[Feedback] Game difficulty after finishing the campaign

If the game becomes easy, it will be boring, and I will not like it, and therefore I will not want it to be a financial success. See how that works?

Frankly, I don't see the problem with the later parts of the game being difficult. That's like, the textbook definition of how difficulty is supposed to work. Granted I'm only at Tomb of Tvericus (giving my Priest/Priest/Warrior party a very rough time), but the game's difficulty curve has been nothing but exemplary so far.

"Handicap yourself" is a lazy, thoughtless answer. The entire problem with a game that's too easy is that it's not interesting. Removing choices is not going to make it any more interesting.

Conversely, a player having trouble with the game does in fact have options. He can ask for help, consult guides (as soon as someone makes guides), replay previous adventures to get new items, or try different builds/parties.

 

Or, perhaps the more likely option, look to other games for enjoyment. While a healthy discussion about difficulty is good, so long as the devs are tracking and adjusting the game to achieve their intended difficulty then things are in order. We are along for the ride and our backseat driving becomes noise unless there is something more than opinions shared.

 

I was originally one of those claiming many of the early adventures were too hard but there were still only a handful that I had real trouble winning.

Pretty much every adventure I was worried about back then has been adjusted since and I'd say the current difficulty is fine. (Well, maybe Melvelous could still use some tuning but that adventure is kinda like the boss fight of the first part of story anyway).

 

In those recent posts, Tobold and Blindsight, you mention how the "most likely reaction" to a difficult situation is to quit. As can be seen from the rest of the discussion (and, obviously, Blindsight's own comments on enjoying the difficulty), that is open to a world of variation.

In many situations, someone who acts like that is "a quitter." In others, "a casual gamer." Interacting with this is that there's more to the game than just difficulty. If the game is actually fun--if, say, its visuals are engaging, or its theme is nostalgic, or its strategic setup is promising--then yet more people would react to it in a manner beyond a casual gamer's knee-jerk. Simply lowering the difficulty because "that would repel gamers otherwise" risks oversimplifying how one attracts gamers. Especially if, as you say Tobold, you're not even talking about the experience when someone first plays the game!

And especially, of course, because people attracted to such a promising game could be repelled (just as Foil) to discover there is no game at all: just another clickfest from start to finish. Yes, I am aware that getting money from the wallet of people who have a trivial engagement with the game (separating fools from their money; catering to the lowest common denominator; "selling out") is a lucrative enterprise: but on the other hand, there's the eternal quest to engage people in a quality product (when more extreme, designing a "slow-burning classic"; a "cult classic"). It's a balance between multiple poles, really, and again it comes back to what target audience Blue Manchu really wants.

Edit: I basically rewrote this post.

 

That's true.

You know, once i made a board game after Warlords and we were playing it all summer.
But it ended up players was constantly asking to buff the side they were playing.
From this i learned that it's not really great thing to make changes in the game out of players opinion.
Creator of the game usually have better perspective and can view the project as one whole thing.
So i think developers knows better what to do(maybe i'll be whining game's too hard after all of it)
but they make game for players so if they all say game's too hard and quit that will be a dev's failure.
So i also want this game to be interesting and successful but it seems that these two intentions
may come to disagreement with each other.

Well after all my vote goes to keep this game hard, maybe with option to make it bit easy(with worse gain for instance)

 

The quest for peoples wallet usually just ends the quest for quality product.
Sadly in 100% cases developers choose money and who am i to blame them.
But Cardhunter seem to be a good try maybe to at least keep some balance on that.
I hope developers will have the will to keep it quality product.

 

I like the difficulty of the game. I've maxed out three parties of characters and completed all quests save the 1-hp ones and the level-10 ones. Those are a massive pain and not very fun, IMO. The "Only Drawbacks" quests were the most balanced I thought, though achieving the item diversity might be a challenge.

 

. . . Whew, dodged a bullet. I went away, thought over how my post sounded (after already editing it once), and realized someone might explode at me. When I said this:

I was NOT trying to say that the aforementioned "less-expert tacticians" were the same things as "fools." I was just trying to express the extremest end of "catering to the lowest common denominator," being to rake in cash even from people who have no idea what quality is. I do not believe that anyone in this thread supports such an extreme.

 

Yes, i also think calling people fools was a bit rude. To call one fool needs something more than not being expert at strategic thinking.
Or else not every people who pay money for games are fools. Game industry is a business of it's own and that's how game makers
make their money. So i think nothing wrong with this, well at least when it's not going to endless pursuit to pay enormous sums
(well, sometimes it happens and usually in my most liked genre of TCG).