how many times you’d expect them to fall into the spike pit. Playtesting will spark those internal discussions about each encounter - such as “we want players to retry this until they’ve understood how to read the attacks, and we anticipate that will take eight runs to achieve”. That gap between the design intent, and the genuine
player experience, can then inspire tuning decisions about whether to make sections easier or harder. The second way of measuring difficulty is more
subjective - how does it make players feel. We’ll frequently ask players during studies to rate their perception of the difficulty of encounters, on a scale from ‘much too easy’ to ‘much too hard’. Handling subjective difficulty takes nuance. It’s
crucial to check you’ve recruited the right kind of players, particularly for specialist genres like this. Genuine soulslike players don’t want encounters to be easy, they want to know they have had the chance to develop and demonstrate their mastery. For this reason, we put a huge emphasis in our playtest process on player recruitment, looking for hard evidence to validate their previous playing experience and history with the genre, and make sure we’re getting the right people to experience the game.
To avoid ‘blandness’, it’s essential to avoid deferring
unnecessarily to player opinion, even with these subjective measures. Maintaining creative control means making intentional decisions - even when receiving strong signals such as all of your players saying a gameplay section is ‘too easy’. Making sure you’re still discussing internally if this aligns with your creative intent and deciding what action you will take will help keep the creativity in games. Playtesting makes games good. It’s the only reliable
way to tell ‘what is the experience we’re currently making for players’, and then compare that to your intended experience. Before they start with playtests some teams worry that it’ll make their game easier, or generic. We’ve seen that’s not the case - instead it’s the only reliable way to tell if each aspect of your game is ‘good enough’ to move on to the next production priority.
Steve Bromley supports publishers and studios across the UK & Europe to level up their playtesting process, and support games throughout development. Learn more, and get his guides to playtesting at
gamesuserresearch.com
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