A few weeks back, I took a peak into Corepunk‘s early access build, and I promptly got my ass kicked by even the most basic low-level quest mobs in that game. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time complaining that most MMOs are too easy and hoping for more difficult open world experiences, I didn’t enjoy this very much.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about what the real purpose of difficulty is in game design, and what I really mean when I say I want games to be harder. The conclusion I’ve come to is that difficulty is a means to an end. It’s not something that’s inherently fun, but which enables other things to be fun.
My issue with Corepunk was that its low-level content didn’t give me any opportunity to overcome its difficulty with skillful play. I didn’t have many active abilities, nor any active block or dodge, and kiting or positioning didn’t do much. All I could do was beat my head against the wall of enemies who simply had better health and damage numbers than I did.
To be fair to Corepunk, I suspect this probably gets resolved once you unlock more abilities, and I think I’d probably enjoy its combat once I get to that point, but the early content was sufficiently tedious that I couldn’t muster the motivation to get to that point.
What’s missing is interactivity, the ability to respond to the threats provided by in-game enemies in interesting ways. And what I find fascinating is that this is ultimately pretty much the same problem I have with games that are too easy.
Right now I’m leveling a new character, a Kul Tiran rogue, through the Battle for Azeroth content in World of Warcraft. The low-level mobs are so fragile that they often die before I’ve even built up enough combo points for a single finisher.
This is much the same problem that Corepunk‘s low level content has; I have no way to interact with the content or my character’s toolkit in an interesting way. Killing mobs in one or two hits doesn’t make me feel like a badass because my own skill had nothing to do with it. The numbers are just busted. Might as well just go for mobile-style auto-play mechanics at that point.
You can see similar problems in other games. One of the reasons I’m playing New World much less these days is that a combination of power creep and repeated content nerfs have removed much of the danger open world mobs once had, largely eliminating the need to block, dodge, or make intelligent use of your weapon abilities. The need to study and react to enemy behaviour that originally made the game’s combat so magical is mostly gone.
When I say I want games to be harder, this is what I’m talking about. I’m not saying I want every fight to be some white-knuckle, hyper-stressful struggle. Sometimes that level of challenge can be fun, but it’s not something I want to experience on a regular basis.
All I want is to actually play the game. I want to make full use of the tools at my disposal and fully experience the attack patterns and unique quirks of every enemy.
This is why the argument to “just take off some of your gear” as a solution to low difficulty has never felt like a good solution to me. I’ve tried it, and it can make for interesting challenges at times, but it still leaves me feeling like something is just broken with the game. The fantasy of these kind of progression focused games is to grow your character’s power and then throw yourself against the mightiest challenges. Nerfing yourself to get a challenge breaks that fantasy and is never going to feel satisfying.
This can also be one reason you’ll sometimes see players ask for more difficult content in their games, only to complain that the harder content is too tedious once it’s added. Not all challenge is interesting.
This is happening right now in The First Descendant. It’s a very easy game for the most part, and a few power-crept characters have trivialized the vast majority of content. To address this, the developers added the Void Erosion Purge, a new form of ultra-hard content, but players have heavily criticized the mode for being too dull.
The problem with Void Erosion Purge is its difficulty comes entirely from enemies having massive health pools, huge damage on attacks that largely can’t be avoided, and ridiculously high resistance to player ability damage. There’s little opportunity to overcome the challenge with skillful play; you just pick one of the gun-focused characters, hunker down behind cover, and hold down left click while you very slowly whittle down the enemies’ bloated health pools.
For an example of difficulty done well, I’m going to do what anyone who knows me could have predicted and reference The Secret World. One of my strongest memories of that game is the first time I ran The Girl Who Kicked the Vampire Nest. Anyone who played TSW in the early days can tell you this was one of its most infamously difficult missions, and it took me most of an afternoon and many, many deaths before I finally beat it.
But at no point did it feel unfair, or unenjoyable, and that’s because the game gave me the tools I needed to succeed. The infinite variety of the ability wheel and the ability to change builds on the fly allowed you to constantly optimize your set-up for each challenge. More powerful mob attacks usually had avoidable telegraphs, and because it’s one of the few MMOs where mobs can’t always instantly turn on a dime, you could even “dodge” some auto-attacks by staying mobile.
When I finally beat the mission, I felt a real sense of accomplishment that I almost never get from games, and it’s because it was entirely down to my skill and my mastery of the game systems, rather than my character simply being numerically more powerful than enemies.
I wouldn’t want to do content on that level of difficulty very often, but TSW understood this, too. Most of its missions were nowhere near that hard; they were in the sweet spot of needing you to make an effort without being overly stressful.
Something else that TSW did very well is having negligible penalties for failure. Repair costs were so low they might as well not have existed, meaning it didn’t feel like I lost anything when I died over and over again to those vampires.
I see a lot of people advocate for harsher death penalties when they talk about making MMOs more challenging, but that doesn’t do anything to make overcoming the content harder. It just makes people more risk adverse. It discourages fully engaging with the game, which is the opposite of what difficulty is meant to do.
Another factor in TSW‘s difficulty being such an effective design is that while the combat was harder, you generally did less of it. Outside of Kingsmouth Town, Kaidan, and a few other isolated subzones, mob density in the open world was pretty low, and Funcom intentionally tuned player movement speed to allow you to outrun every mob, so you almost never had to fight anything you didn’t want to. Quests also usually required fewer kills than in other similar games, and dungeons had little to no trash mobs.
The sheer grind of most online games is lowkey one of the biggest barriers to actually increasing content difficulty in most MMOs. When you need to kill a dozen mobs for every quest and complete a dozen quests for every level, making those fights meaningfully difficult starts to feel pretty miserable, no matter how interesting the challenge is.
This is one of the biggest reasons The First Descendant is struggling so hard to implement any actually difficult content. That game is incredibly grindy, and no one in their right mind wants significant challenge in a piece of content you’re going to have to run 50+ times to get the reward you want.
If there is one lesson I wish other other online games would take from TSW, it’s this: Have fewer, harder, more rewarding fights. It feels so much better than mindlessly cleaving your way through hordes of meaningless trash.
Of course, the biggest struggle here is that difficulty is subjective, and it’s technically challenging to implement diverse difficulty settings in a shared world game, but I do think the genre would benefit from raising the floor a little bit. The point isn’t to make games hard but just to reach a point that players are always meaningfully interacting with their character’s toolkit and the mechanics of content.
Challenge is to game design what salt is to cooking. Just the right amount helps the flavour of all the other elements to really pop, but too much ruins the experience. And sometimes you want something really salty, and sometimes you want something sweet — sometimes you do want a game that’s mindless and easy, and that’s fine.
But most dishes should be seasoned with a bit of salt, and most games should be tuned to a good baseline of difficulty. You just need to give players the tools they need to overcome that difficulty — through skill, not just grind.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively OP writers as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews (and not necessarily shared across the staff). Think we’re spot on — or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
