Balance is a difficult thing to achieve against multiple enemy types. It gets worse when you have to account for both weapon damage stat variance, and the different health levels at separate difficulties.
I personally feel both weapon stats (potentially including +damage perks) and enemy health should be entirely static. This would make balance far easier to work with, and the meta game more predictable and straightforward.
Or they could balance around (almost) max stats and let us pay a bunch of ressources to upgrade the stats of our weapons.
Removing weapon stat bars and perks is just lame and serves no purpose.
To me, this sounds like the opposite of what you would want.
There is no need to make everything 100% moron proof.
Let people pick the perks they want.
If a weapon is better with one perk than with another, let people figure it out.
Or let them play with a worse weapon, if they do not figure it out.
Iâm thinking about how this is going to affect the way the game feels to play. People generally expect to feel stronger as they move through a gameâs progression systems, especially in the early to middle sections. Getting stronger feels good.
Making the act of killing a particular enemy static throughout the difficulties would harm that. We wouldnât feel any stronger at L30 than we do at L1.
I personally wouldnât mind a mission modifier that does something like your suggestion, but I think itâd be received pretty poorly by the average player.
Weapon unlocks and the talent tree kinda dispute that imo. Thereâs plenty of progression mechanics that can give the feeling of progress.
Like âBack to Basicsâ? That one was awful. Felt like whacking everything with a pool noodle.
I agree 100% with OP but donât think such a fundamental change in concept at the current stage of the game is not realistically possible.
Iâd LOVE if it that were the baseline that the game difficulties and progression was then balanced from. But as Eisenfaust says, I think at this point the change would be so sweeping and intensive that I doubt Fatshark has the will or capacity to do so in any sort of timely fashion.
Iâm not talking about progression, Iâm talking about a feeling of getting stronger.
Weapon and talent node unlocks donât do that.
This game achieves it by managing the playerâs effectiveness in combat, and the gradual changes to weapon stats and enemy health is an enormous part of that.
I loved it, but I must admit that a lot of the love was because it nuked the OP meta builds and THP cheesers.
The enemies grow in HP through difficulties. The removal of that as difficulties go up would significantly ease the need to push such big differences in weapon power ratings to inflate player power dynamics. I think youâd find thereâs still plenty of ceiling to accomplish that through talents, blessings and other perks without âbigger number = betterâ mechanics.
It would also definitely improve the player progression flow, as each difficulty could be internally balanced better without having to fight extra layers of numbers.
But as I said previously, it would require a change in effort that I donât see happening.
Well, you have to scale with difficulty somehow and if you are not doing it via enemy health and damage as is customary in nearly every game, I suppose the alternative is to scale it via number of enemies. So on Difficulty I you get anemic hordes, almost no elites, and very few roamers. The problem is that this is a horde-killing game and the enemies should feel like a horde and not like a trickle.
The other big problem is that a number of attacks at damnation can one-shot the player and that would be very unfun for the newbie just starting out with no idea how to block or dodge. Such a concept might work in a standard shooter (bullets = bad, duh) but the combat system in DT is a little more nuanced and complex and needs an easing in period for a new player. Even as a VT2 veteran I needed a while to adapt.
Enemy health inflation âbullet spongesâ are used in precisely those âstandard shootersâ you deride to counter the point. Bullet sponge enemies is a lazy mechanic, which is why itâs easy to use. It doesnât make it good, just convenient, and itâs widely regarded as a low-effort, unsatisfying result.
Darktideâs mechanics are the best format for a more inventive system. If thereâs one attack coming in, itâs a mechanic that can be watched and learned from. Sure youâll have some deaths, but are you so wrapped up in the idea that a death means the gameâs awful? One death doesnât mean unfun. Teach the players better, not like it currently is with the joke of a tutorial and a lack of information on anything in the UI. I maintain that the easy difficulties shouldnât be for âeasy winsâ, but for better learning. Making crushers anaemic pushovers through numbers is insulting to players and harmful to player progression, resulting in the arbitrary weapon inflation and the need for crafting systems to smooth an artificially hamstrung difficulty progression.
I always prefered enemy density to health increases in terms of difficulty. But then I actually think Cataclysm in VT2 was actually pretty nicely balanced so idk. I guess they could continue tweaking the numbers, but like you said, it does make balance more tricky overall.
I got a real kick out of rolling up a max Helbore with crit and blowing a crushers head off, and removing +damage bonuses would completely nullify such (brief) fun experiences.
I think you raised a good discussion though, Iâm not 100% sure where I stand on it.
How many examples can you guys come up with, where a game of a similar genre has mutiple difficulty settings, but no
And the game did not absolutely suck?
Not trying to crap on you.
Just curious because almost every game that i can think of (unless it is a strategy game), has enemy hp scaling with difficulty. And usually, players get better weapons (items in general) as they get further into the game.
I think that there is a good reason for that. Something to do with progression being important.
But maybe i am wrong and they all just do it because someone started doing it for no reason and then everyone else just went with it.
Helldivers 2.
Every enemy has the exact same health regardless of difficulty. All items perform the same regardless of level. The only difference is in how many enemies and what types might spawn, with higher difficulties getting more advanced and more heavily armored enemy types overall.
Probably too late to change it now but yes I agree. Stats should remain the same, then each difficulty level sees new, tougher enemies added, and more volume of enemies.
In an ideal worldâŚ
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