Look at me, I'm a games journalist.
Doom is awesome. Doom is probably my
favorite video game of all time. It's fast, violent, has a bitching
sound track and still plays well even without the many fantastic mods
(like Brutal Doom) that make it faster, violenter, and more bitching
soundtrackier. Normally when you talk about Doom and how fucking
bitchin' it is, you talk about its speed and emphasis on movement and
reflexes. But today we are not discussing Doom's mechanics. We are
talking about its difficulty.
Difficulty and games have been a touchy
subject on the internet lately (I will try not to bring up the
you-know-what game), but that discussion almost always devolves into
idiots on the internet yelling about how younger gamers are entitled
and want everything handed to them, while loosing 3 hours of progress
on a hard NES game somehow counts as good design, and not an absolute
pile of horseshit designed to make a game that's only 1 hour long
last for 4-5.
But in all seriousness, from the arcade
era to now, part of video gaming is the challenge of a game. Weather
the challenge is a series of obstacle courses made by smart people
like your Mega Man stages or the challenge of beating a tough
opponent named Chad at a Street Fighter V match he totally cheated
in, gaming and challenges go hand in hand, and as gaming has spread
to a wider and wider audience, difficulty in games have spread wide
as well to a spectrum ranging from “piss baby easy” to “fuck a
duck and call it Screwdge McFuck this is hard”. With most games in
the creamy middle that is “Medium”. Just medium.
Today, modern games tend to try and
satisfy all walks of life, typically by designing a game to be a fair
challenge and then adjusting the parameters based on what difficulty
the player selects. You boot up a game like Gears of War or whatever,
and you see your “Easy”, “Medium”, and “Hard” modes, with
maybe a little message at the bottom saying “hey man, 'Medium' is
the intended experience”. And yes, play a game on medium and most
likely that is the way the developers (the super smart and handsome
doods who made the game) intended for you to play it. Bringing it
back to Gears, or rather shooters in general, let's say playing on
medium means it takes 2 shots from a shotgun to kill an enemy. If the
player is a good shot, it will take 1 (headshot), and if they're bad
it might take more, so adjust the amount of health and ammo a player
might need accordingly badda bing badda boom ya got your game. Easy
and hard on the other hand, are adjusted forms of this setting.
Because reworking the entire game is a lot of work for a difficulty
setting that some players may never even see, a cost effective way to
make a game easier or harder is just make the enemies stronger and
the player weaker. Easy might mean that an enemy now only needs 1
body shot to take down, or the player gets more health and ammo at
the start of each level. Hard might make the number of shots required
to kill 3 or even more, emphasizing the damage that headshots do, as
well as limiting the amount of health and ammo the player can obtain.
This method of designing difficulty isn't bad or anything, it's just
unsurprising and uninventive . In both easy and hard, the actual
experience of the game is the same, you kill enemies to advance. The
only real change the player is forced to make is to change the number
of mistakes they can make with easy being more forgiving and allowing
more mistakes, and hard being more cruel and reducing that number. As
I said, there is not much wrong with this change and while some might
see it as lazy, I prefer to once again call it “cost effective”.
But to get back on track, the reason
why I brought up Doom earlier is because even though it's an ancient
ass shooter, its difficulty selection is still some of the finest
form of game design in the whole shooter genre.
Doom has 5 difficulty settings. “I'm
too young to die”, “Hey, not too rough”, “Hurt me plenty”,
“Ultra Violence” and “Nightmare”. These settings translate to
“very easy”, “easy”, “medium”, “hard” and “very
hard” respectively. That may seem kind of overwhelming (and it kind
of is), but the devil is in the details. The first three difficulties
are almost identical in terms of enemy placement, ammo given, and the
amount of shots it takes to kill a monster. The only major difference
is on “very easy” players take half damage, and ammo is doubled.
Let's look at E1M1, Doom's first level, to understand how a player on
the first few difficulty settings will approach them.
E1M1 starts off with the player in a
room with a couple barrels and a pistol. There are no enemies and the
player cannot continue until they walk forward and exit the room, so
this room primarily exists to give players a brief chance to test out
controls and movement to get a feel for the game. Since Doom has no
formal tutorial, a room like this kind of has to exist. I don't want
to get distracted talking about how great this level is as a
tutorial, so suffice to say that Doom does a great job of
tutorializing almost every aspect of the game (like how the imp on
the tall structure in the goo room serves as a way for the player to
test how aiming at high things with no proper Z axis works) in a very
short amount of time. The player leaves the first room, and enters
the box room, with 2 enemies at the far end. They kill the enemies
and move to the goo room, and find an imp and several zombie soldiers
patrolling the area. The player kills them and moves on to the final
small room, where they kill one imp and move to the exit room.
This level serves as the introduction
to Doom's mechanics. If you're a first time player or just a little
rusty from not playing in a while, this level is plenty forgiving
enough to get you into Doom's fast paced rhythm. But with time and
practice, this level can be mastered, and players looking for
something more challenging will most likely head to Doom's next real
difficulty: “Ultra Violence” aka, “Hard”.
Doom's harder difficulties go out of
their way to make the experience not only more challenging, but
different enough to force the player to change their tactics, and
therefore, alter their experience as they play the game. This is
obvious right from the first level.
Play E1M1 on “Ultra Violence” or
above and you'll start in the same room with barrels as every other
setting, but look to the left and you'll see you're immediately
confronted with 2 enemies at the top of the staircase. “Ultra
Violence” basically assumes you're a skilled player, but even so in
the name of easing the player into a new or unfamiliar difficulty,
the enemies are far enough away to give the player both a chance to
react to them, and if they're that unskilled, mitigate any amount of
damage they may acquire. Once the enemies are killed, the player can
then grab the armor they will most likely need, and pick up the
enemies' weapons: shotguns.
And here is were the crucial mechanical
change comes in that forces players to change their method of play.
You see, on the first three difficulty settings, the shotgun is
impossible to obtain in E1M1 without finding any secret areas. But on
“Ultra Violence” and above, it's practically mandatory, as most
of the zombie soldiers are replaced with shotgun soldiers, and some
extra ones are added in. The player can obtain the shotgun from the
very first room, and this means that while enemies are larger in
number and can do a bit more damage, you can cut them down faster
than normally. No more standing at the far end of a room and picking
them off with a pistol. No, now you have the shotgun, so get in there
and start blasting!
Anyways, after picking up your new
shiny destruction machine and a shiny bitch suit, you're ambushed by
2 more shotgun soldiers. Better start blasting! Pick them off, and
you'll enter the box room, which now has about 4 enemies in the box,
but entering the room is dangerous, as you're immediately ambushed by
2 more soldiers on either side of you. Yet another example of forcing
a tactical change: walking into the room is dangerous, how do you
continue? Open the door, pick off the box soldiers, then deal with
the pincer squad? Open the door, shoot the pincer bois, then back up
to pick off the box bros? It's all up to you. No way is wrong, but at
the end of the room, you will have nothing but the amount of health
and ammo you have to determine how well you survived that encounter.
Clearing out the pincer crew and the box gang reveals more enemies
hiding behind the box, a few more soldiers than normal in the goo
room, and several more pincer soldiers in the following small room.
With the final stinger being that, once you open the door to the
Exit, an imp is waiting for you. Even going one step further and
seeking out all the secret areas reveals that enemies are even
lurking where your rewards are. The level's enemy placement and
instant mechanical shift with the shotgun sets up the player for what
the rest of the game will become in an instant: enemies are
everywhere, but you are well equipped to deal with them, so RIP AND
TEAR!
See Doom most likely couldn't have
gotten away with the typical “make enemies stronger, make player
weaker” approach to difficulty, because then the game's flow would
have been destroyed. Doom is all about fast flowing combat. Let's
pretend Doom's enemy and mechanical placement were the same on Ultra
Violence, but enemies now take less damage, and less ammo is
available. Suddenly Doom's momentum takes way longer to build up to
the point where the higher difficulty levels are boring. Enemies take
too many hits to kill, the shotgun still isn't available without
using secret areas, and player tactics remain exactly the same, they
just take longer to execute. To keep Doom's fast paced gameplay while
making the game more challenging, the only real option was to make
the enemy placement different, while allowing the player to reach
that fast state sooner.
Difficulty should always be a sliding
scale in games. Different levels of challenge for different players
is a good thing, even if you never touch “easy” or “hard”.
The important thing is to remember that game design is... well,
design. It's about creation and construction. Crafting a new
experience for someone to experience a game all over again takes some
real skill and know how, but the results are always worth the labor.
Even after 25 years, Doom remains an example of excellent design.
Excellent design of monsters, levels, weapons, and good old fashioned
gameplay.
Yeah I'm excited for Doom Eternal, can
ya tell?
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