Difficulty

[Jayrodd]

Once you've beaten your first Pokemon game, you know how hard it needs to be to keep you engaged. Some people are fine with how they are, others need an extra kick to keep them going. Difficulty is a very preference based topic, and everyone is going to have a different idea, so let's hear it!

• Should a game have a consistent difficulty curve throughout, or offer varying options?
• What methods can a game allow the player to let them decided their difficult?
• Other than a level curve, what things can a game do to change how hard it is?

 

[Sparta]

Bit of a short answer right now, but I'm a little short on time.

Personally, I aim for our game to be a bit on the easier side, most of the time. I would rather have a player breeze through the game than to have to slowly grind their way through it. Plus it makes playtesting a lot easier on me because I lose a lot. Honestly, I don't really think much about difficulty or things like that, but my typical rule of thumb is that if I'm having a bad time playing it, then so will everyone else. So I'll just play through parts and tweak them as a good.

 

[Sora]

I think one thing I really liked from Nuzlocke runs were that there were incentives to try to catch a new Pokemon in every new area instead of sticking with one team due to the risk of losing your party members.
What I want to implement for my games is to introduce an optional quest for every new area that suggest a trainer catch a specific Pokemon that's very good at beating a Gym & boss fight.
As a result, those that ended up utilizing the new Pokemon they caught would have a easier time dealing with a specific obstacle, while those that just want to brute force it with their original team would have a bit harder time.
With over 800 Pokemon, I think there's a lot of ways you can do this method.

 

[Tomix9tomix]

Hmmm....
I find that it is better to be on the easier side than the harder side. A game you can breeze through easily is better than one where you have to spend hours grinding and building your Pokemon to be competitive. I believe that a game with a good difficulty is one where the player doesn't have to grind as long as they fought most of the trainers and didn't use many repels. Personally I think the difficulty should come from planning what order you send out your party and what moves to use, maybe you lose a few times, but not because you didn't have good Pokemon, but because you didn't use them well enough. That is a lot to ask though, with so many Pokemon each battling in a different way with different moves, difficulty is something that is hard to get right.

 

[Dragonite]

Difficulty is one of the things I don't think about too often when playing Pokémon games (Gen 6 notwithstanding) so I have to assume it's a detail Game Freak gets right more often than not.

Should a game have a consistent difficulty curve throughout, or offer varying options?

It should be consistent throughout. Please please please please please don't make the game tear-inducingly easy for the first six Gyms and Dark Souls for the seventh.

What methods can a game allow the player to let them decided their difficult?

What Pokémon are accessible where, mainly. I recall the real games doing a few instances of "there's a Flying Gym coming up, so give the player an option to trade for an Onix" or "there's a Flying Gym coming up, so stick Mareep in the route outside it" (I really like HeartGold and SoulSilver, go away). Sticking a Water gym right after a stretch where all you could catch were Fire types would be very not fun regardless of the levels.

Obviously if the player doesn't want Easy Mode (or just thinks all of the Pokémon available are rubbish) they don't have to use them.

Oh yeah, levels. Not even going to mention those because modulating those are just cheati - crap . . .

Other Stuff

As a general rule, if the player has to fully heal after every battle it's probably "too hard," if the player doesn't have to backtrack to a Pokémon Center ever it's probably "too easy" and if the player doesn't have to think about it you probably nailed it.

 

[aiyinsi]

Regarding how hard enemy trainers are to beat:
There is an easy way to make things easy and let the player decide to make it harder: EXP ALL

Well both easy and hard can be nice. When a game is harder and I had to go to the poke center after every battle but has a lot of hidden nuggets I start buying and using items(something that I rarely do in the official games). It is fun too to be thinking about how to preserve you pokemons hp and how potions are cheaper than revives. This kind of game isn't suited for first time Pokémon players ... so we don't see it in the official games. But for fangames it is a viable option if it is introduced the right way.

Well the other things is that a game should have some difficultly at least ... but it doesn't have to be Pokémon battles. Puzzles like Emeralds match bike puzzle in sky pillar. Finding the regis. Clearing victory road. Finding the right diving spot.

 

[Mr. Gela]

Should a game have a consistent difficulty curve throughout, or offer varying options?
Consistent curve please. Also avoid hitting a plateau in difficulty (easy or hard, when battles are all the same it makes me droll). Good examples? Gen 5 and 7. Those have smooth curves with little to no grinding whatsoever. One is harder than the other, although I believe Game Freak now wants the player to shake their team around a few times instead of using the same six all game. Mechanics to incentivice and reward that behaviour are worth exploring.

What methods can a game allow the player to let them decided their difficult?
B2W2 had difficulty settings. While those might seem laughable to you, given you need to beat the game and even use a friend (or another console and game) to use the keys on a new save file, GF wasn't as silly as you think. Not at all. The difficulty keys are meant to be used as a New Game+, not as your first experience, hence the obscured ways of using them.

What I want to get at is, don't use difficulty settings. Not at the start of the game. Your game should be balanced around being fair for all new players. I could say "yeah I beat the Bloodborne of Mario Games, I can play Flappy Bird for the first time ever on Heroic", then get my bird obliterated and quit the game forever. That's not right. Everyone should feel the game is accessible. And nobody should feel forced to choose an easy or hard difficulty in order to enjoy the game for the first time without giving it a first taste. When you've beat the game though, you know what you'd be against in a hard run, so you could replay if you wish on that new hard setting.


Other than a level curve, what things can a game do to change how hard it is?
Oh boy... I love playing around with this, but I've enjoyed building "unfair" boss battles, which give the enemy an advantage (having over 31 IVs on HP or defenses is my favourite, as it makes the battles last longer when you have a strong type advantage) but you could use field effects and weather to give the enemy an edge. You need some code to do all that, but it's damn worth it.

Alternatively, be smart about Pokémon distribution, such as the Machop trade in Goldenrod, Geodude/Phanpy(Crystal-only, I think it gets Rollout?) before Falkner... Make the player have to think outside the box sometimes. It won't hurt.

Exp. All should become a standard. Players can choose to turn it off if they repent from grinding, or they can use it help weak Pokémon grow with haste. I say balance your Xp around it being on all the time.

Just my two Pokécents.

 

[Sableye]

For difficulty I refer to 'comix zone'. Basically this is/was a game on sega/PC and it was tough. Not impossible, not dark souls, not even battletoads, but not quite a walk in the park. You fell down a pit you died. Too close to TNT you died. It worked well because your health was a limited resource, you could kick down doors/barriers but it drained your health or you could use a bomb/tool IF you happened to have found it. There were 2 stages to each level and you only got an extra life after completing each level.
To me that game was challenging.

Another game I liked the difficulty of is Mario 3. Obviously there is a learning curve/slight difficulty curve. However there a lot of instant failure but there's also a lot of lives/chances as well as limited resources that help you as well as the means to bypass some obstacles.
To me mario3 is just right for challenging, gameplay is essentially the same (run and jump little plumber!) With variations in a theme.

Finally for difficulty I quite liked Streets of Rage 2 for sega. You could choose difficulty which reduces the amount of lives you had as well as increased the enemy's hit points. In addition you got bonus points at the end of each round for finishing on harder difficulties.

Now clearly the three approaches are different. One is just consistently tough with limited resources and lives. Another has a low barrier for failure but numerous retries and assistance, the latter is frankly more numerical, enemy HP goes up, yours goes down.

For Pokémon you need to incentevise runs through an area without the need to backpedal to the centre to get healed after each fight.

However there's no point in having items unless you use them. And frankly while annoying I think that I'd feel better if more vanilla trainers used items- it would normalise the use of items.a bit more!

Pokémon also doesn't punish you massively for failure which is good as that then only makes it even harder to recover.

An interesting mechanic might be to have a Player character meet (say) Blue really early (before first gym) who OBLITERATES the player. But rather than say lol n00b he says good effort and heals the Mons and gives some TM or something. To show that loosing one trainer battle isn't the end of the world!

 

[kirlial]

Grinding is terribly tedious so if your game is difficult purely because each next gym has a 10 level advantage on your team then it's the wrong kind of difficulty. My rule of thumb is, assuming you're keeping the same team (training when you add a weaker member to your team isn't a problem), defeating every trainer without doing any wild battles should provide you with roughly enough experience to tackle the next boss. With this in mind, your opponent can still pose a challenge. Maybe they have a lot of Pokémon on your level, meaning a mistake could cost you, maybe they only have one Pokémon that's a few levels higher than all yours, forcing you to try a strategy involving weakening its stats or making use of status to prevent it from ripping through your team.

Try not to make the general difficulty too fluctuating, though what's a real challenge for one player might be easy for another, and provide the players with alternatives in problematic sections. Grinding doesn't need to be necessary but provide decent grind spots where you can as well.

Aside from bosses, the average trainer shouldn't be so hard that they cause you to lose though they might faint a Pokémon or two. Going back to the Pokémon centre frequently is annoying but providing plenty of healing spots can mitigate the issue.

If you ever want to have a really challenging fight, consider making it an optional fight so the player can skip past it if it's too frustrating. Alternatively, hype it up so the player is braced for a tough fight and won't be too annoyed if they don't immediately win.

Oh and don't be like GSC, where the latter half of the game's level curve is completely messed up. Due to being able to access Mahogany Town early, all the trainers around it are incredibly weak (including the rocket base) and not only does this make all those fights boring, this results in you being super underlevelled upon reaching the elite four. Don't be like HGSS either, which remade the game without fixing the problem! Put in obnoxious figures blocking the way to the next town if you must.

 

[VanillaSunshine]

Difficulty is a great topic for me, because I tend to find myself disagreeing with a lot of people about it- in general, I don't play games to be challenged by numbers and stats. When I'm challenged in a video game, I have fun when the challenge is almost entirely in my head. Fun in a game comes when there is NOTHING holding me back except myself- fun, to me, comes when there is a solution (or even multiple) to a problem and I am 100% capable of finding and enacting that solution at any given point.

Everyone plays games to have fun- that's the point, right? The only "right way" to play any game is to have fun, and if a game isn't fun for you because it's too hard/too easy, it sucks!! Especially if the game is set up in such a way where you can't just flip a switch in the Option Menu and now the game adheres to exactly how you personally want it to. So, when people complain about the difficulty (or lack thereof) in Pokémon Games, their complaint/argument isn't invalid. Going "that game was too hard" or "this game was too easy" is a legitimate opinion to have on a game, and I wish more people understood that.
I'm tired of people saying "This Game was so easy", and then acting as if I'm somehow factually incorrect when I disagree and say "I found it difficult, actually."
Don't do that. If you found a game difficult/easy, that's completely fine, but don't act like you're making a factually correct statement when someone comes along and says they experienced it the opposite way. You're not superior because you had a specific experience with a specific game.

When I play games, especially RPG-esque genres like Pokémon, my fun comes through the world and the story.
I don't play RPGs to strategically plan my team and my battles- that's not why I play RPGs, so that's not why I play Pokémon. My team and the battles I experience are the secondary part of the game to me: battles are an obstacle preventing me from reaching what I actually want: the next place to explore, the next chapter of the story to see. That's the part of the game that "matters".
So, naturally, when it comes to a Pokémon game, I don't really care about the battles. I don't care about the next Trainer on the route, I don't even really care about the Gyms or the Elite Four. If a game has an engaging story and the battles aren't at all interesting or unique, I'll avoid every Trainer battle I can if it means I can move on with the story faster. Why would I want to have three, four, five random insignificant battles just to get to the next plot point?
That's not why I play Pokémon games, so it's very easy for battles to become a chore for me. However, I still enjoy battles as a mechanic- that's why I still play Pokémon and RPGs in general, rather than simply playing interactive visual novels.


So!!
When it comes to the Difficulty of Pokémon-styled games, I have two requirements if the developers want me personally to have fun:

1) You can't make Battles/encounters so difficult that they feel like a chore. I play games to have fun, not to fight the same Trainer/Boss over and over because I'm underleveled and grinding is quite literally the LAST thing I ever want to do in a Pokémon game. If a game makes me grind, there's a high chance of me not actually finishing it, because I'm not interested in spending time grinding when I could spend that time playing another game that isn't artificially preventing me from moving on because I didn't spend an hour mindlessly running around some grass.
You can't just have the Gym Leader be 10-15 levels higher than their strongest Gym Trainer and expect me to praise the game for being a challenge.
I never had that issue in an official Pokémon game thankfully (except HGSS, but that was an overall level curve issue- again, I shouldn't have to grind away in some grass for an hour to be "caught up" with where I'm at in the region, GameFreak), so I'd rather not have it in a fan-game either. That's not how you make a game a challenge.

2) You can't make Battles/encounters so easy that they feel like a chore. If I feel like I'm blazing through a game, I'm not going to want to battle that one Trainer on the route- why would I want to waste my time OHKOing three Pokémon (that I know I'll OHKO) when I can not waste my time and just move on down the Route to the next town. Very few people want to just mash the A-button through a game- where's the fun in that? Battles need to stay interesting or else they'll become a chore for the player, but then they can't be too (artificially) hard or they'll become a chore for the player. That's not how you make a game interesting.

So, how do you make a game challenging but interesting? How do you make a game that doesn't frustrate casual players, but doesn't bore the average player?

Don't make the game "challenging" by making all the trainers +10 levels above the player (automatically scaled or not). That's not intuitive or interesting, that's boring, a little lazy imo, and just frustrating. In my opinion, if I have to grind, the game's battles could've been organized better: if I battle every single trainer on the Route between Town A and Town B, and then every single trainer in Town B's Gym, I shouldn't be too far off from the Gym Leader's levels.
Because, if a game is challenging in a smart way, a Gym Leader with Pokemon that are 5 levels below me should still have a reasonable chance of kicking my ass. Because levels are not everything, numbers are not everything: numbers like Levels are a guide, not a clean-cut win/lose.

Challenges in Pokémon games come easily from a couple things: held items, and type counters.
Imagine the absolute surprise when you're battling a Fire-type, you pull out your Water-type to snuff that fucker out, and then the asshole hits you with an Electric move. Holy shit, right?
Now you, the player, are forced to think outside of your typical mindset- you can't just pick the obvious answer this time.
Now imagine you attack a Gym Leader's Pokemon and- what the hell, you took extra damage? Your move doesn't have recoil, so what's up? The Pokemon is holding Rocky Helmet. Now you have to work around the damage that comes every time you make contact, and that can be a struggle if you're already having difficulty getting the upper-hand.

That's the best way to make a game challenging, to me. That's the type of challenge that won't bore me. That's the best way to make your game difficult, but not frustrating. You encourage the player to have a diverse team (having a Ground type would help you avoid that Fire type Pokemon's Electric counter, for example) and you encourage the player to also use Held Items to help get the upper-hand. They can't just steam-roll everything with type-advantages, but they also aren't being arbitrarily held down by numbers because the Gym Leader suddenly shot 10-20 levels above every other Trainer in the area.

 

[Taq]

Ah, difficulty options, I remember all my favorites games that used it. They were Black 2, White, and no other game, quite a classic!
Anyways...

Should a game have a consistent difficulty curve throughout, or offer varying options?
I kinda am neutral with this mostly because even though I like the idea I would usually pick the normal level because I consider it the true difficulty, So I think the best option in all honesty is the do difficulty curves.

What methods can a game allow the player to let them decided their difficult?
I think if you want to find out you could possibly test every possibilty so then you can find the right balance for you. But I think another thing is to maybe have split routes/special that have a different level of difficulty to help people of different skills to go through while making progress. One more thing is to maybe give you a test on your skill to see what difficulty level you should but still have an option at the end to give you free choices.

Other than a level curve, what things can a game do to change how hard it is?
I felt Pokémon games like gen 6 allowed for this balance to exist without difficulty options because if the new XP share, so I recommend make it work like both versions where you can decide to either equip it to the full team or just one pokémon so then you can challenge yourself without having levels, another possibility it to do something like a nuzlocke, if you don't want your pokémon to be removed from the team then I recommend only doing the first encounter rule. But I think another thing is to maybe have split routes/special that have a different level of difficulty to help people of different skills to go through while making progress.

Well, that is all I have to say.

 

[Ice]

I'm personally a fan of weighted levelling system. Gen 5 did it this way, where you gained less xp the more overleveled you were. It allows you to insert a soft level cap. Grinding and overleveling is still possible, but it's just significantly more difficult.
Adding in more items that enhance pokemon also allows for a more traditional rpg approach to the battle mechanics. You have a set difficulty now, controlled by your soft-cap, that can mainly be changed by a player's capabilities to use items. Hand out competitive items, hand out ev raising items, or better even, hand out items that max-out IVs, because a bad roll of the dice seems like a dumb way to handle difficulty.

I'm personally a shitty pokemon player, so I don't like a too high difficulty. Competitive teams ruin me, especially with AI's ability to perfectly predict. I do like the somewhat controlled difficulty I explained above. It allows for me to still be challenged, but mediate my own difficulty curve. The game doesn't just become to easy because I'm stuck in an area, though, and I'm not just supposed to grind through some areas.

 

[Electric_man17]

My Pokemon Fan Game will be easy for professional Pokemon players and hard for new Pokemon players. As a player, I'm kind of in the middle of the 2. In my Pokemon Fan Game: Pokemon Love and Eternity, Team Infinite, especially the admins, is no joke, they will do anything to get rid of the Pokemon Universe. Team Infinite will be the hardest team you will have ever faced in the beginning, it gets easier as you go along your journey in Pokemon Love and Eternity.

 

[Fontbane]

I try to hit a balance of not too hard for potential newcomers to get into, but able to be challenging enough to get you to think about strategy if you want to. You could get something with Taunt to help with Castform in the Lurantis fight, or you could just power through with a Trumbeak. It's good to have options to suit different playstyles.
I think the Exp. Share from Gen 6+ is a great way to let the player control the difficulty (as long as the game is balanced with it in mind, like Sun/Moon).
A lot of difficulty can be controlled by Pokémon availability. I usually try to put a couple counters to upcoming bosses in areas around them, so they're not too hard if you know where to look and you prepare yourself right.
I don't think fangames should ever require you to grind. That's just a cheap way to get some superficial difficulty. That being said, sometimes a level gap is okay if you know what you're doing, like with Beckett in PEG or most of Poni Island.