A couple of weeks ago I posted an email Q&A with Benoit Lambert, lead game designer for Ubisoft's Assassin’s Creed 2, on what I think is a fascinating topic: How developers fine tune the difficulty level of the games we play.
As luck would have it, another Ubisoft game sage has answered the same questions I posed Mr. Benoit. In the interview below, Steven Masters, lead game designer on this fall’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, brings his own unique perspective to the discussion of game difficulty. Here are a few nuggets of his wisdom to whet your whistle:
“Randomness is the enemy of fairness.”
“We’re not making games for the enemies to have fun.”
“Everybody who purchases the game should be able to finish the game.”
Read on to learn more about Mr. Masters’ game balancing methodology.
Steven Masters, lead game designer for Ubisoft's upcoming Splinter Cell: Conviction, photographed in the company's Montreal studio. — Ubisoft
Which members of a development team are typically responsible for determining a game’s difficulty level? Is it an area of specialty in game development? Are they involved from day one, or are they called in at a specific stage?
Difficulty is something that we consider from the very beginning of development, when we are first designing the mechanics, and it is something that continues until the day we ship. Once the level designers are building levels with the mechanics, they’re tuning the difficulty level, balancing and discovering how all those elements interact with each other. It’s something that happens throughout the entire process of the development.
Balancing the difficulty level of the game is a collaboration between a lot of people in different specialty areas. At one end of the scale you have the game design team. They’ll be tuning the enemy difficulty, balancing the weapons and player health and so on. Then you have the level designers who will be controlling how many enemies there are and how well you can see them depending on the different challenges that they set up.
Difficulty balancing involves the animation, sound and art teams as well. When placing lighting in an area it can lead you to think that nobody is there, but really, the enemies are all lurking in the darkness. That will change the flavour and difficulty of the encounter pretty dramatically.
So really it’s the responsibility of the entire team. It’s a close collaboration between everyone to make sure the difficulty is coherent, well balanced and provides a good challenge for the player.
Are there any established philosophies/schools of thought on how to set the challenge level of a game? If so, is there one that you prefer?
There are a number of schools of thought on this. It really comes down to the type of game you are creating and the sort of experience you want the game to offer.
A narrative game could have a very flat difficulty curve and keep the same level of challenge through the whole game.
As a very different example, Nintendo games work on a very strict progression of teasing the need for something then giving you the answer to that thing. For example, if you encounter new flying enemies, you’ll wish you had something better than a sword to hit them. Then you receive a boomerang and you can target them in the air. So they work on evolving your abilities throughout the game and deploy new enemy types to complement your abilities, using a well defined reward schedule.
Something I really like that we do a lot here at Ubisoft is called Rational Level Design. That involves taking all the elements of our games (the various mechanics, the different ways you can set them up in the game, the different ways you can integrate the ingredients together) and controlling them in a very strict, progressive manner. This gives you control over the pacing, difficulty, and variety of your challenges.
