What the hell is "artificial difficulty"?

I've seen multiple people say this term recently, and I don't get it. How can difficulty be "fake"?

I can only speak for myself: Whenever I've used the term, I'm usually referring to a situation where it feels like a mapper made a deliberately nasty thing that offers little to no real way for a player to effectively meet the challenge that feels even remotely fair or possible. 

55 minutes ago, Kwisior said:

I've seen multiple people say this term recently, and I don't get it. How can difficulty be "fake"?

Oh boy, this. As a statement, not a question.

I loathe the term, because I've seen it thrown around willy-nilly for things I consider to be legitimate ways to make something challenging. Old game with a lives system? Oh, that's fake difficulty apparently. Time limit? Nah, fake difficulty. And so on.

Actually that latter example once annoyed me so much it incensed me to make a whole-ass game based around time limits.

You mean you don't know about the great "Artie Ficial"? Jeez guess I'm out of the loop these days...anyways he was so good we named a difficulty after him.

It's possible to make maps that are very hard, yet an extremely skilled player who knows what's coming could still beat them the vast majority of the time. On the other hand, you can have maps that absolutely require grinding for very favorable rng to beat (such as an archvile group simply not attacking the player for 10 seconds, or getting 10 stuns with the SSG in a row); even an extremely good player might die the vast majority of the time. The latter is a type of difficulty that can't be overcome by skill or strategy alone, thus "artificial". I'd say anything requiring TAS level execution throughout would also qualify, personally. Technically being repeatably winnable doesn't mean it's that way for a human player. (And if you're not making maps for a human player then wtf are you doing with your life?)

Mappers have a responsibility to create an interesting challenge for the player, and it should be subjectively "fair". Not everyone draws the same line but some either show the utmost dickishness or simply don't know how the gameplay works on a very deep level. If the challenge isn't meaningful to the player, then they just won't care to play it. That might mean your map might never get beaten because it just isn't fun. Personally I also consider bloat to be somewhat of an artificial difficulty condition if it's too overdone; this applies to monster count as well as map size. I'm only talking about how it applies to Doom however, I don't want to get into the weeds about other games.

An example of non fake difficulty would perhaps be Sunlust in a single segment run. Some of the best players are able to beat every map even though many of them are very tough, because the fights are mostly well designed enough for consistent strategies to exist.

An example of fake difficulty would be wow.wad, or UV Maxing Nuts.wad. The first is basically an unwinnable cyberdemon phone booth with no thought or understanding of game design put behind it. The second is technically beatable, but requires weeks of farming revenant missiles under low FPS, even though the map is so large that you could consistently circle them with no skill required. Note that simply reaching the exit of Nuts.wad without all kills is so trivial that anyone could do it if told how. Granted it's a self imposed challenge but one could envision a similar approach to the UV max strat being required for some other map.

I used to despise "artificial" or "unfair" difficulty situations. Like turning a corner in a narrow hallway and get immediately turned to Swiss cheese by chaingunners behind a fake wall. Or take elevator up into a tiny room, and get punched by revenants waiting there. Or pop-up hell knight right in my face. To me, artificial meant any situation I couldn't foresee that led to my death. But who says I have to be able to beat a map first try? Over time, I started seeing that as a regular part of the difficulty. Yet another tool in mapper's toolbox to craft a particular experience. 

I don't usually play highly optimised challenge wads so I can't speak for those. 

2 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

You're playing an Italo Doom difficulty slaughtermap and then the action suddenly stops and there's an imp with a dialog box that asks you "What's the capital of Bahrain?" and there's a 20-second timer.

 

Naturally you answer "Manama" on the spot, being a geography buff, but there's a coding error and the imp replies "Sorry the answer is manama." Luckily this doesn't seem to kill you. 

 

And then the action starts up again and you die because you were thinking about capitals. 

So, errors, mapping mistakes, bugs and glitches constitute artificial difficulty? A better word for that would be "unintended".

2 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Personally I also consider bloat to be somewhat of an artificial difficulty condition if it's too overdone; this applies to monster count as well as map size. 

In long maps, part of the challenge is endurance and keeping your cool, which are real skills that you have to learn. The same can be said about RNG-heavy maps, as those require you to adapt to unpredictable situations. Doesn't seem fake to me.

Edit: I could've phrased my second point better. What I basically meant was that those types of maps make the player utilize common skills like any other map, so we shouldn't give them an exclusive term.

Artificial difficulty is when someone creates a challenge manually, as opposed to finding it growing on a tree or having it spontaneously arise from the fundamental constants of the universe.

48 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

one could envision a similar approach to the UV max strat being required for some other map.

You mean like NoYe MAP35 or Poogers MAP27?

I think Fake difficulty is probably a misnomer, and that a better term would be contrived difficulty. Something like making a player punch out a cyber demon Bezerkless.

Technically there is little difference in the approach for dealing with the cyber, You have to punch it out either way, the dodging patterns are the same, but the extended time required, the endurance of doing it bezerkless is a contrived way to make the same set up more difficult. 

Won't change the fact that some people enjoy challenges like that. and more power to them. 

I like that approach to the idea, although technically any specifically-designed challenge is a contrived difficulty.

Personally, I tend to 'categorise' different aspects of difficulty; timing, reaction, endurance, knowledge, resource management, space management, puzzle solving, accuracy, observational, et cetera -- there are more than a few ways to put a barrier between the player and success. I think it's in a designer's best interests to use most if not all of them as and where appropriate.

I feel the exact term "Artificial difficulty" can have a clear and concise meaning in game design, but it mostly applies to differences between challenge levels. I feel it's fair to say that when a game's hard mode is exactly the same as it's normal mode, with the only changes being to stats, like enemy health and damage, that is artificial difficulty. No extra work was used to make the hard mode more challenging beyond fiddling with some numbers. I would say it applies in situations where a lack of effort to create the challenge exists and only workarounds are used. 

1 hour ago, baja blast rd. said:

You're playing an Italo Doom difficulty slaughtermap and then the action suddenly stops and there's an imp with a dialog box that asks you "What's the capital of Bahrain?" and there's a 20-second timer.

 

Naturally you answer "Manama" on the spot, being a geography buff, but there's a coding error and the imp replies "Sorry the answer is manama." Luckily this doesn't seem to kill you. 

 

And then the action starts up again and you die because you were thinking about capitals. 

I'm sorry, it's the Moops.

30 minutes ago, hybridial said:

No extra work was used to make the hard mode more challenging beyond fiddling with some numbers. I would say it applies in situations where a lack of effort to create the challenge exists and only workarounds are used. 

Balancing and playtesting are required when changing stats in a game, that's far from effortless imo.

On the topic, I honestly can't think of any moment where this term would make any sense. I mostly see them used when someone don't like an x type of challenge but want to dismiss it in a way that sound technical or objective.

It's when I don't beat something on my first try.

1 hour ago, Kwisior said:

In long maps, part of the challenge is endurance and keeping your cool, which are real skills that you have to learn. The same can be said about RNG-heavy maps, as those require you to adapt to unpredictable situations. Doesn't seem fake to me.

No doubt the first part is true, at least for playing saveless. I do think there's an element of whininess that comes with using the term so I usually don't like to overuse it, but there is definitely a defensible reason why it exists. "It's not fun and I don't care about beating it any more" is a different way of putting it. So others can debate whether that opinion is valid or not, but for that player the map had a serious shortcoming. 

When it comes to fights that are reliant on RNG, I tend to let it slide in the less extreme examples of course. But there are examples where the RNG element is too blatant and becomes too big a determining factor in the run's success to ignore. Particularly so if the bad parts are late into a long map.

As for bloated maps, I agree that endurance and consistent execution are important skills. However in examples like Womp's punching cyberdemons, it's just not interesting to be forced to land 400 punches in a row without taking damage. Nor is it any more interesting to fight 400 revenants with the rocket launcher instead of 20 in a big open room. The threatening portion of the fight should not be overshadowed by the cleanup. 

58 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

You mean like NoYe MAP35 or Poogers MAP27?

Those two examples seem a lot less grindy than I was expecting. Honestly they're set up a lot better than Nuts for getting a cloud of missiles efficiently, and the first example only takes a couple minutes. Aside from the gimmick being very prominent, it's a pretty reasonable looking map. As for Poogers, it's served with a healthy dash of humor from everything I've seen. However, though the first 3 minutes are mostly a mindless circle jerk, I don't see how there's much RNG. It's relying on a dubious and obscure skill of missile herding, but it seems like another puzzle map. 

Compare it to the nuts UV max one, from the creator's own words:

So taking most of a month in real time just to farm missiles. If you get hit you need to start over since there's no health, and the entire area is flat so the revenants aren't as efficient compared to the elevated positions in the other maps where they don't have one another to hit.

Furthermore, and this is very much to my point, he literally copy pasted inputs for the majority of this run. The guy who made the TAS didn't even watch the TAS. That's how much thought needs to go into this strategy. This is obviously one of the more egregious examples and I don't think BPRD meant for it to really be a playable map, much less allow for UV maxing. But yeah, while placing 10000 enemies and very little ammo is technically a legitimate mapping decision and is in fact difficult, it's clearly not something that's worth playing for. The same could be said on other examples of less extreme maps, but it's more subjective. 

I was about to write a post about what "Artificial Difficulty" was but then I realized that I myself don't really know what that is very well.

Difficulty, Now with 25% more microplastics and pesticide!

It's really just a more objective-sounding way of saying "unfair".

For a term no one seems to have a clear definition of, it sure does get thrown around a lot in online gaming discourse. When no one can agree on what "artificial difficulty" even means, it becomes a useless descriptor. All it tells me is that somebody is unhappy with the way difficulty was implemented.

In my view, ALL challenges in all video games are artificial. They were designed by a human, for someone else to overcome. That makes it different from, say, scaling a mountain. Nobody designed the mountain, so the difficulty in scaling it can't be artificial. It just is inherently difficult. If you can't climb that mountain, you don't have anyone else to blame for it. But if you fail a challenge in a video game, you know that another human put that challenge before you, and you may be inclined to blame that person for your failure, and not yourself. But I'd argue that the issue here is not about the challenge being "artificial," but just about it being poorly designed.

I think the biggest issue with harder challenges in video games is whether or not the added difficulty makes the problem more engaging, or just more tedious. Take the challenge of punching out a Cyberdemon with berserk, for example. Now, you could make the fight harder by taking away the berserk, but while that does make it more difficult since you will have to keep going without a mistake for longer, it doesn't make the fight any more engaging, it just takes longer and adds tedium. Instead, what if we add Cyberdemons on raising and lowering pillars around the arena, and have them cyclically peak up to demand your attention (idk, just an idea I thought up quickly)? That would certainly also make it more challenging, maybe even more so than the berserk-less fight, depending on how it's implemented, but it would probably be way more interesting, and actually fun to play.

For me it's either luck based ala pure RNG to get through something, or it's an unnecessary side effect of a difficult scenario that makes things harder than they ought to be, like getting hung up on geometry, something awkward and unaccounted for. My "favorite" unfair scenario is extreme resource starvation, where you deny the player health with no recourse to recoup loss prior so they pay for it for prolonged periods of time, or deplete their ammo unexpectedly and then not give them an option to defend themselves outside of infighting. Yeah, I think they'll die!

17 minutes ago, Archvile Hunter said:

I think the biggest issue with harder challenges in video games is whether or not the added difficulty makes the problem more engaging, or just more tedious.

This is prob the largest dimension of it that I can think of. Things like arbitrarily reducing the damage the player deals or increasing the damage that enemies deal are easy examples across all genres of games.

Doom Eternal, greatest recent example of artificial difficulty I can think of.

Player, and Monster stats are static for the game. All monsters deal a fixed amount of damage, but all the difficulty does is select how aggressive the demons are. Ultra-Nightmare is just Nightmare aggressive enemies with the same monster stats as ITYTD difficulty, but the game ends when you die.

NuDoom is simply artificial difficulty scale that only affects how aggressive the enemies.

Most examples of "artificial difficulty" are simply extra-padding that players can feel it's extra-padding for the difficulty. No change in gameplay, or enemy stats. There's just more of the enemies.

Edit: Chaingunners and Archviles are my favorite "artificial difficulty" mechanic in map making, especially if the archvile is hidden from view and in a crusher sector. Infinite chaingunners = infinite uncontrolled hit scan difficulty until button is pressed to crush the archviles.

When te difficult is bases in being unfair than challenging.

Examples: The Silver Surfer nes Game where literally everything kills you (Including backgrounds or things that just looks like decorativo props).

The infamous Convoy No Nazo... There's literally it goes 0 to 100 in the first 5 seconds.

perhaps this [article] about [artificial difficulty] in game design, may help. complete with definition, history and examples.

13 minutes ago, rita remton said:

perhaps this [article] about [artificial difficulty] in game design, may help. complete with definition, history and examples.

If everyone just accepts this totally incorrect meaning of the word artificial then I guess there's nothing we can do to stop the linguistics tide. Artificial means "not naturally occurring." OP is right to question the use of the word. What in Doom could be said to be naturally occurring? It is a game built by humans. Any difficulty in the gameplay was specifically built by a human. Unfair, egregious, tedious, lacking imagination... these are all words that you could use to describe a level. But artificial doesn't really make sense. I guess Oblige maps could be said to be artificial?

I feel that this word is just used because it sounds derogatory and makes the Infallible Critic feel all puffed up and holier-than-thou.

It means whatever you want it to mean. Possible meanings:

1. "Overly tanky" enemies, or enemies that deal "way too much" damage

2. Challenges that the current player was not ready for

3. A change in the gameplay to something the player is not familiar with (think something like the Drakengard E route/ending)

4. Too many enemies for the player to handle, either gradually or suddenly

13 minutes ago, magicsofa said:

 

If everyone just accepts this totally incorrect meaning of the word artificial then I guess there's nothing we can do to stop the linguistics tide. Artificial means "not naturally occurring." OP is right to question the use of the word. What in Doom could be said to be naturally occurring? It is a game built by humans. Any difficulty in the gameplay was specifically built by a human. Unfair, egregious, tedious, lacking imagination... these are all words that you could use to describe a level. But artificial doesn't really make sense. I guess Oblige maps could be said to be artificial?

 

I feel that this word is just used because it sounds derogatory and makes the Infallible Critic feel all puffed up and holier-than-thou.

I would've written more but but I just find myself agreeing with this. Artificial difficulty is when someone hits you on the head with a baseball bat while you're trying to play [insert hard map here].

5 hours ago, hybridial said:

I feel the exact term "Artificial difficulty" can have a clear and concise meaning in game design, but it mostly applies to differences between challenge levels. I feel it's fair to say that when a game's hard mode is exactly the same as it's normal mode, with the only changes being to stats, like enemy health and damage, that is artificial difficulty. No extra work was used to make the hard mode more challenging beyond fiddling with some numbers. I would say it applies in situations where a lack of effort to create the challenge exists and only workarounds are used. 

I think this is more or less what the term was originally intended to mean. Not the times when a game is designed to be hard from the ground up and a player isn't able to wrap their head around it, but rather the times when a designer creates something that's pretty straightforward to beat but then throws in a very simple gating mechanism that feels incongruous. Even with that in mind, there are always going to be people who can adapt to any form of challenge and enjoy it. The term has limited usefulness, but like every other rule that is sometimes wrong, it's also sometimes right, so it's probably worth thinking about it sometimes. Most really challenging games these days are indies, Soulslikes, or mods; they all come from a long history and have an established audience, so they tend to be reliant on knowledge and good design, and I think the classical forms of "artificial difficulty" are pretty uncommon. Game designers have better instincts about what forms of challenge their intended audiences are going to connect with and what their players are capable of.

People may also use the term when they feel like a game has bad controls. I find it hard to disagree with that in principle, but again, it's always kind of an open question as to whether the game actually handles badly or whether it's designed for a rhythm that the player hasn't mastered.

There's definitely a couple of different cases, one of them is enforced tedium.  Most typically found in games without save states where something can be difficult simply because it takes some number of minutes just to get another chance to retry.  In fact, you've played the lead up so many times that you're 100% consistent with it, it simply takes time.  The difficulty is "fake" because if you had save states you could easily learn the patterns, the encounter may just be plain easy once learned, but you're simply being denied the opportunity.  These games could be rendered easy by simply practicing on an emulator and then transferring the learned knowledge to a single segment run.

Games with poor controls are often considered artificial difficulty.  For example a game which uses an unusual control scheme compared to others in the genre is not actually more difficult, it just exploits muscle memory and someone who hasn't established that muscle memory wouldn't find this challenge to be present.

Finally, as mentioned here a few times, when the difficulty stems entirely from luck or poor communication with the player.  For the luck case there's no challenge to overcome, you simply need to play the game until it lets you pass.  I've grouped this with poor communication, which is where the difficulty is negated simply be knowing some weird fact (i.e. something like hit box location is not where it appears to be), since sometimes very unclear mechanics are mistaken for being luck until someone reverse engineers the game to figure it out.

To me key to "artificial difficulty" is that there's no actual challenge to overcome.  If it were removed, the game would not fundamentally require less skill.

How about giving handicaps to CPU controlled characters, for example if in Mario Kart all enemies would get red shells every time.