>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. <- This is actually magic sauce and could be the topic of a whole talk.
Please never do this. This deceptively looks smart to a game designer, but actual players read this like a book and then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them.
Agreed. Something like Dark Souls where an enemy is an enemy and it'll smash you if you're underleveled is so much more satisfying than something like Oblivion where enemy health inexplicably goes up based on your level. It also gives you the satisfaction of going back to earlier areas that were scary and laughing off the puny enemies.
Totally different when it comes to multiplayer matchmaking, though. There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level. Nothing worse than casually sitting down after work for a quick multiplayer PVP game of any sort and getting totally annihilated by a streamer who plays 20 hours per day.
I used to really enjoy this aspect of older games like Warcraft 3 and TF2.
You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.
Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.
There's a trade-off between how long you wait and the skill spread of the team. IIRC at the very top, for DOTA2, the pros complained enough for the devs to make a "wait longer" matchmaking mode.
SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed. Random matchmaking gives them chance to win. But SBMM means having sweaty games all the time. I do prefer SBMM but I’ve seen people upset about it
People who complain about SBMM being "sweaty" are typically stronger players who want to dunk on casuals. For them, it's true that non-SBMM is sweaty, because if you're even a top 10% player, you're gonna dominate most other people.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?
That depends on the game I think. Games like Battlefield have no problem with players of all skills playing the same match - some are trying hard, some are chiling out, some are doing something silly, either way the scene is so large you can usually choose what you like the best, it all organizes itself naturally. BR games like PUBG always have very different players in one high-ish level match (as it's not possible to pick that many players of a matching skill) and that's completely fine.
Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.
> SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed.
That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.
Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.
This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse.
But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
Ooh very much disagree. Like so many things, when it’s done right, it works real well, it feels good. See Deathloop for a recent example.
Left 4 Dead handled this pretty well in my opinion (i.e. mob spawning behind if you're playing too slowly or a tank in front if you're going too quick). I absolutely hated the dynamic adjusting in games like Mario Kart, though.
in games like wow where the more powerful you get the harder the enemies become, this reduces incentive to get more powerful. its a simple consequence so im not sure why they do it - probably to keep "time played" metric hovering at the desired level. which imho backfires when time played becomes 0.
You're only looking at one side. Dynamic difficulty also allows players to progress by lowering the health of a boss they've failed to beat for over two hours.
Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
How is it a problem? Giving up is absolutely fine. Different games are made for different types of players. Who cares what the others think (or you think they think). By trying to cater to everyone you satisfy nobody.
Just make it a concrete option then. What is the point of being sneaky about it?
Probably because some people want to feel like they're succeeding in the 'actual game' and not the 'Fisher Price version of the game'. For those people the solution is ultimately to make their reality appear to be that, even though it isn't.
Yeah, Hades did this with God mode and it worked very well.