Difficulty in RPGs
I started this post on March 1, honest! I just decided to stick the links up first since they were easier to do.
I haven't come up with any particularly good insights into making RPGs easier or harder, but I think the biggest difference comes from resources. If you can get through most combats pretty much intact, then the game will be easy. If, on the other hand, every combat risks party death even when using up your entire inventory of healing items, then the game will be insanely hard. Usually there's a middle ground (although console RPGs seem to tend towards the easy side...) Even if combat makes you use up a lot of resources, though, if they're easily available, then that will also make the game easier.
I think my vote for having a game with a wider difficulty range might be to have somewhat hard combats, but with a lot of optional resource regeneration. That way the players who want more of a challenge can opt to not stock up on potions or whatever, and the players who just want to get through the game can flood their inventory.
I can't remember where I read this, but someone was discussing combat difficulty versus frequency. Basically, if combat occurs frequently, it should be reasonably short, and at least somewhat interesting. If it occurs less often, then it can take longer, and be more involved and tactical. If combat is long, it needs to be interesting rather than tedious. Additionally, long combats should have better payoffs; most people don't want to spend half an hour getting 0.5% of the way to the next level. All of this sounds kind of obvious, but I've played a lot of first attempts at CRPGs that go for extremely frequent, long-but-uninteresting, low-payoff combats. Obviously I didn't end up spending very much time playing any of these...
This mostly applies to console RPGs, but I really hate the idea of save points. Granted, in most console RPGs, nothing much happens if your character stands around doing nothing for an hour while you go off and eat, but it's really annoying to have to navigate through a maze-y dungeon again because you died before reaching the pre-boss savepoint.
This got a little off-topic, and I'm not entirely happy with the lack of insight...
I haven't come up with any particularly good insights into making RPGs easier or harder, but I think the biggest difference comes from resources. If you can get through most combats pretty much intact, then the game will be easy. If, on the other hand, every combat risks party death even when using up your entire inventory of healing items, then the game will be insanely hard. Usually there's a middle ground (although console RPGs seem to tend towards the easy side...) Even if combat makes you use up a lot of resources, though, if they're easily available, then that will also make the game easier.
I think my vote for having a game with a wider difficulty range might be to have somewhat hard combats, but with a lot of optional resource regeneration. That way the players who want more of a challenge can opt to not stock up on potions or whatever, and the players who just want to get through the game can flood their inventory.
I can't remember where I read this, but someone was discussing combat difficulty versus frequency. Basically, if combat occurs frequently, it should be reasonably short, and at least somewhat interesting. If it occurs less often, then it can take longer, and be more involved and tactical. If combat is long, it needs to be interesting rather than tedious. Additionally, long combats should have better payoffs; most people don't want to spend half an hour getting 0.5% of the way to the next level. All of this sounds kind of obvious, but I've played a lot of first attempts at CRPGs that go for extremely frequent, long-but-uninteresting, low-payoff combats. Obviously I didn't end up spending very much time playing any of these...
This mostly applies to console RPGs, but I really hate the idea of save points. Granted, in most console RPGs, nothing much happens if your character stands around doing nothing for an hour while you go off and eat, but it's really annoying to have to navigate through a maze-y dungeon again because you died before reaching the pre-boss savepoint.
This got a little off-topic, and I'm not entirely happy with the lack of insight...
posted by Selene at
02:26
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