How to Tell If a Game is Really Hard or Just Cheating

Some games are harder than others. But, as some players have realized, games can sometimes cheat to artificially inflate the difficulty. So how do you know if a game is hard or cheating? If you know what to look for, you can spot a cheating game a mile off.

What Is Difficulty in a Game?

As a player, game worlds are supposed to be consistent. They should have rules that define how things act. Within those rules, players can explore and experiment, trying to find the most fun way to enjoy the game. However, for some players, games require a certain level of difficulty to be fun.

Difficulty can be introduced in several ways. Whether it's physical prowess, like aiming in a PC shooter, or the scale and size (which can be intimidating, but fun) in 4X games, these challenge players to do better. When players lose, it's because the challenge is too difficult for them. Unfortunately, not all opponents play fair.

I'm not talking about cheating in multiplayer games here. I'm talking about single-player games with bots and bosses that are designed to watch what you're doing before you do it and respond to it. Or factions in RTS and 4X games that get double and triple the resources you do.

This is difficult, of course, but it also breaks the rules of the game that the players are forced to obey, so it can count as cheating. It's not always easy to spot though, but there are a few things you can notice to give you a clue.

Reading Your Input Before It Registers

Capcom | Epic Games

Do you remember how people would cheat in school by looking at someone else's test paper? This is like that in a video game context. Some games can ramp up difficulty prematurely by reading your input before it makes it into the game engine for processing. Input reading can seem like a scummy practice, and for many people it is.

Take fighting games, for instance. The average fighting game player has a reaction time of around 225 milliseconds (ms) between seeing something, responding to it, and having the engine read their input, working out to around 16 frames at 60 FPS.

If the game responds to input in a one-to-two frame window, it's safe to assume that the game's reading your input prematurely. If enemies are reacting to your inputs even though they can't actually see you, it's a good tell for input reading.

Resource Manipulation

Many games task players with farming resources before using them. Artificial difficulty comes from having enemies with free or unlimited resources. The first time I saw this was in an Age of Empires II game. Despite being corralled into their base, the AI still had enough resources to crank out an army that eventually broke my siege. Higher-difficulty AIs got a faster trickle of passive resources than lower-difficulty AIs.

One can't forget the Civilization series, which allows AIs to get free resources at higher difficulties. I suspect there may also be some speeding up of production and science when playing higher-difficulty AI, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

Resident Evil also has this issue where enemies have unlimited ammo while you're forced to ration each shot. The suspense does make the game the way it is, but seeing enemies never running dry while you manage your ammo pickups and usage makes you wonder.

If a game's AI can quickly rebuild after being wiped out or can collect resources after being locked off from the rest of the map, then the AI's probably cheating. It's a little more complicated to call it cheating in games like Resident Evil since the lack of resources is a game mechanic designed to induce suspense.

In that case, it's probably not cheating but more along the lines of resource manipulation for balance and flavor.

Rubber Banding

Nintendo

Rubber banding is supposed to allow for dynamic difficulty adjustment, but most gamers hate it. The premise is that the game will automatically adapt to give weaker players an advantage while penalizing more competent players and making them work harder to stay on top. In theory, it sounds great, but it's not nearly as fun in practice.

Anyone who has played Mario Kart understands rubber banding intrinsically. When you're in the lead, your power-up pool is severely diminished, and you usually get coins. While rubber banding often appears in racing games (like the Need for Speed franchise), it's not the only example of this tactic.

The NBA 2K series also demonstrates rubber banding when AI teams suddenly shoot multiple consecutive 3-pointers when the player is ahead on points. You could go from a commanding lead to battling back a deficit in short order.

One of the best ways to test for rubber banding is to play the game for some time and note the AI reactions when you're in the lead instead of being behind. If your game's AI gets sudden boosts in performance, it's a sign that the game might employ rubber banding for its balance.

Roll Fudging

One of the most challenging methods to figure out is roll fudging. A miss might be legitimate, or it could be the AI fudging rolls against the player. One of the most notable series in which this happens is XCOM. I can't count how many 95%+ shots my characters have missed, making me think, "No, I cannot be this unlucky." In such a case, it might not be fudged rolls but an erroneous percentage displayed for the chance to hit.

Sometimes, fudging can help you. In Baldur's Gate 3, there's a system known as Karmic Dice. If your character consistently rolls low on checks, Karmic Dice will "correct" one of those rolls into a success. It's cheating, sure, but it makes the player feel less frustrated with failed rolls.

There really is no solid way to tell if an AI is roll-fudging. You're at the game's mercy; sometimes, you must accept what you get. Unless you unpack the source code and there are clear signs of roll fudging, you just have to take it as it comes. However, these roll fudges create tension within the game, and sometimes, it's done as a design choice instead of a gameplay choice.

Can We Get Non-Cheating AI?

As a game designer, one of the easiest ways to force difficulty is by making things easier for the AI. However, new concepts and procedures in AI development make it much easier to build sophisticated AI that obeys the rules yet can play at the highest difficulty levels. For the most part, though, giving AI the edge is the easiest way to balance difficulty in the game. And we will be seeing it for a long time to come.