{"id":521,"date":"2014-04-11T19:08:41","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T19:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/?p=521"},"modified":"2014-04-11T19:08:41","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T19:08:41","slug":"difficulty-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/difficulty-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"Difficulty Balance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The difficulty balance in an RPG is an incredibly hard tightrope to walk on. You don’t know exactly what state the player will approach a challenge. Sure, they may be leveled up high enough, but what about their equipment and their strategy? After Another Star<\/cite>, I have a lot more respect for the developers of RPGs in general! Even generic RPGs make player progression seem so easy.<\/p>\n

A few people have said that Another Star<\/cite>‘s late game is less fun than earlier sections. However, it’s too soon for me to decide if they’re actually right. I designed the later enemies in the game with specific strategies in mind. Thus, I’m not even sure yet if players are approaching the challenges correctly, or if it’s a failing on my part. And even if it is my fault, is it because the enemies are actually “broken”, or because I didn’t explain a mechanic well enough in game?<\/p>\n

I was hoping to see more discussion among players about strategies: enemy weaknesses, what items to use, the best ways to use magic, the fastest ways to take down enemies. This sort of open discussion is an aspect of games that I really love, so it’s really disappointing to see no dialog at all between players. I’m really not sure what to do about it, either.<\/p>\n

That said, I’m certainly not above applying “balance patches” in later versions of the game. If a section of the game is just not fun no matter what, then of course I’m open to changing it. However, I don’t want to “fix” anything until I have enough input to know for sure that it’s actually broken, and that players aren’t just missing something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The difficulty balance in an RPG is an incredibly hard tightrope to walk on. You don’t know exactly what state the player will approach a challenge. Sure, they may be leveled up high enough, but what about their equipment and their strategy? After Another Star, I have a lot more respect for the developers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-another-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":522,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}