Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment

Games that during gameplay adjust their difficulty depending on how well players progresses.

Providing the right level of challenge for players in a game can be difficult for game designers to achieve solely through creating challenges in advance. While they can let players have influence on this, e.g. through a scale of difficulty settings or by choosing their opponents, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment is rules in the game system that adjusts players' challenges depending on how well they are gaming.

There is a US patent related to Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment.

Examples

Borderlands, Fallout 3, and Oblivion all uses Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment systems to within certain limits scale the strength of enemies to those of the players. While changing this is quite natural for these combat-oriented games, Racing Games such as Mario Kart series and Super Monkey Ball series instead typically increase the maximum speed of the last racers to help that player catch up.

Board Games can also have Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment systems. Shadows over Camelot increases the difficulty of other challenges when quests are solved, and Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game has mechanisms for balancing gameplay halfway through game instances when playing with a odd number of players.

Consequences

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment can function as a Balancing Effect.

Relations

Can Instantiate

Balancing Effects

Agents AI Players Challenging Gameplay Damage Decreased Abilities Dedicated Game Facilitators Difficulty Levels Enemies Freedom of Choice Fudged Results Handicap Systems Increased Abilities Game Masters Movement Single-Player Games

History

New pattern created in this wiki.

Acknowledgments

Ian Bogost