Difficulty of a game

Difficulty

Game balance is the different difficulty that a game can be played in in accordance to the ability of the user playing the game. These Difficulties range from game to game. Games such as cubefield have difficulties that increase in speed, the higher your score is the levels change, the higher the speed. There are obstacles within the game and you have to dodge them and get the highest score you can. Everyone starts at the same level, the same speed and there is no differentiating between the better and worse players apart from the score they get at the end. Whereas in games such as Call of Duty you can change the difficulty from the start. There are four different levels of difficulty:
- Recruit, 
- Regular, 
- Hardened  
- Veteran. 

Respectively, they get harder from the amount of people that need to be killed to the specifics that you need to pass the missions. 

Those who play on recruit have most likely never played the game before. They play against soldiers who cannot aim correctly, they barely run, move slowly, do not face the way the enemies that are coming, they stare at you and are ready to die. Whereas when you play on veteran they are the opposite. They shoot through walls, as soon as you pop your head out of the window they will fire, they use their tactical grenades efficiently in order to kill you. You need to complete more tasks and you will find it much harder than the other difficulties.

In Call of Duty the first missions are usually those to allow you to get a feel of the game, they take you through the basics of movement, shooting, aiming down your sights, grenades and so forth. Then you have target practice to put what you have learned to use. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 you will have a little time trial where you have to put everything you have learned to practice. Such as throwing a tactical grenade through a room then killing the enemies, stabbing, shooting and avoiding civilians. There is a soldier who you hear speaking, telling you what to do and how to do it throughout the mission. It is better for games to start with this sort of difficulty, something easy as it allows the user to get a feel of the game, they can (if they have played the game before) remember what some buttons do and how to do certain things. 

Moreover there are some things in some Call of Duty games that there aren't in the others that are to do with movement. For example in Modern Warfare 2, you could lay down, crouch or go prone. However in Black Ops you could dolphin dive, then in Advanced Warfare you could double jump and boost with your exo skeleton. Normally as you advance through the game you will have to put abilities/skills/techniques that you learnt to use at the same time. So at the start of Call of Duty you may just be aiming down your sights, then running, then throwing a grenade. However as you advance you may need to run, whilst picking up a bomb, shooting the enemy and double jumping onto a building while using a score streak. Games use difficulty settings in order to challenge the user, to make them feel like the game is worth their time. 

If a game is to easy you may get bored and not really know why you’re playing it, but on the other side of the spectrum if a game is too hard you may not be able to advance and you’ll keep dying and losing. This will, in turn cause you to get frustrated and not want to play. Therefore changing the difficulty will allow you to challenge yourself in accordance to your skill level and you can change it depending on how easy or hard you think the game is getting.  A player may want to increase the difficulty setting in order to further challenge himself and it will happen throughout the game because the will get used to the buttons and how to play the game. Then these abilities will advance and develop which will, in turn, make the game easier because they can complete their goal easier.