What the hell is "artificial difficulty"?

[Meowgi]

"Artificial difficulty" is a term a player can throw around to shelter their ego when they end up failing at a map they can't seem to beat. If they simply called it "difficult", then it would imply that they are falling short of the challenge, but adding the word "artificial" makes it an external problem that is outside of their control, and implies that the map is unfair in some way.

 

Regardless of what it actually means, this is how it's used 99 out of 100 times.

[Lucius Wooding]

16 minutes ago, tornado potato said:

How about giving handicaps to CPU controlled characters, for example if in Mario Kart all enemies would get red shells every time.

 

Not Doom, but it's an interesting case.

 

That's a series notorious for rubber banding the AI. It's not artificial difficulty, it just straight up punishes you for having a large lead. Conversely, it gives you somewhat of an opening if you lag behind through item availability and the AI leaders not pressing too much. The blue shells and other offensive powerups bully the shit out of the leader, particularly in the final lap. The lower places get more items like stars, gold mushrooms, bullet bill, etc. This is so that it works better as a party game and gives bad human players a somewhat better chance of winning some races. The leader generally only sees coins and bananas and the mid to late places will get everything good. Not to mention the actual speed of the racers behind you will increase if you get ahead. It's more like artificial parity.

 

You're able to exploit this mechanic the other way however; by sandbagging into 5-7th place you guarantee better item spawns and the frontrunners get wrecked by blue shells and don't press too far ahead anyway. Then you can get the most out of a powerup to make up ground late and overtake the leader without spending too long in front. It's possible to drive like a god and win through sheer dominance, but often there will be a reckoning out of your control for doing so. If your goal is to win every race against AI and not go for the fastest possible time, then sandbagging is generally a pretty good idea. Doom does not coddle you for playing poorly however, there are no mechanics to reward taking damage or missing shots for example. Playing better is always better in that case, but in Kart the opposite can often be true.

[RataUnderground]

I'm not sure how to apply the term to Doom, but I would say that artificial difficulty is when the actions needed to overcome the challenge are not difficult to execute, but counter-intuitive, either because it's something new and unexplained, or because the player is not given information about the challenge before it's too late. Therefore almost no player will execute them right the first time, causing in some games deaths or crashes that seem unjustified.
The moment you have enough information, the artificial challenge disappears. Perhaps an example of this could be nuts.wad ?

Edited September 6, 2023 by RataUnderground

[Novaseer]

To me, it means an increase in threat that does not constitute a change or improvement of tactics to overcome.

 

Probably the best classic Doom example is if you switch out a Hell Knight for a Baron of Hell. It isn't faster, it isn't more aggressive, it isn't any more likely to hit you, it just has twice as many health points. If you know how to beat a Hell Knight, you know how to beat a Baron - it just feels harder because it takes longer.

 

Real difficulty, meanwhile, brings a new requirement to beat it - typically thinking differently, though sometimes it's a mechanical challenge too. Supplement that Hell Knight with a Chaingunner. That same tactic you used against solely the Hell Knight - which is probably just circle-strafing around it with whatever gun you have the most ammo for - won't work anymore, because the Chaingunner tracks your position with hitscan. Playing peekaboo with the Chaingunner to try and avoid its hitscan, meanwhile, is punished by the Hell Knight's fast projectile. The difficulty arises from you having to make more decisions - chief among them being which one you shoot first, and where you do it from.

 

An example of mechanical real difficulty would be the difference between the Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal Cacodemons - whilst the Eternal caco is almost immediately killed by landing a grenade in its mouth, if you don't hit that skillshot you're punished with a much more aggressive enemy than before.

 

EDIT: I will say that stat changes being "artificial difficulty" isn't ubiquitous, and is most often a problem in FPSes. In something like XCOM 2, for example, having less health or enemies having more health does actually induce real difficulty, because the thought processes you make whilst playing the game are different. ADVENT Troopers' health going from 3 to 4 is a huge difference when your basic assault rifle does 3-5 on a hit - without an effective guaranteed kill, you're forced to have contingencies for if things go wrong, and upgrading your weapons in an expedient manner becomes more important.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Novaseer

[OpenRift]

I think a good example of artificial difficulty would be something like lowering the player's max health. It's more difficult, sure, but it's hacky way of going about it.

[Zulk RS]

1 hour ago, Blzut3 said:

There's definitely a couple of different cases, one of them is enforced tedium.  Most typically found in games without save states where something can be difficult simply because it takes some number of minutes just to get another chance to retry.  In fact, you've played the lead up so many times that you're 100% consistent with it, it simply takes time.  The difficulty is "fake" because if you had save states you could easily learn the patterns, the encounter may just be plain easy once learned, but you're simply being denied the opportunity.  These games could be rendered easy by simply practicing on an emulator and then transferring the learned knowledge to a single segment run.

 

Games with poor controls are often considered artificial difficulty.  For example a game which uses an unusual control scheme compared to others in the genre is not actually more difficult, it just exploits muscle memory and someone who hasn't established that muscle memory wouldn't find this challenge to be present.

 

Finally, as mentioned here a few times, when the difficulty stems entirely from luck or poor communication with the player.  For the luck case there's no challenge to overcome, you simply need to play the game until it lets you pass.  I've grouped this with poor communication, which is where the difficulty is negated simply be knowing some weird fact (i.e. something like hit box location is not where it appears to be), since sometimes very unclear mechanics are mistaken for being luck until someone reverse engineers the game to figure it out.

 

To me key to "artificial difficulty" is that there's no actual challenge to overcome.  If it were removed, the game would not fundamentally require less skill.

 

After reading a bunch of replies in this thread, I think this answer feels the most right to me. In an RPG maybe artificial difficulty could be like at a certain point in the game's plot, you need an item to progress and to get it you need to buy it from some shop somewhere. However the item costs a fuck ton of money. There's no objective or quest that lets you get that money really quickly. Your ONLY option is to just mindlessly grind random encounters that you can beat in your sleep for IRL hours until you have the money. There is no challenge for you to overcome. There is no skill that you need to develop. The game just decided that you can't progress until you just grind.

 

32 minutes ago, RataUnderground said:

I'm not sure how to apply the term to Doom, but I would say that artificial difficulty is when the actions needed to overcome the challenge are not difficult to execute, but counter-intuitive, either because it's something new and unexplained, or because the player is not given information about the challenge before it's too late. Therefore almost no player will execute them right the first time, causing in some games deaths or crashes that seem unjustified.
The moment you have enough information, the artificial challenge disappears. Perhaps an example of this could be nuts.wad ?

 

I remember a few examples from ProDoomer (A unique and creatively bad doom mod). In multiple levels the mod opens up monster closets really close to the player with powerful suicide-bomber enemies that blow up in less than a second and it kills the player even from maximum health and armor. It doesn't matter if you are better at Doom than all the doom gods combined. You will still die here on your first play through. However, once you know that the trap is there, even someone who is mediocre (at best) at Doom can get past in 2-5 tries. There is no skill involved here. You either die because you're playing the map for the first time or you get past it because you died once before and know the trap is there.

[DoomGappy]

1 hour ago, tornado potato said:

How about giving handicaps to CPU controlled characters, for example if in Mario Kart all enemies would get red shells every time.

 

I think that's called rubber banding, when the computer players have an unfair advantage or always seem to be just 5 seconds away from the first place, for example. There are some good and bad examples of this mechanic.

[Firebert]

artificial difficulty actually translates to skill issue

[Wagi]

Artificial difficulty is when a map designs a fight that entirely relies of foreknowledge in order for the player to succeed instead of skill. After the cheap trick is expended and it no longer works, the player simply memorizes the trap and clears it every time without issue because it was never actually challenging in the first place.

[NinjaDelphox]

Artificial difficulty isn't real because it is an artificial term that can't mean anything definitively. There are many types of difficulty, some great, some bad, then there's Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. DS2 is not a bad game and I don't think it's hard, but what it *tried* to do to make everything harder with no fogwall iframes, ADP, weapon durability, hilarious enemy spam on runbacks, make it a terrible way to increase difficulty. The games I've heard artificial difficulty thrown around the most on is Mega Man and Bass and Mega Man X6, games that are slightly """harder""" than the average MM game, so the average fan cries about it. Nothing about either game is anywhere close to unfair, but the term is still used in basically the exact way Meowgi described it. Changing numbers only for a hard mode as mentioned previously is a very lame way to make something harder, and I guess you could describe it as artificial, but changes like that usually never have much impact in practicality, because if nothing else changes you'd just do it the same way normally and just try to get hit a little less. Examples of great hard modes are Mega Man ZX and ZX Advent, and Metroid Zero Mission. ZX and ZXA removes all health upgrades and subtanks that you can pickup, makes enemies do more damage, makes enemies and bosses be more aggressive, have new attacks, and even changes how some environmental hazards work. Zero Mission does this basically the exact same way, but halves every tank pickup you get. These kinds of hard modes force players to actually get better because there is no way to baby yourself out of it. Now on the topic of Doom, there's so many ways to make something hard that no singular term could ever hold any amount of weight ever. Whether it be adding 90 Arch Viles, capping player health at 1, weakening guns, limiting or removing player movement, these are all different types of designs that can be enjoyed or hated by many, and can provide challenges in vastly different ways between each other. A Doom example would be Run From It in Scythe being commonly seen as bullshit, but there's nothing hard about it, you just strafe lol (Also the only good Scythe 1 map since it's the only unique map)

[Wilster_Wonkels]

I'm petty sure they finally actualized artificial difficulty with chatGPT recently?

[LoatharMDPhD]

// too Many Archviles... minus one million points...

[QuaketallicA]

On 9/6/2023 at 7:25 AM, Archvile Hunter said:

For a term no one seems to have a clear definition of, it sure does get thrown around a lot in online gaming discourse. When no one can agree on what "artificial difficulty" even means, it becomes a useless descriptor. All it tells me is that somebody is unhappy with the way difficulty was implemented.

 

In my view, ALL challenges in all video games are artificial. They were designed by a human, for someone else to overcome. That makes it different from, say, scaling a mountain. Nobody designed the mountain, so the difficulty in scaling it can't be artificial. It just is inherently difficult. If you can't climb that mountain, you don't have anyone else to blame for it. But if you fail a challenge in a video game, you know that another human put that challenge before you, and you may be inclined to blame that person for your failure, and not yourself. But I'd argue that the issue here is not about the challenge being "artificial," but just about it being poorly designed.

 

I think the biggest issue with harder challenges in video games is whether or not the added difficulty makes the problem more engaging, or just more tedious. Take the challenge of punching out a Cyberdemon with berserk, for example. Now, you could make the fight harder by taking away the berserk, but while that does make it more difficult since you will have to keep going without a mistake for longer, it doesn't make the fight any more engaging, it just takes longer and adds tedium. Instead, what if we add Cyberdemons on raising and lowering pillars around the arena, and have them cyclically peak up to demand your attention (idk, just an idea I thought up quickly)? That would certainly also make it more challenging, maybe even more so than the berserk-less fight, depending on how it's implemented, but it would probably be way more interesting, and actually fun to play.

 

I think this is an excellent answer, particularly the final paragraph. What makes something feel artificial is that it just adds tedium without making the challenge really any more interesting. I think the example with punching the Cyberdemon beserk-less versus punching him with moving floors was a good example. Challenge is one factor, but so is how engaging is this fight? That's why I'm not a huge fan of slaughter maps, because their logic is, to me, "More is better." Well no, having tons of enemies doesn't make fighting those enemies necessarily interesting or even challenging, if it boils down to endless circle strafing or BFG-spam ad nauseum. Fewer, more intentionally placed enemies with limited resources and environmental differences (height, lighting, cover, narrow/open, etc.) makes for greater challenge, but a more meaningful challenge.

 

Some people call artificial difficulty, in slang, "Nintendo-hard," because early NES games didn't have much space for much game, so what little was there, while beatable within an hour or two if you know what you're doing, was meant to be incredibly difficult, often even nigh-impossible, and you often die in a single hit with only a small handful of extra lives or continues. So the net effect is you land up playing the early levels over and over, and it's much more challenging to even reach the later levels.

 

That said, that particular "arcade style" challenge can have its own appeal, when done well. While I certainly appreciate the decency of the famous Konami Code while playing Contra, there is a certain allure in being badass enough to beat the game without having to use it. I feel the same way about Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 on GOG. You only get 5 credits/continues with which to beat the ladder, or else back to the bottom. (You can turn on free play for infinite continues with a cheat code). This limit on your continues may seem like an "artificial difficulty" to make the end harder to reach, but actually it makes the game far more satisfying. I enjoy Mortal Kombat 3 too, and that game has infinite continues by default. But since you're going to reach the end and win every time you play regardless, winning isn't as satisfying but just the inevitable outcome. The very fact that I might lose and not make it to the end is what makes the occasional victory all the sweeter.

 

So that would be an example of "artificial" difficulty actually being beneficial. Another, more recent example would be Ultra-Nightmare in Doom '16 or Eternal, (or the Extra Lives mode in Eternal) which of course is just Nightmare on a single life. You don't really expect to win or get very far. The challenge is simply in seeing how far you can make it before inevitably dying. That has its own sort of appeal, for those who have played the base game many times already. (Of course there are those who try to memorize enemy placement on UN a priori, but I think that only cheats them of the experience. It's so boring and tedious to do that anyway, and it makes the game un-fun if you already know everything, so what's the point?)

 

 

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The other type of "artificial difficulty," as others have pointed out, is bullshit deaths. Things which feel cheap and make you go, "Oh, c'mon!!!" because there's no way a new player could have seen that coming or predicted that, and you didn't have enough of a lull in the action beforehand to give the player a chance to breathe and save his/her game before this unwinnable trap.

 

That doesn't mean you should never surprise the player; on the contrary, we want to be caught off guard, but by something we can reasonably deal with and survive given the resources of the map. What makes something fun is the ability to go in blind yet still come out on top of the unexpected challenge. Nobody likes a game where it's impossible to beat without a million saves and re-loads till finally you get it by sheer luck, or you just quick save every 2 seconds till you push forward.