NOTE: new screenshots of my current WIP can be viewed on the next blog post - go there now :)

Game developers these days are cowards. They all follow patterns in their difficulty and complexity - start easy, get harder, plateau out. It's as if developers are afraid that by making a game challenging, they will alienate players. Then again, I suppose today's gamer is a wimp too.

I remember playing Star Goose back in the early 90's. That game was hard. REALLY hard. In fact, getting through the first level was a thing to celebrate. Ghouls and Ghosts was another one, with a truly punishing life system that saw you all the way back at the beginning of the game if you failed.

Would difficulty like in these games survive in today's market? I think so, but it would take cast iron bollocks for a developer to stick to their guns. What I mean is, if you are going to have a game that is so punishing, it really needs to be that way from the very start. Star Goose would have been extremely frustrating had it been easy up to the mid-point, then introduced the insane difficulty.

Most games these days, as I mentioned, begin very easy, and very simple. They introduce the core concepts in the tutorial, as well as a few basic enemies. The difficulty slowly ramps up, until we hit the first boss. From this point, if you were to draw the flow of difficulty on a graph, it would rise and fall in a wave, slowly getting slightly higher. This is a current trend in games design - the rise of action is offset by dropping off to walking, cutscenes or minor battles with lesser enemies.

But many older games took a different approach. They threw you in the thick of it from the opening screen, and let you figure it out yourself. This often meant a LOT of restarts, but that's part of the fun of the game. It's a challenge. A real challenge. These games USED the difficulty as a way to entertain. It was a gameplay element. Games these days have fallen into a trap - they look at lose conditions as something to be avoided, trying to make it as painless as possible for the player. What it really does is make losing a chore; something to be avoided because it's downtime. In those older games, particularly arcade games, the difficulty was an integral design feature, and beating the curve was an enjoyable experience. Losing was an opportunity to get better, not an opportunity to get a drink while the game reloads.

There is something else I wanted to discuss when it comes to using difficulty, and that is when you approach a situation with your game where it would break the difficulty curve to maintain story cohesion. This happens with games that have a very detailed backstory, and where the developers want to impress on the player the power of a faction or entity. So the question is: do you change the story to suit the gameplay, or the gameplay to suit the story.

Obviously it depends on what your focus is, but I've seen time and again the effects of significantly upping difficulty in order to impress a story upon the player. For instance, Star Control II has a couple of alien races that are, story-wise, extremely powerful. Their ships are numerous, and each one is devastating. The designers could have cut back on this in order to make the game easier. Instead they went with it. Running into an Ur-Quan Dreadnought in SCII is a spine-tingling experience - you know these things can match you. Running into a half-dozen of them really gets the blood pumping.

The effect this has is, rather than making the game frustrating, it adds flavour. It forces the player to realise that they aren't a demi-god. It makes them think of other solutions. It makes them want to be better at the the game, so they CAN beat these tough enemies.

I guess what I'm getting at, is that difficulty and learning curves don't NEED to be chores. The player can ENJOY dying, enjoy the challenge of trying again and bettering their skills.

Maybe that's why multiplayer is the new black - singleplayer games don't allow you the chance to better yourself, because developers are terrified that you might stub your toe.