Effects of Difficulty Setting
Difficulty in quake4 is driven by the cvar g_skill, which is modified when the player picks a difficulty level at the console and preserved when the player saves his game. What this means for the designer:
- AI aggressiveness is modified by changing their aggressiveScale, which determines frequency of attacks among other things:
- Easy: combat.aggressiveScale will be 1.0.
- Normal: combat.aggressiveScale will be between 1.0 and 1.25.
- Hard: combat.aggressiveScale will be between 1.25 and 1.5.
- Hardest: combat.aggressiveScale will be between 1.5 and 1.75.
- Marine Buddy Health Changes:
- Easy: Adjusted health is 1.2 times the original health.
- Hard: Adjusted health is 1.2 times the original health.
- Hardest: Adjusted health is 1.4 times the original health.
- Strogg Health Changes:
- Easy: Adjusted health is 0.7 times the original health.
- Normal: Adjusted health is 1.0 times the original health.
- Hard: Adjusted health is 1.4 times the original health.
- Hardest: Adjusted health is 1.8 times the original health.
- Scale of damage taken by player (excluding melee):
- Easy: Adjusted damage will be 0.8 times the original damage (rounded up to a minimum 1 damage).
- Normal: Adjusted damage will be 1.0 times the original damage.
- Hard: Adjusted damage will be 1.7 times the original damage.
- Hardest: Adjusted damage will be 3.5 times the original damage.
- Minimum player health on savegame restore:
- Easy or Normal: You will have at least 25 health on spawn.
- AI will never intentionally miss melee attacks on the hardest setting.
- Dynamic protection (which reduces damage incrementally for high frequency attacks) isn't enabled on the hardest setting.
- Certain entities will not spawn depending on certain key values at certain difficulty levels:
- Easy: Will not spawn if "not_easy" "1" is specified on the entity or in its entityDef.
- Normal: Will not spawn if "not_medium" "1" is specified on the entity or in its entityDef.
- Hard: Will not spawn if "not_hard" "1" is specified on the entity or in its entityDef.
- Hardest: Also will not spawn if "not_hard" "1" is specified on the entity or in its entityDef.
Note that on the harder difficulties, the buddy AI actually gets healthier, and this is simply to offset the punshing damage dealt by the enemies in those harder difficulties. In addition, marine buddies who are flagged as mission critical (i.e. you will game over if they die) get an additional boost to their health on hard / hardest difficulties.