Difficulty spikes as intentional design choices

[TheGamedawg]

I've been thinking about something.  So we can all agree that difficulty spikes in games are usually not a good idea.  The sort of punish the player for not preemptively grinding beforehand and are generally unfair.  But I've been thinking, what if a difficulty spike was intentionally added to a game for one reason or another.


Let me give you a couple examples.  I was actually sort of thinking of trying this in one of my games too.  Imagine there are two pathways.  One which is kind of long, and another which is much shorter and has some cool rewards.  However you are told that the enemies on the shorter path are far more dangerous.  You can then make the choice to take the path with the difficulty spike, or play it safe with the longer route, maybe returning to the shorter one later.


Or how about this.  Right from the start of the game you are presented with a long pathway that leads to the final dungeon of the game.  However the difficulty of the monsters there are extremely dangerous.  Then the game is about exploring around the world, all while gaining enough experience and skills to take on that route.  You can go there anytime to test your newfound strength, however you will never survive unless you're strong enough first.


What other examples could come of presenting a clear difficulty spike to the player, and giving them choices like this.  Could something like this be an interesting idea?

 

[Pine Towers]

I prefer to think of difficult spikes as a mean to show the player that this or that battle is serious. After facing 4~5 combats were you wipe out the enemy after a couple rounds, facing an Ogre that deals 33% of damage per hit can put the "oh shi-" mindset on the player.


This can be seem on Chrono Trigger: Most of the random battles are easy, but the bosses are tough. This dichotomy instills in the player the importance of such battles.

 

[Wavelength]

I believe a "difficulty spike" is generally thought of as an instance where, if the "difficulty" and/or required mastery necessary to successfully maneuver the game's obstacles could be presented on a graph, the graph would spike up for a short time before returning to the "line of best fit".  This is a somewhat different concept than both of the examples you gave - the first of which was more of a "risk/reward" scenario and the second of which actually sounds like an intentionally smoothed difficulty curve in a semi-linear, grindable game.


The main pain that comes with an actual difficulty spike is that in many games, it impedes the player's progress until they've gained enough mastery (or grinded enough, in the case of most RPGs) to complete obstacles that they'd normally see much later on - so the player is stuck behind the same obstacle (boss, dungeon, minigame, whatever) for a long period of time, which doesn't feel good, and then once the player finally has gained enough of whatever they need to progress, the next few areas will feel way too easy.  You constantly want to make the player feel challenged, but capable.


Even though a smooth difficulty curve is usually best for the player experience, there's no reason you can't (intentionally) add little bumps along the way.  Having a few curb-stomp easy battles, and a few "my goodness they're strong" encounters can keep the player's interest high by making battle outcomes feel more unpredictable.


I'm also playing around in my current game with similar "micro-spikes" in difficulty; I have action stages made up of five "action games" apiece - one might be easy, the next fiendishly difficult.  The player cannot be held back from progressing through my game simply by failing an action game (or even a complete action stage), so even though I've gotten the occasional comment of "this one thing was really hard!", it never spilled into "I stopped having fun with the game".  I would hold this up as an example to designers in general - difficulty spikes (and high or slightly imbalanced difficulty in general) are perfectly okay as long as they don't stop the player from progressing through your game.  If they can stop the player from progressing, it's best to flatten that spike.

 

[MAIR]

Another example I could give is having a choice of routes or different endings the player could pursue.  One is the route almost everyone agrees on, and another that causes every other character to turn on the protagonist.