How Ratchet and Clank secretly changes difficulty
Vložit
- čas přidán 5. 07. 2024
- Let's see how Ratchet and Clank subtly makes combat easier for inexperienced players.
🥽 / discord
🔥 / mikeburnfire
👾 / mikeburnfire
Additional imagery generated by Craiyon - Hry
I actually really appreciate the whole 'You don't need health, have some ammo' mindset of the balancing.
Fight FIRE with FIRE!
It speaks to how flawlessly they implemented the dynamic difficulty if so many of us never noticed it was in there.
Ratchet And Clank WWWRRAATTCCHEETT unddd... CCCCLLLAUUUNNKKK
Soooo Truee!!
Adaptive difficulty was also popular in arcade games, so as to ensure that everyone experiences the joy of f̶e̶e̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶q̶u̶a̶r̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ having a challenge suitable to your skill level!
*vietnam flashbacks to motaro on UMK3*
Ratchet & Clank was such a classic. Like you, I have also played these games many times but definitely never realized this before. It's great to see new things can still be discovered about them.
I thought the way past the crash site in R&C3 was to _change my strategy._ I think my failed attempts saw me be too Leeroyish.
Same, I beat Ratchet and clank 2 20 times on the ps2 and never noticed the adaptive difficulty
I definitely noticed there was more enimies but i always assumed it was part of new game plus, not based on skill
The adaptive difficulty also exists in the Insomniac Spyro games! It's most known about in Spyro 3 where it was a little problematic and even has cheats still in the game to adjust it up and down as a bandaid fix. If you weren't "good enough" you would lose the ability to get one of the required gem drops for completion later in the game as the enemy that would drop it was accidentally flagged as being part of the adaptive difficulty settings. However on the other side of the spectrum if you were Too Good and got to the Bonus Round world, one of the board minigames would be effectively impossible as the AI would rubber band ridiculously or be too fast to ever pass in the first place.
So that snowboard/skateboard minigame was bugged? Always hated that one :V
I never liked that final board race. I did find out that those blue boost stars stack their boosts even if you’re not on a board. So I glided down to the track past Hunter and stood inside one of the stars on solid ground for a few minutes and when I was done trekked the rest of the course until I got to a high enough spot to glide back to Hunter. I started the race and I had instant boost.
oh my god I thought it was just overtuned, which I guess it was, but I meant I thought it was intentionally overtuned!
sauce?
Hi, @@Arunnejiro ! Source is literally the game! (PS1 version)
Here's the code to set the adaptive difficulty to max in order to resolve the gem issue in Fireworks Factory: Pause and press Circle, Square, Right, Left, Right, Square, Circle, Square
And here's the code left in to lower adaptive difficulty to resolve the Super Bonus Round Board Race issue: Pause and press Circle, Square, Right, Left, Right, Square, Circle, X
Good to know you can see how good you are in the R&C2 by how many shields you get at ship missions
I have played those games dozens and dozens of times and always feel like I almost never get shield pick ups, now I know why!
Back when I played the original trilogy as a teen I didn't notice the adaptive difficulty except in one fight.
The final boss in Ratchet & Clank 3 simply had too much health to bring down with all of my ammo even though I had nearly every weapon leveled up to deal good damage. I was stuck dodging attacks while waiting for ammo packs to slowly respawn and eventually got killed. Instead of going back and getting the gadget that lets you buy ammo anywhere, I tried optimizing the bossfight to see if I could bring him down with the maximum ammo the developers allowed me to hold.
A few attempts later I won with quite some ammo remaining. This was only possible if the boss' health was stealth nerfed. I did feel patronized and it would have been a lot worse if I had known that this adaptive difficulty adjustment was all over these games.
Thanks for linking that podcast. Going deeper into game design like that is very interesting. I'll go check it out.
How are we not racist
I didn’t know about the adaptive difficulty until years later, but in hindsight, you’re totally right, the adaptive difficulty on Nefarious is insane. On my first playthrough I couldn’t afford the PDA until challenge mode, replaying years later at age 15 or so I had to go bolt-farming for it after rinsing all my ammo without passing his first phase.
I had not noticed at all how the enemy amount changed depending on how well you played, only knew the game did offer more health boxes if you played badly.
Same "difficulty tuning" did also occur with the bosses where more you died to the bosses repeatedly, they eventually started reducing the health of the boss (something what I learned when learning to speedrun the game).
Glad to learn more from a game series I played a lot when as a child and still play occasionally for funsies (and speedrun-sies) and definitely would love to hear & see more of these kind of videos
So how the speedrunning work with adaptive difficulty? Is it possible to die a few times and then start over? :D
you just have to die a bunch of times (20, i think) to the protopet at the end of the game but now it's slower than using the double arachnobot glitch in any% @@6Pope9
@@6Pope9 probably the most "known" example is giant klunk in metropolis (R&C UYA)
Before you start the speedrun you load up another save file where you´re in metropolis and die over and over again on the boss fight(falling down like 10 ish times)
Then you start new save with your speedrun, when you get to the metropolis the boss will stay easier with low hp even if it´s another save file.
Not 100% sure if its exactly like this, but should be
@@6Pope9 not sure it this works in the same way for every boss but when you are fighting Angela on that snow planet in Going Commando you need to die 17 times to trigger the lower difficulty
And I think this was only on any category that starts in base game, it's not an issue in NG+ categories.@@Milkimetria
I remember R&C 2 from my childhood, remember getting hard stuck on that protopet invasion planet. Makes me wonder whether or not me finally getting through that level was partly thanks to adaptive difficulty - kinda takes some wind out of my sails
Tää oli kova junnun
I suppose another way to look at it is that the game thought you were doing so well it threw out everything it could at you to give you a challenge.
That level is just ridiculous anyway. They throw an ungodly amount of protopets at you. I'd take all the help the game decides to give me, and apparently, I did.
*laughs in Plasma Storm*
@@Ultimatemantassaka taa oli
I would pay top dollar for a playthrough of the whole series.
i dont even think 2 billion would be worth it for the editing hell if anyone could afford to fork it over. not to mention the TB of storage it would take to store all the recordings then to post all of them in the editor and make sure it goes through then the days it would take to process it into a file. as i said no amount of money in the world would bee worth the time to combine all games.
@@FreeAimDog what is bro yapping about 😂
@@arananime3156 you wont understand until your an editor
But How Can I Respond When They Call Me Racist But That Is Not True
I played going commando a bunch as a kid and I can't believe a beloved game has successfully gaslighted me. I remembed on other playthrus thinking wasn't there health packs here.
I sometimes noticed that and thought there was some glitch that hadn’t loaded it in
Ratchet and Clank Is one of those games you complete at 100% but still want to play after years and years. I have them all and sometimes pick them up from time to time (currently playing the HD trilogy on the PS3)
But Am I Really Racist How Can We Counter Accusations of Racism I Know I Am Not Racist
love these 1 off videos mike, always nice to see these side projects you make
Not racist I just don't like monkeys getting hurt
Oh my goodness this was a fantastic video! Thank you so much! Ratchet and Clank is my favorite game series of all time and my first video game, this close look at its difficulty system makes a lot of sense now! 🐸💛
Just finished playing up your arsenal for the first time since I was a child and now I get why the game felt different. I thought I just remembered the game incorrectly because of the years but no, there truly was more enemies
Same thing happens in Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Sometimes enemies don't appear after dying and I thought maybe I was imagining things.
This is super interesting to learn about! When I got back into the original R&C trilogy a few years ago, I found myself wondering how I ever managed to play it as a kid and now I know!
The first time I noticed a game with dynamic difficulty was in Spyro: Year of the Dragon, another game developed by Insomniac Games. During the second boss fight against Spike I was getting defeated a lot. Then I noticed he would only fire one shot at time instead of two at the beginning of the fight. I would exploit this by purposefully losing lives during the fight.
Holy crap I remember so much of this music and so many of these levels. So nostalgic!
Adaptive difficulty is really neat. Especially when it does something more complicated than just giving shit more stats.
And since you start with an AoE weapon, a good player can strategize instead of just turning everything into damage sponges
Left for dead director: It's tank time.
Us: Ohhhhh nooo
I don't think it's neat, or at least it should always be given as an option you can turn off. I don't like to be "punished" for playing well, neither to be patronized for struggling. If I would notice that they simply removed some enemies after I died too many times that would feel incredibly discouraging, as the devs basically made the decision that I couldn't do it.
Same happens with crash bandicoot adding additional checkpoint boxes if you die a lot, it feels bad.
@brent8407 funny thing is, you aren't getting punished, you are actively getting rewarded with more enemies to kill and therefore earning more bolts and more weapon experience to get stronger even faster. Unless you are just bad the extra enemies is a very positive thing.
@@dalekin3177 and then extra health and more manageable enemy numbers for less skilled players.
But he did say there were missing ammo crates for better players. Probably matters less if you’re not dying, and only need to play each section once
@@NotsilYmerej there were also added crates for experts to deal with the crowds to
Well this is decidedly not what i expected from this channel but hot damn am i not disappointed. Ratchet and Clank is my childhood, I played every game released on the PS2.
I didn’t realize what channel this was until I saw this comment.
I didn’t realize what channel this was until I saw this comment.
When I played Going Commando as a kid, it was shortly after I got my hands on the first game, and I remember clearly thinking, "Man, they really skimp on health boxes in Going Commando and throw lots of enemies at you".
I think this explains that! I was better at the game from the get go thanks to my time playing the first game, so it adapted to a more skilled player. Everything just clicked thanks to this video! I think I'll start playing through Going Commando again after all these years!
Thank you Mike!
I wasn't expecting to see Mike doing video game analysis, especially about one of my favorite series of all times, but I'm all here for it. Full steam ahead if you want to do more of these in the future.
Well that explains the extra hostiles I never remembered, and why space combat was a hell of a lot harder
Ratchet and Clank 2 was one of the first games I got when I got my first "real" console (not counting handhelds), and I've played hundreds of hours of it without ever realizing this. It's really cool that they put so much effort into tracking player performance and adjusting things on the fly in relatively subtle ways. I figure this is probably why I had such a good time with it over several playthroughs, the game got more difficult as I got better, without telling me.
Loved the adoptive difficulty in the Ratchet & Clank making so much money off those extra enemies
I actually like this adaptive difficulty stuff. It means if i ever go back after gaining some experience, it changes.
This gave me a really big smile. Seeing the differences in something I never noticed feels really cool for some reason. Thanks for this
This gave me PTSD from ratchet and clank
holy shit, my favorite youtuber making a video on my favorite video game series??? Yes please!
Waiting on a full playthrough of the games now :)
Found the furry
Also to mention, I think not advertising an adaptive difficulty is both a blessing and a curse. Like you cast a wider net with adaptive difficulty meaning you get more people being able to accept and play the game with similar experiences but you also have a FromSoftware stance where the difficulty is always there and means the player has to get better not the game.
For a more fair comparison, GoW 2018, the fight with Sigrun was probably the hardest I've ever worked on a stage next to the MGS5 Rescuing Quiet mission. For both of these I believe you are expected to give everything you've got to overcome these obstacles.
FromSoftware has adaptive difficulty too: you just have to obtain and use the more powerful weapons
@@SharkyNebulaThat's not adaptive difficulty. The game isn't any easier, you just discover a different way to play it.
It's like... Halo doesn't have adaptive difficulty just because you can find health packs and overshields around the map if you search hard enough. It rewards a certain playstyle, while games like R&C quite literally adjust an invisible difficulty slider. Not bashing R&C by the way, I love the concept, but Souls games have a more "modular" difficulty.
I really enjoyed this video it was something new to the channel for me and it was fun learning about this.
Seeing ways devs implement adaptive difficulty systems is always such a fascinating and cool thing to learn! Great showcase having the two side by side playthroughs to show the differences!
Just want to say that Clover Studios had notable members like Atsushi Inaba who is now part of platinum games and Shinji Mikami (who after working with platinum left to form Tango gameworks) was the director for RE4 and God hand which had the adaptive difficulty
So they clover weird spirit still lives between Platinum and Tango Gameworks (and whatever mikami is working on since he left tango)
I am not Racist
you should do more video like this. i very much love video essays on certain video games.
something else you didn't explicitly note in the video that i noticed in the footage: despite the veteran facing more enemies, they seemed to be getting fewer nanobots (the EXP of R&C), seeing as there's an ever-growing discrepancy between the two players, which is even more noticeable in the 3 footage (newbie has 15 HP, Vet has 12)
To add to this. You also get more bolts as a veteran player. It's really obvious side by side. So the experience is the same for both, but there is an award for playing better.
The newbie is dying and killing the same enemy several times, so that could be why?
@@MrEvilbyte i'm not sure it'd make THAT much of a difference
also, i'm not sure he's dying to the stuff after killing some stuff or not
I think it simply because the veteran player has more enemies to deal with. More enemies = more bolts. So he can buy more ammo, and guns faster than the newbie.
Absolutely adored these games as a kid, I never knew this. Thank you, Mike!
Very cool video format to see from this channel. Keep up the good work!
Adaptive difficulty works well in certain games, not all. Still glad they did this in the early Ratchet and Clank games. I was breaking the disks with how much I played those games. Shame they didn't come out on the X-box systems as I would grab them in a heartbeat. Great characters and fun games all around.
Thanks Mike for reinforcing all those fun memories from my youth, and thanks for all the effort you and Zack put into these videos, as you never get enough credit for it.
Ratchet and Clank did it right by changing the level after the one you were in, so the adaptive difficulty didn't rob player of the achievement of getting through a difficult section.
A very articulated and well made video Mike!
that's so cool
i kinda remember thinking "huh i thought there was only 1 enemy on this elevator" as a kid it makes sense now
I played the first four Rachet and Clank games a lot as a kid and had no idea about this. I have the vaguest memory I might have noticed subtle differences in the very early levels of 2 and 3, but I could be mistaken. That's so crazy.
I kind of liked adaptive difficulty.
Meant I just kept improving constantly but when I was having an off day, it would be easier so I didn’t get overly frustrated.
Then Dark Souls came out 😂
I believe dark souls actually has some instances of adaptive difficulty
@@Trollanater-zu3kr Joke went right over your head bud.
@@Trollanater-zu3kr I was always curious how Dark Souls adaptive difficulty worked as it seemed to be even more subtle in it. The only way I can imagine is if the game makes enemies slightly weaker and less aggressive because it doesn't seem to be a massive effect
While I don’t like adaptive difficulty, especially if it’s trying to be hidden and fails by having something too noticeable after struggling. It makes me feel like the game is insulting me rather than giving me a fair challenge.
But I wonder how or rather when Going Commando changes the difficulty. Because I breezed through the first few levels and then it started kicking me while I was down for the rest of the game, it never got any easier and constantly could never find health, I had to rely on the level up in order to heal.
Don’t get me wrong I actually enjoy this type of challenge, I like games that give me a fair as in it can be beaten with the tools the game has shown me challenge but it’s difficulty is at “grind your bones to make my bread” attitude. But knowing this game has an adaptive difficulty, I wonder why it can still be brutal even after dying a couple hundred times on later levels.
Going Commando got very tough for me about 1/2 way thru the game too! I noticed I'd lose a lot of health from a single enemy hit later too. It didn't really seem to cool down much either if at all. It was fun but those late game stages can be tough. I always thought the Thugs 4 Less boss was easy though never died in that boss.
Because if it adapts quickly then it becomes glaringly obvious that the game is letting you pass or is artificially blocking you. Players begin to dread what comes next if they do good or bad as neither outcome is favorable.
It would constantly be too hard or too easy because it is changing quickly.
The other side of the coin for the experienced players is that you can feel like they optimal strategy is not to play well. Resident Evil 4 speedrunners will often deliberately take damage at certain areas to make future areas easier with fewer enemies.
I guess for high level play like that it's interesting, having this type of give & take against the game and figuring out ways to cheat the mechanic, but your average player who's just good at it, once you know about this it can feel like the optimal way to play is just sandbagging a bit, and just giving the player more direct control over what difficulty they're playing would've been more rewarding.
Cool video! Would love to see something like this for the Spyro games
I knew the games did this, but I haven't seen it side-by-side before. Very cool
You know it's been a treat hearing Mike explain a technical topic at length for once instead of Zach.
Makes me kind of long for a video where Mike just goes off on a tangent with Zach as the other end. An inverse 'Gun rants', if you will
everyone knows about crash bandicoot spawning you with bonus masks. but the game also gives you extra checkpoint boxes if you are really struggling. Crash 4 also has these
12:51, i just noticed how creepy that red moon in the background floats away as ratchet walks towards it
If I remember correctly according to two former Insomniac developers Tony Garcia and Mike Stout that adaptive difficulty system was there up to Tools of Destruction, included.
Makes sense since the next game Quest for Booty introduced your standard difficulty selection (Easy, Medium, Hard)
My favorite form of adaptive difficulty is Metal gear solid 5 the phantom pains vengeance system, basically if you are a head shop master night beast the enemies will start using helmets to stop the first shot and night vision to see you at night, or you are a run and gun player then Ai will have body armor, riot shields, riot armor and shotguns to counter you, I never noticed at first thinking it's the game just automatically raising the difficulty of itself as there's no difficulty selection but when I was told about it on CZcams I was surprised and saw it as a way to force players to adapt there play styles or out right change it to counter the game before it gets to hard for different strategies and you'll have to work with it, I had to with my first playthrough but I got through it.
recently ive replayed the og trilogy and did notice a bunch of time that some of my memory of it was off, multiple times i encountered more enemies that what i expected, i simply brushed it of as it being a result of me not playing them for a decade or so but it seems it is very likely this very cool mechanic
As a fan of the series and started the series with the PS2 lineup, i never knew the second game has this, which is crazy, Glad to know about this interesting subject
I had heard about this before in the spyro and ratchet games but seeing the side by side comparison actually blew my mind! Like even health crates ? And I never knew after like 10+ playthroughs
Had no clue all these years. The swamp monsters test on R&C 3 prove that I was a badass as a kid because those always spawned for me 100% of the time
my fav youtuber talking about my fav childhood game 10/10
One more thing I didn't hear mentioned but noticed was that it seems the health xp is gained at the same rate even with fewer enemies
Excellent video, well done
5:19 Also would be nice to check, because the veteran takes no damage there might be no health spawning as opposed to the newbie requiring health and the boxes spawning THEN. Same with enemies, you die a lot take a lot of damage and less oponents spawn but if you take no damage the game wants you to get hit eventualy by spawning more robots
Holy, this explains so much! I always wondered why my brother got so few enemies as a kid, but that totally makes sense now!
Great analysis. I've heard many times about this "adaptive difficulty", yet i never knew the extent of it. I even kiinda noticed it when playing with my lil brother (when he was like 4 and therefore awful at games) and wondering "huh, i seem to remember there were more enemies in this area last time i played through the game", but just thought it was random. I never knew the ai was so intelligent as to change enemy amounts on the fly, and having good players get over twice as many enemies! Good stuff
I knew that the Insomniac Spyro games had this adaptive difficulty but I had no idea the Ratchet and Clank games did too. Makes me wonder just how many other games I've played might've had this feature.
This is incredible, I have played through these games in excess of 30 times each and had no idea (I was never bad enough to get the pity system to come in 8D)
This is really cool, never realized it did this after so many playthroughs
Neat to hear. Played the games a bunch and never knew about this. After watching the side by side, that might have been because I never was bad enough to trigger the easy setting since none of those enemy counts looked familiar.
"How Ratchet and Clank secretly changes difficulty"
That Tryannoid can now one shot me in my Tier 3 armor
I’ve played through this game maybe 20 times over my life, I did notice the enemy numbers were different but always thought it was a challenge mode thing. This is crazy! Really cool stuff!!
as a hardcore R&C vet back when I was a kid, I always noticed that I only got nanotech if I was injured prior to entering a new area but I never noticed the increased enemy count or boss accuracy. Great video!
Crash bandicoot 2 also had this system. After 10 deaths in a row it would spawn a pity aku aku and it would upgrade to a times 2 and even more it would spawn custom check points. So you could have the final box in the level be a check point.
Crash 3 did this too. Crash 1 did but not as much lol
Very interesting, after years of playthroughs I had never noticed this either
Loved this video! I knew that Going Commando and many other games had dynamic difficulty scaling, but I've never seen a side-by-side comparison of what it looks like in action. It's really fascinating. Ensuring that it scales properly and is well balanced for different skill levels must be very hard.
Wasn't expecting you to talk about RaC.
Nice video Mike.
I always wondered why in some of my playthroughs stuff was different at times. Now I know!
i guess i can rip the paper that has "3" on it off from my "it has been "0" days since they ripped off Ratchet and Clank" board
this is amazing, i loved these games and never knew they had such advanced features
Never realized this was a thing for so long, so cool!
rac 2 is still my favorite game to this day and i never knew about this thanks mike!
That's impressive, I never noticed that
Way to to keep someone playing however they perform
Really enjoying this video format btw
The sand shark spawn also is adaptive for the hoverboard from skid mcmarks in R&C
I knew about the Nanotech crates and that some places can have fewer enemies but not that there can be such a big difference.
Always nice to discover something new about a game I've known for so long.
Weirdly I don't myself remember them talking about this in the dev commentaries, that must be down to my poor memory.
I’m gonna need every possible example of this
As a Ratchet and Clank fan since the first the game, I like the fact it changes difficultly while you advance planet to planet.
Dynamic difficulty levels are always so fascinating to dissect. Good stuff.
Wow, this is actually new to me!
Generations of consoles later and i'm still discovering new stuff from my old games
I KNEW IT!! I always had a hunch that it would get harder and harder lol I died a lot during my letsplay, what a great video, you earned my sub!
I wonder what the walkthrough guide is like for this game, I remember pickups being constantly mentioned in other guides as something to notice, wonder how it works with this one? and also what exactly is in the code to trigger each event etc
I wonder if this is still done in tools of destruction, that one doesnt have selectable difficulty as well, i also heard something similar happens when it comes to crates, if you miss out on bolts during a level by skipping most encounters or not breaking creates the game will increase the ammount of currency drops later in the level so you can get enough bolts to and pay off the tolls and buy weapons
If I'm not mistaken, Spyro 3 was the first time Insomniac implemented an adaptive difficulty system.
One time this system doesn't work in Ratchet & Clank 2 is during the hoverbike races. If I haven't played in a while, I struggle a bit, and it's usually on the third try that I get it right. _However,_ it's also on the third try that the adaptive difficulty kicks in, so the race becomes way too easy once immediately once I've gotten the hang of it.
Honestly I might take notes on this for running combat encounters in ttrpgs
Is the way you've set up the two screens in reference to RAC3's splitscreen?
This explains why I recalled different enemy amounts, specifically those 2/4 robots after taking the elevator in the lab. I thought it was NG+ stuff!
This has me wondering what the absolute technical limit for an enemy group would be in those older games. Could they have let the system simply keep ramping if players continued to dominate or were they already hitting hardware limitations?
Every time I played Ratchet and Clank 2 in the past six years, I wondered how ever did I ever manage to beat that thing when I was nine. The ship shields especially get me, those space battles are horrific!
You can even interpret loot prioritization as a form of adaptive difficulty. If ammo drops for weapons you're using, then you're incentivized to continue doing what youre doing. If ammo drops for weapons with low ammo, you're incentivized to use your favorites. If ammo drops for weapons you aren't using, you're incentivized to use lots of weapons and constantly switch to not run out of ammo.
I played and finished these games 20+ times when I was a kid and I never knew about an actual adaptive difficulty, that's so great.
Oh my God, I was watching Octopimp play Godhand. I love it~
Glad to see more representation for games like Godhand and Ratchet and Clank.
Holy shit, that's actually really neat. Good video, big thumbs
Honestly with how many enemies start to phase out, it feels more like the veteran is just playing hard mode
i've played through all of the 3 games for at least 50 times each and have never even thought of this... that's crazy.
This makes so much sense now. I recently replayed these 3 games and found I was getting a lot more bolts than I remember and buying weapons faster that I remember as a kid. I assumed my memory was just fuzzy, but since I was playing better now I faced more enemies and got more bolts as a result. More enemies also meant my nanotech upgraded in going commando and up your arsenal faster too.