MMOs face near-impossible difficulty balancing as players demand different experiences

Pcgamer reports that modern MMOs are struggling to balance difficulty because they must cater to widely different player goals, a problem underscored after speaking to The Elder Scrolls devs earlier in the week, who described overland difficulty as nightmarish to balance.

MMOs carry an implicit promise that players will stick around and always have something to do, which means designers must support everything from roleplaying and fashion to casual questing, PvP and a spectrum of raiding styles. The column notes developers are moving toward choose-your-own-difficulty systems—examples include WoW's Midnight Prey optional hard encounters, Final Fantasy 14 designing content with scalable difficulty, and The Elder Scrolls Online adding difficulty options for overworld content—but these are “very fancy ways of putting 'easy, medium, and hard' in the options menu.” The question of whether this approach will work is, the piece says, only “sorta.”

That shift creates additional challenges around the skill floor and teaching players: systems like Mythic+ have a lot of assumed knowledge, and Blizzard is experimenting with affixes that suggest routes to ease newcomers in. The column concludes that figuring out MMO difficulty is a gargantuan task—vital for a game's survival, but effectively impossible to perfect, and one that developers must nonetheless keep trying to solve.

Key Topics

Culture, Mythic Plus, Scaling Difficulty, Skill Floor, Mmorpgs, Mythic+