Regarding Difficulty Settings (and other things)

[Andhaira]

What is the difference between the settings? For instance, between Easy & Normal, what changes? Do PCs get more HP, or better regen, enemies have less HP and Armor, etc??

Also why does the demo default to easy rather than normal?

Finally, how many spells for Magos and Clerics in the demo, and how do you get new ones aside from the ones you start off with?

Anyhow loving this and can't get enough of it! Can't wait for the full game. I just hope it retains the flavor throughout!

[Gallian the Great]

HI there! Good questions all! I'll try to answer all of them :-)

First of all, for all the things you mention, it's all on the drawing board. So for difficulty, we'll be tweaking it quite a bit and by the final game we'll both make it more transparent what the difference is, but also allow you to make a custom difficulty.

Difficulties do a few things: For one, it cheats a bit on the dice so that for lower difficulty, you'll roll higher as a player and on harder difficulty, opponents will roll better (you won't roll worse though). For narrative difficulty, it's also not possible to die and the game cuts out a lot of trash mob encounters. We'll also be ading in ultra high difficulties that introduces stuff like permadeath for the true masochists.

The game starts in Easy mode because normal is too hard for most people (though this is likely to change once you get into it) :-) Give, Easy should perhaps be renamed etc but for now this is how it is :-)

Sadly there are no spells in the demo beyond the ones you see. But rest assured, there'll be plenty more in the final game. How learning new spells will work in the final game is not set yet. I'm not sure if you'll gain them as you advance in level or if you'll learn them from books etc. Perhaps a combo of both?

THank you so much for the kind words! Maintaining the flavor is one of the most important points for me so I'm sure you won't be disappointed :-)

Cheers,


AL

[Andhaira]

Originally posted by Gallian the Great:

HI there! Good questions all! I'll try to answer all of them :-)

How learning new spells will work in the final game is not set yet. I'm not sure if you'll gain them as you advance in level or if you'll learn them from books etc. Perhaps a combo of both?

Definately should be a combo of both; you get a choice of a few spells at level up (or 1-2 per level depending on how many total spells there are) AND you can learn them from books. Encourages exploring! :)

THank you so much for the kind words! Maintaining the flavor is one of the most important points for me so I'm sure you won't be disappointed :-)

Cheers,
AL

Thank you for making this great game. The wait for the full version is agonizing though...that multi tile monster looks incredible. Hope we get a chance to take it on and steal its loot! :)

[Gallian the Great]

THank you so much!!!!

[kabill]

Originally posted by Gallian the Great:

Difficulties do a few things: For one, it cheats a bit on the dice so that for lower difficulty, you'll roll higher as a player and on harder difficulty, opponents will roll better (you won't roll worse though).

Sorry for necroing but spotted this and wanted to write to discourage doing this in the final version of the game.

This kind of dice-loading is practically the same as giving buffs / penalties, but obscured from the player so they can't easily account for it. I only played a tiny bit of the prologue so I don't know how extensive this is, but at least some of the skill checks seem to be given explicit (i.e. player-facing) difficulties / odds of success. If those aren't accurate, it's going to make higher difficulties frustrating (since it will feel like you're having bad luck when actually it's normal) while on lower difficulties the player won't feel empowered to take riskier decisions since they won't know how much better the odds actually are. It may also make the shift to higher difficulties more frustrating, since it will feel like things are more unfair without clearly signposting why.

Basically, if you're going to communicate to the player information about their die rolls, I think it will be best for the player experience if that information is actually accurate. Folks moan about RNG rolls even when they are perfectly fair; actually making them unfair is not likely to make anyone happy compared with visibility adjusting odds of success.