advantage or disadvantage. But that's just not how the world works,

in game or out. And of course this isn't to discount like a multiplayer game situation where everyone playing the same match has the same set of rules for fairness, etc. It's more to point out that at the end of the day, game designers need the most people to have the best time with the games they make. That's the business of game design. More people buy it, they can make more games. So, when you are looking at the games you play, or even when designing your own, remember that we are not all beholden to the easy, normal, or hard mode of it all. And while it might seem odd to rob a player of their agency in the name of giving them a better experience, if I'm being honest, that does kind of seem like what game design is all about in the first place. So, when looking at it in that context, I'm pretty sure that both my lizard brain and ego would be happy to take the hit. Till next time, everyone. And if you'd like to continue to add more gaming goodness to your internet diet, then check out the new Extra Credits live channel over on Nebula to see our weekly long-form shows Design

Club Live and Games for Breakfast all ad-free. Or check out another of our animated design delves here. You would not believe that Angela Valenciana, Dominic Valenciana, Frizo Van Santen, Hunter Z, Joseph Blain, Lotus Wolf, Thomas Tate, and Ziliac's Architectures were the best legendary patrons, BUT I GOT TO TELL YOU, I don't know any other way to label them.