Deconstruction: DOOM - Part VII: Difficulty

Most games of DOOM's era had between one and three difficulty settings.  DOOM, however, offered five settings that increased the difficulty exponentially, and radically changed the strategy required by the player to make it through alive.

The easiest setting.

Not only did the difficulty settings change the attack power of the of the enemies, but also changed the number and type of enemies, as well as the amount of ammo the player collected in any pickup, and the number and locations of pickups themselves.

If we use the medium (third) difficulty setting ("Hurt Me Plenty") as the standard, the easiest setting ("I'm Too Young To Die") offered double the amount of ammo in pickups, the player took half damage, the enemies were minimized, and the pickups were maximized.  On this setting, the game was typically a breeze for players of previous FPSs, but moderately difficult for newcomers.

The second difficulty setting ("Hey, Not Too Rough") was a crossbreed of "I'm Too Young To Die" and "Hurt Me Plenty".  It offered the same enemies as the former, but borrowed everything else from the latter.  This setting was still fairly easy, to the point of this being considered the "real" easy setting, and "I'm Too Young To Die" as being a very easy setting.  The developers themselves called "I'm Too Young To Die" the "baby" setting.

The fourth setting ("Ultra-Violence") used the same settings as "Hurt Me Plenty", but with even more enemies and fewer pickups.  This is typically considered the "Hard" setting.  This was for DOOM veterans who already beat DOOM on easier settings.

The fifth setting ("Nightmare!") was like Ultra-Violence, but gave double the amount of ammo per pickup.  However, to make this setting exceptionally hard, monsters (and their projectiles) were faster, behaved more aggressively, and respawned shortly after death.  Most of the cheat codes, such as invincibility, were disabled.

To see how the change in difficulty is exponential, rather than linear, consider the number of enemies in just the first level:  on the easy settings, there are a mere 4 enemies; on medium, there are 6; but on hard, there are a whopping 29 enemies.

On the easy difficulty settings, the player could pretty much run and gun, without caring much about strategy, and usually survive.  The player could take their time and explore every nook and cranny, searching for secrets or hidden items.  On medium, the player had to consider the environment, carefully dodge enemy fire, and conserve ammo.  On the hardest settings, the player had to mostly run through the level, killing only when cornered, and evading the rest.

Today in games, difficulty settings revolve around simply making enemies tougher, but players can use the same strategy on all difficulty settings, requiring only more patience and grokking on higher settings.

Step 1. Duck behind chest-high wall. Step 2. Get up and fire. Step 3. repeat steps 1 & 2 twice for easy, five times for normal, ten times for hard.

But because of the change of strategy required through playing on different difficulties, DOOM became almost three separate games in one.

Watch Part VIII: Level 1