Difficulty curves in video games are, generally speaking, fairly linear: The first level is easy, and the last level is the hardest. In some video games, like Skyrim, an open world can create variables that throw a monkey wrench in the generic design seen in linear games.
The Last of Us is a linear game, and the types of enemies you encounter later in the game are, in most ways, more difficult than the enemies you encounter in the first few hours. Skyrim, with its open world, can’t simply make enemy difficulty scale with what chapter of the main quest the player is on in lieu of a difficulty curve, as this would oversimplify the process of creating a difficulty curve and result in strange, say it with me now, difficulty.
Instead, Skyrim takes a few variables into its DNA to create its difficulty curve: Player location, player level, and, of course, the difficulty setting the player happens to have selected while playing.
When looking at Skyrim’s map from the top downwards, you can think of the areas and their associated difficulty as rising when moving further away from the game’s de-facto starting town, Whiterun.
The image above is a map of the difficulty curve of Skyrim’s content. The numbers are rough estimates and don’t actually represent anything concrete, so don’t take them too seriously. In concept, these numbers represent the likelihood that the player will run into increasingly difficult content. The underlined 1 represents Whiterun, and for all of the distance the player travels in any direction away from there, they are more and more likely to find content that will challenge them in greater ways.
This kind of map design works very well with Skyrim’s difficulty curve. In fact, the two work so well together that they blend seamlessly in a sort of harmony that’s so intuitive that the player knows ahead of time that the further they move away from Whiterun, the more likely they are to get into trouble.
Similar to Skyrim, Elden Ring is an open-world game. The player, not accounting for all of the early teleport options, can move in pretty much any direction right from the start of the game and find content worth completing. And just like Skyrim, the further an Elden Ring player moves away from the starting area, Limgrave, the more likely they are to find more difficult content.
There’s one key difference between Skyrim and Elden Ring that helps us draw the point of this article, and that’s the staggered difficulty curve that Elden Ring employs to create varied gameplay in a world with a fair amount of reused content.
A reminder to not take these numbers too seriously. They are rough estimates used to showcase a design philosophy and not hard rules.
Although a bit hard to see, close inspection will show the essence of this principle. From the starting area, which is assigned a difficulty of 1, enemies do become more difficult as you move away. With Elden Ring’s design, this difficulty curve isn’t relatively smooth at all. Instead, FromSoftware opted for a difficulty curve that’s staggered.
This means that a new player will go from a one to a three to a five if they continue to move in the same direction. Alternatively, they could go from a one to a two to a three (and so on) if they decided to track back and search for an area with a smoother difficulty entrance as showcased, usually, by the damage deal to taken ratio.
For a new player, this makes first-time playthroughs often feel confusing and unnecessarily frustrating as new players will often not know just how leveled they should be when entering a new area and will jump from just right to way too difficult.
On the flip side of that coin, Elden Ring veterans are given a level of freedom in the open world that scales with their map knowledge due to this design. This is because with stronger enemies, comes greater rewards both in terms of runes for leveling and upgrade materials.
Whenever you see a player who manages to become super OP within just an hour of playing, they are often making use of the fact that they have extensive map knowledge and are choosing to rush the high-value areas before tackling the easier parts of the game.
Elden Ring’s difficulty is, in fact, very frustrating for many players who are used to FromSoft’s normal design of fairly straightforward difficulty curves. That said, the upsides of this staggered design seem to give longer-lasting benefits for replayability among the elite members of the FromSoft community who can display a high level of skill from level 1.