We interviewed four experts and asked them their takes on difficulty settings and gameplay approachability in recent video games
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For this one, we took a different approach. Since the questions that we were asking ourselves were not really our daily bread, we thought, “Why not ask these questions to people who have actually worked on the topic?” And so, there we were setting up some chats with industry experts to debate the approachability of gameplay and its depth. How did we choose the topic?
I am an old-time Final Fantasy fan, and I have spent a decent amount of time playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake (FF7R) a couple of times, just to be sure I am ready for FF7 Rebirth (which I have not yet played as I am currently engrossed with Armored Core 6). I did my first FF7R run on Normal mode, while I decided to embark on Hard Mode for the second run (which honestly was not really difficult at all!). And Hard Mode motivated me to explore and leverage more of the RPG mechanics of the game. As a few examples:
Materia such as Time, Barrier, and Subversion are basically unnecessary in Normal Mode, and given the limited slots per character, I equipped them on Hard Mode for the first time, given their importance for specific battles and to have some advantages over the strongest bosses.
The Tactical Pause happens every time you press X and select an Ability or a Magic Attack. During this time, time almost completely stops to give the player time to strategize and pick the next actions. While in Normal Mode, I never felt the need to really stop and strategize, but the Tactical Pause was essential on Hard Mode against bosses and the toughest enemies.
You can’t use items on Hard Mode (not only in battles, but always), which meant that HP and MP management were real concerns, just like old RPGs.
In both FF7R and Rebirth you can let the AI upgrade the weapons for you with the auto-upgrade function
Given all these things, when I beat FF7R on Hard Mode, I was left with the impression that gameplay-wise, the game was completely different from what I remember of my first run. Especially in terms of genre, this second run felt much more like an old-school JRPG, while the first one resembled the experience of a modern action game.
These feelings led to some questions: “What was the original plan for FF7R?”, “Did Square Enix have to trace back and scale the whole difficulty down for its audience to enjoy the game? Is that why some Materia are completely useless on Normal Mode even though they are there?”.
While we still don’t know what really happened with FF7R (and if you know a Combat Designer at Square Enix let me know, I'd love to chat!), we reached out to some colleagues in the gaming industry to ask how they usually tackle these issues and what is the usual process when thinking about gameplay difficulty, its approachability, and its complexity.
The article is basically a collection of interviews around the aforementioned topics; we hope you enjoy the read!
The interviews have been divided into three main sections, each corresponding to a high-level question, plus a final discussion about difficulty in soulslike games.
The interviewees
Martin Annander - Freelance Game Developer
Martin has more than 18 years of experience in the industry, including various Design Director positions and establishing his own gaming companies.
Judah Avery - Combat Designer at Respawn Entertainment
Judah is a Combat Designer at Respawn Entertainment working on an unannounced project. He previously worked on Star Wars: Jedi Survivor as a Technical Designer
Patrick Jalbert - Principal Combat Designer at Avalanche Studios
With 10+ years of experience in the industry, Patrick has spanned different genres and experiences, from VR/AR at Schell Games to the more recent Immortals of Aveum
Grégoire Meyer - Senior Gameplay Designer (3C) at Remedy Entertainment
Grégoire specializes in 3C-related design and has worked on everything from AAA (Ubisoft and Remedy) to AA (Deck 13) and indie games (Rain Games)
The interview
Topic 1: Difficulty Settings
Let’s start by discussing difficulty settings in general. Although the most common approach in the last decade is probably the Level approach (Easy, Normal, Hard, with some variety and diversification), there are certainly other approaches. We have seen games without any difficulty settings (From Software has been pretty successful with that recently), or more modern approaches, such as the Dynamic approach, which consists of continuously adapting the difficulty level to the player’s skills as they proceed in the game. What’s your take on the argument? Do you have any preference, and how do you think such a decision should be made?
Patrick: The most important thing to do as a first step is understanding your audience. This is not only related to mere demographic data but, more importantly, to how your audience relates to the game you’re building. A great example comes from VR: for VR games, and specifically for our game Until You Fall, there were mainly three segments of players:
VR gamers, who kind of know what to expect in terms of difficulty and overall experience from a VR game.
Players who are interested in VR and want to try out the new technology but don’t usually play video games - they are the target of easy modes.
Traditional gamers.
We thought that each segment has different needs and expectations, and thus different difficulty settings can help manage their expectations. For example, the Easy mode is mostly done for the second category of players since they have very limited experiences with video games. But the most difficult segment to deal with is the third one because they come in with a lot of expectations from traditional gaming and do not take into account that a VR game is different from a standard game in 2D. With such a wild and diverse target audience, you can see why different difficulty options become a must.
Judah: When working on the Jedi series, the Respawn team had to take into account that this was not only an action game but also a Star Wars game. There are people who do not play video games but are interested in the game just for the brand, and we have to keep them happy with our product as well. As IPs get more and more popular, having lower difficulty settings is a must. This is why, for example, there is a “Story mode” in Jedi Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor, and it’s a trend that is growing more and more as we, as an industry, try to expand our audience. Already today, I think it's worth noting that the hardcore audience does no longer make up the majority of the sales for these games. The majority of players might not want a crazy challenge, but we still want to reward the players who do seek that challenge out. So we'll sometimes add an extra attack or tweak some attribute about an attack to make it more difficult on the harder game modes.
Grégoire: For me, having different, static difficulty settings (easy-medium-hard) is kind of a thing of the past. I think that this approach is really hard to balance correctly to keep every player happy. It's one of those conventions that we inherited from the early games and that we never really thought much about, in my opinion. When I worked on Atlas Fallen at Deck13, we had such difficulty modes, and it was a real pain to properly balance the game. It took months to simply have correct balancing for the medium setting alone. And then, for the hard and easy settings, our vision was to simply make the combat more unforgiving or more forgiving. Since Atlas Fallen is a combat-centric game, it made sense and it worked (-ish) in the end, but if you ask me, it was way too much effort for the result.
A great evolution is letting the player adjust the difficulty settings individually for every challenge type in the game (combat, exploration, puzzles, etc.), like we have seen with lots of AAA games recently. I think the first game that did it was Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This fragmentation makes it easier for designers, since we can split it into different independent topics, and gives players the possibility to fully tweak their experience how they want.
Another great example is Baldur’s Gate 3’s custom difficulty. You really have a lot of parameters to play with; you can disable or enable certain features like death saves and multiclassing, or enable advanced mechanics for the boss fights. As a player, you can really fine-tune your experience, and change it at any time.
Martin: Yes, the Easy-Medium-Hard approach is still the most used one. For example, when working on Syndicate at Starbreeze, we approached the topic in the usual way without asking too many questions. For different difficulty levels, we just tweaked the numbers to build the usual “hockey-stick” difficulty curve. But there are also other options, and the one I like the most has not been mentioned yet. I'm going really back in time, but Goldeneye 007 did it a long time ago, and there are some recent games that have approached the topic in this way.
It consists of adding restrictions for the player in order to complete a mission or a chapter of the game at higher difficulty levels. A recent example is Thief. The same missions must be cleared independently from the difficulty level, but some Hard mode's requirements are just optional for the Easy mode, for example. This means that differently from the other approaches, game designers are not really required to work more or add things to make the game more replayable and adjust it to different audiences.
Another thing that we are not really leveraging anymore recently but was pretty common until the PS2/PS3 era is to make each difficulty level unique in some ways. There could be additional cut scenes or special weapons that you unlock by playing only at the most difficult game setting, but this is rarely the case anymore. I would be excited to think more about these approaches.
Topic 2: Automating Player's Mechanics
A trend we have seen recently in the market, especially in action RPG games, is that studios are adding automation features to their games. For example, in FF7R, you can let the AI develop and level up the weapons as you gain XP based on some parameters (giving priority to attack, defense, balanced leveling, etc.). The impression is that something that was core to the action RPG game experience 20 years ago is almost not necessary today, and it seems like players would like to skip it. What do you think of these automation features? When do you think they add value and make sense?
Martin: I'm pretty open to this; I can think of situations where as a player, I just want to move forward with the game, and in these cases, automations could come in handy. Generally speaking, I think these automation features are there for the whole length of the game for convenience's sake. This is because making these automations valid only until a certain point of the game - say, for example, that after 10+ hours some of these mechanics are "handed over" to the player and not automatable anymore - requires them to be contextual to the game progression experience, and thus much harder to design and implement. It's a bit like when adding specific gameplay features only later on in the game; this works only if the developers are able to narratively justify this and make it coherent for the player experience too.
Judah: There are instances where automation can come in handy. This is especially true for games with larger audiences because there will be demographics of players interested in the game who might not be used to specific features or mechanics of the game, and automation can help surpass this problem. Automation is a massive topic of discussion on it's own and has so many different use cases. It may or may not have it's place a game based on so many factors. In the case of Jedi: Survivor, we created some accessibility options to automate certain features like locking onto enemies. This was done alongside our difficulty settings to make the game more accessible to a wider audience and help more players finish up Cal's story. But in the case of a game where you can collect some coins on the ground, maybe collecting coins isn't meant to be a challenge for the player, so the coins should suction to the player rather than the player grabbing them 1 by 1. Or in a survival game, if that game doesn't care about a player's inventory management skills, it might just have a quality of life "auto organize inventory" button. This is a question that doesn't have a simple, clear-cut answer.
Patrick: It is true that it’s something that is popping up recently in different genres, and I also think it is mainly a signal that the studio wanted to extend beyond the usual audience of the genre. To be specific about the FF7R example, I think Square Enix has always underlined how much the Final Fantasy series has been targeting action gamers more and more, and what they are basically doing is eliminating the biggest hurdle for action gamers to have access to FF7R. They still want to be true to their origins, and thus you still have JRPG mechanics, but this does not stop them from targeting other players as well. It is the only way for AAA games to justify their huge budgets.
Grégoire: To be perfectly honest, I am not a fan of automating player mechanics. First of all, because experience has taught me that it’s almost impossible to correctly assume what the player wants - especially when saying that these solutions aim at expanding the audience. Secondly, automating is delegating. Since games are all about interactivity and player choices, what’s the point of having an entire mechanic just being bypassed and doing its own thing? At best, it means that a mechanic is simply superfluous and the game can be fully enjoyed without it, and at worst, it means that the game was so bloated with mechanics that the designers had to give players leverage to reduce the cognitive load. In either case, it means that the mechanic needs some more work, in my opinion.
Topic 3: Development Process - Simplicity vs Complexity
Okay, last question. When building out your game mechanics, what is your usual approach? Do you start big and complicated and scale back as you develop the game and test its features? Or do you start small and simple and add complexity over time as you go deeper into the development process? Do you think there is a best-in-school approach, or does it depend on some factors?
Grégoire: For Atlas Fallen, we definitely started with a lot of complex mechanics that we simplified or cut during production. At Deck13, we had a very solid QA department who also provided the team with feedback on gameplay, so their help was very precious. We also had monthly playtest sessions from Focus Entertainment, held in their playtest lab in Paris. These playtests were instrumental in reducing the superfluous stuff in the game and showcasing our progress as a game experience.
I don’t think there are other approaches than starting complex and cutting or starting simple and adding, because there tends to be a bias for designers to want to fill every corner during the “paper design” phase, which usually ends in too much stuff. What we cannot really estimate or account for at the beginning is how much the actual game content will drive the experience. Some designers will try to put a game mechanic where the simple flow of enemy variety would have filled that gap naturally. And it’s not a problem of experience, I have witnessed both Junior and Leads fall into that bias, me included at times! And what usually happens is that when the levels and player flow start getting into shape, some game mechanics inevitably start to feel superfluous.
Company culture does have an effect on how designers work, but from my experience this aspect is always present. At Deck13, among designers, we all collectively agreed that “less is more”, and that quality should have priority over quantity, but it did not prevent us from having to cut a third of the game mechanics! The same thing happened at Ubisoft Annecy when I was working there.
Patrick: For the games that I've built, I believe that the most important thing has always been to let the player feel like they can improve over time. To achieve this, we start with a baseline that is as low as necessary. For example, for a VR game I worked on, we introduced a super easy enemy, weaker than the easiest one we had planned, in order to construct a sense of progression for a specific demographic of players.
This is why we usually follow this process:
Build the systems and test them all together at high levels of the game (such as near the ending).
Tweak and make changes and improvements until the whole experience feels engaging and well done.
When that point is reached, the ideal would be to scale back over time and introduce all the systems progressively as the player progresses through the story and the game. This way, complexity is naturally reduced, and the player has time to absorb all the new information.
Martin: I like to divide the development process into two different approaches: core-based design and exception-based design. These two are completely different approaches, each working well in specific situations (if you want to know more about these approaches, this article is really well done). I personally prefer the latter because it involves a shorter and smaller rule set to build, making it easier to keep track of everything. I believe this also helps with the trade-off between difficulty and approachability because each exception is created in isolation - the player has fun when combining them, but that’s up to the player to do, and the game designer only has to focus on giving these features one by one to the players.
On the other hand, core-based design requires the game designer to think holistically about all the features, especially towards the end of the game, which can be incredibly difficult.
Judah: Since Jedi Survivor had a huge audience in mind from the beginning, we designed the enemies in our game to be fun for all players at first. Meaning all players should have fun with what we deliver. Once the core of something is fun on all difficulties (complexity aside) then we decided if we should layer a bit more complexity onto it for the players seeking out a harder challenge. Maybe what is fun on all difficulties just isn't quite enough of a challenge on the hardest difficulty. Or vice versa, maybe something is too difficult for Story mode so it should be limited to the harder difficulties.
As we chatted with the people included in this article, we were surprised to find that we (briefly or not) touched upon the topic of soulslike games, especially those from From Software. So we decided to dedicate a small space to this topic, although it would be worth a whole deep-dive!
Bonus Topic: From Software's Approach
From Software games are a kind of different beast when thinking about difficulty settings and approachability. While more and more games are trying to be as approachable as possible to expand their audience, From Software has chosen another road (and I dare say with an unexpected success). There are no explicitly difficulty settings in all their games, but this has not undermined their games, their audience reception, and their financial success in any way. What’s your take on this and how does this relate to what all the other studios are doing?
Patrick: I agree, From Software has been incredibly effective at two key aspects. Firstly, they have successfully marketed the difficulty as an intrinsic part of the experience, and players going into their games generally have the expectation that the game will be challenging. As I mentioned earlier in response to another question, understanding what players expect in terms of learning curve and overall challenge is crucial when it comes to difficulty settings. From Software has excelled at conveying the right message from the start.
Additionally, while their games lack explicit difficulty options, players have the freedom to grind and level up as much as they want before attempting a challenging battle again. This provides players with the option to artificially scale down the difficulty if they find certain sections too challenging, without compromising the integrity of the game's design. This flexibility allows players to tailor their experience to their own preferences while still maintaining the overall challenge and sense of accomplishment that From Software games are known for.
Grégoire: From Software's approach to difficulty settings and game design works well because they have a clear vision of the experience they want to provide to players, and they have consistently delivered on that vision for over a decade. They have cultivated a dedicated fan base that appreciates their unique style of gameplay and challenge.
The soulslike is actually a very specific genre with its codes and player challenges. It’s not just about making a hard game, or slow-paced combat. It’s also paying particular attention to enemy readability, very well-balanced player locomotion metrics, enemy variety, and great efforts on pacing through difficulty progression. It’s an uncompromising holistic experience. Attempting to replicate From Software's approach without a clear understanding of the target audience and the experience they are seeking could lead to dissatisfaction among players. It's essential for each game to find its own balance between challenge and accessibility based on its unique goals and audience expectations.
In essence, while From Software's approach to difficulty works well for them, it may not be suitable for every game, and studios should carefully consider the needs and preferences of their target audience when designing difficulty settings and gameplay mechanics. I don’t think an Action-RPG game like Starfield would benefit from having a unique difficulty setting, for example.
Judah: Elden Ring represents a significant evolution for From Software, particularly in how they have marketed the game as an open-world experience. While previous From Software games technically allowed players to explore and grind, the emphasis on Elden Ring as an open-world game has attracted a broader audience.
By building Elden Ring as an true open-world title, From Software has appealed to players who may have been hesitant to try soulslike games in the past due to their reputation for difficulty. The open-world aspect gives players a sense of freedom and exploration, making the game feel more accessible and inviting to a wider range of players.
This shift in marketing strategy has undoubtedly contributed to Elden Ring's success, elevating it to another level compared to previous From Software games. While their older games found a niche audience of enthusiastic players, Elden Ring has managed to capture the attention of a larger and more diverse player base, thanks in part to its open-world design and the way it has been marketed as such.
Well.. That’s the end of it! We hope you enjoyed the conversation and the topics discussed, there are some real interesting points of views here in our opinion. Feel free to comment and let us know what you think! We would love to hear more people’s experiences on the topic, given that there is probably no right or wrong answer.
Now, I just read an article mentioning that FF7 Rebirth has added a Dynamic Difficulty option.. I might have to check that soon!