Difficulty can serve several important roles in a game’s design: It can create an aesthetic sense of danger and foreboding, it can make the actions of the player feel more consequential, and it can push the player to vary their approach and strategy and to thereby encourage them to explore more of the game’s design space. Difficulty is created through the use of obstacles, and can be increased either by changing the quantity or quality of those obstacles. That’s a vague description, with quantity covering everything from increased spawn rate of enemies to a turret firing missiles faster, and quality covering everything from a blanket hp increase across all enemies to introducing a new enemy type which is selectively swapped out for existing enemies, and probably countless essays could be written about the skills and methods of doing so – but really I just wanted to convey this understanding of difficulty as being created through obstacles which can be modified.
One way of understanding a game, then, is as a set of obstacles and a set of tools, with the player mediating a relationship between them – one which successfully fulfills the requirements of the obstacles by using the available tools. By making the requirements of the obstacles more stringent, a more varied and more creative use of the tools is often required to meet those requirements. So far so good, right? However, there’s a danger here in making those requirements too stringent: In a lax system, there are a number of possible solutions, which creates room for self expression: The game becomes a canvas through which the player can express themselves, a trait which has become only more desirable since livestreamed gameplay has become a common pursuit. As we tighten the obstacle requirements, make them more demanding and stringent – in other words, as we increase the difficulty – this space narrows.
This actually leads to the main complaint I have about Dishonored, which I recently livestreamed my first playthrough of: Since I was streaming, I was trying to make my approach to the obstacles presented by the game as flashy and absurd as possible. Dishonored is an excellent game for this sort of approach since it offers a huge number of ways to approach most of its obstacles. However, this also meant that things which were meant to make things more difficult also ended up frequently making the game less interesting, since they decreased my available space for improvisation. For instance, there’s an enemy later on who, once they notice you, disables all of your special abilities – at the same time, this enemy slows your movement to a crawl while being extremely resilient against any damage from the front. This completely hamstrung the high-mobility, extremely mobile and aggressive style I’d been trying to highlight, without really offering up anything interesting in exchange. In other words, rather than forcing me to do something new, they actually forced me into the more predictable style of just sneaking in and killing them or knocking them out from behind – rather than, say, running past the guard, knocking someone out with a sleeping dart, grabbing the unconscious body right in front of their face and jumping out through a window to make my escape.
So, when we tighten the constraints of the obstacles too much, it begins to feel like the player has no room for expression. This isn’t necessarily bad: Some games, such as demanding platformers like Super Meat Boy, are intentionally built with little to no room for expression and just demand raw performative reflex skill. That’s fine. At the other end, if we relax the system too much, the game becomes a sandbox where anything goes, where the game itself doesn’t really care much what the player does: This, too, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and many games are specifically sold on this kind of openness, but it does remove any sense of consequence to the player’s decisions. That is, it becomes an exercise in creativity rather than an exercise in creative problem solving – which has its own sort of appeal, to be sure, but an appeal that many would prefer to turn to artistic pursuits for, rather than playing a video game.
Still, that just represents the way these systems trend. That is, it’s possible to create both a strict system of obstacles with room for player expression and a lax one with a high degree of responsiveness, it’s just challenging for the designer. Viewed through this lens, Dark Souls is clearly outstanding as a game that, while being strict and demanding in terms of the obstacles it presents, offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of the tools and methods you can use to navigate those obstacles. At the other end of the spectrum are those games which give you tools to navigate obstacles but don’t position any particular resolution as desirable: Given the tools and the obstacles you can decide what your own goal is, based on the creative style you want to express. City-builder games and the like are usually built upon these lines, though occasionally they make the supposed obstacles so lenient they end up being mostly sandboxes anyway.
When adding or modifying obstacles, when planning difficulty, the important thing is knowing which experience you’re trying to offer: The problem-solving game where the player finds their personal favored solution to the presented problem, the recitation game where the player discovers and perfects the intended solution, the building game where the player finds and surmounts obstacles based on their taste, or the sandbox game where obstacles are absent or irrelevant and the player simply creates as they will in that space. What sort of obstacles, what sort of difficulty you are building, depends entirely on what the intended gameplay, and the player’s role in that play, is meant to be.