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Difficulty discourse is back so here's a thread with links to two more threads where I discuss how what we think of difficulty is really a ton of different design elements all interacting https://twitter.com/MOOMANiBE/status/1029081068157030406
"skill arcs" continues to be my favorite concept for thinking of the way players and design intent for difficulty interact, b/c it's a clear and useful visual metaphor.
Once you recognize 'challenge' is about expectations of the player and where they are in relation to those, you can start asking questions that give you clear direction
"how close is the player to my desired arc, can I move them or do I need to expand the acceptable range"
"how close is the player to my desired arc, can I move them or do I need to expand the acceptable range"
And on the non-dev side it helps you understand where games fail to engage certain players and why. The arc jumps and the player doesn't jump with it - a failure of teaching. The arc starts so high or so low that many players are shut out - a failure of expectations.
And so we hit FF7R, where the 'normal' difficulty arc has been placed juuust enough above communal norms that many of the audience look for something lower and finds the next option down is outside their range in the other direction. Two narrow tunnels that don't overlap.
Tbh, I kind of feel like square walled thesleves in with this one, because a standard JRPG has a LOT of fallbacks in this kind of scenario, but square has made the leveling & encounter systems so tightly restricted that grinding your way out of a problem isn't especially viable.
As I mention in the other thread, gameplay features can act as a fallbacks, lifting the player into a desired arc when they fall short on a higher-level system. Souls is built on many layers of fallbacks, dustforce on few.
FF7R's fallbacks are very restrictive.
FF7R's fallbacks are very restrictive.
Given the narrow stat ranges within the game, even a player who's highly skilled at hyperoptimizing will struggle if the action bits don't click. They try to provide leeway in the form of keeping xp if you die, but this is meaningless for bosses, the part where most struggle.
And beyond that, I think FF7R does a shockingly poor job teaching the player about the majority of its systems, meaning if you aren't already used to this sort of thing or a self-learner, you'll almost certainly be lost when they suddenly decide to test your "knowledge".
The result is a game that basically has a completely steady upper bound of its skill arc, and a sharply fluctuating lower bound. And that's a rough time when that lower bound is a place a lot of people occupy.
While I don't think EVERY game must target every player, I think in the case of a AAAA game where the target audience is "as many people as possible" it'd have been in square's interest to expand player options to where skill arcs fill in as much of that empty space as possible.
Whether that's through fallback systems, brute-force leeway in the form of checkpoints or revivals, more difficulty modes, whatever. It doesn't need to be any one thing. But they had options and didn't take them, and that's their loss.
(for the record I think spelunky is a game that starts with a moderately wide skill arc for ppl into action games and then eventually narrows into a razor-sharp point, and the part that people find exciting is how the game dares them to fit themselves into the narrowing space)
I've realized I didn't actually explain skill arcs in this thread so:
A skill arc is.. Imagine you're walking along a road as you play the game. The road narrows and widens, ajd the path you take along - or alongside - it, depends on how you're engaging with the game's systems.
A skill arc is.. Imagine you're walking along a road as you play the game. The road narrows and widens, ajd the path you take along - or alongside - it, depends on how you're engaging with the game's systems.
If you're on the road, you're inside the skill arc. Being inside the arc means you're the sort of player the designer catered to and are probably having a good experience.
A player 'above' the skill arc is having too easy a time. They might be bored.
A player below it struggles
A player 'above' the skill arc is having too easy a time. They might be bored.
A player below it struggles
