I’ve been ruminating on game difficulty some. Whilst I don’t want to go into the Cuphead debacle, I’ll concede that some valid questions were asked and we owe it to ourselves as consumers and to the game industry to try and come to a consensus, or at least to figure out what the mainstream and niche answers are.
But I’ve heard the sentiment echoed here and there that difficulty isn’t accessible, and I don’t think that’s true by default. Challenge is one of the core aesthetics of play, and difficult challenges often yield more rewards, especially if they’re fun to complete. Nothing feels better than overcoming a tough obstacle, and knowing that you only did it because you became better as a player.
But I do think that Cuphead’s difficulty does raise an important question that I think we definitely should be asking;
How do we make difficult games accessible?
Here’s a quick refresher; Arcade games were hard. They had to be in order to earn your coins. That difficulty ended up being translated to home consoles in their first iterations, and a whole generation of gamers grew up with tough games just being the norm.
Today, tough as nails games are niche. You still get the odd stand-out here and there, but games are easier, and as a result, more accessible than ever. And unless you’re playing on original hardware, even older tough as nails games are much more accessible thanks to save-states via emulators, although there’s certainly an elitist mentality in the gaming community that frowns upon the usage thereof.
But here’s my main point; Tough games can be accessible, they just have to be worth the challenge.
Touhou, Dark Souls, Osu, Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight, almost the entirety of the SNES library… These are some of the toughest games but are all so fun and rewarding that you have to ask, are we just not approaching difficulty correctly? Challenge is fun. Overcoming adversity is what’s part of why videogames are fun to play.
I think that the difficulty curve of games isn’t too often talked about. Creating a satisfying difficulty curve in a videogame is an art; If it’s too steep, the challenge might ramp up before a player can adjust and needlessly frustrate them. If it’s too shallow, the game might feel like it plateaus, which makes what is meant to be a challenge an exercise in monotony. Most games also have design oversights that can introduce spikes. The infamous Barrel of Sonic 3 & Knuckles comes to mind. A difficulty curve also changes as a player grows in skill. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Dark Souls veteran who still thinks the Asylum demon is a tough fight.
Nailing a difficulty curve is the difference between a game that gets completed and favourably viewed retrospectively and a game that gets lost to obscurity.
While Cuphead seems to be a game that, for the most part, handles its difficulty curve competently, the entry barrier is also a tad thick. Each game has a skill floor and a skill ceiling. The skill floor is the minimum amount of skill required to produce competent play, and the skill ceiling is the maximum skill one can acquire. Usually, any given game wants to have a low skill floor, and a high skill ceiling. Make the skill ceiling too low and mastering the game becomes unsatisfying. Make the skill floor too high and the price of entry is too high for most casual players.
One aspect I think a lot of developers don’t consider is screen real-estate; The more you fill up the screen with, the more information you give to the player, the more likely sensory overload is to occur. Admittedly, this is usually more of a problem with Bullet Hell and Shoot ‘Em Ups than with any other genre, but I’ve seen it occur within platformers. Any given clip of high-level play in Touhou looks like a rave and an acid trip all mixed into one. High-level Osu can be just as daunting. But if you give the player too much visual information before they’ve reached a certain skill level, you’ve effectively neutered their ability to play. If you don’t have practice reacting that quickly to that many on-screen objects, your brain might do a derp and you could make a mistake that you’d usually avoid. Snoman brought up the idea of how poor use of screen real-estate can actually lead to a detrimental experience in a game, and introducing too many elements at once can definitely cause a player to leave a game unfinished.
Inaccessible difficulty can come from another place; Poor frame rate and sloppy controls. If your game feel is awkward and clunky, you’ve added a new dimension of challenge, and PC gamers know how awful playing at less than desirable frame rates can be (although I still think the standard should be 60 frames per second and not 30 frames per second). The common example brought up for control is coyote time or the ghost jump. The extra few frames after leaving a platform in which you can jump. Some platformers extend the player’s collision box in order to achieve this. Others code a short timer, but either method creates the same result; responsive controls.
Long iteration cycles also come to mind. This comes in two parts, the time between the fail state and a point where new progress can be made, and the time taken for a fail state to reset. Both should always be as short as possible. Re-treading old ground too often is never good, and lengthy death animations that boot you to the main menu can just find the nearest garbage bin to climb into. It’s cheap difficulty. It’s artificial.
Telegraphing is also important. Telegraphing is the act of conveying information to the player, whether it be their current objective, or that an attack or obstacle is incoming. Nothing sucks more than a game with a bad case of “where the heck do I go”, and being hit by something off-screen you could never see coming just is poor game design.
Here’s another thing developers might not consider; Effective teaching tools.
How you convey the ins and outs of your game’s mechanics are the way that it teaches the player. I’m not talking about Hbomberguy’s play-conditioning, although it certainly forms part of this. I’m talking about the effectiveness of your tutorials, the resources available, the way lessons are taught. Older games had extensive manuals, the original Final Fantasy famously has an 80 page guide to get you through the first half of the game. Dark Souls is an interesting case in that while there are in-game tutorials, the community itself is the teaching tool. Guys like Vageta311 release tutorials using mined data, many players release build guides, there are hundreds of walkthroughs and of course, the notes on the ground from other players. Games don’t come with manuals anymore, so the way players are taught is essential in making a tough game more accessible.
While this is by no means comprehensive, other aspects to difficulty might just be quality of life; clearly visible boss healthbars, level progress meters, recommended level before attempting warnings, cancel-outs from combos. Stuff that might make the game easier, but also just make it that much more accessible to play. The idea isn’t that you rig the game against the player; you should be giving them a wall that you want them to conquer, even if it is by repeatedly mashing their heads against that wall until it falls over.
From this, I think in order to create a game that is tough but accessible, I think the following conditions should be met:
- There should be a satisfying difficulty curve
- There should be a relatively low skill floor, but a high skill ceiling
- Effective use of screen real-estate
- Solid frame rate and tight controls
- Short iteration cycles
- Clear telegraphing
- Little quality of life additions
- And just a fun game
Fun is subjective, but players will power through any game if the aesthetics are pleasing and the gameplay is fun. Tough isn’t necessarily inaccessible. We just have to be smart about the way we create difficulty and resist the temptation to be cheap.
If nothing else, just include a guide on how to get barrels to move up and down, please.
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