I very much like most games of the UFO / XCOM franchise, especially those that remained true to the original MicroProse concept of the game. So while I generally don't pre-order games nor buy them at release, I did pre-order Firaxis' XCOM 2. So I was reading a number of previews like this one, all of which mentioned the extreme difficulty level of the game, and how much it hurts to lose characters you spent much time customizing and building up. That, and some discussion on my blog this week, made me think about difficulty in PvE games.

For me a game is first and foremost an area of liberty, where I can experiment with different things without having to fear serious consequences like in real life. Especially in strategy and tactical games much of the fun of the game to me is to try out different strategies and tactics, and see which ones work better and which ones don't work so good. A game where building up power is very slow, and any minor mistake or even just random bad luck can set you back by a lot or even make continuing the game impossible to me is simply not much fun. "High difficulty" in such a game means either following exactly the one best strategy and tactics and then praying for luck. If there are 20 ways to approach a problem and 19 of them don't work and punish you severely, trying out things becomes a rather painful exercise. You end up searching the internet for a guide or YouTube video telling you the one and only way that works. Which is pretty much why I gave up raiding in World of Warcraft.

I am pretty sure that when I get XCOM 2, I will start playing at the lowest possible difficulty level to try things out. Then I can only hope that the release version has options which make the easiest difficulty not as punishing as the preview versions that some journalists got to play. But if the easy mode then turns out to be actually easy, I'll dial it up for the next game until I reach a good balance between challenge and frustration. I don't like Telltale "you always win and just follow the story" games either. I want a game where I can use my creativity to develop clever strategies and tactics, and where severe punishment is reserved for stupid mistakes. A strategy that is just sub-optimal should result in slower progress and encourage you to keep trying; it shouldn't result in a loss of hours of gameplay or force you to completely restart from scratch.

I do think that "one single difficulty" games are a design mistake. Different players enjoy different degrees of challenge. And in a game where the player is not up against other players, but only against the script and the AI, "difficulty" becomes a completely arbitrary concept. There *are* people buying and enjoying those Telltale games, because they really just want a sort of mildly interactive story with very little challenge. And there are others who like extremely punishing rogue-like games where even perfect tactics only give you a low chance of getting to the end of the game. The thing is that in a game like XCOM you can easily have both of those, by just fiddling with some numerical parameters. I especially liked version of the game where you could separately set the difficulty level of the strategy / economic base management game and the tactical combat against aliens game, because again different players have different preferences here. There really is no reason why people shouldn't be able to tune the difficulty level of a single-player game to their liking.