Videogames throughout the years have set a challenge for those that play them. Whether it’s through a series of puzzles that get more ingenious and complex as the game advances, or through an increasingly concept sequence of moves that you guide a character through, it’s become an agreed mechanic that a game becomes more difficult as it progresses. The way a game becomes increasingly difficult, or the difficulty curve, is one of the key tools that a game designer has that can dramatically affect the playable lifespan of a game. Make it too easy and the player won’t feel challenged, walk through the game quickly and ultimately be left unsatisfied. Make it too hard and the game becomes frustrating, turning players off and ultimately kicking any hopes you had for making a sequel out of the window. It’s a tightrope balancing act that relies heavily on playtesting to get right, which is why when it’s not done properly it’s incredibly noticeable.
DooM: Multiple difficuly options available
Going back through history, the earliest videogames traditionally took a static approach to difficulty. Although games demonstrated a difficulty curve, there wasn’t any way to alter it. If you couldn’t complete the game, it was either a case of getting a friend to complete it for you, or finding a way to cheat so that you could overcome an obstacle. Cheat codes were passed around school playgrounds like sacred lore, offering young gamers a sure-fire way to finish certain games if only to see how the story ends. Although cheat codes offered developers a back-out clause of allowing a player a way of making the game easier, it wasn’t until difficulty menus started emerging that players could really choose how difficult they wanted a game to be. This was arguably popularised through the id software classic DooM with it’s now legendary “Nightmare” difficulty setting being the hardest of five different ones available. The legacy left behind by this still crops up in more modern videogames, typically first-person shooters. As time has progressed, techniques such as dynamic difficulty adjustment have been developed in order to tune a game experience even more closely to the person playing it. The difficulty of individual components that may make up an encounter or level are also studied in much more detail now, in order to control elements such as pacing in much the same way that a director or editor would seek to control the pacing of a scene in a film.
All this, in a rather roundabout way, brings us to the central theme of this post: defining the difficulty level of MMO content. Problem is, in an MMO, you don’t really have the option of letting the player choose a difficulty level to play at. Pretty much all of the content is designed in such a way that the majority of players will get to experience it, if they want to. The problems emerge when you have a clash between two parts of a player’s MMO experience – levelling their character, and “endgame” content.
Burning Crusade: Lots of content, flow restricted
As a player levels up, there’s usually a lot for them to do: there’s quests to complete, zones to explore, dungeons to investigate and so on. As they progress, their character develops by gaining new gear, becoming tougher and gaining new skills and abilities. Once a player hits maximum level, their options become more limited: they can take part in maximum level dungeons, invest time in PvP, or look at joining a raid group. As a result, your choices as a developer become limited – you want to maximise the value of the content already available at endgame, but you also wan to be able to provide new content in a timely fashion for players to experience. This is where the difficulty curve comes into play – by varying the difficulty of challenges sufficiently at endgame, you force players into a situation where they have to complete the easier content before they can move on to the more difficult stuff. You can even put artificial barriers in to play in order to slow down the progression between one grade of content and another. Get it wrong, and the players will have rapidly completed the hardest content you have available, putting increased pressure on your development teams to churn out more content, and increasing the risk that the new content will be rushed. To give an example of this, I’ll use two popular examples from the same game: The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, both expansions for World of Warcraft.
Burning Crusade: Gates galore
On release, The Burning Crusade introduced two new concepts for endgame players. For 5-man dungeons, players would have the option of tackling them at either their standard difficulty setting or a new “heroic” one, specifically tuned for endgame players with a minimum level of equipment on their characters. In addition, unlocking the heroic mode for a dungeon usually required completing it in normal mode a number of times. Beyond that, being able to access raid content relied on players completing a number of tasks in 5-man dungeons, while accessing higher tier raiding required players to complete lower tier raid locales first. This enforced gating process meant that upon release, Blizzard would have a reasonable idea how long it would take for groups to progress through the content. It also meant that the complexity or challenge of each instance was less of a risk – it didn’t matter if the difficulty curve was poorly implemented if the flow of players into the higher content was restricted through the use of gates. Over time the gates and restrictions were removed in order to open up content to more players, but by then Blizzard had managed to release further content updates in order to keep players with something to do. More than that though, having far off goals provided players with an aspiration to work towards, even if they would never ultimately reach that goal.
Wrath of the Lich King: No gating
By contrast, Wrath of the Lich King has been completely open to players. There are no gates or hoops for players to jump through, and heroic modes are available to all players as soon as they reach endgame. Only, it hasn’t been as successful as one would have hoped. The normal modes of endgame dungeons have been largely discarded, as heroic ones are instantly available and in many cases are only marginally more difficult. This in a stroke halves the replay value of these dungeons – the trick was to use the gear your character would collect in the normal ones to enable you to complete the heroic ones, but if the gear from normal dungeons is worthless and heroic ones are easy to complete, why bother going through that step if you’re not forced to by some artificial gate? The situation gets worse with raiding – players can throw themselves into either a 10-man or 25-man version of every raid dungeon currently available and are likely to be able to complete it. There’s no tiering or gating mechanism in place, which means that once players have gorged their fill on existing content they start turning to Blizzard asking for more. Understandably, the responses have been less than firm . Although content patches are planned, there are no firm dates on when they’ll arrive or what’s in them.
Morton's Fork: both prongs are unappealing
For Blizzard, as much as any developer, it’s a difficult situation with no easy choices. Although it’s painfully obvious now that the difficulty level of much of the endgame Lick King content is not only low but closely packed together, it’s endemic of a Morton’s Fork when it comes to building an MMO difficulty curve. Do you build gates, quests, attunements and so on in order to restrict the flow of players through content, or do you rely on the intrinsic difficulty level of each piece of content to control the pace of progression for you? Neither are particularly appealing to the player base, as on one hand accusations of “holding players back” emerges, while on the other the risk of unbalanced content becomes much more pivotal in the player experience. For my own end, I prefer hard gating mechanisms, as they provide a checkpoint that the player has to work through as well as a mechanism that can be removed once further content is in place.
More than this though, I think there’s a more fundamental question to ask. Do players need a mixture of both goals (I’m going to finish this dungeon) and aspirations (One day I’ll have a full set of top-grade armour) in order to keep them motivated to play a game in the long term? More than that though, how dependant are they on those aspirations, even though they may never achieve them? And does providing a game with few challenges have the result of generating fewer aspirations in their playerbase? For me, a game without long-term goals to work towards leads me to wondering what all the short-term goals are in aid of, how they fit together and where they’re ultimately going to lead my character. And as soon as you get that seed of doubt about your short-term goals, your motivation to complete them evaporates like morning dew.
Tags: Blizzard, development, difficulty curve, MMORPG, morton's fork
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I have a few comments to go on this…
There is a few things I disagree with – Though there is no attunements as such (Besides needing the key from Sapphiron to get to Malygos), there IS a difficulty curve, though it might not lead as high as Sunwell Plateu did in Burning Crusade, there is the special achivements (Sarthiron 3-drakes) and despite what you claim here, heroic dungeons is not a pussover for the majority of the playerbase – I am certain that people with good gear and a good group can zerg heroic Utgarde Keep without breaking a swear, but a newly level 80 paladin will have a hard time healing Loken in heroic halls of lightning. Similiar, new players or people with new classes will not have an easy time in the heroics – damage dealers may be able to get a long mostly by having good playing skill, but a tank can not take a huge beating without either the gear or a good healer.
Additionally, the start of this expansion have from the beginning been intended to be easy – Ulduar will be harder and will additionally include a “hard mode” for every encounter (Except one which is ONLY hard source: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/13908770558-blizz-do-not-make-ulduar-available-on-ptr.html).
Additionally, I for one does not need specifically one of those goals that you describe but rather a feeling of accomplishment. Though a lot of guilds stroke down Karazan as nothing, I was incredibly proud the first time Moroes went down for the group I was with at the time.
In a way I would say that I disagree with (Though I might have misunderstood, feel free to correct me if I am) the idea that there is less goals in Wrath Of The Lich King – In Vanilla and TBC aswell the challenge was mainly to defeat a dungeon and then go on to the next untill you were grinding SWP day and night – The dungeons would only get easier and easier the more you did them. In Wrath Of The Lich King, when you have managed to kill everything in the game (When, at some point, Arthas is dead) you can start doing it the hard way (sartharion 3-drake style) and get not only new gear but also titles and mounts.
@Upa
Thanks for the pingback!
@Rholand
I agree that there is a difficulty curve in play, but I think you might be missing what I’m trying to emphasise here. Essentially, I’m saying that when the expansion was released, Blizzard had a rough idea how long it would take for them to release further content patches. The trick they have to pull off is to ensure that players don’t chew through existing content too quickly and become bored before new content is released. You can either do this through artificial gating or attunement mechanisms, or you can do it through fine-tuning the difficulty of each of those dungeons. My argument is that putting a huge dependency on the difficulty tuning of each dungeon creates a large amount of risk – if you get the tuning wrong, you either make it frustratingly difficult or simplistically easy.
To take the new 5-mans as an example, in TBC players were forced to play through a dungeon repeatedly on normal mode in order to gain enough reputation to buy the keys that unlocked heroic mode. This replay intentionally slows players down, helping them gear up in the process, before moving on to the next challenge. By contrast in Wrath players can dive into a heroic as soon as they’ve hit endgame. Now admittedly some heroics (like Halls of Lightning) they’ll struggle to do, but others (Violet Hold comes to mind) they should sail through. The trouble is, the difficulty of the level 80 dungeons like Halls of Lightning, Halls of Stone or Occulous are so close to those of the easier heroics, that it makes it almost pointless to do them. After all, why go for level 78 blues when you can be getting level 80 blues, perhaps the occasional epic and and a collection of Emblems of Heroism. It’s this overlap, rather than a definitive break between one and the other (either gated or otherwise), that I think reduces the value of the dungeons immediately available.
More than that though, I think the key thing I’m getting at is how goals and aspirations are somewhat different. A player may have a mixture of goals, such as working towards an item, a roleplay event or similar. By the same token they may have a number of aspirations, such as becoming a top-flight raider, the best PvPer or leaving a roleplaying legacy on the server. The complaint was about the long term aspirations that are available to players – becoming one of the best raiders on the server becomes meaningless when the difference between being the best and being average are minimal. It’s this loss of aspiration that worries me, as I fear that without it, players will drift away instead of waiting for the next bite of the apple.
I guess that it’s one of those things that you grow used to over time, but miss it when it’s gone. In the past, Blizzard have been careful to provide aspirations for players to aim for. This time, in the absence of those aspirations we are faced with two stark choices: either acknowledge the loss, or create our own aspirations to aim for, whatever they may be.
Difficulty in games is hard to get right. There are some parts of both the main Half-Life games which are close to mission impossible, even in normal difficulty mode. The only game I think I’ve played with any kind of Dynamic AI difficulty was one of the Unreal Tournament games, and didn’t think it worked that well, to be honest.
Difficulty in MMO’s is a totally different thing though. As an Eve Online player you can sometimes find yourself running into some very difficult PvE missions where you’re actually limited as to what size/class of spaceship you’re allowed to take into the “dungeon” area of the mission. Many of those have over time been adjusted and changed, more to do with CCP’s Need For Speed programme than anything else, although I dare say there probably was some player feedback involved as well.
Once you get into PVP though, any notion of difficulty goes out of the window. As well as Eve, this also appears to apply to WAR. In any PVP situation you can make the fight as easy or as hard for yourself as you choose to. It’s all to do with picking primary targets well and making a good judgement of the skills and resources (be it spaceships and guns/ECM capability/tanks or Healers/Mages and combat fighters) you have on your side. The best Eve Online Fleet Commanders make their names within their Alliances and Corps through being able to pick their fights, and win them more times than they lose them.
Of course one of the biggest difficulty modifiers you can get with PvP in Eve in particular is lag. When you’ve got 1,000 players trying to duke it out in one solar system, the server response plummets, and that can make a difference. Alliances have died because of server lags. I know, I was in one that did.
I don’t really think that the gating in the earlier expansions was what held the groups back – rather they were an annoyance that was not needed. The very good players with the well organized guilds won’t have a problem with doing 3 dungeons to get into Naxxramas – likewise, it wasn’t getting the key to get into Black Temple in itself that was the problem, it was the difficult bosses associated with getting to this point that was the challenge. In TBC the end game stuff was done within days of it’s release as well – I’ll throw in Sunwell Plateau as an example because that is one that got greatly appraised as a hard and well done dungeon by the top guilds of the world.
In this one there was gating that stopped people from progressing further – but what that meant was not that it was hard to get to the last boss, just that the gate did not open untill a certain time – and when that time had passed, less than five days were gone and the last boss hiding behind the last gate was dead.
Additionally: Sure, sunwell plateau might have been cool for Nihilum and SK-gaming, I am certain these players had great fun (And earned some money too) – but those are just not the majority of the players.
If we take Sunwell Plateau and transferred it to any other game, it would mean that the last ten levels of a shooter was completely impossible to play through unless you were a totally insane shooter fan. Simillary, if any RTS game were tuned so only 1% of the players in the world could complete – and that only if they spent day and night trying and actually got paid for it, any reasonable reviewer (Or player for that sake) would cry out that this game was stupidly difficult. Making the difficulty in the game rather the hard-core modes (sart-3drakes and what they will have in Ulduar) is much more favouritable than having only 1% of the gaming population ever trying the content.
Additionally, I don’t personally know anyone who have done the really hard core encounters or gotten all the achivements – myself, I still aspire to get this done and I am certain that a lot of players do, too – Even though they may cry out that the game is too easy before even attempting any of the hard stuff.
That being said, I do think it is a problem that they are lacking an ETA on the next patch with Ulduar
The problem with Blizzard is that they’ve created an MMORPG that caters to almost every fan of the genre.
While this on paper doesn’t seem a bad thing, it creates many huge problems in trying to cater to everyone. Some MMORPG for the Casual gamer aspect, some for the Roleplay aspect, some for the PvE aspect and some for the PvP aspect.
And in those final two you get further discrepancies dependant on how “hardcore” people take the content. For PvP the arena is a great example of this, what works in one bracket at one rating is often quite unpopular higher or lower on the ratings, or in a different bracket all together.
For PvE it’s trying to appeal to the hardcore demograph without making the game inaccessable to those who like to take raiding less seriously.
*WARNING, long history lesson ahead*
Going back to the original WoW Vanilla raiding was problematic only in the basis you needed fourty people and at least a good 4-5 warlocks (back in the days when warlocks were rarer than Black Pristine Diamonds) for Garr. Co-ordinating 40 people was a logistical nightmare and often killed raiding groups on smaller servers. However the content was significantly easy. MC was doable with half the raidforce actually afking, which makes you wonder why you took fourty bloody people there in the first place. Moving on Blackwing Lair proved challenging in the start with Razorgore but then turned into a gearcheck cockblock (Vael) followed by four fights of standing still afk button mashing, a spam cleanse fight and then finally something fun when you got to Nefarian. Personally I hated BWL but I’m going off sidepoint, fact is if you could do Razorgore and had farmed MC enough to down Vael it was still EASY.
It just depended how early in the game you started raiding, which was vastly overlooked when people stated how hard raiding was. The first guys to 60 were the first doing runs for their tier 0 sets, getting their UBRS keys and Onyxia attunements. Onyxia again being a fight that is little more than “there’s fire and threat, keep an eye on both”
Raiding itself didn’t get vastly difficult to AQ40, when Satura started pointing out who exactly in your raid would afk and roll their face on the keyboard instead of actually pay attention to what they were doing. The biggest problem AQ had was for holding some of the best (if not THE best with C’Thun) fights in the game, it had the worst and most demoralising fight ever designed in Princess “Lets go back and farm Mauradon” Huhuran. But the content was also the first where at the end boss raids would down every consumable known to man, aswell as take world buffs just to kill the bloody thing, because it really was tuned to be hard, a fight that wouldn’t be eclipsed in terms of “This is tuning to the extreme” until M’uru in Sunwell. The difficulty continued with Naxxramas, although the encounters werne’t quite as demanding on the individual, they remained fights where you had to be aware and active, but sadly more demanding on your gear than your personal skill.
However the majority of content while hard and challenging to the hardcore demograph was outside the reach of the majority, Blizzard nerfing many key fights allowed more people a peak in but was still way off because fourty man raids were just too chunky for their own good.
So then we got to TBC, the problem with TBC was while it had great ideas like heroics, they kind of failed when you needed gear from Karazhan to actually complete some of them before they were tuned downward. The second problem with the majority of gear from them was the same as normal five man, and that the epic off the end guy would be replaced early on in a Karazhan dungeon run. The badge loot at the start was also bitterly disappointing save a couple of interesting items, mostly trinkets. They added in the helms later but even those were just sidegrades at best for the min/max crowd.
Karazhan itself was very highly attuned at the start, probably too much. Hence the early Romulo nerf that had tanks rejoicing in the masses. The instance however did have some very good encounters, the problem was mostly the gearcheck requirements from gear needed within the actual instance itself. At the start you wouldn’t have gotten Nightbane or Malchezzar off skill and items you picked up in L70 dungeons or heroics, but you’d have to have gotten the drops from within Karazhan, a fair few of them. Now had they tuned the numbers down you could still demand a certain level of gear but not so heavily that you can;’t clear part B of dungeon till you’ve farmed part A. Nerfs eventually came later on and Karazhan became a pug instance but it really was a case of too little too late for starting content, something Blizzard have recognised this time around.
Gruul’s lair was just a headache of an instance, first being a great balanced fight, then deemed stupidly over the top and then nerfed to a fragment of its former self. I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t keep version one in as it was achieveable but a challenge to raidgroups. But once you had Kara and Gruul under your belt you moved onto Magtheridon’s Lair.
Now, for the record let me say I never agree with raid stacking in order to make a fight doable, Magtheridon’s warlock requirement was ridiculous and had the fight just been tuned to less Infernal spam I think many groups would have been happy with that. The subsequent mass nerfage that boss encounter took was ridiculously overkill to the point it was a pinata and you could sit there and wonder “why bother with this fight’s existence anymore?”
Now had the tuning been right from the start it was perfectly accessible to those who had the time and inclination to do it, regardless of pace. To gear up in 5 mans, leading on to Heroics & Karazhan > Gruul > Maghteridon was the perfect progression route. What Blizzard got RIGHT (and I’ll be shot for) is the vast number of attunements as it paced raiding fairly.
What they got wrong was not opening some of the lower key attunements sooner. Once the content was moved on and everyone was doing the next tier, it should have been opened. Also heroic keys should NEVER have been for Revered reputation, Honoured was more than enough (lower city anyone?) Once the majority was in SSC/TK make Karazhan attunement free, not because these were hard but many people had moved on, and from someone who rerolled his character end of 07 it was a nightmare trying to get many dungeons and attunements done.
Moving into SSC/TK level the game was in my opinion, perfect for the difficulty, ok Hydross could crush but that didn’t last long. The content there was well balanced and people had no problem getting through it. The final fights in both Vashj and Kael’thas were HARD fights, not gear checks but in terms of player difficulty. They were the first real fights that came to the difficulty of AQ/Naxx back at 60 in terms of co-ordination and individual skill.
And here is where my biggest gripe was about raid content being dumbed down. While I make my stance that once the majority were in t5 content, Karazhan should be attune free, and while the majority were in T6 content SSC/TK should be attune free. They removed the demands to kill Kael’thas and Vashj for Hyjal/BT (when they could have merely simplified the quest chain omitting Karathress and Al’ar) as well as allowing raids to run straight to Vashj/Kael. This was a bad move in my opinion as it removed the incentive to take on two of the best fights of the TBC content era, had they kept the attunement in with just those two, but allowed you to skip the raid content to reach them the problem would solve itself. Instead many people walked into Black Temple too early, and this was the same patch that released Sunwell, so the majority weren’t even in the next tier of content, and encounters began getting cheesed downward before the majority of people got to see the content for what it was.
Fortunately I was just (read week before Sunwell released) on the cusp of those who cleared BT before Sunwell was launched. Before walking into what was the worst designed cockblock for gear I’ve ever seen. Sunwell didn’t make itself inaccessable to raiders because of player difficulty, but the gear checks were utterly retarded. Now the problem with farming content is people get bored and drop out, replacing them being an utter nightmare, it was a long gap of nearly three months for us between downing Illidan and getting our foot in the door of Sunwell, just because of the gear issues surrounding it. The issue of raid stacking didn’t end either, Brutallus was a case of bringing four shaman if your group was on the cusp of the gear check or going home early to do Gruul so a melee might get lucky with a Dragonspine Trophy.
The encounters themselves were really really fun, once you got around the gearblocks they were amazingly well designed, sometimes a bit too RNG and in the case of M’uru maybe too perfectly tuned. Had the gear demands and class stacking been dumbed down it’d have been a great finishing instance that many people would enjoy, instead Blizzard decided to cheese it by not only giving us the class stacking relief with spell changes, but new talents and a whopping health nerf to everyone. M’uru dead in a night, GG >.>
Looking at current content my only gripe is that five mans and heroics are often overlooked because Naxx is slightly TOO accessible. There’s little reason to do a normal mode five man because in quest gear you can gather everything up in the heroics and ten man naxx and just ohlolaoe it. It is entry starting raiding but there should be some preperation before you go in other than hitting 80. Case in point we did a joint raid with another group on Earthen Ring for the Sartharion 25 server first, about 10 of us had hit 80 that day or the day before. We then went and cleared three wings of Naxx till we hit Patchwerk and found he hit harder, before doing 25 man Archavon and deciding enough was enough for one night.
Ulduar looks to be tuned so that those of us who have Naxx happily on farm should do well in the first encounters, but I hope that again the future of raiding is going to be on skill and not how many gear cockblocks you can throw at a raid. Hardmode bossfights are where the gearchecks should and thankfully do come into play right now, Sartharion being a prime example, two drakes was hard, looking forward to doing it with three.
With the class balance sorted to some degree many encounters are doable with almost any setup, as long as you’ve got the right mix of x tank y healer z dps. There are a couple of cases with achievements that it’s currently just too demanding on a certain setup, “Gotta go!” springs to mind, though nerfing it from two minutes to four seems a tad overkill. We had a shot at it last night and after he burrowed too early 18 seconds in we decided to just lolaround and kill him after having enough, a buggy pound ganking me off and we still did it in little over three minutes, a timer which would have been a more suitable achievement.
The problem will always exist however in keeping the casual PvE raider and the hardcore PvE raider happy. Achievements resolve this to some degree but how long till the casual aspect complains that it’s too hard and that they deserve the same quality of reward? Hopefully Blizzard doesn’t bend it’s knee there, call me elitest if you will, but achievments are called so for a reason. If 3 drake Sartharion gets nerfed I’ll be one of the first to complain.
I think that the reason I disagree here (Though I agree with most of Khaotikal’s comment) is that I have somehow been used to a different group of people – the people who got to Black Temple was certainly not the roleplaying crowd I hang out with. Even though I have myself been insane about doing everything correct (To the point of exchanging every single gem in my gear for a single point of DPS if that was what was needed) and playing well, the ones I played with was not in the same boat as me. Instead of rocketing away and seeing all the cool stuff in TBC Quill And Sword (The raid group) didn’t get past moroes for what, 7 months? (I wasn’t there at the time so I am not sure, but something like it) and only ever made it to finish the animal bosses in Zul’aman – and that was only with a group handpicked to be the very best members of the group. Sure, these playes may not “deserve” to raid black temple and SWP (And I kind of think that SOME things should be kept for the good players, there should be some kind of incentive for them to actually being good other than being slightly neurotic like me) but somehow I don’t think they deserve to only see Karazhan for months and months and months on end.
With Wrath of The Lich King (And certainly with the ten man version of all dungeons!) even the players that does not invest quite the amount of their soul into it as others do aren’t forced to get to a stalemate in the game in five months and then just… Stand around… For the next year.
To be honest, this is why I am so hugely impressed with the “hard-core” modes of certain fights (And as they will throw more of those into Ulduar I am all happy like a pig!) – It doesn’t make the “casuals” (In fancy “” because I suppose that the term can mean different things to different people) feel that they are not a part of the game but it at the same time give the hard-core players a chance to shine