After finishing up the WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos singleplayer campaign rather handily in Hard mode, I had assumed that The Frozen Throne expansion pack would offer more of roughly the same. It turns out I was sadly mistaken, because Blizzard has gone nuts with stacking the odds in the singleplayer missions. I’ve only just managed to claw my way through the final mission of the Night Elf campaign and there are still three more campaigns to go!
This was a bit of a shock after the simplicity of the recently released Command & Conquer 4. Where Command & Conquer 4 was an utter cakewalk on the highest difficulty setting, WarCraft III had me challenged in numerous missions and The Frozen Throne is proving to be genuinely difficult. And this got me thinking about how much difficulty levels in games have changed over the years.
I’ve already spent more time in WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne’s singleplayer campaign than it took me to complete both of C&C4′s singleplayer campaigns – and I’m only a quarter of the way through. Worse, I had to reload only a single mission in C&C 4 and that was due to misunderstanding the optional objectives rather than actually losing the mission. As for that final Night Elf mission of The Frozen Throne: I had to reload four times until I had a viable strategy.
This reduction of difficulty seems to be common in every gaming genre nowadays, but why is it happening?
Back in the day, when you set WarCraft III to Hard difficulty, or Unreal Tournament to Godlike, then you knew you were in for a real challenge. Even Normal tended to pose a decent challenge to the average gamer, with Easy mode being the way out for those looking to simply experience the game and not be challenged in any way. The singleplayer component was still just a lead up to multiplayer mind you, but even those AI opponents could pose a genuine threat.
Fast forward to modern times and you have Mass Effect 2 tauting an Insane mode, which offers a whopping three moderately challenging encounters in a 60 hour singleplayer campaign. I’m sorry BioWare, but that makes for an inane playthrough, not an insane one. Likewise, Crysis in Delta mode strips HUD elements and makes Koreans talk Korean, but it’s never genuinely difficult.
There are still some games that pose a challenge, such as Left 4 Dead 2, Unreal Tournament 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, but those are the exception rather than the norm.
This victory took a sound strategy and several reloads - a great challenge!
As I see it, there are two reasons for this change, the first being achievements.
Most recent games include an achievement system, which inviarably rewards players for completing the game in the highest difficulty setting. Incidentally, all of these games (with very rare exceptions) also feature maximum difficulty settings that just aren’t difficult. Just look at Assassin’s Creed, C&C 4, Mirror’s Edge, Supreme Commander 2, BioShock, Modern Warfare 2 or Mass Effect 2 and you’ll see what I mean.
It seems like most game developers have determined that they’re better off serving the achievement seekers than the (less numerous) gamers who are simply looking for a challenge. Achievements do seem to attract more players to a game. And by reducing the challenge of the highest difficulty settings, game developers enable less competent players to gain their achievements.
With most gamers opting for Normal difficulty for a first playthrough, these practices ensure that a lot of these gamers stick around to do another run in Hard difficulty rather than abandon the game because hard mode is too hard anyway. That’s what these game developers are after, because more time spent playing their game generally correlates with a purchase of their next game.
Another reason for the reduction in difficulty is that there just aren’t many gamers that play games in the maximum difficulty setting. This is clearly demonstrated in Valve’s statistics for their Half Life 2 episodes, which indicate that just 10% of all players chooses to play in Hard mode. In fact, even Easy mode is significantly more popular with two (episode two) to three (episode one) times as many players.
If you’ve actually played the Half Life 2 episodes in Hard mode, then you know this isn’t all that much of a challenge. This only further strengthens the argument for lower difficulty settings, for if 90% of all gamers shies away from Hard mode in a game that isn’t very hard, then those numbers are almost certainly higher in other games. And what’s the point of catering to such a tiny minority?
In Mass Effect 2, even Insane mode is easygoing, especially with bonus damage for headshots
So, if you’re one of those old school Hard mode gamers like me, then there are dark times ahead. This trend will almost certainly continue and even those indie games and East-European games will fall to it, eventually. You’d better get used to playing online, because that’s where we’ll have to seek our challenges in the future.
Rest assured that there’s a positive side to this as well. Developers have already started phasing out artificial difficulty-increasing techniques such as infinite respawns and enemies with 100% accuracy, just look at Modern Warfare 2 vs Modern Warfare. This can only be a good thing, for while a challenge is good, a cheating computer is never fun to play against.
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