Obviously, games are going to be balanced differently from each other, on a case-to-case basis, but I personally think altering enemy health and damage is a cheap copout to avoid finetuning the difficulty. Playing SWAT 4 again, I'm pretty sure enemy stats are the same across all difficulties, but they have a scoring system that gives you varying amount of leeway with how to handle each mission, the easiest being that you can have a score of 0 so long as you don't fail the objectives. I mean, it is a pretty hard game the more armed enemies there are. The new Hitman games do something a little similar, except the score doesn't matter, but you have more horizontal restrictions like not being able to disguise yourself in clothes if the former owner died violently. Games like Thief and GoldenEye and its descendants add more objectives. Other games just add more enemies to the levels like classic Doom.

What games have you played where changing the difficulty was interesting and not a flat damage boost/reduction?

hmm probably anything other than give ai unlimited resources like most strategy games do
it completely ruins the games cause it removes nearly all strategies and only turtling remains, why hit enemy economy when they get everything for free anyway

I think to some degree achievements have replaced things like Thief's "don't kill anyone" requirement on higher difficulties. Not saying that's a good thing, but they at least offer some kind of unique challenge with a reward of sorts. Would I have gone through Deus Ex: A Criminal Past with no augments if it wasn't for the achievement? Probably not, and I don't even care much about the social media aspect, just the satisfaction of knowing I did it.

While "boost enemy health and lower player health" is super lame, it can still add to a game if "normal" is too easy and it makes you engage more and learn the systems. Like oh I have to actually pay attention to potions, or craft good items, or spend money on better stuff, because combat actually challenges me now. The Pathfinder games for example, and other RtwP games... you can generally roll through and waste everything on normal, but hard or core or whatever makes you learn the RPG systems and design your characters well.

Doom Eternal has good difficult level slider imho.

Hmmm... I'd say have multiple things that affect difficulty and include more of them the more difficult it gets.

Stronger weapons - if they normally start with say pistols and later may have shotguns, or piercing ammo. This would make encounters where you don't get surprise to be more deadly.

Better armor - Many monsters/enemies may not have armor at all, armor can be very light like pressed paper, to leather, to going to bulletproof, etc. Naturally this should affect their inventory layout as well as vehicle values when scrapping. (Yes i said paper armor, a while back they did tests and paper did okay vs swords/knives but not against arrows i believe, so it offers partial protection)

Better AI - Naturally more ruthless or more intelligent AI would make a difference, be it having certain characters on the lookout instead of attacking first, they may retreat and call for help with scenario specific actions on top of more deadly training with called shots or using different weapon combinations or healing comrades. Or going to felled companions to get a better weapon to use, if the scenario seems useful.

More HP/MP - While they may be tougher this is a cheap one, and should only be given to say bosses or a marginal increase. So most enemies get +10% while bosses get +30% HP/MP. Not so much they become bullet sponges, but may affect 2-3 extra hits in a heavy battle.

More enemies - Also a cheap one, but where you may face say 4 enemies instead you face 6. It again means more loot.

Healing - Quite a few games the enemies can't or never heal. Having them with say healing items and using them on companions may change things up. Though you get to the 'They're drinking our treasure!' scenarios come up. Though unless you have obvious dedicated healers like clerics, said healers would be taken out first probably for efficiency reasons.

Status effects / Reputation - I'd add in where reputation of the players comes in, so as you play they get more difficult. This mostly is 'oh crap it's these guys' so they might be more likely to do ranged combat and hiding behind cover, or get +10% damage per level (a level calculated by maybe every 100 of their sect killed) where they are seriously trying really hard and maybe have been training just for encountering you.

Visibility - In some games the visual range changes of how far they can detect you from. MGS games are particularly poor it feels like. In other games increasing the odds of them ambushing you and you ambushing them goes more in their favor.

Bad luck - This is where loot from the enemies gets broken more often (they fell over and broke potion bottles, etc) but this doesn't sound very fun. On the other hand items that wouldn't break (weapons ammo etc) would likely be worth more... Diseases and other effects would be more prevalent (infected wounds, etc).


Other difficulty options could be taking on difficulties to boost XP/points or something. Like having fewer points to distribute per level, bandaging or healing takes longer or is more difficult. Not being able to use certain weapons due to physical limitations (broken/weak arms). Though this is starting to get into Munchkin territory.

Hard to say what combinations are the best way to do it.

The best in lots of games would be actually different AI. But making different AI is really hard... A lot of 4x games scale by cheating, even at the "even on" difficulty setting because AI is that hard to make fun.

I prefer it when it's not a single difficulty setting, but a panel of them. Fell Seal is a good example of this. (List: https://fellseal.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty)

Horizon 2: Forbidden West, while not as robust, lets you adjust incoming and outgoing damage separately, as well as toggling how loot is handled*, whether the game will automatically use your healing when under a threshold, or how long the game's zoom in/slow down (concentration) lasts. Plus it has some accessibility settings on top of it.

More and more games are implementing difficulty this way. And that's good.

Dragon Quest 11 has certain special challenges that can be enabled at game start. You can turn them off at any point, but it's a one way disable. To get a game complete with the challenge on, you have to leave it on the entire time. These would be things like FFX's famous "No Sphere Grid" challenge: "no fleeing", "no shopping", "no armor", "reduced XP from easy fights", "enemies tougher", "randomly lose turns".

Strategy games often have lots of places to tweak, too. Civ4 has a whole host of them at the game creation screen (and even more if you look into the config files to create your own custom difficulty level. Old World does too.

I'm a big fan of -- though I can't actually recall any games right now! -- games that, in addition to giving you a palette of difficulty options, "sums them up" and gives you an overall percentage-above/below-normal, and scales certain things (like final scores) by that. (e.g., perhaps you choose "decreased starting resources" but also "larger map" so they're awash). Or tells you "very easy...very hard" names based on the chosen percentage so you can have a comparison.

The worst: Time limits. They're awful game play. There are some turn-based games that have time limits applied to your selection and difficulty settings reduces that. Unfathomably stupid.

*: late game loot farming is totally nuts even with easy loot enabled; the game's biggest weakness is its late-game MMO-tiers of unfun repetition

A long time ago I played an RPG and increasing the difficulty didn't seem to change anything... at first. Then I realized it made the enemies "smarter". Common thugs were still the same but enemy Ninjas hid in the shadows and backstabbed my healers or wizards instead of blindly sharing at my tanks. Archers shot me and then ran back, pulling me into traps. I was really impressed.

I can't remember the name of the game. It wasn't Baldur's Gate or any D&D-based game.

In a Master of Orion clone game, increasing the difficulty made the opponents brighter. They talked about honor and joined forces with me against another civilization, only to backstab me mid-fight. I remember cursing as if I was playing against a real human opponent :)

- Alterable mid-game.
- No damage-sponging massive HP when it comes to beefing up enemies (in other words they can be tougher, but don't be lazy and make it a chief mechanic of a tougher boss).
- Keep a balance on all difficulties (ie don't break the game trying to make it tougher - if the difficulty rises it still should be possible to beat them without spending all night spamming attacks on one boss)
- Don't punish lower difficulty players with locked content (difficulty should be rewarded with the satisfaction of meeting the challenge, not giving the user more content).

What is allowed then is up to devs. Make enemies smarter, alter their attacks behaviour, lower the available clock on timed events, lower drop rate of consumables etc etc.

That's about it. It's less "how to handle" and more "how not to handle".

System Shock 1 absolutely amazes me as it does thing I can't recall from any other game. It has 4 independent difficulty sliders that allow to tailor experience for what you like, from literal walking simulator to hardcore challenge.

All can be set from 0 to 3 and include:

Combat: toughness (and number?) of enemies, on 0 they won't attack and die in one hit

Mission: 0 - no story elements and all doors open, 1 - adds audio logs, 2 - adds closed doors, 3 - adds time limit

Puzzles: wire puzzles complexity, on 0 all puzzles are automatically solved

Cyberspace: movement speed and time limit in cyberspace sections, on 0 there is no automatic movement

Oh heavens yes.

VVVVVV has one of the best handlings of game difficulty, even if things like turning on invincibility is mislabeled as an accessibility option. At the same time, it also makes me feel like someone needing to use this option is no different than my need to turn off things like screen shakes. There is no punishment for using these options and no reward for avoiding them. They're just there to use if you need them.


Bastion has one of the more interesting ways of handling difficulty. The default game is pretty easy, even for someone like myself with reflexes that come and go due to a wrist injury years ago. If you want to make the game harder, you go to the Shrine and invoke one of the gods.

Pyth, for example, is the first one you encounter and will increase enemy speed for both movement and attacking.
Full List: https://bastion.fandom.com/wiki/Idols

You get an experience bonus for your trouble and invoking more gods, thus making the game harder, gives you a larger bonus. There is no other reward for your efforts.

The other thing I like about this game's handling of difficulty is that all the weapons become viable if you're willing to upgrade them, even though some of them are really, really bad at first. Even if you are not able to win a specific weapon's proving ground, the weapon is still viable even without that extra skill so long as you've upgraded it as the opportunity presents itself.

This means that less skilled players don't miss out on anything if they don't invoke gods. It also means that not being able to unlock skills in proving grounds won't cause further difficulty issues for them either.

My prefered method of handling difficulty levels is to have only one difficulty level. If there is a selection it tempts you to switch to a lower difficulty but if you do play on a lower difficulty it's unfulfilling knowing there is a higher difficulty. Of course that's just me.

I prefer it when the normal or medium difficulty level is actually the difficulty level around which the game was meant to be played. I have nothing wrong with hard games but it always gets on my nerves when you have a game with normal difficulty and it teases you with "For slightly less then new born players" or the hard difficulty says "the way the game was meant to be played." I am not saying that games should not be meant to be played on what others would consider a hard difficulty, that is a value in itself, just that when the option of normal or medium appears that that is the default difficulty. Easy should be for people either just wanting a little bit of fun or who are otherwise not really wanting to put the same energy into the game as one they actually want to play. I tend not to replay games from easy to normal, if I take the game seriously I play the default difficulty first and if I think it would improve things I play on a harder difficulty or easier depending how much I enjoyed the game in the first place often times.

One thing I prefer is when enemy AI improves (but this has its own issues) or something changes with enemies or the like other than the enemies have higher damage and HP the higher difficulty gets. If the enemy mixes change that is fine, but just a fictional example: If your pistol does ten damage to the basic baddy on normal it is not fun for that pistol to only do eight damage on hard; likewise if the enemies have one hundred health before it is not fun for the basic enemy to get one hundred twenty health on hard. I would rather the enemy's are just more aggressive or have a wider degree of behaviors on higher difficulties.

In RTSs indeed the worst way for the enemies to be more more difficult is when they receive unlimited resources. This actually broke Ancestor's Legacy for me in the Russian campaign when in the last level the enemy gets this straight shot from their base to yours (vice versa is also true, but no consolation) so they just spam units straight to your base on a timer basically and you just have to somehow manage to spam your units slightly faster than theirs. It felt stupid and I never felt the need to play it again (also, it really just did not impress me anyway).

Of course, I'd probably just whine and complain no matter what depending on how well I do.
Honestly, that's probably for the best in quite a few games.


Unrelated to the topic but the blank space where the rep used to be is really distracting. I wish they just put our sigs and names below our avatars.

Crosscode has 3 difficulty sliders, 2 for combat and 1 for puzzles. The combat sliders are straightforward, the 1st scales enemy damage and 2nd changes frequency of attacks. This game has a lot of time puzzles, so the last slider gives the player more time before the puzzle is reset. It gives the players so control over what aspects of the game they want to keep challenging and what they want easier, and can be changed anytime. I usually leave the settings at default, but lower it when I have some trouble.

What about giving the *player* infinite resources on the lowest difficulty?

(The SaGa 3 remake, while a different genre, basically does this.) I would prefer raising enemy health over raising enemy armor.

Raising enemy armor can have the result of some strategies that are balanced for a lower difficulty being useless on a higher difficulty.

(The following example uses Attack - Defense as the damage formula.)

For example, consider two weapons:
* Weapon A has 5 attacks, but hits 6 times.
* Weapon B has 15 attacks, but hits only once.

If the enemy has 3 defense, then:
* Weapon A does (5 - 3) * 6 = 2 * 6 = 12 damage
* Weapon B does 15 - 3 = 12 damage

So, these weapons do equally well against this type of enemy. (Note that A is stronger against lower defense enemies, and B against higher defense enemies, so there's a trade-off there.)

Now, suppose higher difficulty doubles enemy defense, so the same enemy now has 6 defense. Then:
* Weapon A fails to do damage at all, making it useless here.
* Weapon B still manages to do 9 damage, so 75% of what it does normally.

This sort of difference is fine if we're looking at different enemies on the same difficulty, as it ensures that the same weapon isn't always optimal, but when we have the difficulty changing enemy defense, we find that some things become useless on higher difficulties, limiting the strategic options. When it comes to HP, increasing it can make random encounters more interesting. Some enemies might die too fast to do anything interesting on easy difficulty, but on hard difficulty suddenly you can't just kill them before they can unleash their most powerful spells.

Enemy MP doesn't usually matter, as unlike players, enemies generally don't last long enough to run out of MP. (Some games don't even track enemy MP in the first place.)