Dynamic Difficulty: Difference between revisions

Video games attract all kinds of people, from the casual gamer to the hardcore [[Tournament Play|tournament champion]]. But a game that provides a satisfying play experience for one may be frustratingly difficult or yawningly easy for another.

 

This is very similar to [[Rubber Band AI]]. Can cause problems such as [[Empty Levels]]. The opposite of [[Unstable Equilibrium]], where the game gets harder if the player is doing badly. Not to be confused with [[Schizophrenic Difficulty]], where the difficulty goes up and down at random, regardless of the player's performance.

 

{{examples}}

 

 

== Edutainment games ==

 

== Fighting Games ==

* ''[[Mortal Kombat]] vs [[The DCU|DC Universe]]'' features this type of AI. Lose, and it will edge down the difficulty slightly. Lose more, and it keeps sliding the difficulty down until you can win and continue progressing through the story. The final boss is not exempt from this difficulty edging, either.

* Most of [[Capcom]]'s fighting games will make it so that the opponent gives more and takes less damage the more you win. This occurs on any difficulty setting.

* [[Smackdown vs. Raw]] does this two ways. After a few wins the computer will kick into overdrive and engage [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]] mode to make you lose, no matter how much it has to break the game to do so. On the other hand, winners and losers seem to be chosen before a match starts, so if you're facing a CPU opponent and they are slated to lose then they will really slack off and you have to carry them throughout the match.

 

** The game's balancing system worked off of invisible triggers you ran past, among other things. Going over one recorded the time since you'd gone over the last one and deactivated it. Going faster obviously made the game harder. What went wrong is that one of the levels had left in it an extra trigger used for testing, which made the game think you were going faster than you really were in one part... And it didn't deactivate, and was in the middle of an area with a fight so there's a good chance you'd end up going back and forth over it several times, causing the game to think you'd run through half a dozen checkpoints in 20 seconds, thus cranking the difficulty into the stratosphere and making the difficulty-lowering functions a drop in the bucket.

*** These invisible triggers are also autosave points, and loading from an autosave would lower the difficulty, while loading from a quicksave would not. This still applies (though not nearly as much) in the bugfixed release, though in the original version the way most people played (quicksaving and quickloading) meant that the game never let up, as opposed to dropping difficulty slightly each load from an autosave point.

* [[Valve]]'s game ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' features a "director AI" that spawns Infected based on how easily the players made it past the previous encounter. If the skirmish ends with the players healthy and having used few ammunition, the director sends in a horde. If the players are dying and low on ammo, the director only sends in a few. If you are playing on Expert and are doing poorly, it says "why aren't you dead yet?" and redoubles its efforts. Whimper.

** This is, however, a straight case of [[Statistically Speaking]]. The enemies just have more HP and shields. They still do the same amount of damage as their level would inflict on a a single-player.

 

== Four X ==

== Light Gun Games ==

* The arcade Lethal Enforcers started with a certain amount of time a baddie took to hit you (a bit under three seconds). This gradually decreased over time and reset only after you took a hit. The upshot was that you'd have to shovel in a ton of tokens to get to the end of the game ''no matter how good you were''. Lethal Enforcers 2 was even more brutal, with a shorter starting time and a ''much'' faster decrease.

*** Also, for the whole series: Playing good or poorly in a stage will change the boss' speed.

** ''Brave Firefighters'', though not exactly a "true" gun game (you use simulated firehoses instead of guns), operates on a similar principle. If you play in 2-player mode, the time bonuses for clearing segments quickly are lower.

 

** Vehicle fights were originally a [[Inverted Trope|static difficulty]] - vehicles didn't scale with the player's gear, so the battle didn't change in the slightest. They were later updated to scale, though still slower then the players themselves do.

** And in a particularly egregious example, don't ever try to bring a carrier (a capital ship) into the fight in wormholes. Each time you do, there is an extra spawn of a few sleeper battleships. Unless you are doing this specifically to farm them, this is tantamount to suicide.

 

* Games in the ''[[Crash Bandicoot]]'' and ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'' series will often disable environmental hazards and/or move checkpoints if a player dies too often on one particular obstacle.

** ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'' also has a leveling system, and experience points are kept when you die. If you die a lot, you will end up getting stronger than if you played through the game without dying or revisiting old areas.

* The ''[[Spyro the Dragon]]'' series also scaled difficulty depending on the skill of the player. Weirdly, this resulted in an individual playing on the lowest difficulty setting to be incapable of completing the third game 100%.

** Note this is only passing the level, and usually the bare minimum for doing so. You still have to do it yourself if you want the extra goodies or full completion.

* Perhaps the earliest advertised use of this is in the Bitmap Brothers' ''Gods'', which would at predetermined points give the player a "help bonus" if he was doing poorly, or spawn additional enemies if he was unhurt.

 

 

== Real Time Strategy ==

 

== Role-Playing Games ==

* The difficulty of a level in ''[[Nethack]]'' is based on the average of your character level and the dungeon level.

* In ''[[Dragon Age]]'' ''Origins'', at higher levels the enemies will start using attacks like Scattershot, Crushing Prison, and Curse of Mortality. These are dangerous enough when the player uses them; in the hands of the enemy they are ''lethal''.

 

== Rhythm Games ==

* ''[[Guitar Hero]]'' 5 has a battle mode called "Momentum", which increases the difficulty every 20 combo (starting at medium), and drops you back down after 3 misses in a row. Warriors of Rock adds "Momentum+", where it increases every 10 combo instead, and automatically drops the leading player back down to ''beginner'' difficulty if Star Power is deployed.

 

* ''[[Triggerheart Exelica]]'' calls this the VBAS (Variable Boss Attack System): basically, this means that the more point medals you collect during the level, the more forms the boss of that stage has and the harder it is. If you have enough, you even have to face a [[Bonus Boss]] afterwards.

* ''[[Touhou]]'' has this is the 4th to 6th games. It gets remarkably less complicated each game. In the 4th game (''Lotus Land Story'') pretty everything that could be considered playing well raises it, but the opposite is also true, meaning that letting point items fall off the screen makes the game easier. The next game (''Mystic Square'') has fewer things increase the rank, but the only ways to decrease it are dying and bombing. ''Embodiment of Scarlet Devil'' has the rank just keep going up over time and can only normally be decreased by dying. And for some reason it resets to the middle level with each stage. None of the other games use rank, though ''Imperishable Night'' lets you start with more lives if you keep continuing.

** Not exactly rank, but part of this trope: The AI in the story mode of the versus shooters, ''Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream'' and ''Phantasmagoria of Flower View'', [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|blatantly cheats]]; there's a period of time at the start of each fight<ref>Also the end, at least in ''PoFV'', but it's shorter and immune to this trope</ref> where the AI simply refuses to get hit. Every time you lose to it this time goes down by a bit. This is especially noticeable for ''PoFV'''s [[Final Boss]]; it's three minutes long, meaning that most people lose their first fight before even damaging her.

** And in ''DoDonPachi Dai-Fukkatsu [[Expansion Pack|Black Label]]'', you get a new [[Super Mode]] known as "red mode" in which continuously using it will gradually crank up the difficulty, indicated by a special gauge off to the side of the regular HUD.

* ''[[Tumiki Fighters]]'' makes the game harder if you try holding on to a large number of enemy ships (thus maximizing your score). If you lose these ships, the bullets immediately thins out.

** If the boss manages to kill the player, [[Unstable Equilibrium|it'll have more and better guns of the same type next time]].

* The faster you destroy groups of enemies and [[Mini Boss|mini bosses]] in ''[[Ikaruga]]'', the more enemies are generated. The screen is also cleared of bullets when you die, and dying also decreases the difficulty of certain bosses, especially Tageri. The third boss's difficulty is unfortunately [[Unstable Equilibrium|bass-ackwards]], as it spins faster the longer the fight takes (although it times out after a while).

* ''[[Resident Evil]] 4'' does this, the fewer times you die the more enemies will appear and will be a tad smarter but if you kept dying they would decrease in number and stand still while you aim at their head for a minute, also ammo and health items would decrease/increase. This would stop players getting frustrated at sections where they are repeatedly dying but arguably it removed the challenge.

** ''Resident Evil 5'' has a similar dynamic difficulty mechanic, which has been discovered to use a hidden points system. Basically, the game has 11 separate "sub-levels" for the difficulty level, changing how much damage enemies deal, and how much damage they take from your weapons. Attacking and killing enemies adds points in small amounts (anywhere from 2 points for each hit you deal, to 100 points for a critical headshot), while taking damage or dying subtracts points in larger amounts (from 400 points for a small hit, to 1200 points for dying and continuing). For every 1000 points added or subtracted, the game shifts the difficulty up or down one level. Each of the four difficulty modes (Amateur, Normal, Veteran and Professional) has a minimum and maximum setting, and although some of them overlap, Professional mode is in a league of its own. At the lowest setting, enemies deal half as much damage to you, and take 2.5 times normal damage from your weapons. For the sake of comparison, Veteran mode's highest setting is the second-highest overall, where enemies deal three times normal damage to you, and take 88% normal damage from your weapons. The highest setting, which Professional mode stays at all the time, makes enemies deal ''ten'' times normal damage to you.

 

== Turn-Based Strategy ==

* ''[[X-COM]]'' let you select a difficulty level to begin the game at, and then moved it up or down a notch once per month depending on your score that month. This was rather undermined by an [[Game Breaker|unfortunate bug]], which reset the difficulty to the lowest level when you loaded a saved game. Saving and restoring frequently could make the game arbitrarily easy!

** The monthly timer had very little effect even without saving and loading; since the game was made up of two executables, it had to save & quit each time you switched from a land battle to the world map (or vice versa). In short, it's impossible to play more then one battle before the difficulty resets to the lowest level - if you patch the game to fix this (using, say, [[Xcom Util]]), or use the Windows-based re-release, then the difficulty stays static.

 

== Non-Video Game Examples ==

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]