Sometimes games contain a difficult level that make gamers throw down their controller. Some easy examples off of memory would be a first-time playthrough of Ocarina of Time’s Water Temple, or the part in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time where you have to navigate through Kirlsa Caverns via a non sequitur mini game that is never revisited in the game again. It’s true that difficulty can sometimes ruin a game, but there are many beneficial aspects to making a game difficult. It’s impossible for difficulty to ruin a game. Even the ridiculous, impossible, terrible levels of our childhood served a purpose: to challenge us and to make us remember the experience.
Adding challenge to a game is a no-brainer. If a task is easy, the sense of accomplishment is much smaller than it would be if the task was much more difficult. However, balancing the difficulty with the reward can be a daunting task even for developers. To cite the Water Temple again, that level wasn’t close to the end of the game, but it was by far the most difficult. Moving it towards the end of the game may have made a better impression on gamers, since they would be expecting the difficulty at the later levels. However, its location in the middle of the game does serve to make the game more memorable.
Many of the first games in prominent series were incredibly difficult to beat. In example, the original Mario and Legend of Zelda games have proved to be NP-hard—that is to say, the number of correct routes is small compared to the amount of incorrect routes through a level, and compared to other problems, it is difficult to calculate the optimal paths of a character through the games. As an example of what might be considered NP-easy, rhythm games such as Guitar Hero and DDR have easily observable optimal routes. While their difficulty isn’t linked to their success, it does show that difficulty does not prevent it.
But not all games are designed with balance in mind—Battletoads is nigh impossible to beat without dying, Prince of Persia’s physics are nearly impossible to control, and prominent MMOs might give certain classes ungodly powers on accident. In these cases, what could these difficult-to-execute button timing and poor control systems ever have to contribute to the game? Other than memorability (let’s face it, do we remember Battletoads for anything else?), difficulty significantly adds to the atmosphere of the game. With genres like arcade fighting, the most difficult and precise button timing and chains that are difficult to memorize are the same ones that allow you to beat your opponents in multiplayer. In survival horror, those difficult controls make the game much scarier—after all, if battling a horde of nightmares or running across a room full of monsters was easy, you’d never be afraid to do it.
Some people like to take the easy route and slide through a game with minimal effort—but, let’s face it, most of us like challenges. Without a challenge, there is no reward. The best way for developers to handle this is to provide a variety of difficulty levels for gamers to choose from—but in the absence of this, providing a more difficult game is the best choice a designer could make.
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