Our return to the Solana Galaxy has been met with a warm welcome from many faces, both new and familiar. We’re… I mean Captain Qwark is… leading the charge? Seriously?
Unfortunately. But lucky for us, we have more than enough raw firepower to compensate for our so-called leader of the “Q Force”.
Something that was brought up as a topic of discussion during this episode was the idea of dynamic difficulty. We often forget that it was a very long time until adjustable difficulty was a standard feature in gaming. Prior to the late sixth and early seventh generation of game consoles, it wasn’t always expected for games to allow players to fine-tune the difficulty to better suit their desired play experience.
And yet, many games before did get easier or harder to scale with the player’s level of skill, they just did it more discreetly, rather than shift a difficulty mode. We saw it more obviously in Crash Bandicoot, where when we kept dying in certain sections the game would give us extra masks and turn regular crates into checkpoints for us.
The Ratchet and Clank series is more subtle about it, such that most players won’t notice, but it does do something similar. Each time we die, the game begins to fudge variables like bullet spread and enemy accuracy to make the same section easier. Additionally, more obviously in Going Commando and later, we keep gaining experience for health and weapon upgrades with each death, meaning we’re also growing stronger with each failed attempt until the two lines meet and the level is easy enough for us to beat it while still providing an adequate challenge.
Mike Stout and Tony Garcia talk about this during some of their Developer Commentary Let’s Plays, where they mentioned that the goal is to keep the average number of deaths consistent across various degrees of player skill. If the player was performing too well, the game would dynamically grow more difficult, and the opposite is also true.
It makes the conversation over games getting “dummed down” amusing because even if players never realized it, a lot gets fudged in their favor when they play to ensure they have a smooth experience.
Leave a Reply