Role of Difficulty in Survival Games

 

Difficulty can be ironically enough difficult to balance around since no one person’s idea of difficulty is going to be the same. Some people might want an easy-going experience while others will want a grueling challenge that demands a lot from them. Neither are wrong but it naturally means that some games are going to alienate players if it's too easy or too difficult. Survival games similarly deal with this problem although to maybe an even greater extreme. If it’s too easy, the survival aspect isn’t going to be felt, and it might cause the game to fall flat with audiences. Meanwhile, if it's too challenging, players aren’t going to want to interact with the game at all since it feels like they are wasting their time with it. Survival games must be able to hit that right balance if they want players to enjoy the game. 

The first thing a survival game needs to do to make the survival aspect actually work is to force players to interact with it. If a game like Project Zomboid allowed you to just sit in a room to avoid all the zombies, then it wouldn’t be a very interesting game. This is where things like hunger, thirst, and tired meters come into play with these games. By giving players, a smaller goal like: FIND FOOD, it naturally makes them interact with the game's content without it feeling like a chore. But these meters also need to be balanced because if they feel too easy to deal with then players aren’t going to feel pressured but if they are too hard then it's going to consume all the players’ time to do other things. Striking a balance even in systems like this is important. 

Things like enemy design are also important in survival games because they tend to act as obstacles for players. Not every enemy in a survival game can be the hardest, most difficult encounter in the game because the player has limited resources. Developers can’t throw enemies continuously at the player either because eventually a player is going to run out of options and feel trapped. Like an obstacle, an enemy needs to be something a player can best or get around or otherwise it's not going to feel fun. But if they are too easy, players are going to notice that lack of resistance and become bored as well. This doesn’t just apply to enemies either, things like the weather, seasons, or events that act as obstacles also need to provide resistance but not too much. Most importantly of all though, these obstacles need to still feel fun to go against at the end of the day. I might be able to beat an enemy with no problem in a game, but if it takes me five minutes to do so, it doesn’t matter how fun it is.  

In general, difficulty in survival games should be looking to challenge the player by forcing them interact with parts of the game but it shouldn’t be done so in an annoying way. You can have one or two enemies be difficult, but you also must keep in mind that every other enemy is going to need to be weak in comparison.  

How Do Single Player and Multiplayer Survival Games Compare Balance-Wise?

 

Survival games have had a history of being almost exclusively single-player experiences and still tend towards being single-player even today. However, multiplayer survival games have started to pop up far more frequently in the last few years. Due to the addition of more players, survival games must change their design philosophy around to accommodate. I would argue that there are three types of survival games in this regard. There are strictly single-player experiences where only one person can play the game like Rimworld. There are then games like Rust that essentially require other players to function which would fall more in line with a strictly multi-player experience. In between these two types though are the games that offer single-player gameplay as well as multiplayer game play like Don’t Starve Together and Project Zomboid. 

Starting with the singleplayer exclusive games, these games tend to focus on the threat of the world around you be it through hunger, AI enemies, or something else like the weather. These single-player experiences can afford to be unbalanced since there is only one player directly interacting with the world. With Rimworld for example, players have to manage a colony and keep their colonists alive by building defenses against things like raiders and wild animals. However, players have the freedom to build their colony however they want which means they can also set up defenses however they see fit. One of the most popular strategies in this game is setting up ”killboxes” that essentially exploit the games system and prevents threats from fighting back. While this kind of design would be incredibly unbalanced in a multiplayer setting, it works due to the singleplayer setting of Rimworld. 

There are then the multiplayer exclusive games which tend to put players all on the same playing field. However, whereas in a single-player game, players tend to progress towards an objective be it given by the game or by themselves, multiplayer games tend to incentivize progression by offering advantages over other players. Many of these multiplayer games have PvP (Player versus player) combat so the game needs to be much more balanced in its approach. And as a result, the systems that allow progression have to be balanced far more heavily to prevent players from abusing a system or tool in the game. 

Finally there's the hybrid approach of having both singleplayer and multiplayer experiences available. With these types of games, the multiplayer tends to be more cooperative than competitive so that the same systems in single player can be used without modification. When it comes to the balance of these types of survival games, there tend to be two routes which developers take. Theres are games like Project Zomboid where there are very minimal changes to the balance of the game. In other words, another player is just plopped into the world without much change to accomodate balance even if it means making the game potentially easier. Then there are games like Don’t Starve Together where the changes to things like enemy health are made to make it more difficult for groups of people to just steamroll the enemies. However, since the game still must be played solo, the changes can’t be too extreme and so they don’t tend to change mechanics of the game much.