Here’s Why More Games Need Expanded Difficulty Settings

Most video games use the same simplistic difficulty settings of easy, medium, and hard. But some games offer expanded difficulty settings, allowing players to fine-tune difficulty to their tastes, and I’d love to see more games implement this.

What Are Expanded Difficulty Settings Anyway?

In a nutshell, expanded difficulty settings allow you to tweak a game’s difficulty beyond the usual difficulty slider. For example, combat difficulty settings can include the level of damage enemies inflict upon you, but also the amount of health you and your enemies have, the number of enemies in combat encounters, and the amount of damage you inflict upon enemies. But that’s not all.

Some games where exploration and puzzles are an important part of the experience offer customizable exploration and puzzle options. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, a great game that also happens to work natively on Linux, allows you to set exploration and puzzle difficulty independent of combat difficulty. You can choose to have less white paint on ledges, reduced time to react when Lara’s hand slips while climbing, and for basecamps to not light up like a lighthouse when you’re near them.

Similarly, you can increase or decrease puzzle difficulty, which can enable or disable interactive object highlights when using Survival Instincts (a version of Detective Mode from Batman Arkham games and Eagle Vision from Assassin’s Creed titles), and make Lara not give the player hints on what to do next.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is another game with advanced difficulty options in which you can independently adjust the action and puzzle difficulty. Silent Hill 2 Remake, a must-play for horror fans, does the same.

Lastly, there’s also Persona 4, where you can freely adjust the amount of damage you take and receive, the amount of experience and money earned when defeating enemies, and even enable or disable retries in dungeons and battles after your party gets annihilated.

How Expanded Difficulty Settings Make Games Better

Expanded difficulty settings allow you, the player, to fine-tune all aspects of your gameplay experience. If you’re in it for the action, you can drop the puzzle complexity down and breeze through puzzles while upping the combat difficulty.

Or you can increase exploration difficulty, remove stuff like Eagle Vision, and hide the paint on climbable ledges to get a hardcore exploration experience. You can enjoy games you normally wouldn’t because you can make the parts of the game you don’t like that much easier, and increase the challenge for parts of the gameplay loop you do enjoy.

In System Shock Remake, I set combat and puzzle difficulty to 2 out of 3 (normal) but reduced Cyber and mission difficulty to 1 out of 3 (easy) because I’d heard that cyberspace sections are weaker than the rest of the game, which was absolutely true. By doing this, I didn’t get bogged down in the uninspiring parts of the game.

I also wanted to have map markers while exploring the station, telling me where to go next, because I didn’t want to hear and read each note I’ve collected five times to determine my next objective. As it happens, map markers are only available on the easy mission difficulty.

These Games Nailed Expanded Difficulty

Two of my favorite game series that implement advanced difficulty settings are Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon, the latter being one of the best simcade games ever. Too bad Forza Horizon 4was pulled from digital stores a few days ago.

The Forza games let you adjust how quick and skillful other drivers are, while also adjusting all kinds of driving aids. Not only does reducing or turning off driving aids and making other drivers faster make the game more challenging, but it also awards you with more credits for completing races. This provides a great source of motivation to get better and take on higher difficulty.

There’s also the aforementioned System Shock Remake. By default, this game doesn’t include map markers. I don’t really like that because the space station the game takes place in is huge and has lots of levels, with each floor being a maze of unlockable shortcuts, similar-looking corridors, and hidden paths. I chose to have map markers for easier navigation.

While I’m not a huge fan of the Mount & Blade games due to their open-ended approach (I prefer clear goals and a quality story instead), I adore their approach to difficulty. In these games you can tweak the amount of damage you take, but also how much damage your troops and your allies receive (friendlies you aren’t controlling). You can also adjust just how hard it is to recruit new troops in the settlements you visit.

Increasing recruitment difficulty means you must get on good terms with major NPCs in settlements before you can grow your army. You can also adjust how fast you move across the overworld, which is great since not all of us are here to manage stuff, we just want to fight!

Last but not least is Persona 4, or to be more accurate, Persona 4 Golden. As someone who likes a challenge but hates bullet sponge enemies, I set incoming damage to the equivalent of hard but kept the damage given and the rest of the options at normal. That way, I still had a higher challenge, but didn’t have to spend ages reducing enemy HP to zero.

Almost Every Game Can Benefit From Expanded Difficulty

I love fine-tuning difficulty in games this way and think most games can benefit from advanced difficulty options. The worst offenders here are Bethesda RPGs that simply increase enemy health while reducing how much damage you deal, turning even the most innocuous enemies into tedious bullet sponges.

I remember playing Fallout 4 and realizing the game was getting a tad too easy. So I had upped the difficulty. Five minutes later, I encountered a legendary mole rat that took me about ten minutes to defeat because the thing had the health of an elephant, and my damage numbers were reduced.

Similarly, when I replayed Skyrim a few years ago, I also increased difficulty halfway through the game, and every encounter with enemies dragged on and on because they all had way too much health. This made me ultimately bounce off the game because I had to choose between being overpowered or spending way too long defeating bandits and monsters.

Just imagine Bethesda games with adjustable health and damage sliders. You could keep enemies at default health and keep your damage levels normal, but increase the amount of damage enemies inflict upon you. That way, you could enjoy a greater challenge once you get your hands on better gear without having to spend ages battling against even the weakest foes.

Virtually every shooter out there could benefit from this approach, as well as games with lots of boss encounters. Just make it so that I can get killed in a couple of hits, but also allow me to keep enemy health or my damage level normal.

Most racing games could also implement Forza-like difficulty options and end up better for it. Instead of expecting the player to have the internal motivation to get better, why not sweeten the deal by offering more cash for disabling assists and upping other drivers’ skills? Or perhaps offer car rewards to players ready to go the extra mile and race with zero assists?

Seeing expanded difficulty settings gets me invested from the get-go. Though I still don’t mind playing games with classic difficulty options, I think virtually every game can benefit from allowing players to tailor their in-game experience exactly how they want.