As you might have gleaned from my last post, I've recently upgraded my PC and got a shiny new graphics card. As such, I've been testing it out by playing some pretty games - today's was Crysis. I could run that at Medium, provided I didn't mind jerkiness and my heat sensors wailing at me. The new card runs it on high settings at 1600x1050 resolution, with no jerkiness at all. I've been enjoying it so far, but one thing has struck me about it - the difficulty.
The same thing hit me with Halo 3 when I picked that up last Christmas, actually. The fact is, I'm a pretty good gamer now, mostly because I've had a lot of practice. Consequently I usually ramp the difficulty setting right up on whatever game I play, particularly if its an RTS, RPG or FPS. I played through Halo 3 on Legendary, completed HL2 and expansions on the max difficulty setting and I'm playing Crysis on Hard. Unfortunately, I've got to the point where the only way the game designers can make the game more challenging is to make the AI do more damage, rather than making them more clever.
This presents a problem, because on the hardest settings the AI can usually one-shot you if they're packing any kind of heavy weapon, or if they're up close with something like a shotgun. I find I'm killed by being one-shotted far more than I die to sustained fire from the AI, so I'm not being killed in firefights but usually being killed by a grenade exploding near me or a rocket hitting a wall nearby. The frantic battles where you're wildly fighting for your life as dozens of enemies attack you are cool, the ones where you're taking it slow and trying to dodge an arbitrary instant death really aren't. But because playing the lower difficulty settings is no challenge now, I've got no choice but to play the instant-death roulette instead. At the end of the day it just becomes frustrating to play, because you're not being killed by a lack of skill but instead by the enemy getting a lucky shot in.
Released a year ago now, Crysis makes me wonder why we accept such poor quality graphics in every MMO except AoC.So that's why I think FPS designers are beating up the wrong tree with regards to difficulty curves. They don't need to ramp up the damage that enemies do, they need to make them cleverer and more numerous. A grenade going off nearby shouldn't instantly kill you, but it should flush you out of cover by giving you a fair warning that (unless you move) a second one will arrive pretty shortly and finish you off. Make it more challenging rather than more arbitrary.
But how does this compare to MMOs? How can MMO's become more challenging, to keep them interesting? It's easy enough to make them harder, but that's not necessarily the same thing. In Everquest, dying was a major thing - you spawned naked at the last area you bound yourself at, which could only be a town. It wasn't necessarily in the same zone, so if you'd bound yourself in Freeport and then taken the long journey over to the continent of Kunark to go adventuring, you'd wake up right back in Freeport if you died before you found a new bind zone. Worse, all your equipped weapons and armour would still be on your corpse, leaving you essentially helpless. Oh, and you got a significant experience penalty too, something like 5% of a level, and if you got enough you could un-ding and go down a level.
Everquest was a difficult game compared to modern MMOs, but this doesn't necessarily correlate with challenging. The combat in EQ wasn't necessarily any reliant on skill than in WoW, for example, just because the death penalty was harder. In the same vein (and perhaps a better example of what I'm driving at), if WoW doubled the amount of experience it took to level up, it wouldn't become a more challenging game because of it. It'd just take longer. A game doesn't have to be long and punishing to be a challenge, so just making an ulta-hardcore remake of EQ (like Vanguard) isn't necessarily the way forward here (certainly not if you want people with full-time jobs to play).
Adding a challenge to a game is often as simple as making players adapt their play style. In WoW, NPC's pretty much all went down the same way to my rogue. I adapted my playstyle slightly depending on the class of the mob, but not much. In PvP, however, I varied my playstyle immensely - not just depending on the class of my opponents, but due to group dynamics and the situation at hand. Sometimes I'd wade right into a battle, other times I'd wait for a straggler to break off to try and heal himself and then pounce on him, other times I'd just jump people as they travelled. Though my character's skills were the same, I had to adapt my playstyle pretty much every time I went into a battleground or was involved in world-pvp.
This hits on the most obvious way to make MMOs more challenging without just making them harder is then to make PvP more important in the game. Replace the dungeon crawls and raids with lots of battlegrounds and raid-level sieges. The industry and WAR in particular is one step ahead of me on this one, as you've probably noticed. But players are inherently more entertaining opponents than AI, so they're onto a winner there.
But that's not the only answer. I don't think PvE can be phased out entirely because, while players are good opponents, there generally has to be a level playing field. It'd be difficult to implement a raid system where one player got to be a raid boss and had to fight forty other players. It might actually be good fun in something like LOTR's monster PvP system, but there's something a lot of players enjoy about fighting raid NPCs - working with twenty or forty other people to go through a pre-arranged plan.
In this case, I think the dungeons need to be made more varied. Like if each dungeon had three middles, and three ends, which were chosen at random when you logged in. So every Molten Core raid wouldn't be the same every time. Bosses, too, should have maybe five different scripts. Developers are already pretty creative at making cool bossfights (Blizzard in particular), but having bosses do a different thing each time would keep it fresher. It wouldn't make it harder, exactly, but it'd make it more interesting because you'd have to adapt your playstyle a little.
Of course, an improved combat system that was far more skill-based than the current one would do wonders too, but that's an issue for another day (and also something a lot of people have puzzled in vain for a long time, so probably not something I'm going to solve any time soon). In the absence of that, though, the best bet is to make using the current one as varied as possible.
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