Can we get a difficulty in-between "Normal" and "Nightmare"?

[Stabbey]

Maybe a "Hard" difficulty?

You start out with 128 health at level 1. The first enemy in the game, a Cheveur Spring, on Normal difficulty, does 4 damage. On Nightmare difficulty, it does 73 damage, or over 18 times as much.

That's fine for a "Nightmare" difficulty, and I don't mind a challenge, but I did find Normal pretty easy, even though I'm not very skilled. On Nightmare, I am unable to kill Vandigroth after at least 2 dozen tries and I'm getting tired of trying.

Some sort of middle option for players somewhere in-between dying in 32 hits and dying in 2 hits seems like it could be reasonable and doable. Just a thought.

[Garmichael]

I totally agree. I beat the game on Normal in a little over 4 hours. I reached a point where i just brute-forced my way through encounters and cleared the map quickly. I died maybe 3 times in the entire normal campaign.

And then tried nightmare and had the same experience you did. It was kind of fun being extremely cautious not to get hit, but some of the stretches between save points acted like endurance runs and was getting pretty burnt out on it.

However, halfway through nightmare mode, the game actually becomes pretty easy again. I'm not sure what happened - if its equipment or levels or enemies werent tuned to be more difficult or what.. Maybe its just a matter of how much more powerful you are as you get new orbs and movement abilities.

Either way, once you beat the enemy that shoots fire and missiles, the game starts getting easier. The first part of the game is definitely the hardest.

[Stabbey]

I supppose it's fair to report my current experience.

I think I ground up to level 10 for Vandigroth, not for the levels, just from walking back to the library to buy the Ancient Coin for defense and getting the Security Vest and Visor also for defense. It took a frustrating amount of attempts before I was able to discover the evasive pattern which lets you avoid the missiles and get my reflexes to properly use time-stop on the ram attack.

I got past the 3rd boss (Azure Queen). I spent quite a bit of time there attempting to get the "Battle Savant" achievement because I remembered that boss's attack patterns are easy enough that you don't need to stop time, so I eventually managed to beat her without taking damage either.

Once you get the ability to teleport around, the game starts feeling more like Hard than Nightmare. That is partly because enemies are no longer 2-shot killing you, but 3-4 shot killing you, but largely because of the access to the Warp Gates.

Obviously the Warp Gates let me return back to stores to buy healing items - there's actually not much to buy in terms of equipment. In a way, the Warp Gates start acting like save points, as you can then skitter off to another one near a save point. When completing side quests I've started to use Warp Shards just to not risk death returning to the Warp Gate naturally, so I'm glad the Warp Shards are really cheap to buy.

[BadNetCode]

I'm 90% sure I can mod in different difficulties, but it will probably be in the form of different monster stats as the game seems pretty well secured and it would take me a while to figure out how to inject or hijack dlls.

[zervo]

The balance really is way off. I guess the maker assumed that people would play nightmare on new game+ or something. But even then, the enemies have the same health, so you end up one shotting the enemies on a ng+ run. Weird.

[BadNetCode]

Try nightmare with the level 1 cap. Kinda ridiculous, but I'm having fun.

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by Garmichael:

However, halfway through nightmare mode, the game actually becomes pretty easy again. I'm not sure what happened - if its equipment or levels or enemies werent tuned to be more difficult or what.. Maybe its just a matter of how much more powerful you are as you get new orbs and movement abilities.

I mentioned this in another thread, but it feels like there's an issue with the difficulty curve around the midgame, regardless of whether you're playing Nightmare or Normal. Even just through normal progression, the player scales up in power faster than the enemies, leading to the game becoming easier as you progress rather than harder.

(Though, to be fair, the game is based on Symphony of the Night, which had a similar problem - but not to this degree.)

[Stabbey]

Yep, that's definitely the case. I'm approaching the end-game - Garza is dead - and I'm having a much easier time than the early game, and it's not because of NG+, I did a clean run. The proportion of damage enemies have done to me has steadily decreased and now I can survive several hits from enemies and bosses. So I don't think a user mod for enemy stats is going to be a simple solution.

The only room I've had a bit of trouble with is the second room in the military base, a small one with one knight and two snipers, I couldn't kill them, not without the knight hitting me and knocking me back to the previous screen. I eventually just stopped time to get in, get the chest and get out.