Difficulties in games

Difficulty and balance

The term balance in video games means to balance the difficulty of the game in order to make it viable for the player to play. It is crucial for the initial missions of the game to be easy and passable for even the beginner in a video game because of the fact that these will be the foundations that need to be built upon by the player as the game progresses further on. As the game goes on in a video game it will mean that the player will then be met with harder tasks to complete, this is done in order to help the gamer improve and hone his/hers abilities. A way game designers will try to balance a games difficulty is to add different difficulties which can be chosen at the start of the game. This will allow the player to set their own difficulty dependant on how much experience they have with the game or similar games. The reason as to why games use difficulty setting to balance their game is to make the game playable for the player. A game that uses difficulty settings is Halo 3, this game goes from ‘recruit’ to ‘legendary’ recruit being the easiest and legendary being the hardest.

Player actions

Different characters have different actions that can be performed by the player. The first action is what the player can do with the character inside of the video game, this means the controls of the character given by the developer of the game. within different games characters can perform different actions which allow them to complete levels or missions. for example in assassins creed the character can run, jump, grab onto ropes, balance on bars, climb and fight the enemies. whereas in FIFA the characters do different actions such as kicking the ball passing shooting tackling and defending. the actions the character can perform are determined before the game is made and depend on the genre and the type of game it is.

The way you control the character varies from game to game for example in the game League of legends you can control your character by using skills which range from character to character by pressing the buttons that are linked to that skill, “q, w, e, r, p, ctrl 1 2 3 4 and so on”, this allows the player to move the character in whichever way he or she feels necessary. The way a player can control its character ranges from the console used in order to play the game on, for example on Xbox one the player can use Xbox Kinect move the character without the use of a controller or a mouse, and it works by using sensors that view the player. Another method in which the player can control the character is using a mouse, this is used in most computer gaming scenarios because it is the most effective method this is also combined with a keyboard in order to increase the range of movements the character can perform (however there are gaming mouse which have all the keys that a keyboard has and you can link those keys in order to control the character). These things affect the gameplay because imagine if you were to play a game using Xbox Kinect and it was a racing game it would be awkward to move around in such a way to control the cars movement so it is better to use a controller in the shape of a steering wheel to control the character.