How Does Game Difficulty Work and Why Do Some Games Feel Unfair While Others Feel Hard But Fair?

[NovaPrime68]

I'm always having to increase difficulty levels on games. But some are just too damn easy these days

[Rapid Ava]

The distinction between a game that feels hard but fair and one that feels unfair is one that players make intuitively but that has clear design principles underlying it. Understanding those principles helps you both identify why specific games are frustrating and helps if you ever want to design games yourself.

A hard but fair game kills you for reasons you can understand and potentially avoid in future. Every death teaches you something specific: this enemy attack has a visual tell before it fires, this section requires this specific approach, this resource needs to be conserved for this situation. The information needed to succeed was available to you before you died, either through prior gameplay or through clear visual and audio signals. When you die in a well-designed game the feeling is I should have seen that coming. You are frustrated with yourself rather than with the game.

An unfair game kills you for reasons outside your control or knowledge. Hidden damage that had no visual indication, an attack that is impossible to dodge given the character's movement capabilities, a difficulty spike so sudden that the skills you developed were invalidated without warning, a random element where the game simply decided you would lose regardless of your decisions. When you die in a poorly designed game the feeling is there was no way to know that or the game cheated.

The From Software games, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, represent the clearest example of the hard but fair design applied at high difficulty. Every enemy attack is telegraphed with an animation you can learn to recognise. Every death has a correct response you can discover through experimentation or observation. The games are extremely punishing of mistakes but the mistakes are always yours.

Random number generator dependence is the grey area. A game that kills you because of a bad RNG roll can feel unfair even if the probability was communicated to you. Roguelikes manage this by making the random element the premise: you know the run will have different luck each time and the skill is in playing well with whatever you are given.

[CrimsonWolf]

From Software games taught me more about this distinction than anything else. The first ten hours of Dark Souls feel unfair because you do not yet recognise the telegraphs. By hour twenty the same deaths that felt unfair feel obvious in retrospect because you can read the animations

[KaiHeck]

The difficulty curve failure is the most common unfair feeling in games. A game that has been accessible for fifteen hours and then suddenly requires skills and knowledge it never built toward produces a specific kind of frustration that feels like betrayal rather than challenge

[FrostDrifter]

Random elements being acceptable in roguelikes but frustrating in skill games is a design context question. Players opt into randomness in a roguelike. A skill game that randomly decides whether your input registers has violated the implicit contract of the genre

[Brett42]

Accessibility options in difficulty design are the most contentious current topic in game design. Whether a game should offer an easy mode that removes challenge, or whether the designed difficulty is fundamental to the intended experience, is a genuine aesthetic and ethical question that does not have a clean answer

[Joel96]

The feeling of mastery that hard but fair games produce when you finally overcome a boss that defeated you twenty times is one of the most rewarding experiences in gaming and it only exists because the twenty defeats felt like progress toward mastery rather than arbitrary punishment

[ElectricPilgrim]

The dying with understanding versus dying with confusion is the clearest diagnostic for whether a game is hard or unfair. If you understand what killed you and know what you would do differently, the design is working. If you do not, it probably is not