Balancing Skill Levels for Quake

Nearly every modern game implements skill levels by programmatically tweaking gameplay variables. Choosing a harder skill level means playing with monsters that soak more damage, being able to tank less of it yourself, and that the ever-present 'magic breakable crates' that always seem to have just what you need in them always seem to have less of it. This is done to make development (which costs Money) easier and faster: every level needs to be designed and tested only once, and skill levels are implemented automatically.

Quake doesn't go this route. id's shooters all the way up to Quake 2 implement difficulty settings at the level of level design: every entity, in every level, is flagged for what skill levels it does and does not appear on. The implications of this would make a line producer on modern games faint: every level is effectively three levels and must therefore be tested in triplicate, and level designers have to spend a lot of effort making skill settings feel consistent across the entire game.

It is the opinion of this author that this is still a superior method, however. There are a myriad of ways that level design makes a game feel easier or harder situationally, and being able to vary these on a case by case basis in a bespoke way does a much better job of tailoring gameplay to different skill sets. Quake gives you tons of unappreciated variables that you can tweak by skill, both obvious and subtle. In this article, we're going to explore some.

Armor

Strong armor makes Quake significantly easier, by expanding the 'until-death buffer' to much more than the player's current health. More reds and yellows, more often, effectively extends the player's survivability in a given fight by hundreds of HP. More Greens, or stretches without armor at all, makes every fight more potentially lethal.

If you're speedmapping or running out of time during a map jam, and you want to take a shortcut in setting the skill levels, you can get away with leaving monsters and health static across all three skills and only vary the armor. Giving the Easy player several Red and Yellow armors and the Hard player only one or two Greens makes the three difficulties feel like completely different games.

Weapons and Powerups

What weapons you do or do not give the player is often fundamental to a given level's design, but there's no reason you can't vary when and where the player finds those weapons. On Easy, the next big weapon might come before the next big encounter so the player can kick ass with it, on Medium it might be placed within it so the player has to engage to grab it, and on Hard it might only come as a reward after beating the fight without it.

Don't assume all weapons are created equal for all players, either. Thinking of the Easy player as simply a scaled-down Hard player can be an oversimplification. Some examples:

• Skilled Quakers know that in their hands the Grenade Launcher is more valuable than the Rocket Launcher or even the Thunderbolt, because they can make up for the arcing, bouncing trajectory of a grenade with skill, but to a player who chooses Easy it may be a weapon they just spam around corners hoping for a lucky hit. A larger grenade budget on lower skills may not overpower the player as much as you think.
• A casual player might not appreciate a Rocket Launcher as much as a diehard, because to them it's a recipe for facerockets and accidental self-owns, so there's more to the formula than 'more power earlier'. Maybe all that player wants is to spray the Super Nailgun at everything and never run dry.
• Unless you're using a lot of Enforcers, you might provide all players an early Thunderbolt and simply vary the quantity and frequency of cells you provide them, as a way of dealing more or fewer 'get out of jail free' cards.
• Quads provide the player with more killing power, but this interacts with facerockets and sloppy grenades too. Hard players are expected to know how to avoid this sort of thing, but avoid that expectation on lower skills.
• Not every player has the presence of mind to maximize a powerup's 30 seconds. Watching a demo from a player who finds a Quad and then wastes it getting lost or investigating something pointless as the clock runs down can be maddening. Place these items accordingly: if your map requires a Quad to be used for clearing a 'quad run', then don't leave a gap between the item and the first batch of enemies.

Monsters

The instinctive default way to make the game easier on lower skills is to simply filter out monsters, so that Hard presents the most and Easy the fewest. To a point, this is good guidance: Easy players shouldn't be expected to handle as many targets at once, and may more easily become fatigued by one combat encounter after another. This does, however, mean that Hard benefits from simply having the largest quantity of Quake's core gameplay: shooting monsters. There are a number of thoughtful things you can do to make the lives of Normal and Easy players easier without slashing the kill count.

Instead of just cutting monsters from lower skills, try downgrading them. Lower tier monsters can stand in for higher ones, presenting similar gameplay and a similar kill count without asking as much from the player.

• Knights, Fiends, and Shamblers all chase the player out of cover and force a choice between prioritizing them as targets or staying on the move, but Fiends are more vicious and effective at this than even two or three Knights, and Shamblers layer a hitscan attack on top. A pair of Fiends can give the Easy player as much trouble as a pair of Shamblers can for players who choose Hard.
• A sniping Hell Knight takes longer to dispatch than a sniping Enforcer, and deals more chip damage over that time with its broader fan attack.
• The chaos of a loose Ogre grenade can demand a lot of focus from a player who is easily overwhelmed, and is worth as much danger on Easy as a Vorepod on Hard.

Putting the player up against a greater variety of monsters at one time leads to more ways the player can be attacked at one time, and successfully avoiding damage requires juggling more variables and possibilities from moment to moment. Two slow Vores can be nullified by cover as easily as one, but one Vore paired with a Shambler or Fiend are much harder to handle together.

Variety also raises the chances of infighting, depending on placement, but creating infights can be done with skill and intent by a Hard player while those on Easy only ever benefit from infights by luck.

The angles that enemies are presented from makes a difference. Monsters directly in front of the player are easiest to deal with, especially if they can be led through a choke point like a doorway. Monsters in flanking positions split the player's attention and are harder to deal with, and monsters from behind can be borderline unfair depending on circumstances. Monsters below the player are a turkey shoot, monsters at eye level are straightforward, and monsters up high have a distinct advantage.

Resources

Quantity of resources matters, of course. Bigger medkit pools clearly make the game easier, plentiful nails can be sprayed around while rare ones are only for tougher moments. Nails are more valuable than Shells because the Nailguns have higher DPS than the Shotguns.

Frequency of resources matters too. A steady drip lets the player feel secure, but isolated bursts create situations where the player has to stretch themself to get to the next 'island'. Depending on where they make errors, they might have to stretch pretty hard (meaning, those 'quicksave with 5 health left' or 'shambler axe dance or bust' moments). Feast-or-famine item placement can induce mild stockholm syndrome, leading to more positive reviews

A good trick is to place 2 rotten medkits (15hp each) on Easy and Normal but change that to a single regular medkit (25hp) on Hard. The two smaller items, while providing a tiny bit more health, also provide more protection against wasting resources, while the single larger one encourages players to save it until they can maximize its value.

Everything Else In The Level

Don't forget that the difficulty spawnflags are present on every entity. If you're using monster closets, vary the locations of the ambush triggers. You might have your Hard ambushes happen when the player is in the worst possible position, and give them an advantage or more warning on easier skills (or even leave the closet open on Easy so there's no surprise at all). You might even duplicate the doors so you can set different 'speed' keys per skill, so the harder ambushes are an instant surprise and the easier ones are more like a countdown until the monsters come out, complete with early warning aggro sounds.

Absolutely anything that participates in your gameplay can do so differently on each skill. Doors can be temporarily barred behind the player on hard skills while they are free to retreat from a fight on easier ones. Falling into a pit can be a mild backtracking inconvenience on easy skills but death by spikes on harder ones. How much room is there between the nail shooters in this hallway, and how rapidly do they fire?

Func_wall is incredibly powerful (if you can get the lighting right), giving you the power to vary level geometry itself. Platforming that requires long or precise jumps can be tuned with wider and more forgiving ledges or eliminated with bridges on lower skills. Lava, slime, and bottomless pits can be built with reducing or covering them in mind. The entire layout can branch through different sequences of progression by walling off and opening different entrances. This is a trick used to add extra connective routes to Quake's single player maps that are only present in Deathmatch, why not apply it to skill levels as well?



With careful use of triggerable lights and skill-specific trigger_relays, you can even use light and darkness against the player differently. An ambush is always worse if the lights snap off as it happens, but skill-specific scripting with relays and delays can leave them on or turn them back on after a few seconds on a per-difficulty basis. If you can spare the lightstyles without running into the "Too many styles for a face" error, a level-wide pass of extra lights that all share a targetname can be triggered at map start to brighten up the level on skill 0 or darken it on skill 2. Lighting aids navigation, as well, so lower skill players might be given spotlight trails to lead them where they need to go that higher skill players must do without.

Getting crafty with what you change between difficulty levels can give you ideas for entire encounters, but don't rely on that to make your fights interesting: any given player is probably only going to experience one such permutation and thus won't realize the need to appreciate how different it is from any others.

Why Bother?

"Forget about people who aren't good enough at this game," I hear you say. "Why are they playing if they're bad at it? Why should I cater to them? Hard is the only skill I care about."

The Quake mapping community has come out of a long period of being very insular, and people in those days only played on and catered toward Hard or Nightmare, with little care for lower skill levels catering to newer, casual fans or to people who just want to blast stuff and enjoy a level without being squeezed through the ringer. Tough-as-nails levels are easy to make - just plop down lots of monsters with no resources - but balanced ones that are fun for everyone are much a much tougher challenge that mappers should strive to take on.

Being a 'gatekeeper' is a mentality that unfortunately can come easy to a level designer. After all, your job is to gatekeep, in a way: you can't exit my level until you beat everything I put in it. It's important not to get carried away by this attitude. The player wants to beat your level, but you aren't trying to beat the player in turn, just make them earn it, and more importantly, have fun in the process. Skill settings are the most important way that a broader audience of people can enjoy your architecture, your lighting, your setting, your mood, and yes, also your gameplay. If you aren't in it to provide everyone who plays your maps with a fun time, why release them?

Adapted from a post on func_msgboard. Thanks to scampie and h4724 for additions.

 

An excellent article! When working on my Bonk Jam map, I tried to make the harder difficulties much more punishing on the player by spawning enemies in when they'd normally have a moment's rest. If you want the players to stay on their feet, treat an enemy encounter like a joke- Set it up by luring them into a sense of comfort, then hit them where they least expect with the punch line.
Ultrakill does punishing enemy encounters quite well. Pairs of streetcleaners around corners, cramped secret areas with hidden boss encounters, and one particularly annoying immortal stalker in P-2 are all encounters that feel like the developers pulling a prank on the player. But they're effective for kicking the player's adrenaline in and stimulating some great combat.

 

If you want the players to stay on their feet, treat an enemy encounter like a joke- Set it up by luring them into a sense of comfort, then hit them where they least expect with the punch line

I love encounter design as comedy. My favourite maps in a given pack will often be the ones that manage to make me laugh with their combat setups. I haven't been able to do much of it myself, other than with the reliable "comedy spawn", and the occasional "fuck load of a single enemy type spawned in rapidly".