Difficulty

[krozman]

1. Difficulty. Horribly low. I took on Hardcore mode, and other than the monsters being more difficult, thus making it harder to get kill shot bonuses, it's still just too easy to consider threatening. The reason why it's so easy is because you let the mobs leash on you, and once you leash them away, you can sit and wait for full health and mana.

Because of this fact, Consider this ENTIRE GAME in a different way: Don't imagine each level as a whole, but a series of battles with monsters. The question is: Are there points inside each level that guarantee challenge to the player, i.e. possibility of death?

IF NOT, then monsters are a mere pretense to clicking on your walls and finishing the level.

IF SO, are there enough of these challenges to make any player feel a sense of accomplishment when done?


Here's my "exploit" way of survival. If I encounter a situation where I wont win by just charging in, I will run away, leash the mobs, and go get a drink of water while I regen health/mana. Is that really the intended way of playing the game, or should each battle MAKE the player choose powerups and kill selection in order to survive?

As far as solutions are concerned, there are a few I'd suggest. You could eliminate the leash mechanism, basically forcing you to kill the monster in order to rest. You can still kite them, but in order to fully feel safe each monster must die.

A possible second solution is to institute the LEGEND OF ZELDA PROGRAMMING. Sorry, Zelda did far too much in the mid 1980's that I wish people would implement. Considering the worldview of "each battle is it's own level" approach, make it so that when you go into certain areas, the doors close and FORCE you to defeat the monsters prior to being able to escape. When all mobs die, the doors open and you can freely explore, etc.

If you're old enough to remember, when you went into one of those rooms in Zelda you paid a lot more attention, and played your butt off to not die because the dealth penalty sucked.

yet another solution is to give players a POINT PENALTY for running away from any battle.

Yet another solution is to allow monsters to respawn if you run away, but that will cause people to farm monsters for powerups.

Anyway, I fear that if you don't take the difficulty of this game seriously, nobody else will either.