A game without changing the difficulty

Posted by fanzhou on December 27th, 2016

This mechanic – minus the mockery – was quickly adopted by other games, such as God of War.Indeed, elective difficulty itself can be a core gameplay mechanic. The browser-based Desktop Tower Defense has no difficulty levels at all but does allow the player to speed up the game (and thereby increase the challenge) by triggering attack waves prematurely. Then, the final score is calculated from not just how many enemies were destroyed but also from how quickly the game finished.RS 3 Gold Therefore, beating DTD on the default speed is just the beginning. as players must learn how to master the speed-up mechanic to start improving their scores.Orthogonal ChallengesSimilarly, Thief determines the difficulty mode not at the beginning of a level but by how the player challenges herself during the level. The requirements of Easy may only be stealing a certain number of jewels and artifacts while Hard also necessitates finishing the level without killing a single guard.These different modes suggest orthogonal challenges within the same game, a smart way to extend a game’s life for the hard-core. Other official examples include the One-City Challenge and Always War options in Civilization 4 and the Hardcore mode (with permanent death) in Diablo 2.Indeed, Xbox Live Achievements provide a fantastic infrastructure for adding new challenges via unorthodox goals to games that might otherwise no longer interest core gamers.Furthermore, other settings can adjust the challenge of a game without changing the difficulty, per se. For example, RS 07 Gold StarCraft had both a difficulty setting and a speed setting, so a player could try a more difficult AI but at a slower speed if he did not enjoy time pressure. One sadly forgotten setting is the complexity option that appeared in earlier games, such as M.U.L.E. and Lords of Conquest.