Exactly my point. It makes me despair when someone like Jeff Vogel, a noted RPG designer, starts saying that everything has to be easy in order for it to be appealing. There is room for a wide variety of options. As Tesh says, there are lot of games out there, and trying to make one size fit all (or making the largest size possible so that everyone can wear it even though it will fit terrible) isn't a very good option.

Thoughtful discussion all around.

If you're making another casual bubble popping game then it should be easy... if you're recreating a hardcore mmorpg then it should be very hard.

All depends upon the game design <3, keep it up though. Great read =]

Key to that to date has been a wide variety of games to play. If one game wants to cater to all of my moods and whims, as well as those of other players, it needs to give players control to tailor the experience. There is simply no other way to make everyone happy.

Difficult games also give players more temptation to cheat. The sad thing about chess online is that a lot of players cheat by using bots. I've played people who move multiple pieces in one minute blitz chess and manage to force a mate in under 30 seconds. Yet with all that brainpower they can't spell correctly. Make a MMO hard enough and you will see the players try and make it easier.

I don't think difficulty is an issue if segregated by type. I know in FFXI einjerhar and Salvage were considered the hardcore raids, and people dodn't bitch much about them. That was because there were easier raids for people to do as well, with nice, but lesser rewards.

Will adding a difficulty slider bring in more revenue than you lose from releasing games on a slower cycle, or from the customers you lose because you didn't test the difficulty setting they picked?

I suspect that difficulty settings pick up enough players to make up for development time. It's really as though you're designing two different games: One for the story lovers and one for the gamers. Without difficulty settings it's hard to appeal to both groups.

Take Dragon Age, for example. It's obviously meant to appeal to tactical RPG players who want a challenge. At the same time, many people play Bioware games mostly for the stories, and an easy setting helps capture that market.

I love RoM because of choices. Many players have complained the world search, and quest tracking, and other helpers make the game easy and less challenging, but never do they mention that all of that stuff can be fully customized in Runes of Magics built-in features.

I think a large percent of MMORPG players don't know what they want. I know I don't know half of what I want. I've been playing 2+ years and I only know a tiny bit of what I really gravitate towards and know actually what I want.

But I digress. Choice is a wonderful thing. RoM also doesn't tie char level to craft level. I've seen players complain about this too, but you have a choice with it untied. You can level all you want, and besides there is a little "real" world restriction. The higher your craft level, the higher the mats, and those are in higher leveled areas. BUT, you can still take a longer route to craft level cap doing the low level stuff.

I agree that perhaps the best option is letting the player choose the difficulty. They do that in instances in WoW, D&D online, and probably others that I can't remember right now.

In single-player games, or in instances in MMOs, I think allowing the player to set the difficulty level is definitely desirable. In the public areas of MMOs, I think it's good to offer a range of difficulties and let players seek out their own challenge level.

Games that are trivially easy bore me quickly. Games that are impossible (i.e. in which I cannot see a way to complete them with the resources available to me, and in which I lack a way to acquire the resources I think I need) are frustrating. Like Goldilocks I seek the game that's "just right". I like failing from time to time; if my characters never die then I start to lose interest because the game just isn't challenging enough. If I die over and over and over again, I'll usually move on to something else, unless the game is highly tactical and I have more options for success I haven't yet explored. In those cases I can be very patient indeed, and very difficult challenges can be great fun.

For example, if I've had a hard, challenging day at work, I'm not looking for more challenges at home, I just want to play some games and have light hearted fun. On the other hand, on my day off I may want a tough challenge to really engage my gray matter.

Further, every player is different. Difficulty is highly subjective, and so you can't really test for this via small group playtesting. This applies both to intellectual challenges in games and physical reaction challenges. A FPS on Nightmare may be a reasonable challenge to one player, but that same game on Normal may be virtually impossible for another who simply does not have the physical reaction time or movement precision.

This point is the biggest stumbling block for a lot of players discussing difficulty (particularly in MMO space), and sadly many developers too. They're often unable to come to grips with the concept that what is easy for them can be very difficult for someone else - and that that may not be fixable by 'learning to play'. Some people simply have better reflexes than others, some are simply smarter than others, and some just think in patterns that are more applicable to a specific game.

In a competetive game, that's fine. In a non competetive setting however it's definitely something that needs to be considered.