Alternative Difficulty Scaling

Games have included variable difficulty settings as a standard feature for years now. Most of the time, this scaling difficulty curve follows a simple pattern: as the difficulty setting increases, the enemies do more damage, take more hits to kill, come in larger numbers, and fight smarter/more aggressively. This is a pretty tried and true method of scaling a game's difficulty for different modes. However, this way of scaling difficulty has a few flaws, as well as a few alternatives.

The most significant problem of the traditional method of difficulty scaling is that it is completely opaque to the player until he or she actually chooses a difficulty setting and plays with it for a while. You can't really quantify the differences easily, and can't describe the differences to the player without revealing a lot of information about the inner workings of the game system.

However, there alternative means of varying difficulty than just manipulating damage and enemies. In my last blog post, I described how the inclusion of permanent loss in the Fire Emblem and Megaman series affected game difficulty. Since it has a noticeable effect on game difficulty, it means that it can be manipulated in order to adjust game difficulty and perhaps form the basis for various difficulty settings. For example, the possibility of permanent character death is what makes the Fire Emblem series so difficulty. It is not inconceivable to imagine adding a new "Easy" difficulty setting to a Fire Emblem game where characters simply don't die permanently or have a finite number of extra lives. This would certainly make the game somewhat easier, by allowing the player more leeway to make mistakes. And this is just one example of how it is possible to adjust game difficulty by modifying various different gameplay systems.

In fact, two recent Fire Emblem games did use nontraditional means of adjusting difficulty. In FE: Path of Radiance, the Easy and Normal difficulty settings did not have Fog of War on any maps, while hard mode did have it on specific maps. In FE: Radiant Dawn. Easy and Normal modes allow the player to make a mid-battle save, while the player can only suspend their game on Hard mode. Another example is from Megaman Zero. In that game, a basic feature of the game is that the player can build up weapons by using them and unlock new techniques, such as the charge slash. However, on Hard mode, the player cannot build up weapons, and is stuck using basic techniques. Coupled with bosses who have moves they do not possess in Normal mode, and the game becomes much more difficult.

The advantage of using techniques like this is that they are obvious to the player. These differences can be explicitly spelled out to the player in the manual and can have an obvious effect on difficulty. They also allow the developer to allow the player to control how "hardcore" a game is in ways that cannot be done with traditional scaling of enemy power.

Fateful choices

Recently, in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, in the middle of a story sequence before a mission, I was suddenly presented with a choice of two options in how a main character would act. I was rather surprised since this had not happened before in the game. As a whole, I am not certain that making the player face such a choice was a good decision by the game developer.

There were two major problems with the choice that the game presented: it was the first such choice, even though I am very deep into the game, and the consequences of the choice are unclear. Neither quality would be problematic on its own, but combined they detract from the game experience.

In the RPG Radiata Stories an equally unusual choice presents itself. At a seemingly random point in the game, two conflicting requests are made of the character, and the hero has to choose between them. However, the hidden consequences of the relatively innocent choice are made clear, when the game tells the player that choosing one or the other is a choice between two different paths through the rest of the game, and explicitly lays out the cost of each choice (losing access to different groups of recruited characters). The choice is sudden, but the consequences are known. Also, based on the scenes which occur right after the choice, the consequences would be clear even if it was not specifically spelled out for the player.

The RPG Persona 3 has many choices of consequence. However, these choices are not unusual, since the player is required to make them all of the time. It is impossible to know how important any particular choice is, or even if there is any importance. As such, the player never has any reason to dwell on any particular choice, so even choices with severe consequences can be made more easily, even though the consequences are unknown.

If you do not have many paces to make player choices in a game, then any choice given to the player seems like it should be very important. If the consequences of a choice are vague and unknown, then decision making is more stressful for the player. Both occurred n a severe form in Radiant Dawn, with the first choice occurring only with a very dramatic and tragic choice, and the consequences are not obvious, even several hours later in the game. I have gone a bit further into the game since that choice, but I am still wondering if I made the right decision, and the second-guessing and replaying the scene multiple times has reduced the dramatic impact of an otherwise great part of the game.

Permanent Loss

One of the most distinguishing features of the Fire Emblem games has always been the fact that when one of your characters is defeated in battle, that character dies, and is gone for good. Permanent death of a character is something that most videogames try to avoid, and for good reason. Making it possible for the player to permanently loose something by making a mistake radically increases the difficulty of the game. In Fire Emblem for example, if you actually let characters die once a mission, you would eventually be stuck trying to beat the game with only one character.

One good illustration of this concept is in the Megaman X series. In Megaman X5, rescuable civilians first appeared as an optional objective. Rescuing these civilians gave X an extra life and partially restored his health. A few specific civilians even forked over valuable equipable parts. Not a bad addition in of itself. However, in Megaman X6 and Megaman X7, this system led to problems. In X6, these civilians could be permanently killed if a specific enemy called a Nightmare touched them. In X7, these civilians could be killed if any shot, enemy, or hazardous terrain touched them.

Now, I should mention that dying isn't really a big deal in most Megaman games. Even if you run out of lives and get kicked back to the stage select screen, you still have everything you have collected up to that point in the game. It isn't uncommon in the series to enter a stage, go find a power-up, and then kill yourself off so that you can go to another stage. There isn't any permanent penalty for dying. In X6 and X7, the civilians became a possible permanent penalty that you have to constantly worry about. Since civilians could drop power-ups (one of which was necessary in X6), the death of a civilian could mean that the player could become weaker in the long run. Not to mention having a list full of MIA and Dead just feels bad. And since all progress is kept if you die, the only course of action if you lose a civilian is to reset the game from your last save file. In other words, losing a civilian becomes a more severe losing condition than the death of the main character.

This wasn't so bad in Megaman X6, since the only enemy that could permanently kill a civilian is obvious, and fairly slow-moving. However, it really became a pain in X7, where civilians could be killed just off-screen before you see them in some missions depending on how fast you move. It prevented the typical strategy of casually exploring a stage to get a feel for it, and instead demanded perfection from the very get-go. Because of this, even more than the sluggish controls, Megaman X7 is the only game in the series I did not beat.

Permanent loss took on another form in Megaman Zero, which conspired to make it the single hardest of all of the Megaman games. In Megaman Zero, extra lives did not replenish after a game over. Instead, you start with a finite number that does not grow much. Furthermore, it is sometimes possible to fail a mission by dying. In addition, dying seriously hurt the player's post-stage ranking. Therefore, the game demands that the player clear every stage without dying. When I went through the game, I ended up resetting every time I died.

Because of this effect, game developers should be very cautious about adding in the possibility of permanent loss. It can have a dramatic effect of difficulty, and can make a game more frustrating than fun if the loss comes seeming randomly.

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn Part 4

It is Thursday again, so time for the next entry about the big game I am playing right now.

Game Completion: In the middle of Chapter 3-10

A few more details worthy of mention:


Shops in Radiant Dawn show the signs of the gradual improvement of the Fire Emblem system. In older Fire Emblem games, you can only buy weapons if you bring a character to a Shop or Armory square during a battle, and few missions even had Shops or Armories. Buying items was a fairly stressful task of somehow guessing the number of weapons you needed to buy in order to last your army until the next shop became available, determining what weapons to buy and how much you could afford, and balancing this with the limited item capacity of your individual soldiers and the needs of actually trying to win the battle at the same time. In addition to the strain on the player, it limits map design, because it is required to have visitable shops every few stages, regardless of what makes sense for the plot or what makes sense for a particular mission.

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones made a slight improvement, in which you could buy from battle shops in the overworld after you cleared the mission and at the preparation screen before battles (albeit at higher than normal prices and with a limited inventory). Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance made the significant improvement of moving all shops (except the secret shop) to the new Base screen, which clears up all of the problems caused by shopping in the middle of a battle. Radiant Dawn takes this a step further, by adding the "special inventory" of unique items in the main Shop, which mostly replaces the role of the secret shop that lets the player buy rare and powerful items. I don't know if there is a secret shop in Radiant Dawn, but it is no longer needed. The special inventory, which changes with each mission, also is an interesting way of providing hints about the challenges of the coming mission by providing special weapons and items that improve your chances at beating the mission.

The Forge, introduced in Path of Radiance, is another useful addition to the series. The ability to forge weapons of much greater than normal power helps even out normal characters against more powerful characters like Ike, the main hero of Path of Radiance, especially since there were very few powerful "S-Rank" weapons in Path of Radiance, and it was difficult to even find characters capable of using A-rank weapons. In Radiant Dawn, the forge is mostly the same, except it seems to be cheaper, the arbitrary limitation of one use per chapter has been removed, and the ability to add small boosts to a forged item by using rare items has been added. There is supposed to be a system of expanding the options of the forge by selling your old weapons, but the options of the forge seem to shift from stage to stage as well, so I am unsure how useful that function is. Like many things in Fire Emblem, a bit more documentation and transparency would be appreciated.


The Skill system, returning in Path of Radiance after being introduced in Fire Emblem 4 and missing from the GBA games, has been improved somewhat in Radiant Dawn. I am honestly baffled as to why basic abilities like Shove and Canto, which are inherent to whole categories of characters, cost valuable skill points, but other than that, I like the system. Unlike in Path of Radiance, when you remove a skill from a character it is now moved to your inventroy, rather than just disappearing. This makes skill assignment more flexible and less stressful, and encourages experimentation. At the same time, the skills a character starts with will cost nothing unless they are removed, so there is both a distinct advantage to leaving those skills equipped, and the freedom to remove them and use them on someone else. It is quite elegent. Also, the addition of third-tier Beorc unique class skils and the Satori Sign skills for Laguz, which are powerful, can not be removed, and don't have a net cost for the character, is an improvement on the useful but somewhat limiting and scarce Occult Skills from the previous game.

I will need to discuss the addition of a third-tier class upgrade for Beorc after I get more of a chance to actually use those classes.

Main Characters and FFXII

When designing the main characters of a videogame, it is vital to make sure that at least two things are true: 

1) The main characters need a reason for becoming the heroes. If the person playing the game ever questions why a certain character is sticking through numerous bad situations, then the believability of the game becomes compromised.

2) The main characters need to be appropriate for the kind of story that is being told. You can't just come up with any kind of character and make him or her the central hero of any kind of game.

The reason I decided to write about this topic today is that I was recently reminded of Final Fantasy XII, a game that had great potential that was held back in part by a poor choice of main characters. At this point, I should put the disclaimer that I did not finish FFXII. I estimate that I made it about half way through the game. However, even though I made it that far, it still had not become apparent to me why Vaan, the supposed main character, had even joined the team.

At its core, the main plot of FFXII deals with war and the political situation concerning Dalmasca and the Archadian Empire. Even though the main character is technically Vaan, the princess of Dalmasca, Ashe, is the character who actually drives the action of the game with her desire to see her country freed from Imperial control. Balthier and Basch also help drive the action because they have personal connections to some of the most important players in the game's action and are sympathetic to Ashe's goals. Fran and Panelo join mostly out of their connections to Balthier and Vaan respectively.

The character whose motivations are questionable is Vaan (and by extension Panelo, who he drags into the events). The reality is that Vaan never really has a motivation to save Dalmasca. Unlike Ashe or Basch, he doesn't really seem to be very patriotic. His only tangible connection to the political events of the game come through his brother, who plays only a minor role in the game that is overshadowed by Basch. His main connection to Ashe is that he can apparently share the strange visions she has, but that remained completely unexplained half way through the game.

Early in the game, when I was first getting to know Vaan as a character, his strongest motivation is to become a sky pirate, the same as Balthier. However, Sky Piracy has very little to do with the plot of the game. The game doesn't even dwell too much on what Sky Pirates do other than fly around in airships. Vaan's obsession with sky pirates has more to do with the allure of freedom from responsibility and his current worries in life. In that sense, Vaan is the archetypal protagonist of a coming-of-age story. Unfortunately for him, FFXII is not a coming-of-age story.

The is really no room for Vaan's story in Final Fantasy XII's plot. A lot of the time, Vaan's lighthearted chats with Panelo and such are pushed off-screen in favor of more serious dialogue involving Ashe and Balthier discussing the morality of using ancient super-powerful artifacts as weapons against the Empire, and how much they actually trust each other. Not even the other characters take Vaan seriously. Balthier quips that he brought Vaan along for entertainment. The one time the other characters ask Vaan why he is coming along, he ends up grasping for something to say, and they end up just walking out before he can come up with a response. It seems that even the game developers did not take Vaan seriously as a character.

It might have been better if the developers had picked a different character to be the lead character. One good pick would have been Larsa, the prince of Archadia who drops by the party often enough that he might as well be a party member. Not only does he have direct connections to the politically heavy plot, he is the main villain's little brother. He also demonstrates a very pro-active interest in the unfolding events of the game. He is also young enough that he could easily take on a lot of the coming-of-age plot aspects surrounding Vaan. Not to mention that he probably has more speaking lines than Vaan anyway.

Vaan's weakness as a main character could become a more long-term problem for Square-Enix. Many of the recent Ivalice Alliance series of Final Fantasy spin-offs, most notably Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, have been using Vaan's appearances in those games in their marketing to try to bank on the popularity of their big budget game. However, since Vaan put in a very weak showing in FFXII, his cameos and second appearances might fail as an effective draw for players. Weak protagonists lack long-term marketability.

.hack//Liminality and Online Jack

.hack//Liminality and Online Jack are two unusual elements that are included in the .hack and .hack//G.U. videogames. They fall somewhere between in-game animated FMVs and an independant animated series designed to tie-in with a videogame.

.hack//Liminality is a series of four animated episodes, each on a disk that is packaged with one of the four volumes of .hack, and they range from about 15-20 minutes in length to 45 minutes. More importantly, they are mostly unrelated to the characters and main action of the games themselves. rather than tell the story of the games, they tell the story of people other than the game characters who experience firsthand the damage that originates from the game's conflict, and those characters' attempts to understand that conflict. The games take place entirely within the fictional MMORPG "The World", but .hack//Liminailty takes place in the real world. The degree of separation is such that only passing references occur in the games to the events of the animated episodes.

The .hack//Liminality episodes' main purpose is the portrayal of why it is important that the heroes of the game succeed in their goal. Episodes 1 and 2 in particular show people who are put in danger and who have a common friend who has fallen into a coma due to the problems found in "The World". This actually helps the games themselves quite a bit, because the way the plot and set-up of the game itself prevents the player from seeing these problems firsthand while playing the game. Also, episode 3 helps clarify a lot of the otherwise vague backstory of the game. Episode 4 is a lot less effective, because it doesn't serve such a clear purpose for the game's story.

Online Jack from .hack//G.U. is in a very different format, as a set of optional movies that can be accessed within the game itself. What is more, it is broken into a larger number of episodes, each of which is unlocked by progressing within the game story. This connects it more closely to the game's timeline, and integrates it with the various simulated forums and animated news boardcasts that provide all kinds of information to the player about the game world. This reduces the ability of the episodes to tell a long, self-contained story (which .hack//Liminailty Episode 1 did very well), but it does make the episodes more closely conected to the game experience itself.

The problem with Online Jack is that the events of the episodes do not tie in closely enough to the main game's plot. Online Jack portrays several characters who are trying to gather information about certain events, but, for the most part, the player knows far more about what is going on than those characters do, so it contributes very little to the plot of the game, and results in a plot that feels incomplete.

As a whole, I think the concept behind .hack//Liminality and Online Jack has a lot of potential, and could probably be used more widely. It seems that it is very difficult to strike a balance between the need to connect such a side-story in with the main plot and to keep it entertaining in its own right, but if it is accomplished succesfully, it cna probably add a lot to a complex story.

Multi-Volume Games

Since I have been playing .hack//G.U. Volume 3 a bit lately, I have been thinking a bit about the idea of games which come out in a series of volumes, each of which is purchased as an individual game. Right now it is an unusual scheme that has its pitfalls, but it has a few clear advantages. Its largest advantage is that it allows a company to create a long game with high production values, even if the game would not otherwise be able to sell enough copies to justify the large cost. These days, rising production costs have worked to make games a lot shorter than they once were, and long games with an epic story are becomming less common, so the movement to multi-volume games does make sense. Still, it is rather difficult to make a multi-volume game that makes the best advantage of the structure.

Because I have played them, I am going to use the original ,hack games, the Xenosaga trilogy, and the .hack//G.U. trilogy as my examples. From what I hear, recent episodic PC games like Half-life Episodes 1 and 2 might also work as examples, but I don't know enough about those games in particular to commenton them.

As far as I am aware, the four volumes of .hack were the first games to use this set-up. All four games use the same save data, have the same engine, and all tell different chapters of the same plot. As such, it really feels like one game that has been split into four parts. In terms of gameplay, this works well, because this removes any learning curve for the later volumes, and makes the games all feel more like a coherent whole, but at the same time squanders some potential to make use of the volume structure. A larger problem is that the story and gameplay were not really well suited to the legnth and pacing of four volumes. The fist volume works well, providing needed exposition and setting up the premise of the story, and ends at a great place: the first battle against the main enemy, and a dramatic sequence which sets up the goal for the rest of the four games. Unfortunatly, the next three volumes do not distinguish themsleves from each other very well, and the whole experience ends up being overly repetative, with too little plot and character development for such a long story. Another significant problem is that the game does not have the variety of scenery, good visuals, and intricate story that would justify buying it in four volumes. The whole thing feels like it would fit on a single game disc quite easily, so it can be hard to justify the purchase.

The successor games to .hack, the three volumes of .hack//G.U., vastly surpass the original games in every way. While there are a few storytelling issues here and there, the .hack//G.U. games tell a much more complicated and interesting story that has enough variations and character development to flesh out a long game. The story works better as a set of volumes as well, because each volume focuses on particular charcters and subplots, and each volume ends with a dramatic sequence that wraps up many subplots and has a revelation that triggers a clear shift in the story and the characters' goals. Also, the beginning of each volume introduces new plot elements and complications, which works quite well. The game keeps the same system between each volume, but adds minor changes and improvements, so there are new things to try and experience in each volume. Finally, the game has fairly high production values, which helps justify the purchase. As a whole, it makes much better use of the multi-volume structure than its predeccesor.

I think I need to write about .hack//Liminality and Online Jack at some later time.

I can probably write a whole essay on the mistkaes and lost potential of the Xenosaga games, but certainy one of the biggest problems with the story of the games is the flawed divisions between the different volumes. The story of the first volume is left incomplete, the second volume only serves as the second half of the first volume, and the third volume completely skips a large section of the story, and wraps up too many plot threads from the first two games too quickly, while ignoring others. In terms of both gameplay and graphics, each volume is highly inconsistent, which makes the experience somewhat jarring. The fact that you can't directly carry save data between volumes because of the gameplay changes is a very severe problem. If nothing else, this series is proof that it is nearly impossible to use later volumes of a game series to fix problems with previous volumes.

As a whole, there are a few things I can conclude about multi-volume games. First, the story of each game needs to both tell part of the greater story, and stand on its own as a story-arc. Transitions between volumes should be memorable and distinct, and involve major changes in the story. Also, having a lot of consistency in graphics and gameplay is very important, but it is also important to keep adding minor new things for each volume so the player does not feel like he is just playing the same game over again. In that regard, .hack//G.U. serves as the best example with the way the main character's abilities are expanded once each volume. Also, it seems that having more than three long volumes might drag things out a bit, so it might be best to stick to just three (though this is probably very different for games in which each volume is very short). Finally, it is probably best to use the same game engine between each volume, to keep the expereince consistent and avoid the costs of making each volume be a full project.

Other than those conclusions, I am a bit uncertain about two important details: I can't decide how introducing new characters should work across multiple volumes and I am not sure whther it should be possible to miss something in one volume and lose the chance to get that thing in a later volume. The first comes up because I disliked waiting until the third volume to recruit some characters in.hack//G.U., but having the dsame cast across all three volumes of Xenosaga became too boring. The second problem is because both alternatives have benefits and drawbacks. Losing the opportunity to get something is painful (I missed a lot in .hack//G.U. becuase I didn't do a few things in the first volume), but it rewards the players who went through previous volumes, which adds to the experience. I suppose some compromise needs to be made for these issues.