Difficult levels are one of the defining traits of video games writ large, but often, making an arbitrary choice at the start of the game rarely makes for the best experience, and adaptive difficulty levels are better.
Whether it be a world that scales to the player’s level, or subtly influencing the maths behind the scenes to make dice rolls a little more reliable, there are plenty of ways games can subtly adjust their difficulty to adapt to the player.
Typically, old-school RPG games would have set difficulty levels depending on the area, meaning that if the player wandered into a difficult area, they’d soon know about it. However,The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, chose to take a somewhat novel and sometimes controversial option instead that carried over to its sequel.
In short, the vast majority of the world inThe Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivionscales to fit the player’s level. That means they can usually go wherever they please fairly early on with little fear of being absolutely trounced. It’s a controversial design decision, but undoubtedly one reason why the game was such a massive success (alongside its litany of brilliant mods).
Anyone who has played an XCOM game will know the extreme frustration of being in point blank range with a shot almost guaranteed to hit, then it missing. That’s because everything in the game is based off dice rolls, meaning that it’s always possible to miss.
Although, that isn’t exactly true. Though the exact means are a little mysterious, dedicated XCOM players have found that the game subtly pushes the RNG in the player’s favor. That includes increasing hit chance after successive misses, reduced hit chance for aliens after consecutive hits, and a bonus chance multiplier depending on the difficulty level. It’s subtle, but a great way to minimize the worst kind of frustration.
It’s almost a certain that when Nintendo were developing the soon to be laudedThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, they had to try and conquer the issue of scaling the world depending on the player’s progress. The game doesn’t seem to have scaling on the surface, but dedicated players have dug deep into the games files and figured out how it all works.
In short, the game works on a point based system where killing enemies gives the players points, and when the player gets a certain amount of points, the enemies that load in from thereon will be stronger. That means the game naturally gets harder as they get stronger,including some of the hardest enemies in the game.
Everyone knows the sheer dread of being in first place in a Mario Kart race and knowing that a blue shell that’s guaranteed to destroy that lead feels like. That’s because Mario Kart has a famous system where the items players receive from the boxes littered around the track are highly dependent on their position in the race.
To vastly oversimplify, players who near the back of the pack will usually receive far better items than those at the front, such as blue shells or bullet bills. That means that whoever is in first place can’t work up too big a lead, and players at the back of the pack still have a chance to make up some groundno matter the quality of their chosen character.
While the originalLeft 4 Deadwas great,Left 4 Dead 2single-handedly cemented the franchise as one of the very best ever made. A lot of that is due to the satisfying gunplay and fun campaigns, but the innovative AI difficulty director also deserves its laurels.
Though there are some scripted moments in the levels, a lot of the zombie hordes are actually decided by the AI director that measures the pressure and stress of the player, then throws enemies at them depending on how well it will be received, usually maximizing stress rather than minimizing it, but also adjusting the difficult level as the level proceeds too,
If anyone knows about a game responding to the player, then it’s Hideo Kojima, andMetal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Painis no exception. LikeMetal Gear Solid: Peacewalker, 5 is structured through a series of discreet missions set across a series of large maps.
However, as the player’s knowledge of the game grows, so too do the enemies. If the player keeps headshotting enemies, they’ll start to wear helmets. If the player fultons away lots of enemies, they’re going to be much faster to shoot them down. If the player leaves behind bodies to be found, then the enemies are going to be much faster to search. It’s a lot of fun, and constantly keeps the player on their toes, and if players are on PC, there area lot of mods that can help keep the experience fresh too.
Following up the massive success ofFinal Fantasy 7was never going to be easy, and it’s hard to say that Square Enix weren’t brave withFinal Fantasy 8,not only because of it’s story that is essentially a romance told on a grand scale, but also because of its scaling enemies.
Just as it was controversial in Skyrim and Oblivion, scaling enemies was even more controversial in 1999 onFinal Fantasy8’s release, deeply dividing the fanbase. Some players love that it stops the soft-locking, and some hate it and intentionally keep their party low-level to avoid the higher levels. No matter what a player thinks, it’s damn effective, and makes for one of the more consistent difficulties in a series that often struggles with it.
BothResident Evil 4and its remake in 2023 were famous for pioneering a lot of modern gaming’s most popular mechanics. However, one of the original’s most subtle but effective ideas was its adaptive difficulty, which was incredibly sophisticated for its time.
In short, the game would constantly keep track of how accurate a player’s shots were, the damage they had taken, how many resources they had, and how often they were dying, influencing enemy aggression, item drops and the number of enemies. The system only grew more sophisticated with its 2023 remake, making it one of the best examples of adaptive difficulty in video games.
