Difficulty with Transparency

A conversation I've seen coming up a lot on video game forums and in gaming related podcasts has to do with the difficulty settings in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.  Specifically, the game is surprisingly up front in explaining in detail how (and in what ways) each setting affects the experience.  It's a nice change of pace considering nine times out of ten, games only give some generic explanation that goes something like this:

• Easy - for players unfamiliar with the franchise/genre
• Normal - the default setting
• Hard - for veteran players who desire a real challenge

Easier-than-easy (if it exists at all) usually has some text about being for players who just want to enjoy the story, while harder-than-hard tends to have the word "masochist" somewhere in the description.  If a player wants to know concrete facts about how each difficulty setting adjusts the gameplay, they are often forced to look it up on a wiki page or consult with others on a message board.  To put it bluntly, this is a bad system that can tarnish the experience.  The original Halo was famously way more fun on the hardest difficulty setting because it encourage players to engage with the full breadth of the mechanics in the game.  Conversely, many strategy games seem to shed a lot of their gameplay elements at higher difficulty settings because anything other than a narrow and highly optimized approach is guaranteed to result in failure.

Obviously, the solution here would be to explain everything upfront.  Even so, there might be problems in terms of granularity.  It's not uncommon to see differences in difficulty do things like reduce enemy damage, accuracy and health all at once, while simultaneously boosting player resilience and damage output.  Compound this with tweaks to AI behavior, and the result is a massive change due to the way subsystems interact.  One way too avoid the problem of having one setting being too easy and the next being too hard, is to have custom difficulty settings.  I really preferred playing Golden Eye on my N64 with enemy accuracy turned way down, but enemy damage cranked up to the max.  I think these setting options make for a very tense, but not necessarily frustrating experience.  I'm also not a fan of bullet-sponge enemies so whenever possible I like to adjust the setting to remove that annoyance as well.

To some degree, players have to know what they are getting into.  Otherwise how are they supposed to know what settings would best suit their play style.  It's kind of a chicken-or-egg paradox.  Regardless, a lack of flexibility is almost always a determent in the long run.  The RTS genre serves as a particularly good example of why transparency and customizable difficulty options are important.  Nobody likes cheating AI in games that don't have asymmetric gameplay.  It can feel really unfair when computer controlled opponents can build new units without having to expend resources or wait on construction timers.  In the past, I would sometimes play games like Starcraft and Homeworld against bots, but never above the medium difficulty setting (the cutoff point for AI cheats).  If I wanted a more challenging (but still mechanically balanced) experience, I would just add more AI opponents.  The difference between one cheating AI opponent and several that have to play under the same constraints as the player might seem irrelevant.  Once you get past that first glance though, employing tactics like divide-and-conquer or strategic raids against resourcing operations are only feasible if the AI doesn't cheat.

I tend to look to XCOM and the mod making community (in particular) as an example of modular difficulty done right.  Being able to check a variety of boxes that customize the overall experience is a great feature to have available in pretty much any game.  That said, sliders are also nice.  Whatever the case may be though, developers need to get away from the needlessly opaque labels of "easy," "medium" and "hard."