Selectable Difficulty
Selectable difficulty asks players, before they begin, how hard the game should be, then adjusts enemy damage, enemy counts, resources or forgiveness to match the setting they declared.
Choosing a setting changes numbers behind the scenes and sometimes content itself: enemy health and damage, how much ammunition spawns, how many opponents appear, whether saving is restricted, whether one mistake ends a run. Names carry tone as much as information, and the hardest tiers are usually positioned as a claim rather than an option. Most implementations lock the choice at the start; many now allow changes mid-run.
id Software gave Doom five named skill levels in 1993, spanning a range wide enough that identical maps served both a first-time player and someone replaying for mastery. Economics pushed that way. A single set of levels had to satisfy an audience with wildly different experience, and building separate campaigns was out of the question, while placing extra enemies at higher settings cost almost nothing in level data.
Access and challenge stopped being the same axis, which widened who could finish a game without lowering its ceiling. Tuning absorbs the cost, since every tier needs testing and the middle one takes most of it, and a game built for four settings can end up sharply tuned for none of them. Certain works refuse the option entirely, arguing that a fixed contract is part of what they mean.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 3 steps deep, beginning with Numeric Score in 1972.
Descends directly from
Forked into
GoldenEye 007 attached extra mission objectives to harder settings, Celeste separated assist options from difficulty entirely, and FTL: Faster Than Light used tiers to reshape resource scarcity.
Carried forward by 23 later games
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Also called: difficulty levels, skill level, difficulty modes