Random Difficulty Setting

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
The Right Question!

In Poll Question 045 I asked “Would you buy and play a game that only had one difficulty setting?”. It was a badly worded question because I meant that the only level available was the HARD setting. Whilst posting a reply comment I had a flash idea….

Random Difficulty Setting!

In comment 19 I thoughtlessly suggested a random difficulty setting but immediately after posting it I reconsidered it. Perhaps it would be interesting to see how it would play.

Here’s some thinking behind it:

  • The player still sets a base difficulty setting as normal - probably Easy, Mdeium and Hard.
  • The game engine assigns the setting to approximately 70% of the game (This figure could be user configurable).
  • The remaining percentage is randomly assigned difficulty levels.
The Details

Not being a game developer myself I’m not entirely sure how this would be accomplished. I suppose adjusting individual enmies’ settings is difficult or perhaps currently impossible. Perhaps sections of levels could be assigned difficulties and these would include:

  • Number of enemies
  • Skill level of enemies
  • Placement of enemies
  • Placement and amount of ammunition
  • Placement and amount of health
  • Placement and amount of cover

Perhaps there would be other variables, like maximum speed of vehicles.

Conclusion

Back in January 2005 I wrote a post entitled Replayability and Difficulty Settings. In it, and I had forgotten about it completely until I researched PP for this post, I mention randomness but didn’t go into details.

I believe replayability is very, very important and developers should do more to make their games replayable.

What do you think?

About this entry

Published:
26th August 2007 at 5:03 pm
Category:
Phillip's Blog
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