The challenge level of many current games
Method 1: Add more enemies
This is the Serious Sam approach to difficulty-add a whole ton of additional foes and the game will indeed be harder. Bonus points if the game requires the player to individually click for each attack-eventually their finger will get tired.
Eventually they'll get tired!
Although this method does work, I find it to be a cop out. In many action RPGs your character will not even take significant damage from these types of enemies because you have sufficient armor and hit points to resist their attacks. This means that you don't succeed in adding a sense of danger and challenge-the player never feels menaced, just inconvenienced.
A similar obstacle would be a room full of kittens you have to pet
Method 2: Add health and damage to the enemies
This is another pretty easy approach to make the game more difficult-just make the monsters harder to kill and make them injure you more. This is better than method 1 because it at least makes you feel that enemies are a real threat, but it's difficult to balance. It's hard to find the sweet spot of difficulty where they are hard enough to pose a threat but not at an unreasonable level of challenge.
The tricky seesaw of game balance
The other problem with this method is that it may not fit the game world very well. For example, in the The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion all of the monsters increase in strength along with your own character. This means that toward the end of the game every common bandit will still be an equal threat for your battle-hardened warrior who has won thousands of engagements, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
If this method is chosen ideally it should be implemented by making different enemies appear that look like they should be more challenging. For instance, if you were fighting bandits and thieves at the start of the game, add better equipped mercenaries or knights later on.
This enemy might pose a plausible threat at the start of the game-not at the end of the game
Method 3: Limit the player's resources
This is one of my favorite ways to add difficulty to a game. It forces the player to consider what to use in every situation as they may need that grenade or healing potion more later on. Many RPGs and survival horror games use inventory limits to impose this on the player-you're physically unable to carry everything you might want so you have to pick and choose what you take with you. Other RPGs don't have limits to your inventory but you don't have unlimited cash so you have to pick what to buy very carefully.
However, this system poses a difficult balancing act once again, as there may be situations where limiting player resources results in being stuck in a situation with no way out except reloading or restarting the game from an earlier point. This results in the player being forced to slog his way through a bunch of stuff he's already done earlier-or more likely to quit the game entirely.
and you really don't want to be stuck in the torture dungeon
Method 4: Make enemies only vulnerable to specific attacks
This is another one of my favorite methods-and can be done in many different creative ways. Add a specific weakness to an enemy-such as taking extra damage from silver weapons. Require the player to use a certain item to damage their foe-such as a stake to kill vampires. However, it's very important that there be a way for the player to KNOW what the enemy's weakness is before or during the encounter, so that they can potentially prepare for and beat it without having to go to Gamefaqs. You can do this by having hints in the game-such as NPCs you talk to in town or a book you find saying that the enemy is afraid of light.
You can also ask the player to use logic-for example the first boss in Final Fantasy Nine is a big plant. Astute players might realize that plants tend to not like being set on fire.
The dreaded Plant Brain
There should also be some visible or audible sign that you have successfully identified the enemy's weakness-anything from a shout of agony to simply taking significantly more damage from your attacks.
Method 5: Impose additional restrictions on the player
This is a great way to not only make the game more difficult, but to make the game feel more unique and original. In Final Fantasy Seven-players need to have various materia which have to be equipped to cast magic spells that can cause damage to enemies or heal allies. At one point in the game, players have all of their materia stolen by Yuffie.
Don't trust anyone who dresses like this
Obviously they want to get it back, but Yuffie is kidnapped by an enemy and the player has to fight their way through them without being able to use their magic to help. What I found extremely clever about this part of the game was that while you weren't able to cast magic and this was an abrupt, unexpected occurrence, there were ways around it. The store in town sold items that could be used to cause high damage to enemies, as well as healing potions that you could use to substitute for the cure spell.
In the Trauma Center game for the Wii you have to perform surgery on patients. You are used to being able to see the entire patient's body so that you can treat them quickly. Well, in one scenario you get involved with a car crash in a tunnel with no lighting. All you have available to light the scene is the flash on a camera that needs a few seconds to recharge. So you have to remember what's going on as the flash dims and you return to being completely in the dark so that you don't injure or kill your patient.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with doing surgery in the dark
Method 6: Make the enemy smarter
Unfortunately, making good AI for opponents seems to be extremely difficult. They are able to execute what they are programmed to do with perfection but they are also extremely predictable. Even in FPS games with the best enemy AI, after you've been through one or two rooms of enemies you pretty much know what they will do for the rest of the game. In RTS games, after the first few difficulty levels the AI is made more difficult by giving it resource gathering bonuses instead of making it better at the game.
Artificial Intelligence has not reached this point yet unfortunately
I think the best way to make the AI seem more intelligent is to constantly add new tricks that the enemies use with the precision that the AI can offer.
Using a FPS game where you attack a facility as an example, in the first engagement the enemy is stunned by you showing up and just returns fire while in the open as you gun them down. The next guards you meet are prepared and use cover to protect themselves. After that, there's an alarm in the room that you have to keep them from pressing and summoning reinforcements. Later on they turn the lights out in the room so you're blind and have to return fire to their muzzle flashes or at their flashlights. Maybe a later room has tear gas or something that floods it and you have to deactivate it.
Far too many FPS games stop at the second stage of AI-they take cover and then you spend the rest of the game popping out to blast at them for a few seconds before returning to your own cover
Summary
There are many ways to add difficulty to a game but if you want to separate your game from the pack, try and use more creative options. Don't just add more monsters with more health and damage-try and force the player to think. There are already tons of games out there that add enemies with slightly more health and damage-players won't remember those. They will remember trying to suture bleeding lacerations from the light of a camera flash.
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