Can we stop ramping up the difficulty, please?

[Pandabites]

Can we have a reasonable discussion about the difficulty spike caused by the last two updates? I've put 55 hours into this game, unlocked more than half of my whips and even for me the difficulty has become ridiculous. I'm barely ever even making it past the first biome. I was struggling with the third biome before these updates so I'm pretty much giving up on ever unlocking my third tier whips now. This game needs a more steady difficulty progression, not a massive spike in difficulty spike each update. I hope the devs address this and i don't have to leave the community for this game because I was having a lot of fun with it before. Finally (and I'm sorry I have to say this, but) I'm already anticipating the "git gud, noob" responses to this topic, so if you came here to say that, know that it contributes nothing to the discourse and only serves to make you look like an elitist douche.

ATTENTION TO ANYONE COMING TO THIS THREAD SINCE THE PHANTOM ESSENCE UPDATE:

The Phantom Essence Update seems to have fixed a lot of the issues I raised in the original post. There seems (on the first ten or so runs I've done into the updated Temple) to be a much needed improvement to how the difficulty scales and much less of the kind of horrible trap spam nonsense that characterised the previous updates. The difficulty ramp now begins at quite easy (similar to how it was upon initial release) and follows a steady and manageable scale up to where Inferno is still very challenging, though not impossible. I wholeheartedly commend the devs for listening to feedback and improving the player experience.

[indoor boys]

i have like 4 hours in this game and get to the end of the second biome every other time. i know you dont want to hear it but, git gud noob

[MetalAtlas]

yeah the difficulty is much harder than it used to be. Combined with rng, its hard to know what youre going to get at any time and sometimes things are just not possible to avoid getting hit. Can go the whole temple without getting hit and one awful area can wipe out your whole health. And they havent even added gold relics yet. I think they should scale it back a little, and make the harder areas be gold. I think with another tier, the current difficulty spread out between 4 biomes would be perfect.

[Hikuitori]

I like the difficulty like this.
Sometimes temples are easier, sometimes harder, the random of guardians and traps makes the game more interesting for me.
I like the fact we have to learn and think fastly, especially with the rage guardian and followers defenders.
With the difficulty, the die and retry, we improve our skills and, even if it can be very frustrating sometimes, we get more abilities and happyness when we progress further and further :)

I don't think this type of skill game has to get all players finish it.
There's a big panel of skills' players, so it can be very difficult for any, and not too difficult for others.

[scaine]

Yeah, I suspect the issue here is that the devs only interact via their Discord, and the Discord channel is populated by very committed, long-time players who have literally THOUSANDS of Inferno keys. Their videos are pretty spectacular - I can't be bothered trying to match the skill levels, but it's very impressive. However, their feedback tends to dominate the Discord and I expect that the devs are therefore getting a very skewed view of how difficult the game is. I have 20 hours in the game and never managed to complete an Inferno run before the Invasion update. Now though, I often fail in the first level, and caverns is basically nearly impossible (for me).

It's a shame. It was a real gem of a find initially, but I suspect the competitive nature of the core mechanism (completing the Inferno level to free up failed Phantom's whips) will result in the game just getting progressively more difficult. At some point, I'd worry that as player numbers fall, and whips become trapped forever, it puts off newer players, and the game drives its own death spiral. Game's peak was Q2 when it regularly saw 1500+ players. These days it's lucky to get out of double figures. Twitch figures fell off a cliff too. Probably not directly related to difficulty, but it might be a factor.

Still, plenty of time to turn it around. Maybe the next update addresses some of the horrible decisions made in Invasion. The Discord feedback/ideas channels are full of great ideas, so it's not all bad.

[SamuraiChameleon]

I don't think the game is actually that difficult after you put enough time in it. It's really just a few rooms and trap set-ups that are consistently difficult for me, and then a few more rooms on top of that that are normally fine on their own but get more difficult when there's a guardian and you can't take your time.

That said, I do think the difficulty could definitely use more tweaking and tuning. There are definitely trap combos that I think are just stupid, and I don't like guardians at all. I think as is, they're just annoying and make the game less fun. I wouldn't go as far to say they should be removed entirely, but I think they need to be heavily re-worked.

[SnakeTGK]

The game at it's core is supposed to be hard and it will probably get harder with new traps, guardians, rooms and stages.

[scaine]

That might be true, but games are meant to be fun too. I stopped playing due to the difficulty. Plenty of ways to address this without alienating the entirety of your (original) audience. I wonder if they'll address the issue.

[Arriator]

I used to be able to get some area 1 relics every now and then, but now I'm too scared to bring any whips into temples at all because I can barely make it off of the first floor if I'm lucky, what with all the new enemies and traps. The temple restructure - notably the Inferno relic limitation (temples only seal when the INFERNO relic is taken) doesn't help; I used to raise an eyebrow at 7 dead explorers, now 20 seems to be the norm in most temples (making some whips ridiculously hard to use, by the way) and I'm just... not having much fun anymore. Too bloody hard, too unforgiving, and whips stay locked for upwards of potentially weeks. Apparently player numbers have dropped sharply too...

[PigeonOfTheAbyss]

I heavily disagree, i have bought the game two days ago have 2,5 hours in it and even on my first run i made it to the end of biome 1. There are some traps that are really hard even compared to biome 2 (the rotating hallway has some pretty hard layouts, altough you can skip many of them if you jump out of the hallway if there are gaps) but other than that i don't really see what you're talking about. What traps or room layouts do you struggle with exactly ? because especially on biome one i have maybe encountered 1 layout so far where i had the feeling that i needed a few more hours in this game to not take damage.

[indoor boys]

Originally posted by Linux scaine:

That might be true, but games are meant to be fun too. I stopped playing due to the difficulty. Plenty of ways to address this without alienating the entirety of your (original) audience. I wonder if they'll address the issue.

yes, games are supposed to be fun. have you ever stopped and considered that maybe other people find this fun and this game isn't meant for you?

[Arriator]

Originally posted by Murphy Brone:

Originally posted by Linux scaine:

That might be true, but games are meant to be fun too. I stopped playing due to the difficulty. Plenty of ways to address this without alienating the entirety of your (original) audience. I wonder if they'll address the issue.

yes, games are supposed to be fun. have you ever stopped and considered that maybe other people find this fun and this game isn't meant for you?

While I would normally agree with your sentiment, it's another story entirely when the game USED to be fun but no longer is due to the devs cranking up the difficulty. I spent money on this and found it fun, but it's like having a nice steak dinner when someone comes along and drops an entire salt shaker on it when you're halfway through, you know?

[indoor boys]

Originally posted by Arriator:

Originally posted by Murphy Brone:

yes, games are supposed to be fun. have you ever stopped and considered that maybe other people find this fun and this game isn't meant for you?

While I would normally agree with your sentiment, it's another story entirely when the game USED to be fun but no longer is due to the devs cranking up the difficulty. I spent money on this and found it fun, but it's like having a nice steak dinner when someone comes along and drops an entire salt shaker on it when you're halfway through, you know?

i have to disagree. i used to think the game was too easy and now its pretty fun. i can sympathize with you though, i understand where youre coming from but it feels like the devs want to cater to a different crowd than the one youre in even if thats not the impression the game gave you at the start

i know that not everyone has time to invest in games but if you spend a little time adapting to the new difficulty it would be just as fun, if not more fun than before

[scaine]

Originally posted by Murphy Brone:

Originally posted by Arriator:

While I would normally agree with your sentiment, it's another story entirely when the game USED to be fun but no longer is due to the devs cranking up the difficulty. I spent money on this and found it fun, but it's like having a nice steak dinner when someone comes along and drops an entire salt shaker on it when you're halfway through, you know?

i have to disagree. i used to think the game was too easy and now its pretty fun. i can sympathize with you though, i understand where youre coming from but it feels like the devs want to cater to a different crowd than the one youre in even if thats not the impression the game gave you at the start

i know that not everyone has time to invest in games but if you spend a little time adapting to the new difficulty it would be just as fun, if not more fun than before

Oh, they're definitely catering to a different crowd right now - their Discord faithful, as I noted before, are where they get their feedback and ideas from, not this forum. I haven't played since Invasion. Hopefully they bring some sanity back with Saturday's update.

I'm all for difficult games, but only if it's optional, sane and of course, fun. This game used to offer all three - optional by way of the three routes, sane in that very, very few combinations of traps and guardian were impossibly hard, and fun. Now none of that is true.

Such a shame. As I say, maybe Saturday will roll this back a bit, and hopefully some of the other bad decisions made in Invasion, like sandbags, temples that routinely kill 200+ phantoms, and the "only inferno unlocks whips".

it's EA. There's still plenty of time to come good.

[HighFlyer15]

Got to admit, the first biome has truly ramped up the difficulty by a lot these days. Too hard to even complete, not really, but it's definitely far too difficulty for a beginner biome. This should be the biome where people get their feet wet, learn the ropes, but often the second and third biomes are far easier.
Rolling boulder rooms in red? Pff. Child's play. A million blow dart statues with traps on the floor and a fast guardian behind you? Not really a problem.
A room full of floating mines, homing minions, a narrow path to run on, and spike traps everywhere in green? Ehm, you might want to check your difficulty algorithm

[Jaden]

Originally posted by Pandabites:

Can we have a reasonable discussion about the difficulty spike caused by the last two updates? I've put 55 hours into this game, unlocked more than half of my whips and even for me the difficulty has become ridiculous. I'm barely ever even making it past the first biome. I was struggling with the third biome before these updates so I'm pretty much giving up on ever unlocking my third tier whips now. This game needs a more steady difficulty progression, not a massive spike in difficulty spike each update. I hope the devs address this and i don't have to leave the community for this game because I was having a lot of fun with it before. Finally (and I'm sorry I have to say this, but) I'm already anticipating the "git gud, noob" responses to this topic, so if you came here to say that, know that it contributes nothing to the discourse and only serves to make you look like an elitist douche.

I have to agree completely. I grabbed this game because it offered a reasonable challenge to everyone evenly, but I don't even bother playing anymore because the difficulty has been ramped up so high. The devs are cutting off a good chunk of casual players with these updates, and I won't be picking it up again unless a difficulty setting is placed in-game, or they roll back the complete flooding of traps and enemies they've clearly put into it.

It's a real shame too, because I liked this game, but I've got a whole library of games that don't put me in situations where I have to be hit, or make it so my run is destroyed because of trap/enemy placement being too frequent, and I'll just play those rather than putting myself in a situation where I'll be frustrated by a game.

EDIT: Just played today, and they may have changed something because I only had moderate trouble with area 1. I'll keep playing for now because I had a more fun time than last time I played, which at that time was frustrating.