And, if they get killed, they won't remember that they were warned. If there's an unexplored area, people will enter it. No reason to think things should be different here. Characters in games tell them how lethal the territory ahead is all the time, and then they enter it and prevail. I swear, I put in "OMG this room ahead is megahard guys srsly!!!" warnings all the time, and nobody ever listens to them. And if you give a warning, most players will ignore it. When you suddenly make the game's difficulty jump without warning, you aren't playing fair with the player. And they will fail and be frustrated and hate you and not play your next game. If you put in a little nugget of difficulty, most players will still try to take it on. Want to put in something tough? Save it for the next area. When you are supposed to enter an area, you should be able to handle all of the encounters and quests in that area. But, at last, after fifteen years, I think I have finally learned the main lesson:ĭifficulty In a Game Should Have a Curve With As Few Bumps As Possible I just patched Avernum 6 and removed a bunch of those dumb encounters, but the structure of the game means there are a few that have to stay. To doom most players to several attempts to kill the boss and getting slaughtered before they figure out that they have to return later, wasting their time and goodwill. To add one more item to an ever-increasing list of things to remember to return to. How sadistic and stupid is that? To let the player fight through a dungeon and not give the satisfaction of finishing it off. The player will kill the early bandits, get some lewt, and then see that the final boss is an entirely different sort of character and back off and come back later."
"Ah," I thought, in a moment of exhaustion and idiocy. I actually had one bandit dungeon where the boss was super-tough. There were way too many encounters that were rough and meant to be returned to later. This sort of thing is something I think is neat and has a place, if you're very, very careful about it.īut in Avernum 6, I went way, WAY too far with this. Sure, it'll slaughter you the first couple of times you run across it, but it will give you the motivation to work harder and prevail! It's a hardcore gamer way of thinking. Something to come back and try later to test your strength and see how much power you have gained. The basic idea behind this was that it gave the player a challenge. These little nuggets of toughness were always optional and always had special text warning the player that there was a really nasty foe here. It would be some special named or boss with tougher abilities and better loot. I have long thought it was cool to, in any given area in a game, place one encounter that was far harder than the stuff around it.
And error I've made again and again, with increasing energy, until I finally went way too far in Avernum 6 and made a resolution to never, ever to do it again. This post (like a similar post a few weeks ago) is about one of the errors I've made in the past. When I started writing role-playing games for a living, I had a lot of ideas for how an RPG should be.
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