Game difficulty: Hoping they won't go the "stat/damage/life" slider for game difficulty but use something more interesting.

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Not a big fan of game difficulty just being a % damage received, damage dealt modifier. like:

Easy: 50% damage taken, 150% damage dealt
Normal: 100% damage taken, 100% damage dealt
Hard: 125% damage taken, 75% damage dealt

No info on this at this year's E3 either to my knowledge. What I'd really like to see is:

1) A pool of randomly seeded positive and negative traits tied to difficulty. Example:

Purely beneficial:

Agile (+50% reload speed)
Blitz (Will attempt to rush the player)
Tactician (Will attempt to flank)
Toughness (+25% life)
Spray'n'pray (Will fire with reckless abandon, providing supression fire)

Mixed:

Eagle-eye (Drastically improves aim, -33% life)
Cyborg (Has more and/or upgraded implants, but has a chance to go berserk also attacking allies)
Junkie (Uses more combat enhancing stims in combat, worse aim)
Survivor (Might grab nearby allies to use them as a living shield)
Leader (Has lower combat stats, but provides buffs to nearby allies)

Negative traits:

Fearful (Weaker aim and damage the less allies are nearby)
Coward (Chance to flee when wounded)
Weak (-20% life and damage)
Slow (Less movement and reload speed)
Traitor (Might shoot allies, bringing them out of cover for you to shoot at - to give themselves room to shoot or advance)

The way it could work, with all enemies getting 1-4 traits at random. Some stronger traits for enemies are only applied at higher difficulties. Some bad traits are excluded or has a very low chance to be rolled on higher difficulties. So difficulty applies trait seeding.

Other than that: Difficulty tied to AI behavior. Like enemies might flank more at hard+. Enemy spawns. Remember that gangleader you fought on normal in that alley who had 2 bodyguards? Well on Hard difficulty he has a sniper on the roof. And on VH difficulty he has 2 guys reinforcing from the back. Maybe also a RNG seed system equal to the trait system above for weapons and armor.

Yeah I know, I'm probably expecting too much here. In any case, I'd personally enjoy pretty much ANY game difficulty that does not do the arbitrary dmg/life slider/scaling thing. I'd like your opinion on this. What is your preferable way to deal with game difficulty? What are good and bad ways to make the game less and more difficult? What's your dream-come-true of a game like this handling difficulty?
 
Im personally hoping for a gang based difficulty system. Some gangs are experienced netrunners so you might find it impossible or very hard to hack their network and use quickhacks, forcing you to a different play style if your experienced in hacking.
 
Difficulty level only affecting damage dealt/received % is what I call 'artificial difficulty' -- and consider the absolute worst way to implement difficulty levels. All it does is affect the time it takes to kill enemies and get killed by enemies. So boring.

Difficulty should affect AI behaviour and detection, precision required in regards to timing actions such as attacks, and that sort of things. Or, simply put, anything but "Oh, playing on the hardest difficulty? Have fun with these enemies that have 100000 HP with 99% damage resistance and that deal 10000 damage per hit."

I think I just pretty much agreed with the OP without adding anything; I guess my views are really similar.
 
Theres a Poll about Difficult Level, if you search. Im not sure if they use those polls for game development, but you could imagine they do.
 
Difficulty level only affecting damage dealt/received % is what I call 'artificial difficulty' -- and consider the absolute worst way to implement difficulty levels. All it does Is affect the time it takes to kill enemies and get killed by enemies. So boring.

Difficulty should affect AI behaviour and detection, precision required in regards to timing actions such as attacks, and that sort of things. Or, simply put, anything but "Oh, playing on the hardest difficulty? Have fun with these enemies that have 100000 HP with 99% damage resistance and that deal 10000 damage per hit."

I think I just pretty much agreed with the OP without adding anything; I guess my views are really similar.
I'm waiting for the "but that's how RPG work! You don't like it, go play call of duty".

One of the most hateful and laziest game designs. But that's what we gonna get, it's always like that, in particular with levels that already do this no matter of difficulty: lower level enemy dies with 1 bullet, same level enemy dies with 5 bullets, higher level enemies needs 100 bullets and kills you with 1 shot, because game designer doesn't want you to beat him.
 
They'll probably make like the ones from TW3, I don't think they have much time to invent shenanigans 10 months from release. But they didn't answer about difficulty at E3, odd that no one asked.
 
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