History Main / DynamicDifficulty

* The arcade ''VideoGame/LethalEnforcers'' started with a certain amount of time a baddie took to hit you (a bit under three seconds). This gradually decreased over time and reset only after you took a hit. The upshot was that you'd have to shovel in a ton of tokens to get to the end of the game ''no matter how good you were''. Lethal Enforcers 2 was even more brutal, with a shorter starting time and a ''much'' faster decrease.

* ''Franchise/ResidentEvil'': Known formally as "Adaptive Difficulty" or "Game Rank", it's been a part of several major games in the series.
** In ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'', playing well will increase the amount of spawned enemies and improve their AI; conversely, playing poorly and dying often reduces the number of foes and disables most of their AI. How severe this is depends on the difficulty selected at the start of the game, with Easy reducing the upper and lower bounds while Professional locks it to the max. Ammo and health item rarity is also affected by how well you are doing. If you are well stocked on ammo, it'll drop much less frequently, but if you are starved for ammo, it'll drop more frequently to help avoid making the game unwinnable.

** ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2Remake'' follows a similar difficulty dynamic with the previous games. Aside from the general difficulty settings (Easy, normal, and hard), the game also fine tunes the current difficulty based on your performance. Doing well and conserving ammo will have enemies become more resilient and ammo pickups will yield less bullets. Getting injured a lot and/or running out of ammo will have enemies do less damage, become easier to kill, and ammo pickups give more rounds. Dying also lowers the difficulty some and dying too much will have the game offer the chance to permanently drop the difficulty by one level; if you died a lot on normal for example, you can choose to switch the difficulty to easy.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' assigns experience points based on the difficulty setting. Conversely, the higher your level, the tougher your enemies will be when entering new areas. ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' also has {{level scaling}} for certain enemies, especially in the DLC's.

Instead, some games take a different approach: they automatically adjust their own difficulty to match the player's skill. This an especially common feature of [[UsefulNotes/ArcadeGame arcade games]], where the practice is known in industry parlance as "rank".

Not to be confused with SchizophrenicDifficulty, where the difficulty goes up and down unpredictably, regardless of the player's performance. If the single-player mode has dynamic difficulty but the multiplayer mode doesn't, this can result in a MultiplayerDifficultySpike (although this can be mitigated with matchmaking players with other players of similar skill). See also ComebackMechanic.

Instead, some games take a different approach: they automatically adjust their own difficulty to match the player's skill.

* ''VideoGame/MaxPayne'' does this in addition to three difficulty levels: doing exceptionally well would have enemies react more intelligently, do more damage, and take more damage (to the point that a headshot ''might'' not kill them), while doing poorly would have enemies behave more suicidally, have worst accuracy, do less damage, and be easier to kill. The easiest difficulty level, Fugitive, restricts the difficulty to a lower level, and makes it harder to increase. The medium difficulty level, Hard Boiled, restricts the difficulty from ''reaching'' the lowest level. And the hardest difficulty level, Dead on Arrival, locks the difficulty to the maximum level at all times.

* ''VideoGame/{{Daioh}}'': The difficulty of the game increases depending on how well you do. The farther you go without dying, the more likely it is for the game to become a BulletHell.

* ''VideoGame/Hades'': God mode operates like this, gently lightening the difficulty each time you lose to find the right medium for the player.

There are also some players who simply don't ''want'' an adaptive challenge, be they a casual gamer who enjoys the power trip of kicking ass on Easy mode, or the hardcore masochist who will happily fight ThatOneBoss over and over again on the hardest difficulty and will feel cheated if the game just "lets them win".

** The ''VideoGame/{{Police 911}}'' spinoff is extremely fast, with [[CatAndMouseBoss bosses running and shooting around]]. Players have to aim more precisely in order to defeat the boss.

** ''Homeworld 2'' addressed this by making capturing enemy ships a lot harder, to the point where it's not usually worth the effort outside of a few occasions where it's required to complete an objective. Unfortunately, the difficulty scaling was one of many mechanics that suffered from [[ObviousBeta the game being somewhat rushed]]; there's no upper limit to how many additional enemy ships it will spawn while the player's faction is still subject to a quite restrictive unit cap, meaning that not only can later missions become effectively UnWinnable thanks to NotPlayingFairWithResources, but the game can potentially try and spawn so many units that it lags or freezes because the CPU can't keep up. There's also nothing stopping you from exploiting it by dismantling or self-destructing most of your fleet right before you complete a level, tricking the game into thinking you're doing much worse than you really are.

* ''VideoGame/EnterTheGungeon'' initially has a 5% chance of each enemy in the game not spawning so newer players have an easier time. This drops by 1% every time the player successfully reaches the Forge, and disappears completely if the player completes the game for the first time no matter how many times they've reached the level.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{SiN}} SiN Episodes: Emergence]]'' features the Personal Challenge System, designed to adapt itself to the player's skill level and varies the skill, numbers and toughness of enemies faced in accordance the player's performance. It was claimed that thanks to this, a proficient FPS player and a brand new FPS player would be able to finish the game in roughly the same amount of time. However, a bug present on release in the system caused the game to never ease up on players making it overly challenging and unforgiving. This has since been corrected. [[note]]The game's balancing system worked off of invisible triggers you ran past, among other things. Going over one recorded the time since you'd gone over the last one and deactivated it. Going faster obviously made the game harder. What went wrong is that one of the levels had left in it an extra trigger used for testing, which made the game think you were going faster than you really were in one part... And it didn't deactivate, and was in the middle of an area with a fight so there's a good chance you'd end up going back and forth over it several times, causing the game to think you'd run through half a dozen checkpoints in 20 seconds, thus cranking the difficulty into the stratosphere and making the difficulty-lowering functions a drop in the bucket. These invisible triggers are also autosave points, and loading from an autosave would lower the difficulty, while loading from a quicksave would not. This still applies (though not nearly as much) in the bugfixed release, though in the original version the way most people played (quicksaving and quickloading) meant that the game never let up, as opposed to dropping difficulty slightly each load from an autosave point.[[/note]]

One common solution is to allow the player to select their own difficulty level, but this can be unsatisfying in its own way - it might make the player feel like they aren't playing the "real" game, or feel inadequate for not being able to play the harder difficulties. (Particularly if the game [[EasyModeMockery insults them over it]]).

If done correctly, all players should experience the "same" level of challenge from the game - it's just that the challenge level automatically rises or falls to adapt to the person playing it.

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* ''VideoGame/GodHand'' will adjust the difficulty up a level (1, 2, 3, and [[FourIsDeath Die]]) if the player lands enough hits on enemies, increasing enemy strength and durability. It will then scale the difficulty back down if they take too many hits. You gain more rewards for defeating more enemies at higher difficulty levels. The game has "normal" difficulty settings, as well - the difficulty level never rises above 2 in Easy Mode, and Hard Mode has you ''always'' on Level Die.

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* ''VideoGame/CrueltySquad'' has an unusual, one-directional variant of this. You start up in the hardest [[spoiler:non-secret]] difficulty and bumps you down one tier after just a single death, onto the mode that halves the damage you'd take. Dying few more times within the same mission in that one downgrades you ever further which adds ability to [[ImAHumanitarian eat corpses for a single hitpoint]]. With all that being said, the way of bumping up the difficulty [[GuideDangIt is a bit more convoluted]] and [[spoiler:whatever remains of this trope stops applying at all when the secret difficulty mode - colloquially named Hope Erradicated - is activated]].

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** While playing through the game more and more times unlocks more items to use, it also inevitably unlocks more bosses to have to fight (including stronger versions of previous bosses) and more levels to have to clear, making the game harder and longer the more you play it and beat it. One achievement even blatantly makes the game harder (increasing the likelihood of [[EliteMook champion enemies]] and curses,) and beating [[spoiler: Isaac in the Cathedral]] for the first time increases the likelihood of a curse even further.

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* Most games offer some sort of "mystery award" feature, which gives a random award - usually points, feature completions, or even lighting extra balls. If you're having a poor game, it's much more likely to award a lit extra ball -- on the other hand, don't expect more than a small point reward if you're doing well. In multi-player games, when not in "competition mode", it may give better awards to players who are behind.

* In ''Pinball/SafeCracker'', the difficulty of the bank vault board game changes according to how well you were on the pinball playfield and the games set payout % (there are 2 roms for this on does not have any % based payouts due to legal issues.

* ''Videogame/TriggerheartExelica'' calls this the VBAS (Variable Boss Attack System): basically, this means that the more point medals you collect during the level, the more forms the boss of that stage has and the harder it is. If you have enough, you even have to face a BonusBoss afterwards.