this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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I don’t get it. Someone explain to me Plz
Some games test your skills. Other games test your patience. Both are hard, but the latter is a lot less fun.
It's the difference between a zombie only dying from a carefully aimed headset, vs only dying after smacking it with a stick 274 times.
What exactly are you doing with this headset? Are you putting it on the zombie and putting on Joe Rogan's podcast until the Zombie's remaining brains melt?
You break the headband and use it as a pair of nunchucks
That describes the start, a bit hyperbolic but accurate.
The whole experience is more like "the zombies are always hard to kill, but you can get good at killing them" vs "the zombies are hard to kill, then you get gear or whatever, then the zombies are easy to kill".
Which one is "The zombies scale as your character does, so the longer you play the harder they are to kill"?
Numbers
I wanted to make it more clear for those not too familiar with gaming
We used to call them twitch games IIRC.
Like you need good reactions. But I guess dancing & rhythm games fall under that too.
The other would have been "RPG" or RPG Elements, which meant your helicopter could "upgrade" its weapons, hull, manuverability etc. for xp/gold/cash/...
Not all hard games (or ones that can be hard based on settings) are about twitch reflexes though, sometimes slower strategic processes are involved and how rapidly you can click doesn't really matter so much as how much you can plan ahead.
Yeah, I didn't like how they claimed they're all twitch games either.
Timing is usually a factor, but it's not like they're all fast paced. In my opinion shit like Dark Souls is pretty slow paced a lot of the time.
I was thinking something like Factorio or Rimworld that can be a very slow paced difficulty without using bullet sponges.
Defeat could be the result of hours of just barely clinging on and finally collapse. Rimworld lets you reload or change difficulty, Factorio usually you get a decent enough idea fairly early on as to how hard it will be and if you are going to struggle then that is clear within the first 20 minutes or so of a game. Generally neither game lets you get 12 hours in easily and then you are stuck at an impossible wall outside of big mods or some very custom settings.
Well of course. Chess comes to mind :-)
I'm looking at the headset hanging on my wall with apprehension now.
There's precision, complexity, timing, punishment, and resource consumption.
With precision, you have to do things in a certain amount of space. To make something more difficult with precision, you shrink the spaces that the player has to fit through. Think of having a smaller road with for a racing game, having a boss with bigger attack hitboxes so the player has less space to dodge to, or having a smaller keypress window in a rhythm game.
With timing, you have to do things in a certain time window. You make games more difficult timing-wise by shrinking the time window. Think shorter time frames for a race, faster attacks from a boss, or tighter keypress requirements in a rhythm game.
Precision and timing are closely tied to one another so they are often treated as the same thing. In Rhythm games, for example, they are near-inseparable.
With complexity, you have to do a certain number of things. you increase difficulty with complexity by increasing the number of things you have to do. Think More turns back-to-back on a racetrack, more unique attacks you need to memorize from a boss, or longer rhythm game courses.
With punishment, you have to do things while only failing a certain number of times. To increase difficulty with punishment, you shrink the number of times you can fail before losing. Think of racing games where your car degrades from collisions or where there's cliffs on the track sides, where the boss attacks do more damage, or where you get fewer miss allowances in a rhythm game.
With resource consumption, you have to do things with access to a limited amount of time, energy, items, etc. to increase difficulty with resource consumption, you shrink the amount of resources available and/or how long resources last during use. Think giving a player less health, a boss more health so each attack is worth less, giving a player fewer health potions, make the player have to fight more enemies total (not necessarily more per fight).
All games shift difficulty with any number of these. a mechanics game will increase difficulty by demanding better precision and timing, increasing complexity, etc, usually a combination of all methods I mentioned. a numbers game will change difficulty almost exclusively by increasing resource consumption, usually by increasing enemy health pools and nothing else. It's also common for difficulty to increase by just making good items more scarce.
Very good and detailed explanation!
I want to also add on the last part; often the difficulty is composed of all of those elements, because each single difficulty element scales very badly.
For example game that only focused on the precision and timing has some limits where the game just breaks because it is no longer possible to move fast enough to keep up. At this point increasing the duration (adding numbers) of the 'encounter' becomes a better way to increasing difficulty.
Good example of this would be "Through the fire and flames" in guitar hero. It already tests your precision and timing to the extreme, then adds a long song duration (7+ minutes)
TL;DR: Game balance is incredibly complex, and the amount of attention to detail required is insane in order to keep all of these in check. You can do anything with anything if you know how.
Just to piggyback, it's actually possible to do any of these with mechanics or numbers, although depending who you'd ask this breakdown is either spot on or the wildest shit they've ever heard because game balancing is a weird difficult concept.
Precision Numbers: Think overflow. Whoops, you missed the mark by 1 or 2 and wasted some points.
Precision Mechanics: Best example I can think of is a bullet hell or a racing game as you explained. More enemies/bullets = less space to maneuver.
Complexity Numbers: Think bloated idle games and daily quests (aka Tedium)
Complexity Mechanics: Like adds on a raid boss. Extra things to worry about.
Timing Numbers: Time attack in a racing game is a great example of this
Timing Mechanics: Quick time events, but only if they're done well
Punishment Numbers: Less HP, more damage, etc. fairly obvious
Punishment Mechanics: Again going back to rogue likes, it's not uncommon to have multiple types of HP which swings Punishment around depending on how those types of HP work.
Resource Consumption Numbers: Drop rates, mana, health pools
Resource Consumption Mechanics: Usually this is where layering resources occurs, gear and a skill tree or a skill tree and temporary buffs, etc. Metacurrency can be considered either mechanical or numbers based depending on how it's handled.
Man, this is why I love lemmy. There's always some extensive and insightful info in the comments somewhere. Great explaination! I might use some of these concepts in my dnd campaign
Like in Elden Ring you can beat late game bosses with a low stat character if you are really good. So basically you rely on your own gaming skills rather than on big number defeats smaller number. Sure Elden Ring is a mix between mechanical and numbers difficulty, bosses are hard because of high HP (numbers difficulty) but their difficulty also comes from their attack patterns (mechanical difficulty) which you have to dodge at the right moment and attack when there is an opening, so it’s also relies on the mechanical skill level of the player.
While in turnbased RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 you rely purely on the character stats to defeat enemies. Sure there is tactics involved but it’s impossible to defeat a late stage boss with a low stat character in those type of games. Since it is purely a big number defeats small number type of game. So that’s numbers difficulty. Of course you can defeat bosses that a low stat character shouldn’t defeat if you load up with a ridiculous amount of items like potions. But that’s still numbers difficulty. There is no mechanical skill involved from the player.
(edit: spelling)
I've never heard it phrased this way, but from context I'm guessing it's the difference between big bosses that have arbitrarily high HP, or if the game mechanics themselves are difficult.
Tetris is difficult because you need to be good to play it, mechanics. WoW is numbers difficult because you can buy the best equipment and then pwn the noobs even if you don't really know how to play your character.
Mechanical difficulty is how difficult it is to play it
Number difficulty is how easily you die or how hard it is to kill enemies
Dark Souls is mechanically easy (just learn patterns and dodge) but it has high number difficulty because you can die in 1 hit and it takes more than 1 hit to kill enemies
Mechanically difficult would be those fighting games where you have a list of 100 different button combos
Edit: Note instead of kill/die I should say win/loss to apply to more genres