Skill floors and ceilings, not to be confused with difficulty, is a topic I see discussed a lot even when the people talking about it don't necessarily know it. The inspiration for this little ramble was actually a forum thread talking about a game's difficulty, specifically about how a player could reliably just "mash the attack button" and get through the game with little to no need to adopt more complex strategies, making it boring. Others argued that there was actually a lot of depth in the combat, which becomes more essential to explore on the game's critical difficulty level. The game in question was Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix on the PS4. Being one of my favorite games, I felt a need to add my own thoughts to the topic, but found it took me a little longer than I imagined to really identify how I felt about it.
The first time I played Kingdom Hearts 2, I was guilty of mashing attack, and occasionally backing off to heal, through basically the entire game. Proud was the highest difficulty level we got in the West on the PS2 original version, which wasn't even all that difficult for those familiar with action RPGs. There were times where a little more strategy was involved, sure, but for the most part a player really could just rely on throwing themselves at whatever enemy or boss they were faced with and hammering in on the attack button and hitting reaction commands when they popped up. On my first play through, my magic bar might as well have been my healing bar because that's all I really used it for. Plus, since a single heal depleted the entire bar, I felt like I had to conserve my magic for that heal, which disincentivized the use of other magics. Drive forms, which granted Sora a second keyblade, new set of moves, and other abilities, ended up becoming my back-up heal in boss battles since transforming into those forms also restored full health. Summons...I actually never used until I had completed the game and was completing everything in the journal. The same goes for party member abilities (Except Auron's and Riku's because I'm a shameless fanboy of both of them). Exactly like the people posting about it recently, I didn't need to use magic, summons, drive forms, or any of Sora's more complicated moves beyond increasing his combo potential to beat the game. Does that make the game easy? Well, kind of, yes. Add in the fact that you can grind levels to brute force your way through things, and yeah, the player absolutely has the ability to negate most of the challenge of the game on proud without switching tactics. However, the answer to the question as to whether or not KH2 has a low skill ceiling is certainly no.
Sora has an incredibly diverse list of magic, attacks, movement options, and more that all flow together for the player to experiment with. I didn't even know until my second play-through, after 100% completing my first, that Sora has a launcher that can be performed anywhere in his combo. I didn't know until watching a video online that you can use magic as combo finishers, and they're different from how the spell behaves normally. I had no idea about so many different options and ways to approach combat that the game offered until I had long since beat the final boss. So, no, the skill ceiling is not low, but the difficulty doesn't push players to actually go beyond the first optimal strategy they are given. Since you begin the game with basically no options besides a basic combo, never being pushed to do more than that leads to the game coming off as a button masher, despite the full tool set on offer. In other words, the game also has a very low skill floor, which is the amount of skill needed to beat the game. Critical mode, which was mentioned earlier, does actually do a lot to push players beyond that way of thinking. Sora has far less health, and can only gain so much through leveling up, and enemies are much more lethal. Brute forcing a boss no longer becomes an option in a lot of cases, leading to players exploring those other options or give up.
So, Kingdom Hearts 2 has a bevy of options that raise the skill ceiling, but the question I faced next was what I spent the most time contemplating. Does it matter how high the skill ceiling is if you never have to explore it? At the same time, is it be a bad thing when games do force players to 'be this tall to ride' so to speak? It's an issue that I can see people taking both sides on. A low skill floor means more people are able to play and enjoy it, while still offering that high level of skills for those who seek it out. But, on the other hand, is there even a point in making such a high skill ceiling if it isn't necessary to get through the game? Why scale the side of a building with your bare hands when there's an elevator right over there? For the challenge, of course, which led me to my next conundrum.
Are self imposed challenges as valid as ones built into the game? Or, rather, are they valuable? Personally, I say yes. Character Action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta also have very high skill ceilings, and show that to the player by giving rankings on how they perform during a fight. Different factors like how long it took, how many hits the player took, how big of a combo they reached, how many different moves they performed, and more are tallied up and calculated into a rank the player can see. It's a great and streamlined way to show the player how much higher there is to the skill ceiling to go without actually holding them back from progressing through the game. Take those rankings away and, well, they wouldn't be all that different from Kingdom Hearts 2, would they?
Skill floors and skill ceilings need to be given a lot of attention when making a game. Depending on how they are adjusted, a game could swing wildly between different types of audiences. Too easy and the "hard core" audience would get bored with it, and too hard would alienate those who don't want to, or can't, commit that much time to learning and mastering the game's systems to the level required to progress. The obvious sweet spot is to have a game that just about anyone can beat, but allows players who want to master it a satisfying and deep experience. Does Kingdom Hearts 2 do that? In my opinion, yes, but it fails at conveying that there is that deep level of mastery available compared to how DMC or Bayonetta handle it with their ranking systems. Kingdom Hearts 2 will never tell the player they can play in a more effective, complex way. In some ways that's good, because no one likes to see a D rank or stone trophy after winning a fight just because they got hit or used healing items. Now, I'm as far from a game designer as you can basically get so I have no idea how much work it would actually take to implement, but it should be possible for ranking systems like this to be optional. Why not allow it when choosing difficulty? Easy, medium, hard, or whatever they might be called, and then a toggle for ranking on/ off. That way the information is there for anyone who wants it, and those who don't can enjoy the game without it demeaning them for mashing their way through if that's how they want to play.
What do you guys think? Would this optional ranking system appeal to you, or is it completely unnecessary? Do you get just as much enjoyment out of self-imposed challenges as ones provided from the game, like Nuzlock runs? Are people who don't find the depth in a game because there's not a strict need to seek it out fairly complaining about it? Lot's of questions on this one. I look forward to seeing the discussion and hearing everyone's thoughts.
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