Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Frustration Part 1

 "Frustrating" Hard Signs


When a game is difficult but unfairly difficult, it can often be frustrating to the player. Many signs of frustration can be attributed to a sense of powerlessness from the player's side as if he has no choice but to accept the punishment the game is doling out for him.

As a designer, one of the main questions you have to ask yourself is "How can the player overcome this difficulty?" If there's no answer besides "Suck it up" you might want to question your design a bit more.

Let's go over the points in the recap:


Unavoidibility - "I just can't dodge that one attack." 

Unavoidable problems are almost always a mistake in design because the player can't do anything about it. These kinds of problems, especially if they lead to death or boredom, can become death knells in your game simply because the player has no choice in the matter. If he dies due to an unavoidable attack, he's always going to die. He just has to pray he never runs into the problem in the first place because there's no solution.

If you do have unavoidable problems in design, make sure that they do not directly lead to death or boredom. Unavoidable problems in this case should mean putting additional penalties or constraints rather than punishing the player because he did nothing wrong. These are good to some limited degree.

Note that unavoidable attacks due to the player doing something bad aren't truly unavoidable because the player has the option of not doing that horrible mistake in the first place and therefore don't fall in this category.

Round-aboutness - "So first, make your way uphill in the snow 6 miles. And then uphill back"

Nothing is more annoying in frustrating difficulty when you simply give no option for the player to efficiently plan his goals.  When you make a problem difficult by giving the player a convuluted method to achieve something, this is a difficulty that the player has no way of getting around.

For example, let's say that our challenge for the player is to collect 6 golden mushrooms. Now, if the player was allowed to collect them in any order, it would be wise for the player to efficiently collect mushrooms that were close to each other. But if we had the arbitrary restriction of picking them in a set order (especially a set order that made no sense, tediously making the player go back and forth in the longest path possible) the player no longer has the option to plan his route.

Thus, this level of "increased difficulty" is only frustrating.

Arbitrary methods - "You have to wait for the gold button to be depressed, then you shoot somewhere else."

This problem is often due to the designer trying to be far far too clever by half. Instead of making the player's abilities do something, they want the player to solve some specific puzzle that they have in their heads. The problem is when that puzzle follows the designer's internal logic without actually paying attention to whether or not it makes sense.

It might be a terrific puzzle that they have to shoot the gold button and then a weak spot. The problem is, is this any kind of game at all? Why would a game has something so outside the normal realm of thinking? What kind of difficulty is encouraged by this behavior?

Lack of signals/instruction/hints and/or Lack of time to gather information - "The bosses weak point is not glowing, marked or even hinted at anywhere. And then he kills you if you shoot the wrong part."

This usually goes hand in hand with the above problem. If you tell the player there's a weak spot or a set of instructions they have to follow, it's "too easy." Or is it? If you tell the player absolutely nothing at all, more often or not, the first sign something is wrong is confusion. Frustration quickly follows.

What is worse is that designers usually feel like punishing the player for not picking up our their subtle hints. However, this just exacerbates the original problem. When players are trying to figure out a problem, they shouldn't continually punished because they're trying to figure it out. That's like whipping someone for taking too long on a convuluted riddle that you asked them in the first place without giving them any hints.

You can either be subtle or you can aggressively punish mistakes. You can't have both.


Artificial difficulty - "Oh, that gun we just gave you? Doesn't work. Oh, by the way, if you don't have *this* level of gear, you're dead no matter what you do."

Artificial difficulty is the recourse of a lazy designer trying to make his game harder. Instead of thinking of interesting challenges he just gives the boss more health or makes him do three times the damage. Giving monsters arbitrary immunities or invincibilities to "cheap" attack by the player. The problem with this type of difficulty is that it really doesn't encourage the player to do anything. They can't do anything about the problem's magnitude.

There really isn't anything interesting about an artifically difficult boss. He just takes longer and he's just not as fun to fight. This may be a tough problem to identify because it's very subjective as to what makes a proper encounter. The key question here is "What makes this problem difficult?" If the answer to that is simply a sheer matter of "the enemy has high statistics and better gear" and not "the enemy fights in an interesting way" you might want to look into making your enemies more complex.

Low interactivity - "The boss kills me because he ensnares me 99% of the time."

One of the ways to frustrate players is simply take away their ability to interact with the problem. What could be more difficult right? Take away their swords and give them a toothpick. Take away their horse and make them walk through mud. That's difficult. Now they can't use their most powerful abilities and their ability to control the character is weakened.

Except for the tiny fact that, if we didn't want any control over what was happening in a game, we wouldn't be playing a game in the first place.  Nothing is more frustrating than an encounter where you spend 90% of the time watching yourself get beat on while you can do nothing about it. Sure, it may be a difficult encounter but if the majority of the time is spent fighting the fact that we can't control our own character, it's not much of a game anymore.