Best Games With Adaptive Difficulty

Getting a game's challenge right is one of the most important elements of game design, and it's also the trickiest. Every player comes with their own skillset. Some players might have excellent rhythm but terrible aim, whereas others might only excel at high-paced action sequences but suffer during diabolical puzzle segments without a robust hint system to keep the flow going.

That where adaptive or dynamic difficulty comes in. With clever lines of code, programmers are able to scale a game level's difficulty depending on how well the player is doing at any given moment. This way, the gaming gods can get their share of glory against hoards of monsters whereas newcomers can take the time to get used to the game's conventions.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Playing A Deadly Game Of Tactical Chicken

• If a player gets too good at using a single tactic, the game's soldiers will dynamically adjust their tactics as a counterbalance
• After too many game-overs, Snake will be offered the "chicken hat," which dramatically reduces difficulty but looks ridiculous

The difficulty bar in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain shifts on two ends. On the one hand, if Snake is doing too well or has devised an "overpowered" strategy for completing stealth missions, the game will fight back by dynamically adapting the soldier's tactics. For example, if the player has gotten very good at popping headshots with the tranquilizer gun, soldiers will stop leaving the barracks in the morning without their hard hats.

Suddenly, tranquilizer rounds lose their efficacy, and the player is forced to switch things up. On the other hand, if Snake keeps running into trouble (or gunfire) over and over, he will be offered the cartoonish "chicken hat," which dramatically reduces the game's difficulty but at the high cost of the player's pride. As a consolation to players who repeatedly struggle with Phantom Pain, it isn't that out of place, given Metal Gear Solid's wacky history.

Resident Evil 4

Swinging Between Hardcore And Right At Home

• Although there are preset difficulty levels, Resident Evil 4 oscillates its difficulty based on player performance
• Player who find themselves struggling will be able to find more resources and will encounter fewer enemies after the game lowers the difficulty

Being punished for doing well sounds counterintuitive for fun lovers, but the Difficulty Adjustment system is actually the secret sauce that makes Resident Evil 4 so engaging after the developers shifted the series towards a more action-oriented genre than traditional horror. RE4 and its Remake have difficulty settings that change the game up depending on the chosen option, but there are also lines of code busily working away in the background, ensuring that the player experiences a constant challenge or, if they find themselves overwhelmed, time to catch their breath.

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Perhaps realizing that many players quit out of frustration and knowing those roadblock moments ruin the horror anyway, the developers at Capcom made it so that fewer and easier-to-kill enemies would spawn after too many player deaths. Additionally, the player will find more pickups to help get them back into the flow of things after a particularly bad run-in with the parasite-infected Ganados, both in terms of mood and resources.

Mario Kart 8

Holding The Competition Together With A Rubber Band

• Mario Kart's "rubber banding" ensures that players closest to first place are never truly safe
• Players further back are offered a chance to catch up thanks to their increased chance of gaining some of the better power-up items

While some adaptive difficulty systems make an attempt to hide the fact that the player is getting an easier or harder time, most people who have ever picked up any Mario Kart game will cotton on to the fact that there is some background balancing going once they take first place, and Mario Kart 8 is no exception. This is especially true against AI opponents due to "rubber banding," which is when drivers at the back start demonstrating impossible speed boosts.

A race's difficulty even adapts in multiplayer. Drivers at the front will start gaining fewer useful items, such as bananas or green shells, while those lagging at the bag will increasingly gain the most potent power-ups, such as speed-boosting red mushrooms, stars, or Bullet Bills. This is to keep the race fun and exciting for everyone and to ensure there's always a chance for the positions to change, even in longer races.

God Hand

Putting A God Finger On The Difficulty Scale

• Rather than being hidden, the adaptive difficulty in God Hand is a visible incentive for the player to improve their game
• At higher difficulties, enemies go down harder but also produce more lucrative drops

The few games that leverage adaptive difficulty tend to keep quiet about the swaying difficulty curve under the hood, in part to ensure that the player is experiencing the dead center of difficulty and domination (and to avoid hurting their feelings). However, Clover Studio's God Hand prominently displays the player's performance and current challenge level as a UI icon at the bottom left.

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As Gene battles his way through waves of enemies, a dynamic difficulty gauges visibly shifts from Level 1 to Level DIE. At higher levels, enemies bring more devastating attacks, faster reaction times, and immunity to some of Gene's cheaper moves. As a counterbalance, they tend to drop more gold when defeated. This unflinching transparency challenges players to adapt on the fly and celebrates their skill (or ruthlessly exposes their weaknesses) with typical Clover Studios panache.

Left 4 Dead 2

Directed 2 Perfection 4 Maximum Terror

• When players take too many hits of have failed to take down enemies, the game reduces the number of spawning zombies
• Zombies pursue players who are doing well to crank up the tension, and vice versa for players who are struggling

Video games have the power to elicit a vast spectrum of emotions from players, and terror is one of them. There's a delicate balance between bending players with tension and breaking them. If players find themselves getting murdered over and over in a horror game with extreme levels of challenge, the sublime fear is likely to transform into frustration. Left 4 Dead 2's stress-tracking system (The Director) helps keep the player on the edge of their seat by going between three modes (Build up, Peak, and Relax), which dynamically adjusts how many zombies can spawn in at once.

Not only that, but "high-stress" players, or those who are struggling to take down enemies or have taken a lot of hits in quick succession, will have fewer zombies directly targetting them, with subtle cues, such as music stings, to let them know when the tides are changing. Rather than deflating the tension, it allows tension to drum back up continuously as if there's really someone behind the scenes directing. The gameplay is well-balanced and designed to always push players into difficult spots (with the ravenous walking dead), which cranks up the fear factor.

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