History Main / DynamicDifficulty

* ''VideoGame/{{beatmania}} IIDX'' has Step Up mode. First, your current [[KyuAndDanRanks dan rank]] dicatates the initial pool of charts you get to play; the higher your rank, the harder the songs you'll start with. Second, as you clear songs, the the game gives you harder charts to play, while failing songs will decrease the difficulty of charts allowed.

* In ''VideoGame/CaveStory'', the Last Cave becomes a much harder level if you have Booster v2.0, whose proficient use is required in the "hidden" version.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' assigns experience points based on the difficulty setting. Conversely, the higher your level, the tougher your enemies will be when entering new areas.

* CPU-controlled [[MechaMook Jugger]] from ''[[VideoGame/AdvanceWars Advance Wars: Dual Strike]]'' has this as part of his C.O. Power "Overclock", along with an increase to attack dispersion. He has two separate AI scripts in the game, [[ArtificialStupidity a quite stupid one that he uses normally]], and a [[ArtificialBrilliance much smarter one]] that he follows when his power is active. [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Of course when you're playing as Jugger, all you get is the dispersion increase]].

* Perhaps not a real Edutainment but this might be the closest category: My familiy was at a hospital for people recovering their abilities after a stroke and there was a computer with software/games for that. We considered that it might be a nice idea (memory, teaching hand-eye-coordination and such), logged in as example user and started a random game. We had to distinguish some pictures and choose the one that was displayed in an additional window. We started at level one, the three pictures were completely different and we laughed as we cleared the ten pictures for that stage. Still laughing, we expected level two to have four complete differenty pictures... The computer laughed back, placed us at level 11 and proceeded to give us nine almost identical pictures (4 degrees of freedom - as in "person wears shoes; baloon is yellow; there is a tree in the frame and the earring is on the left"). We considered ourselves counter-trolled but it makes perfect sense to challenge patients at their capabilities.

* In ''{{DoDonPachi}} dai ou jou'', using a [[SuperMode Hyper]] will cause enemies to fire more and faster bullets.

* The ''VideoGame/RaySeries'' also does this.

* Gottlieb's ''Pinball/{{Caveman}}'' was a {{Pinball}} table with a built-in VideoGame. The difficulty of the video game would change based on how well the player did on the pinball board.

!!Video Game Examples:

!!Examples:

[[folder: Non-Video Game Examples ]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

* ''[[LegoAdaptationGame Lego Star Wars II]]'', ''Indiana Jones'', and ''Batman'' feature "Adaptive Difficulty" which merely affects the amount of {{Lego}} studs you lose upon death depending on how well you play, which can go up to a very high amount.

* ''GodHand'' will adjust the difficulty up a level (1, 2, 3, and [[HarderThanHard Die]]) if the player lands enough hits on enemies, increasing enemy strength and durability. It will then scale the difficulty back down if they take too many hits. You gain more rewards for defeating more enemies at higher difficulty levels. The game has "normal" difficulty settings, as well - the difficulty level never rises above 2 in Easy Mode, and Hard Mode has you ''always'' on Level Die.

* The ''VideoGame/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtlesTheArcadeGame'' has a similar set up to ''The Simpsons''. Aside from the difficulty dip switch, this game features a dynamic difficulty involving the enemy count that kicks in depending on several factors, including how many people are playing in the game, and--chiefly in one-player mode--whether or not the player has died/continued. Beating any level without losing a life will make the subsequent level much tougher (in that you have many more enemies to contend with in each wave), and dying at all will reset the soldier count to an easier level. Also, some bosses (namely the DualBoss with Rocksteady & Bebop, and the final battle with Shredder) will have more health if you reach them without dying.

* This shows up in ''VideoGame/ForzaMotorsport 4'''s World Tour. The AI starts ridiculous easy, but the more events you win, the harder they become.
* The ''[[NeedForSpeed Need for Speed Underground]]'' series plays this one twice. First, the more you tune your car, the faster the other cars will be. Second, there's the Catch Up feature that makes the enemy cars go faster as you pass them, and slower as they pass you. In theory, the latter makes the game more balanced; in practice, it's nothing but FakeDifficulty.
** To the extent that one of the recommended strategies if you're having difficulty is to remove all your upgrades, as the lower speed makes it much easier for you to react to obstacles and avoid mistakes. It's like playing in slow-mo.
* ''GranTurismo 4'' uses "[[BraggingRightsReward A-Spec Points]]" to encourage you to choose slower, less powerful cars to win the race: the more powerful your car is, the smaller your score will be. If, for example, you manage to win against a squad of sleek German machines with a puny little Pontiac Sunfire, you'll win 200 points; but if you win the race with the superpowered Polyphony Formula Gran Turismo, you'll win 1 single point.

* Many edutainment games start you off on the lowest difficulty setting by default. Then depending on how well you're doing, it would start to throw harder challenges at you. If you have trouble on a certain difficulty level, it keeps you on that level.
** It's actually possible to exploit this in ''VideoGame/JumpStart Typing''. You actually have to type to a certain level of words-per-minute to unlock Coach Qwerty from the trophy closet, and the activities are merely to practice typing. What really sets the difficulty was how you typed in the initial trial, and then it'd set your goals. It's therefore possible to finish the game in a ''ridiculous'' amount of time by simply typing at 1 word per minute so the goals are set low, and then proceed to steamroll through it all.

* SmackdownVsRaw does this two ways. After a few wins the computer will kick into overdrive and engage TheComputerIsACheatingBastard mode to make you lose, no matter how much it has to break the game to do so. On the other hand, winners and losers seem to be chosen before a match starts, so if you're facing a CPU opponent and they are slated to lose then they will really slack off and you have to carry them throughout the match.

* ''{{SiN}} Episodes: Emergence'' featured the Personal Challenge System, designed to adapt itself to the player's skill level and varies the skill, numbers and toughness of enemies faced in accordance the player's performance. It was claimed that thanks to this, a proficient FPS player and a brand new FPS player would be able to finish the game in roughly the same amount of time. However, a bug present on release in the system caused the game to never ease up on players making it overly challenging and unforgiving. This has since been corrected.
** The game's balancing system worked off of invisible triggers you ran past, among other things. Going over one recorded the time since you'd gone over the last one and deactivated it. Going faster obviously made the game harder. What went wrong is that one of the levels had left in it an extra trigger used for testing, which made the game think you were going faster than you really were in one part... And it didn't deactivate, and was in the middle of an area with a fight so there's a good chance you'd end up going back and forth over it several times, causing the game to think you'd run through half a dozen checkpoints in 20 seconds, thus cranking the difficulty into the stratosphere and making the difficulty-lowering functions a drop in the bucket.
** These invisible triggers are also autosave points, and loading from an autosave would lower the difficulty, while loading from a quicksave would not. This still applies (though not nearly as much) in the bugfixed release, though in the original version the way most people played (quicksaving and quickloading) meant that the game never let up, as opposed to dropping difficulty slightly each load from an autosave point.
* ''VideoGame/UnrealTournament'' has the option to turn adaptive bot AI on and off, and it gets quite eerie sometimes...

* The ExpansionPack to ''GalacticCivilizations II'' can be set to feature massive events that intentionally destabilize the playing field from time to time to keep things interesting. Additionally, the player can also tweak the personality, competence, and [[KarmaMeter starting alignment]] of the factions.

** For a specific example: ''The VideoGame/HouseOfTheDead III''. With 2 players playing, zombies double in number, and bosses take twice as much shots to cancel their {{Break Meter}}s. This is especially bad with The Fool's [[ThatOneAttack swiping attack]], which requires 6 shots in less than 2 seconds to cancel, and that's only in 1-player mode. In 2-player mode, you need 12 shots (6 per player), so unless the other person is competent at the game, he or she will be bogging you down and [[FakeDifficulty making you lose a life EVERY TIME, NO MATTER WHAT]].
*** Also, for the whole series: Playing good or poorly in a stage will change the boss' speed.

[[folder: MMORP Gs ]]

* ''WorldOfWarcraft'' generally doesn't have dynamic difficulty - the bosses remain constant no matter how good or bad geared players are. Which makes most bosses a cakewalk for a well-geared group or even killable by only a single player who leveled to a higher level {{cap}} from the next expansion. Still, some of them employ numerous {{One Hit Kill}}s and other crafty mechanics which the players will still have to avoid no matter how well-geared they are.
** Vehicle fights were originally a [[InvertedTrope static difficulty]] - vehicles didn't scale with the player's gear, so the battle didn't change in the slightest. They were later updated to scale, though still slower then the players themselves do.
* ''EveOnline'' features wormholes, where the amount of enemies depends on the number and size of the player ships.
** And in a particularly egregious example, don't ever try to bring a carrier (a capital ship) into the fight in wormholes. Each time you do, there is an extra spawn of a few sleeper battleships. Unless you are doing this specifically to farm them, this is tantamount to suicide.
* A staple of open-world content in ''GuildWars2''. Dynamic events adjust the number of enemies, variety of abilities available to bosses, and HP of destructible objects according to the number of active players present.

* Games in the ''Franchise/CrashBandicoot'' and ''RatchetAndClank'' series will often disable environmental hazards and/or move checkpoints if a player dies too often on one particular obstacle.
** ''RatchetAndClank'' also has a leveling system, and experience points are kept when you die. If you die a lot, you will end up getting stronger than if you played through the game without dying or revisiting old areas.
* The ''MegaManZero'' series assigned you a rank after every mission based on how well you completed it. If you fought a boss while having an '''A''' or '''S''' rank, the boss used new, stronger attacks [[VictorGainsLosersPowers which Zero would gain for himself]] after winning the battle.
* The ''SpyroTheDragon'' series also scaled difficulty depending on the skill of the player. Weirdly, this resulted in an individual playing on the lowest difficulty setting to be incapable of completing the third game 100%.
* In ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBrosWii'' if you die on a single level enough times, a green block will appear. Hit it, and you will activate Super Guide mode, where the computer basically beats the level for you.
** Note this is only passing the level, and usually the bare minimum for doing so. You still have to do it yourself if you want the extra goodies or full completion.
** The Super Guide returned, with slight variations, in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'' and ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryReturns''.

* In Master Mode of ''TetrisTheGrandMaster 2'' and ''3'', certain game mechanics behave this way:

* In ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresIII'', the level of your computer-opponents' Home Cities will scale up to match yours (or an average of all player-owned cities in use). This seems to also come with a slight increase in computer competence as well.

* The difficulty of a level in ''NetHack'' is based on the average of your character level and the dungeon level.
* In ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'', at higher levels the enemies will start using attacks like Scattershot, Crushing Prison, and Curse of Mortality. These are dangerous enough when the player uses them; in the hands of the enemy they are ''lethal''.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVIII'' has this. Monster levels depend on the average level of your party, and their attack patterns will differ depending upon their level. As a result, grinding early on without paying any attention to your junctions can and will screw you over utterly.
* In ''VideoGame/DragonSlayer'', each time you kill a monster, the ClownCarGrave that spawned it will spawn the next tougher one.

* [[{{DJMAX}} ''DJMAX Portable'']] increases the current scroll speed as the player's Fever (score multiplier) goes higher.

* ''VideoGame/BattleGaregga'' exponentially increases in difficulty by increasing enemy aggressiveness and health due to a number of factors, such as picking up too many items you don't need and shooting too much. The only way to reverse this? Dying (especially effective if it's next to last life) Cue crying from more conventional shoot-em-up players.
** To make matters worse, every time someone plays the game, the starting rank goes up, and each time the attract mode loops the starting rank decreases. The idea is the more people are playing it the harder it gets, so it can eat more quarters, but if people stop it backs down so a new player will have an easier time and get hooked. However, people figured out that resetting the arcade game also reset the rank. So Raizing fixed this in their next game, ''Armed Police Batrider''. The rank at power-on was the ''maximum'' possible starting rank instead!
** This is a (very infamous) trade mark of Shinobu Yagawa, the programmer of Battle Garegga, Battle Bakraid, and Batrider. These traits are in his later games with Cave, Ibara, Pink Sweets, and Muchi-Muchi Pork.
* In modern {{Shmups}}, this is known to fans as "rank" and very common. This has been a feature in shooters since the Japanese release of ''VideoGame/{{Zanac}}'' in 1986. That game had artificial intelligence that adjusted itself to your playing style. However, the AI wasn't all that bright, and could be subverted by simply firing less.
** ''Zanac'' for the NES got this [[UnstableEquilibrium ass-backwards]]. The AI level ''decreased'' if the player could defeat a boss [[StalkedByTheBell within the given time limit]] but ''increased'' if the player could not defeat a boss within the time limit. Thanks, Compile.
* ''TriggerheartExelica'' calls this the VBAS (Variable Boss Attack System): basically, this means that the more point medals you collect during the level, the more forms the boss of that stage has and the harder it is. If you have enough, you even have to face a BonusBoss afterwards.

** Not exactly rank, but part of this trope: The AI in the story mode of the versus shooters, ''Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream'' and ''Phantasmagoria of Flower View'', [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard blatantly cheats]]; there's a period of time at the start of each fight[[hottip:*:Also the end, at least in ''[=PoFV=]'', but it's shorter and immune to this trope]] where the AI simply refuses to get hit. Every time you lose to it this time goes down by a bit. This is especially noticeable for ''[=PoFV=]'''s FinalBoss; it's three minutes long, meaning that most people lose their first fight before even damaging her.
* The ''{{Gradius}}'' series has both this and its infamous UnstableEquilibrium, the worst of both worlds.

* ''TumikiFighters'' makes the game harder if you try holding on to a large number of enemy ships (thus maximizing your score). If you lose these ships, the bullets immediately thins out.
* ''VideoGame/WarningForever'' adjusts to the player's tactics. If a player focuses on destroying a particular segment of a boss, the next boss will have that section reinforced.
** If the boss manages to kill the player, [[UnstableEquilibrium it'll have more and better guns of the same type next time]].

** The ''RaySeries'' also does this.
* In ''Chaos Field'', if you switch from the Order field to the eponymous Chaos field, your weapons become more powerful, but the bullets [[BulletHell greatly increase in speed and density]].
* The difficulty of the bosses in ''{{Rez}}'' increases depending on the player's skill in shooting down enemies.
* ''Daioh'' has a similar situation where the difficulty increases depending on how well you do. The farther you go without dying, the more likely it becomes BulletHell.
* ''GigaWing'' has this in two forms. The game's overall difficulty gradually increases until your first death; some players will exploit this by committing suicide at the very start of the game. Second, there is a [[MercyMode pity]] OneUp in stage 4 that will only appear if you lost at least two ships by that point.

* ''AfterBurner Climax'' adjusts its difficulty depending on how many enemies you shoot down in a level. If you get more than 50%, you'll earn a star (up to five). Dying brings the star level down by one, and using a continue resets it to zero. More stars = more enemies bombarding you with missiles. However, if you have a full set of five stars when you reach specific stages, you'll access an "S" version of that stage instead of the main one.

* The AI opponents in ''WiiSports'' combine Dynamic Difficulty with RubberbandAI. Get enough home runs in baseball, and they start to make it harder to do in subsequent games, for instance.

* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' does this, the fewer times you die the more enemies will appear and will be a tad smarter but if you kept dying they would decrease in number and stand still while you aim at their head for a minute, also ammo and health items would decrease/increase. This would stop players getting frustrated at sections where they are repeatedly dying but arguably it removed the challenge.
** ''Resident Evil 5'' has a similar dynamic difficulty mechanic, which has been discovered to use a hidden points system. Basically, the game has 11 separate "sub-levels" for the difficulty level, changing how much damage enemies deal, and how much damage they take from your weapons. Attacking and killing enemies adds points in small amounts (anywhere from 2 points for each hit you deal, to 100 points for a critical headshot), while taking damage or dying subtracts points in larger amounts (from 400 points for a small hit, to 1200 points for dying and continuing). For every 1000 points added or subtracted, the game shifts the difficulty up or down one level. Each of the four difficulty modes (Amateur, Normal, Veteran and Professional) has a minimum and maximum setting, and although some of them overlap, Professional mode is in a league of its own. At the lowest setting, enemies deal half as much damage to you, and take 2.5 times normal damage from your weapons. For the sake of comparison, Veteran mode's highest setting is the second-highest overall, where enemies deal three times normal damage to you, and take 88% normal damage from your weapons. The highest setting, which Professional mode stays at all the time, makes enemies deal ''ten'' times normal damage to you.
*** The official guide had an entire section devoted to this system, and how to game it.

* ''KidIcarusUprising'' lowers the difficulty every time you die, unless it's already at 2.0 or lower. The hearts invested in the difficulty increase are lost however, and weapons found in the level correspond in power to the difficulty you end on. It doesn't scale up during a level if you do well, but the recommended difficulty for the next level corresponds to how well you did last level.

* ''{{X-COM}}'' let you select a difficulty level to begin the game at, and then moved it up or down a notch once per month depending on your score that month. This was rather undermined by an [[GameBreaker unfortunate bug]], which reset the difficulty to the lowest level when you loaded a saved game. Saving and restoring frequently could make the game arbitrarily easy!
** The monthly timer had very little effect even without saving and loading; since the game was made up of two executables, it had to save & quit each time you switched from a land battle to the world map (or vice versa). In short, it's impossible to play more then one battle before the difficulty resets to the lowest level - if you patch the game to fix this (using, say, XcomUtil), or use the Windows-based re-release, then the difficulty stays static.
* The ''SuperRobotWars'' series has Battle Masteries, which are optional, and occasionally difficult, goals to reach in a mission. Depending on how many Battle Masteries (also known as Skill Points) you have at certain points in the game, the difficulty will scale back to Easy, or up to Hard mode.
* Sting Entertainment's two flagship GBA games, ''RivieraThePromisedLand'' and ''YggdraUnion: We Shall Never Fight Alone'', reduced enemy HitPoints and other stats (notably, the [[LimitBreak Rage bar]] in ''Riviera'') when the player lost. In ''Riviera'', if you lost enough, you wouldn't have to fight the enemies at all (although this didn't work on bosses, for obvious reasons). ''Yggdra Union'' would just scale down until a certain minimum point, and then stop (although practically, the player is getting stronger all the time because of how the game handles experience).

* On the Japanese game show ''{{DERO}}!'', the Bomb Room round worked this way. All questions were multiple-choice, and each time the team gets a question wrong, the number of choices on all subsequent questions was also reduced by one. If you did poorly enough, you'd end up facing 50/50 choices, albeit for relatively paltry potential rewards.
** Some of the other rounds seemed to do this as well, albeit in a less obvious manner. For example, in the Block Word Quiz section of the Beam Room round, a team that was doing especially poorly would often get puzzles with answers only 2 characters long instead of 3.

[[folder: Truth In Television ]]

* RN and EMT certification exams have a binary branching system, where your performance on each question will determine the difficulty of your next question. Because of this, if you correctly answer enough questions at the beginning of the exam, they will pass you without requiring you to finish.
** The computerized GRE also does this, though you ''do'' need to finish answering all the questions; it just impacts your final score.
** Many computerized standardized tests do this.
*** In recent years, so do driver's ed tests.

* ''GodHand'' will adjust the difficulty up a level (1, 2, 3, and Die) if the player lands enough hits on enemies, increasing enemy strength and durability. It will then scale the difficulty back down if they take too many hits. You gain more rewards for defeating more enemies at higher difficulty levels. The game has "normal" difficulty settings, as well - the difficulty level never rises above 2 in Easy Mode, and Hard Mode has you ''always'' on Level Die.

* ''{{Raiden}}'', ''RaidenFighters'' and ''FireShark'' have the tank/gunboat enemies. If you do well enough (survive long enough, amass loads of points, get lots of powerups/bombs), the tanks/gunboats that initially have poor reaction time as well as {{Painfully Slow Projectile}}s start shooting you with faster and more accurate shots ''as soon as they come onscreen''. If you're doing well enough, you'll start meeting up with [[FanNickname so-called]] "[[ImprobableAimingSkills Sniper]] [[DemonicSpiders Tanks]]".
* On a similar note, ''BattleGaregga'' also exponentially increases in difficulty by increasing enemy aggressiveness and health due to a number of factors, such as picking up too many items you don't need and shooting too much. The only way to reverse this? Dying (especially effective if it's next to last life) Cue crying from more conventional shoot-em-up players.

* In modern {{Shmups}}, this is known to fans as "rank" and very common. This has been a feature in shooters since the Japanese release of ''{{Zanac}}'' in 1986. That game had artificial intelligence that adjusted itself to your playing style. However, the AI wasn't all that bright, and could be subverted by simply firing less.

* On a similar note, ''BattleGaregga'' also exponentially increases in difficulty by increasing enemy aggressiveness and health due to a number of factors, such as picking up too many items you don't need and shooting too much. The only way to reverse this? Dying. Cue crying from more conventional shoot-em-up players.\\
To make matters worse, every time someone plays the game, the starting rank goes up, and each time the attract mode loops the starting rank decreases. The idea is the more people are playing it the harder it gets, so it can eat more quarters, but if people stop it backs down so a new player will have an easier time and get hooked. However, people figured out that resetting the arcade game also reset the rank. So Raizing fixed this in their next game, ''Armed Police Batrider''. The rank at poweron was the ''maximum'' possible starting rank instead!

[[AC:Action Adventure Games]]

[[AC:Adventure Games]]

[[AC:Beat Em Ups]]

[[AC:Card Games]]

[[AC:Driving Games]]

[[AC:Edutainment games]]

[[AC:Fighting Games]]

[[AC:First-Person Shooter]]

[[AC:Four X]]

[[AC:Light Gun Games]]

[[AC:{{MMORPG}}s]]

[[AC:Multiple]]

[[AC:Platform Games]]

[[AC:Puzzle Games]]

[[AC:Real Time Strategy]]

[[AC:Role-Playing Games]]

[[AC:Rhythm Games]]

[[AC:Shoot Em Ups]]

[[AC:Simulation Games]]

[[AC:Sports Games]]

[[AC:Third-Person Shooter]]

[[AC:Turn-Based Strategy]]

[[AC:Non-Video Game Examples]]

[[AC:Truth In Television]]

----