Time was mentioned as a resource, so is difficulty selection...

[Alexandra Lorular]

Is there any difficulty setting that lets me disable the time crunch Entirely?

[TentacleMayor]

There's no hard time limit, just a slow encroachment of passive Corruption gain. The lower 2 settings disable the Game Over for having too much corruption, but in any difficulty you'll want to keep it low anyway in order to avoid low willpower and the associated debuffs. If you're experienced with RPGs and willing to understand the game mechanics, I think Normal is a good place to start, you can always lower it later.

[Alexandra Lorular]

Fair, I just...absolutely hate being forced to hurry anything at all, and like to take my own pace. Was interested, but got disheartened seeing the time mechanic in play.

[Shadowfox]

Originally posted by Alexandra Lorular:

Fair, I just...absolutely hate being forced to hurry anything at all, and like to take my own pace. Was interested, but got disheartened seeing the time mechanic in play.

time moves by doing certain things and it usually gives you a heads up like theres no clock ticking down.

[Bookman]

As someone that usually avoids games that put a time crunch on the player, I recommend you give this one a try.

I started this one unaware that you were under time pressure, and I pushed through after learning that fact. In my humble opinion, it doesn't change all that much - you can take your time and explore the game at your own pace without worrying too much about things (and the 2nd of 5 difficulty modes, Explorer, is even named after players looking to do just that). You might miss out on certain rewards, but they're not necessarily going to stop you from playing, maybe slow you down, you can get to most of the content eventually.

This game also encourages replayability, even across the different difficulty modes. The overarching story doesn't change much with difficulty alone, but it changes a lot in small ways depending on your choices and which upgrades you unlock, in what order. For me that's a strong incentive to play this game multiple times: I started on Normal, went down to Story to check how easy things can get, and I'm planning to try Nightmare next to challenge myself.

You can make things more or less difficult depending on how you end each day, too. Do you focus on building up stats to grow stronger first, or do you prefer to gain access to new spells and martial skills to take on the various enemies you meet and exploit their weaknesses? You need some of both, but you can't take everything at once, and having different stats and skills available earlier rather than later makes your playthrough vastly different, too.

Also, you can get bonuses on your next playthrough depending on how many bosses you've slain and/or how many upgrades you've unlocked, and these scale with the different difficulty modes. This includes having more starting gold, raising your stats by a bit, but also unlocking certain spells and skills from day one, instead of waiting to learn them in game - and having the right skill can absolutely transform your playthrough, especially if it's one you cannot learn normally until much, much later in the game, exploiting bosses' weaknesses that you'd have beaten before learning it otherwise. All of these bonuses can make Story Mode even easier than it already is, or they can make Nightmare Mode a bit more manageable, since it's brutal on players that start it without such buffs. But you can always turn them off if you'd like, to increase the challenge and push yourself even harder.

In a sense, the time crunch starts to matter once you're both familiar enough with the game to do things optimally (and go for those optional rewards), as well as invested enough in this game to challenge yourself to play it as well as you can. Even just from my first to the second playthrough, I did a lot better than what Story Mode allowed me because I knew exactly where to go and what the various enemies' and bosses' moves were, so I could plan ahead and do things in a slightly different order than the first time around, and I even managed to beat a tough optional boss (without resorting to your super mode, which makes that one and most other bosses trivial), learning that it's a pretty fun fight once you get the hang of its mechanics.


TL; DR: This game has enough content to get you hooked, and if you don't care about playing it 'optimally' then you won't really notice the time crunch, plus a part of its replayability lies in getting better over multiple runs as you try different tactics and explore the story variations.

Thank you for your patience, especially everyone that read this wall of text. ^_^ Have a nice day.

[trihan]

In story and explorer difficulty, the day doesn't end when you infuse materials at the workshop, and you can't get a game over from corruption accumulation. So you can take as long as you like and there's no mandate for making changes in the mental world.

[Alexandra Lorular]

Thanks for the info!