A prevalent topic in gaming is difficulty. How hard is that boss? Is it challenging to press a certain sequence of buttons? Should <thing> be easier? These questions bounce around the gaming space about once a month but nothing new is really brought to the table. “Dark Souls is hard and not everyone can beat it” is a worn out talking point, and after all is said and done nothing changes. Difficulty is also a staple discussion for many competitive games especially. Old heads constantly spout “the game was better and harder in the old days,” and that “they took the skill out of things” even if the ‘old day’s were a few years or even a few months ago. Whether these complaints are true or not is dependent on the game and what it’s being compared to, and that requires a huge deep dive into mechanics and comparing play at a very high level. I’m not here to do that. Rather I want to look at difficulty at a concept and look at how it is affected by the complexity of a game. Games like Rainbow Six with the quick lean of old and more dynamic operator interactions were a different beast than today. But is it really harder than what we have now? It’s true that individual mechanics were deeper or harder to master but there’s almost 70 operators in the game now. That’s loads more than the 20 present at launch, each of which creates new and unique gameplay interactions. ‘New’ Siege at the least is more complex than any prior version of the game. Which brings up my main point: the complexity of a game is separate from its difficulty, and while it can be a contributing factor, it is not the only part of a game that needs to be considered when talking about how hard a game is. A game’s difficulty is affected by a number of factors, but the prevalent perception of the concept is heavily based on front end gameplay mechanics.
Games as interactions
What even is difficulty in games?
The difficulty of a game is how hard a game is. The Oxford definition is “needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand”. But when playing a game it can be best understood as a relationship between the player and the game. The player sends commands to the game and the game gives feedback, positive or negative in response to which the player responds ad infinitum. It’s in this relationship that difficulty is created. From the physical challenge of the inputs, the reaction speed requirements, unclear instructions, and aspects within the game itself. In-game factors include but are not limited to systems, mechanics, controls, and bugs. Of course difficulty is also perceived to be a setting, an option that can be adjusted in PVE games to affect how many enemies appear or how much damage you give and how much you take. While a relatively lazy method of changing the challenge of combat, it is the most obvious example of raising and lowering the barrier of entry around a game. It’s the reason why Dark Souls gets brought up all the time: it has no difficulty adjustment and has both extremely punishing combat and intentionally malicious situations built into the game. Many can’t play the game, let alone beat it. On the flipside, you have Nintendo making platforming more lenient in their 3D Mario games because the 3rd dimension was more challenging for players than expected.
However, the challenge of a game may not come from its gameplay, but the way its systems interact with mechanics, like stiff controls that make a perfectly fine movement mechanic rigid and imprecise. It isn’t that the game’s mechanic itself is bad, but the way in which you as the player interact with it. Because the movement is janky there will be more situations where players find themselves fighting the controls rather than the enemies. Think of early Dark Souls games where systems like movement weren’t as polished as later entries. Just because you could overcome the added difficulty doesn’t mean that the challenge was never there to begin with, or that it was intended on the part of the developers. In the same vein as bad systems, bugs also add an extra challenge to games. But not on purpose. Say sound is an important aspect of a game, but there’s a bug that completely mutes it. Here the relation between the player and game is broken, as the game is trying to send a signal to the player, but cannot because of the interference from the bug. This isn’t a part of intentional game design, but it does make the game harder to play. And on top of all these factors that singularly affect difficulty in some way, when you introduce a second, third, or tenth player into the mix, the relationship a player has with the game becomes infinitely more complicated.
Ok, but what about multiplayer games?
Difficulty in games with multiple players is a much messier topic for obvious reasons. Instead of only taking into account one player’s actions, the game has to account for and interact with multiple people doing things all at the same time.This in turn has the chance of changing the interaction other players were going to have. Each player being able to interact with a system in the game creates added depth to the relationship between the game and players exponentially. In a hypothetical two player game, being able to interact with a basic PVE combat system that features <attacks> <magic> <skills> and <items> not only affects Player 1, but may also have an impact on Player 2 – healing skills would logically be usable on both players after all. So now Player 1 and Player 2 aren’t just interacting with the game’s 4 mechanics once, they interact with it at least 16 times.
Player 1 is interacting with the combat system 4 times for every way they interact with the game alone
4 times for every way Player 2 interacts with the game alone
4 times for every way Player 1 interacts with Player 2’s character and their status
4 more for every way Player 2 interacts with Player 1’s character
This is why a game like Siege can lose complexity in quick leaning, yet remain a hard game to learn. Every time a new operator is added, they create a ton of new interactions with the rest of the cast that have to be learned and adapted to. When enough characters are added, the game has more depth than when quick leans existed, even if it takes a different form. Speaking of PVP games, that’s where systems and mechanics really become interesting. Every mechanic has a positive and negative effect depending on which side of things you’re on, and mastery over game systems becomes paramount to being able to win. If you can’t shoryuken with the best of them, you’re going to lose to someone who can. But when this discussion of difficulty comes to multiplayer games, things get muddied and people mistake difficulty for complexity, especially in legacy franchises where newer entries are seen as ‘easier’.
Lets get complicated
Back end complexity
Complexity is a concept separate from difficulty. The Oxford definition of the root word is “consisting of many different and connected parts”. This lines up pretty well with my definition of complexity within games, which is the way multiple game mechanics interact with each other. It is important to note that this is separate from a player interacting with the game’s mechanics. This is only the game interacting with itself in unique ways. Think of how items in an RPG like Final Fantasy can affect a character’s stats, which in turn affect their performance using that stat. A +2 ring of strength that makes you hit harder with a sword. While conceptually simple sounding to us as humans, the way the game sees these systems interacting is much different. The <item> interacts with <stat block: Strength> which then changes the numbers used in the equation for <attack>. This is back end complexity, and it doesn’t really have any bearing on the player. The only thing the player notices is that hitting things with a sword does bigger numbers than before the ring was equipped. But complexity does not imply difficulty. The player only sees the end result of extra damage caused by the ring and doesn’t think of the system in place to make it work. This also does not mean that item management in an RPG is difficult, it’s a pretty well known and easily understood concept by now.
Likewise, the mechanics around firing a gun in Call of Duty can hardly be called difficult: you see the gun kick up away from your opponent and you pull back down onto the target. In the back end there’s a lot going on to make that interaction between you and the enemy work out, such as calculating recoil, damage fall off, remaining ammunition, what body part is hit, and cosmetic features like muzzle flash and bullet casings. Do all those mechanics make Call of Duty hard? No. It’s the player controlled aspects such as aiming and positioning that define the difficulty of the game, not in the way the gun moves while firing. As another example, compare the combo systems in Street Fighter 2 and Guilty Gear. The gatling system allows you to cancel any attack into another one of equal or higher strength, rather than only specific moves linking together like in Street Fighter 2. Which combo system is more complex in the back end is anyone’s guess, but for the player, the only complexity that they interact with is knowing what moves link together. Which in Guilty Gear is all of them. Its when complexity starts to be affected by player control that difficulty starts to be a factor. What is easier and harder becomes much more relative to the player’s interaction with the game’s systems.
Front end complexity
Front end complexity is when the mechanics of the game interact with each other and are more actively influenced by the player’s actions. This is where a game’s complexity starts to affect the difficulty. It isn’t just the gatling system, it’s the way it interacts with the blocking mechanic, overhead and low properties, RISC, proration (damage fall off), cancelable moves, burst, and roman cancels. Since the gatling system allows players to interact with all these mechanics, they can choose what to influence and prioritize over the other mechanics. RISC is affected by the amount of moves a blocking player is hit by, which in turn means that they take more damage when they get hit. Player 1 using a low attack changes the interaction for Player 2, who now has to adjust by changing their blocking state to <blocking low>. Depending on the entry, all of these mechanics can have more or less depth, which in turn makes the rest of the game more or less complex. With so many factors that can be delved into, it’s inevitable that there are going to be mechanics that affect difficulty on some level. When a player understands (or doesn’t understand) the various mechanics interacting with each other, they can stretch the limits of the game and optimize to a terrifying degree. Super Mario speedruns are almost to the point where Tool Assisted Speedruns are mere frames away from human runs.
Front end complexity affecting difficulty isn’t exclusive to fighting games and speedruns though, games like League of Legends and Rainbow Six find their complexity in individual character’s mechanics interacting with each other. A Mute jammer may be able to block the signal of Twitch’s shock drone, but when positioned correctly the drone will be able to destroy the jammer without being jammed. This simple interaction can evolve further as the jammer’s radius works in a sphere and goes through walls, so verticality and hiding the device behind surfaces becomes an important aspect. Here the complexity of the game contributes to the difficulty of the game more as a knowledge check than anything else. Nothing about this interaction is physically demanding of players. Nothing about positioning a piece of utility, jammer or drone, asks the player to go above 30 actions per minute. All the game asks is do you know how Mechanic A interacts with Mechanic B? It’s hard to know everything about a game and its interactions, and that creates difficulty beyond a overcoming an opponent’s mechanical skill with your own. Because of that, gamesense and knowledge become just as much of a barrier to improvement as individual mechanical skill. However, this also means that new avenues for players to express their talents are opened. Rapha may not be an aimgod in Quake, but he is by far the most successful player in the game’s history thanks to his mind for the game. Cypher may have the pure mechanical skill, but he can’t trap an opponent like Rapha.
Addressing the Elephant in the room
So all the ‘back in my day’ gamers can quiet down
It’s an undeniable fact that games have become simplified in comparison to the 90s. Video games at those times had gotten well beyond the point of being basic proof of concepts, and started to truly explore what was possible with the medium. Finally games had gotten to the level of Super Mario World, Final Fantasy 2, Mortal Kombat, and Wolfenstein 3D. However, this exploration also meant a lot of janky mechanics and straight up flops since no one really knew what makes a good game. No one could. Not yet at least. Gaming is in a much different place than it was during the 90s and early 2000s, there’s not only been a lot more time for developers to figure out the medium as far as the creative process is concerned, but also more time for the players to understand what they want out of a game. Some old games can age like fine wine if they were good enough of a title. Super Mario 64 for the N64 is a great example of this. But if Nintendo were to release that exact game without the Mario branding in the modern day, it would flop. Too many technical and quality of life changes have been made to games for a Mario 64 clone without Mario to succeed. Remastered versions of games prove this point; people like the old games, but want a more modern experience with auto saves, better controls, and prettier graphics. Some points of stress will remain, like a bad level or two that aren’t going to get deleted, but for the most part remastered games are just modernized versions of classics. It’s in the newer entries, the Mario Odessy’s, where the real changes get made. Here points of stress within the gameplay loop are investigated and removed if they negatively impact the gameplay. I doubt anyone will complain about a more refined encounter system in Final Fantasy or autosaves included as a new industry standard. Yet when games make these kinds of changes to more front-facing mechanics nowadays, either as a sequel or as an update to systems in a Game as Service, there’s always a vocal group that lampoons the new version.
What about my esports complexity?
Within competitive scenes the main argument against this is that it makes the game easier on some level. However, very rarely is there an exploration about how adjusting a handful of game mechanics affects the difficulty of the game, or if it lowers the complexity, which is the part people actually care about. Look at Fighting Games; every time there’s a new entry within a legacy franchise and a mechanic gets changed the immediate response is that the game is being made easier, which makes it less skillful. This may be true to a certain extent, Half circle motions are less prevalent in Guilty Gear Strive in comparison to Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R. (I know, what a name) I-no players everywhere are in shambles over Chemical Love being a quarter circle as opposed to a half circle. We used to be a society, a real society. However, does this really negatively impact the complexity of the game? Many also cite that the main draw of fighting games is the cool combos and high level mind games you can have in a long set. Learning combos is rote memorization in training mode, and if the mental game is the real draw of fighting games, why are some changes to the motion inputs of the game drawing so much ire? If anything, skilled players should be able to abuse the fact that they’re used to more complicated games and dominate newer players who only have a newer ‘watered down’ game to learn from. Dive Kick is literally a two button game, but John Doe isn’t going to throw hands against Justin Wong at an equal level just because of that.
By the same token it’s not as if no players rise to a high level when a new game comes out. Tenz was an average looking North American player, with the potential to become a star in Counter Strike. When Valorant came out he became one of the best players overnight despite those that consider Valorant an ‘easier’ game. Valorant may be mechanically easier than Counter Strike, but that doesn’t explain the meteoric rise of the player. What does is that Valorant has different mechanics affecting its complexity in comparison to Counter Strike. Being able to read Ultimate usage and navigate high mobility characters in Valorant demands a different skill set to knowing Dust 2 smoke lineups. Similarly changes to existing mechanics within games does not affect the difficulty of the game at a high level. It may lower the skill floor so that new players get started easier, but the notion that games lose skill ceiling defining complexity because some mechanics within the game get simplified or more intuitive discredits the true difficulty of becoming a good or great player. I mean if Valorant is such an easy game why can’t all the old Counter Strike players hang? Why is it only the proven legends and super young talents? It’s not as if players like dazzLe have taken over the Valorant scene after making no impact in CS. He’s still at the Tier 2 level of play, nothing changed just because the game got ‘easier’. It still takes players like ScreaM or Hiko to be on top teams off name brand alone, and even that doesn’t guarantee success with all the new guns rising up in just the past year.