I hooked up my 360 and Guitar Hero 2 and was shockedpikachu.jpg that my skills had decayed enough that I had to play Medium, hahah.
There’s a lot of great stuff about the game, but I think it is really an absolute masterclass in difficulty ramp design, and teaching players mastery. It’s worth study.
So, part of why this happened is because it’s a really clear-cut. The game gives very strong but also finely granular feedback around success/failure. It feels good to succeed, even at low difficulties, and you can clearly see yourself make progress song over song so you’re always motivated.
And from the dev side, the difficulty is plain as day just from looking at a song map. You can at-a-glance see stuff like note density, length, how far apart the notes are, how many and complex the chords are. I bet the designers could look at two maps side by side and instantly see which was harder.
The game has many very cleanly defined steps for difficulty:
- How many buttons used (3, 4, or 5)
- Chord complexity (2, 3, or 4, plus adjacent vs non-adjacent buttons)
- Note density
- How quickly or frequently players need to do all of those peaks and valleys of the above elements
- Whether or not songs require advanced techniques, like hammer-ons and hammer-offs, or strumming up AND down to strum faster vs being able to just strum down
And of course, songs aren’t flat, difficulty spikes up or down. Solos and finales for songs are analogous to boss fights: they make you execute the skills from the rest of the song at a higher level for a short time, and you do stuff like barely squeak by if you come into them with enough health.
So what happens with all this is that as you play through the campaign in order with different difficulties, they can gradually layer in elements
- Songs in the 1st set on easy: 3 notes, no chords, low density
- 2nd set: Introduce chords
- 3rd set: Introduce pinky -> index finger note progression
- Etc
And of course they save the biggest single difficulty spikes for going up a difficulty setting:
Easy: 3 notes only
Medium: 4 notes only
Hard: All 5 notes
These act as goals, skill checks, and a ramp up in hitting the fantasy all at once.
And of course they save the biggest single difficulty spikes for going up a difficulty setting:
- Easy: 3 notes only
- Medium: 4 notes only
- Hard: All 5 notes
These act as goals, skill checks, and a ramp up in hitting the fantasy all at once.
I hadn’t played this game in maybe 15 years, so I didn’t recall, but now it’s very clear to me: I’d assign “analyze GH2’s difficulty curve” in a game design class because it’s both incredibly well done AND very, very easy to parse, if you’re looking.
It’s the sort of game where you might try to break it down and use it’s difficulty map as a starting point in totally different games and totally different genres.
Every action game’s skills + difficulty can be broken down and paced, intentionally, like this, but it’s usually harder to see.