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Why don't games have auto difficulty sliders?
- Thread starter Men_in_Boxes
- Start date
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
I've solved my own thread.
Developers / Publishers don't get paid based on engagement. They don't care if buyers quit their game due to frustration or boredom. They win at the point of sale.
Implementing a SBMM for single player games isn't a marketable feature so there's no financial incentive to include it.
Developers / Publishers don't get paid based on engagement. They don't care if buyers quit their game due to frustration or boredom. They win at the point of sale.
Implementing a SBMM for single player games isn't a marketable feature so there's no financial incentive to include it.
Arachnid
Member
Shubh_C63
Member
Artificial difficulty is one of the worst thing ever. I hated NFS crap for this, rubber banding and races being entirely different based on your skill level
Games should have just one difficulty level. And devs should make in-game stuff for easier players like Hades.
Do a story mode maybe for old people.
Games should have just one difficulty level. And devs should make in-game stuff for easier players like Hades.
Do a story mode maybe for old people.
AeonGaidenRaiden
Member
When someone who knows nothing about game development says "This must be an easy fix"....Go look up on YT developers explaining how hard it is to implement last-shot camera replay in COD multiplayer. Nothing is easy, all it is resources thrown away if they don't think it's worth it.
thekillergreece
Member
Don't forget King Kong (2005) too. If you die at a certain stage more than 2-3 times, the game may drop you an extra box of weapons/ammo or reduce the number of enemies or their aggressiveness (ie. VREX). It was pretty neat.
The game had no difficulty choices btw.
Last edited:
Psychostar
Member
I remember this topic coming up a lot in the past where patents had been submitted that involve controllers that track your heart rate and sweat or something to determine how you are feeling playing the game and adapt accordingly.
Personally, I think anything that automatically adjusts your challenge is a big no for me. If I want to blast through a video game, I'll turn on the EZ mode myself. Likewise, I'd very much like to lock in a difficulty and work through its associated challenges so that I might clear through and feel that accomplishment on completion.
The idea of a game always being easy to win sounds god awful to me. If there's no challenge, then I am not gaming, in which case I am better off putting on a movie.
Personally, I think anything that automatically adjusts your challenge is a big no for me. If I want to blast through a video game, I'll turn on the EZ mode myself. Likewise, I'd very much like to lock in a difficulty and work through its associated challenges so that I might clear through and feel that accomplishment on completion.
The idea of a game always being easy to win sounds god awful to me. If there's no challenge, then I am not gaming, in which case I am better off putting on a movie.
Gandih42
Member
Generally, I would say hard pass on a feature like this. Most single-player games represent a series of challenges to overcome, with an escalating level of difficulty that is ideally tuned to provide a sense of accomplishment when overcome.
Static difficulty gives you a clear bar to cross and makes the sense of accomplishment more tangible, as you keep improving your performance relative to the goal.
If the goal shifts (with dynamically changing difficulty), you could lose that. I would say games that use level-scaling are guilty of this at some level. In that case, the satisfaction from numerical Stat-based progression is attenuated by the dynamic scaling.
That being said, difficulty is also a pacing mechanism, and I can imagine situations where you might use some sort of dynamic difficulty system to enforce the intended pacing / feel of a game. I think this is tricky and has lots of pit-falls, but it would be cool to see experimentation around this in my opinion.
Static difficulty gives you a clear bar to cross and makes the sense of accomplishment more tangible, as you keep improving your performance relative to the goal.
If the goal shifts (with dynamically changing difficulty), you could lose that. I would say games that use level-scaling are guilty of this at some level. In that case, the satisfaction from numerical Stat-based progression is attenuated by the dynamic scaling.
That being said, difficulty is also a pacing mechanism, and I can imagine situations where you might use some sort of dynamic difficulty system to enforce the intended pacing / feel of a game. I think this is tricky and has lots of pit-falls, but it would be cool to see experimentation around this in my opinion.
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