 Alright so I'm late getting this one up because my wife and I went away on vacation and also I just been having trouble getting this thing together. Coming up I'm still writing my piece on Dead Space 2, I'm going to do a real quick look at what we got with the Dark Souls remaster and I'll be doing a video about how, despite my initial warm and fuzzies after Destiny 2's forsaken reveal, I'm just as skeptical as ever about the game's future. But today we're going to take a look at one of the most important things game developers need to deal with when designing. Difficulty. Difficulty can make or break a game experience and how hard a game is and how that difficulty is achieved needs to be a central focus when developers make games. Beyond even that, if developers and publishers want to sell their games to as many people as possible, and they do, they've got to thread the needle on difficulty. As always, if you like what I have to say or how I sound sane it, do us both a favor and click the like and subscribe buttons. And more importantly tell a friend about the channel if you can, that would be awesome. So today we are going to really drill down on how hard a game should be. We'll examine several games that do difficulty right, like Dark Souls, Fury, Binding of Isaac and Titanfall 2. We'll take a look at a couple games that fall on their faces with their difficulty like Destiny 2 and Cuphead, and we'll examine a couple games that do it well but could do it even better. We'll talk about difficulty and accessibility and the importance of allowing the player to adjust the difficulty of the game. Eventually we will get to Titanfall 2's master difficulty and Destiny 2's truly putrid campaign for two games that almost perfectly demonstrate how difficulty can completely change how your game plays for the worse. But as always, let's get a really brief history out of the way. Difficulty as Monetization Strategy Video games in the early days made their money by tempting players to keep pumping quarters into the machine. Computing power in the days before the PC was very expensive and arcade machines could cost upwards of $3,000. Looking for inflation, we're talking about a $6,000 investment for one machine. In order to just break even, a machine had to be played thousands of times, maybe tens of thousands of times, which meant that early video game developers had to balance fun and difficulty. Make the game too hard and players will get frustrated and walk away, looking at you, Dragon's Lair. Make a game too easy and a player can sit at the machine for an hour on a single quarter. As a result, the best early games were games of skill. Pac-Man was addictively fun because it was hard, possible, and not bullshit. Fail states felt earned. However, games also couldn't ramp difficulty up too slowly. So most games had challenging but doable early stages before ramping up to extreme difficulty very quickly. This model still exists in the arcade today, by the way. If you get a chance, go play a rail shooter in a bowling alley or a mall. You'll find that the first level is tricky but fun before ramping up to near impossibility within a level or two. Because almost all the games people had played had this difficulty system, and indeed because all developers had come from this business, the early console games followed the same formula. Games are only fun when they have some difficulty, but at the same time players at home want to finish games. A save feature was a really rare thing in the early console space. While it took a long time for games to ditch the punitive bullshit difficulty found in later levels of old arcade games, eventually developers realized they didn't have a monetary reason to crush the hopes and dreams of their players anymore. This realization happened right around the time that game developers also realized they could push the medium forward and expand its audience by marrying storytelling to gameplay. The nature of difficulty in games meant that it was functionally impossible to have narrative and story as a fundamental feature of games. If you sell somebody a story, they'll get right pissed off if they can't get the ending. Imagine movie theaters showing films but not allowing patrons to see the ending if they failed a physical test. People like stories and they hate not hearing the endings of stories. Something had to give. Once games decided in the early aughts that they were going to tell stories, they needed to tone down difficulty enough that the average player could reasonably be expected to see the ending. It's almost impossible to even imagine these days having a narrative story that players couldn't finish. Lots of kids never beat Mario and they didn't care at all. Playing the game mechanically was the main selling point, but most narrative games need to balance difficulty so that players can get to the end. This is why almost all story focused games are, by and large, far too easy. It's also why most narrative games these days have several difficulty settings. These settings are usually lazily implemented, but that's a whole other can of worms that we don't have time for here. Okay, I told you to be brief this time. We've briefly gone over the history of difficulty and the considerations that companies take when designing their games. Let's get to examining which games do it well and which don't. Dark Souls. Perfectly difficult. Let's begin by examining a few games that get difficulty right by starting with a notoriously hard game in Dark Souls. Dark Souls uses lost progress as its primary difficulty mechanic. A player levels up not only by defeating enemies and earning XP, in this game, Souls, obviously, but also by getting to a checkpoint without dying. The checkpoints are spread out and need to be found through combat and exploration. A newcomer to the series will find even the earliest enemies extremely challenging because every enemy has the ability to kill the player in only a few hits. This can be overwhelming to the player at first. But the beauty of Dark Souls, especially the first game, is that extreme thumb skill isn't required to succeed. Very quickly, a player will realize that the non-boss enemies only have a few highly telegraphed attacks and that all of these attacks can be exploited or avoided with only a few fairly simple techniques. Layered on top of the general learning curve, Dark Souls featured several other mechanics that organically lower the difficulty. The player could simply grind the areas that they'd already figured out for Souls and overlevel for each area. They can use magic and pull enemies. They can cheese difficult enemies with a bow, or they can exploit what seems to be purposely very limited AI in order to confuse enemy pathing and reset their aggro range. Or, as I taught my seven-year-old son to do, you can just meticulously learn the generous parry timing and backstab mechanics and parry and backstab spam almost anything in the game. The point is, there are many ways a player who isn't as skilled can make the game easier while still enjoying most of what it has to offer. And the same is true for players who want the game harder. You can choose to play without magic, or bows. You can choose to wear no armor. You can limit yourself and what equipment you use. You can decide to not level up at all. Or for players like me who want a bit more challenge but nothing crazy, you can just continue running up the NG plus cycle. While I think Dark Souls is probably the best implementation of difficulty in gaming, that doesn't mean it can't improve. I still remain convinced that adding an actual difficulty slider to the newer Souls games would only mean that more people could enjoy them. Something as simple as slightly reducing damage values from enemy attacks would make the game much more forgiving to the newer player, especially in the newer games. You'll hear people say how the newer games are easier, but in my opinion, those people are hilariously wrong. The newer games are much, much faster. They have enemies with much more varied movesets and bosses that hop all over the place. The final boss of Bloodborne's DLC is orders of magnitude more difficult than any Dark Souls 1 boss. The newer games require much quicker reaction times, feature multiple enemies and multiple bosses far more often and have very little room for error. These games only seem easier because veteran players have played them many, many times. This is an important point we'll get more into later, but Frum has actually done an excellent job slowly ramping up the difficulty of the newer games so that the experience of playing Bloodborne feels about the same as the difficulty the first time you played Dark Souls. A brand new player, however? Fighting Father Gascon is someone who's never played a Soulsborne game must be an absolute nightmare. In order to make the newer games as accessible to a brand new audience as the early games were, Frum should consider adding a difficulty slider. But even without a slider, there are still enough tools for a new player to find their way. Dark Souls lets you set your own difficulty with only the tools and mechanics within the game. It is masterful use of difficulty. Fury. I got to Fury late. It was almost an entire year by the time I got around to it and its reputation as a brutally hard game turned me off for a while. I like hard games, but I'm not always in the mood for them. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game, while hard, wasn't nearly as hard as people have been claiming. Fury does require, like any good game, that the player master the mechanics to progress, certainly. But, unlike the games we'll get to next, it isn't needlessly cruel. It doesn't punish players for no reason. And by being nearly perfectly balanced between difficult and forgiving, it remains just a joy to play. In fact, gamer's obsession with praising a game for being hard almost certainly did this title a disservice. So before we go any further, if you'd heard of this game and decided you weren't interested because you saw 1,000 toxic try-hards online splooging about how difficult it was, go buy it. It's not that hard. It's just about perfect, actually. All right, listen. It is very easy to make a game difficult. I can design a game that has 1,000 bullet-sponge enemies that can one-shot you and requires that you demonstrate absolute perfection to progress. But that would be frustrating and stupid. What's hard is threading the needle. A game needs to challenge, or else it's just a movie, looking at you uncharted, but it also has to keep the player going by being a realistic goal. Fury, while played on normal, does this about as well as any game I've ever played. For some reason, they instituted an easy mode by pulling out the coolest and most challenging phases from boss fights, something I think is beyond fucking stupid when the far easier way to accomplish that is already in the game. But whatever. How do they balance this game so well? The boss fights all have checkpointing. For me, the most frustrating Soulsborne boss fights are almost always the multiple phase fights. A perfect example is one of their coolest fights and Sister Frida. This fight is three separate fights, each of which on its own is fantastic. The first phase is relatively easy, but can be failed the first time or two as you learn the mechanics. The second phase is a classic multi-boss clusterfuck that is quite challenging. And the third phase is hard as fuck with the boss on constant attack. Most players will fail the fight in the second and third phase. And when they do, they'll have to fight through the first phase that they have totally mastered again and again and again. For a hard boss like this, you can end up fighting that first phase 10 times. It's frustrating and annoying. And after a while, that frustration can lead to stupid mistakes that waste preciously needed health. I find this fight and a few like it the only time that Soulsborne fails at its difficulty. There are a bunch of ways to avoid tedium and inconvenience as a punishment mechanic. You could simply have boss checkpointing. Or if you want to make sure the players have mastered the mechanic, you can only checkpoint after they complete a perfect phase. So you would hit the phase two checkpoint for Sister Frida only after you'd beat phase one without taking damage. Something I did almost every time, by the way. Whatever. The point is that checkpoints are a good way to keep difficulty from overwhelming the player. Very checkpoints each phase of a boss. The player has three lives. If it gets knocked down a fourth time, the fight is over and it has to start over. But after you clear a phase, you get one of those lives back. On top of that, the game's parry mechanic heals the player so mistakes can be recovered from. And while the game certainly does require mastery, it never requires perfection from the player. This simple checkpointing system means that while fury is indeed difficult, it never feels punitive or cruel. The player can progress without being absolutely perfect. And importantly, the game is for the most part much more about pattern recognition than it is about twitch skill. So with enough patience, the game is beatable by most players. So fury's mechanics at the default difficulty are challenging and fun, while still giving players enough tools and leeway to never let the frustration get ridiculous. But it also has a very poorly implemented easy mode. Instead of giving players more ways to beat the game, fury takes things away from the player by removing the most difficult phases of the fight. This doesn't make sense to me. If you are a game developer and spent a tremendous amount of time, effort and money designing boss fights, why would you want to implement a mode that means some players will never see your work? In a game like fury with a fantastic and hypnotic visual presentation of the boss attacks or half the joy, this is just insane as far as I'm concerned. A simple way to have an easy mode without removing boss phases would have been to make it so the player gets all of his lives back after clearing a phase. An even easier mode would do that and double the heal you get from a parry. And the easiest mode would do all that and double the amount of lives the player gets. Fury is such a good game that I would like everyone to be able to play it. People who are bad at games or disabled or young kids. What's the harm in giving those players a way to play the game with all of its mechanics and phases but just simply more room for error? There is no harm. I always play games on hard from the start because normal on most modern games is generally a bit too easy with the one recent anomaly being Wolfenstein 2 which was just fucking awful and hard. In fact, quick aside, the difficulty was so annoying in that game that it's probably the first time I played on easy that I can even remember. Anyway, Fury's default difficulty is about perfect for somebody who plays a lot of twitchy video games. And I think the game's mechanics are perfectly balanced for challenge and mercy. It's just a shame that they screwed the pooch so badly on their easy mode. Moving on. Cuphead. All right, I'm an old dude. Old enough that the cartoons Cuphead is based upon were still being shown on television when I was a kid. Old enough that I remember having conversations with friends about how awesome it would be to play a cartoon as a video game. Old enough that I pumped hundreds of quarters into Dragon's Lair, which fucking sucked solely because the idea of playing a cartoon was so cool. So it was with great, great anticipation that I bought Cuphead. And after finishing the first boss of the final island, I decided I had had enough because the level of difficulty present in Cuphead is so extreme it becomes a lesson on not respecting your player's time and tolerance for frustration. Cuphead is absolutely gorgeous. The bosses and their phases are each lovingly crafted animated experiences. The entire joy of this game lies in seeing each of those phases and the interesting and imaginative ways that the levels shift and the bosses transform. And Cuphead's combat and platforming is quite tight and responsive. Deaths are almost always the player's fault. There's no janky bullshit like in the old console days. You don't die because the game lagged or a button press didn't register. I mean, it's not perfect controls wise. It's best played by taping down the trigger because there's quite literally never a reason to stop firing and holding the trigger down for three minutes at a time is fucking ridiculous. But they're very good. The controls are good. So what's the problem with the game? The problem is the game is an asshole. Cuphead has no respect for the fact that different people have different skill levels. The entire game's playtime is held up by forcing players to replay sections of the same boss dozens of times until a nearly perfect run is achieved. And it further slaps kids, disabled people, old people, or people who just aren't good at games in the face by having the easy difficulty only be easier by removing phases of the fights. The animated bosses here are quite literally this game's main selling point. Fury's bosses and visuals are a part of its appeal but it has a fantastic and quite unique combat system that would work even if the game didn't look as good as it does. If Cuphead looked exactly like the old eight-bit console games it's based upon, no fucking buddy would have bought it. Its entire hype and sales success is built solely upon its animation and boss design. So punishing players who can't beat the game at its absurd default difficulty by removing the one thing everyone is there to see is shitty and misguided. I did a video all about Cuphead, which I mean, you probably really shouldn't watch. It was my first video, it's terrible and you can hear my fish tank in the background but when I made a blog post of the script many people argued that making the game easier would ruin the experience. But here's the thing, I don't want the game made easier in exclusion to everything else. I want everyone to play the same game at a difficulty that gives them the most enjoyment. If you enjoy beating your head against the wall literally 19 times until you beat a boss because you got lucky and the boss's most bullshit random attacked it in proc, that's great, do it up man. But why is the only difficulty adjustment removing content the consumer paid for? Why is that okay? There are several ways to make the game better by adjusting the difficulty. Parry slaps could heal the player. The player can have twice as much health. Attacks can only do half a heart of damage or allow players to have checkpoints in boss fights. The boss fights in Cuphead are long. Each phase can take several minutes and the early phases are usually quite easy. Having to replay a very easy phase 15 times isn't fun. At least not for me. Beyond that, this game's difficulty is in direct contrast to its look. My seven year old son loves Cuphead. He watches YouTube videos about it to this day. He has plushies and pop figures. He has a hoodie with Mugman on it. And while he has now finished most of the second island, it puts him into a blind rage playing the game that I find deeply unhealthy. Why can't he just play the game with twice as much health? How does that hurt anything about the game? By all means, keep the normal default difficulty, but something as simple as adjusting player health is ridiculously easy to implement. I would assume much easier than actually removing entire sections of the fight. Cuphead combines the annoying tedium as punishment mechanic of the worst souls bosses with a randomness as difficulty mechanic because boss attacks are random and some are clearly more difficult than others with literally no mechanic that allows the player to recover from mistakes. It demands perfection. And its punishment for not achieving perfection is being forced to play the same section over and over and over. The reason we don't have games designed like that anymore isn't because people are big crybabies. It's because that shit isn't fun. The Binding of Isaac. The Binding of Isaac is one of my favorite games all time and it manages to be incredibly difficult at some times and ridiculously easy at others. In many ways, Isaac is a perfect game. I have apparently played this game over 500 hours on Xbox alone and I also own it on PS4 and PC and I played it a bunch on those platforms too. The art style is original and beautiful. Its aesthetic is dark, creepy and cute all at once, meaning that a creepy character like Monstro also happens to make us super cuddly plushy. Its music is fucking amazing. Its story is actually quite excellent and its gameplay is insanely addictive. But when you first start playing Isaac, it is also quite difficult. It takes many playthroughs for the player to become familiar with all the room layouts and different enemies and all the different tactics required to deal with them. Once you figure that out, and again it takes dozens of runs to really get it, you'll get into a rhythm that allows the player to progress quite far in each run regardless of the items one gets. With just the base tiers, the game is very difficult but still beatable if you're an experienced player. Luck plays a huge role in how any run will turn out. Certain rooms are almost impossible to avoid damage in. Without enough damage upgrades, even weak enemies can end a run and the game rarely lets up. It constantly ups the ante in its difficulty. This combination of random bullshit and aggressive difficulty can lead to quite a bit of frustration. But if that's all Isaac offered, it wouldn't have become the massive hit it did. Isaac handles its difficulty scaling by having enough super powerful items that every so often, even the most unskilled player can break the game. My son beat Isaac several times as a five year old because he ran into Brimstone and Tammy's head in a run or some other super powerful synergy of items. These rare but fun combinations do what Cuphead can't pull off. They let the player blow off steam and provide hope. Unlike failing 20 times in a row at a Cuphead boss and boiling over in rage, Isaac offers the player the comforting knowledge that the next run might provide just enough upgrades to succeed and the lesser chance of running into items that make the player an unstoppable force of destruction. Isaac also cleverly keeps the game from getting too easy by unlocking more crappy items and good items as you progress. Brimstone is there from the beginning, but a mountain of items that are actual debuffs are unlocked as the player improves. This manages to balance the game along with player skill. As a player needs Brimstone less in order to succeed, more items are added to the pool, meaning that Brimstone is much more likely to appear. It works so well that it must have been a conscious balancing decision. And yes, I understand that this kind of difficulty scaling only works in a rogue light. That's fine. I just thought it was important to look at moving on. We've looked at games that do their difficulty well and games that do their difficulty poorly. Now let's finish up with a look at two games that do both at the same time. Titanfall 2. I loved Titanfall 2. A lot. I really liked Titanfall 1, but I fucking loved Titanfall 2. The multiplayer is, in my opinion, the best first-person shooter multiplayer ever created. It's fast, it's difficult to master, it's amazing. It's easy enough to learn, but so hard to master that I went from these stats when I was playing for about a year after launch to literally being unable to get a kill when I went back recently for footage and went up against people who'd never stopped playing. PS, if you've never played Titanfall 2, do not bother playing the multiplayer now. You will just get brutally shamed. On top of that fantastic and difficult multiplayer game, Titanfall 2 included a campaign as good as any shooter campaign in the last 15 years. Great shooter campaigns are actually kind of rare when you think about it. Doom 2016, Titanfall 2, um, yeah. Actually, I guess that's all the great ones right there. The Wolfensteins were good, they're all right. All right, anyway. Titanfall 2's campaign featured a shockingly touching story considering it's a cliche tale about a boy and his robot. And it has wonderful gunplay, probably the best movement system in any shooter ever, amazing level design, the best mission design I've ever played in an FPS. Each level perfectly blends wall running, sliding, bunny hopping, hip firing madness on expertly crafted maps. On hard, the game is perfectly balanced. You'll need to effectively use every mechanic to succeed. Chaining wall runs and slides and jumps while using your weapons and explosives is absolutely necessary to clear out the large amount of enemies attacking from all directions. So all that's to say that I just absolutely love this game and its difficulty is right on the money for the most part. On easy, the game is easy. Enemies are barely a threat and you can beat the whole thing without really using the parkour system at all. On normal, the game's still pretty easy. You'll need to use the movement system a little bit, but not really. On hard, you will need to use all of the game's tools which make it the ideal way to play the game. But something weird happens when you bump the difficulty up to master. The game breaks. And by breaks, I mean that the very thing that makes the game great is suddenly drained away. Let me preface this by saying master difficulty is beatable. The only part that becomes complete bullshit is a certain titan fight that takes place on the outside of a moving ship. But while it's beatable, it is ridiculously unfun because at the master difficulty, titanfall 2 becomes a different game. Enemies are spongier and you become paper mache. The grunts suddenly have inhuman hyper accuracy from outrageous ranges. When out of cover, the player dies insanely fast. And there is only one way to counter this. By playing incredibly cautiously, you have to basically memorize where the enemies spawn and find safe cover where you can pick them off before carefully creeping out to the next spot of cover. Sprinting without being absolutely certain that every enemy is dead is a bad idea. Wall running is completely out of the question. And when you take titanfall 2 and remove wall running and jumping and sliding, what do you have? Yeah, you've got Call of Duty. But I didn't buy Call of Duty. And seeing as how these guys made the old Call of Duty games and are instead now making titanfall, they seemingly didn't want to make Call of Duty. Something as seemingly simple as the difficulty can completely change the game, making all the carefully crafted mechanics completely useless and turning a shooter that's a breath of fresh air into just another FPS. It's not the difficulty itself that makes the mode so horrible. It's how the difficulty completely breaks the design. A way to make the game more difficult while still staying true to the intent of the design is even pretty easy to imagine. What if instead of the way the mode is played now, the AI enemies got deadlier the slower you were moving? So while running on a wall, the enemies are as accurate as they are on hard. But while only sprinting, they become more accurate until their near one hit kills when you're standing still. Difficulty should change how hard a game is by reinforcing its core mechanics, not by working against them. Making a mode in titanfall 2 where not moving fast is the primary means of survival runs against everything the game is about. And as a result, the mode is aggressively unfun. If you got the game, check it out. You'll see what I mean. I promise you it sucks, totally sucks. Moving on. Destiny 2. As strange as it may seem, if you've watched any of my videos, I really liked Destiny 1 a lot. I liked the aesthetic. I liked the lore. I love the gunplay. I liked most of the strikes and I love the raids. Destiny 1, especially in the campaign, was too easy. But Destiny 2's campaign is just ridiculously absurdly easy. If you have ever played an FPS game, Destiny 2 would be too easy. If you've played a bunch of Destiny 1, then Destiny 2 is so easy, the game is fundamentally broken. I died a few times from falling off of things and by getting so bored that I stopped paying attention, but other than that, the campaign was utterly mindless. I sat stunned as glowing reviews poured in for Destiny 2. Right from the beta, I thought the game was terrible. With dumbed-down mechanics, eliminated depth, slower movement, the game felt like a shell of what it had been. But it wasn't until playing the campaign for a second time that I really discovered that the difficulty of the campaign completely ruins the experience. During the second mission, I started punching things and I never stopped, all the way through. And it was actually a much more interesting gameplay experience than playing the game as intended. When a game is too easy, every tactic becomes viable. So the Destiny 2 campaign ended up being ridiculously boring and with vastly increased ability cooldowns, completely boring and neutered weapons, only cosmetic armor, and supers that take forever to charge, there's no longer even any distraction hiding just how boring the campaign gameplay was. Destiny 2's incomprehensible desire to strip out all of the depth made it painfully clear just how little game is really here when you strip out the spectacle. The game is so easy that through the entire first three planets of story missions, I was never even challenged. Without using my guns and a shooter. But something interesting happened when I got to IO. Several missions there were actually kind of challenging when using only my fists. Playing the game with only punching made me have to use the movement system. It made it so I had to think about how to take down enemies and what order they needed to be eliminated in. It suddenly got fun. It is almost impossible to have fun when there is no challenge in a video game. And when you release a sequel that's supposedly about humanity being on the brink of destruction that an average player can beat without shooting. Yeah, that's gonna be really fucking boring for the veterans of your game. I spent a bunch of this video talking about how important I think accessibility is. But that means having a difficulty level that is appropriate for all different players. Not just easy. I don't understand how Bungie thought the releasing game with no difficulty scaling was okay. Destiny has always played best when you were forced to use all of the game's mechanics like all games. But even at its best they have done a truly dreadful job at managing their difficulty. Destiny's gameplay has more than a little bit in common with Titanfall 2. Its movement system is as much a part of the game as its shooting mechanics are. And when a game is too easy, when I can just slaughter everything mindlessly there is no reason to push those mechanics to the limit. All games, whether shooters, hack and slash, RTS, whatever all games boil down to puzzles. They present us with a problem. They give us a diverse set of tools and then they ask us to solve the problem before us. Destiny, at its best, presents us with a level and a horde style amount of enemies. Sometimes it'll throw in another mechanical wrinkle. Then it gives us its movement system, its large array of different weapons, grenades, jumps, melees, supers and asks us to use those abilities to solve the puzzle. Especially in Destiny 1's raids the player needed to have a firm grasp on all of the game's mechanics and how they interacted with each other. But when the puzzle is tic-tac-toe we don't need to use any of the tools. And that's boring. The best games with a good difficulty balance ask us to push their mechanics to the limit to solve the problems they put before us. But Destiny 2's campaign was so easy the player stops paying attention. The answer to the puzzle is do whatever you want. It all basically works. Apparently, as I discovered recently that goes all the way to just punching everything in the face. Alright, I'm about to wrap up but I wanted to really briefly touch on how Destiny 2 simultaneously fails by its recent decision to make the game harder as well. Bungie had apparently heard that the game is too easy and it is. And they decided with the Warmind DLC to make Heroic Strikes far harder. Sounds good. I was thrilled to hear this as Heroic Strikes were always my favorite activity in Destiny 1. After playing the Heroic Strikes for dozens of hours now I find myself questioning if the designers of the game even played what they made. And this is gonna go back to what I said about how easy it is to make something hard. Bungie had a chance to institute interesting and fun difficulty. The entire point of difficulty is driving the player to use all of your game's mechanics at their peak efficiency. That is the only goal a developer should have when it comes to designing difficulty. In Bungie's old Halo games they drove difficulty by making positioning, enemy priority, and weapon choice need to be nearly perfect to defeat the groups of enemies they put before the player in the harder modes. Bungie this time around simply made every enemy extremely spongy and put a bunch of modifiers that make the player do way less damage while adding in tons of one hit kills. Instead of driving the player to use all of the game's mechanics what this type of difficulty does is quite literally exactly the opposite. If the player dies almost immediately from even low level enemies you can no longer use the movement system. You can't use any super that's a roving melee range super. The only solution to every problem the game throws at you in a Heroic Strike is to sit behind cover and carefully pick off enemies from a distance. Does this make the strikes more difficult? Maybe. It certainly makes them more tedious. Difficulty has to drive the player to adjust their play style. It has to push them to the brink. What it shouldn't ever do is drive all players into the same play style. Especially when that play style is completely at odds with everything your game is about mechanically. All right, thought experiment. I want all of you to think about Destiny's marketing materials. What do you see in those materials? You see Guardians jumping around. You see them sliding into huge groups of enemies. You see them popping supers. You know what you never see? And I mean this literally. I'd be surprised if anyone can show me even one promotional image or video clip of it. What you never see is Guardians hiding behind cover and picking off enemies from a distance before carefully moving to the next bit of cover. And you don't see that because Destiny has never been about that kind of gameplay. Its entire enemy and level design is about throwing tremendous numbers of fast moving enemies at the player and giving them an entire toolbox built around movement and burning those enemies down as quickly as possible. Even in Destiny 1 raids, hiding behind cover was never a central mechanic. You occasionally had to do it of course, but it's never been a core aspect of the gameplay. And I don't think it was even a consideration in any of the strike designs because the strikes in Destiny 2 and especially the boss rooms feature very little cover. The knocker strike and the new Warmind expansion literally features four or five rocks three of which the boss destroys. Destiny's design never intended for players to spend their time hiding. When designing difficulty, the focus always needs to be on enhancing the mechanics of your design, not contradicting it. It's almost as if Bungie is completely lost. Like the marketing department has a better understanding than the game designers do of the mechanics that drive player engagement. It's amazing that Destiny 2 ends up being an example of difficulty failure at both extremes of the spectrum. Making a game so easy, your mechanics are irrelevant while at the very same time making other aspects of the game so difficult that your mechanics are irrelevant. It's quite the accomplishment. Wrapping up. All right, I had a lot of trouble writing this. I kept tearing it up because for the first few weeks I was trying to find a format that nicely fit all together. And two days ago I just said fuck it and decided to simply look at a few games and how they handle difficulty. I've been really focusing on game difficulty lately while I play. I don't know why it's just kind of been in the back of my head probably because I played a bunch of Destiny and it's so fucking bad. I've also been playing Fallout 4 on survival and slowly realizing that I am having very little fun at it. Destiny feels completely hollow because 80% of the game is too easy, 15% is the wrong kind of hard and only the rage are just right. Difficulty is so important. You would think a huge chunk of development energy would be devoted to getting it just right. And that says nothing about my firm belief that games should be accessible to all. I work with disabled people these days and I don't see any good reason while all games shouldn't be able to accommodate them with dynamic difficulty settings. I don't see any good reason for Cuphead to not offer settings that make the game challenging and enjoyable for my seven year old and also challenging and enjoyable for me. In some ways we are getting closer to that. The game Celeste has a diverse set of difficulty settings. I don't really like to platforming on it that much but the game is a great example of doing it right. But for every Dark Souls or Celeste or Dead Cells there are 50 destiny to use in Cupheads. Games that either seem to have no idea what they're doing like Destiny or Rebel in being games that only a few people can enjoy like Cuphead. I think it's bad for games. I think it's bad for players and I think it's bad for business. Hopefully better things are ahead. All right, see you next time. Thanks.