Opinion – Super Mario Odyssey Does Difficulty Right

I remember playing the original Super Mario Bros. on the NES.  Six year old me was delighted by the bright colors, the neat challenges, and the whole newness of it all.  To the shock of no one, a young child playing his first video game wasn’t very good at it.  I’d constantly play, getting a little further each time until I ran into one level that I just couldn’t beat.

And that was it.

Game over.

SMB’s approach to difficulty was static and linear.  The game gave the player no options to modulate the challenge (static) and forced the player to face each challenge in a specific order (warp pipes excluded).  This mean that, when players faced a level they couldn’t surmount, it was game over.  The rest of the game’s content was locked behind a challenge the player would never beat.  SMB had nothing left for them.

Some games still operate to this way and to good effect.  Plenty of players love to test their mettle against a seemingly impossible challenge until they finally figure it out.  The challenge is the point rather than the obstacle to fun.  Other games use linear modeling to lay out sequential story beats or achieve a particular thematic progression.  It’s worth noting that these games generally have lower difficulty curves to ensure most players can get to the end.

Both styles have their virtues, but neither fits the Mario games particularly well.  Mario is historically family friendly making the hardcore approach contrary to the fun and accessible ethos of the series.  Alternatively, dumbing down the challenge would rob Mario of its entire reason for being.  More than any other series on the market, Mario sets its focus on pure fun through game mechanics.  The fun comes from figuring out a puzzle, executing a tough jump, or beating a boss. Making the puzzle easier, the jump shorter, or the boss slower reduces the feeling of accomplishment.  The challenge for Nintendo is always trying to include enough difficulty to make the player feel like they’ve overcome a real hurdle, but not to the point where it becomes frustrating or simplistic.  Given the wide variety of player skills, this seemed like an impossible task.

At least, until Super Mario Odyssey.

The genius of SMO’s difficulty is that it effectively allows the player to set the difficulty by choosing which challenges they want to face.  Players must collect a certain amount of “Power Moons” on each level, but which Power Moons are largely left up to them.  SMO’s level contain a plethora of levels to complete ranging from the dead simple (butt stomp this hill) to the fiendishly complex (jump from rotating platform to rotating platform while dodging enemies).  Low skill players can pick up the simple Power Moons while their more skilled counterparts can grab the more challenging ones.  Even better, the hard levels can get even harder by putting additional collectables in even harder to reach places giving the more committed players something to reach for.  One game can meet all needs without sacrificing any part of their audience.

And that is the true genius of SMO.  Nintendo has finally figured out how to appeal to a broader audience without alienating another chunk.  As an added bonus, SMO is now a game that can grow with its players giving new challenges that 9 year old me or his 12 year old successor would have loved.  Well done.

Opinion – Balancing for Goodness!

Back off, I’m right on the edge.

In my sickness enforced downtime, I spent a lot of time with the Playstation 2 classic, Persona 3: FES (It’s still awesome.  Go check it out).  I recently ran across the mid boss, Sleeping Tables, (Enemy names are still ridiculous.  Still go check it out.) who proceeded to annihilate my party.  After several attempts resulting in my quick and ignominious death, I consulted online guides who helpfully informed me that he was going to murder me.  Sleeping Tables is an example of a poorly balanced boss fight.  He does tons of damage, ignores previous strategies, and has no effective means of dying except luck for the players.  This got me thinking: what are some of the challenges in balancing difficulty?

The first and most difficult problem is player skill.  Players come from a wide variety of skill levels that don’t align on a single scale (good to bad), but reflect the player’s competencies at a number of tasks.  Some player’s may have excellent twitch skills while others are great at formulating strategies.  Double Fine’s recent release, Hack n’ Slash, relies on coding ability beyond the average gamer’s experience. When building a game, it’s hard to imagine what the typical gamer looks like in terms of jumping, dodging, attacking, puzzle solving and the tons of other tasks that games ask the player to perform.  This gets even more complicated when the developer tries to modify these skills along the previously mentioned sliding scale.  Inherent in the concept of an easy, medium, or hard mode is the notion that, what each mode changes, specifically addresses the skills of players.  If easy mode allows players to take more damage, then it might have zero effect on a player who dies to instant death jumping puzzles.  After all, absorbing ten extra bullets doesn’t save the player from falling into a chasm of doom.

Past decisions also matter in establishing difficulty.  Many games allow player decisions to carry across sections of gameplay.  In some of the grand RPGs, player actions may result in the death of a character or the developing of a certain skill tree.  If that character is then vital to defeating a boss or the skill tree is weak against an enemy, then the player is boxed in by their previous choices.  Developers must account for the many ways players play their games and be even more cautious with end game material that could require the player to replay the whole game if they made the “wrong” choice in the beginning.  This also effects the smaller decisions.  Standard FPS games, not known for carrying choices across the game, still have smaller decisions that can have major effects on player difficulty.  Everything from gun choice to positioning on a map can make a game harder or easier.  Getting pinned behind a wall make one fight unwinnable while taking a sniping position atop the rafters make the same fight a pathetic turkey shoot.

Size also matters.  The longer a game is, the more likely the developer is to include new elements that test the player’s skills and strategies in new ways.  This creates ever more scenarios that the developer will need to test to ensure the appropriate difficulty.  Size of the game also makes the difficulty harder to test.  In the original God of War, one of the final stages had the player climbing up a series of pillars with blades attached.  The pillars rotated and the goal was to both climb up and avoid the moving blades.  Unfortunately, the God of War developers ran out of time and were unable to test that section.  As a result, an impossibly hard challenge made its way in, much to the chagrin of many a God of War player who was staring enviously at the end.  Of course, the developer should have fully tested their game, but the size of the game makes it hard to check every aspect of it, particularly with limited resources.

Finally, developers and testers have a deeper knowledge of a game than the vast majority of their players.  Not only do they program every aspect of their creation, but they also play it to test out these changes.  This means that developers and testers are approaching their game with far more practice and knowledge than their players will have.  It’s hard to divorce yourself from your knowledge and easy to forget that an “easy” jump wasn’t so “easy” the first 20 times you tried it.  By the time a game ships, that jump has probably been tried thousands of time.

There are a ton of challenges when trying to balance a game.  It helps if the developer can a) get fresh eyes on near finished code and b) has a clear understanding of their target demographic.  Fresh eyes allow the developer to understand how a new player would approach a game without the benefit of many playthroughs.  Understanding the target demographic gives the developer an idea of who will play their game, and what level of skill they bring to the table.  Even then, it’s hard to get the difficulty just right.

….but Sleeping Tables is still going to die.