Stitch on 12/4/2012 at 21:54

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Choose your door, choose your fate :cool:

Christ, it's weird how large DM loomed in my childhood; I never even really got all that far but at the time it was the big, bad game on the block, and I had far more mentally invested in it than was probably normal. And apparently that shit doesn't fade with time, as I feel like Grimrock has mined down to that vein and released all those obsessions and demons to dance around and remind me that years of dormancy haven't dulled their edges any.

justmea on 13/4/2012 at 02:52

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Here is hoping the sequel will improve, this is more of a dungeon master, than lands of lore. Need more varied environments and better story that involves characters. Maybe they'll kickstart it to get more funding. Still very well worth the $15

Papy on 15/4/2012 at 05:22

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The most obvious reason for not wanting a difficulty level is simply because difficulty levels are obscure. They have no real meaning. They don't give much indication to the player about which difficulty level he should choose in order to have fun with the game.

Worse, most games now include the tutorial inside the game, instead of being external to the game. As a result, someone who is familiar with that particular kind of game will find the "tutorial" part very easy (because he already knows what the tutorial is trying to teach him), so he'll choose a high difficulty level and then hit a wall when the tutorial is over because of his wrong choice.

Personally, when I start a game, choosing the right difficulty level is something I hate. The game ask me to choose something, but the truth is I can't because I don't have enough information. It is always a trial and error kind of thing. The consequence is that for the first few hours, I will regularly be thinking about it, I will regularly ask myself if I should restart the game at another difficulty level in order to have more fun. The result of this control is I will view the game from an external point of view, instead of being "inside" the game doing my best to survive. Simply put, the choice of a difficulty level at the begining directly breaks immersion.


Another reason for me not to like difficulty levels in a game like this one is because a video game is (still talking about me) about challenge. I have zero interest for a toy. I find playing with a video toy a boring waste of time, but playing against a video game fun. Being able to choose a difficulty level is a control over the game which kind of destroy that idea of challenge (obviously, I'm talking about games which are meant to be played only once). It's a bit like running a marathon, but with the ability to stop the race whenever I want and still having a nice certificate saying that I ran a "marathon". Or to use a better example, it's like playing a match of badminton against someone who voluntarily misses some shots in order to let me win. When this happens, even though the score say I won, I certainly don't have any sense of victory. It's not about what other people do like you assumed, but it's about our own feeling of achievement.

Of course the solution (for people like me) would be to always play at the most difficult level, but the thing is sometimes the most difficult level is really made for people who already played the game or who use the save and reload functions every two minutes. So it's not a solution.


A third reason is because difficulty levels are almost always about more hit points or more ennemies, not about more difficult puzzles or more complex levels. They are about more repetitions while doing less errors, not about finding more elaborate solutions. Sometimes having more enemies with more hit points will force you to find alternative solutions instead of brute force, but most of the time there is no alternative solution and the higher difficulty level completely fail to make the game more interesting, it only makes it more tedious.


So it breaks part of the immersion, it destroy part of the sense of achievement and most of the time it fails at making the game more interesting. I even guess I could go on and find other reasons against difficulty levels, but I think the best for me to say is simply that I did play a lot of games without difficulty levels (obviously more in the 80s than now) and it rarely was a problem. There are a few times when I found a game too difficult and quit before the end, but the possibility of losing is what makes the idea of a challenge possible.


Having said that, I have no problem understanding that some (most?) people don't want to really be challenged when they play a video game. I also understand that not all people have the same abilities. So I'm certainly not really against difficuly levels, but I'm certainly against the meaningless "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard" presentation. I think the game should ask what the player wants, whether he wants a fun pastime or a real challenge, and then give him a gameplay which match what he likes.

Pemptus on 15/4/2012 at 11:56

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Also, what you consider a "challenge" others may consider "weaksauce casual bullshit" and vice versa, so yeah.

As for the game itself, I spent half an hour on it so far. And didn't make it past the character creation screen. Goddamit, this used to be so easy - I just picked whatever seemed appropriate. Now it's not enough, apparently, I have to do at least some amount of min-maxing or my brain keeps yelling at me for not being optimal.

Malf on 15/4/2012 at 12:39

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Apparently you can. Don't ask me how, but the devs have strongly hinted it's possible on the official forums.