Practical Game Design

Progression-driven difficulty

Certain games aspire to offer both extensive character progression systems and vast worlds with seemingly unrestricted exploration. This offering creates a balancing risk where players are likely to run into a whole array of encounters, from trivial to impossibly difficult.

To counter this risk, game developers often create systems that automatically adjust game difficulty based on a particular indicator, such as the critical vector of progression (which we introduced as a concept in Chapter 3, Scoping a Game Project). This could be a player’s experience level, the state of the main storyline, or even the elapsed time since the game began.

The aforementioned difficulty changes often focus on scaling the power ...