Difficulty settings are a large way to expand a game’s appeal to encompass a wider audience. When implemented correctly, these settings allow people who seek challenges in games, people who use games to relax, and everyone in between to all enjoy the same game. However, it is easy to fall into the pitfalls of lazy difficulty implementation, especially in hard modes.
When I was designing Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War, one of the biggest pitfalls I wanted to try to avoid was “damage sponging” in the hard difficulty. From what I’ve been able to determine, this arises when a hard mode just increases enemy stats such as HP pools and damage to introduce difficulty. But this often results in a tedious experience where the player just has to hammer away at the combat longer, and it isn’t necessarily any harder at the end of the day. What I believe truly provides a hard mode experience is having the player follow the game’s core mechanics more tightly. That is, the players should have to deeply engage with the game in order to succeed. Of course, higher damage and slightly higher HP pools could be a means to that end, but enemy stat increases cannot be the only difference in difficulty, lest the hard mode becomes a damage sponge ridden snore fest.
Now, I’d like to explain what I have done in Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War to help illustrate my point. Its hard mode does NOT have any blanket stat increases for the enemies. There are only a few instances where stats are increased in the harde mode of the game, and it is when specific additional hard mode mechanics temporarily increase enemy stats. Instead, I chose to lower player character base stats. At first, this may seem to be doing essentially the same thing, and on the surface it is. It increases damage done and received by the player party. However, there is a key difference here. Player stats can be augmented by equipment such as weapons and armor, and stat builds (“Training” in the case of this game). Decreasing the base stats of the player characters emphasizes stats gained from other sources, which makes finding good gear and creating good stat builds more necessary for success. Players who choose to engage with these systems have more options in tackling the hard mode, and they are presented a more entertaining challenge than “hit this glorified damage sponge for twenty minutes.”
Another thing I added to the hard mode of Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War was the “Malicious Release Timer” or turn limits for boss fights. These timers are by no means tight for experienced players, but they do punish players for ignoring the core combat mechanics. In my mind, boss timers do two things. They contribute, as I just mentioned, a motivation to learn and consistently use the game’s mechanics. And they add a small worry to the back of the player’s mind during the fights. There’s always a small urge to take risks, sometimes necessary, and sometimes unnecessary, when timed. It then becomes the player’s job to make judgments on those urges and act accordingly. Because some of the game’s core mechanics mildy play off of risk-reward decision making, adding boss timers just made sense. (As a side note: there’s always a big sense of relief and accomplishment when the player defeats a difficult boss right when the timer runs out and the game tells them something that translates to “you’re going to die next turn.” So that’s another plus).
Lastly, the final key difference in Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War’s hard mode is “Malicious Actions” or extra/upgraded abilities that bosses can only use in hard mode. Extra abilities have been around for a while. For examples of this outside my game, see the difference between raid fight difficulties in games such as World of Warcraft. Adding extra abilities is a chance for the designer to go harder on the mechanical or narrative theme of a boss fight. To be as spoiler evasive as possible, one of the fights in Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War focuses on draining player mana (MP) instead of dealing raw HP damage, hoping to run the player out of resources. In the normal and easy modes, it’s not really a huge threat. However, on hard mode, the mana drain is more intense and the added ability relies on the expectations that the player will use a certain core mechanic in order to reduce it to manageable levels. In order to the adding of more mechanical depth, extra abilities can just be used to increase the raw damage output of an enemy, without relying on blanketing stat increases (which, not to mention, may cause balancing nightmares in and of themselves).
Overall, creating a hard mode is a difficult balancing act itself. Most of the time, it cannot be a mere raw enemy stat increase. Making sure new mechanics or additions on existing mechanics tie into the core of the game is key to creating a compelling hard difficulty.
If you’re curious about how all my nonsense actually plays out in a game, check out Draconic Echoes: The Ardent War on Steam!