For a little over a week I’ve been about two-thirds through inFamous. I have the final island left and then I’m done. Yet instead of burning through to the end I’ve allowed it to sit there.

It’s not that my interest in the game has dwindled or died. The game wasn’t getting boring, tired or repetitive. It was still a lot of fun.

But the game was also getting a lot harder. This tends to happen with games. It’s an age-old design concept, actually. The player adapts to early strategies and tactics, coming up with a set of their own, and thus needs to be stimulated with new and more exciting challenges. Sometimes this is done by introducing new foes. Sometimes it is done by introducing new weapons or abilities the enemies have. Very commonly it is done by introducing the same enemies with new colors/clothes dealing more damage than before while taking less from the player, or greater numbers of the same old enemies you’ve already been obliterating.

inFamous goes for having the same type of foes with stronger armor and weapons. This wouldn’t be so bad, truth be told, if it weren’t for the fact that the game set my difficulty to Hard to begin with.

It’s a feature that has been implemented in the popular Call of Duty franchise. Run the player through a quick interactive tutorial to give them a feel for the game and its controls, then provide a recommendation based on their performance. inFamous allows the player to complete the first mission, and if they are good enough will recommend they play Hard mode.

Unfortunately, they never give the player an impression of just how hard the game is going to get. The moments toward the end of any Call of Duty game are much more frantic than the timed courses provided, and there’s a lot more going on by the fifth hour of inFamous than you’ll have encountered in the very beginning. The game has no worthwhile metric to determine whether the player will be capable of handling the challenge ahead of time.

With inFamous, I have a slight conundrum. While I can set the game to Normal difficulty at any time, I feel like I would be cheating myself. I’ve completed two-thirds on Hard, and to drop the challenge down now would be like confessing I’m just no good. In addition, I miss out on the meaningless trophy for beating the game.

My stubborn attitude aside (I dropped the difficulty for Ninja Gaiden 2, and that was back when I actually put forth an effort for achievements), I feel like this great idea could use some better execution. After all, it’s a lot easier for a player to determine what sort of difficulty they want to play at if the game helps determine their abilities.

You’re going to want to allow the player the chance to get used to the controls first, so start it at the easy settings with only a few enemies. Low damage taken, high damage dealt, and only a few guys surrounding. Once they have the basics down, start introducing more foes. Ramp up the difficutly to normal, and gauge how much damage the player takes, how quickly they are able to take enemies out, etc. Begin throwing in more powerful enemies that may show up toward the end of the game. If the player can continue to survive, then move it onto Hard difficulty. Once again, see how much damage they take it what amount of time, and how quickly they are dispatching foes.

The goal isn’t necessarily to see if they survive. The game should be measuring the actual player performance. It’s easy enough to implement regenerating health so the player doesn’t die, or for them to suffer some other minor inconvenience to indicate a potential death. If they can handle a few enemies on Hard, that’s one thing. If they are surrounded by the more difficult odds and die two or three times in the process, then Normal difficulty may be ideal. If they’re dying constantly while doing little damage on Hard, then Easy is the way to go.

An alternate method is to have a display on the side, showing the player the difficulty of each encounter. This way they are able to see how hard the game may get themselves, and also understand why the combat scenarios are so varied and dynamic. It breaks some of the immersion, but it provides feedback to the player allowing them to make their own decision.

The real problem is implementing this sort of scenario. You have to allow the player to drop into combat with odds that makes sense, expecting them to be beaten to a pulp while facing hoards of foes. Sci-fi shooter games can escape this sort of scenario with a virtual reality training simulation. A game like Call of Duty may use a flash back to a previous battle, or even something silly like a high school paintball game.

inFamous has a bit more trouble. The beginning of the game isn’t supposed to be in such dire straights as it becomes towards the end. Or perhaps a horror game like the original Resident Evil, where the building suspence of slowly increasing danger is completely broken by a combat focused orientation.

Nonetheless, if the story can fit it, then the idea is relatively sound. It allows the player to actually play the game first, then make a decision on what to play while grading various performance metrics outside of “did they survive?” It would have been helpful for me especially, as I’m not sure I’m going to like Hard mode on the final stretch of inFamous.