will be too hard for 90 percent of the players out there.
The first comment testers will often make is, “This game is too hard.” As I dis-
cussed above, your first reaction will be to ignore this complaint, to chalk it up to their
incompetence or inexperience with the game. “They’ll get better,” you may say. And,
unfortunately, that is true. If the game spends three months in testing, the testers will
be just as good at the game as the rest of the development team. Then they too will
probably stop thinking that the game is hard. It is entirely likely that the game will ship
with the development team, including the testers, having no clue just how difficult it is.
As a designer you must be very careful to maintain an honest sense of how hard
your game is, and during the balancing phase you must concentrate on making the
game something that first-time players will have a reasonable chance of succeeding at
when they first start playing. Always remember what the first impression of the testers
was, and ask yourself if you have addressed the problems they immediately identified.
If necessary, you should bring in new first-impression testers to see if the game is still
too difficult.
Unfortunately, sometimes you may not always be able to make your game easier
through balancing alone. You may have created a game design that, on a fundamental
level, is hard to play. If you truly want your game to be something first-time players
have an easy time getting into, you need to concentrate on this from the very beginning
of your game design. My projectCentipede 3Dis a good example of how a game can
become far more difficult than the development team ever anticipated. Attempts were
made to balance the game to make it easier, but the gameplay was intrinsically designed
to match that of the original arcade game. As a direct result,Centipede 3Ddid every-
thing it could to make the players’ game short and fast paced. Unfortunately, players of
home games want their games to last a little longer than what they get for 25 cents at
the arcade. As hard as the game was in its shipping version, it is chilling to think that
before it went into the balancing phase the game was easily ten times as hard.
496 Chapter 25: Playtesting
TheMarathongames
were tested for difficulty
by forcing the
development team to
play through the game
on the hardest difficulty
setting using only the
weakest weapon, the
fist. Pictured here:
Marathon 2.