Current Events > Artificial difficulty is such a dumb term.

(+) Yeah! (+)

All difficulty in games is technically artificial. People generally just throw around the term artificial difficulty as a way to dismiss games they arent good at.

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You can utilize the gameplay your game offers to make an actually challenging game by enticing players to learn the deep mechanics within your game to overcome the obstacles you've placed within your game

or you can just crank the enemies health up to 100X the damage the player does and make them sit there wailing for minutes or hours on end to defeat the "difficult" boss

MachineJaipur posted...

or you can just crank the enemies health up to 100X the damage the player does and make them sit there wailing for minutes or hours on end to defeat the "difficult" boss

This is not artificial difficulty. This is just normal difficulty.

Artificial difficulty is more like how Mario 64 DS was more difficult than N64 version because of the control scheme.


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A lot of people use it as an excuse when they need to get better. Sometimes damage numbers make all the difference.

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It's a dumb term because it's not very descriptive. There certainly can be a distinction between what feels like "cheap" and "fair" difficulty. And there's also a distinction between avatar strength and player skill, which tends to be a factor when it comes to game difficulty.

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It makes perfect sense. There's well-crafted difficulty, programmed with scaling in mind no matter which difficulty setting you pick. Then there's the "increase the numbers" difficulty that has no thought put into it. That doesn't mean "increased numbers" instantly means a bad job, but typically games with a sliding scale are not given that amount of detail.

MachineJaipur posted...

You can utilize the gameplay your game offers to make an actually challenging game by enticing players to learn the deep mechanics within your game to overcome the obstacles you've placed within your game

or you can just crank the enemies health up to 100X the damage the player does and make them sit there wailing for minutes or hours on end to defeat the "difficult" boss

I agree though like someone mentioned it's not a very descriptive term and while I've heard people say this is what it means, I've heard others use it to describe games like Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden (Nes and Xbox), and Dark Souls.

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nemu posted...

It makes perfect sense. There's well-crafted difficulty, programmed with scaling in mind no matter which difficulty setting you pick. Then there's the "increase the numbers" difficulty that has no thought put into it. That doesn't mean "increased numbers" instantly means a bad job, but typically games with a sliding scale are not given that amount of detail.

Like I said to the other guy I usually dont see it used to describe this kind of difficulty, I usually see it aimed at NES games and Dark Souls. I've seen it used to describe Sekiro.

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IndustrialTrudg posted...

Like I said to the other guy I usually dont see it used to describe this kind of difficulty, I usually see it aimed at NES games and Dark Souls. I've seen it used to describe Sekiro.

Then those people are idiots.

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its basically a catch all term for a person to use when they dont want to just come out and say "this game is hard in a way i do not find fun" that functionally means like, literally nothing

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Shadowplay posted...

Then those people are idiots.

Well yeah I agree.

ultimate reaver posted...

its basically a catch all term for a person to use when they dont want to just come out and say "this game is hard in a way i do not find fun" that functionally means like, literally nothing

Basically yeah, though I do agree with the criticisms mentioned about thoughtless scaling.

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Reminds me of Super Meat Boy and how that game developed a pretty much cult-like following that was worse than I've ever seen for any Fromsoft game.
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I'm with you too. Especially since difficulty is subjective too.

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Bio1590 posted...

Reminds me of Super Meat Boy and how that game developed a pretty much cult-like following that was worse than I've ever seen for any Fromsoft game.

Honestly I rarely see people talk much about it tbh.

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MachineJaipur posted...

You can utilize the gameplay your game offers to make an actually challenging game by enticing players to learn the deep mechanics within your game to overcome the obstacles you've placed within your game

or you can just crank the enemies health up to 100X the damage the player does and make them sit there wailing for minutes or hours on end to defeat the "difficult" boss

Ive always used that definition too.


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To be fair, just cranking up the numbers can result in a pretty substantial difficulty increase. Depending on how the game is balanced, it can mean the difference between bypassing difficult obstacles by one-shotting enemies, and routing completely differently to avoid attacks, etc. It's not necessarily cheap at all.

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You can tell who here as ever worked on a game and who hasnt

scar the 1 posted...

To be fair, just cranking up the numbers can result in a pretty substantial difficulty increase. Depending on how the game is balanced, it can mean the difference between bypassing difficult obstacles by one-shotting enemies, and routing completely differently to avoid attacks, etc. It's not necessarily cheap at all.

Yeah, there are certainly some "resource management" type things that change when you increase the numbers. For example, if you double all the Mega Man X bosses health you have to start using buster strats rather than just special weapon weaknesses.

I think the places where I think artificial difficulty come up are games where "Do this thing 5 times in a row" becomes "Do this thing 10 times in a row". Is the second more difficult? Sure. But it's not requiring more advanced tactics or anything, it's just increasing the chance that you mess up the old tactics.

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My biggest problem with difficulty is when devs just crank the health.

Its why I gave up on Hypermode/Veteran on Metroid Prime 2 on GC because once I got to the Jump Guardian, I realized that a fight that normally takes 5ish minutes was going on 15-20 minutes. With the enemy just using the same ol boring patterns. All that changed was they increased the health by like 3 fold.

It didn't make the boss more difficult. It just made it boring, forcing you into doing the same stuff but for longer. That's not to say I think a game should be short and enemies go down in one or two hits.

Now on the flip, if the game just makes you take more damage that can actually make you change tactics and lead to intriguing fights (except maybe for games like CoD where you just wind up sniping everything and everytime you get hit you hide behind cover)

I just feel there is a good way to make difficulty and a lazy way to make difficulty.

I actually enjoyed Spider-Man PS4 on Ultimate because the increase in health and damage made you use all the tools you had on hand instead of them potentially falling to the way side on lower difficulties. So increased health CAN be a way to make a game legitimately more difficult but usually its done poorly.

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No it isn't.

Mechanics that only appear once. Bosses with insane health. Lack of explanation of mechanics. Time gated requirements.

Those are all examples of fake difficulty.

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VonOrdelia posted...

No it isn't.

Mechanics that only appear once. Bosses with insane health. Lack of explanation of mechanics. Time gated requirements.

Those are all examples of fake difficulty.

Fake difficulty isnt a thing. Unnecessary or poorly implemented difficulty would be better terms. I dont know what you mean by time gated requirements. Just having to do something in a set amount of time?

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Anteaterking posted...

Yeah, there are certainly some "resource management" type things that change when you increase the numbers. For example, if you double all the Mega Man X bosses health you have to start using buster strats rather than just special weapon weaknesses.

I think the places where I think artificial difficulty come up are games where "Do this thing 5 times in a row" becomes "Do this thing 10 times in a row". Is the second more difficult? Sure. But it's not requiring more advanced tactics or anything, it's just increasing the chance that you mess up the old tactics.

Exactly, that's what I'm after. Context really matters! The same action (e.g., increasing enemy health/damage) can have vastly different outcomes depending on the situation. The Mega Man X example is great.

Another great example IMO is things like the Nuzlocke challenge, hardcore modes, etc. Unless the game is designed around such a feature, adding it is really boring to me. Playing a Nuzlocke challenge or doing a hardcore character in Diablo would just make me play super duper safe, and never take risks. Whereas in other games, like roguelites, the same mechanic is super fun and feels fair.

In the end I think the best word to use instead of "artificial" or "unfair" difficulty is just "boring". That's it. Either the design of the game gives you a fun experience, or a boring one.

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VonOrdelia posted...

No it isn't.

Mechanics that only appear once. Bosses with insane health. Lack of explanation of mechanics. Time gated requirements.

Those are all examples of fake difficulty.

No those are all just normal things. Don't confuse "not fun" with "artificial"

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I thought artificial difficulty was stuff like only being able to shoot left right or straight up in Metroid and having a lot of enemies that really would want you to be able to shoot diagonally.

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IndustrialTrudg posted...

Fake difficulty isnt a thing. Unnecessary or poorly implemented difficulty would be better terms. I dont know what you mean by time gated requirements. Just having to do something in a set amount of time?

I disagree with this a little bit. There's definitely an argument for classifying something as "fake" difficulty; when the solution is just increasing avatar strength. If the only solution to the problem is to increase the level of your character, and then it essentially is just as easy as before, then I'd argue that it's fake, or maybe it's a good use of the word artificial. The point of such a design is to force the player to spend more time with the game, without requiring their skill to improve. Pokmon games, for example, are rife with this kind of design. It's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly not difficult in the sense that you need more skill to finish an endgame fight compared to an earlygame fight.

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Artificial difficult is when the AI is given unfair advantages over the player that circumvents their skill in a lazy and terrible attampt at balancing the game.

Such as in certain kurt races like mario kurt when the AI is given a ridiculous speed boost and better item rng to catch up to the player.

Which is just a pain when you're trying to 100% the game, unlock everything and enjoy pvp.

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Lmao, now there are three different definitions of artificial difficulty floating around ITT, none of them any more or less artificial than any other.

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uwnim posted...

I thought artificial difficulty was stuff like only being able to shoot left right or straight up in Metroid and having a lot of enemies that really would want you to be able to shoot diagonally.

No that's still just normal. Artificial difficulty is really only things that hinder the ability to play the game.

It's curious people brought up pokemon and didn't mention the obvious how some pokemon are only obtainable via trades.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

No that's still just normal. Artificial difficulty is really only things that hinder the ability to play the game.

It's curious people brought up pokemon and didn't mention the obvious how some pokemon are only obtainable via trades.

Shit controls do hinder the ability to play a game though. <__< That sort of thing isn't much different from the previously mentioned Mario 64 DS being much harder cause the controls were garbage compared to the N64 version.

Event only pokemon are like totally worse than trade only pokemon.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

It's curious people brought up pokemon and didn't mention the obvious how some pokemon are only obtainable via trades.

I wouldn't really say that introduces difficulty, save for some potential edge cases. That's more of a marketing strategy than a design choice that impacts difficulty in a meaningful way.
...and if you do consider it something that affects difficulty, I don't think it's any less or more artificial than the other definitions floating around ITT

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Its a bit different than poorly implemented because Artificial difficulty implies intent. Its a criticism of a developer wanting to make something difficult through cheap shortcuts rather than thoughtful design.

usually when you see artificial difficulty, theres an ulterior motive where the developer benefits from players spending more time with the game.

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Artificial difficulty isn't a dumb term. I , and I'm pretty sure lots of other people, know what someone means when they say it. It's when a game is hard just to be hard and not cause the game itself is hard. You can make Kirby a difficult game by removing lives, health, and making it so your save file erases when you die. I get the argument that if Kirby came like that, then that is in fact the difficulty, but lots of games have modes to choose from and all the modes just inflate numbers

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scar the 1 posted...

I wouldn't really say that introduces difficulty, save for some potential edge cases. That's more of a marketing strategy than a design choice that impacts difficulty in a meaningful way.
...and if you do consider it something that affects difficulty, I don't think it's any less or more artificial than the other definitions floating around ITT

It artificially increases the difficulty of completing there pokedex. The game itself isn't hard but artificial difficulty isn't defined by how hard the game is by rather whether or not the difficulty has anything to do with the game. In this case the difficulty of completing the pokedex relies predominantly on your ability to find another player willing to make the trade.

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AlisLandale posted...

usually when you see artificial difficulty, theres an ulterior motive where the developer benefits from players spending more time with the game.

Curiously that's where difficulty in games came from. And it's almost a trivial point - pretty much every single design decision will be with the intent of the player spending more time with the game.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

It artificially increases the difficulty of completing there pokedex. The game itself isn't hard but artificial difficulty isn't defined by how hard the game is by rather whether or not the difficulty has anything to do with the game. In this case the difficulty of completing the pokedex relies predominantly on your ability to find another player willing to make the trade.

I understand this argument, I'm just saying that I don't think that makes the challenge any more artificial than other designed challenges. There is no organic difficulty. You keep referring to some universally agreed upon definition of what "artificial" means in terms of designing difficult games. There is no such definition.

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Master Kazuya posted...

Artificial difficulty isn't a dumb term. I , and I'm pretty sure lots of other people, know what someone means when they say it. It's when a game is hard just to be hard and not cause the game itself is hard. You can make Kirby a difficult game by removing lives, health, and making it so your save file erases when you die. I get the argument that if Kirby came like that, then that is in fact the difficulty, but lots of games have modes to choose from and all the modes just inflate numbers

Are you saying the bolded is artificial difficulty or the opposite?

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scar the 1 posted...

Curiously that's where difficulty in games came from. And it's almost a trivial point - pretty much every single design decision will be with the intent of the player spending more time with the game.

the caveat here being that artificial difficulty is rarely meant to be circumvented through options and difficulty modes.

in the old days it was keep players from beating the game over the course of a rental period. These days it may be to encourage gacha mechanics or subscription fees.

the point of difficulty, from a design perspective, not a marketing one, isnt merely to make people spend more time with the game. Its to test a players skill. Spending more time with the game in that case isnt the intent, but a natural matter of course.

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scar the 1 posted...

Curiously that's where difficulty in games came from. And it's almost a trivial point - pretty much every single design decision will be with the intent of the player spending more time with the game.

The difference is that artificial difficulty comes across as cheap and manufactured with the SOLE intent of making a game take longer than coming across as intriguing engaging gameplay that is challenging to your skill set as a player.

Without knowing anything about DOOM (1993), you're going to have a pretty difficult time but you're generally never going to feel cheated. The higher difficulties add more demons, yes, but that causes you to change up your tactics. Instead of dashing into a room you might fire a shot to lure demons or take it a bit slower.

Hell, DOOM (2016) handles difficulty in a different way. Instead of adding demons (at least not in a very noticeable amount if it does) it just lowers the amount of health and armor you get from pickups. Nothing else really changes, except you might die a bit faster due to the naturally lower pool of available health and armor totals.

It comes across as a very natural difficulty step because now you're adding stricter health management to your concerns instead of "I've got to shoot this big mother fucker with even more bullets". Yes you can say that it comes across as intentionally making the game tkas longer but if you're skilled at the game it isn't making that big of a difference. Your ability to win is only limited by your skill as a player, not by the whims of a developer that decided an enemy now takes 5 times as long to kill.

scar the 1 posted...

I understand this argument, I'm just saying that I don't think that makes the challenge any more artificial than other designed challenges. There is no organic difficulty. You keep referring to some universally agreed upon definition of what "artificial" means in terms of designing difficult games. There is no such definition.

People using it wrong doesn't mean there's no definition. Games are designed with a certain level of difficulty which is contained entirely within the game and it's controls. When there's an element of the game that hinders you from playing the game, that is artificial. In the case of pokemon, it's needing to find someone to complete trades to fit the exclusive pokemon. The difficulty as to how you can accomplish this varies wildly depending on where you live and who you know.

Another good example of this stuff is all that Street pass exclusive shit Nintendo constantly pushed in their games. Most Americans had a very hard time completing that content and ended up having to do stupid hacks like turning their own wifi router into a pass station just to avoid having to regularly drive 40 minutes to the gamestop to do it.

That's different from say, Pokemon Go where that's literally the point of the game.

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AlisLandale posted...

the caveat here being that artificial difficulty is rarely meant to be circumvented through options and difficulty modes.

in the old days it was keep players from beating the game over the course of a rental period. These days it may be to encourage gacha mechanics or subscription fees.

the point of difficulty, from a design perspective, not a marketing one, isnt merely to make people spend more time with the game. Its to test a players skill. Spending more time with the game in that case isnt the intent, but a natural matter of course.

A lot of those old games that get accused of artificially difficulty meant to "make people spend more time with the game" could just as easily be said to use difficulty to test a players skill.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

People using it wrong doesn't mean there's no definition. Games are designed with a certain level of difficulty which is contained entirely within the game and it's controls. When there's an element of the game that hinders you from playing the game, that is artificial. In the case of pokemon, it's needing to find someone to complete trades to fit the exclusive pokemon. The difficulty as to how you can accomplish this varies wildly depending on where you live and who you know.

Who defined it? Where is it defined? On whose authority? What you're describing isn't any more artificial than other types of difficulty discussed here.

Tyranthraxus posted...

That's different from say, Pokemon Go where that's literally the point of the game.

It's also literally the point of the original games. Version-specific Pokmon requiring either buying multiple versions or playing with your friends was the USP of this game from the start.

A game being designed for a specific player archetype, played by a more varied player base, is what you're describing. In fact, if a player can't complete parts of a game due to such negligence from the designer, it would be the opposite of artificial. Pokmon games are meant to be played with friends. If you're the only one in your friend group who plays, the games got harder for reasons that the designers didn't intend. That would be accidental more than it would be artificial.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

Artificial difficulty is really only things that hinder the ability to play the game.

Tbh I don't think that's the standard definition and I'm not sure where you're getting it from.

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scar the 1 posted...

It's a dumb term because it's not very descriptive. There certainly can be a distinction between what feels like "cheap" and "fair" difficulty. And there's also a distinction between avatar strength and player skill, which tends to be a factor when it comes to game difficulty.

Yeah, I would say this is the issue. However, I don't think the type of person who uses this term has the knowledge of game design to properly express their concerns.

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scar the 1 posted...

Who defined it? Where is it defined? On whose authority? What you're describing isn't any more artificial than other types of difficulty discussed here.

Anteaterking posted...

Tbh I don't think that's the standard definition and I'm not sure where you're getting it from.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

Yes this is community edited which means this is the community consensus of what it means.

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To me, artificial difficulty has always been pumping up an enemy's health without adding anything else like new mechanics or restrictions

Or enemies that don't play by the same rules as you, like having infinite stamina (example: mace drakekeepers in dark souls 2)

The health one requires context though

For example, Mr. Freeze on the hardest difficulty in Arkham City has doubled hitpoints but that just means you have to use all your gadgets to their full potential because once you use one type of takedown on him you can't use that same takedown again

Which makes for a fun fight

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If we're going to do this properly we should take a look at what the word artificial means. A dictionary definition is a good start:

1. Man made
This meaning is very redundant since all games are man made.

2. Fake, misleading
In this sense, something like requiring a stronger avatar would fit as artificial difficulty, like I discussed above. You solve the obstacle not by being better at the game, but by making your numbers go higher.

The reason I'm unwilling to put mechanics like version specific Pokmon here is because I don't think we're talking about difficulty anymore. If you don't have access to both versions, you just don't have access to the complete game. Much like I wouldn't say a demo is difficult because you can't finish the whole game in it. Yeah, that's the point.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

Yes this is community edited which means this is the community consensus of what it means.

It's the community consensus of tvtropes, yeah. Why would I recognize them as an authority? TVTropes is not really a resource for, say, people who study game design

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scar the 1 posted...

It's the community consensus of tvtropes, yeah. Why would I recognize them as an authority? TVTropes is not really a resource for, say, people who study game design

The term was pretty much made by the community, not game designers, to create an umbrella term to describe certain things that kept showing up in games like this. These are the patterns gamers noticed and the name given to it by the community.

Inflated HP isn't artificial. You can call it lots of things. Lazy, boring, unfun, disappointing, uninteresting, etc, but it's all well within the established framework of the game.

scar the 1 posted...

The reason I'm unwilling to put mechanics like version specific Pokmon here is because I don't think we're talking about difficulty anymore. If you don't have access to both versions, you just don't have access to the complete game. Much like I wouldn't say a demo is difficult because you can't finish the whole game in it. Yeah, that's the point.

There are probably a lot of kids (well adults now) in Wyoming who just never got an Alakazam or Golem. It had nothing to do with how good they are at Pokemon itself.

And come on man a demo is a sample of the game not the game itself.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

The term was pretty much made by the community, not game designers, to create an umbrella term to describe certain things that kept showing up in games like this. These are the patterns gamers noticed and the name given to it by the community.

Inflated HP isn't artificial. You can call it lots of things. Lazy, boring, unfun, disappointing, uninteresting, etc, but it's all well within the established framework of the game.

Why wouldn't it be artificial? Like I said, if the solution to the problem is not solved by an increased level of skill, but rather an increased level of avatar strength, then there's a good argument that the difficulty is fake, or artificial.

As for the tvtropes page, it's neat, but I wouldn't treat it as some sort of authority. I don't particularly agree with everything on there, but it does make some good points. What it doesn't do (correct me if I missed it) is classify the Pokmon example as artificial.

Tyranthraxus posted...

There are probably a lot of kids (well adults now) in Wyoming who just never got an Alakazam or Golem. It had nothing to do with how good they are at Pokemon itself.

And come on man a demo is a sample of the game not the game itself.

Yeah, and what I'm saying is that those kids weren't able to get Alakazam because they didn't have access to the full game. By design, the content was divided into two versions so you either had to buy both our engage with friends who played. My example with demo vs full game is not meant to be a 1:1 comparison, it's to show my reasoning: I don't consider "unlocking content that requires access to game x" to be a feature of difficulty for game y.

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scar the 1 posted...

Why wouldn't it be artificial? Like I said, if the solution to the problem is not solved by an increased level of skill, but rather an increased level of avatar strength, then there's a good argument that the difficulty is fake, or artificial.

It takes increased skill to defeat an enemy with more HP. Call it "arbitrary" difficulty if you want but it's not artificial.

Avatar strength is the same deal. Now if the game contains a multitude of avatars and one of those avatars is necessary for a particular encounter and the game does not inform you of such ahead of time, that's a problem. I suppose a good example of this is the original Spyro Skylanders where certain parts of the game were simply impossible without specific skylanders. While you can beat the game just fine, significant portions will remain inaccessible or impossible.

Otherwise avatar strength simply reflects an investment of time becoming better at the game. Now if you're playing Hoshi wo Miro Hito where your avatar resets to level 1 every time you load the game, that would be artificial under technical problems.

scar the 1 posted...

Yeah, and what I'm saying is that those kids weren't able to get Alakazam because they didn't have access to the full game. By design, the content was divided into two versions so you either had to buy both our engage with friends who played. My example with demo vs full game is not meant to be a 1:1 comparison, it's to show my reasoning: I don't consider "unlocking content that requires access to game x" to be a feature of difficulty for game y.

It's simply artificial difficulty by design. And it depends on the player in question regardless. While some people consider defeating the champion the end, others will want to fill out the pokedex. For those who do want to fill out the pokedex, the artificial dependency on another player with another version of the game adds a level of difficulty that has absolutely zero to do with your skill at the game.

The artificial difficulty need not permeate the entire game, it simply need exist. A kid from New York will have an easier time catching all the Pokemon than a kid from Wyoming for reasons that don't have anything to do with the game itself. So when undertaking that specific task, there's a varying amount of difficulty based on who is playing it simply because of where they are playing it.

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