Most interactive experiences are lacking difficulty options with the current trend that is pervading across the gaming industry of expecting the player to play the game according to the vision of the developer. These types of rigid constraints and ideas can alienate new players because of the increased difficulty. Take for example, a game like Dark Souls where insanity reigns and the player is required to perfect his every move and carefully read the subtle tells that enemies make to save himself from danger or risk staring from the previous checkpoint or a polar opposite like Uncharted 4 which make playing a game a dull and monotonous for experienced players who have played one too many games of the same genre and are well versed with the mechanics by now and feel like they are subjected to an on-rails experience where no agency for critical thinking is being presented to them. While there are a few which masquerade around advertising about dynamic difficulty based around the player, these usually don’t have any meaningful level of integration within the game-world. They are usually superficial, like in Resident Evil 7, where the amount of resources the player finds in the world is dependent on the quality or amount of resources the player already has in his arsenal.

While the age-old practice of having static difficulty options still exists, on higher difficulties, they just make the enemies into bullet sponges (I’m looking at you – Borderlands!) and transform you into a glass figure which turns the mission into an arduous task for little or no rewards and most of the time a lot of cowering around for your health to regenerate. In lower difficulties, these are quite prone to holding your hand and bestowing upon you the status of a God who is virtually invincible while your adversaries fall like a stack of dominoes at the slightest touch of your bullet. They do not meaningfully change the behavior of the enemy. It is essential that we as gamers not be satisfied with the current level of customizable difficulty present and push for better experiences. After all, necessity is the mother of invention and for such “inventions” to happen where games truly feel ‘next-gen’ it would be wise to provide a conducive environment for ideas to flourish and reward such implementations.

The AAA industry has stagnated to a large extent and has now become synonymous with producing rehashes. This might not just be the fault of the developer. Incentivising rethreads of the same game by buying or pre-ordering it sends a message to the developer that they are on the right track which leads to a detrimental effect on the industry. You could be playing Assassins Creed and not even be able to recognize whether it is the second or the eighth in the series. Bringing out dynamic enemy behavior depending on the minute to minute actions of the player can create more exciting experiences. It can drive the level of engagement so that the player is constantly evolving and does not need to have any kind of filler gameplay where the entire objective is to move to the next thrilling part if it exists!

Technology and costs might be a limiting factor that is still holding back developers from creating such experiences. Players might not have the kind of processing power that is required for changing the core of the experience or to create separate models and enemy AI ranging from the easiest to the hardest. It might be difficult to play-test too as no two humans would have the same level of skill. However, it is high time that we commit to improving the mechanics of interactive experiences by trying in small steps rather than increasing the fidelity of the pixels on the screen when all that we get out of it are diminishing returns which are more a measure of the ability of technology to improve rather than an assessment of the interactive medium’s evolution.