I have a super complicated relationship with “difficulty” that causes fights in the necrosoft games slack like every 2-3 months prompted by me glibly saying something like “difficulty is pointless,” so this is going to be a long answer from me.
"Difficulty" is how we tend to describe friction in games - the thing that slows you from completing your goal. Most games have some sort of friction, and they can either show that to you right up front, or build it up over time. There can be multiple laters of friction - Street Fighter II is a difficult game to just start playing, let alone beat. The number of movements and inputs one must memorize in order to play the game at an absolute base level is very high. Then on top of that, the opponents get more difficult to defeat, and "smarter," as you play through a circuit. These are two different types of difficulty, and I think we mostly focus on the 2nd one, but both should be considered.
Action-oriented games with no friction are no fun. It makes you wonder why you're even playing it if there's no challenge to surmount. Classic visual novels where you just choose locations and dialog boxes have almost no friction outside the narrative they've created, but this is no problem for anyone as long as the story is good.
Then there's a game like Gunstar Heroes, which when played on easy difficulty will almost certainly let you see the end with no continues if you've played other action games - but you may wind up close to death a few times which gives you a thrill and a feeling of frictiveness. This is achieved through careful balancing and the fact the game has built in levers to pull (hit points, attack numbers, hp values, numbers of enemies) that enable this kind of tuning. On the other hand there's Contra Hard Corps which is just punishing and uses a lives system meaning every move must be as close to perfect as you can get. I don't like perfection.
Another key factor is whether you can see this difficulty and friction as a player. Playing Gate of Thunder on easy mode, you'll have a bunch of ships to destroy, which always fly in the same patters in each level, allowing you to learn it like a race track. Play it again on normal or devil mode and you'll see ships that once simply flew by are now shooting projectiles. Where a squadron had three ships now it has 5. Where an enemy did a single attack pattern now it does three. This is all difficulty that builds on a solid core and is visibly understandable to the player at a glance.
**DEATH**
First I want to talk about death, which I think is pointless in 90% of games (I already hear the necrosoft chat anger brewing). Death in games is highly tied to two things: one is arcades, in which you needed to squeeze more quarters out of players once the game got its hooks in. More deaths later in the game means more quarters, so the ramp was exponential quite often. The other thing death (and by extension grinding) has been tied to is prolonging the game experience. When number of hours of play was a big back of box feature, devs would pad the experience with random battles, frequent deaths and restarts.
In most tactics games death occurs because you stepped into the wrong area, attacked a strong foe without enough allies, or didn't master the element system or whatever else correctly. None of these deaths really teach you anything because - either you need to memorize a map, which sucks, you needed more allies, which is something you'd already know, or the complex RPS system that got layered on top wasn't interesting to engage with. To combat the idea that death is pointless, folks added permadeath, which for a certain kind of person is apparently engaging and they like to restart battles and do it perfectly. Or they let characters die. For me it's a frustrating slog, I don't want characters to die, and I don't gain anything of value from it.
This is especially true if the world carries arbitrary rules. Like for example in yggdra union, early on you're told not to fight an enemy, they're too strong. But I thought - I'm pretty good at this game, I'm playing it for the 2nd time on a new platform, let's just see. I defeat everybody but the enemy that's "too strong." Then I whittle them down to 1 hp, only to learn that the way in which they're "too strong" is that they're invincible because the game doesn't want me to beat them now. That sucks. An extremely similar thing happens in a Fire Emblem. They tell you to escape, and I think - maybe I'll try fighting them. They destroy you, and with permadeath this just totally sucks and is not an interesting type of friction in my view.
Dying in a modern FPS - you get spawned a few meters back and go again. So what was the point? Also god forbid you walk a little bit off the beaten path, you'll get a grenade spawned under you or a "sniper" will appear.
Dying in an old FPS - you restart the stage and lose all your progress which also sucks.
Dying in most vintage platformers - you slowly lose your lives and lose access to playing the game at all, often having been penalized for exploring.
Dying in modern platformers - you get spawned a few meters back and go again BUT also have to listen to a big cutscene again about how this is all life or death and it totally matters that you stay alive (uncharted).
Dying in an RPG - tons of variance here but some combo of sent back to town, lost some stuff, forgot where you were going in the first place, etc etc.
Unless death is specifically worked into the experience I think it's pretty pointless in the modern era. Rogue and Souls-likes bake this into the experience. Learn how far you can get and push your limits. Learn when to turn back. Learn what enemies are treacherous and what to do with them by dying. Learn the stilted animation system and where the attacks land. As long as dying is a rinse/repeat part of that cycle it has some value.
Shooters (STGs) are a great example of death meeting friction in interesting ways. In a game like Gradius or the original R-Type, you get hit, you lose all your powerups, and you start from a checkpoint with nothing, and the game is no longer fun to play. It's incredibly punitive and you might as well start over.
But there are ways to make this sort of thing work better. I see several good options in shooting game deaths.
- restart me at the start of a stage/checkpoint with as many powerups as I had when I started that stage in the first place. I'm just rebuilding what I had by the time I died
- let me collect my powerups again (this is less compelling but an easy band-aid)
- give me only one life period and let me see how far I can get
- or, the mars matrix style, where you will die, but by playing you earn points that let you buy more continues, more lives, ships, etc, so that you are necessarily playing the first few stage over and over to get points in order to get credits to move further, but you're also learning the stage by replaying it and thus less likely to need continues to get further. This is what so many of these games want you to do, but actually building it transparently into the game loop is really important to me.
In general I find debuffs massively annoying, with powerup loss in STGs being a very straightforward example of it. But in RPGs you get into situations like "you've got poison now, you'd better have enough room in your limited inventory to carry a few poison items!" Who cares! That's all busywork that gets in the way of enjoyment, and doesn't enhance it.
So, on to **DIFFICULTY** in general.
A lot of games have vert soft friction. Phoenix Wright's friction is in whether you can solve the case in the way/order the game wants you to. This is a little annoying but also the game is so generous with the amount of times you can fail that it winds up a relatively non-frictive game. There's the threat of failure, but it's not likely to really apply. It's the specter of difficulty, which I don't love, but I don't hate either.
Games like Yakuza are interesting to me. The fighting mechanics can be complex, and you'll need that for the higher levels of difficulty. If you enjoy engaging with complex mechanics this is a good spot for you. If you don't, and you choose to play on easy, battles become an extreme nuisance, basically hitting the same button til the battle is over so you can go back to delivering sunscreen for somebody or whatever it was you actually wanted to do. I'm quite convinced that Yakuza would be a better game without random battles - I think it'd be a much better game with ONLY "dungeons" and bosses.
This is where I really diverge from my peers I think. Tim was telling me about how the FFVIIR battle system is actually good, and the most fun part of the game, but they didn't have the confidence to make you engage with it in the way that makes it fun on hard difficulty. So for someone like me, I wind up mashing away in easy mode, bored as heck. FFXV was the same way - enough complex systems so poorly explained that I wound up just playing on easy and wishing there were no battles.
I get a strong sense from high difficulty that my time is being wasted, and I get a strong sense of that from easy difficulty as well, in more of a "why am I here" sort of way, but at least I get through it faster.
In 3D action games, especially Platinum ones, the attacks are just everywhere, so fluid, so well animated, so contextual, that I also wonder why I'm here. All these things happen when I hit buttons but I don't know why I really need to do any of them. I suspect I don't need to do most of them. And I never learn which of them are right for what scenario aside from "ranged" or "melee." So I'm hitting buttons and attacks are happening but it's like when you're spinning a nut on a low friction bolt, and at a certain point of flicking this nut round, you think - am I really part of this process? If this is so rote, so repetitive, so consistent, what's the point of me being here? (I have a distinct vision of my dad trying to tighten a nut for a whole minute than stopping to look at it and saying - just making sure that thing was spinning because of me, not on its own.) The difficulty is usually "damage sponge enemies" or "learn this timing-based counter system" or how much visual information can you parse, which are all things I'm not interested in engaging with.
If you look at the Persona vs SMT games, I think that's a good example. Persona's difficulty comes from choosing the right spells for the right dungeon and the battles all wind up pretty samey, with greater or fewer hit point numbers for enemies. SMT leans much more heavily on elemental affinities, relying almost totally on magic, so strongly that you actually learn who's weak to what, understand how to switch out demons for the right balance, and wind up thinking "wow, this person who's strong with fire elements is really useful right now." the turn passing system is also cool but that's another thing.
So here's my **PROBLEM**
I don't like games where difficulty and friction comes from layered-on systems complexity, grinding, arbitrary death, debuffs, as punishment for exploration, et cetera. I am absolutely fine with falling off a cliff in Tomb Raider and getting to just start again from where I fell. But what was the point of that death? That interaction was in fact without friction, other than making me look at my dead body for 5 seconds as I mash the control pad to get back into it. Is there not something else that could've happened there?
I don't like the idea of difficulty as gatekeeping, pushing folks out of the hobby through complexity of control (I'm guilty of this), systems (guilty too), or punishment for experimentation. I don't think there's any point to making you fight a lot of battles in Yakuza if you're playing on easy. I don't think there's anything good that comes out of permadeath in tactics games.
That said I don't know HOW to deal with death in a tactics game. I feel like I might be a bit trapped in the older mindset of game making that I can't see a way out of my characters dying in a tactics RPG. In a game like Into the Breach it's okay because death doesn't matter ultimately (you'll get new people), but also because the narrative is only a framework to get you through the game. It doesn't matter to the story if your people die. In a game like Fire Emblem where you're trying to complete a specific narrative, your main narrative units can't die or the story can't proceed, so you have some characters who can die, and they're gone, but others who if they die trigger a game over, and then they happily come back lazarus style while their fallen comerades are not so lucky. It's arbitrary and does not feel good.
So **WHAT IS "GOOD" DIFFICULTY**
In my view, difficulty should be about refining simple intuitive rules, not layering systems that must be remembered. Look at Out Run 2. You need to know how to accellerate/brake, turn/drift, and identify turns and what you should do on them. Pretty simple. And it's not hard to drive and get somewhere. It's somewhat more difficult to make it to the end of any course. It's a fair bit more difficult to make it to the end of the toughest course. It's even harder to unlock all the cars, etc etc.
You do this by getting better at using the very few tools you've been given. Sure, you unlock cars that are faster, and all that. That's a numbers-go-up kind of thing that I'm fine with. I want to be able to see the shape of it.
R-Type Final is a game that requires learning. It punishes you and kills you. But there are so few powerups - get the satellite thingie once, and you're good. There's one at every checkpoint. You'll want to increase your speed, you'll want to power up the satellite, but once you've got one of those you've got a chance. The game lets you learn how to improve because it's always throwing you a life vest, but rarely a boat.
I really think difficulty in games needs to be considered differently in the modern era, and the more I think about it, perhaps obviously, the more lost in the woods I get about what this actually means for my games, and in terms of what I want people to get out of an experience. I'm still thinking about it, and maybe you'll see it in our next game, or maybe I won't figure it out by then.
I often think I'm maybe removed from everyone's sensibilities because for example I really dislike Hollow Knight. I don't say this lightly or often but I think it's a Bad Game. I think it's got an overused aesthetic, attacks and movement are sluggish and "wait for the animation" style which I strongly dislike, I have no sense of why I'm in the world or should care about what I'm doing, and on top of that it's punishing and difficult while having fiddly controls and feeling like my character is gunking around in a vat of molasses. To me when you provide a punitive friction experience on top of all that other stuff I said it's just like... get out of here with that. And yet everybody loves it, so what the heck do I know!
There are tons of games that are "easy" to play, finish, and engage with, that play in these familiar spaces without making things "difficult." We often call them hangout games, but things like Fez, dragon egg on pc engine, night in the woods, these games don't really care about making the game hard for you to finish, or getting in your way - they'll let you do it if you want, but the default is a smooth experience with good controls that feels good to play without angrying up the blood. (I also think Death Stranding is a good example of friction decoupled from death and somewhat outside the traditional game concept of difficulty. It's not so much difficult as it is laborious.)
Anyway - it's always an interesting conversation but I can sum it up by saying: difficulty sucks lol