Post Script

Is Saints Row’s approach to game difficulty the future of player-regulated challenge?

As with most open-world games, we start playing Saints Row on the default difficulty setting. We’re immediately pleased to discover that we can adjust the challenge at any time should we wish to up the stakes a touch – or to tone things down if we’re dying too frequently. A little over halfway into our playthrough, we reduce it to the second-lowest setting, but not for the reasons you might suspect. It’s not that we’re failing too many missions – in almost all cases, that’s either down to friendly AI having a death wish, the oddly exacting time limits of cleanup missions, or stepping beyond mission boundaries (in one instance while engaged in a shootout with the police we need to kill before the next objective triggers). Rather, it’s because encounters have become too tediously attritional to bear: enemies are showing up in ever greater volume, with larger numbers of tougher or shielded variants among their ranks, dragging out firefights to wildly excessive length. When the biggest difficulty you’re having isn’t staying alive but staying awake, it’s probably time to cut your losses and, if not necessarily make things easier, then at least shorter.

Granted, there’s nothing we can do to stop Los Panteros, Marshall or the Idols turning up in their droves, but Saints Row does offer a rare degree of modularity in its challenge settings. In a game that frequently makes you travel more than 2km between objectives, this is the right way to go the extra mile. Here, there are no fewer than seven difficulty sliders, ranging from danger level (the amount of damage your character takes) and enemy durability to ammo scarcity and timed objective difficulty, the latter worth nudging upwards for those cleanup tasks. On the default Entrepreneur difficulty, everything is set to five, while the next step up, Sensei, is mostly sevens and eights. The hardest setting, Boss, sets everything to nine, and for Hustler it ranges between two and four, though to add an element of risk we dial up the danger level a couple of notches while dropping the tough enemy frequency to avoid bulletsponge boredom. (Bravo, too, for the non-condescending difficulty descriptions. Tourist mode – all zeroes – reads, “You’re not looking for trouble. You’re just here to enjoy the scenery and the story”, while Hustler says, “You like to take it easy but are not afraid to mix it up. If there’s an angle to play, you’ll play it”. In other words, we’re just doing what a criminal mastermind would.)

On the face of it, then, this would seem to be one of Saints Row’s few unequivocal triumphs. However, in this particular case, it also raises some thornier questions. In doing this, does Volition inure itself from criticisms about the game’s difficulty? This level of granularity seems to put the onus on the player to tailor the challenge to their own tastes. But, by the same token, it could be argued that Volition is simply reducing the burden on itself. Would there be a need for quite as many sliders if a game presented a firm but eminently surmountable challenge? The line between making a game approachable and effectively inviting us to do the balancing is a fine one. So does this fundamentally change the relationship between designer and player?

Those are – fittingly – tricky questions, which are perhaps best considered on a case-by-case basis. What’s more clear is that this isn’t necessarily the optimal approach to difficulty settings. It’s certainly not the only

approach we’ve seen lately from studios thinking about how to make their games more approachable. Perhaps stung a little by complaints from critics and players, Remedy and MercurySteam patched Control and Metroid: Dread respectively, in both cases sanding off some of the games’ harder edges after the fact. The latter’s Rookie Mode made restoratives more effective, while lowering boss damage output and increasing Samus’s missile count. The former’s Assist Mode, meanwhile, allowed players to effectively become unstoppable, with auto-aim, one-hit kills and invincibility. However, the setting did come with a warning: “Control was designed to be both challenging and rewarding, and we encourage you to first try playing it with Assist Mode disabled”. You can see why: Remedy’s game is supposed to generate an oppressive atmosphere, to amplify a sensation of unease.

It’s a reminder that challenge can be a significant weapon in a game designer’s armoury: to evoke such feelings, it’s sometimes necessary to make the player feel overwhelmed. On the flipside, developers can reduce difficulty when they want the player to feel empowered: if relatively few games get easier as they approach the end, plenty have sequences (some player-triggered – think of the many games with a ‘rage mode’ or equivalent) where the protagonist is made to feel unstoppable.

There’s a broader discussion to be had about what this means for videogames as an artform versus videogames as product, and indeed our Dispatches section has featured plenty of healthy debate about whether a game needs challenge to be defined as such. Are sliders such as Saints Row’s the way forward, or are games better off using diegetic methods to give the player the tools to conquer their most formidable obstacles? Once again, we look to FromSoft’s games, and the many strategies – some rather cheaper than others – open to players keen to make it to their conclusions, by fair means or otherwise. Besides, there’s evidence to suggest that when a game is good enough, players will persevere: How Long To Beat users had Metroid: Dread as the second mostcompleted game of 2021, before Rookie Mode was patched in. It probably doesn’t say much for Saints Row

that in its case we were rather less willing to persist.

Would there be a need for quite as many sliders if a game presented a firm but eminently surmountable challenge?