This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse.

But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.

On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.

Agreed. Something like Dark Souls where an enemy is an enemy and it'll smash you if you're underleveled is so much more satisfying than something like Oblivion where enemy health inexplicably goes up based on your level. It also gives you the satisfaction of going back to earlier areas that were scary and laughing off the puny enemies.

It doesn't have to be deceptive!

In Factorio, you build an automated factory on an alien world whose native inhabitants hate air pollution.

If you spend your time gathering resources manually or with a humble-sized factory, there'd be very little alien hostility. But the better you're playing, the grander the factories, the more you're polluting, the more aggressive the aliens attack you.

Furthermore, trees soak up CO2, so if you preserve them you reduce alien hostility, but if you go fully industrious and build on top of them you invite more alien aggression.

I think this concept is delightful and far from deceptive. It makes the game suitable for players of all levels and it meshes with the game mechanism rather than working behind your back.

hnews folks would also probably enjoy the cellular-automata-like mechanism of the pollution. Essentially the world is divided into cells and each cell has a pollution value. Pollution dissipates to nearby cells on regular intervals. Cells with trees soak up some pollution, cells with machines produce some pollution. A pollution map is available in-game.

Ooh very much disagree. Like so many things, when it’s done right, it works real well, it feels good. See Deathloop for a recent example.

Hard disagree. All of my favourite games of all time have dynamic difficulty systems.

Not stupid stuff like levelling up enemies in Bethesda games - but actual skill based games that get harder depending on how good you are at it: Resident Evil 4, Battle Garegga to name a few.

Games that unlock more content as you reach skill gates are the most memorable.

> then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them

Or even blocks them, in games that have dynamic leveling. Oblivion is the ur-example, but I've ran across at least two more:

1. Been playing Tyranny and there are mentions in the faqs/forums that you should disable leveling of skills you don't use if you do the new game+ thing where there are no level caps.

2. And one that happened to me personally a year or two ago: was playing Grim Dawn and hit my character's incompetence ceiling. This is a gear based ARPG/Diablo clone so the solution is to get better gear. But you can't go back to an easier area to improve your gear because they're all auto scaled and every map is the same - too hard now - difficulty. So there goes the uninstall and the lost DLC sales...

The good way of doing this is to ask the player if the difficulty shall be lowered temporarily just for that level of they keep dying. Then it is transparent and the choice is theirs.

It's often a very bad idea. One example is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Players are punished for leveling, and many players simply give up and have to do everything on level 1.

It's essentially punishing players for playing well, and often could be gamed by playing badly intentionally.

On the other hand, the whole Director system of Left 4 Dead works like this and it’s incredible.

https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2009/ai_system...

I think it strongly depends on how it's done and how it plays into the feeling of the game. Certain kinds of level scaling can feel pretty cheap, for example, because they kind of work against the feeling of progression you get in the game. Similarly a game obviously making things easier for you can feel like it's cheapening the satisfaction of improving at the game, though how important this is varies from person to person.

But done well, it can much more reliably create the feeling of being just on the edge of failure but pulling through, which is really satisfying in a lot of games. L4D did this, but Helldivers 2 for example also has a lot of game design focused on creating this kind of feeling.

in games like wow where the more powerful you get the harder the enemies become, this reduces incentive to get more powerful. its a simple consequence so im not sure why they do it - probably to keep "time played" metric hovering at the desired level. which imho backfires when time played becomes 0.

It's a pretty well proven design pattern.

The adage is that the customers never know what they want, and it's doubly true when it comes to video games.

My go-to example is Homeworld 2, where the dynamic difficulty scaling was IMO very poorly hidden. It was as if the player is being punished for doing the legwork to preserve and expand their fleet across missions even though the game's lore and mechanics encourage them to do so.

Crash Bandicoot did this well. In the original game, you needed to finish without dying and get all of the boxes to get the gem. In future games, some levels would have a “death path” that would only be available if you got to a certain point in the level without dying.

Yes feels like this can easily be "gamed"

For example, if I want friendlier lobbies in arc raiders, I will spawn in with no loadout and purposely surrender.. I can game my difficulty lower

Left 4 Dead handled this pretty well in my opinion (i.e. mob spawning behind if you're playing too slowly or a tank in front if you're going too quick). I absolutely hated the dynamic adjusting in games like Mario Kart, though.

"actual players" as opposed to other people who just, what? "use" the game?

Sorry, but it's hard to take this comment seriously when it reeks of "git gud". So I'll just point out that a lot of people play games, and that there are well-documented instances of games with dynamic difficulty as early as the 80s.

Nope. Ex-game developer here. There are plenty of situations where choosing a single difficulty level will make a game impossible for some players and too easy for others.

I worked on a commercial game where the only solution was to subtly adjust the difficulty to keep the experience enjoyable for everyone. The trick is to do it in a way that players don't notice.

This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop.

Do you really hate Breathe of the Wild so much?

I like when your character or your party feels like superheroes for a little while after leveling up, then it gets harder to really test your new ability, then keep repeating that cycle.

This works for sandbox or simulation type games, but otherwise I think difficulty sliders are like going to a restaurant and getting all the cooked ingredients in separate plates for you to combine. While that can be fine and cater to the maximum number of people, it's a safe approach that wastes good opportunity cost of a great plate of food catered by someone with the skills to do it.

If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a good example of lots of difficulty settings. You can turn off some annoying parts of the game, set enemy tactical difficulty, disable some survival aspects of the game if you don't care about them, and adjust the amount of on-screen information in several steps. For the latter part, you can have a minimap that shows the location of enemies once you've seen them, or not, and you can have waypoints that show the direction of some objective, or not. With all of the on-screen stuff disabled, there would be an awful lot of searching required to find objectives. It's pretty cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire.

I remember there were some complaints about the puzzle sections in a recent-ish God of War game where they had clearly tried to avoid this problem but by essentially having NPCs spontaneously tell you the solution to the puzzle at some point, which then just annoyed people who wanted to solve the puzzle themselves.

seems like this is more of a personal taste issue. I rather enjoy little surprise minigames like this.

Oddly specific niche jumpscare. Which games? Cookie clicker and universal paperclips are the household names, but reactor idle based off of ic2 has been my favorite gameplay-wise. The 2D adjacency bonus mechanics scratch the same itch tactical games have but without the stakes of messing up strategy.

What is ‘normal’ is unfortunately subjective and can mean a lot of different things to different people. Also often what is listed as ’hard’ is often normal, because most people will see ‘normal’ and decide they’re better than that and have a miserable old time.

That's because the hero's journey is an attempt to study the physiology of story telling, so it's not restricted to the typical written romance. Games just like books and movies are often trying to tell a story and it'll eventually follow Campbell's book, even if unaware or not trying to.

I'd say that writers do know about this a lot, the problem is that games are becoming progressively more expensive and riskier to make, so money will push new titles to be safer and more boring, which could be why you perceive them as unaware of this, because why not wouldn't they want to make a good game?

an old school monster hunter gamer feels the same, and being stuck is part of the fun