Cruise Elroy

Bill Harris’s recent posts dismantling EA’s Madden NFL 09 and NCAA Football 09 (1, 2, 3, 4) got me thinking some more about how difficulty in games should work.

One of the grievous errors Harris mentions is the unnecessary futzing with the difficulty sliders. In past EA games, serious gamers used these sliders to tweak various mechanics — changing, for example, how often the CPU quarterback throws interceptions or how effective the player’s offensive line is. In NCAA, though, the sliders affect both the CPU and the human player, crippling their utility; in Madden, they seem to have been removed altogether.

For those want an accurate simulation, this is treason. If these games don’t reasonably approximate real football out of the box, and history suggests that they probably won’t, the immersion will be destroyed for the purists. “There’s no way that guy rushed for two hundred yards!” “He doesn’t fumble the ball that much in a whole season!”

Here’s the thing, though: sliders or no, difficulty in sports games is incredibly abstract.

Take baseball. Originally, connecting with a pitch was simply a matter of timing a button press correctly. More recently games began foisting other choices on us: high or low swing, “power” or “contact” swing, pushing or pulling the ball. But while it’s significantly more complicated than it used to be, video game batting is still nowhere near as complex as the real-life activity it represents. It’s difficult but still eminently masterable.

And therein lies the problem: there are masterable systems in sports games that attempt to recreate unmasterable activities in real life, which makes any talented gamer into a hall-of-famer. Designers try to sidestep this issue by giving in-game athletes different skill levels, but that only creates awkward conflicts between the player’s skills and the avatars’ skills. Consider:

• If you learn a baseball game’s batting mechanic inside and out, should you be able to bat .500? .800?
• If you’re an expert at a soccer game, should you be able to beat Chelsea FC with the New York Red Bulls?
• If you’re skilled at dekeing and stiff-arming, should you be able to plow through any defense with your crappy rookie running back?
• If you master the swing mechanic in a golf game, should you be able to shoot under par on every hole? Should you never miss a putt?

Sports games, especially realistic ones, have a lot to balance. They have to allow the player agency so that the game is fun to play, but hamstring her success so that the results and statistics are believable. They have to reward the player’s talent while taking into account the skill of her team’s players. They have to simplify the mechanics of the sport in such a way that they’re easy enough to perform on a video game controller, but difficult enough not to be trivially repeatable.

The problem for me isn’t that EA has taken out the difficulty sliders — it’s that they’ve pulled back the curtain on sports game difficulty as a whole.