Being Miserable is the Fun Part
It's a random Wednesday night, and my friend Zora has been playing Ghost of Tsushima for thirty minutes.
In a technical sense, at least. That's what his Discord activity says. In reality, he has yet to even progress past the main menu and into the game's opening cutscene.
Two of my other friends and I are watching him in voice chat. We've spent twenty-five of those thirty minutes bickering over one singular setting that will potentially underpin the entire experience he has over the next 10-20 hours that he spends completing the game—difficulty.
The concept of difficulty in video games is an interesting one, primarily because it can illustrate what someone hopes to get out of a game—whether they consider additional layers of challenge as an impediment to their progress or whether they find satisfaction in having the game push back so that said progress is not guaranteed. In a less self-evident manner, however, it can also define the player's role relative to their environment (and therefore, how they must navigate it).
Back in our voice chat, one friend argues that the only real way to fully appreciate any game is to play with the difficulty set to the highest possible configuration—anything less is not sufficiently rewarding. I respond that the best way to enjoy games is to NOT want to bash your head against the wall every three seconds because you can't make any progress.
He kindly suggests that I try "being less dogshit."
Zora seems to consider this a compelling argument. I roll my eyes and watch as he starts the campaign on the hardest difficulty setting. He proceeds to make good on my prediction, dying about twenty times within the first ten minutes. Six of those came in the prologue.
Somehow he's barely even fazed. Dare I say he's enjoying himself.
* * *
Games are fundamentally about choice.
Modern games that let you decide between various story paths, complete side quests, and customize your character are obvious examples thereof. But even in games that have much more defined structures, every action the player takes is in its most granular form a choice—whether you move right or left, jump or duck, shoot or don't shoot. Every single time the player presses a button, they are somehow altering their state of being within the game. Choice—the ability to actively engage with the content—is what distinguishes games from any comparable form of media. And to that end, the very first choice players usually make is what difficulty level they'll be playing on.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023) has four difficulties plus a story mode where combat is ornamental.
Said choice is important primarily because it enables the player to situate their experience in a way suited to their abilities. Psychology has proven that we engage best with content that is in a "Goldilocks zone” of sorts, i.e. just slightly beyond our current capability; challenging yet still attainable. Interestingly enough, this is also how Duolingo designs its lessons.
Under this framework, the majority of players will default to the "normal" or "medium" difficulty (or its equivalent), and often enough, they'll walk away having enjoyed the game exactly as the developers intended.
Other times, however, even this Goldilocks difficulty can vitiate certain aspects or systems of a game that complete its experience. Take for example The Witcher 3, winner of the 2015 Game of the Year award. On its normal difficulty setting, it's a perfectly enjoyable RPG adventure. Yet most players will be able to complete the game without ever needing to engage in some of its more unique mechanics, like the ability to make potions, oils, and bombs with alchemy or studying various monsters and their weaknesses in the bestiary. If you can just hack at everything with your sword and move merrily along with your day, why bother?
The Bestiary in The Witcher 3 allows you to plan ahead by perusing the weaknesses of the various monsters you'll encounter.
Only upon playing on one of the harder difficulty settings does the mastery of these and other systems become essential to your success in the game, which is pertinent because they're arguably a principal factor in why The Witcher 3 stands out from the competition. As gaming essayist Razbuten describes, harder difficulty levels encourage—or perhaps force—you to explore and conscientiously engage with the world in ways that you probably would have ignored on the "normal" setting (which, to be clear, is not strictly unenjoyable, just incomplete).
In a similar vein, increased difficulty—albeit at times unpleasant—can also be representative of a narrative shift, such as in the 2018 God of War reboot. There’s a particular point in the story where you as the protagonist must journey to recover a pair of flaming blades. On your way to do so, you are ambushed by a horde of enemies immune to the frost axe you've used the whole game, and are thus forced to rely clumsily on your shield and fists in a sequence that is intentionally made to be extremely challenging. Once you do manage to retrieve the blades, you're attacked by another horde of enemies, but this time your new weapons cut through them like butter in a sequence that feels truly cathartic after the grueling struggle of the first fight. It's clear how the increased difficulty in this instance is used to create greater congruence with the narrative flows of the protagonist losing and then gaining power—a design choice whose impact would be greatly muted if you were to lower the difficulty to get through the first half (as I must shamefully admit I did back when).
Kratos (protagonist) retrieves the Blades of Chaos to save his son Atreus.
Evidently, difficulty plays a salient role in defining a game's experience beyond just the degree of the challenge that a player faces; it serves as a tool that can help them engage more deeply with its mechanics and narrative. And sometimes, the difficulty itself—and overcoming it—is what makes games epic.
Enter the Souls franchise, the golden child of developer FrommSoft Games. Their modus operandi is to create games that make you want to put a sledgehammer through your TV and throw the controller into the Hudson River. So it would naturally follow that every last thing they put out is a chart-topper.
Souls games are infamous for being notoriously hard and containing no difficulty settings whatsoever, completely spitting in the face of that Goldilocks zone principle. They're characterized by an infinite series of back-to-back David vs. Goliath-esque battles set in an open world whose generally bleak, lifeless, and haunted nature is a metaphor for your odds of survival. If that wasn't enough to make you gulp, they are also relentlessly unforgiving in that every time you die (many times), you lose all your currency unless you manage to make it back to the spot where you met your fate.
You are always weaker, slower, and smaller than your enemies in the latest Souls game, Elden Ring.
Despite a gameplay loop that can drain your will to live within an hour, these games are universally heralded as some of the best in history. Designer Anna Anthropy calls them masocore games; they "deliver a masochistic and hardcore experience that ultimately rewards the player with an immense sense of achievement after beating a challenge that appears to be insurmountable." Fundamentally, what allows masocore games to bypass traditional constraints on what difficulty should or shouldn't be and exist so far outside of the supposed Goldilocks zone is that they give you incremental learnings every time you fail. The game hasn't and won't get any easier, but you die once and realize that the enemy has a distinct pattern where she slams a fist after swiping at you with her claws. You learned something. You die the fifth time and realize there's a lethal trap in the dungeon on the left side. You learned something. You die the tenth time realizing that she starts flailing her staff when she's low on health. You learned something. And it all pays off in spades once you assimilate it all and land the killing blow. Pure dopamine.
Newer Souls games in particular, such as the 2022 Game of the Year Elden Ring, build on this concept because you're never at a dead end whenever you die to a powerful enemy. You're able—and encouraged—to ride off and explore in another direction, take on some easier enemies, find better gear, level up your character, and return much better prepared to face the monster that previously had your number.
But not every game can just as successfully replicate the Souls formula for using difficulty as a psychological motivator—Respawn Entertainment's Star Wars Jedi series demonstrates one such interesting case. Unlike the Souls series, the games do contain five difficulty levels to choose from, but given the impracticality of designing and programming thousands of enemies with different attacks and patterns for each one, developers instead just jack up the stats on the enemies so they have more health and deal more damage on higher difficulty levels. The result is a sense of struggle that feels largely artificial, ostensibly as a consequence of the bosses being designed primarily with the normal difficulty in mind. Say there's a given attack that gives you a 0.15 second window to block or dodge. If you can't react in time, it'll hit you for a quarter of your health. On higher difficulties, you still have 0.15 seconds to react, but failing means instant death. Enemies also don't always have a tell or a pattern you can exploit (that would make it far too easy on lower difficulties). While bosses in Souls games are obnoxiously difficult, they feel fair—you'll know your exact mistake every time you die, allowing you to study the patterns and learn from them. Bosses in the Jedi games, on the other hand, can just leave you wondering what in the Ten Hells you're even supposed to do.
The notoriously difficult Oggdo lizard boss fights in Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor spawned a host of memes across gaming communities.
The Jedi games aren't bad games whatsoever—in fact, they're among my favorites from the last few years—but they exemplify how difficulty can sometimes hinder the experience more than contribute to it. Unlike Elden Ring and the other Souls games, they just don't feel like they were optimized around the hard difficulty (although that won't stop YouTube gamer psychopaths from trying it, with varying degrees of success).
Contrary to the ethos of the Souls and similar franchises, however, there's also an argument within gaming that games shouldn't have to skillcheck their players to provide rewarding experiences. This concern is especially crucial when considering gamers with physical or motor disabilities, or non-gamers who are there just for the story (like those who started playing Naughty Dog's The Last of Us after watching the popular TV show adaptation of the game). To that end, many games have begun to include "story only" difficulties, where combat is essentially ornamental; your character is for all intents and purposes invincible, and enemies die in one or two hits. Difficulty can greatly enhance the experience for some players, but it can also preclude others from enjoying the medium entirely, and this mode is an accessibility venture that attempts to combat that.
Horizon: Forbidden West (2022) is among the many recent games to feature Story Mode as a difficulty; a tier below the "Easy" mode, it's perfect for players who have no interest in combat and exploration.
Difficulty is an interesting concept to tackle, because for all the ways it’s an integral component of making games what they are, it’s also a very personal choice. Elden Ring and similar games could win award after award, but they still wouldn’t be suitable for someone who solely plays games to relax with their friends. Yet when difficulty is carefully orchestrated, it's one of the best examples of how game mechanics can intersect with storytelling to immerse the player and add dimension to the narrative. And nowhere is this more potent than in games that push you to the absolute depths of your courage and perseverance, demanding everything you have before allowing you to feel the rush of accomplishment.
A friend of mine put it best when he was first trying to put me onto the Souls franchise.
"The only thing better than being a god is killing one."
To see more of what I've been playing, check out my Playlist account.
