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Difficulty... curve? hill? rollercoaster? parabola?

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Motorheadbanger:
The Lava Pits?

Klear:
I hate the way difficulty works in Oblivion and Fallout 3 - everything is scaled to your level. If you stay level 1 throughout the game, so will the enemies. It really kills the immersion to me when in late game every lowly bandit has extremely expensive top-tier armour (which is very ugly, BTW), and you don't get the sense of getting stronger. There are no places where a level 1 character couldn't go for fear of getting killed. On the other hand, late game is full of incredibly strong monsters which makes it inbelievable that anybody by the greatest badasses would ever venture outside city walls.

Worse, it means that if you level inefficiently (which is what I usually do, since I like to roleplay even gameplay elements in my RPGs), the enemies everywhere will get progressively harder to deal with (and by harder I mean that they take too long to kill, which is boring).

I was nicely surprised when on my first Fallout: New Vegas playthrought, when I ventured to a mine overrun by Deathclaws ang got ripped to shreds no matter what I did (and this remained true for a long time).

Uranium:
DoomRL (and the original Doom games) get difficulty perfectly. Enemies don't get tougher on higher difficulties because they have more health and deal more damage. They get more accurate, and there are harder enemies at earlier levels, requiring larger amounts of skill (rather than time) to deal with using the limited resources you have at your disposal.
The only enemies that have increased health on higher difficulties are bosses, and I quite like this mechanism, as they're only ever going to appear on designated levels so that's really the only way to make them tougher.
In my opinion, level scaling is probably the worst way to make a game harder. Even if you're a god-slaying tower of a man, that lion that could kill you when you were a whelp with a wooden sword is still going to be able to kill you.

The only real qualm I have with difficulty is Ao100 - the first 25 levels are moderately hard, then there's a difficulty spike from 25 to 40, as you've passed the normal game length, and harder enemies begin to appear, but you haven't got to that point yet where your firetime is 0.35 seconds and you can let loose nine shots from a 1d9 recharging plasma rifle, each shot dealing +5 damage with almost no chance of missing. I'm not sure how the team would go about it, but I think that rather than there being a difficulty spike in Ao100 it should be a slope, with the last ten levels being among the hardest challenge in the game.

tl;dr level scaling sucks, DoomRL's difficulty is pretty damn good

spacedust:

--- Quote from: Uranium on April 02, 2012, 10:05 ---The only real qualm I have with difficulty is Ao100 - the first 25 levels are moderately hard, then there's a difficulty spike from 25 to 40, as you've passed the normal game length, and harder enemies begin to appear, but you haven't got to that point yet where your firetime is 0.35 seconds and you can let loose nine shots from a 1d9 recharging plasma rifle, each shot dealing +5 damage with almost no chance of missing. I'm not sure how the team would go about it, but I think that rather than there being a difficulty spike in Ao100 it should be a slope, with the last ten levels being among the hardest challenge in the game.

--- End quote ---

On one hand, it's pretty awesome to feel like a untouchable god with no equal once you get all souped up for the final 50 levels. On the other hand, I tend to agree with this - the last few levels of Ao100 tend to feel like work that you have to complete in order to get the mortem. I don't know if there's any good solution to this, after all it's nice to have the payoff of 50 easy levels once you survive the *&# first 50 when you are clutching at straws to survive.

Klear:
Are there Spider Mastermind caves in Ao100?

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