During the difficult games session I had the opportunity to play Cuphead with one of my friends and had a fun but interesting experience. Even though I had played the game when it first came out and was rather good at it, I found myself really struggling to get back into it. I became aware that my muscles were failing to remember how to play and it felt like I had to relearn the entire game. I believe that this is the standard for most people who play difficult games such as Cuphead and Dark Souls games.
But what I found more interesting was the fact that, as opposed to other difficult games like Dark Souls, Cuphead is a multiplayer game. And this got me thinking about how the implementation of a multiplayer element, that is the cooperative experience, effects the difficulty of difficult games.
On one hand, playing Cuphead alone would mean not having to worry about reviving your teammate or paying attention to their whereabouts. It would also mean having less distracting projectiles on the screen enabling you to dodge enemy projectiles more easily.
On the other hand however, you would lose out on the ability to be revived and you would have less collective lives or chances to beat the boss or level. Playing cooperatively in some cases would make the game easier or at least have it be more enjoyable to some degree. That is if you’re not being blamed by the other teammate for failure.
In my experience, my teammate and I were attempting to beat one of the easier levels which did not include a boss. In the beginning we were about the same skill level as I was trying to reactivate my muscle memory and my friend had never played the game before. But quickly I found myself improving at an exponential rate while my friend still struggled.
When the skill levels of the players differ in a cooperative difficult game I find that this actually makes the game more difficult for the more skilled players as they have to, in the case of Cuphead, constantly watch their teammate to make sure their alive and try to revive them.
I guess the questions I’d like to pose are: Do you believe having multiplayer in difficult games makes them easier on average or more difficult? What if the Dark Souls games had a real time cooperative element (that would appropriately scale the bosses difficulty of course)? Would you rather play Cuphead by yourself or with a friend? Are there any other difficult games with an interesting cooperative element or that you would like to imagine having one?
Dark Souls games actually do have a real-time, cooperative way to play the game! In the mainline Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, you can summon online players from around the world to help you with sections of the game. The Soulsborne games have a way of scaling difficulty when multiple players are involved: the HP of bosses will get multipliers applied to them in order to scale with the number of players fighting them. So 2 people fighting a boss makes the boss have more HP than it would otherwise have had if it was just a single player. And, a boss facing 3 players would have even more HP. Also, the summoned players have fewer healing and mana-recharging items than they normally do in their own worlds, scaled to the main player’s current progress in the game.
Unlike Cuphead, if a summoned cooperator dies, they can’t be revived. Despite this difference, however, I think the Dark Souls co-op experience can actually be pretty similar to the multiplayer Cuphead experience you described. Due to the lack of revival, if the main player dies, the boss fight ends, and the summoned players get sent back to their own worlds. So, like in Cuphead, the cooperators have to learn how to support the main player and keep them from dying. This usually involves learning to manage and take the boss aggro, and applying buffing spells and item effects to the team if possible. If a cooperator dies, they get sent back to their world, and then the remaining players are left with a boss with inflated HP. So, that’s how Souls games balance difficulty of boss fights for multiplayer. In this case, the developers deliberately added a mechanic for that purpose.
Does Cuphead have any boss scaling, or does the potential added difficulty of multiplayer come naturally from the fact that an inexperienced teammate would need some micromanaging and help?
Personally, I think adding a cooperative element to the game also makes coping with failure easier–not only do you feel less personally responsible since you have someone to share the blame with, but also the “playing with a friend” atmosphere makes for a less tilting, for lack of a better word, experience.
I think the inclusion of multiplayer aspects all depend on the structure of the game and difficulty itself. For example, in World of Warcraft where there are thousands of players on a server, having more players (40 in a raid) is not necessarily easier than 5 (in a dungeon) I think maybe a way to classify difficulty in video games is how much responsibility per player there is. For example, in a 40 man raid in World of Warcraft, being a DPS damage dealer is a relatively low responsibility as there’s a majority of DPS on the team, but for a healer, especially when you’re the only one in the party can be much less manageable as a role.