{"id":242,"date":"2017-06-03T17:13:11","date_gmt":"2017-06-03T21:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.sixages.com\/?p=242"},"modified":"2017-06-03T17:13:11","modified_gmt":"2017-06-03T21:13:11","slug":"difficulty-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sixages.com\/index.php\/2017\/06\/03\/difficulty-level\/","title":{"rendered":"Difficulty Level"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I started seriously thinking about Six Ages, I decided I didn\u2019t want to have difficulty levels.<\/p>\n

This is partly because King of Dragon Pass didn\u2019t do a particularly good job with them. The hardest setting was certainly harder than the easiest one, but I think calling the easiest one \u201cEasy\u201d was a mistake. The game itself wasn\u2019t particularly easy, and if a player thought they were experienced at similar games, they might try a harder setting and become frustrated. (I changed the labels to begin at \u201cNormal\u201d as part of the version 2.0 reworking, to clarify this.)\u00a0And the effects of the settings weren\u2019t explained. In general, King of Dragon Pass\u00a0stays immersive and doesn\u2019t mention game terms, but this is before play begins.<\/p>\n

Even if they had been explained, it\u2019s one more thing to decide before you get to the meat of the game.<\/p>\n

So my plan was to focus on tuning the game, and make sure that was right.<\/p>\n

Then I asked Ken Rolston<\/a> to give some feedback on the latest Six Ages build. One of his key items was that he missed KoDP\u2019s difficulty options at the beginning of a new game.<\/p>\n

We had a short discussion about this, since Ken said, \u201cwhen working with\u00a0Raphael van Lierop on The Long Dark<\/a>, the single most important thing I worked on was persuading Raphael to add difficulty levels.\u201d I\u2019m pretty sure Ken made many other contributions, but at the very least I needed to reconsider my design.<\/p>\n

Certainly difficulty levels are a simple way to accommodate players of different skill. They also hint at replayability (your future self after winning is likely to be at a different skill level, so you might want to try a more challenging level). And while Ken didn\u2019t say this, if\u00a0he missed difficulty levels, other players might as well. Starting players off with even a minor disappointment isn\u2019t the best experience!<\/p>\n

So I will be adding three levels of difficulty: Normal<\/strong> (since this is how I expect people will play), Hard<\/strong>, and Harsh<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t figured out exactly what these mean, but the basic idea is that Hard will make careful resource management more important, and Harsh may feel like all Glorantha is against you. The game system has a lot of difficulty levers, including<\/p>\n