I actually really appreciate the whole 'You don't need health, have some ammo' mindset of the balancing.

It speaks to how flawlessly they implemented the dynamic difficulty if so many of us never noticed it was in there.

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!

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.

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.

Good to know you can see how good you are in the R&C2 by how many shields you get at ship missions

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.

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

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)

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

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

love these 1 off videos mike, always nice to see these side projects you make

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! 🐸💛

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.

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!

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

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!

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.

I would pay top dollar for a playthrough of the whole series.

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.

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!

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.

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)

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)

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 :)

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.

I actually like this adaptive difficulty stuff. It means if i ever go back after gaining some experience, it changes.

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 😂

Well that explains the extra hostiles I never remembered, and why space combat was a hell of a lot harder

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.

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 KZfaq 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Loved the adoptive difficulty in the Ratchet & Clank making so much money off those extra enemies

This gave me a really big smile. Seeing the differences in something I never noticed feels really cool for some reason. Thanks for 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!

I didn't have a memory card when playing Up Your Arsenal, so i noticed the dynamic difficulty a lot, i started realizing what i should and should not do to get different effects. Same for RE4, altho a lot of people replayed that game several times so i imagine it was more well known. Nuclear Throne has something similar. Pickups drop based on current health and ammo. So the lower you are, the more spawn. Thing is that it is not "the less ammo, the more ammo you get". The game simply gets the average total health and ammo and uses that to spawn a random pickup. So if you're low on health but full on ammo, the game will avoid dropping anything. But if you're low on health and ammo, you get more of either. So the game does not consider you to be struggling UNTIL you run out of options. Which can often lead to awkward balancing where you are punished for playing well and not taking damage or not wasting ammo. If you are low on health, you should waste some ammo to get better chances for health. If you're low on ammo, you should have taken damage earlier to spawn more pickups before you run out (since there are many insta-kill cases in the game, so you must be careful with what damages you and when).

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.

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.

I think Adaptive Difficulty is cool if the player has to opt into it. Forcing it onto a player just means you'll never have access to the hardest difficulty as mistakes make it easier for you undoing any difficulty while if you want an easy experience any success makes it harder for you. No one wins if it is forced.

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

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

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

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?

This gave me PTSD from ratchet and clank

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!

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.

I knew the games did this, but I haven't seen it side-by-side before. Very cool

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

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.

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 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

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)

I actually really love this because I did like 12-15 NG+ and broke the bolt counter. I tried to keep the 20x multiplier as long as possible and by the end could do the entire game about 90-95% at 20x bolts.

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.

Absolutely adored these games as a kid, I never knew this. Thank you, Mike!

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.

It's not as important and not applicable to every game that might use adaptive difficulty but I like how the increased enemy count indirectly benefits the more skilled player by funneling more bolts into their wallet, letting them keep pace and otherwise get the cool upgrades that much faster.

Interesting. Nice seeing adaptive difficulty actually working as intended. Games like Max Payne, in 2001, used it as well. Though it fails there thanks to quicksaves and quickloads. When a player dies, they tend to reload a save... which didn't seem to carry the new difficulty status over. So the game would just get harder, and harder, and harder, without lightening up.

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!

I just told my firend about this, cause you see, when he was a wee young lad at 7 years of age. He didnt memory card for his ps2, and you can probaly imagine the nine circles of hell he had to go through everytime he shut of his console and needing to essentially speed run to the point where he ended last time, through repetition skill. Which eventually lead to the game not distributing enough ammo, having him resort to melee combat with the omniwrench. Having explained this situation to him recently, you can imagine the horror he realised he was putting himself into in the sake of efficency, and finishing the game.... which he eventually never did because he grew up, and found dark souls. which he could save, so it was much more enjoyable.

I really enjoyed this video it was something new to the channel for me and it was fun learning about 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.

you should do more video like this. i very much love video essays on certain video games.

I didn’t know Ratchet and Clank did this and it’s one of my favourite series ever. TBH though I have played through almost all the games 5+ times each so I suppose Ive just gotten really used to it like you said in the start about having played it a few times

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

12:51, i just noticed how creepy that red moon in the background floats away as ratchet walks towards it

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

I always hated when video games secretly change the difficulty on you and don't give you the option to disable it

Did you know, that a Barrel Roll isn’t what Star Fox described? It’s actually an Aileron Roll - a barrel roll is when you make the ship travel like you’re flying around a barrel

Might just be handsight, but I feel like I noticed this to a small degree as a child. I feel like remembering that I expected enemies to appear when replaying. Sometimes they did show up, and sometimes they didn't. I of course never knew that this was actually the case, and designed in such a way

Oh my lord, Ratchet and Clank, I remember being a kid and always handing my PS2 controller off to my mum to play the Racing segments I could only wish there was a readily-available way to play the older games on PC, such a wave of nostalgia All the disks were scratched to hell back when I still had my PS2, good times

I knew about the Nanotech crates and that some places can have fewer enemies but not that there can be such a big difference.

Damn, the health crates is something I actually noticed when I replayed the first game. I told myself "damn, didn't this game use to have more health packs lying around?" Just chalked it up to my dwindling sanity, though

You can also notice that, even with the more enemies for the veteran player, he still has the exact same exp. Meaning the amount of enemies faced doesnt change your growth

Pretty well made video. Would however have been cool to showcase more details about how the adaptive system worked, like use a mid skilled playtrough who never dies, but takes a lot of damage. Would it then still be affected? I definetly noticed as a child, that if I died in some parts, the game would then help me out, but still dont know if that happens if im just perma low health.

I recently did a playthrough on the Vita, in the early levels I was still getting used to the way the controls for the strafe worked and died a few times, I thought the lack of enemies was just a glitch.

These systems are commonly refered to these days as Director AI. They are tasked with tailoring the exoerience for the desired audience much as a director of a film will adapt the screenplay to suit what they think will be the best exoerience. While Director AI can be just responsible for NPC stats, item placement and hazard placement you can also get them having intimate control over an Actor AI like we see in Alien: Isolation whereby the xenomorph's behaviour was directly influenced by the Director AI deliberately creating a rise and fall of stress for the player to both avoid causing bordem or long periods of fear.

I generally rolled these games, so even with the greater enemies, it was just more targets to power up your guns with. I never noticed the game tweaking stuff. It's cool that it does it though. I got these as a thing play with my niece and nephew as I wanted something more kid friendly to play with. I ended up playing through several of the games with the kiddos over the years. (My eldest niece beat Going Commando by herself when she was like 8ish, with me just coaching her. I would trade off normally, but she decided to do it. ) Ratchet by the end of most games is death incarnate and will lay waste to everything in your way. I doubt a few extra enemies would be noticeable once you reach the end game set ups.

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

Wow, this is actually new to me! Generations of consoles later and i'm still discovering new stuff from my old games

That is an incredibly subtle way to implement adaptive difficulty, and honestly, probably the best way, because it doesn't just straight up tell you 'you suck, get good' No, it makes you get good on your own, especially if you replay multiple times, which the Ratchet & Clank games are very much set up for. That, or just use cheats, the game is literally still fun with a RYNO even on the first level

I did see a problem for the rookie players in that they didn't get as much bolts as the veteran player (seeing as they are killing fewer enemies). This is a problem later on in the game seeing as it will be much harder to buy the stronger guns.

Adaptive difficulty is really cool, but how well it works heavily depends on the execution. It's so well implemented in Resident Evil 4 that several players still don't know the game alters the difficulty depending on how well you're doing, leading to a very comfortable experience. On the other hand, it can get out of hand in something like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where random fights with wildlife can be surprisingly difficult depending on how you build and level up your character. It's a mechanic that needs a lot of fine tuning to pull it off well. I do think games that do this should have a mode that locks the difficulty. I like that Resident Evil 4's Professional difficulty sets the challenge to the hardest the entire game. It can be frustrating at points, but it's a great option for players that want that challenge.

Knowing that adaptative difficulty is a thing in the original trilogy, I replayed Ratchet Deadlocked 4 times to see if it has a system like this. Thank god it doesn't have it, nothing changes across skill levels. The test was made playing the game on hero difficulty using stylish and effective weapon combos without dying, the second one was on potato difficulty with the same playstyle, the third one was on normal playing horribly in first person dying a lot, and the last one was on hero playing like ass

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!!

I would be curious to see the comparison for a newbie playthrough that got good over the campaign to a flawless veteran that got worse over the campaign to see the variations in enemies and crates, and provide a real-time evolution of the system. Perhaps a cross-over point could be found where the noob and veteran are facing the same amount of enemies.

Oh wow, honestly shocking just how much variation there can be, yet so difficult to notice in standard play

I always wondered why these games, Ratchet and Clank, Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, never ever got stale. Ever. And now I know why.

"How Ratchet and Clank secretly changes difficulty" That Tryannoid can now one shot me in my Tier 3 armor

It’s wild to think that even though the veteran player has a harder experience overall, they would both have roughly the same difficulty since more enemies = more weapon xp and bolts to compensate

I never knew! I’ve been a veteran of Ratchet and Clank! I played so hard that I had to buy the 3rd game three times. This is so interesting!

The Ratchet and Clank 2 footage, I noticed, also only gave experience for the original enemies, not the bonus ones the veteran faced. Only explanation I can see for them veing identically leveled.

Been playing the first Ratchet & Clank for the first time and I had the suspicion that something was up with the difficulty, there's some insane difficulty spikes in the later half of the game and sometimes I felt like I was BARELY scraping by, now I know the game was getting more lenient on me instead of telling me to GIT GUD SCRUB.

Ratchet & Clank is the reason I got good at the claw grip on controllers. It's served me well many times since