Modular Difficulty

"Easy, Medium, and Hard" is a tried and true method for altering difficulty in a video game, but it seems rather rigid. What if you could make individual aspects of a game easier or harder to suite your playstyle? That's where Modular Difficulty comes in.

Sometimes in place of, or even in addition to standard Difficulty Levels, a game will have difficulty you can augment in more specific ways. For example: instead of a hard mode that increases enemy health, damage, and speed, you can individually tweak those stats to make fast, hard hitting enemies that have basically no health. Usually this will come in the form of ways to make the game harder, but Modular Difficulty to make a game easier is also quite frequent.

Can be a byproduct of a game's accessibility settings or Cheat Codes. Sub-Trope to Difficulty Levels. Related to Arrange Mode. For difficulty augmented by the player using only the mechanics of the game, see Self-Imposed Challenge. See also Dynamic Difficulty, Challenge Run, and Video Game Randomizer.

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Examples

Action Adventure

• Dishonored 2 has a Custom Difficulty setting that lets you fine-tune nearly every parameter, from your maximum inventory size, how tough or lethal enemies are, save file limitations, and even allowing guards to detect you above them.
• Rodina has separate difficulty sliders for on-foot combat, spaceship combat and atmospheric entry.

Adventure Games

• On top of the general difficulty selection for the puzzles first introduced in the previous game, The Curse of Monkey Island allows you to choose between easy sea battles and hard pirate duels or vice versa in its third chapter.

Action RPG

• CrossCode: When starting on a New Game Plus playthrough, you can access a selection of modifiers to change the difficulty of the game using Trophy Points accumulated in your last playthrough. They can vary from boosting your credit and experience gain to voiding it entirely, and some others have more unique effects like slowing down time after a perfect dash to turning you into a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: In addition to the standard difficulty setting, the Trespasser DLC adds toggled Trials that serve as self imposed challenges for the player. These include Even Ground (Level Scaling enemies), Rub Some Dirt on It (Healing Potions only heal 1 HP), Take It Slow (slows down experience gain), and Grizzly End (turns bears into bosses in mooks' clothing).
• Genshin Impact: Various events have challenges with difficulty settings both of the regular kind and this kind combined with there being options to have enemies have higher health of resistances to certain elements along with doing more damage. The more of these kinds of settings are on alongside the higher set difficulty, the higher the player's score can be in the event's challenge.
• Horizon Forbidden West: The Custom difficulty setting lets you tweak individual aspects of gameplay, like enemy health, enemy damage, and activating or deactivating Easy Looting (which lets you loot machine parts that normally have to be shot off an enemy from their body instead).
• The Kingdom Hearts series has two of them:
  • Kingdom Hearts Re:coded has the Cheat Tuners which are unlocked by upgrading the Stat Matrix. The first one allows you to change the difficulty level at any time. The other four alter the game by changing how much health you have, how strong the enemies are, or how many items you can obtain. Using the Cheat Tuners would make things harder on the player but the bright side is by doing so you will benefit from it by gaining more munny, rare items, and earn trophies.
  • Kingdom Hearts III: Re𝄌Mind has the Premium Menu offering both EZ codes and PRO Codes for the DLC and base game. You can pick one or the other depending on what choices you make during the Dive to the Heart tutorial though both can be unlocked for use after defeating the True Final Boss, Yozora. EZ Codes as the name implies make the game incredibly easy giving you choices such as destroying the enemy in one hit, allowing both your HP and MP to recover immediately and removing the AP Cost to all your abilities. PRO Codes make the game harder for those looking to challenge themselves by locking away certain options. These include having your team start with their default stats at the start of the game regardless of levels. Stopping the use of items, form changes, and even cure magic during battle.
• NieR: Automata features difficulty customization in the form of "plug-in chips"; most of the core HUD, from damage numbers and health bars to the minimap and text log, can be unplugged from the player character in order to add in other chips. Easy Mode has its own array of optional chips, including an auto-attack and auto-evade. Just don't remove the OS chip, unless you want a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Pyre: Once you unlock the feature, the Titan Stars can be accessed before every Rite, which consists of several choices, each bringing their own ways of increasing the difficulty of your next match, but in return, this also boosts the experience gain for your participating players.
• Transistor: Throughout the game you unlock "Limiters," which increase experience at the cost of making the game harder when enabled. The Process can do doubled damage, spawn in greater numbers, spawn corrupted souls upon defeat, and much more.

Factory Games

• Factorio allows high degree of methods to adjust various individual aspects of the game, including how many enemies and resources there are, how widely are resources and enemies spaced, are they aggressive, how much resources the recipes cost etc.
• Factory Town has options to decide what are the biomes the player starts on, how much map is initially unlocked and what tech level the player starts at.

First-Person Shooters

• Even the earliest versions of Doom have the "-fast" switch, which makes all enemies move faster and shoot quicker than normal; this is the default only on the Nightmare setting on the main menu. Hellspawn fling fireballs aplenty right after their "alert" noise, pink demons (and spectres) charge at the player at a dead run, and hitscan enemies soon become Bullet Hell generators. This goes ditto for Respawning Enemies, which is normally reserved for Nightmare difficulty only but can be individually set with the command line parameter "-respawn" (or simply selected from a menu in any the many available source ports)
• Goldeneye 1997 features an unlockable 007 difficulty setting, which allows for fine tuning of enemy health, damage, accuracy, and reaction speed. This can be set as low as possible for a simple jaunt, or everything cranked up to maximum difficulty for a challenge well beyond even the standard 00 difficulty. This has led to the popular fan challenge difficulty License to Kill (One-shot, one kill applies to both the player and enemies) as well as Dark Agent/Dark LTK. (Maximum stats for enemies.)
• Halo: Skulls are modifiers you can apply before entering a level. They vary wildly in use, some are completely useless vanities, some are cheats that make you super powerful at the cost of not being able to record your score and best time when active, and some make the game harder in exchange for a score multiplier.
• Operation Flashpoint and ArmA have a few difficulty presets, and various options that can be used to fine-tune difficulty. In the first game, Veteren simply disables most of the assistances and makes the game harder, while Arma III allows tweaking numerical difficulty values directly.
• Perfect Dark, being a Spiritual Successor to Goldeneye 1997 mentioned above, has the similarly unlocked Perfect Dark difficulty setting which allows you to adjust enemy health, damage, and accuracy. (Though it lacks the ability to adjust reaction times.) Similar to Goldenye, fans have established License To Kill (Maximum damage and accuracy, minimum health) and Dark License To Kill (Maximum health, damage, and accuracy) fan challenge difficulties.
• The Serious Sam games offer modifiers that change the number of enemies, the health that enemies have, whether health or armor spawn, and whether you have infinite ammo or not. In the first games, these modifiers were only available in multiplayer, and later installments giving access even in single player. Truly unhinged players can attempt to play the later entries in the series with 11x the normal number of enemies that have 5x more health than normal.
• Beginning a new game in System Shock lets you adjust difficulty levels for four separate aspects of the game: puzzles, combat, cyberspace navigation and the overall mission.
• Turbo Overkill: There is a custom difficulty option where players can adjust enemy health, projectile speed, whether health appears etc.
• ULTRAKILL features minor and major assists that can be turned on to make the game easier in specific ways, such as providing aim assist, reducing the game speed, reducing boss aggression or making healing easier.
• The Epic Games-approved OldUnreal patches for Unreal add several options for single-player play such as the use of mutators and a "Classic" switch that mimics the original game version's balance.

Idle Games

• Factory Town Idle features unlockable options that affect experience gain and population, ability to make available land or storage infinite, and so on.

Metroidvanias

• Hollow Knight: The game's designated boss-refighting area, Godhome, features the Pantheons, basically a series of Boss Rushes. For each pantheon, you can apply up to 4 different "bindings". One cuts your damage by 20%, one cuts your health in half, one prevents you from using charms, and one cuts your soul vessels down to 1 spell usage. The incentive for completing a Pantheon with bindings is adding lifeblood cocoons to future Pantheon attempts and accessing a secret area.

Platformers

• Celeste: Once you beat the game^note or enter a cheat code in the first level, you unlock "Variant Mode" where you can change aspects of gameplay to mess around. Some are purely positive like infinite stamina and infinite dashes, some are purely negative like invisible motion and no grabbing, and some fall somewhere in the middle like 360 dashing.
• Hard Hat IV ditches the difficulty levels from the previous games in the series in favour of separate toggles to modify the game's difficulty, such as whether Mercy Invincibility protects Hard Hat from Spikes of Doom, whether enemies have their own Mercy Invincibility or whether running out of Hit Points will instantly consume an E-Tank.
• The original Kirby's Dream Land has an optional "Configuration Mode" that unlocks after beating the challenging Extra Game. In it, you can set Kirby's maximum health and number of Video-Game Lives before getting a game over. This means that you can set it to make Kirby a One-Hit-Point Wonder, with one misstep equalling an automatic game over.
• Prison City has a custom difficulty mode where you can adjust things like number of lives, whether the Bottomless Pits are lethal or not, how aggressive enemies are etc.

Real-Time Strategy

• Minecraft Legends: The Custom Settings menu offers the ability to adjust a variety of Game Mechanics, inluding Falling Damage, Knockback, the number of bases and outposts in the world, and more.
• Last Train Home: As well as the Custom difficulty that allows the player to adjust difficulty more precisely, two of the four preset difficulties make either combat missions^note Tactician or resource management^note Quartermaster more difficult.
• Timberborn: In addition to the default easy, normal, and hard difficulties, there's also a custom setting that allows you to adjust the length of droughts, how much resources beavers will consume, and more.

Roguelikes

• Brotato: In the accessibility options, you can set the enemy health and damage from 25% to 200%, and the enemy speed from 25% to 150%.
• Crab Champions has difficulty modifiers that can be added to games, such as disabling auto-collection of money, adding random powerups to enemies, causing damage to lower your maximum health, and others.
• Dead Cells has "Custom Mode," where various modifiers can be applied to your runs. You can disable specific unlocks/upgrades, tinker with how deadly Malaise is, just about anything you can think of.
• Hades:
  • Upon completing your first successful run, you gain access to the Pact of Punishment. The Pact allows you to to obtain more meta resources like Titan's Blood and Diamonds if you play at a higher Heat level. Your heat is determined by what conditions you have active, including taking bonus damage, health restoration being less effective, a time limit, and much more.
  • At any point^note unless your save file has Hell Mode enabled you can pause the game and activate "God Mode." It's not invulnerability as the name would imply, but it does give you 20% damage resistance which gets increased by 2% all the way up to 80% every time you die.
• HoloCure: Under the 'Difficulty' tab in the shop, there's a variety of free purchases to modify the game and challenge the player. There's the option to limit the amount of weapons the character can carry, like with Vampire Survivors, but there's also the ability to do the same for the item slots. Other modifiers include the prevention of Collabs (combining maxed weapons to make stronger weapons) or Super items (randomly obtain incredibly rare variants of items that are much stronger), and Hardcore (setting the player character's health to one HP).
• One Step From Eden: The Hell Passes are this game's Harder Than Hard mode where beating the game on your highest level Hell Pass unlocks the next one up to 14. Hell Passes can be toggled individually for effects like giving enemies artifacts, higher tier bosses, giving enemies regeneration, and lowering your max health all the way down to 1 at the start of your run.
• Risk of Rain:
  • Hidden throughout the game are secrets you can find to unlock "Artifacts." Artifacts drastically change the way the game is played, from positive benefits like allowing you to choose your items, to negatives like lethal fall damage, and the in-between like quintupling your damage at the cost of 90% max health. These artifacts return in Risk of Rain 2.
  • The remake has various changes to the gameplay of the original that can be toggled such as the new items, stage variants, and whether or not you need to kill every single enemy before going to the next stage. It allows you alter the "intensity," letting you increase and/or decrease the damage you do and/or take.
• Rogue Legacy 2: The House Rules are accessibility settings that augment the difficulty. From enabling flight, to disabling contact damage, to cranking up or down enemy damage, etc.
• Slay the Spire: Custom Mode let's you pick seeds, ascensions, and enable card you haven't even unlocked. You can also enable tons of modifiers, including but not limited to: endless mode, making enemies drop relics, starting with various relics, lowering max HP, debuffing enemies, ignoring paths, etc.
• Touhou Lost Branch Of Legend: Requests are Experience Booster options that make the game harder in exchange, and can be mixed and matched. Some of the options are: 1. Reduce maximum HP by 10; 2. Halving both the Gold reward, and the After Boss Recovery of bosses; 3. Increasing the cost of upgrading non-Basic cards at Gaps by 25 Gold.
• Vampire Survivors:
  • On the character select screen, you can limit yourself from 6 weapons all the way down to just 1, and you can chooses to enable or disable stat boosts from golden eggs.
  • The map selection lets you pick and choose from 6 modes with unique effects. Hyper makes everything, including you, move faster. Hurry Mode doubles the rate at which the in game timer ticks. Arcana enables the Arcana mechanic, giving you access to unique buffs. Limit Break makes it so instead of getting money and food when you've leveled up enough, you instead get buffs for your weapons. Inverse rotates the stage 180 degrees and makes enemies more difficult. Finally, Endless mode is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Role-Playing Game

• Chained Echoes: In the options menu, there are separate settings for Overdrive Area Size (Wide, Normal, Extra Tight), Enemy Stats (Low, Normal, High), and Aggressiveness (Low, Normal, High).
• Dragon Quest XI has “Draconian Quests”, which are toggleable features that make the game harder in various ways, such as increasing enemy strength or giving you a Game Over if the protagonist dies.
• Epic Battle Fantasy: Epic Battle Fantasy 4 and 5 have a "Cheats & Challenges" option that involves "Cheats" that make the game easier, like increasing SP gain and letting all characters be able to learn any skill, and "Challenges" that make the game harder in different ways than just affecting stats as the usual selectable difficulties do, like giving foes extra counter-attack moves and putting your turns on a timer, so you would have to select actions for all your active party members in 30 seconds before your turn ends by force.
• Kingdom Hearts III added EZ and PRO codes in the DLC which allow the player to make the game easier and harder in various ways.
• Owlcat Games allows for very granular difficulty customization in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. There are several preset difficulty levels that can then be further customized with sliders for damage differentials for the Player Party and mobs, whether the mobs can inflict critical hits, whether a party member being reduced to the negative of their Constitution score is actually killed or only badly wounded, etc.
• Pokémon Masters: Master Mode in the Champion Stadium arena allows the player to choose parameters that give advantages to opponents in exchange for more points when they are defeated. Accumulating points will give rewards to the player.
• Prayer of the Faithless: After beating the game once, the player can access Chaos Quest Settings. Some settings include not just statistical changes to difficulty, but also increasing aggro towards low SP characters, making save points one-use only in exchange for healing, and making loot either double or disappear.
• Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure:
  • The Weighted Dress which slows the Action Meter to 3/4 of its regular speed. As its Flavor Text says:
    It takes a real pro to win wearing this!
  • The black-haired girl at the top of the Champion's Guild, as she says: "I'll level with you. The badges I sell make fighting harder, not easier. If you really want to have a tougher journey, well, I won't stop you..." The badges she sells are:
    • Danger Mode: "Brill takes double damage"
    • Shield Break: "Halves Brill's Block Strength and slows her Block Speed by 10%"
    • Bumpy Road: Prevents Regenerating Health from working between battles, making healing items more important.
• Sea of Stars has Relics you can obtain throughout the game. Once obtained, you can activate/deactivate them anytime out of battle. They have effects ranging from beneficial (after-battle recovery, chance to auto-block attacks, etc) to challenge (more damage taken, one-hit-kill unless blocking, etc).
• Persona 4 The Golden adds difficulty settings to independently alter how much damage you deal, how much you take, and how much money and experience you earn from battle.

Shoot-'em-Ups

• Blue Wish Resurrection Plus allows you to adjust, in addition to the difficulty level itself: the amount of slowdown, the Auto-Guard feature that uses up a bomb to protect your ship from damage, and an "Accel" toggle that makes bullet accelerate faster the longer they are on screen.
• Hellsinker has three different axes of difficulty:
  • Level impacts the range that Stella will fluctuate between. It only affects stage select and not the main campaign.
  • Way of Life determines the maximum number of lives. Higher settings are obviously safer, but lower settings allow you to get bonuses from collecting hearts at max lives sooner.
  • Bootleg Ghost determines auto-bombing behavior. "Aspirant" only auto-bombs if you have 5 Sol and fewer than 4 lives and "Solidstate" will auto-bomb any time you have at least 3 Sol; either way, you can only auto-bomb 3 times per stage. "Adept" disables auto-bomb altogether.
• Many of the M2 ShotTriggers ports have Custom mode, which allow you to adjust various difficulty-related settings beyond what's provided in the original edition of the game, such as adjusting player shot power, player hitbox, the difficulty level (from Super Easy to "Arcade" difficulty), auto-bomb (when hit, fire a bomb in lieu of losing a life if any bombs are in stock), and in games that repeat upon completing the last stage, the option to play with only one loop (in games that loop endlessly, this may also apply a large end-of-game bonus based on the number of remaining lives).

Simulators

• Project Wingman: Before you start a mission, you can apply various modifiers to increase the difficulty. They do things like limiting you to your machine gun (Gun Runner), doubling enemy spawns (Double Time) or forcing you to leave your afterburner on at all times (Speed Demon). Of course, the community came up with the Halo-esque MAMO challenge — Mercenary with All Modifiers On (Mercenary being the hardest difficulty).

Sports

• Madden NFL and many of its Electronic Arts sports sister-series do have standard Difficulty Levels, but allow for the adjustments of individual settings for both the human-controlled team and the AI. Examples include penalty frequency, kicking/punting success, non-human controlled player AI skills (catching, tackling, blocking, etc.), and many more. Each year, many Madden players even share the settings that they've found to produce the most realistic and/or challenging (without being overly frustrating) with the community.
• Some wrestling games such as the WWE series not only let you pick the overall difficulty, but also have slider bars to adjust things like AI behavior, reversal rates and how quickly your Finisher meter fills up. You can usually fine-tune the attributes of wrestlers to not only emphasize their speed, power or technique for a realistic skill set, but also either max out all their stats and make them a Lightning Bruiser you can use to dominate the ring, or reduce them all down to the minimum and turn them into a pathetic Jobber for you to squash to your heart's content (older games would impose a cap on how many points you could invest into a wrestler's stats, but newer ones generally do not).

Survival Horror

• Nearly every game in the Five Nights at Freddy's series has an unlockable "Custom Night," where you can configure the aggression of every animatronic available. This culminated in Ultimate Custom Night, where all 50 enemies from the previous 6 games are available to be configured with.
• Pathologic 2 was updated to allow disabling the game's intended difficulty and give access to a number of sliders, affecting how quickly the player character's needs decay, how much damage it deals when they fill up, how resistant the player is to infection, how quickly weapons and clothing wear out, how expensive food is and more. It's possible to make the game even harder than the already difficult default experience this way.
• Both Silent Hill 2 and 3 have individual difficulty settings both for combat and puzzles, so along with turning the whole game either piss-easy or tough as nails, you can also mix and match; giving you a major challenge fighting for survival while breezing through the puzzles, or you can go for more of an adventure-game feel where enemies are easily managed but the puzzles are brain-twistingly hard.

Tower Defense

• Bloons TD 6: The Challenge Editor has options to change nearly anything about how the game plays. Which gamemode is used as the base, bloon speed, which towers are available, how many towers you can place, how much money you can spend, how many tiers you can purchase, how many lives you have, whether or not all the bloons are regrows, whether or not all bloons are camo, and the regeneration rate of regrow bloons can all be modified, just to name a few.
• Gemcraft gives modifiers that increase the difficulty and therefore reward from a given map. It first became modular in Gemcraft Labyrinth, giving a multiplier for each pick.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Civilization: In addition to the overall difficulty level, the advanced game setup allows the player to adjust factors like the threat of hostile barbarians; the abundance of resources; whether your starting location is biased towards favourable conditions; and whether new Policies and Promotions can be saved up or must be used immediately.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its expansion Enemy Within feature a variety of options in addition to the difficulty levels, including "Ironman Mode" (prevents save scumming), and the "Second Wave" options, which range from giving rookies highly variable stats to randomizing damage and funding. These options are unlocked based on the difficulty levels of campaigns you've completed previously.
• XCOM 2's expansion War of the Chosen has its own "Advanced Options" for difficulty, some of which address player complaints about the base game being too focused on a hard time limit (both the Avatar Project and timers in missions can be expanded using these options). There's also an option to expand health pools, and three options to start with one of the resistance cells (Reapers, Skirmishers or Templars) already in contact with XCOM.

Visual Novel

• The Danganronpa games allow you to adjust the Logic difficulty (number of choices to pick the correct answer from amongst) and the Action difficulty (difficulty of shooting, number of white noise obstacles, and amount of available time and health) independently of each other.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Marvel's Spider-Man 2: In the options menu, you can tweak various aspects including enemy stats, simplifying puzzles, more generous parry timing, and more. One of the more notable aspects is the "Swing Assists," which let you slow down the game while turning corners, toggle the bending of webs as you crawl on them, and a steering assist that changes how much physics applies to swinging compared to your direct control.
• Minecraft has standard difficulty levels plus various game rules that can be changed when making a new world (and later as well if you have permission to use cheats), such as whether players drop their inventory on death, whether they receive Falling Damage or whether angered mobs become neutral when a player that angered them dies.
• No Man's Sky has a custom difficulty setting that allows for setting several aspects of the game's difficulty separately from each other, like resource scarcity, hostile wildlife's behaviour or the consequences of player's death.
• Palworld: In custom difficulty setting, it's possible to set things like damage taken, item rate, how difficult raids are etc.
• Terraria: Journey Mode lets you essentially play god in how you can mess with everything. Enemy spawn rates and difficulty have adjustable sliders from no enemies in easy mode to 10X in Master Mode. You can turn on Godmode, increase your building and pickup range, and even disable spread of Crimson, Corruption, and Hallow.
• Valheim: The Mistlands update added a number of adjustable difficulty settings, such as the frequency of raids, minimap availability, how much is lost (items and experience) is lost when dying, damage taken and received, amount of resources dropped by enemies (from half to three), an option to use no materials when building, and the much-requested ability to bring metal ores through portals. There are also a number of preset modes that combine those settings in different quantities (Hammer Mode for those who just want to build, Hardcore for the opposite, etc.).

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