Behind the Curtain: Difficulty, or an Excess Thereof

As people have gotten around to playing my game, I have heard a bit of recurring feedback:

It's hard.
Like, maybe on the punishing side of hard.

I figured that the difficulty of the project in question could be a fun topic for this week. How I approached difficulty, as well as how I'm approaching it now that I'm getting feedback.

Trial By Fire

In play-testing, one thing I wanted to consciously steer clear of was the fame feeling "unfair", or like it was a puzzle with only one solution.  That was something I sometimes noticed with other strategy RPGs at times, that they would occasionally do a very heavy-handed steering of the player towards "play this way or perish". As a couple of examples for this...

• In Final Fantasy Tactics, the battles in Riovanes Castle (also known as "the reasons I am heavily dissuaded from ever replaying that title") are punishingly unfair. If you're playing blind, it's entirely possible to run into a sort of soft lock where you can technically finish the game, but you're just too weak to survive a particular battle without a massive amount of luck.
• In Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, some of the game's optional battles necessitate a very specific strategy to meet all of the objectives. Trying to brute-force past those battles is a sort of Sisyphean task, and while they're rarely required, it's sort of clear that you need to approach things in a very specific way, lest you meet with an unfortunate death experience.
• In Vestaria Saga I: War of the Scions, a sort of spiritual successor to the old-school Fire Emblem games also done by the original sries creator (Shouzou Kaga), several battles are lie very intricate puzzles that you have to "solve" with a very particular solution...and the RNG deciding that this is not the day where it loathes you and merely hates you.

My approach to difficulty was that I was fine with it being hard, but I was less fine with, in general, it feeling unfair. I dislike feeling like there's nothing you can do in a certain scenario to get better or to improve, that you just have to keep running into the same meat grinder over and over and hoping that you get lucky this time.

Difficulty is a bit of an interesting push and pull. While there's certainly room for games without difficulty, and I don't begrudge those who just want to have a chill, placid experience, I also think that difficulty is what can make games satisfying, within reason. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.

That said, difficulty settings are a good way to moderate how hard the game is, so let's talk about those.

Lowering the Bar for Entry

Looking back at the first of the Fire Emblem games I played, they were not exactly forgiving, between the permanent death component and RNG's ability to say "lol" and screw over a run. Those can be what makes for things that are satisfying, but those also can lead people to say "oh hell no" and give up.

Early on, I made a decision to start with a "normal" difficulty setting that I would focus most of my balancing around, and then add in other settings. It turns out that "normal" was...hard.  A difficulty I thought was "fair and reasonable" was actually a lot more punishing to others than I expected, and one person whose feedback I valued was not exactly a fan of just how vicious some of the parts of the game could be. They did push through and finished the game, but I definitely could tell they were getting frustrated by some of the harder chapters.

So, with the next patch I'm planning to push out (version 1.05), I'm doing two things in particular:

• Implementing what I call "Casual Mode". It's the same as the "standard" difficulty, but with permanent death turned off; fallen units will still return on the next map.
• Sharpening the challenge provided by my Hard mode.

I think it's fine for games to be hard, and I'm rarely one to back down from a challenge myself, but I also like the idea of making them accessible and letting people opt into ways to make them harder. These are all definitely things I'm learning and adjusting as I go, such as how to make specific things less painful and more reasonable.

As always, thanks for reading! Before Halloween, I'm going to push version 1.05 out, which will provide a couple new things here and there, along with further refinements and adjustments based on the feedback I've gotten. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!