How do you do hard mode difficulty setting?

I've never done a hard mode in regular combat encounters. If I did, I'd probably start by giving a buff to attack and defence on monsters. I know, not very original, but what are you going to do? I don't like the idea of making mechanics exclusive to one mode only.
Hard mode doesn't work well in basic RPG's, because they tend to be number games. Obstacles can be overcome by outgrinding them, so the challenge is going to lie in requiring more patience from the player to deal with higher numbers on enemies and spending more time on levelling up if their progress is blocked.

I'm with Milennin on hard mode in basic RPGs being... perhaps a little pointless.

Now, easy/'story' mode is something I wish more games included - either by nerfing encounter rates but boosting EXP gain or by just nerfing enemy stats a lot, for players who are way more interested in other aspects of the game than combat.

I try to avoid numbers-game combat anyway by making alt skills the standard mode of attack - each skill has some additional quirk, so you can combine them to greater effect once you have it figured out, and some enemies are weaker to certain tactics than others.

I actually really like the original Halo's approach to difficulties, and it's quite an interesting one. Now all of this is from memory so it might not be accurate, but this is my account of it:

In Halo, after completing the game on normal difficulty, when you move on to heroic the game feels like it picks up from where you left off. Here's what I think they change:

1. Enemies have a tiny percentage more hitpoints, probably like 10-20%.
2. Enemies have smarter AI, they dodge & hide under cover when you're shooting or when their shields are down.
3. Enemies have better weaponry and grunts can throw grenades.

Note at least point 3 is present at the end of the normal playthrough. Regarding point 2, I think what they did is set the likelihood to dodge or take cover as a percentage, and simply increase it for higher difficulties. Overall, this creates 2 effects. Firstly, you have to spend more of your time dodging grenades, and secondly you have to be more tactical and sparing with ammo as the enemy is dodging you more often. It's very unlikely these mechanics make a fight any more punishing than it was before, since neither hitpoints nor quantity are tampered with all that much.

Since enemies in my game level up over the natural passage of time, I just make them level up faster on the harder modes. (and of course, they start off stronger as well)

That said, there's an easy mode for those who don't want to deal with grinding or urgency.

All of the stats and most skills are optional in my game. Wanna make it harder? Don't buy any stats. Now that I think about it, I could maybe do an achievement for say, only increasing stats to a certain level. Hmmm....

increase the HP/DP of BOSS

My courrent project have Easy, Normal and INSANE difficulties. The normal one is default.

In the easy mode, I did an event that make all attributes of all characters +3, HP +20 and MP +5. In my game, a single point do makes a difference. A lot of chest also have more itens and more money, and all the bosses have less attacks and less HP.

The INSANE mode is meant to be a true challenge. All characters have -3 in all attributes from the beginning. Like I said, a single point makes a huge difference. Some chests have less itens and less money, and all the bosses have more attacks and custom actions when their HP is below 50%. For instance, a big snake boss in the forest attacks all party with its tail every 2 turns. In normal mode, it attacks every 4 turns, and in easy mode it do not have this custom action at all.

I did things in a really simple way, but it fits perfectly for what I wanted to do.

In my first project, Hard Mode gave enemies and bosses more attacks. For example, "Normal" mode would have the first enemies simply attack and the boss only had a single phase, but Hard Mode had plants shoot three seeds, worms apply a null-guard debuff, and the first boss had three phases.

For my current project, I do have a Power mechanic similar to Smash Bros that trades loot for damage (aka, you have 600 Power and enemy has 300 Power, letting you deal more damage but gain half as much gold/items). The highest theoretical Power is 99999 or x13 if the other party's at 0 (before final adjustments). I suppose if I mix a difficulty setting to that, there would be some caps (Hard Mode would have a minimum x1 for enemies and maximum x1 for players).

The discussion of difficulty is indeed a fascinating topic. It is deeply tied to one's philosophies, so every answer is different!


This is huge. Especially after this whole Dark Souls business has blown up, everyone is arguing about how hard things should be. And some people are really pushing for the hard stuff. I've worked for one triple A gaming company whose product was actually sank at least partially because the game was too hard.

The other big problem with chasing max difficulty is how much of a rabbit hole that quest becomes. In that game I mentioned I worked on, something like two guilds in the world completed the endgame content. And even then, I heard people around the office talking about how the encounters were "easy" for various, clearly incorrect reasons. It was insanity, I tell ya.


My answers to these are related. I'm actually making the hardest difficulty the base line and working backwards from there. This is because what I feel makes hard modes frustrating is when people use blanket formulae (like others have mentioned) to create a hard mode. The problem there is that there are always going to be edge cases where the math creates a problem. IE things that one shot the player, or end up creating too much oppression on the player to survive (like a low damage AoE starts doing enough damage that the player spends all of his time healing).

I also plan to examine my fights during tuning and figure out exactly which parts are the most problematic for the player. From there, I want to either tune down those specific elements or remove them entirely from lower difficulties. So, say a boss's gimmick is about healing. On lower difficulties he will heal for smaller amounts. Or one that might revive/summon other enemies. On the lowest difficulty, he might not do that at all. OR the bosses could have these do full value, but the frequency they use them would be significantly lowered.

Also, using scaling to make the player stronger works better because it does not carry the same consequence. If a player on easy can one-shot a hard boss? Whatever, it's called "easy" for a reason. It's not frustrating or a roadblock, which is what happens if scaling is used to create a hard mode.


The best way I can answer this is to say that the player's expectations are set and met as best as possible. You need to look at how hard your game is, and how hard your testers say it is. From there, you can advertise how hard you think it is appropriately.

This should be done for the lower difficulties as well. Imagine you have a difficulty like "Very easy" or "Casual" and players can't beat it. That's gonna make them unhappy. So, the reverse is also true. If you say your game is insanely difficult, a player who can beat it without breaking a sweat is gonna downvote it.

My plan is to have a pretty standard 3 settings: Easy, Normal, Hard (wording will change).

Easy is going to be, essentially, impossible to lose (more or less). Since a main attraction of my game is story, it is natural that I offer a path that any player can get past.

Normal will be closer to hard than easy. Enemies will deal a little less damage than hard. Basically the player will have 1 or 2 more turns to survive and turn things around. And some more complicated AI/skills will be thrown at the player. The goal is to make a challenging game, but with a lot of wiggle room for the player to figure out the finer points.

Hard mode is still not too difficult. It's a turn based game, so there's always that sense that so long as the player makes the right "choices", the battle is winnable. Going too hard will make things feel too random or that the player is locked down too much. The goal is that the player should feel more of a need to fully understand the mechanics in the game to succeed (min/maxing, smart strategies, etc).


I want to make one last point. This is my own philosophy, and I know many will disagree with it. But I think it's the right thing to do. But my philosophy is that difficulty should be 100% the player's choice, and you should never make the player feel bad about that choice or try to influence them against their decision. People play games for enjoyment, and by choice. So if a given player would be better off playing easy, and you have text that insults them for it (calling it Baby mode, or begging them to player a higher difficulty) you're going to immediately make them unhappy. And, worse yet, if they listen to you... you've just ruined their experience. The same goes for gating content or achievements to difficulties. Doing so encourages players to play on a difficulty that may be wrong for them. People shouldn't need to be rewarded for a higher difficulty. The reward is simply their own enjoyment of difficulty!

Figured I would share my two cents here too, aside from the usual "enemies have more HP/higher stats, additional attacks and hits harder method":

1) Enemies having increased elemental resistances & additional immunities, or no longer being weak to certain elements. (eg. undead enemies in Hard are no longer hurt by recovery spells/insta-killed by Revive)

2) Escape function is disabled completely.

3) Limiting items availability. No more free potions or money lying around in dungeons, and you have a smaller carrying capacity for recovery items meaning you can't just bring more potions and expect to bruteforce the tougher enemies. Removing/nerfing some of the stuff that tends to trivialize endgame content or allow you to cheese a boss (especially guilty for Full-Heal items that can be acquired amass that MP no longer becomes an issue later in the game) to ensure the game remains difficult even if you got most of your arsenal.

To me what makes a hard difficulty good is the incentive it provides for the player to figure out a different playstyle to cope with the new challenge, rather than simply grind more hours for higher levels then repeat the same thing they did for normal mode. Case in point: I like it when some rather subtle skills, such as Dodge-and-Counter type of move, a skill normally not used in most circumstances, becomes the key to survival in the harder modes where it is physically impossible to overpower the enemy with regular methods.