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A6 -This game is many times as hard as it should be.


blackwight

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Originally Posted By: Spidweb
So yes, the game will become easier.

- Jeff Vogel


Victory is mine.

Another level below 'Casual' might also be nice. BTW the term 'casual' brings casual gaming to mind, which has a sort of granny reputation. I used 'relaxed' to encourage people to adjust the difficulty down; which they still refuse to do.

Have a good vacation.
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Originally Posted By: blackwight
Another level below 'Casual' might also be nice.


Hmmm, difficulty must be one of the hardest things for Jeff to judge, given that the beta testers seem for the most part to be hard-core gamers.

Heck, I've been playing these games since... well, I clearly remember trying to figure out what the heck the wine-crazy gremlins wanted up near Silvar in the original Exile, on my Mac LC III, back before there was a web to check such things on easily.

Despite having played forever, I still generally play on normal, and occasionally on hard. So there's only one step below where I normally play, and I'm not exactly new to gaming.

I wonder if he's got stats as to what percentage of his users prefer each difficulty level?
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Originally Posted By: You would, wouldn't you?
How can someone give information on the difficulty played before they download the game?

—Alorael, who doesn't think Jeff would rely on voluntary, self-reported difficulty. Or he shouldn't, anyway. There are all kinds of sampling and bias problems.


Of course there is. But that's how surveys with humans work, people lie they lie, there's nothing that can be done.
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If you want to do rigorous social science (not actually an oxymoron), you need to try to account for falsehoods, self-censorship, and non-random samples.

 

—Alorael, who suspects that Jeff not only doesn't want to be rigorous, he doesn't care about who plays on what difficulties.

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Originally Posted By: alorael
he doesn't care about who plays on what difficulties.


Well, I suspect he cares that the games be well-enough calibrated to users' preferences that they love the games enough to want to buy more of them, and to spread the word about their general awesomeness. smile

It seems to me that Jeff has spent some pretty serious time since -- oh, what was the awful one, Avernum 4? -- considering what makes for enjoyable game play. Most notably, he's mostly gotten rid of mobs/grinding, which is a pretty major accomplishment in games the size of G5 or A6. I suspect he's also spent some time tweaking just what *kind* of difficulties the game presents.
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A4 wasn't too bad later on (if anything, most fights became too quick and easy by the end). It was just the slimes and chitrachs in the second quarter of the game that really sucked. You can revisit the chitrach tunnels in A6 and they're as huge as ever, but they're much more bearable, and you can skip nearly all of them and still advance the main plot.

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