Difficulty and Character improvement.

[Terraziel]

I'm apologising beforehand if this comes of like a rant....

I'll start by saying that I am probably in the minority by playing on the highest difficulty for both Combat and Platforming, which is why to some extent this a query about what others feel about it rather than assertions to change it.

"Before I manged to post it Edit": Having read the patch notes this is even more of a concern.

The more I play, and consequently the better I get at the game, the more I feel that there is a fundamental disconnect between Difficulty (as in the players experience of the game rather than just the setting) and the way character improvement currently works.

Character improvements (both upgrades and enchants) undercut the difficulty of the game significantly, because the game is essentially balanced for NOT having them, for various good reasons.

Now I'm going to point out somethings I see as being fairly obvious, if I'm wrong feel free to correct me but as I understand it the system works like this...

Tier one spells do the "correct" amount of damage to a tier one enemy.
Tier two spells do an overpowered amount of damage to a tier one enemy.
Tier one spells do an underpowered amount of damage to a tier two enemy.

That is all fine, but if I can increase the damage output of my spells by 100% via upgrades and enchants (which is very easy) before even getting out of tier one, then the system collapses.

Enemies that would taking the "correct" damage are now being overpowered, and enemies being overpowered before are being slaughtered, and the tier increases do nothing to stop this, there is now no point at which I am underpowered (excluding deep caves).

And that's just for damage, which is pretty bad, but if you look at health similar things apply. Say my base character can take 3-7 shots (depending on enemy) before dying, with relatively little investment that is now 6-14, then 9-21 etc. and because, as I figure the way the system seems to be working is that the only way to take extra damage from an enemy is if the enemy is a higher tier than the world, then Tier changes don't effect this either.

Now obviously, what does change as you play is the enemies attacking you, and to some degree this balances it out, but not by much.

The reason I actually started investigating this is because It occurred to me, as i reflected on playing the game on hard, that I had been putting the difficulty up to maintain the challenge not to increase it.

Now, lots of complaint up there, but this is a discussion. so...

Had you noticed the game getting easier?

Do you care?

The latter is probably the important one, personally as I near the end of a game (any game not just AVWW) I inevitably end up experiencing a sort of profound disappointment when I realise that the difficulty has peaked, and that the game will just get easier from here.

The reason I started this thread is because, I haven't actually started "playing" the game yet, I am still for the purposes of testing making what my mind knows to be poor choices, currently I am trying a build with all upgrades in damage, and it is fairly hard to survive, my hatred for clockwork probes knows no bounds, but I know I could half the difficulty just by putting one point into health.

Are people like me supposed to nerf themselves for the purposes of a challenge, or should the system be changed?

I shall note that aside from lowering the percentages on upgrades and enchants quite significantly (as in a 30% increase requiring every bonus you can muster) , I have no ideas what can be done.

[x4000]

Whew, I skimmed the above, but rest assured this is not something that we've been blind to.  The plan, so you know, is this:

1. As you gain enchants, you're also unlocking unlockables, many of which are making for harder enemy types and patterns.  Thus the overall difficulty of enemies are growing as you are growing power.  It's a sub-linear growth, but the idea is that you'll need those enchants in order to deal with the harder enemies that you're unlocking.  That's more or less their purpose.

2. Right now the difficulty of enemies is out of whack in general, being far too few hits to kill most stuff.  This is almost a separate topic, but it's just a general note here.

3. When it comes to your upgrades to your character, this is more intended to deal with the higher tiers of enemies.  You upgrade your health or whatever else through upgrades and through upgrading spell progressions, while enemies (and your allies) get upgraded through the tiers.

4. Actually, having a tier+1 of a spell is what we're going to be aiming more for in terms of "baseline" damage to most bosses in particular, because so much of the time that's what you'll have.  First order of business upon getting to a new tier is getting tier+1 spells.  Of course, this makes tier 5 the hardest, because you can't get tier+1.  Which is the idea.

In your average RPG game, you have a linear progression that goes something like this:

Character Level 1 -> 99
Equipment quality tier 1-> 10
Enemy Level 1-> 60

And thus you can combine your own level and equipment quality to take on enemies of whatever level, and you can massively over-level enemies by the end.  But this is not an RPG.  In your average adventure game, you have something like this:

Character health 3 -> 20
Character equipment options 0 -> 20
Enemy complexity/health/power 1 -> 20

And the balance THERE comes from hand-tuning everything.  It's not possible to "over level" the enemy, unlike an RPG.  This is getting closer to what we're doing, but still doesn't really model it.  Here's the model we're actually using, which actually has two progression tiers:

GLOBAL PROGRESSION TIER
----------------------------------
Enemy complexity/health/power 1 -> (via unlockables)
Character enchants 0 -> ?? (via enchant containers)
Character available spell power 1 -> ?? (via unlockables giving you new and more powerful spells to deal with the inflated enemies).

PER-CONTINENT PROGRESSION TIER
-------------------------------------------
Enemy health/damage/speed 1 -> 5 (via continent tier) -- or even up to 10 if you like dangerous spelunking.
Character health/mana/power ?? - ?? (via upgrade stones) - this is a very fuzzy sort of area, but it all stays within certain bounds; you can over-level enemies, but only to a point
Character equipment quality 1 -> 5 (via continent tier +1) -- and not being able to go higher than 5, unlike enemies in caves


What you wind up with, then, is two separate progressions, one of which is a per-continent loop and one of which is global.  What you are rightly recognizing is that neither is complete quite yet, or fully balanced, but that's something we need to fix in the next 3 weeks.  Key points about this design:

1. It provides long-term ways to improve yourself and get new challenges even beyond the first three continents.
2. Each continent is still kind of like a "New Game +" in the sense that many aspects of the game "reset" on each continent.
3. It is definitely possible -- and desirable -- for players to be able to over-level enemies in an RPG-style sense, but that gets progressively harder to do the longer you play through the natural interactions of the mechanisms noted above.


One of the things I already have planned for the next release is a massive shift in combat difficulty effects.  I'm noticing that on hero difficulty, enemies are about 1/3 as powerful as they are supposed to be, and that's without my using any enchants.

In the meantime, even with that change, you will notice for a while that things will be a little on the easier side.  Why?  Because we've added all the enchants before we've added all the new enemies.  So you get your side of the global progression, but the enemies don't yet have theirs.  It's out of balance simply by virtue of our work not yet being done.

Hopefully this puts your mind at ease a bit, and explains where we are going with this, anyhow.  What you said didn't come off as a rant, but about a month ago I was going through the same though process you just were (the reason being that I knew what we were planning at the time, and you're just now seeing it in action).  The solution outlined above is what I came up with to combat this problem, and is why we proceeded along the current development path between then and now.

[BobTheJanitor]

As usual, I've finished typing this after Chris posted what appears to be a long and informative response. So this may not make sense now, but I'm posting it anyway. Yay!

A lot of good points in there, but one thing that seems pretty obvious to me is that it's awfully hard to make enemy damage balance out when (thanks to upgrades) your character can have anywhere from below 100 up to more than 800 hit points. How do you balance enemy damage for that? I have no idea. I'm afraid to say I think the previous system was a little better in this regard. Yes, you could build an 800 hit point (or 800%, same thing) character, but every 100 hit points you lost a health tank, so it still encouraged you to play like every 100 points was an entire health bar. So you balance damage around the assumption that everyone has 100 hit points and it comes out pretty well.

Of course, damage balance is very flaky right now because -X% damage enchants are basically broken, reducing damage by way more than they should be. So if you've got any of those on, it's going to skew the numbers rather drastically. (It also appears anything that does 20% or more damage reduction is actually turning damage into healing currently, whee!) But once that is fixed, the basic problem of how to balance damage versus health will still be there. Perhaps health buffs need to be more normalized? So a base character might have 100 HP and a character with all 10 of their upgrade slots used by health buffs would only get up to 200 HP. Then you normalize damage around the 100 HP character and everything is much more reasonable. (Or do 1000 HP base and 2000 max, so the numbers can be more granular, whatever works)

[x4000]

This was coming anyhow, so it's unrelated to the timing of this thread (but good timing anyhow), but I figured I would point out this is in the next version:

* In general, monster health was not at the level it was a few weeks ago, due to unintended consequences of various rebalancing.  Actually, all difficulties were erroneously having monsters at the same level of baseline health, even, which was one of the central problems.  Therefore, a correction was in order:
** Featherweight monster health is 0.3 of the "baseline" health.
** Apprentice monster health is now 0.75 of the "baseline" health.
** Adept monster health is now 1.5 of the "baseline" health.
** Hero monster health is now 3 of the "baseline" health.
** Master Hero monster health is now 5 of the "baseline" health.
** The Chosen One monster health is now 8 of the "baseline" health.

* Summoned monsters and player ally minions no longer get their helath messed about with in the manner of enemy monsters.
** This means that they are much more powerful now on featherweight and apprentice, but they are now a little bit weaker on adept and incredibly weaker on hero and up.
*** How exactly this will change battlefields on the very highest difficulties is something we'll have to experiment with; in general we want to make more ways for you to buff your allies for these sorts of things in general, so that will just probably become required at the highest difficulties in order to carry a battlefield mission off.
*** For summoned monsters, the reasoning here is that, like any other spell you would cast, your spells should not get more powerful (or weaker) on a higher or lower difficulty level.  So that's just bringing these in lines with every other spell you have.
*** For regular NPCs, it is worth noting, they are not affected by this one way or the other.

EDIT: Corrected the first batch of noted changes, because those were further off than I thought.  No wonder the difficulty was too low lately!  On the highest difficulty monsters had the same health as on the lowest!

[Hyfrydle]

I play the game on the difficulty just above default and find most areas are a little too easy so I should perhaps push it up. The exception to this is the battlefield missions where I need to reduce the difficulty as the allies just get mown down on any difficulty higher than default. At the default level it is perhaps a little too easy so a sweet spot between the two would suit me.

Another observation I have is the assasination missions seem a little light on enemies so a few more would help these become more challenging.

[x4000]

A lot of good points in there, but one thing that seems pretty obvious to me is that it's awfully hard to make enemy damage balance out when (thanks to upgrades) your character can have anywhere from below 100 up to more than 800 hit points. How do you balance enemy damage for that? I have no idea. I'm afraid to say I think the previous system was a little better in this regard. Yes, you could build an 800 hit point (or 800%, same thing) character, but every 100 hit points you lost a health tank, so it still encouraged you to play like every 100 points was an entire health bar. So you balance damage around the assumption that everyone has 100 hit points and it comes out pretty well.

Actually, I think the current system is far superior.  This isn't WoW, where you basically just stand there and trade blows.  Numerical evenness of your own health stats are not important to balance.  I balance the enemy spells such that, on the adept difficulty level, you're likely to want about 100 HP per tier of the enemy if you hope to take an average amount of damage.  This means that, since that's an average difficulty, you can get far more than that and really overpower the monsters, which is fine.  It is supposed to be on the easier side.

On the flip side, at the higher difficulties, it's meant so that you are faced with a hard choice: if you want to be a damage sponge, you'll of course need more health.  But you need more firepower in order to take out those enemies, too.  So the question becomes: just how good at dodging are you?  If you are good at dodging, you don't need much health, and you can focus most of your upgrades into attack power.  This is what I try to do, but I still want around 300 health just to be safe.  I play on Hero.

What this also means is that, on higher difficulties, if you're playing in this fashion you're faced with another choice: either boss battles are really long and protracted, or you're really minmaxing to huge effect, or you are dodging like crazy but at the same time taking close to one-hit kills anytime you miss a dodge.  At that level of play, any of the above seem appropriate to me, and what the player chooses is based on their own skills and preferences.

Of course, damage balance is very flaky right now because -X% damage enchants are basically broken, reducing damage by way more than they should be. So if you've got any of those on, it's going to skew the numbers rather drastically. (It also appears anything that does 20% or more damage reduction is actually turning damage into healing currently, whee!) But once that is fixed, the basic problem of how to balance damage versus health will still be there. Perhaps health buffs need to be more normalized? So a base character might have 100 HP and a character with all 10 of their upgrade slots used by health buffs would only get up to 200 HP. Then you normalize damage around the 100 HP character and everything is much more reasonable. (Or do 1000 HP base and 2000 max, so the numbers can be more granular, whatever works)

To some extent, this game is impossible to balance, like any RPG.  You can identify points where things move smoothly and places where the player suddenly feels the need to grind (there were two such points in FF6, for me), but in general it is possible at any time for the player to choose to grind for a while, and then wield an enormous advantage for a while.  That's the nature of an RPG, and while This Is Not An RPG, as I keep adamantly saying, that sort of effect does carry through here.  If you grind enchants for a while, then things will be easier.  This is desirable, because it lets you overcome impossible-to-you challenges without having to cave and lower the difficulty.

On the other hand, eventually things are going to catch up with you, and things stop being so easy.  You unlock some wicked new monster types or behaviors, and suddenly those enchants you got aren't just extra bonuses, they are the minimum bar for doing well at your current difficulty level.

This is opposed to, say, AI War where the level of challenge is expected to be kind of a smooth ramp the entire time (more or less).  This takes more the freeform RPG approach, in general, and that means that players can find themselves wherever they like on the spectrum for a while.  If you put in time and effort to powering yourself up early, then... well, you're extra powerful for a while, and have the satisfaction of rolling some bosses for a while.  That's fun, and if it didn't work that way, people (including myself) would really complain.  The important point is that it has to eventually come back into balance based on the natural progression of the game, and I think that once we have our boss work done that it will.

Unless, of course, you choose to play at too low of a difficulty for your skill level.   Then, as with any game, even AI War, you can just cheese the enemy and have a grand old romp without having to really worry much.  That's certainly a valid way to play, too.  I know that after my dad and uncle got stomped too many times in a row on difficulty 7 in AI War, they downed the difficulty to 4/4 and smashed the heck out of the AI in spite.  They had a grand time doing it, and then went back to 7/7 feeling more refreshed.  I don't see anything wrong with that, either.

[x4000]

I play the game on the difficulty just above default and find most areas are a little too easy so I should perhaps push it up. The exception to this is the battlefield missions where I need to reduce the difficulty as the allies just get mown down on any difficulty higher than default. At the default level it is perhaps a little too easy so a sweet spot between the two would suit me.

Another observation I have is the assasination missions seem a little light on enemies so a few more would help these become more challenging.

Wait for the next version, for sure -- I'll be very curious to see what you think of the difficulty there.

[KDR_11k]

That reminds me why I like better rewards for tougher fights: It baits players into playing at the maximum difficulty they can handle and constantly push themselves to get those better rewards. It's not a matter of deciding whether I'm bored or not (who posted that survey that players stick with a difficulty no matter how much they dislike it?), it naturally encourages me to seek the toughest challenge I can find and improve my skills to take on even tougher challenges.

[x4000]

That reminds me why I like better rewards for tougher fights: It baits players into playing at the maximum difficulty they can handle and constantly push themselves to get those better rewards. It's not a matter of deciding whether I'm bored or not (who posted that survey that players stick with a difficulty no matter how much they dislike it?), it naturally encourages me to seek the toughest challenge I can find and improve my skills to take on even tougher challenges.

Which is true, BUT -- then you get into Dungeon Defenders territory with their nightmare mode.  It's a very very fine line, and too early for us to be flirting with that remotely.  I actually really prefer the idea that a kid would be able to get all the content at age 6, rather than having to be uber skilled, and then later they can come back and really rock the difficulty.  With AI War, lots of people play up in difficulty despite there not being greater rewards there.

[Armanant]

So the question becomes: just how good at dodging are you? 

This reminds me of my great exploits last night : At the very ass end of a maze, fumbled a critical dodge and got knocked down to 6 hp. On the highest difficulty. A few versions ago, not a problem - just warp back to the start, zone out, heal, done. Now... No warp points anywhere in the ruins so far. Even if there was, It'd be risky as the portal at the start chunk was in the very middle of the zone, so would probably zone in surrounded. So I Dodged. I Dodged like I've never dodged before. A few times I stumbled, and took a hit. Each time, I had built up just enough hp to not die from it. I was reduced to 1 - 2 hp about 6 times on my bloody trek back home.


But I made it.



Dammit, first you post a link to boatmurdered and get me hooked on DF, and now this.

[x4000]

That post is made of awesome.

[Terraziel]

For me the issue with Dungeon Defenders was not the difficulty, it was the ludicrous length of time the higher difficulties actually took to do. But that's off topic....

I tend to disagree with difficulty related quality rewards because like you say, it makes skill a gate to content, which it shouldn't be. The other route games take with difficulty related rewards is simply increasing volume (so getting 50xp instead of 10xp) but that fails because unless it is particularly well balanced all it actually does is make the game easier for those who can do it.

I sort of mentioned them previously, but implicit challenges are a good way of catering to hardcore gamers, to use recent Castlevania games as an example, many of them have had an implicit challenge to gamers to play it with 1hp, they provide you with an ability that increases stats as health decreases and an entirely separate way of setting your health to 1hp. The game provides the tools but doesn't advertise or encourage it.

With these changes I shall knock the difficulty down again, see how it feels, because part of what was making it so easy was being able to 1-shot everything.

[BobTheJanitor]

For me the issue with Dungeon Defenders was not the difficulty, it was the ludicrous length of time the higher difficulties actually took to do. But that's off topic....

Argh, Dungeon Defenders. If you ever want to see balance done terribly, there's a game for you. No patch notes should ever indicate that the damage of one arbitrary ability is going up or down by 50% with all other things in the game remaining equal, and then that same ability is being changed by another 40% in the next patch. And yet theirs did constantly, when they released new patches every other day requiring another 150 mb download. That game really almost offended me, because I was having fun playing it and the devs messed with it constantly until it became unplayable. If I didn't know better, I would think that one team made the game, and another much worse team took over post-release.

[x4000]

General agreement here, Terraziel -- I want for there to be some elite challenges through here that even I have no hope of completing.  I have no hope on difficulty 9 of AI War, for instance, but some other players do.  And I can't beat about 60% of the puzzles in Tidalis.  Arguably I am better at this sort of game than either of those other two genres as a player, but even so there are enough people better than me that playing on maximum difficulty should be... really intense, to say the least.

As with AIW difficulty 9 or 10, that's going to make it more than a bit of a grind no matter how much you cut it.  Being best in the world isn't "can you pull off that amazing jump and shot combination," it's "can you pull that off 50 times in a row, while not taking much or any damage in between?"

As a tennis player, that was always my downfall -- I can't play anymore because of fear of damaging my wrists (borderline carpal tunnel), but I had some pretty killer shots.  I could hit a serve over 120 mph, and I'd get an enormous number of aces with that.  However... I could only get it in about 5% of the time.  And my second serve was timid and sucky, by comparison.  Similarly, I was capable of hitting really professional-seeming forehand topspin shots, ones that would really back-foot the other player.  But I was even less reliable of that.   Being able to pull something off once is something that a moderately talented amateur can do; I tended to play strong 3.5, weak 4.0 on the tennis scale, if anyone here knows what that means.

But one of my tennis coaches was from Nigeria, and his little brother came to the states to play professionally one time.  My coach was amazingly skilled himself, and at one point had been #200 in the world or thereabouts.  But that was too low to get sponsors, so he had to go into coaching instead.  His brother, at the time, was #120 in the world.  I watched the two of them play a friendly match, not for any prize or tournament or anything, just to play.  It was... humbling.  It was like watching two thunderheads beat at each other, and of course my coach was utterly destroyed by his little brother.

But not only were they hitting the ball hard, fast, and near-perfectly, they were doing it a dozen times in a row.  Then one of them would make some tiny error, or gain some tiny advantage on the other player, and that would be the end of that point.  That's a level of tennis, or any level of gameplay in any game for that matter, that I will never attain.  And I'm cool with that.  But those were the people that difficulty 10 in AIW were designed for, those crazy Starcraft folks, in other words.

If you've ever watched the "superstar" runs of the New Super Mario Bros Wii, those are the sort of folks I'd like to think that the hardest difficulties here are for.  There's no reward for that -- the reward is just being able to freaking do it in the first place, and the awe of everyone else who sees you do it.  "Hero" combat difficulty in AVWW should be about like difficulty 8.6 in AIW, something like that.  Pretty much everyone here, including myself, should have a rough time on that mode.  Right now the platforming difficulty level doesn't effect enough to really be effectively judged on a meaningful scale, but anyhow... yeah.

That was kind of a tangent, but the extreme jump in difficulty is going to catch some folks by surprise next release, and I wanted to explain the rationale.  The lowest difficulty of the game is still just as low, but the spread between that and the highest difficulty is now appropriately much larger.  It was previously far too narrow.

[KDR_11k]

It's just that I like completing challenges put before me more than seeking my own challenges. In Earth Defense Force I dial up the difficulty much more than in any other game because in EDF the equipment tiers are partially based on the difficulty you play on. Pushing the difficulty to the absolute limit of what you can do allows you to get powerful weapons that you cannot get normally. It also lowers the difficulty of the game a bit because you're getting more powerful but as soon as you're feeling comfortable with a difficulty you start wondering if you can dial it up even more and get even bigger guns. Of course this isn't just limited to difficulties, there's also a large number of missions and later (harder) missions also give better stuff so you can up the difficulty in two directions, by increasing the game difficulty or by picking missions that are just more difficult by themselves.

With a regular difficulty selection I never bother with that because there's no real reason to. It's not really a challenge put in front of me.