| abstract | - The Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) is a system introduced in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back and then also implemented in many later Crash Bandicoot platforming games, designed to help players struggling with a certain level or section of a level. The idea was to make the game easier for players who were struggling, without making the game easier for better players who would like a more challenging game. The DDA was thoroughly planned out by Naughty Dog in Crash 2 and 3, but a very minimal version of it is included by later developers in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure, and Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced. Jason Rubin described the reasoning behind the DDA as comments included in a 2011 blog article by fellow Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin describing the improvements made after the first Crash Bandicoot game. The quote below by Rubin is taken from that article. "We were already learning. We had realized that if a novice player died a lot of times, we could give them an Aku Aku at the start of a round and they had a better chance to progress. And we figured out that if you died a lot when running from the boulder, we could just slow the boulder down a little each time. If you died too much a fruit crate would suddenly become a continue point. Eventually everyone succeeded at Crash. We called all this DDA, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, and at the time the extent to which we did it was pretty novel. It would lead later Crash games to be the inclusive, perfectly balanced games they became. Good player, bad player, everyone loved Crash games. They never realized it is because they were all playing a slightly different game, balanced for their specific needs."
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