THE NERFENING
6 NOVEMBER -
GOLDEN ERA GAMES
I never dreamed after I released Grimoire that the biggest outcry would be that the game got too easy with the exploits. I left the exploits in so players could discover them and that way nobody could say the game was too hard once you knew what they were.
Somehow,
MUH BALINSE became a thing. Woe onto those who ask for
MUH BALINSE and receive it, for they shall weep tears of snowflake angst when it arrives!
The biggest spell exploits like
Deep Freeze have been nerfed down to much more modest levels. The Bards have had their skills trimmed to where they are formidable but not decisive. This has made the game much more difficult. Monsters think harder about targeting when they are directing their attacks and they save better against the attacks by the party in all forms.
The game has gotten harder and fairer across the board, with spells like
TIMESTOP reduced to brief advantages that fade quickly.
I plan to release V2 within a week but it is likely that work on V3 will begin thereafter and there will still be tweaking going on before the end of the year. A game this complex requires colossal cycles of testing and adjustment that I was not able to complete before getting it out last year, despite several successive Q&As with thousands of players on the beta version.
It is only recently within the last two years I got automated testing and test harnesses for Grimoire. If I had to do a similar game again from scratch, this time the unit testing framework would be one of the first things I'd get running. The fine tuning of the game is very difficult compared to most software because a single percentage point can tip the logarithmic curves of the way combat works and responds to the player. I was reading the original history of Wizardry once about the extensive test frameworks created by Woodhead and Greenberg - and it is obvious how brilliant they were to foresee what kind of testing was needed for quality assurance in a game like this. I had been working on Grimoire for five years before it became apparent that I had badly neglected this aspect when starting work on the game. Coming from my background mostly writing arcade games for the Commodore 64 this was something I had not been properly exposed to. Trying to play catch-up now but these things are much easier to design at the outset than at the end.
