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.