How Ratchet and Clank secretly changes difficulty

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!

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.

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.

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 <3

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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!

Holy crap I remember so much of this music and so many of these levels. So nostalgic!

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

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

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! 🐸💛

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!