The problem of complexity is a widely discussed topic in the field of gaming and game development. At the same time, the concept itself complexity very complex and vague. Almost all of my fictitious interlocutors intuitively correctly interpret complexity as a characteristic of the difficulties that arise during the game. But here is the specific set of difficulties that players have in mind when talking about complexity there may either not be one at all, or the ideas about this set vary greatly among different players.
Actually, in order to decide for yourself what it is complexity video games, I decided to summarize my own experience and thoughts on this topic in a blog in the form of a classification of types of difficulties in games.
Because the difficulties that arise during the game can be of different nature. They differ in both form and content. Different modes of difficulty result in the player having a different experience when overcoming them. This fact is very easy to observe: players consider games of different genres difficult. For example – strategies from Paradox Interactive and games of the series Dark Souls.
A detailed answer to this question deserves a separate series of articles. But to classify complexity, we will need to know a simple fact – overcoming difficulties causes pleasant feelings. To put it bluntly, success brings pleasure. This phenomenon is used almost everywhere in games. Moreover, the more difficult it was for us and the greater the result we achieve, the more pleasure we get. And this is where the problem arises – players may not overcome the difficulty and… get upset. There is a famous picture that illustrates this phenomenon well.
The ordinate shows how much difficulty the game offers the player. The abscissa shows how well the player’s skills are developed. If the difficulties roughly correspond to the player’s capabilities, then the player will be able to cope with them without serious costs on his part. And at the same time he will feel satisfaction from the success achieved. A set of similar states forms a flow region.
If the game offers too simple tasks, then the player will not receive satisfaction from solving them. If a game does not offer other sources of pleasure, then it will seem very boring to the player.
If the game offers too difficult tasks that the player cannot cope with, then he will either immediately quit the game or burn out trying to achieve game goals and failing again and again.
The goal of the game is to keep the player in a state of flow by adjusting the difficulty level (or asking the player to adjust it themselves). Now all that remains is to understand..
We will classify difficulties according to the nature of their existence and the player’s target system on which they affect.
The nature of the difficulty is its form and content. How it manifests itself in the game, what it consists of, how it operates.
The target impact system is the part of the player that is responsible for overcoming this difficulty. We overcome some difficulties with the help of intelligence (puzzles or strategy games), and some with the help of developed hand motor skills (platformers).
Shows how difficult it is for the player to interact with the game. Namely, how many resources on his part he needs to spend in order to carry out the intended action.
This characteristic depends on two factors:
How simple and clear is it to use the tools that the game provides to the user to implement the gameplay?.
How easily predictable, stable and expected is the result from using the provided tools?.
The first factor depends on the thoughtfulness of the interface and the convenience of the control scheme. The second factor is more complex and depends on how well the developers built interaction with the gameplay.
These factors can be well understood by an example – you are playing a first-person shooter and wanted to go through an open door. You hold down “W” and run towards the opening, but at the very threshold the movement is interrupted for some unknown reason. This is where you realize that you are playing ARMA, in which the character liked to cling to ledges. In real life, we control our body and change the position of various parts of it in advance in order to get through a doorway, so we expect from a game that we can get through it without extra difficulties.
Inconvenient interface is a common problem. There is no pleasure in making 100,500 clicks to manage your inventory or find the desired function; getting lost in the interface for players is also pointless. Same for developers. Inconvenient control of the MAKO armored personnel carrier from MassEffect, to some extent a mission with a helicopter from ViceCity – these are all examples of an incorrect connection between the player and the game.
User complexity is a harmful characteristic. Ideally, it can be minimized to about zero values, since it appears along with developer errors. The better the interface and controls are designed, the fewer errors there are. But there is a nuance – the larger the game and the more mechanics it implements, the more difficult it is to think through the interface and interaction. The higher the likelihood that something will not be done completely correctly. Therefore, user complexity is, to one degree or another, an inevitable component of many famous games.
Describes the skill of using a controller necessary to perform gaming tasks. Literally – how timely and in the right quantity the player can press buttons. In part, this also includes the speed of reaction and perception of the image on the monitor required from the player.
A rather ancient and simple type of difficulty, practiced by developers from the very beginning of the formation of the computer games industry. To overcome difficulties caused by mechanical complexity, we use hand motor skills and reactions. The fewer buttons you have to press and the more time the player has to make decisions, the lower the mechanical complexity. A classic example of the banal exploitation of this mechanic is Cup Head. The player is constantly under threat of colliding with the enemy or his shots, so you need to dodge by jumping, bending and moving in different directions.
Thinking in such games is harmful. Conscious decisions take time. Just training your reflexes helps. Reaction to game events without thinking is much faster. When you first complete a level, you don’t know the direction of enemy attacks. Then you memorize them and think through the sequence of your actions in advance. And then just bring the reactions to automaticity in order to minimize the likelihood of errors.
Dark Souls as a synonym for suffering. The parry window is very small, so it is difficult to win here, but not to die.
In games by type Dark Souls there is such a thing as parry window. This is the time period during the animation of an enemy attack, during which the set strike block stuns the attacker. The problem is that this period is very short. Actually on my own Dark Souls exploits the same principles as arcade games, expanding them with a variety of 3D environments and wrapping them in an RPG system.
Quantitatively characterizes the superiority of opponents over the player, and the nature of the superiority in this case lies in the plane of simple, easily measurable characteristics, such as indicators of health points and damage caused. It is also important that these characteristics do not differ qualitatively between the AI opponents and the player.
The most striking example of artificial difficulty is the levels of opponents in RPG games. You probably already understand what we’re talking about here. But even so, I suggest you read the quote:
If we are talking about normal NPCs that you meet on the street, I would say that they can have different rarities. Most of the NPCs you meet are ordinary, just thugs. And if you keep leveling up and are at the enemy’s level, you should never experience bullet looseness. They’ll feel pretty fast to kill… However, they’re also pretty deadly, so you’ll need to use cover and move around a lot… Some of the NPCs will be at officer level for example, so they’re more elite enemies that deal even more damage… However, what we’ve decided to do is basically ensure that the reaction to hits on our NPCs is always rendered. This is a big problem in most games I’ve played that have bullet sponges – t. e. basically you don’t see any reaction from the NPC when you hit him. It feels like you’re literally shooting into an absorbent sponge like there’s nothing there. And we never wanted this. This way we will still reproduce NPC reactions when they are hit. You’ll still see them hurting. They will trip, they will fall from your fire… As for the boss battles, well, I think it would be better if the players saw it with their own eyes. However, I can assure you that we have taken the necessary steps to ensure that they don’t feel like bullet sponges either.
And yet, opponents in such games feel like bullet sponges. Cyberpunk was no exception.
Let’s remember the graphs from the beginning of the article. The player upgrades and becomes stronger than his opponents. Boring! Therefore, we need to strengthen our enemies. This happens primarily due to an increase in the number of health points and damage. The same as when leveling up a player. The problem is that the rules of battle most often (there are some minor exceptions) do not change. The basis of combat in Cyberpunk is shooting. At level 1 they are essentially the same as at level 40. This leads to the fact that the player is qualitatively prepared for battle with any opponents, since he knows all the necessary techniques to destroy them. But quantitatively it loses a lot. AI isn’t smart enough to take advantage. A boss with over 9000 health points may, for example, simply not be able to raise his head to the height of a one-story house. Or react to a player who is 1 meter beyond his line of sight. In all cases, the player can destroy the boss by methodically emptying magazines of ammunition into him.
Artificiality in this case consists in the https://casino-prive.uk discrepancy between the form and the content. Both from an aesthetic and gameplay point of view. This manifests itself in different ways in different games, but is present almost everywhere there are health points and levels. If in Cyberpunk high-level characters sometimes look cooler than the player himself, but in Dark Souls III a naked man with a katana, who himself can withstand dozens of cuts from a bastard sword, but himself minuses a player with two touches looks very awkward. This is an example of aesthetic inconsistency. An example of a gameplay discrepancy is different restrictions on the player’s progress, found in a very large number of games.
Another example of artificial difficulty is the handicap for AI opponents in Stellaris or Civilization. The behavior of AI players differs little from level to level, their tactics and strategy are approximately equally inferior to the tactics and strategy of the average player. Therefore, to create a challenge for the AI, players simply increase their chances by adjusting the odds. If a player, conditionally, can extract N resources, then the AI extracts 2 * N resources in the same time under the same conditions.
The game plays along for the cadets, but for captains and higher-ranking officers it’s the opposite. Only the ensign will have honest bots.
I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that there should be a slight division here, since the next cluster of types of complexity is somewhat different from the previous one.
Characterizes the intensity of opposition from game mechanics to a player performing a game task. In other words, the more ways a game has to prevent you from completing it (or, relatively speaking, winning it) and the better it does this, the more hardcore this game is.
Hardcore, Sometimes (!), may correlate with artificial difficulty. Indeed, a bot that extracts resources 2 times faster will be more difficult to defeat. But this does not change the intensity of the impact of the bot itself. He still loses his troops in thoughtless attacks, only now 2 times faster. At some point, the bot may become so numerous that the player’s troops simply run out of ammo before the bot’s troops do. The mechanism of influence on the player does not change, as well as the mechanism of the player’s counteraction to the bot – only its quantitative component changes, which does not turn into a qualitative change. Therefore, artificial difficulty in games is a hardcore smoker.
An example of hardcore games – war simulators series ARMA. A player can die from one bullet hit or a nearby shell explosion. The intensity of opposition to the player’s life is extremely high. In a story-based campaign, the player is up against forces that are superior both numerically and technically – the tank cannot be destroyed with small arms, the intensity of resistance to destruction by the AI is high.
Another example of a hardcore game is Don’t Starve Together. The player is constantly affected by hunger, temperature, fear, and physical opponents. It’s easy to throw yourself off simply because you didn’t eat on time. There is no need to talk about confrontation with a numerically superior number of opponents.
Another cluster of hardcore – strategies. RTS, 4K, management – good representatives of the genres always have enough mechanics to prevent the player from getting bored. In the same Victoria 2 you can lose at the very beginning, simply by not having time to enlist the help of allies during an attack by a more developed power.
There are also non-strategies, of course. I consider one of the best examples of a good hardcore game Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Thanks to realistic combat mechanics, wide options for selecting equipment, a deeply developed system of interaction with other characters and a developed, level-less leveling system, this game does not cause disharmony in the battle with difficult opponents, remaining interesting and exciting throughout the entire playthrough.
Characterizes the intensity and depth of interaction of game mechanics with each other. Complexity is influenced by the amount of variability in performing a game task, the degree to which methods of performing a task differ from each other. Complexity is also influenced by the number of mechanics that need to be used to achieve game goals.
A classic example of a complex game – strategies from Paradox Interactive. Many mechanics interact with each other in complex ways and give the player freedom to choose what to do.
Not only 4K strategies can be complex, but also games such as Factorio, the very basis of which is the interaction of different game elements with each other.
It is worth noting that a game may have many mechanics, but lack depth.
The depth of development makes the mechanics more interesting, allowing them to be used more organically and effectively in the gameplay.
A high level of complexity requires the player to have knowledge to enjoy the gameplay. Which in turn leads to such a concept as entry threshold. The complexity caused by learning in such games belongs rather to the class of user complexity, but the amount of necessary knowledge belongs to the complete set.
The best example of a very hardcore, complex game with a high custom difficulty IMHO is Dwarf Fortress. The game implements a well-developed, complex system of interaction between game mechanics and a simulation of many components of a procedurally generated world. The game interface makes it very difficult to master.
Let’s summarize. The classification is not complete, it can be supplemented with new items that assume the same criteria for considering games. So and some new, alternative system with different criteria.
What can we say about games from this?? I complete most games on the last or penultimate difficulty levels. And I advise you to do the same. Why? Because I consider the main advantage of the gaming industry to be interactivity and player involvement, and not the plot and visuals. Everything visual and story should support interactivity, and not vice versa. Easy difficulty levels are designed to give the player the opportunity to run through the story quickly without any difficulties. The visual and narrative components are affected by artificial complexity, which seems to me to be outright hackwork on the part of the developers in relation to the development of the game. If a player is stronger than all his opponents combined, he simply does not need to use the mechanics inherent in the game. How often did you use potions in The Witcher, playing on easy difficulty?? I guess only during training or just out of curiosity.
A high level of difficulty reveals the complexity of the game, making it truly interesting, encouraging you to use all the tools conceived by the developer to complete the game.
As a person who once upon a time wrote a blog on this topic, I disagree with part of the theses. Hardcore is not difficulty, although it may correlate with it. And complexity does not always mean depth, although it can also correlate with it.
The thing here is that higher difficulty does not always force the player to use more abilities in his arsenal. Even take The Witcher, where the difficulty is simply that the enemies are fatter, and Gervant is thinner. And taking into account the broken balance in the game, the player can absolutely destroy the entire environment with a sword, at any difficulty, without really using the rest of the arsenal. Because why bother and invent something if you don’t have to?? And so many places. Open worlds, with RPG elements, probably everyone suffers greatly from this. I don’t remember a single one where a higher difficulty would somehow change the game dramatically. Unless the player could start playing more focused and try to take less damage with his face.
The challenge of complexity should be fun, not just for the sake of complexity. The approach in strategies is similar, which is also annoying. The player wants to fight with an interesting challenge, and not with cheats that the stupid AI cannot adequately manage. The author correctly wrote that even with an incredible advantage, the bot still plays almost the same on all difficulties. As an example, Total War Warhammer, where at a higher difficulty bots simply become more aggressive towards the player, and only towards him, while still falling for the same tricks as on easy difficulty.
I can suddenly name the new Duma as an example of good work of complexity. This is where, according to personal feelings, the approach to the game changes dramatically with increasing difficulty, and the player begins to use his entire arsenal of weapons and abilities much more. In this regard, slashers like Devil May Cry or MGR Rising also work well, where with increasing difficulty the enemies actually change not only the body density and sharpness of the weapon, but also new techniques may appear, which pushes the player to use techniques and combos much more actively, but not because it has become difficult, but first of all, it has become interesting.
Interesting article, thanks.
Didn’t notice. In my information field, "hardcore" is applied to games.
Match three players, by your definition, are also hardcore?
then their “hardcore” is not in the “intensity of opposition”, but in the number of nuances that need to be understood and taken into account in order to win (complexity) and the requirement to devote a lot of time to the game.
You also need to devote a lot of time to mobile grinding. And I considered complexity as a separate type of difficulty.
As I see, you do not agree with the definition. Most likely, in your conceptual system, “hardcore” means something completely different, which relates indirectly to the difficulties of games. Like passion and passion for the game, something like that. In this case, we can simply rename hardcore in my article with a different word and nothing will change ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But I will still call it hardcore, because in communicating with others and reading I did not notice the meanings behind this word that you put.
I enjoyed reading it.Wonderful article.Although it’s useless for me, because if the game is very difficult for me, then I either send it to the trash bin or cheat.
There are also types of players like me who often go through games like books, preferring to stumble over bosses and opponents as little as possible (with rare exceptions), because they don’t feel the difference between overcoming an ordinary and a strong opponent – the same amount of dopamine and adrenaline comes in, but much more effort needs to be put in. The salvation here is Very Easy \ Easy difficulties, which allow you to enjoy the core mechanics themselves (not overcoming difficulty, but the feeling of combat) and the plot with the aesthetics of graphics and sound.
When the brain doesn’t reward you for victory, playing the same game, for example, Dark Souls, becomes painful – you just drop it on the first or second boss due to frustration and lack of pleasure from the process.
Many of those who completed the second Witcher, even on maximum difficulty, did not use elixirs and alchemy at all simply because they were lazy and in general it was implemented inconveniently there. High complexity does not always force you to use all the elements of the game mechanics; sometimes, on the contrary, it forces you to use them extremely limitedly, making only the most effective and efficient. In the same King Arthur knight’s tale, at the end of the game, many hero classes become useless and even harmful, while others, on the contrary, simplify the game so much that you feel invincible.
A high level of difficulty reveals the complexity of the game, making it truly interesting, encouraging you to use all the tools conceived by the developer to complete the game
There’s an error here. That’s right, making it really difficult, not interesting.
HALO The Master Chief Coll. tried to pass on the penultimate one:
I still mastered Reach, starting from the first part, I quit. Endless enemy shields have never made the game more interesting. That’s where the sponges are, that’s where the sponges are.
The Witcher – started on high twice and quit after the first location both times. In order to love collecting these herbs, you need to love playing a witcher.
It’s incomprehensible to me why you can’t just go kill enemies without endlessly collecting herbs.
Therefore, difficulty and interest are poorly correlated on their own; you need to look at specific changes in mechanics at each difficulty.
Also, for example, someone may not like to die with one shot if, in principle, he is not able to hit the enemy with the first shot.
In general, the article poorly covers the topic of platformers, with and without a life scale.
In most cases, no, because there is no need to delve into the details and strain yourself to play the game.
Sometimes yes. Logging in during a week-long event every two hours, without breaks for entertainment, business, or even sleep – I think that’s hardcore.
By the way, in the blog to which I linked, I wrote all this.
Nice blog! I agree with all the conclusions in it, but conditionally from the second half I slightly disagree with the terminology.
As I understand it, your disagreement lies in the area of terminology. I read several publications on the topic of discussions about types of difficulties on other resources before writing the article, but now after searching for queries like: “Complexity and hardcore” I found another blog where these concepts are compared.
I believe that these are incomparable concepts, since complexity is a general concept, and hardcore is one of the forms of difficulties.
Exactly! That’s why in the block about complexity I mentioned depth. Complexity correlates with depth in much the same way that a bag of wet laundry correlates with the water content of each item.
> Because I consider the main advantage of the gaming industry to be interactivity and player involvement, and not the plot and visuals.
And this man talks about the complexity and depth of the mechanics. Games, after all, are a little deeper than this judgment. Just remember the visual novels?. Interactivity is at a minimum, but this does not make them bad games (let alone not games at all) a priori.
Firstly, the term "hardcore" is usually applied to players. Hardcore players are players who devote a lot of time to the game, delving into all its details.
And secondly, even if we talk about hardcore games (that is, games tailored for hardcore players), then their “hardcore” is not in the “intensity of opposition”, but in the number of nuances that must be understood and taken into account in order to win (complexity) and the requirement to devote a lot of time to the game.
That is why I do not agree with your statement that it is a matter of “intensity of opposition” and examples of an increase in the number of enemies.
Why does the complexity and depth of development of the mechanics contradict the interactive??
Nothing. The only contradiction is that the complexity and depth of the mechanics contradict the simplification, that the main thing in the game is interactivity, and everything else is secondary.
In my understanding, the complexity and depth of the mechanics work on the interactive, and not, for example, on the visual component.
