Difficulty Level
Digital games often allow players to influence their balance by offering a choice of "difficulty levels". These affect how challenging the game is to play.
In addition to altering the game's rules, difficulty levels can be used to alter what content is presented to the player. This usually takes the form of adding or removing challenging location or events, but some games also change their narrative to reward players who play them on higher difficulty levels (Max Payne 2) or end early as punishment for playing on easy (Castlevania).
Difficulty selection is not always presented bluntly, particularly in competitive games where all players are affected equally and the standard "easy/hard" terminology no longer applies. Sometimes veiled language is used (Mario Kart offers "CC select"), while at other times there may be an array of granular settings instead of an overarching difficulty option.
An alternative approach to difficulty levels is catering to players of all abilities at the same time, a technique that has been called "subjective difficulty". This requires a game to provide multiple solutions or routes, each offering challenges appropriate to players of different skill levels (Super Mario Galaxy, Sonic Generations).
Difficulty can also be managed by a third party or the game itself; see the Gamemaster section below.
Read more about this topic: Balance (game Design)
Famous quotes containing the words difficulty and/or level:
“When you take a light perspective, it’s easier to step back and relax when your child doesn’t walk until fifteen months, . . . is not interested in playing ball, wants to be a cheerleader, doesn’t want to be a cheerleader, has clothes strewn in the bedroom, has difficulty making friends, hates piano lessons, is awkward and shy, reads books while you are driving through the Grand Canyon, gets caught shoplifting, flunks Spanish, has orange and purple hair, or is lesbian or gay.”
—Charlotte Davis Kasl (20th century)
“Nihilism as a symptom that the losers have no more consolation: that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that without morality they no longer have any reason to “resign themselves”Mthat they put themselves on the level of the opposite principle and for their part also want power in that they compel the mighty to be their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, renunciation, once all existence has lost its “meaning.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)