The Reverse Difficulty Curve: When a Game becomes Tedious

Have you ever watched a sporting event where the outcome was so clear from the beginning that it just felt like a formality? Like, clearly one of these teams or players is just so completely outmatched that there’s almost no fun in the game anymore? I know for myself, a lot of the thrill that comes with watching sports is being unsure of the outcome, the constant to and fro from evenly matched opponents. So when one of these games happens, while there can be a little fun if I really like the team winning or dislike the team losing, I often find myself losing interest. It’s a feeling remarkably similar to one I get in games that have what is often referred to as the reverse difficulty curve.

To start: what is a difficulty curve? For the unaware, the difficulty curve of a game refers to how a game starts out easy and becomes more and more difficult as the game continues. Enemies deal more damage and have more health, puzzles get trickier and more complicated to solve, consequences for failure increase, and rewards for success become fewer and farther between. It’s a lot harder to beat the Elite Four than it is to beat the first gym leader. 

So then, what is a reverse difficulty curve? Given that you, reader, are smarter than the average ape, I think you can guess. It’s when a game starts out at a certain level of difficulty, but then rather than that difficulty increasing, the game actually gets much easier as you progress. Now, this is often not the intention of the game designers, no one is really aiming to make a game that becomes stupidly easy by the end, but it can happen. Oftentimes, it’s not because the enemies become weaker but because the power gained by the player so far outstrips the increased difficulty of the enemies that the relative difference in strength becomes much greater than it was at the start of the game.

While such a feature can be observed in certain action games (Combat in Shadow of Mordor or Ghost of Tsushima can certainly become pretty easy by the end with all the skills you get) I find it to be most egregious in turn-based tactical combat games. For the purposes of today, we’re going to be looking at XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus. 

Oddly enough, in both of these games you play as a human organization fighting off aliens for the good of mankind. Of course, in XCOM you’re a united multinational organization fighting off an alien invasion of Earth while in Mechanicus you are part of a techno-fascist cult seeking to uncover the mysteries of a world of space undead who have just awoken, so it’s a bit of a different vibe. Regardless, in both you control a squad who is sent on a variety of missions with the usual goals of eliminating hostiles and sometimes recovering people or equipment. 

Whether it’s the soldiers of XCOM or the tech priests of Mechanicus, your squad members will level up and grow as you use them more, becoming increasingly powerful with each mission until you have a team of bonafide killers tearing it up. As their abilities stack and their equipment gets better and better, it almost stops mattering what type of enemies get thrown at you. Dealing with a cyberdisc, two mutons, and a sectopod? Who cares, rapid fire assault + mech sniper + hyper skilled suppression and suddenly those aliens mean nothing to you. Necron Destroyers and Crypteks bearing down on you? Here’s a tech priest with a super axe who can run across half the map while another has mega chain lightning destructo powers with a nigh on infinite supply of cognition points.  No matter what enemies the games throw at you, the amount of tools and power you have at your disposal make it almost trivial to solve. You’re no longer desperately worried about ensuring you have enough resources or that you’re perfectly positioned. Instead, you can move about at your leisure, with only a catastrophic self-inflicted mistake having any real effect on your ability to succeed. 

Now, you might say, isn’t that the point? Didn’t you talk in a previous article about how a game can use its difficulty as a narrative element, with this showcasing how powerful your soldiers have become? And sure, it could do that, but also: the enemies are meant to be powerful too! These are incredibly powerful alien forces, and yet by the end they just feel like more meat for the grinder! (To any necrons reading this: I apologize for calling you meat). You essentially undercut the threat provided by the enemies because you have become so absurdly powerful that they can’t do anything to you! I had a 100% to mind control the uber ethereal and only couldn’t because the game wouldn’t let me!

Outside of narrative reasons, it also makes the games a slog. Part of the fun, for myself at least, in games is the risk of failure. Just like when watching a football game, it’s the intense highs and lows of nearly losing it all and still narrowly succeeding against all odds that make this hobby so much fun. Yes the narrative and unlocks and all those other things are great, but I want my games to challenge me, to engage my brain and make me need to figure out how to accomplish my goals. With these games though, the end of them becomes more of a slow, inexorable march towards victory. I’m no longer struggling and just barely getting by, navigating incredible obstacles on my path to success; I’m just bulldozing through enemy after enemy with little care or concern for who they are or what they’re doing. 

I want to be clear: I enjoy both of these games. I liked playing with them, and the mechanics are fun even when it becomes clear you have become unkillable. Also, I like unlocking new things in any game. However, it definitely became harder to keep my attention on them when they became so easy and it felt less like I was playing a game and more like I was just marching to the end. There was no suspense, no worry: just the knowledge that I had to do x, y, and z and then the game would be over and I could move on to the next. Much like when I was playing Diablo III as a wizard and learned that with convergence I could just melt any enemy (Including Diablo himself) in .3 seconds, I stopped caring about the actual gameplay. It didn’t mean anything anymore because nothing could actually stop me. 

There’s a lot to be said about stakes in storytelling. We as people naturally care more when we understand the stakes of a situation and especially in a high stakes situation. I may not be happy at the ending, but I was glued to game 7 of Sabres-Canadiens because it was all-or-nothing, loser go home hockey. There’s a lot of reasons I love Sinners but there’s something to be said about how it ensures that you know that anyone in that movie could die. We care about things so much more when we know that there’s a chance that we will lose them. Likewise, I care about a game a lot more when I know that there’s a possibility that I can fail. If you take that away, if I become so powerful that the only realistic way I could fail is by intentionally handicapping myself, then it’s only natural to lose focus. Everything becomes repetitive because there’s no new challenge and there’s no threat of failure. It’s one thing if this is because you’ve discovered some sicko (complimentary) build that required deep knowledge of the game and how to exploit its mechanics. It’s another when its just a natural consequence of playing the game and leveling up. If you know you’re going to win anyway, what’s the point in playing to begin with?

Now, I don’t want games to just become arbitrarily difficult and unfair, a la early video games with inflated difficulty to draw out playtime. I just think there’s something to be said for limiting the powers that the player can get. It’s difficult in these long games to make something you do over and over and over again engaging after the three thousandth time that you’ve done it, so I can understand the impulse to almost remove that friction and make it easy. Hell, there are times I agree with that decision, such as with Total War’s auto resolve or Persona 5’s Insta-kill for weaker enemies. But when the whole game revolves around these missions in stuff like XCOM, Mechanicus, and even games like Fire Emblem, I really just want these missions to be fun, and sometimes that means making you the player weaker, so that the stakes can once again feel real and important. After all, football would probably be a lot less fun if we just gave Josh Allen a gun and said go for it.