DIFFICULTY

I like difficulty in games. When I win, it makes me feel like it was actually an accomplishment, instead of just an inevitability. It makes me feel good.

Difficulty in RPGs can be sticky compared to difficulty in more actiony games, though. A lot of professional RPG designers don't seem to have the foggiest idea how to do it, so you get games like the Suikoden series that could be beaten by a drunken quadriplegic ferret. As I see it, there are a few things that can be classified as "difficulty" in an RPG.

Reflexes and coordination - Introducing action game mechanics into an RPG can add very real difficulty to the game, especially for players who are used to RPGs and do not play many action games. This can be integrated into traditional battles like Mario RPG and Paper Mario, where every hit must be timed; or done on a full Action RPG scale like the Mana or Tales or Kingdom Hearts series, where you must actually run around and attack the enemies with each button press; or done on a much more limited level for just a couple skills like in Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 10, where your limit breaks are the only skills that involve timed button input.

Time consumption - Raw repetition as a requirement for success. This qualifies difficulty in that it makes the game harder to play; unfortunately, the reason it's harder to play is because it's less fun and makes you want to quit. This type of "difficulty" is typically not desirable in most situations, though in an online game where you are attempting to form a community, you may want to include a healthy amount of this to keep people playing longer than they would otherwise.

Complexity - So this ability costs 25 rage point and 16 MP and has a 3 round cooldown, and is only usable when the limit gauge of two or more of your allies is between 15 and 45 percent. Rage points are restored by 5-8 points every time you perform a normal attack and by 10-15 points every time you're hit by a normal attack, while MP recovers by 10% of its maximum amount every round, and both are reduced by half at the end of every normal battle, by 1/3 at the end of every sub-elite battle, and by 1/5 at the end of every elite battle. To learn the ability you must have spent 15 talent points in the Discipline talent tree and have learned the three prerequisite abilities that are above it in the tree, and your job level in the Dark Hunter job must be at least level 15, while your experience level must be at least 40 and your strength level and agility level must each be at least 4B and 3A, respectively. The player will spend the first half of the game just figuring out how the hell to play - once he understands everything, he will typically be able to abuse this knowledge to completely overpower enemies in a large variety of ways. This can actually be quite fun if done right, because it eventually gives the player a feeling of "overcoming the system" which is extremely satisfying. However, at the beginning of the game, it is often very frustrating for a new player, unless you are really good at introducing the ideas gradually.

Problem solving - My personal favorite form of difficulty in RPGs. You have a variety of abilities with interesting side-effects that work together in unusual ways, and you have to figure out how to use them to overcome skills that the enemies use. So, you're in the middle of fighting a boss, and your fire spell inflicts a damage-over-time effect, and then the boss counters with an area magic spell that only one of your characters is immune to, so you heal the other three with an area healing spell, and then dualcast Shell on two of them, but not the third because he has an attack that gets stronger when his HP is low, and then you cast a lightning spell because using fire again would be a waste while the boss is still taking damage from the first fire spell, but you didn't notice that the boss had used WallChange and now absorbs lightning, and he counter-attacks by draining your mage's MP down to 0, so you have your monk use his Chakra ability that you never usually use because it's awful but it does heal the entire party's MP a little bit, and then one of your other characters starts charging up for a strong physical attack but the boss kills him with an instant death spell before he finishes, but you had cast Reraise on that character so he manages to pull the attack off anyway, and now Shell wore off but you wait to recast it until the cooldown for Doublecast has worn off, and in the meantime the boss uses an area attack again and kills 3 of your 4 party members, causing the last one to go into Enrage mode and gain double attack power, so you summon Phoenix which revives your party and almost kills the boss, and then you have three members low on HP so you use the monk's Sacrifice ability to kill him off and fully heal the other two, and then since the boss is low on HP you use your other three characters's strongest attacks with no regard to survival and you finally win. When I design player and enemy skillsets, I try to create situations like this - situations where, every turn, you are responding to events that have taken place in the battle so far and thinking about how each of your skills can counteract whatever problems the enemies are causing or augment whatever strategies your allies are using. So that the player is never just using his optimal damage output strategy over and over, never button mashing his simplest attacks and healing spells, but always thinking critically about the situation. Because if he doesn't, he will die.

Preparation - The player is tested not on his ability to fight the battle, but on his ability to create a party that can effectively deal with challenges. You have enemies that use paralyze? Sleep? Instant death? Powerful lightning attacks? You're dead meat unless you find a way to make yourself immune to the effect or give at least two characters ways to heal the effect. You need characters that have access to the right elements, to the right buffs and ailments, to all the healing and tanking skills you need. You need a party of characters that complement each-other and build upon each-others' skills. This is very closely linked to customization, and yet at the same time directly opposed to it. You can't have this type of difficulty unless your game allows a lot of customization, but each thing the player has to do to be successful removes alternative options as valid choices. If the player has to wear a poisonproof accessory for this fight, then all your other accessories are "wrong" choices and the customization is essentially nullified and replaced with preparation-based difficulty. A decent measure of this is necessary in any game that gives you any customization at all, but it must be carefully balanced with customization so that neither one nullifies the other too heavily.

Bullshit - I am using this as kind of a catch-all for things that cause the player to lose that are not the player's fault. Typically in RPGs this amounts to inability to read the designer's mind (how am I supposed to know that Meteor Strike is tri-elemental and is cast every 8 rounds on the party member with the second highest HP and can only be blocked by giving that party member all three elemental barriers on that round?), instant death attacks, crippling status effects that can't be reliably recovered from or prevented, or whatever other bullshit you can think of. If every choice you made as a player was the best you could make under the circumstances, and you still were able to die, that is the definition of bullshit.

Can you guys think of other things that qualify as difficulty in RPGs? Do you disagree with anything above?

What would you say is the difference between proper difficulty and "just widening the gap between players"? A lot of people would say these are the same thing. Certainly, the latter is an inevitable result of the former.

Hmm. But.

I can see where you're coming from, but... adding complexity still causes the complexity itself to be harder. If we're saying that complexity is a type of challenge, that it's a type of difficulty that the player is expected to have to overcome in order to be successful, then adding more of it adds more difficulty.

I do agree, definitely, that if the player is skilled at handling the complexity, then the problem solving becomes simpler. That's absolutely true. The problem solving in battle allows a wider margin of error because your skill in complexity made you stronger. But the same is true of preparation: if you are skilled at handling the preparation, then the problem solving becomes simpler. On the same token, if you are skilled at handling the problem solving, then the preparation becomes easier: you can fail at certain aspects of it and still win.

And in fact, I think this works in all directions. If you're skilled at handling the preparation, then you don't have to work as hard at the time consumption or the complexity. If your game involves reflexes and you're skilled at handling the reflexes, then you can win with less preparation and with less problem solving and with less time consumption and with less complexity. It seems like this is universal - being good at any one part of the game will make it so you don't have to be as good at other parts.

The exception, I guess, is if the different types of difficulty are completely separated into distinct gameplay segments: a reflex-based level, then a problem solving based level, then a pure time consumption level, then a level with nothing but complexity, and you earn no powers or rewards or anything else that carry over from one segment to the next.

author=Crystalgate
Alternatively, you can create a scenario where the player has to be good at all of them and there's very little in ways of compensating if you're lacking in one skill. One example is raid bosses in World of Warcraft. To beat them, your party has to both have good enough gear and the players have to know what to do. If your gear isn't good enough, either you will flat out die (the tank isn't durable enough) or you can't defeat the boss fast enough and some form of time limit kicks in. If you don't know what to do or you do know, but cannot execute the maneuvers properly, you (and sometimes teammates as well) will often get hit by something strong enough to kill you many times over. In neither case can you compensate for lacking in one by being better than needed in the other.

I think this is actually an extremely good way to handle time consumption.

See, testing the player's willingness to put up with time consumption isn't fun. Time consumption isn't something I want players to feel like they gain an advantage from, because then they compulsively go out of their way to do it, and as a result the game becomes less fun for them. Yet a lot of RPGs do exactly that: you can keep gaining more and more experience until all other types of challenge become obsolete. This can even happen by accident if the game offers engaging sidequests and makes time consumption seem like fun - but even though you're having fun at the time, it removes all of the other aspects of the game's challenge when you reach them later.

Making a game with no time consumption is obviously impossible, and trying to make your game as short as possible is not really advisable, but what you can do is make time consumption have a binary effect on other aspects of challenge, like what you described in WoW. You can make it so once you pass a certain point in time consumption - say, level 10 - you can no longer put extra effort into time consumption to become more powerful and marginalize the rest of the gameplay. One way of doing this is an experience system where enemies stop giving rewards when you surpass them in level. Another way is to have a limited number of encounters in the game, so that once you kill them all, you're done killing them. Or you can make a game with no 'level up' system at all, so that the only time the player gets a benefit from time consumption is when he's spending that time moving forward in the game.

I kind of wonder why so many RPGs give time consumption such a huge benefit.