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Balancing a competitive multiplayer game is orders of magnitude harder than balancing a single player game. When we try to balance a single player game, we are basically striving to match the “skill” of the computer to the skill of the player. There are many techniques for doing this, and there is a large margin of acceptable error.

For example, consider what happens if Joe Hardcore figures out a super sneaky way of beating almost every enemy in a single player game for free. Further suppose that this method is very obscure and discovered by less than 1% of all players. Factoring in strategy guides and the internet, sure, others will figure out this method, but the overall impact will be small. Joe Hardcore feels full of himself, the computer doesn’t mind being beaten, and most players will never know about this method at all. It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. If the same trick/bug existed in a competitive multiplayer game, the game would be totally ruined.

Though balancing a competitive multiplayer game is extremely difficult, balancing a single-player game is no cake walk. Before we can even talk about how to do it, we’ve got to decide what exactly we’re trying to do. Is the goal to challenge the player? Is the goal to empower the player? Is the goal to give the player a particular experience? Is the goal to give him busy work and use operant conditioning to tap into any latent OCD tendencies he might have? (If the goal is that last one, then please stand up World of Warcraft. You’re doing an excellent job!)

The game industry is still trying to figure out whether games should be really hard or not. Really hard games challenge the player, and potentially create a lot of gameplay time because the player has to play a lot to master the techniques, the patterns, etc. They also give the player a sense of accomplishment for beating the game. The games of old were great at this, and there are too many ridiculously hard games to even mention. For starters, try Ghosts’n Goblins, Spelunker on NES, or just about any top-down flying shooter.

The gaming market is a lot different now than in the old days though. We used to have a much smaller market of relatively hardcore players. Now the market is much, much bigger and it’s possible to sell many millions of copies of a single game. Do many millions of people actually want to play a ridiculously hard game? To the dismay of many old-time gamers, I think the answer to that question is “no.”

Let’s compare the difficulty of these four games: Ninja Gaiden (Xbox), Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (PlayStation 2), Devil May Cry 3 (PlayStation 2), and God of War (PlayStation 2). These games immediately fall into two camps: 1) The designers sat around all day wondering “What can we do to make this game more friendly to the player?” and 2) “How can we infuriate, frustrate, and repeatedly kill the player?”

Prince of Persia is the nicest of the 4 games. The prince himself is very acrobatic and the controls feel very fluid and great. There’s a lot of context sensitive moves, and they always seem to do exactly what you wanted them to do. The enemies aren’t very hard, but you get to flip around and do cool stuff when you fight them. If you are ever low on life, you can just drink some water anywhere you can find it. Water is incredibly plentiful, so no problem there. Most games give you life back when you pick up some kind of health item, but then the item disappears. In Prince of Persia, the little pond or fountain or whatever is still there, so you can drink repeatedly (before a fight, after a fight, even during a fight) and get your entire life meter back.


In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, like in all games, you push a box at some point.	This game sure has a lot of water.

It also includes the ultimate player-friendly feature: the ability to rewind time! If you miss a jump or get hit by an enemy, just rewind time to before that happened and try again. You need sand to power this time-rewind, but you can get it easily from almost any enemy. The Prince of Persia design team wants you to succeed. They are rooting for you every step of the way. While some gamers thought this was “too much hand holding,” I think the majority of the audience found it “accessible and inviting.”

Now consider the stark contrast with Ninja Gaiden. This game wants you to die repeatedly. One friend said, “It’s basically a single-player fighting game where you are forced to fight intermediate-level opponents, even though you are a beginner.” Even that is pretty kind, since I have still never beaten this game. Fans of this game seem to enjoy the concept of “I died at the boss, now I have to do a huge portion of the level over again.” That gameplay model, to me, seems like it’s from the 1980s. Itagaki, creator of the game, loves to talk down to players who can’t handle his game. He released online expansions to Ninja Gaiden called “hurricane packs” where he made his ludicrously hard game even harder and harder and harder. He was pushing the limits of “impossible.” He then collected these hurricane packs together into a title called Ninja Gaiden Black. When asked if he would put in an option to make the game easier, he said something like “I do not think we should, but some people think that everything in life should be handed to them. They are like dogs. That is why I have put in a new mode called ‘Ninja Gaiden Dog mode’ just for them.” Itagaki has lost all connection to reality and has now directly insulted his players.


This is the hardest first-boss in any game I know of. Thanks Ninja Gaiden.	Get used to this screen.

God of War and Devil May Cry 3 repeat this same pattern. God of War is relatively easy because it concerns itself mostly with giving the player an experience. You feel like you are on an adventure and that you get to do many things (fight lots of enemies, swim, climb walls, cast magic spells, open treasure chests, etc). God of War views itself kind of like a movie; it wants everyone to experience the journey from beginning to end and be entertained.

Here's an epic moment in God of War that everyone got to enjoy, even without a raid group of 40 people. Blizzard can't figure out how this is possible.

Devil May Cry 3 is a very similar style of game, and yet it wants to ruin your day at every turn. The Japanese release defaults to a difficulty called “Normal” that is in fact incredibly hard. If you beat the game, you unlock another difficulty called “Hard.” In the US release, the game defaults to Japanese “Hard” difficulty(!!), but it calls it “Normal” just to mess with you. After you die a bunch of times (and you will), the game tells you that you have unlocked “Easy,” which is incidentally the same as the Japanese “Normal.” Many people have asked me if they should buy DMC3 and I have to tell them “I loved it, but you should not buy it. It’s too hard and you’ll hate it.”


This Cerberus boss will own you before you even know how to play Devil May Cry 3.	At least Dante is pretty cool.

God of War outsold Devil May Cry 3 by 2:1 as of this writing. Capcom, creator of Devil May Cry 3, is actually publishing Sony’s God of War in Japan. We can debate easy games versus hard games all day, but the mighty dollar is hard to ignore. That Capcom is now publishing its rival’s game is telling.

Speaking of Capcom, they won Gamespot's award for best game of 2005 with Resident Evil 4, and probably rightfully so. Overall RE4 is difficult and you will die a lot of times, but it's far more forgiving than Devil May Cry 3. Yes, Resident Evil 4 has great graphics, great design, and a much better control scheme than the series ever had before, but without its auto-adjusting difficulty levels, I wonder if it would have touched so many gamers in just the right way. It's challenging, but forgiving. Secretly, there are 5 levels of difficulty. Every time you die, there is a 66% chance that you will switch to the next easiest difficulty setting. You probably go up a difficulty level if you play well for a while, but I don't know how exactly it works. I do know that the easier difficulty levels have fewer enemies who are each less threatening. Sometimes, even mini-boss enemies such as that blind enemy with "wolverine claws" are replaced with regular bad guys if you die too many times.


Resident Evil 4's chainsaw guy kills you in one hit. By the way, if you're against violence in video games, you're against the First Amendment.	These are level 60 World of Warcraft players who found out that the end-game is totally raid-centric.

Though it might be frustrating to try to get past a certain situation only to find it different (and easier) after dying a few times, I think it's much more frustrating to encounter a situation that's just flat-out too difficult and never lets you by. Auto-adjusting difficulty schemes are a lot of work, and I've seen them done poorly, but Resident Evil 4 shows what a huge success they can be.

Another clever feature of Resident Evil 4 is the rocket launcher. It's one-time use weapon you can buy from any vendor, and it's powerful enough to kill a boss in one hit! It costs just enough to make you want to save your money and not buy it, but if you are really fed up with a boss, you have a get-out-of-jail free card. I used it two thirds of the way through the game on the typical "boss with a vulnerable eye that you have to shoot so he opens up his real weak spot for a few moments, then goes back to slashing at you various ways with tentacles." I've fought enough bosses of that exact type in my day that I didn't think twice about taking a "pass" on this one. Skipping something I found annoying really made my day, as most games don't give me that option, ever.

Finally, there is one special game that bears mentioning in this tale: Sega’s Rez. Rez is a critically acclaimed game that got completely lost in the shuffle whenever it came it out. It’s one of the best games you’ve never played. I know a few people who don’t like the game, but I think they just “don’t get it.” On the one hand, Rez is a rail shooter; your character flies along a pre-determined track and you shoot stuff along the way. But to describe it that way is a horrible injustice. Rez is an experience.


Well, here's Rez. So...um...these pictures won't help you much either. Go buy it yourself, which you can't, because it's almost impossible to find. What a shame.

As your progress through each of the 10 layers of each stage, another layer of music is added. The sound of your shots and of the enemies being destroyed work together to create music as well. The levels are psychedelic and basically indescribable. They are hypnotizing and not like anything you could ever dream up. Just watching someone play through Rez is mesmerizing. Try watching someone play EverQuest and see how long that lasts you. Try watching someone play Tetris or Counter-strike or Mario Sunshine. Even though those games all have virtues, they are not “amazing” to watch like Rez.

And yet, Rez is a very easy game. Most enemies cannot even hit you. Some can, and some shoot projectiles that can hit you. There are also some engaging bosses, but relative to other games, it’s all very easy. Rez doesn’t want to kill you; it wants you to experience its beauty, a beauty of sight and sound. In fact, it even has a mode called “traveling” where you cannot die! In this mode, you are free experience Rez in a totally non-threatening way. Can you imagine this mode in Super Mario Brothers? Or Street Fighter? Very few games are genuinely entertaining enough that you would actually want to play just for the fun of playing them without any threats. (Exceptions I can think of are Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, Sim City, and Katamari Damacy. And maybe Burnout.)

The flipside is that Rez is actually a very difficult game if you want it to be. For example, to unlock the “Boss Rush” mode you have to get a shot-down rate of over 95% on all 5 of the main levels. That’s pretty difficult. To unlock some other options in the “Beyond” mode, you have to get 100% shot-down rate on the those levels. That’s incredibly difficult. Other unlockables require you to get 1^st place in various “Score Attack” stages. If you are a fiend for Rez, there is plenty of challenge if you’re looking for it, and very little challenge if you aren’t. An interesting note is that the unlockable items that require 100% shot-down rate because automatically available after 10 hours of play-time. Rez figures that if you are willing to put in that much time, then you deserve to have some of the extras, even if you can’t complete the difficult objectives. If Itagaki were dead, he’d roll over in his grave at that thought, and so would the creators of any massively-multiplayer game.

I submit to you that perhaps Rez is the ultimate example of difficulty tuning. First and most strking, it is fun to play for its own sake, apart from any objectives. That is a rare and wonderful property that very few games can live up to. Next, it allows a very wide range of players to experience that beauty and fun. It also gives a high challenge level to those who seek out challenge, and even then it throws you a bone if you’re struggling. Perhaps this is the winning formula we should all be striving for.