Difficulty curve in RPGs

[Sjukob]

Hello . I would very much like to read people's opinion about this . I've noticed that a lot of RPG games have harder begging part , but become easier as the game progresses .

I think this is quite bad and difficulty shouldn't be like this , I think that such curve indicates a somewhat bad design and developers not willing to spend proper amount of time on game's balance . It is not fair to punish a new player with strong enemies , low resources and hard to get equipment in the begging of the game . A player doesn't have access to most of the game areas in the begging , doesn't have abilities and skills he can rely on , doesn't know game mechanics and other stuff if he is playing the game for the first time . I usually loose interest in combat quite fast if the game scales like this , since after the beggining nothing can stop me and it becomes clear very soon . Besides , such difficulty curve just doesn't make sense sometimes , an epic dragon boss in the end is less frightening than the pack of wolves in the beggining .

So , eventually , a player brakes out and ventures forward only to discover that the ongoing game can't compare to the previous parts in terms of difficulty . I am sure that everyone here is familiar with this and so what do think about it ? Is it good or bad ? I stated my opinion about this and would like to hear the others . If you encountered this and feel infuriated because it ruined a game for you or if you truly believe that this is the only right approach to RPG's difficulty , than feel free to post here , I would read anything .

 

[Eirikur]

Some players will develop their characters based on what's optimal (most powerful), other players will develop them based on what makes sense from a roleplaying-perspective, and many will go with a balanced approach. Additionally, some players have a knack for learning the mechanics and adapting good tactics, while others do the equivalent of 'spray and pray'. For this reason I think it's impossible to make the endgame challenging to one type, without making it too easy or near impossible to other types. Unless you implement very sophisticated scaling based on the character's power, of course, but scaling is the work of the devil.

"Gothic II: Night of the Raven" is probably closest to my ideal so far, at least unless you're a Fire Magician in the endgame or have min/maxed your build using all permapotions etc.

 

[Animal]

The best is to have a difficulty slider with a wide range of options, which you can tune during gameplay.

But I understand your point, some games suffer a lot from this. Not so much in the "too hard at start" department, but in the too easy to care later on (like Pillars of Eternity). Again, the ability to tune difficulty on the fly helps.

 

[gestalt11]

I think its more because you tend to start off as some kind of murder hobo with no skills in a lot of RPGs more than anything else.

 

[Animal]

It's also character creation. If you pump up strength and constitution to the max at the expense of all else, you'll probably wipe the floor with rats and wolves at the start.

 

[Keldryn]

I think it's partially a side effect of the "zero to hero" progression in many RPGs. When you have a steep power curve, a beginning character can be taken out by one or two lucky hits from even the weakest monsters.

If PCs went from "competent" to "very competent" over the course of the game, the difficulty level would probably be more even. Many players might find it underwhelming to have a narrower range of progression.

 

[Telengard]

This is one of those fundamental design thingies that cannot be solved through conventional means. And that is because what people want is at odds with balanced progression. (In fact, you can see it right there in that final phrase, since that is a phrase that runs counter to the very thing that so many RPG players demand.)

So then, if you were to take a very traditional (read 80s, not 90s) RPG, you would have a game where character level is the only fundamental determiner of a character's relative power level. One can influence that power level with stats and equipment, but level is key - a 5th level fighter is a 5th level fighter is a 5th level fighter. Now then, if you couple that with a simple set of special abilities (for instance, a limited list of spell abilities), your have a system where characters are what they are. Then, if one puts that hard-coded character system into a game world with a linear structure and a fixed number of monsters, the designers would then know exactly what level the characters would be at any given point in the game, and they would know exactly what characters of that level were capable of. Because the designers know exactly where the players are going and how much experience they will have earned, and that on a fixed character system. The linearity and fixed nature of the game makes creating challenges simple, and it remains just as simple no matter how far in the game players go.

But that kind of game's not what people demand. They want choice. And as soon as choice enters the equation, there is divergence. Every choice in character development means some players will make one choice, others will make another. And the difference in relative power level between characters making these different choices is the range of divergence. What's more, the same goes for choices made in game. - Are there secret powerful weapon hidden away in dungeons? Some players will find those, others won't. That means more divergence in relative power level. - The more choices available, the greater the range of power divergence possible during the game.

Players want lots and lots of choices, but lots and lots of choices spreads the divergence far and wide. This has a number of effects, but the greatest of them all is the impossibility of directly balancing the game for all players. For proper balance, every fight would have to be keyed for every single possible choice available, so that at any point along the divergence, the fight would be precisely balanced. And that is an exponentially increasing number of balance points.

So, what's a designer to do? Difficulty sliders don't even begin to answer this issue, and actually make the problem worse, since they simply add even more choices to the game - now players will be arriving at different points in the game at different divergence and different difficulty levels. Which just makes an even wider spread of divergence.

Answers to this issue have been attempted. There is, of course, the devil's work of level scaling, but that is - by definition - the devil's work. There are some who advocate having dungeons of fixed power levels, and letting the player choose where to go and when, skipping over dungeons that they exceed the power level of and thus finding their own challenges. But 1) that means none of the dungeons involved can be part of the game's plot, since the player will be randomly skipping any number of them, which would make it really hard to understand the plot if key points are randomly being skipped. And 2) and more importantly, the skilled player will be spending an increasing amount of in-game time not playing the game at all, but instead wandering around looking for somewhere that he can start playing the game again. The farther he gets in the game, the larger the percentage of available dungeons he will need to skip, and thus the greater amount of time it will take him to find an appropriate challenge. And very few people have much patience for that sort of thing.

And so, here we are with the hacked-together solution that we have. What devs do is gather up and a bunch of playtesters and collect data on them as they play the game. From that data, devs can then find where the average player is at any given point in the game. Then the devs set the power curve at a point just below the average player.

Below the average! you gasp.

Yes. The player data falls on a bell curve, and setting the difficulty just below the average means the largest swath of people will be at or near the designed fun-point of the game all of the way to the end. And there you are. Since the game's difficulty is set below the average, most players will end up overpowered by the endgame. Unless, that is, they consciously dumb their choices down in order to maintain game balance.

Now, there are off-beat theories out there for getting around this issue. However, the vast majority of players are not accepting of off-beat solutions. They want games to play out in a traditional (read 90s-style) fashion. They want developers to be creative, but not inventive. Not at all. And thus, RPGs are the way they are, and they can't be any other way without either making players mad or being really dumb (level scaling).

 

[Ninjerk]

RPG games

 

[Lhynn]

A way to do it is to just wing it, forget about balance and plan to murder base classes. Then go back to designing the classes and give them tools to overcome said challenges. You will find that characters will be forced to use their classes to the fullest to overcome each and every challenge. Min maxing should allow them to tackle some challenges sooner, playing a substandard character will offer more challenge, but with good enough design min maxing shouldnt be viable anyway. some stuff should target the Min, in minmaxing.
I rather like 5th ed due to this, saving throws tied to skills already solves a lot of problems when it comes to munchkin builds.

Level shouldnt grant so much power as flexibility so you can deal with more situations more efficiently, and hopefully change your playstyle to keep up with the new challenges.

 

[Tigranes]

Many of us, especially Codexers, find that most RPGs become easier after the first 1/3 or so, and become a cakewalk by the end. This holds with a remarkable variety of designs and developers: FO, Witcher, Gothic, DOS... The thing is, it's often hard to figure out how much of this is due to the player (veteran RPG players will learn the ropes and start to optimise their builds and tactics) and how much is due to an objective decline in difficulty (your average DPS vs enemy HP, the introduction of win buttons, etc). It would be an interesting experiment to, say, play somebody else's save from mid/late game your first time through Arcanum or a Might and Magic.

After all, we talk about the difficulty curve, but when you fire up a game for the second time you discover that the early game really was quite easy as well in most games if you know what you are doing. A Piranha Bytes neophyte will be killed repeatedly by the fucking birds in the beach of Risen 1, and then the gnomes, and then the wolves. Playing it the second time round (or having played Gothics to death), the player finds that actually, they can be trivial if you know what to do. Same applies for more tactical turn-based games.

I suspect that a huge part of solving the difficulty curve is to continue to introduce new challenges to the player, instead of the current convention where you learn 3-4 tricks and they last you for the whole game. This even applies to relatively tactically complex games like KOTC. I would much prefer games where you continue to encounter new types of enemies and rules. POE gives you Shades who fuck up your engagement rules... but then that's about it. Arcanum gives you Ore Golems to fuck up your weapons, but again such 'special' enemies are rare. Where we do get more unusual enemies who don't play by the usual rules, we often get stupid bosses like the Witcher's Kraken that are QTE minigames rather than enemies who creatively optimise the existing ruleset.

What we need is design that really feels like enemies are playing by the same ruleset, but the Dungeon Master (dev) is really trying to have the enemies ruthlessly beat you in the same game. Consider: in Shadowrun, the fact that you can give yourself extra moves and attack 2, 3 times, but the enemy actually never makes more than one action per turn, becomes a defining factor in rendering difficulty trivial over time. Why don't we start to find enemies who use those hypo syringes on themselves and start hitting faster and more often than the player? In DOS, you get all sorts of tools to teleport enemies on top of barrels and set pools of oil on fire, but enemies for the most part act oblivious to all these possibilities. Why don't I find more enemies that drop me onto problematic areas or on top of my own ally? Why does no enemy in Arcanum that I remember cast Tempus Fugit? Hell, do any of them even throw Stun Grenades? Why not have such enemies be introduced in specific areas mid/lategame to spice up the tactics that you've become used to?

 

[Telengard]

For POE, I wouldn't know, but my goto guess would be the usual for any low-budget game - lack of time and resources.

But for the big picture out there, I'll make a sweeping generalization and say AI issues. Enemies can be given lots of attack options, as long as all of those options do roughly the same thing, a la a Bioware game. For instance, an Ogre can have 10 different attacks, and as long as all of those attacks are some variation of Do Damage, the Ogre will function in combat. Some of those attacks may do more or less damage, some may be sweep attacks versus heavy single hitters, some may cause various status effects, but the core remains the same. Hit foe. Assign a randomizer to the 10 attacks, and the ogre is ready to go into combat. At any particular moment, it may randomly pick a less than optimal attack for a given situation, but overall it won't do anything really dumb.

Give that Ogre a bull rush ability, though, and things get iffy fast. When is it a good idea for that Ogre to do no damage in one round for the possibility of briefly removing one opponent from the fray? When is it a good idea to move out of position to make that attack? Is making that move going to leave allies exposed to a gang-bang from the remainder of the party, who will then turn on the Ogre and destroy him now that he has no allies? Is the party trying to trick the Ogre into moving into position to expose it to a billion AoOs? How is the AI going to make this decision, and make it well?

Unless doing a scripted battle section, even if the AI is capable of doing such a maneuver according to the rules, the possibility usually has to be turned off or the AI will just shit itself over and over. For instance, the AI in SR: D will throw Stun Grenades. But its evaluation system to do so is so simple, the player can cause it to throw a stun grenade in order to prevent it from doing something that would be more effective simply by doing the things that make it throw and then punishing it for making that mistake. There are simply too many possibilities that have to be weighed for an AI to function with many of the usual pnp variety-makers.

A clever designer, given time enough, can find clever ways of surprising the player that don't break the AI. But each such clever possibility has to be first thought of, and then it has be programmed in, and there's only so much time available. It's an uphill climb, and an expensive one. Not to mention, being clever doesn't get you more pay and your games more sales. The popular designers are the ones who make shinies, and the famous designers are the ones who make pretty writing. Being clever gets you nothing but notice by other game designers. And who fucking needs that?

 

[Telengard]

And while I'm on my design soapbox - the other related big question often asked here: why hasn't story-based C&C evolved in these Kickstarters despite advances in computer technology and game design?

It's not the stalling of RPGs for 10 years. No, it's the fact that computer tech was never the big wall that C&C runs up against. The big wall for C&C is number of pages written. That's it. The more C&C, the greater the compounding on the number of pages that must be written to expound upon all of those choices. Just as with a CYOA, where the actual story is short-story length, but there's lots more pages than a short story, a story C&C game needs lots of text. And on top of that, a huge C&C section tends to weaken the overall story quality, since - by the very nature of stories - stories rise in quality as they build upon the themes and events within them. And C&C denies any event as actually happening, so the story can't build. Thus, in order to maintain story quality, the C&C has to be written to a higher quality in order just to maintain the baseline quality of the story.

So, more C&C means a demand for many more good quality pages. And that causes a run into the same budget resources that are being demanded by complex combat and more 3d shinies and, well, everything else.

 

[laclongquan]

If you make the game goes harder, the player will think that there's no reward for playing well in the early period. :futile:

You can think of many game like that. The late game enemies are harder and drop off better gears (for player to have means to deal with them). And so players will think it's futile gameplay.

You can change it with many methods:
- Open up their possible range of enemies and range of damage. Like, early game you got normal melee damage, but middle game enemies can use stun and other abnormal statuses from ranged attacks.
- Open up the axis of threats. Early game you only has to deal with one group, but later on there are more, and appearing at most inconvenient place. Like, you got normal clumps of hostiles on the map, but when you approach the highest point of the area you find it's occupied by a group of ranged attackers raining down on you, something that wont happen at early game's map because the ranged wont appear early.
- Open up the difficulty. Like logistic, for example. early game you dont have to think about pays for troops/heroes because they are dirt cheap, but later on the high level demand high pay AND some special consideration, like precious material to use their special skills

 

[Invictus]

One of the ganes with a pretty much perfect curve was Wizardry 7 since it had this very good system where there was level scaling in each area but they were set up so they had a flexible scaling setup. Sure some areas had tougher encounters than others but since they had a maximum they could reach, for example in Orkogre Castle you would start the area fighting archers and rangers and eventualy as you went deeper into the castle and you level up you woild start running into lancers and samurai by the time you finished up the area. So enemies would raise acording to your level but top out depending on the area you were in, therefore giving you the feeling of growing in power till you went to a further area were you might run into stronger enemies abd begin all over again
That was a series that always remained challenging, by goofying around you could getting killed in a random encounter by a misfired spell or getting hit by multiple status effects
The Souls series also does that really well but as others have mentioned the gane isnt tied that much to your character stats and gaining experience but in yourself getting the experience and learning the patterns and combos to take on any enemy... Thise games are almost like small real time puzzles were you have to figure out which was to proceed as not to get your butt kicked

 

[sser]

I like games that start out very hard but through a mixture of increased player skill (learning) and acquired items/successes the game gets easier. It has a much better feel of progression and there's some real satisfaction to be had in stomping old enemies that used to fuck you up. The world is also more alive for having areas so dangerous you can't venture there makes it feel like it's bigger than you. Risen/Gothics are a good show of this. Skyrim is a good show of the exact opposite (killing a dragon 30mins into the game).

 

[Tigranes]

If you make the game goes harder, the player will think that there's no reward for playing well in the early period. :futile:

People think that? My reward for playing is to continue to have fun, that is, be challenged. Of course you don't want to feel like you're never getting more powerful, but that's why it's important for enemies to throw new curveballs at you, instead of just becoming HP obese.

Generally, today, the mechanic is scarcity early on, abundance later on - and there is no counterweight to the abundance. So you have lots of gold and consumables in RPGs, lots of troops to spare in strategy-RPGs, etc... and nothing to really balance it out. I would be interested in systems that expand things like Arcanum's aptitudes, so that early level you can really make use of anything you find to a limited effectiveness, but later you grow super-strong in some areas, and in compensation, even weaker/more vulnerable than at the start for others. You might be able to chuck grenades and swing swords early on, but if you then build a fencer, you're going to have a really tough time against, say, ranged enemies.

 

[laclongquan]

Okay, I worded that badly.

What I mean is that if you increase the degree of challenges in early difficulty, like instead of killing 5 goblin fighters, now you have to kill 50... oop dee doo~ then the player wont feel that the effort they put in accumulating xp/level and gears are worth the time.

You must increase the dimensions and the depths of difficulty. So that the early efforts are paid off in ONE way, but since the difficulty increase in many ways, it's not enough. Players must play smarter, and change the way to adapt to the new challenges.

 

[skyst]

I would say that every RPG that we've gotten out of our renaissance of late has had the same challenge with remaining difficult past the first 1/3 of the game. I've played most of them, always on the hardest difficulty (but not iron man, when offered) and can't think of a single one where the latter part of the game is even remotely challenging.

Most recent games on our radars (and my Steam library...) are just easy, regardless of difficulty levels: Divinity: OS, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Skyrim, Expeditions: Conquistador, Legend of Grimrock 2, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns + Dragonfall, South Park: TSoT (lol), Wasteland 2, Witcher 3, XCOM: EU

A handful of others can be challenging on the hardest difficulties due to questionable game design: Game of Thrones RPG, Lords of Xulima, Mars: War Logs

Some others come to mind with irritating and unjustified difficulty spikes like Banner Saga and Blackguards, where maybe one or two missions are randomly excessively hard.

For all of the hate they get, Mass Effect 2 and 3 are some of the only games that I can think of that remained challenging to the end. Then again, I have only ever played them on Nightmare (or equivalent) as a Vanguard (shotgun guy), so it's entirely possible that the class is horrible - regardless, it's a fun ride through an otherwise disappointing pair of games. However, those games have hardly any build and gear variation and little to no XP grind potential, so it's certainly far easier to balance as opposed to something like PoE.

The open worlds and side quests of many recent games could be to blame. When the end dungeon has to accommodate main quest rushers at level 12 and completionists at level 30, scaling seems like the right choice. It feels dirty... and wrong, so wrong, but what other options are there?

 

[KK1001]

Making a game that is challenging for the top 10% of skilled players is more rewarding than trying to accommodate everyone with a difficulty slider. I really can't think of many games that do this however. The problem is that if you've played games your entire life, you have acquired a ton of general "game" skills that just make most games trivial, especially since we really aren't doing anything fundamentally different than we were almost 20 years ago. Moreover, developers are of average skill at best, and focus groups don't help much either. The fear of alienating people because it was "too hard" was, up until recently, something companies avoiding like the fucking plague.

My "ideal" game difficulty provides a suitable challenge as you adjust to the game mechanics, and then ratchets it up fairly quickly, peaking pretty close to the end.

A lot of games provide a linear or linear-plateau-linear increase in difficulty. For the former, player learning quickly trivializes much of the game. For the latter (which is much more common) it provides a few initial challenges as the player uses the relatively easy sections of the game and then feels a sense of reward in the beginning-middle, it loses a lot of the edge come the mid-game. Things become tedious and the game just throws a ton of shit at you that just gets in your way. People are naturally going to adjust to the game, so you should continue to challenge them throughout. For RPGs, this means making things pretty damn difficult off the bat. Let people fail and adjust. Just when they're comfortable, hit them with something new and challenging. Get them conditioned to react in a certain way and fuck with their mental training. In the end the best way to do this is with hand-crafted encounters, little puzzles with an optimal solution and a couple adequate solutions and a few that just might be crazy enough if to work if the player is skilled enough.

 

[Sjukob]

"Gothic II: Night of the Raven" is probably closest to my ideal so far, at least unless you're a Fire Magician in the endgame or have min/maxed your build using all permapotions etc.

From my experience , gothic 2 night of the raven becomes too easy after you finished with Jharkendar and I always went there at the start of Act 2 . I always play pure melee if it matters .

The best is to have a difficulty slider with a wide range of options, which you can tune during gameplay.

But I understand your point, some games suffer a lot from this. Not so much in the "too hard at start" department, but in the too easy to care later on (like Pillars of Eternity). Again, the ability to tune difficulty on the fly helps.

Your second statement is correct . Difficulty slider is nice , but might some players might abuse it ( I did it myself ) , so I personally would prefer unchangeable from the start .

I think its more because you tend to start off as some kind of murder hobo with no skills in a lot of RPGs more than anything else.

That is what I still can't understand , why developers keep sticking to this . Since player usualy gets a mature character to play with , it's quite silly that they are so unskilled and can't do anything .


Telengard , I understand your point . If the player has more freedom , then the developers have harder time managing things he can access .


Ninjerk . Noted .

A way to do it is to just wing it, forget about balance and plan to murder base classes. Then go back to designing the classes and give them tools to overcome said challenges. You will find that characters will be forced to use their classes to the fullest to overcome each and every challenge. Min maxing should allow them to tackle some challenges sooner, playing a substandard character will offer more challenge, but with good enough design min maxing shouldnt be viable anyway. some stuff should target the Min, in minmaxing.
I rather like 5th ed due to this, saving throws tied to skills already solves a lot of problems when it comes to munchkin builds.

Level shouldnt grant so much power as flexibility so you can deal with more situations more efficiently, and hopefully change your playstyle to keep up with the new challenges.

So , if I understand you correctly , you suggest to make the beggining tougher , but make make character's abilities easier to get and player's strength shouldn't strongly depend on level , so the player eventually will choose tools he feels more comfortable with and maximizes what he feels like .
Alright , this might sound good to me , but the main question here is how to handle difficulty in later game .

I suspect that a huge part of solving the difficulty curve is to continue to introduce new challenges to the player, instead of the current convention where you learn 3-4 tricks and they last you for the whole game. This even applies to relatively tactically complex games like KOTC. I would much prefer games where you continue to encounter new types of enemies and rules. POE gives you Shades who fuck up your engagement rules... but then that's about it. Arcanum gives you Ore Golems to fuck up your weapons, but again such 'special' enemies are rare. Where we do get more unusual enemies who don't play by the usual rules, we often get stupid bosses like the Witcher's Kraken that are QTE minigames rather than enemies who creatively optimise the existing ruleset.

Yeah and I hate it when enemies can have special prefixes and player can't , especially when developers try to balance the game with them . The best example I can think of is Might and Magic X , I hope you are familiar with this game , because I am going to explain why I don't like "tricky" enemies , using this game as an example , enemies have immunities , passive abilities to stun , to poison , resistances and other crap like this . Why my characters can't have it ? Why my crusader isn't naturally resistant to light magic ? Why hostile orks are resistant to fire , but orc in my party is not? Why humands with shields have passive ability to stun on crits , but my crusader with shield can't do that ? Why enemies with large weapons can hit multiple characters , but my barbarian with mace as big as himself can't do that ? Wraith in this game is a fucking joke , they are immune to poison as they are undead , so you can't damage them with earth magic , since it mainly uses poison as damage source , they also have high resistance against dark and primordial maigic , so 3 out of 7 magic schools are ineffective against them , they also have high HP pool , so it's not like your warriors can take them down easily , also I was specking my mages in those exact schools wraiths are resistant against , the most excellent experience I had indeed . I hope I made myself clear on this , I feel handicapped , I always thought that such "tricks" kinda humiliate the player , but it's personal opinion of course , I wasted those ghosts with much less problems than I make it look like , but it was very irritating to me . If enemies are given ressitances , immunities , then the player should have full acess to them as well , this is what Telengard was speaking about , that it is hard to balance the game for everyone . While I had troubles with those enemies , other players who developed their characters in different way probably found them easier .

Oh and those Ore golems in Arcanum . The first time I encountered them in Black mountain clan , I decided to come back with blunt weapon , I bought a hammer and tried hitting them with it , but surprisingly it didn't work , for that moment I thought that there is no weapon in the game that can damage them without getting broken , so I decieded to use fists and since I was playing a warrior , and had a 20 strength by that time , it wasn't a problem . But one time I noticed that in order to break some object ( crates , metal doors , robots , engines ) in melee , you have to use axe . I tried to use axe on golems and oh gosh , it works ! What the fuck ?! Why the fuck do you use the axe to destroy a stone golem? Just another game feature , I guess . . . Anyway , I think the idea with tricks is not good , since player has no idea on what to expect next and RPGs are so dependent on level , and usually don't have options for player to change his abilities ( again , this is what Telengard was talking about ) , it's just not fair to make certain abilities player invested in useless or weaker , because there is some sort of the "unique and special" enemy like golem for example , he can't be hit with melee weapons other than axes making your sword warrior useless against him , is that fair ? Would that be fair if golem can't hit warrior who don't wield an axe ? Huh .

 

[Sjukob]

If you make the game goes harder, the player will think that there's no reward for playing well in the early period. :futile:

You can think of many game like that. The late game enemies are harder and drop off better gears (for player to have means to deal with them). And so players will think it's futile gameplay.

You can change it with many methods:
- Open up their possible range of enemies and range of damage. Like, early game you got normal melee damage, but middle game enemies can use stun and other abnormal statuses from ranged attacks.
- Open up the axis of threats. Early game you only has to deal with one group, but later on there are more, and appearing at most inconvenient place. Like, you got normal clumps of hostiles on the map, but when you approach the highest point of the area you find it's occupied by a group of ranged attackers raining down on you, something that wont happen at early game's map because the ranged wont appear early.
- Open up the difficulty. Like logistic, for example. early game you dont have to think about pays for troops/heroes because they are dirt cheap, but later on the high level demand high pay AND some special consideration, like precious material to use their special skills

I never understood that talk about reward , I thought that playing a game ( any sort of game , not only videogame ) is about overcoming a challenge , if you can't you lose , so you seek the way to do the tasks you currently have , if you can then you win and victory is your biggest reward.
Your methods make sense to me .

I like games that start out very hard but through a mixture of increased player skill (learning) and acquired items/successes the game gets easier. It has a much better feel of progression and there's some real satisfaction to be had in stomping old enemies that used to fuck you up. The world is also more alive for having areas so dangerous you can't venture there makes it feel like it's bigger than you. Risen/Gothics are a good show of this. Skyrim is a good show of the exact opposite (killing a dragon 30mins into the game).

I already told that my problem , is that there are no real opponents after the game starts to get easier . So you can proceed to faceroll everything . You see there is no middle ground after some point in the game and that is what bothers me .

Okay, I worded that badly.

What I mean is that if you increase the degree of challenges in early difficulty, like instead of killing 5 goblin fighters, now you have to kill 50... oop dee doo~ then the player wont feel that the effort they put in accumulating xp/level and gears are worth the time.

You must increase the dimensions and the depths of difficulty. So that the early efforts are paid off in ONE way, but since the difficulty increase in many ways, it's not enough. Players must play smarter, and change the way to adapt to the new challenges.

The efforts always pays off , I honestly can't remember a game ( even with escalating difficulty ) that denies your early efforts .

Divinity: OS

I see that many people say that D:OS is easy game , do you fellas honestly just stomped enemies like Braccus Rex , Evelyn and that guy ( can't remember his name ) who appears in the cathedral when you take the White Witch's blood on hard difficulty?


I know that a lot of people hate world scaling with player . But do you think about Daggerfall scaling ? The enemies that appear on higher levels are quite scary and can kill you in a second , but in the begging , the game is quite friendly to the player .

 

[Innsmouth Dweller]

that's why it's called difficulty curve. i personally like being rewarded for all that hard work of learning the game and ass whooping i received on 1nd or 2nd level. and i love if there is no difficulty curve similarities between classes - mages always have it hard in the begining, only to faceroll later, warriors are complete opposite.

if the game is easy at the begining, i'm not really interested, there's no challenge. later, when combat becomes repetitive and boring, i don't mind it being too easy.

 

[KK1001]

I get that sentiment. Personally I find more enjoyment from recognizing and overcoming challenges than I do from demonstrating all the hard work I've learned. I think there's a place for that but I don't think it is in RPGs.

 

[Zetor]

This topic seems to come up a lot recently; fwiw, I think Telengard hit most of the important points.

I'd expand a bit on optional content and the problem with the completionist mindset of your typical RPG player. As discussed before, most RPGs have a lot of 'side content' (optional missions, "secret" areas, bonus objectives, etc) that reward the player both by providing them more gameplay and increasing the power of their character(s), making the rest of the game much easier... sure, some of this side content is designed to be super-hard and/or require the player to consume resources, but they still come out ahead when they get the reward in the end. IMO the real problem is that most players feel compelled to do all such optional content and the designers are doing their best to convince the rest of them too, otherwise all that time/money spent on the side content is wasted! So unless someone deliberately sticks to the critical path, their characters will be overpowered by midgame.

I'd probably deal with this by adding tradeoffs to side content. The obvious solution is imposing a time limit (it doesn't even have to be super-strict, see Fallout 1). If the player REALLY has to go after Irenicus before he succeeds in draining the Bhaal essence and destroying Suldanesselar, they won't be inclined to do every single time-consuming sidequest in Athkatla. If trekking across half the wastes to do a '100% exploration run' unlocking shrines and side-zones in Wasteland 2 wastes enough time so that the enemy can march across the map and raze settlements (maybe even causing a soft/hard failure state), players will try to focus on the main story track and just complete optional zones as they find them 'normally'. Of course time limits have lots of caveats (it's kinda mean to put the player in a fail state without them being aware of it, there should be a way to catch up and still win the game after the 'last warning', etc), but I never saw anyone whine about Star Control 2 because the Kohr-ah destroy the universe if the player spends too much time hunting biological data or rainbow worlds. Hell, even the really soft solution of Wizardry 7 (if you screw around too much, NPC parties will take key items and you'll have to trade or fight them for it) is better than nothing.

The other option is just making content exclusive (you can go to A, but then you can't go to B -- this usually doesn't work out well, see also the initial decision point of Wasteland 2), or making sidequests have consequences that aren't entirely positive. A good example of this is Gecko in Fallout 2, where doing the 'optimal' solution to the side quest ends up screwing the ghouls in the end. Another example would be a sidequest where the player breaks the sensitive balance of power / stalemate in some settlement, and even though the player "wins" by completing the sidequest and getting the rewards, everyone in the settlement is going to suffer from the consequences of the conflict to some degree.

 

[Tigranes]

Sjukob Yes, I'm familiar with M&MX. I don't think that particular game was as unfair as you describe it, because the player also had many different kinds of immunities, etc. available. But your general point, I agree with. The enemy shouldn't be using special cheap tricks. Ideally, the enemy uses the same rules as the player, but uses them with enough smarts and diversity. Now, as Telengard shows, this is often difficult due to the load on the AI. So I'm OK with occasional, sensible, transparent enemy bonuses. E.g. one of the easiest things for players to abuse and the hardest for AI to deal with is when players slip in and out of line of sight and use MMO pull/kite methods. Hence, SCS-modded BG1/2 uses a magical-instant Call to Arms trick to get enemies to converge on the player, which is sensible. The worst case is when the player gets bonuses in the ruleset but the enemy is too stupid to use them: e.g. enemies never drinking potions, or Shadowrun where the enemies just get banned from having more than 1 action per turn just because.

Zetor this would have made a great FNV DLC: you start off with a limited set of survival resources (let's say, 8 waterskins' worth of drinking water) and within the DLC world you aren't getting more, so how you use that up for MQ/side quests matters and you can't save everyone. A more radical use is, of course, if players' abilities actually had permanent costs - e.g. a KOTOR game where using Light/Dark side powers actually had permanent maluses for your character, rather than "OMG TATTOOS".