[Editor's note: unangbangkay takes a look Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in his contribution to the Monthly Musing. DDA isn't really brought up that often and I must say this was a really enlightening read. -- CTZ]
Videogames as we know them were built on the idea of challenge. Arcade games were always about (and still are about) getting as far as you can go, mastering the gameplay (or at least the minutiae of the levels) and going until you either ran out of money or you contracted premature arthritis in your wrists.
As games got more complicated the management of challenge turned into something of an art. Too much challenge, and players got frustrated and quit. Too little challenge, and players got bored and quit. So the idea of dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) was born.
DDA is a relatively new concept, and only really emerged in roughly the last decade. Obviously intended to give players a consistently fun experience, DDA increases the difficulty according to a variety of formulas based on how the game's AI regards the player's skill level. DDA also started to be applied to other aspects of gameplay, such as rewards and helpful items, where rewards were modified by the difficulty of the encounter, not unlike decisions a Dungeon Master might make in a game of Pen-and-Paper Dungeons & Dragons. Certain items and powerups were sometimes added if the player spent too much time at low health or given a bit of ammo if they were out.
Did you ever notice
Max Payne's DDA? No? That's when you know DDA is working.
Max Payne very slightly adjusted the level of aim assistance you got, and upped enemy health a bit depending on your projected skill level and success. I don't know the specific algorithms, be it your health after fights, ammo usage, or some kind of timer, but for the most part, you never really knew God was giving a little boost.
Half-Life 2 also did it, but in an even more subtle and unobtrusive manner. Commentary Mode in
Episode 1 and
2 reveals that the game slightly modified the contents of the supply boxes you encountered, depending on Gordon's status at the time you break it. Be at full health when you smash the box, and you were more likely to receive the dinky +5 health vials or random ammo. Be on the verge of death, you might get the nice +20 first-aid kits. Subtle, and almost almost invisible. Bravo, Valve.
Of course, this worked because both games' DDA predicated on your skill and success in relatively simple ways. The rewards were predictable, and challenges entirely planned (enemy here, supply box there). Because of their linearity, developers knew when and when not to lend you a helping hand.
Unfortunate though it may be, there are many more instances of "Bad Idea" than there are of "Good Idea" when it comes to contemporary DDA.
Now before you lay into me about
Oblivion, let's go with what worked and what Bethesda was thinking of when they implemented DDA.
Oblivion's obviously an open-world game, wherein the appeal is its nonlinearity and your ability to go anywhere and do anything.
Morrowind's static difficulty pretty much closed off certain regions to you and your pitiful gear, at least until you stole some fun-lookin' stuff from the shops.
So, in
Oblivion enemies scaled their levels, even their presence based on the player's level. City guards were always 2-5 levels above you, bandits 2-5 below, and so on. This made sure that no matter where you decided to go, you didn't feel as if you COULDN'T go there. A fine, laudable goal.
To bad it went horribly wrong in "vanilla"
Oblivion.
Sad fact is, Bethesda went way too far in how deeply they chose to scale. Scaling permeated nearly every aspect of gameplay, from how strong enemies were, to what enemies actually spawned, to what they carried on their corpses, even to what items shops could sell. After a certain level, wolves and lower-end Daedra would simply disappear from the world, and you'd often see common road bandits wearing the most powerful armor in the game. They'd probably make more money selling that crap than by extorting a few gold pieces from you.
Oblivion's own official strategy guides recommend that you complete certain quests before a certain level, such as one where you had to offer a wolf pelt to a shrine. If you did it too late, wolves were gone, and you had to find one sitting somewhere in the world. Another story mission pitted you and some city guards against a force of Daedra. Do it too late and the Daedra spawned would be titanic Atronachs that would slaughter your allies lickety-split.
Not only did it not make sense, it significantly damaged your sense of growing power and progression, probably the one most critical aspect of any videogame RPG. It was
Final Fantasy VIII's "level 100" problem all over again, only extended to loot. And furthermore, the game was pitifully easy if you chose NEVER to level up, making some of
Oblivion's most dire foes look more like easily broken pinatas.
One of the more publicized failures of DDA was
Homeworld 2, best exemplified in the now-infamous "Mission 4 Massacre". It seems that developer Relic took it personally when
Homeworld's challenge could be surpassed through copious abuse of Salvage Corvettes to bogart every enemy ship. In
Homeworld 2, not only were Salvage Corvettes "nerfed", but DDA implemented to adjust enemy fleet size and composition based on YOUR fleet at the end of the previous missions. You can see where this is going.
Players that did well in mission 3 began mission 4 (before some patches) facing a massive assortment of capital ships that almost immediately raped you before you could get into formation. Early GameFAQs walkthroughs advocated scuttling your entire fleet at the end of each mission, rebuilding from scratch again and again to circumvent the overzealous DDA. And instantly, one of Homeworld's more appealing aspects, namely the consistent fleet, was destroyed.
Many of the most egregious and despicable examples of DDA failure exist in racing games. Yes, I speak of "Rubber-Band AI". Simply put, rubber-band AI gives advantages to AI competitors based on the player's standing. Do poorly, and every other car slows down to accommodate you and your laughable skills. Do well, and every other car suddenly gets nitro, steroids and gains the power of The Force to catch up to you, even if it forces them to go faster than their cars could possibly go. All in the name of making the player feel as if it's a close race, when it isn't.
I'm using a screen from
TOCA Race Driver, which didn't use this catch-up but other games certainly did.
Burnout did it,
Mario Kart does it (to an extent), and several other racers employ it, when it's simply a crutch for poorly designed computer competition and out-and-out CHEATING. It's unfair and makes a racing game unnecessarily frustrating, rarely taking into account a player's actual skill, in a genre whose entire existence is based on it! If DDA must die anywhere, it's in racing and sports games.
What conclusions can be drawn from this? In my book, DDA is a double-edged sword, with the edge pointing towards you being MUCH MUCH SHARPER. Implementing it is harder and more prone to failure the more complex and deep a game gets. The cases in which it is working are the ones where you never notice it happening.
Contest:
1:53 PM on 02.17.2008
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One other thing you should have mentioned was the bounceback effect. Do well for a while, and you get pwnd, triggering a DDA adjustment to make the you pwn, which then... I think you get the point. You end up going through a rollercoaster of difficulty, and the game becomes extremely inconsistent. Time your 'phailing' correctly, and bosses become easier than peons you fought hours ago.
I agree whole heartedly. Subtle DDA is awesome.
I also hated the leveling system in oblivion, worst idea ever. "Hey sweet, I just spent enough time grinding to master blades and get glass equipment sweet...wtf, why does every bandit have ultra-rare enchanted equipment now?"
RPGs are about being able to grind your way up if you are sucking and under leveled.
Oblivion, however, despite its beauty and impressive open-world structure, did absolutely nothing for me -- largely due to its ridiculous DDA. I simply never felt as if my character's abilities were improving.
hahaha so true =D
and that pic with the cars? awesome :D
personally i prefer the non-dda way...u get to a boss and get raped...load that save and get grinding some, u'll probably find some fantastic new combination of skills or whatever that u can use to breeze through.
nice reading btw
Excellent write-up.
But yeah I agree that racing games are the ones that tend to have terrible A.I/DDA. I also agree with the points you make about oblivion.
Yay!
Under any circumstances, Bowser or DK are slow as hell, in 150cc they are the fastest car in the game and they recover in a second and are back to full speed if it hit with anything, hell I read somewhere that the big boo and petey pirahna where the most brutal opponents in the game and even the official Nintendo guide says to unlock them last so you don't have to deal with them during normal races.'
And as they say a picture says a 1,000 words, Elrando's says many.
With a world that big, it should be like Morrowind, where you couldn't go into areas without being beefy. If you had your ass handed to you, leave and better your skills and/or gear, then come back. If the game was linear, it would be a problem. With an open-ended world like Oblivion, that kind of oh-shit-these-guys-are-way-tougher-than-me feeling can really deepen the gameplay.
"Fine, you killed me...just give me 5 levels, steel armor and a silver axe and we'll see how badassed you really are."
Just to add, I felt SiN Episodes did a really nice job of DDA, especially with allowing you to set how quickly it would adjust and how easy/challenging you wanted the game to be in the first place.
Oblivion was bad, too. I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't, however, realize that animals disappeared after a certain point! The bandits with better armor is one thing (a challenge in combat was always welcomed by me), but totally nerfing missions is another entirely.
Excellent write up.
rather than a punishment, it would be seen as a reward. do really well, get more doors to open in a dungeon that were previously just plain walls.
noobs wouldn't know what they were missing, and good players would see more content and harder content.
it makes so much sense :)
nobody gets punished for being too good, nobody gets punished for sucking, you just continually get rewarded with more and better content for performing better.
But then, Oblivion. What was the point?? You probably peaked somewhere around level 7-8 when you'd been mainly pumping your combat skills so you were slightly tougher than your level let on. From there the game designers idea of tough encounters involved slaughtering tonnes of creatures at once. I never even finished the main story line cause it was more chore than game.
I hope they can that idea by next iteration.
When you die and choose to continue, your foes come again in half of their HP, keep dying and the otherwise hard battle will be done in one turn
Also, I agree. DDA works most of the time, but in racing games it does get boring.
To be fair though, look at GT4. You could spank the AI and it got boring most of the time, so I'm not completely against it when it comes to giving cars some extra horse power. Maybe making them more aggressive or something would work as well.
Disclaimer of sorts: I'm not some kind of gaming ubermensch who can win every race in Gran Turismo with a Civic and complete Rainbow Six without dying once. I lose races and I die. Often, sometimes. I just like it that way.
That said, I never noticed it as a problem in FF8. I actually found it useful to go back and draw Firagra from Bombs. I did notice a problem in the sea research lab (where you get Bahamut). On the way down, you can often be back attacked by a Red Dragon who will immediately cast an attack that hits all your party members for 9999. Aside from that, the only other problem I saw in that was that when you hit 100, you can't lvl up your hp and stuff.
Sorry guys, but I loved the level-scaling, or DDA if you prefer. I'm hoping we see it in the next Elder Scrolls game too, though it wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me if it wasn't in.
I quite enjoyed Max Payne's difficulty adjustment. For the record, you could choose a difficulty at the beginning of the game, with the highest, "Dead on Arrival", preventing the game from lowering the DDA setting below maximum difficulty.
Agreed 100% about Oblivion. It's a bit odd though. Both a friend and myself are going through it presently, and I'm having a ridiculously easy time of things, while he's finding it insanely difficult, down to things like having rats being able to instakill his character.
By the way, there's mods for Oblivion that fix the levelling system by giving every character and item minimum and maximum level caps, and tweaking a number of other aspects of the game related to difficulty.
@nopk
Minutiae = "Minute or minor details". In videogames it might refer to trial-and-error challenge memorization, though that in itself might be considered a skill.
@akathatoneguy
I'm actually a lazy gamer. Comes with piracy and having too many games in your backlog to appreciate. I first noticed the level-scaling in Oblivion as I had been cheating up my skill points to level up with less grind. I did this as I stood in front of a quest character, apparently one who would level. One day I saw him with a Dwarven Claymore on his back, wearing an Iron Helmet, and Elven Greaves. Seriously ugly, but whatever. Three cheated levels later, I see him walking around in full Daedric with a Daedric Longsword and Shield. See what's wrong?
With Oblivion it wasn't so much the level scaling. Aside from wiping creatures out of existence, most enemies had a challenge cap. But the most acute evidence of its failure was in the loot scaling. When everyone's in Daedric, there's no more joy in finding it lying in some tough-as-hell dungeon. Kind of like you're being regarded trend-setter when you want to be non-conformist.
Bethesda states that Fallout 3's DDA will be to set environmental difficulty based less on the player's current skill but where they go first. Hit Vault 3 first, and it'll be full of chump ants. Hit it last and get radioactive Deathclaws. Sounds a teeny bit better than Oblivion, but it's pretty easy to see how this system can be "gamed" by the munchkins who make speedrun videos.
I'd recommend reserving judgment on F3's DDA until we get an impression on how the challenge map proceeds. Previous Fallout games, despite being nominally nonlinear tended to line up their challenges in a logical fashion that most players would follow, and that only the crazily independent would ignore. Quest 1, 2, 3 in town A led people to go to town B, where enemies were harder, etc.
Oh look, I made another write-up.
Nice read. FF8 lazily did DDA by just giving your enemy a level that was the average of your party member's levels.