A difficulty question

[Nuclear_Pacific]

So, the recent update and subsequent discussion over it's difficulty has got me thinking about how much difficulty is good for the overall health of the game.

Starting with the dawn office as case study for why making the game too difficult is bad, I think on launch it was too challenging because it didn't let you engage with the games emotion mechanic. I think it also made combat more brainless as the "optimal" strategy was focus specifically on one guest and kill them as quickly as possible, with a specific order. This doesn't make me feel like I'm strategising and instead makes me feel like I'm taking the path of least resistance. Contrast that with the abnormality fights and, while actually more difficult, particularly spider bud, is more satisfying because it feel like I'm thinking about the best way to proceed. Also it helps that I don't have to worry about the emotion mechanic.

Moving on to themes, I don't see how the current game is served thematically by having challenge the way the dawn office brought. Using lobotomy corporation as an example, it's difficulty tied into it's themes of finding hope after tragedy, such as the loss of a loved one. Library of Ruina, by contrast, seems to have themes of learning to live again and learning to understand one another. While i can see difficulty as useful to that end, the only combat that seems to actually take advantage of this are the abnormality fights. This is because they can easily be seen as metaphors for confronting your emotions, and thus them being difficult fights that you need to understand to progress is thematically relevant.

So what do we do now. Personally, I think receptions should be easy to get through but challenging to raise to the max emotion level as a metaphor for the ease of only focusing on yourself, but also the difficulty of understanding someone else. I also would change the emotion system so that killing someone at an emotion level of zero isn't even guaranteed to drop a book.

But I could be missing something or even have a flawed understanding of the game. What do you think, dear reader? I'm honestly hoping for a productive and nuanced discussion.

[Taihou]

A wonderful and needed topic I must say.

I've talked long with other fellow Librarians around here and there's been a bit of everything! Some people demand higher difficulties in encounters, while others demand a more approachable challenge.

I think I can link this with your theme discussion and personally say I would like to see the challenge of the game more notable as The Library ranks up from Myth, Legend, Plague... and the future rankings. Each of the first combats we get in these ranks should bring up the heat and make the player think "Yes, this content is indeed harder, we indeed ranked up as Roland and Angela were talking about."

Falling back to the theme again, as we rank up we get to see and know more of the city and its intricacies, the weird Carnival people, the Finger who was about to hunt Full Stop, Gear Princess... We started from the bottom, with thugs and "no ones", and now our rank is making more interesting people visit us, I think a part of the theme is in this progress. LobCorp only revealed the intricacies of its plot starting at the middle-late part of the game, considering where we are in LoR, I think it will still take a bit longer to see where Angela is taking us and what the most belligerent parts of the Sephirah think of this situation once they are added. Angela says she wants to get the book that completes her... but what is this book? Who will carry it? Or what will? Maybe the Book of Carmen? That would be truly amusing.

As I mentioned in another threads, I consider the core issue of Dawn Office's apparent difficulty a dissonance with the difficulty that The Carnival and Full Stop (this last to a degree) presented. All these three are "first battles of Urban Plague", but Dawn is simply on another level. Considering I personally found The Carnival relatively trivial and Full Stop only hard due to the nature of ranged cards, I think these two should see an increase in difficulty to bring the player a feeling of ranking up and avoid sudden spikes in difficulty within the same rank which I personally consider are of poor taste.

I think Abnormality battles should rely on strange and intricate mechanics and ways of clearing them through the abnormalities traits and skills, while normal receptions should offer a challenge with a difficulty related to their Urban Ranking.

Thanks for creating the topic, I think it was a must have now that the content is getting people to have more different opinions.

[Dima green]

I do not agree with this post. The main problem of dawn office was that it was an unexpected difficulty spike for players who did focus on building their decks as right now up untill Full stop/Dawn the game is just SUPER easy and only started requiring any deck building or equipment manager only starting from urban legend (it's completely possible to complete both canard and Urban myth with standard attire + standard decks) and once you get proper pages even Full stop and dawn becomes not that hard. And engaging with emotion system? Do you really want long and pointless battles when your opponent can't even stagger you properly? I am not saying that this game "needs" high difficulty from the begging but leaving it as easy as it is right now? This is not lobotomy corporation. This game has much smaller replayability and you think it would be more fun to force players to stall battles to raise emotion levels instead of just giving them a proper fight? Emotion system while being an important part of this game just isn't fit to be completely centered around. No matter how "thematically fitting" it might be, it'd just make the game more of a chore. Unless they completely rework it but even then it wouldn't change the fact of how easy the game is.

[Nuclear_Pacific]

Originally posted by Dima green:

I do not agree with this post. The main problem of dawn office was that it was an unexpected difficulty spike for players who did focus on building their decks as right now up untill Full stop/Dawn the game is just SUPER easy and only started requiring any deck building or equipment manager only starting from urban legend (it's completely possible to complete both canard and Urban myth with standard attire + standard decks) and once you get proper pages even Full stop and dawn becomes not that hard. And engaging with emotion system? Do you really want long and pointless battles when your opponent can't even stagger you properly? I am not saying that this game "needs" high difficulty from the begging but leaving it as easy as it is right now? This is not lobotomy corporation. This game has much smaller replayability and you think it would be more fun to force players to stall battles to raise emotion levels instead of just giving them a proper fight? Emotion system while being an important part of this game just isn't fit to be completely centered around. No matter how "thematically fitting" it might be, it'd just make the game more of a chore. Unless they completely rework it but even then it wouldn't change the fact of how easy the game is.

If I may defend why I think that the emotion system is for the best, it's because it encourages players to fight in a way that's different from ever other strategy game. It caused combat to actually feel unique to this game, instead of using the same tired old strategy ad nauseam.

On the note of replayability, firstly the game isn't even fully out so I would expect the same amount of content. Secondly, there's more reason to redo fights in Library of Ruina than days in LobCor, if you want that new gear or the story of it, for instance.

Lastly, I'm not saying the difficulty shouldn't increase as the game goes on, but how that difficulty affects players and how they interact with the game should be taken into consideration. For instance, you said a player shouldn't be forced to use the emotion system but is it really better to force the player to ignore it? Also, I'd invite you to think of gameplay as part of the story since it changes how we interact with it.

P.S. Thanks for taking the time to think about and reply to the discussion i started.

[Narisa Kanael]

I agree that Dawn Office is out of place, but for different reason.

Looking at how Lobotomy Corporation progressed. If anything, LobCo was easier at this point in the game. In LobCo term, ||At this point, we wouldn't have Meltdown or Midnight, and we are just start picking up WAW.||

If I have a complain, its how insane grind on this game is going to be. Current level of grind is okay, but if each awakened Librarian progression is going to be similar, considering that we haven't even awaken half of them and point where difficulty starts to ramp up haven't been reached yet,

I worry that much longer combat duration as difficulty climbs may end up making grinding unbearable for people who doesn't expect more-than-RPG level grinding. Imagine page you want not dropping after 7 acts fight or something.

[Shbnfc]

I didn't mind at all that they made Dawn Office have a clear strategy left for the player to figure out, first time they did something like this where it felt like a really good idea to do what they are sort of suggesting, outside of abnormality fights. I think it's cool that they mixed things up a bit.

I think they raised the difficulty a bit too little with the Carnival fight in particular, I was expecting them to keep stacking strength every turn if one of them was killed while the others were still alive, which would have made that fight more similar, with there being a clear intended solution but how you get there is up to the player. Though this is probably way too OP of an ability for the player to get for later stages of the game.

Full Stop is probably fine just as a tutorial for how guns work.

Abnormality fights in general are good, I hope they keep making them more tricky and difficult to figure out. I hope things ramp up in difficulty and variety across the board from here.

The developers are doing well, and should just keep going!

[Han]

I think Carnival and others should have ''buffed ability'' compared to their pages. It would feel right if they are better with their 'natural ability' then you with their book/pages

Plus it would make Carnival a threat and not just three stronger zwei fixer grade 8
Plus plus if they stacked strength after each turn it would force people to try to think an make a strategy instead of ''You can't just hit the same enemy to win every fight !'' ''Hehe hitting go boom''

I think we got enough brainless fight and now they should make us think more. They are urban plague after all. They should at least push us into a corner if we are not prepared

But as pointed out, we are probably not even in the middle of the game. We still didn't get the 'middle layer' sephirot

[Grim Xzag]

I sware if Urban Nightmare's are easy to beat, I will question that Nightmare part in the name.

[kaymarciy]

Originally posted by Hanrazen:

They are urban plague after all. They should at least push us into a corner if we are not prepared

No, they are not Urban Plague. The Library is Urban Plague. Carnival are some random tailors who were ordered to suicide because Index Finger didn't like that they provide their fabric to Thumb Finger. They are more like Pierre (a cook) in terms of combat skills, just with a slightly better bodies. Full-stop fixers look like some random grade 8 office which somehow got their hands on guns and use it to clear missions way above their paygrade. They weren't even supposed to be able to deal with the library - first they get a very fishy request from the 4th association and on the quest site they encounter a colored dude who drives 'em into a corner and offers a pen to get inside the library. This was a setup trap from the very beginning. The Dawn office with grade 5+ fixers are the only real threat.

And don't forget, Roland told Angela that the stuff is graded not by its threat or difficulty, but by the amount of money people are ready to pay for dealing with it.

[Han]

These are all very good point actually.
I still think the difficulty should be ramped up a bit for creature such as the Carnival or at least hope it will become a challenge to advance further, i don't want every fight to be dawn but it would feel nice if you couldn't pass everything just by waving your hand around with ease

[Nuclear_Pacific]

So, when when I started this discussion my main goal was to get people thinking about how they wanted the difficulty of the game to affect the experience of playing it. As hinted in my original post, I want the difficulty to serve to enhance the story. So, I actually really like the idea of having each encounter approached differently. I think it would bring receptions closer to the way we deal with abnormalities, and it would serve the games themes similarly.

On to the more nuts and bolts aspect of this. I've seen people suggest guests having unique combat pages, which we already have with Lulu, so it's not really out of question. As users Shbnfc hinted at and Hanrazen pointed out, this can extend to stronger passives for enemies than what we get. These passive can be used to encourage players to get a better understanding of the way enemies fight before they can proceed.

P.S. This'll be the last time I say this so it doesn't get irritating, but thank you everyone who participated or even just thought about this discussion.

[CarThief]

Hm... Part of me wouldn't mind a little more difficulty in general, atleast, for everything except Full Stop and Dawn Office, Molar Office is probably fine as-is too.

Maybe enforce some strategies for enemy encounters, such as...
-Zwei enemies: Notably increased defensive power, like +3 or more. To give players incentive to creatively bypass defence rolls with their defence rolls. (May want to reduce the stagger damage they'll produce from high DEF rolls though.)

-The Carnival enemies: Perhaps like 4+ attack power from Rememberance or more, to encourage players to whittle them down and then kill them in quick succession?
(Or a +1 every 1-2 turns that stacks up and causes trouble if you take one out early.)

-Streetlight Office: Perhaps deal with weaker but bigger enemy groups, like 4-5 enemies? Might help inspire the player to use defensive cards more to deal with several attacks.
(Or even throw in the mechanic of having 6+ enemies in one match, 5 on-screen, with reinforcements arriving at the end of each turn if a spot is free on the enemy side?)

-Brotherhood of Steel: Better defensive power for enemies? I mean, they're bulky robots, so, hm...

So that's kind of the gist of it, adding a bit of "puzzle" nature to the encounters, that if handled correctly, makes them fairly doable/easy, but if ignored or mishandled, may be a fatal error.
And all it takes is giving enemies passives that are exclusive to them in that battle, for most part, potentially some improved stats too.

---

And if we're talking difficulty, i find it's rather easily nullified with how obscenely strong ranged pages are. They're fine like this in enemy hands (really forcing you to get a good defensive/clash-winning build going), but they should probably be weaker in the player's hands (with probably lesser to no drawbacks such as "exhausted on use"), or if things get dire, perhaps leave ranged purely as a trick the enemy can perform.

Honestly, something like nerfing ranged pages and giving Full Stop Office's enemies like +4 ranged page power in their encounter would be a start (they're proficient and well-trained in ranged weaponry, after all).

But all in all it's a hard one to solve, this conondrum. Range is strong, but with noticable drawbacks, but if you take away the strenght, there's little reason to use it over melee pages (especially since both attack and evasion rolls can repeatedly counter ranged attacks, and melee pages don't get exhausted on use).

So i don't have much in the way of ideas about that, but perhaps that would be a useful subject, as i have reason to suspect even PM isn't sure what to do about ranged cards (in the player's hands, anyway).

---

Also gotta say, the difficulty is whack sometimes on the latest additions, Carnival was kind of a joke, Full Stop was pretty rough, and Dawn was pure bloody murder.
But in a sense, i like the idea of having various "paths", some harder, some easier. If one storyline is too hard, you could improve yourself on another one and try it again later.

But i'd imagine it's preferable to have a gently upwards difficulty curve globally, instead of this weird high-low mashup.

Ah well, they can always rebalance the fights to be harder/weaker as needed when stuff is more complete, as we're just getting bits and pieces right now.

[Narisa Kanael]

Looking at it now, I don't think mainline story of this game is designed to be difficult at all. In a way, I think developers made a mistake here.

This game doesn't allow 'reset' during fight (Except Abnormalities, since quitting their fight doesn't result in costing books.) But doesn't provide you any information about fight you are about to have. Because losing the fight cost a lot.

First, there is no way to 'steal back' the book lost. Also, there is no incentive to add this since beating new invitation likely results in better books anyway.

Second, books that you lose this manner are not trivial. It is possible book required for progression to not drop after the fight, and number of progression book you obtain in this manner is usually one. Considering fight will only get longer and more complex, giving up books will be even more frustrating and undesirable.

Third, there is no inherent interest in losing books - you don't get to see what happen if they actually manage to get the book they want anyway, so there isn't any incentive to play any battle that could fail unconditionally.

Making Lobotomy hard wasn't too problematic - Resetting doesn't lose significant progression until very far into the end game, so trial and error approach for surprising gimmicks and sudden difficulty was perfectly fine.

But making such game play in Ruina is fairly high cost - Every time you re-attempt, you have to fight fairly long battle that likely won't reward you in anything useful and makes no progression.

Since game is not even half way done yet, repeating above trial-and-error cycle for rest of the game is going to make blind Ruina run unpalatable once the game becomes full-sized. I think this is the driving factor that forced Dev team to make fights that can be brute-forced.

I don't know how they could resolve this issue outside of allowing you to change your gear on reception screen or increase item drop rate to ensure there is enough pages to build every department fully in unique manner.

[Arknights]

Just Alt-F4 out of a losing fight if you don't want to grab the books again.

[CarThief]

Eh, at that point i'd prefer it if they notably ramped up the difficulty overall, but in turn, ensured that we lost no books if we lose, maybe only if we burn em. And if it will be quite hard, then even better if we can keep any books we get from a defeat if we killed atleast one enemy, so we can slowly but surely build up a team that's strong enough to win.
(But if we had to defeat them all to get their books, that'd be fine too. Works either way.)

Perhaps to go as far as to make a permanent record of every book once gained purely to use for invitations, so then even if we burn all our books for loot, we can still use them for invitations.
That would justify ramping up the general difficulty to make nearly every fight (except the "tutorial" sections) a lot harder.

[Acds]

Just make an easy mode for people who can't be bothered learning the mechanics (or optimizing decks, which is a big part of any card game) at this point, for anyone else the game being made easier just turns it trivial and not fun, might as put a skip button on receptions.

Simple switch in the options for easy mode, add light to librarians or remove light from enemies, reduce enemy health by some percentage (25%), and maybe restrict some cards that the enemy can use (e.g. forbid them from using the stronger ones). Luckily there are a lot of variables PM can just decrement to create an easy mode and then leave it, as they produce more content the easy mode modifiers are applied automatically without extra work from the devs (most of the time anyway). At this point we've had a lot of threads about difficulty and I don't really see a solution being found that makes everyone happy other than an easy mode.