Having recently played the new Devil May Cry game from Capcom, and watching my older child play the even newer Sekiro:Shadows Die Twice by From Software made me think about the nature of difficulty in games, its purpose, and the types of difficulty that we encounter. Devil May Cry may not be that hard to play - but it may be hard to play well, and Sekiro is difficult to play at all.
When I think about what I enjoy in a game, typically what I like is a game that is easy to get into but allows for many levels of skill and improvement. I think that is the essential formula of most of the widely popular original arcade games. Pac-Man and Centipede are great examples of this. The things that we are required to do are clear and obvious to us, and are simple to perform. If we as players are able to keep up with the game as it slowly increases in difficulty, then we are able to succeed in the game. It does not start so difficult as to discourage play (hey - they're trying to get you to put a quarter it, aren't they) and gets more difficult at a reasonable pace.
This can also be done in a game by having a wide range of available game mechanics or a more open path of progression, although this method is more popular for home console games than arcade games. The game can allow a player to proceed at their own pace, and still be able to proceed through the game using simple techniques, but also allow for higher scores and rewards by being able to adapt to more sophisticated techniques. Katamari Damacy is a great example of this. One can get through the levels easily enough, but as one becomes more familiar with the level layout and figures out better and better ways to complete a level, the possible score that one can finish a level with increases a lot, and is indicative of one's mastery of the level. The newest Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild is another good example - if you are really skillful, you can take on challenges sooner, but if you want to take your time and gain resources to do levels in an easier fashion, that's good too. The most common way for an adventure game to get more difficult is for the enemies to increase in health in comparison to the character, and to be able to dispense more damage to your character. Most of the time you can also offset part of this by gaining rewards that at increase player health, improve weapons, add armor, etc. The 'stylish action' games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising Revengance all do these sorts of things, and then also make sure that the enemies have more additional and more complicated attack mechanics as the game progresses. Bayonetta takes this even one step further by removing the tactical advantage of the dodge mechanic on the hardest game difficulty. (Normally, dodging at the last possible second would activate "Witch Time" mode where all of the enemies would be slowed down.)
Some games are simple and straightforward but their difficulty only comes from consistency of performance. This is a thing that carries over from some real sports - golf, bowling, and darts are all exactly like this. The objectives are clear and obvious, and not so difficult as to be impossible, but perhaps they're not going to go easy every time. In the video game realm, racing games are the most likely candidates for this formula. Some "Runner" games, which might as well be side-scrolling racing games, operate similarly.
However, this is often not enough for some gamers, or even some designers. Often, a game wanting to be more challenging takes a number of different routes in being more challenging. An obvious way to be more challenging is to just be rather difficult from the beginning, either internally or externally. In the old days of the arcade, Defender (and its sequel Stargate) were rather challenging on both fronts. Not only did they use one of the most difficult joystick-and-button interfaces ever constructed, but the game was inherently difficult, could go into a mode drastically more difficult if the player failed certain conditions, and using the Hyperspace button too often to attempt to escape a sticky situation could randomly cost the player a life. The early Resident Evil games used tank controls and a fixed camera perspective as an interface-based way to make the game difficult, and this became all too obvious once Resident Evil 4 started using an over the shoulder camera, and then the version on the Wii allowed players to use the Wiimote to target enemies on the screen directly. It went very quickly from being a slowly paced game full of jump scares to a more action-based game because making the controls easier drastically lowered the initial difficulty and made the game more accessible. The From Software games - Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro - have fantastic, responsive controls and are just purely difficult, offered as a challenge to only the best players and as an antidote to the usual array of bored teenagers complaining that they beat a game in a weekend. Other games in that challenge level include the Ninja Gaiden games, Super Star Wars SNES, Battletoads, or some of the shmup games by Cave .
Another way to be internally difficult is to present the player with challenges that they have no way to predict the first time, and then force incremental memorization of sections of the game as a result. This is probably my personal least favorite way of a game being difficult, and good examples of this are the original laserdisc arcade games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.
Another interesting mechanic that can be used to create difficulty in a game is to create expectations about how tasks should be accomplished, and then use that expectation and intentionally subvert it. This can backfire if used too often, as the player will just resort to being more cautious even when it isn't warranted and slow down the narrative pace of the game. The Evil Within comes to mind as a good example of this, but probably most horror games do this to one degree or another as it is a common horror trope.
Part of the reason that I am writing about this is that I am still trying to finish The Evil Within, and contrasting it to my initial experience with the first Devil May Cry game.
The first Devil May Cry game was built from a failed attempt at making a fourth Resident Evil game. I got stuck on a fairly early level in Devil May Cry, after amazingly making it through earlier parts of the game that I thought were harder. The control scheme was not typical for American games*, (DMC used the Triangle button for jump which is more typical of Japanese games) and I could not pass the first close-quarters battle with the aptly named Death Scissors. I tried starting the game over, spending more time failing secret missions on purpose so I could continue to collect Red Orbs to level up Dante's moves, and still could not pass it. As a result, I would stop playing the game for months at a time, play other things, and hope I could come back to Devil May Cry and make sense of it. As it turned out, I just needed to refine my technique and find which specific attacks were effective and which were not. Once I passed that particular level, the rest of the game proceeded normally enough. *(Re-releases of the game included a control system that more closely matched the subsequent games, and also allowed for changed in the control scheme if desired.) This is markedly different from the current Devil May Cry game - DMCV, where the game isn't so difficult that you will miss out on the story, but the difficulty comes in getting good scores at regular difficulty and then playing the higher difficulty levels.
With The Evil Within, the game is much more generous with mid-level checkpoints that it automatically saves. The Evil Within was the first game that Shinji Mikami worked on with Tango Gameworks, and much more of a 'survival' horror game than the later action-based Resident Evil games. Thanks to the checkpoints, I play a tiny bit of the game at a time. Early in the game, you can see quite a number of stylistic similarities to Resident Evil 4, the last Resdient Evil game that Shinji Mikami worked on. I also think that some of the conventions that the game intentionally subverts are from Resident Evil 4 - as if it's a little bit of a 'gotcha' to people that are playing this because of his work on previous games. Unlike Devil May Cry 1, I haven't abandoned the game entirely for months at a time. I just work on slowly inching through the game.
I just hope that the game's story is worth my effort. It seems funny now to say that, since narrative was not as an important feature of early games.
