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Players Bitch About KoA: Reckoning Not Being Hard Enough, Yet 2/3 of Them Played it on Easy |
Listed in: News Tags: Big Huge Games, gdc 2012, kingdoms of amalur: reckoning, koa: reckoning, reckoning
Speaking at GDC 2012 in San Francisco yesterday, Michael Dawe, Big Huge Games' Senior Programmer said that one of the biggest complaints on their forums was that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was too easy. On the other hand, when they took the time to crunch the numbers (it's not clear if the information was merely gathered from the forums - which would be pure hearsay - or online information) they found that 2/3 of Reckoning players played the game on the easiest difficulty setting.
Mr. Dawe had screenshots of their forums showing that a majority of the topics were people bitching about the game's difficulty. On the other hand, he also said that every single one of those threads had a comment from another player that said the difficulty was fine.
Dawe said it's difficult to strike the perfect balance in an RPG like Reckoning because of how subjective it is by nature. One player may sail through the main storyline in 3 hours and put the game on the shelf, while another may explore every nook and cranny of the game and invest 200 hours in it. How do you make it so both players encounter the same difficulty?
He also pointed out how vastly different playstyles and builds can affect difficulty. He cited how one QA playtester had a game in which he invested heavily in health regeneration and damage resistance and only killed 27 enemies throughout his entire playthrough. Another tester, meanwhile, maxed out his blacksmith skill and stacked buffs on one piece of armor that let ultimately let him do 5 million points of damage in one hit.
So finding the perfect balance for players like that is tough, to say the least.
What do you think? Is Reckoning too easy? Did these people really not figure out that they could up the difficulty setting for more of a challenge or is this just another case of people using the Internet for its true, intended purpose - crying about everything?
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Comments
You don't. Screw people who want to breeze through the main storyline. It should be near if not completely impossible to beat a game without a few sidequests. You're just punishing hardcore players for actually giving a shit. Why don't you punish the lazy asses instead? It reminds me of Socialism. Reward the lazy asses and punish the people trying to give a shit
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You have like 50 "mini difficulty", divided into 5 categories (1-10 Very Easy, 11-20 Easy, 21-30 Normal, 31-40 Hard, 41-50 Hardcore), the player start at a standard difficulty of 22, and various action can modify this value like:
- Defeat a Boss with No-Damage +3
- Defeat a Much-Higher-Level enemy with No-Damage +2
- Defeat a Boss = +1
- Defeat a Little-Higher with No-Damage = +1
- Die to a Much-Higher-Level enemy = 0
- Die to a Same-Level or Little-Higher enemy = -1
- Die to a Lower-Level enemy = -2
And a lot of more option...
Any "Mini-Level" just add/remove a little 1% strenght and resilient to the enemy, while any category step instead add/remove like 6% and the enemy gains maybe another attack and at the Hardcore difficulty some enemy gains the immunity to a certain tipe of attack.
That's the way ! XD
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as for finding perfect balance in gameplay, i'd say it can't be done unless you plan on making a game with 20+ different playing styles or as an above commenter mentioned an in-game balancer
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