Diff Spikes vs. Attrition

[Maxie]

I've a game design question for you. Which of the two do you prefer more;

- challenge enforced by battles of markedly higher difficulty than usual, with tougher, stronger, smarter enemies which will make you reload often;

- challenge enforced by many unavoidable battles with moderately difficult enemies which will drain your equipment and resources dry eventually?

 

[Wunderbar]

Both?

Trash guards - trash guards - Guard captain miniboss - trash guards - trash guards - Boss encounter.
Don't want to start a difficult fight without healings/spell charges? Manage your resources well.

 

[Citizen]

challenge enforced by many unavoidable battles with moderately difficult enemies which will drain your equipment and resources dry eventually?

The most retarded gameplay design in RPGs that not only supports the idea of filler combat, but also results in shit like item-hoarding, save- and restscumming. IMO, rest mechanic is cancer and party resources (health, spells, whatever) should reset after each encounter to minimize tedium. With exception of consumables of course, to add some needed resource management

Shit thread btw, lol @ unironic use of semicolons

 

[Grauken]

Attrition is great, because depending on your resources even low-level enemies can present a threat, especially when you crawl back to town with no spells left and your last few HPs

 

[Rat King]

Turn-Based game where fights are rarer but all incredibly difficult would be perfect IMO, I fucking hate constant copy-pasted filler enemies.

 

[V_K]

Any approach that relies on constant reloading is retarded, thus attrition with no rest at will all the way.
Misconceptions about attrition:
1) There needs to be a constant flow of random encounters. No, not really, attrition works perfectly fine with hand-placed encounters and some minor respawning - see e.g. Grimrock games.
2) Attrition needs pemadeath or some other save restrictions. No, not really, attrition is actually the one system that makes save-scumming absolutely pointless - as long as there's no rest-at-will mechanic. If you let yourself get too low on resources to survive a trip to safety, no amount of save-scumming will help, you'll have to reload from a much earlier save.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[DraQ]

Why not have both?

 

[Old Hans]

I've a game design question for you. Which of the two do you prefer more;

- challenge enforced by battles of markedly higher difficulty than usual, with tougher, stronger, smarter enemies which will make you reload often;

- challenge enforced by many unavoidable battles with moderately difficult enemies which will drain your equipment and resources dry eventually?

I think it depends on what kind of game you're trying to create. I like the way Darkest Dungeon does attrition, where it isnt just the monsters draining your resources.

 

[DalekFlay]

I dislike it when a boss or whatever is ten times harder than the usual encounters. Especially if I am playing on hard and it's relatively easy going, and then all of a sudden a hard as fuck boss makes me question my entire build strategy. A game should more or less prove your tactics and build's worth before that.

In general though a mix of both is fine, as long as it's not that out of proportion. Also avoid doing it at the very end. Massive difficulty spikes at the end of a game, when you're probably ready to be done with it, are one of my biggest gaming pet peeves.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

If forced to choose, I prefer difficulty spikes--so long as the game plays by its own rules. Singular scenarios that test your mastery of combining resources, rather than preservation of them, are the fights that people remember in games. Few things irritate me more in a game than bosses with inexplicable immunities and unique abilities not accessible to the player. It also needs to avoid highly elaborate "murder puzzles", where a scenario can only be succeeded against in a contrived manner. It relies on good AI, which is hard to come by these days.

Attrition can be enjoyable, but it typically needs to be part of some build-up for a "difficulty spike". Something to put you off balance so you can't run in optimized for the actual challenge. The mechanics need to support it too. Attrition can get annoying in any version of D&D. Finally, attrition is a risky design choice, because it usually rewards avoidance of games obstacles. That means a large chunk of the games mechanics are going have disincentive and risk bifurcating the game. That can lead to quality issues.

 

[Tigranes]

Both, but #2 in practice is very very rarely done, especially in the last 15+ years.

There's nothing like knowing you have 2 potions / tents / mana potions / whatever and 4 rooms of enemies left to safety. Except in most games you never end up using any potions, or having 80 of them after the first act.