Shrimp
Liturgist
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2019
- Messages
- 1,065
More or less anything that's not a global change that affects the entire game (for instance just increasing all health and damage values by a certain percentage) will require some level of tinkering with every single encounter that has to be changed.I started thinking about how to regulate difficulty in these sort of games and I thought I'd ask people here a question:By playtesting I don't really mean testing for "balance", which I agree isn't that important at higher difficulties, but just testing to make sure that the extra monsters don't get stuck or otherwise spazz out because the area wasn't originally designed for that many creatures.
Fair enough, but once again, on a difficulty setting 0,5% of your playerbase is gonna play let alone complete, you can probably get away with that stuff being a bit wonky on release.
What are the base elements of difficulty in these games that can be adjusted on an encounter by encounter basis? Number of enemies; substituting enemies; enemies stats and abilities (hit points, immunities, spells available, etc.); their AI behavior; changing environmental conditions; placement of enemies... what else?
I ask because I was trying to figure out how difficult it would be for the developers to adjust that sort of stuff on a per-encounter basis at different difficulty settings.
The severity of these changes will come down to how willing they are to allocate time and resource on this. Considering difficult combat encounters isn't exactly what the game is being advertised for, I personally can't imagine they'd spend too much time tailoring every single encounter, but I guess we'll see once the game is out.