What about; locked difficulties till completing the previous one?!

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Oasisbhrnw wrote:

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Narfi wrote:

D2 system is an easy way to give the player more to play through without having to build so many more zones :)

Yeah, it's brilliant. Does anyone know the first game to structure their difficulty progression like this?

A couple of games come to mind:
Donkey Kong
Ghosts 'n' Goblins
Pretty much any oldschool arcade game with escalating difficulty.

As for the difficulty locking thing, there are possible balance reasons for doing it.
Such as certain character builds that become very powerful in the late game, but are difficult to play up until they get to a certain point. I mean there might be an area with a unique challenge mid-way through the game. Players would normally need to have some way of dealing with the area. But if you could just skip the area then builds could become even more specialised, upsetting the overall game balance.
The game would degenerate into nothing but highly specialised builds that fail pretty much everywhere but are very efficient at farming one or two high level areas.
Same with hardcore. Notoriously dangerous bosses could just be skipped, players would just move on to farm xp somewhere safer.
So not enforcing progression could actually make the game easier.


Asking for no enforced progression is a bit silly IMO. It's like complaining that you have to play all the way through the game to face the final boss in super mario bros. "but why can't I just skip all the content and finish the game in one minute?"

:P

I like the locked difficulties.... you can't start in very hard at lvl 1 you will die in 1 hit of a simple imp xD

Like d2 !!! I love it

The way I see it, there are two different concepts of "difficulties" here.
The first is the Diablo-style (and, as Malice pointed out, not just Diablo) Normal/Nightmare/Hell "difficulties", where the character starts the storyline over with harder enemies but also with whatever skills, experience, and equipment they've accumulated.
Here, locking more advanced difficulties makes sense.

The second is where new characters face harder enemies from the beginning on higher difficulty settings - the difficulty settings from first person shooters comes to mind here (or, as mentioned earlier, Torchlight).
Here, locking different difficulties makes significantly less sense, and I think is what zeto was getting at. However, this I think would correspond to different leagues, and so it's unlikely they would be locked in any case.

your excused :-)

is it set in stone for 4 types being the max?

thank you chris for this update

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eversorgod wrote:

your excused :-)

is it set in stone for 4 types being the max?

i thought they plan 5 but i could be wrong!

as far as i understood this, 4 is pretty much it.
First 3 is for leveling and the whole 4th one is endgame cuz everything is maxed lvl (instead of only a few high lvl end game zones like D2 etc.)

i only asked as they initially started of with 3 difficulties. the 4th being added was quite recent so theres ever possibility for a 5th i guess

was trying to squeeze some info lol

yea i like that difficulty adds more to the game, you had it in baldurs gate with harder difficulties adding more weapons and armour and harder levels/missions

i have been missing a good game in so long that i actually dug out my ps2 and started playing it again thats how good it was

drakensang isnt doing it for me completely



ps outlaw and brutal were my picks ;-)

In the FAQ it is mentioned that 100 is the level cap.

Does this mean that we are leveling from 50-100 in the 'Merciless' difficulty? Since the current plan is that all the monsters in the fourth difficulty are the same level and drop items with the same 'effectiveness', does this mean that level 50 items are what we still will be using at level 100?