History Main / MultiplayerDifficultySpike

* In ''VideoGame/DeadstormPirates'', the enemies are more durable than usual in co-op. You ''can'' combine your shots to do even more damage than in single player, but that requires coordination, while most bosses and minibosses now ''must'' be hit by combined shots to be stopped. As a result, in co-op you will often have to perfectly shoot fast-moving targets, one at a time, and pray your friend does't shoot a different target instead.

* ''[[VideoGame/PhantasyStarOnline]]'' makes enemies take less damage if you're playing in an online party. You can start a "One Person" party to avoid that, but it will prevent other players from joining in.

* When played in co-op mode, ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' games have extra enemies (including boss enemies like the Spider Mastermind and Cyberdemon) in places where they weren't there on even the hardest single-player difficulty.

* ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoV'' features enemies that become much, MUCH more precise and bullet-resistant once the player goes from the solo campaign to multiplayer. It's not uncommon to knock an enemy down with gunfire, then have to fire on his or her prone body several more times just to make sure.

* ''VideoGame/PuyoPuyo'' has a very brutal learning curve (more like a learning ''wall'') for its multiplayer mode. The game is not exactly a piece of cake as it takes while for new players to understand how to make chains in order to defeat your opponent, but by the time they can make 4-5 chains somewhat consistently, defeating all the AI players becomes very easy. Multiplayer, on the other hand, can see those very players struggling to make their prized 5 chains against players that are effortlessly building 10 or more chains that are going to be overkill on these circumnstances - and those are the ''average or above-average'' players; top players won't even let you make a chain in the first place.

* ''VideoGame/{{Destiny}}'' averts this, thankfully. It's done to encourage co-op with friends and other players, to the point that doing Strikes, you are put into matchmaking to make sure you have a full Fireteam.

* Many [[BeatEmUp Beat Em Ups]] will add extra Mooks (and, rarely, bosses) when more than one person is playing.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Portal 2}}'' Co-Op mode is a lot more challenging than SP, thanks to the puzzles requiring four portals to solve rather than just two.

* ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts358DaysOver2'' has the Mission Mode, which has a multi-player option. The enemies have buffed stats compared to story mode whether you have multiple players or not.
* ''VideoGame/EvilIslands'' doesn't allow importing your SP characters to co-op (so you have to make new ones from scratch), makes all enemies a lot tougher than in SP, and drastically reduces the XP and money rewards for quests and combat.
* When played in co-op mode, ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' games have extra enemies (including boss enemies like the Spider Mastermind and Cyberdemon) in places where they weren't there on even the hardest single-player difficulty.
* ''The VideoGame/HouseOfTheDead'' series does this. Irritatingly, one boss in ''The House of the Dead III'', The Fool, has a final attack that requires the player hitting its claw with a full clip of shots in a very short timespan (we're talking no time to reload) in single-player... and ''two clips'' in two-player, meaning that both players must fire a full clip at it and not miss. Conclusion? You're better off playing alone than with an incompetent or fooling-around player, unless you don't care about spending money.
* In ''VideoGame/BraveFirefighters'', playing with a second player reduces the time bonuses you can get from clearing sections.
* The ''VideoGame/MonsterHunter'' series has separate sets of quests for singleplayer and multiplayer. In the multiplayer quests, monsters have more health to compensate for allowing up to four players. Quests are divided into two or three distinct ranks of difficulty depending on the game, and highest rank is only available in the multiplayer quests, featuring new monsters that are unavailable in the lower ranks. Of course, a sufficiently determined player can still take on all of the multiplayer quests alone, and having a full set of four players can make a multiplayer quest go faster than its singleplayer equivalent. ''VideoGame/MonsterHunterWorld'' instead has a single set of quests with DynamicDifficulty based on whether they're being faced solo or with a group. ''VideoGame/MonsterHunterRise'' separates the single- and multiplayer quests again (while still applying DynamicDifficulty in the style of ''World'' for the latter), but reverts into a single set (continuing from the end of the high-rank multiplayer quests) for Master Rank in ''Sunbreak''.

* ''Videogame/KillingFloor2'' has the number of zeds scale with the number of players. Dosh earned is also reduced the higher the number of players is, and a player healing themselves with a medical syringe goes from 50 to 20 once more than one player is playing in the match.

* ''VideoGame/StreetsOfRage'' has every boss except the FinalBoss come in pairs if you're playing co-op whereas playing alone only has you fighting one boss per level (Stage 6 is always a DualBoss regardless if you're playing alone or with a buddy). Later games dropped this feature.
* In ''VideoGame/DarkSouls1'', the health of bosses increase by 50% for every phantom you summon to help you (150% health for one phantom, 200% for two), to balance out the fact that you could potentially be doing two or three times as much damage, as well as the potential tactical advantage of having multiple players. For some bosses, like [[DualBoss O&S]] and the [[PuzzleBoss Bed of Chaos]], this is a godsend, whereas it's less helpful for others, like [[DamageSpongeBoss Gaping Dragon or Manus]].
* ''[[VideoGame/PokemonRanger Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs]]'': The multiplayer missions have very strict time limits, prevent you from charging your styler, give you generally low stats, and have enemies and bosses with much more dangerous attacks. Beating the multiplayer story solo requires immense grinding and skill.

* In ''VideoGame/{{WarCraft}} 3'', the campaign AI is quite blatantly railroaded into the same attack patterns over and over again and protected only by [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard cheating]]. Online AI, on the other hand, is intended to emulate how human players will act.
* ''VideoGame/{{Starcraft}}'' has similar issues. In the first game the AI is fairly predictable in the campaign, but custom game computer players can be anywhere from "really dumb" to "scary effective and stupid fast".
* ''VideoGame/WorldInConflict'' is actually a mixed example: by pitting teams of players against each other, it both gives them access to all the destructive potential only glimpsed in the campaign, ''and'' enforces CripplingOverspecialization mostly absent from the single-player.
* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' battles against other players are nightmare-inducingly difficult compared to the battles against in-game [=NPCs=]. This is not only due to the absence of ArtificialStupidity, but also because Pokémon are capped at level 50, cannot switch out freely after fainting an opponent, and bag items cannot be used. And that's not counting the insane MinMaxing and the {{Metagame}}, depending on who you battle with. In Pokémon, [=PvP=] is quite possibly the highest difficulty spike an RPG can offer. The development team is fully aware of this too, as the Battle Frontier and other related facilities, present from [[VideoGame/PokemonRubyAndSapphire Generation III]] and onward, have AI and Pokémon with that sort of Min-Maxing and Metagame savviness.
** Averted with the Pokémon games made by Genius Sonority, but not in the way one might expect: If the game uses the standard Pokémon battling system, then its difficulty will be aimed at the experienced player. Even random trainers in Genius Sonority's games have optimized builds while major adversaries use the same strategies tournament players use. In other words, the single-player experience is designed to be just as tough as the competitive experience.
* ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' can become this on servers which have [=PvP=] enabled. A fully-armed player can slaughter many of the hostile mobs easily, but mindlessly attacking other fully-armed players (especially those with potions and/or weapon enhancements) can lead to a swift and embarrassing death. It can become even more difficult if the game mode is Survival, since players might have to compete with each other for resources. The game's wiki notably has [[http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Player_versus_Player a lengthy article]] written on how to deal with other people, flat-out calling [=PvP=] "a hard nut to crack for many players."
* {{MOBA}} games address this issue by giving each player a score that increases with victories and decreases with defeats, matching them with people with a similar score, and matching that team with a rival team that has a similar average score. This score is best known as "Elo", due to ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends''[='=]s use of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system Elo rating system]] during its first few years of existence, although new systems have since been developed. New players will as a result start out losing their first game badly, but subsequent games will be easier and easier as their Elo keeps decreasing with each passing defeat, until the day their Elo is low enough to match them against opponents who are unskilled enough to be defeatable; afterwards, as the player becomes more and more skilled and starts winning more and more games, their Elo score will increase with their new victories and as a result they will be matched against increasingly more competent opponents. Likewise, if a player's skill somehow decreases, e.g. after a long hiatus or by venturing into a role they don't usually play, the player's Elo will decrease and they will be matched against increasingly unskilled opponents.
** Most {{MOBA}} games also have an extended tutorial mode that allows players to acquaint themselves with the controls, the game mechanics and their characters' strategy and usage before they come out to the matchmaking queue. ''VideoGame/Dota2'' does this with 6 tutorial levels with increasingly complex games, whereas ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' does this by barring new players from playing against people and forcing them to play against the AI until their accounts have reached level 5.
* ''VideoGame/MarioKart'' has RubberbandAI that likes to GangUpOnTheHuman in single-player mode, but it still can't make a good use of items and shortcuts. Enter the online mode, where you will have your ass handed to you nearly constantly by players who pick the best driving character and kart, take advantage of all the shortcuts, and maximize chaos on the road by spamming items. Likewise, the battle modes has the AI being fairly average, but playing against others online can be quite chaotic.

** Par of the course for most light gun games, in fact. These games usually balance for 2 players by increasing the health/defense of boss enemies (universally designed to make players pay more quarters).

* The ''VideoGame/MonsterHunter'' series has separate sets of quests for singleplayer and multiplayer. In the multiplayer quests, monsters have more health to compensate for allowing up to four players. Quests are divided into two or three distinct ranks of difficulty depending on the game, and highest rank is only available in the multiplayer quests, featuring new monsters that are unavailable in the lower ranks. Of course, a sufficiently determined player can still take on all of the multiplayer quests alone, and having a full set of four players can make a multiplayer quest go faster than its singleplayer equivalent. ''VideoGame/MonsterHunterWorld'' instead has a single set of quests with DynamicDifficulty based on whether they're being faced solo or with a group.

* ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' has the enemy AI come in small swarms if you're playing in single player. Playing in co-op will ramp up the amount of cops rushing you in order to provide a challenge and promote teamwork between players, to the point that [[AcceptableBreakFromReality the PAYDAY gang would single-handedly deplete an entire police department of officers from one successful match]].

* ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' has the enemy AI come in small swarms if you're playing in single player. Playing in co-op will ramp up the amount of cops rushing you in order to provide a challenge and promote teamwork between players.

* ''Videogame/KillingFloor2'' has the number of zeds scale with the number of players. Dosh earned and health recovered each time one heals also reduced the higher the number of players is.

->--''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'' review of ''VideoGame/DCUniverseOnline''[[note]]Itself, being an MMORPG, not an example of this trope.[[/note]]

* Games with pronounced CoOpMultiplayer increase the difficulty in it with the justification that more players can take on bigger challenges and stronger enemies. Some additionally impose penalties ''on the players'' to enforce teamwork, such as CripplingOverspecialization and artificial {{Cap}}s. On the downside, if the game doesn't become popular, players may end up [[UnwinnableByMistake barred from most of its co-op content]], unable to find enough co-players online to match the raised difficulty.

* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' battles against other players are nightmare-inducingly difficult compared to the battles against in-game [=NPCs=]. This is not only due to the absence of ArtificialStupidity, but also because Pokemon are capped at level 50, cannot switch out freely after fainting an opponent, and bag items cannot be used. And that's not counting the insane MinMaxing and the {{Metagame}}, depending on who you battle with. In Pokemon, [=PvP=] is quite possibly the highest difficulty spike an RPG can offer.

* The ''VideoGame/MonsterHunter'' series has separate sets of quests for singleplayer and multiplayer. In the multiplayer quests, monsters have more health to compensate for allowing up to four players. Quests are divided into two or three distinct ranks of difficulty depending on the game, and highest rank is only available in the multiplayer quests, featuring new monsters that are unavailable in the lower ranks. Of course, a sufficiently determined player can still take on all of the multiplayer quests alone, and having a full set of four players can make a multiplayer quest go faster than its singleplayer equivalent.

* ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' multiplayer {{cap}}s the player level to 20 (compared to 60 in the SP), drastically reduces available skills, and consistently pits the players against DemonicSpiders rarely encountered even on higher difficulties in SP (or not encountered at all, such as the {{DLC}}-only [[VideoGame/MassEffect2 Collector]] faction). To put things in perspective, a generic Reaper mook during a Bronze multiplayer match (the lowest available difficulty) has about the same health as one in single player, but the difficulty set at Hardcore (equivalent to Hard). Enemies will also do much more damage with their weapons. Now consider that there's also Gold and Platinum difficulties in multiplayer...

* Strategy and shooter games (especially post-2000) are often geared towards competitive player-vs-player modes, with the campaign serving mainly as an extended TutorialLevel sequence. The campaign AI is often handicapped while the player is gradually introduced to game mechanics; the multiplayer/bot AI, on the other hand, is completely unhindered in its task of taking you down. And, of course, the human opponents are, in theory, the biggest challenge since most of them will have been playing longer than you have. Good luck dealing with the {{Metagame}}.

* ''The VideoGame/HouseOfTheDead'' series does this. Irritatingly, one boss in ''The House of the Dead III'', The Fool, has a final attack that requires a full clip in a very short timespan (we're talking no time to reload) in single-player...and ''two clips'' in two-player, meaning that both players must fire a full clip at it. Conclusion? You're better off playing alone than with an incompetent or fooling-around player.
** Par of the course for most light gun games, in fact.

* ''VideoGame/MarioKart'' has RubberbandAI that likes to GangUpOnTheHuman in single-player mode, but it still can't make a good use of items and shortcuts. Enter the online mode, where you will have your ass handed to you nearly constantly by players who pick the best driving character and kart, take advantage of all the shortcuts, and maximize chaos on the road by spamming items.