How Difficult Should Thrive Be?

Let’s talk about difficulty. Generally, there are three parts that define how easy or hard a game is:

  1. Balancing - Damage, health, speed, etc. These are a bit easier to diagnose, and a bit easier to set. Ties to immediate combat and gameplay.
  2. Mechanic Complexity - How nuanced and layered the different systems in the game are. Ties to micromanagement and depth.
  3. Information Accessibility - Explanations for mechanics, as well as information on what is going on around you. How much the player knows about what is happening, what is going wrong, and what is going good. Ties to discovery and confusion.

Manipulating these three variables results in what we call difficulty. Elden Ring and Dark Souls are really difficult games, and it achieves this difficulty by saying “I don’t care about balancing, here’s a boss with a one-shot attack that covers half the arena” in the second half of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a very easy game, but to add some element of difficulty and to reward experimenting, it does not fully explain every control and input that the character can do. This rewards players for trying different things, but can also be very confusing for players who have trouble with the sometimes clunky mechanics in the game.

Furthermore, games usually offer various elements of difficulty management:

  1. Difficulty Levels - Easy, Normal, Hard, Legendary. Very accommodating to a player, but can result in inconsistent experiences and can be difficult to balance. We all know games where Easy and Normal are too Easy, Hard is okay, Legendary is Satanic.
  2. One Single Difficulty - Very handcrafted games, such as Red Dead Redemption or Elden Ring, tend to go this way. Probably the best way for developers to design their ideal experience, but can result in sections of the gaming community being dismissed; game will always be too easy or too hard.
  3. Single Difficulty, Feature Enabling/Disabling - A lot of simulation or management games tend to go this way, such as KSP, where the core mechanics are always the same but the player has more or less ability to experiment. For example, disabling money restrictions or progression limitations.

In regards to Thrive, I think staying with difficulty levels is ideal; it would be a big lift I think to reorganize our settings right now to be number 3, and I don’t think we are straightforward enough of a game to just have a single difficulty for.

I think ideally, we should go for the Halo approach, where they explicitly mention that a certain difficulty (Heroic) is how the game is meant to be played. It might be best to have one difficulty where things are engaging for even experienced players, but not necessarily punishing to them, balancing it to be the “ideal” Thrive experience. Then, we balance difficulties to be slightly easier or slightly harder based off that standard.


Enough exposition, here comes the discussion part: How difficult do we want Thrive to be? However, we all know that all game developers love to say that their game “is easy to pick-up, difficult to master”, or “challenging but rewarding”. So perhaps a more productive conversation to have as well: What aspects of Thrive should be easy, what aspects should be difficult?

  • What difficulties do we tolerate that the player reports? In other words, which feature difficulties do we essentially say “figure it out, that’s part of the challenge” to, and which features do we make sure the player does not get frustrated by?
  • Do you guys think Thrive is currently too hard or too easy? What impression do you generally get from the community?
  • At what point in the Microbe Stage do we want things to be most difficult, and at what points most easy?
  • How punishing should a bad trip to the editor be?

If you guys notice other questions coming to mind, do post them. And if members of the community are reading this, do give input on the forums.

2 Likes

I think the default, “normal” difficulty level of Thrive needs to be about what it is right now. We basically get no complaints about the game being too easy (except from the biggest fans who have become super familiar with all the game systems) and only a few complaints that the game is too hard to get into (which can be further improved by having more tutorials or an optional extreme tutorial mode that forces the player to play a certain way through the early microbe stage).

I think playing microbe stage “normally” to get through it needs to be pretty easy. So that players don’t give up and they get the feel of game progression. Once we have further stages, those can be balanced to be slightly more difficult in comparison as microbe stage has already taught the player all key mechanics and a player that far into a playthrough is less likely to give up and more likely to be willing to experiment a bit to find a workable strategy forwards.

In contrast to just getting by in the microbe stage, I think optimal play should be (very) hard to achieve. This would ensure that experienced players would take long to find an optimal strategy to use. Currently it seems that optimal play is too easy because we get those experienced players saying they think the game should be a bit more difficult. One way this can be achieved is by adding more complex systems that players who have no clue about them don’t need to interact with them but players going for optimal playing need to use. For example I think the endosymbiosis system is a perfect example: it gives experienced players who want to maximise their Thrive gameplay more activities to do in the microbe stage, but anyone not knowing how to use the system is not impacted negatively much at all.

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I think that progression through the stage should get increasingly difficult: surviving a couple generations and making it to a point where you can build a distinct species before you go extinct should be pretty easy, Making it to Eukaryotic status should feel tough but not like a roadblock, and actually reaching multicellular or the “you thrived” menu should feel like a challenge. On a second dimension, increasing difficulty settings should narrow the range of “viable” strategies, and force players to make use of more and more mechanics to reach the same point.

For example, on easy you don’t need to know what Lysosomes are to be able to be an engulfer. You just need to know you need to be faster than the prey, and bigger than the prey. And for a player that only knows that and is only acting on that information, it’s easy to find things to eat early on, and challenging to find enough to eat towards the end of the stage, but you can keep doing the same thing all the way through.

On hard, trying to do that will get you killed, while half your food ejects out the back. On hard difficulty, you need to be looking at species to figure out what digests them and how you can catch them, designing a species without excess parts to keep your species specialized (going back to your previous design philosphy document), and developing counter-measures to predators. For a player that is keeping up with all these things, early gameplay is still pretty easy, and late gameplay is still pretty challenging.

The tricky part with this approach, I think, would be how to make the player understand that going up in difficulty is a matter of learning more, and not being more frame-perfect or just plain lucky. My hope would be that by looking at what the AI does, and being curious about all these new orgenelles popping up, the player would start to poke around and figure out more.

What I’m not worried about is the idea of finishing microbe stage being a challange when it’s only the end of stage 1 out of 8 (7 “finishable”) stages. I don’t think every stage has to be tougher than the last one. Each stage will be bringing new mechanics into the game to learn all over, and each player will probably have different opinions on which was the “toughest” and “easiest” stage based on preference.

And I don’t want the poor space stage fans to need to be dark souls junkies as well…

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I agree. In case your point was kind of a reply to me, I’ll clarify that my opinion was more like that we need to ensure that early microbe stage is a really gentle introduction to Thrive, because I don’t want to lose on any potential players who would like the game as long as they can get into the game. In that sense the other stages can start off being more difficult without us suffering a hit to the potential playerbase.