Any game that allows you to change difficulty settings mid-game is for cheaters.
b e a r d
@xianc78 what about increasing the difficulty if it becomes too easy
@xianc78 I have difficulty settings in my game for 2 reasons.
1) you can level up forever so at some point the game might become too easy at standard difficulty
2) if balance is bad in a certain area and people don't want to grind for eternity, lowering the difficulty for a little bit to get through it is preferable to a player feeling frustrated and putting the game down
I'm just a solo dev so I can't account for that much. The more options I can provide the better.
@xianc78 that sounds like an anti piracy method lol
@beardalaxy People who cheat deserve a bad ending. I'm surprised that there aren't any game developers who put checks at the end of the game to make sure the player didn't sequence break. There should be a check to make sure that the player got all the dungeon items or whatever (assuming that all the levels are intended to be mandatory of course). If the check fails, it should be an instant game over and your save file gets deleted.
@xianc78 ultimately you want to respect the player's time and the fact they purchased and played your game instead of someone else's.
also this would totally kneecap the awesome thing that is speedrunning. glitched speedruns are extremely fun to watch and very fascinating.
@beardalaxy Assume that anyone speedrunning your game is a tranny and have this be the ending if the player is caught sequence breaking.
@xianc78 @beardalaxy The point of a game is to have fun. Cheating generally detracts from it, I'd rather grind than cheat, but at the same time I'd rather noclip if i get stuck in bad geometry than reload
@applejack @xianc78 yeah that's kind of my ethos, i'll do whatever i need to in order to have fun. if cheating is part of that then i'll do it. i got THIS CLOSE to removing the police chases from unbound while i was playing it because it was happening way too frequently and i just wanted to enter in races lol.
@xianc78 the main focus of my game is also not the combat, it's the world. The difficulty only affects combat difficulty. I think it really depends on what your target audience is and what you want the players to focus on while playing your game. Ara Fell has an option to skip battles entirely because the focus is mostly on the world/story and the dev realized that people may not want to grind a lot to get to that, or they may want to just experience the story by itself. Dark Souls' combat is a core element, and it is meant to be experienced in a certain way, so they have no difficulty adjustment period.
@beardalaxy
>you can level up forever so at some point the game might become too easy at standard difficulty
Thanks for reminding me why I prefer action-adventures over RPGs. The game theoretically becomes piss easy if you just kill enough enemies.
@xianc78 i actually don't play many RPGs because i always run into the issue of getting stuck at a boss fight and then grinding for hours and hours, only to return to the boss and completely wipe the floor with it as well as potentially the rest of the game in its entirety. at that point i'm playing it only for the story.
when i started making god's disdain one of the core ideas was to make an RPG i would actually enjoy playing. i've tried my best to make it so that not a whole lot of grinding is even necessary. in an ideal world the player would never have to grind during the game, but i know there will be cracks in that here and there.
it is what i like about modern final fantasy though, because it isn't just pure stats that are going to get you through fights.
@beardalaxy Make it so that if players suddenly make the game easier (or cheat in any other way) that they get a super sudden bad ending where an asteroid randomly hits the planet and kills everyone.