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.