How do you feel about the game's current difficulty?

I'm sorry if I seemed angry. I'm not at all. Honestly I did not once shit on anyone's opinion, only replied with mine once more.

 

The game's not difficult enough, but at the same time if you never leave planet surfaces you're also not challenging yourself. Monsters get worse as you dig deeper and move into new sectors.

 

This is one of those games that has to appeal to the casual players for its success and survival. That said, i think mods will turn this game golden. Most of the mechanics in this game have a great foundation, with a few tweaks we can have the difficult game we want.

Personally, i hope mods can remove some of the surface ores and increase planet size while adding additional biomes.

 

If anything, I'm confused with the difficulty.. Or lets say, the combat part of it.

The monsters aren't hard because they are smart, they are hard because they (all) have super-reflexes and they (all) leap perfectly ontop of your head (they even perfectly adjust speed mid-air to achieve that). It's not really rewarding to make cool ninja moves, because monsters will hit you anyway with their better ninja and super-reflex moves. The ones that fly also have super-aim, and hit everything if you wouldn't move for a second. Blood vomit seems to hit you with full dmg even if it has almost dissipated (3 pixel clouds), goes for other vanishing projectiles too like cold and poison clouds...

Combat would be fun if smart tactical movement or thinking would be rewarded (no, not spamming block cages around monsters because they are too dumb to move out of them...), right now survival purely depends on how many bandages you decide to bring along, how strong your armor/weapon is, and how much you decide to abuse exploits. What I'm saying is, it would be fun if you would have to use different "tricks" per monster to defeat it.

The NPCs are a joke. They might be slightly smarter than monsters when it comes down to moving around, but they do very little damage, and usually one monster can easily rape a whole bunch of them. In dungeons, they mindlessly charge at you, without regrouping or anything.. I don't mind it if just one keeps doing that, but they all do the same stupid thing, which makes it a simple matter of knocking them back all the time (since they literally fly away even with small attacks). NPCs with guns are slightly better/smarter, probably because of placement in dungeons (usually high). The NPCs still don't switch to melee properly when you are up close either, which leads to another thing.

Weapons just don't feel right, the lightning effect on melee weapons can still be used to shoot through walls, monsters that have attacked you and are literally at the same position as you are can't be hit in any single way... There should be at least some option to push them off or something. Hits with guns and especially bows sometimes simply don't register while actually making the hit sound on monsters, discouraging the usage of bow early-game since you can't shoot so quickly with it (and monsters rush at you like crazy) and unexpected "misses" aren't really helping.

Dungeons with challenges/traps are a joke too, because you can dig straight through the building to the reward room, from surface. I know this is just temporary though, at least I hope so, but things like this have no point if you can destroy the dungeon's outlining blocks.

Power-ups seem pointless as they always either kill me with the poison-cloud of death or give me a speed-boost, kinda weird to add a 1-hit kill mechanic to a power-up.

So yea, the game can be difficult at times, but only for the wrong reasons imo, and with a little bit of abuse, even that can be prevented (block caging).

I realize this is still beta, but I think the flaws should be pointed out so it can be fixed at a later stage maybe. I noticed they are working on making monster behavior more interesting though.. Some of them already flee from you sometimes

 

One-shotting enemies is lame. Being one-shotted by enemies is worse.

 

They can balance all they want but won't get it right unless they add a difficulty setting.
Make it easier -> People like me are disappointed.
Make it harder -> Casuals are disappointed.
It's as simple as that.

In my opinion (and those of the players I play with on a server) it's like this:
It used to be too hard in some aspects, now it's too easy in general. Especially the bossfights are real letdowns. Even with help they were really intense, now you can just kill them yourself if you got 5 minutes.

 

It would be more difficult if you had to adapt to different enemies, instead of walk backwards, hammer, backwards, hammer...

 

too much easy for my tastes

 

It'd be neat to some day at least have offense/defense buttons for any slot... like mouse1/shift-mouse1... with alternates like parry on melee weapons, shield bash on shield, pistol whip, rifle stock strike/knockback etc. Until then what can you really do but dodge and attack? Can still swap to shield I guess. Not complaining; just sayin there's currently not a whole lot of options for difficulty based on gameplay meta.

 

This post actually highlights one of my key issues with any difficulty level of games, such as Starbound, Terraria, Minecraft, etc.

Players are often given a multitude of movement options and combat methods, but there is very little focus on what enemies can do, which can lead to these situations where all the enemies can be killed by simply walking backwards and hitting them when they get too close. I'd like for the enemies to be able to have some of these movement options that we also get as players.

For instance, an enemy that can use the Speed Dash tech and a couple of other things would make a pretty interesting enemy.

 

Somewhere along the line, people are failing at reasoning. I'm not sure where it is, but I'd wager it's somewhere between the inability to put two and two together and figure out why games are being made the way they are, and the ability to accept this as there's not much that can be done about it that doesn't hurt a game's potential success.

Fact is, "easy" sells. Those of us that grew up with Capcom and Konami in the 8 and 16 bit age would do well to remember that we didn't have much of a choice at the time and the game industry was much more narrow at the time. Not everyone can handle that, and not everyone wants it. Hell, I still play hard as balls platformers and even I don't want that all the time.

 

Well, you could have guards that regroup instead of mindlessly charging at the intruder. They could use bombs/grenades and bandages to heal. You could have mobs that can block your attacks if you time them poorly. You could have enemies using techs. Just imagine a boss that is no monster but a guard that uses bandages and has the blink tech.
The possibilities are there.

What kind of poor excuse is that?
Let me introduce you to the ancient technology that can make everybody happy...

 

Please for the love of god don't make me go digging for my last post where I explained in detail why that isn't guaranteed to be a viable solution at all.

I'll summarize, but it's the best you're going to get. If you're too hard headed to come to the proper conclusions yourself I'm not going to go out of my way to help you.

Difficulty meters require additional developer resources to produce and come with all sorts of difficult considerations and problems that need to be solved the moment that multiplayer is introduced to the mix. Often, the time spent developing them isn't worth it, and efforts spent making it worth it can harm your game.

 

There are some things that clearly need re-balancing but building the core components of the game is far more important at this point. Why would they spend extreme amounts of time balancing something incomplete? It's going to take the "too hard" to "too easy' shift quite a bit more before they have a completely stable system to start seriously balancing. In the meantime, we shouldn't be pontificating upon the "Casual vs. Hardcore" argument; We should be finding real and meaningful bugs in the system and reporting them.

 

I think the bosses in the game are way to easy and some surface monsters, but the game seems like it is at a pretty good place to me.

 

I've already encountered small hostile monsters on my new starting planet (as of v. Angry Koala) that can use Blink. Jesus.

 

Sorry, they should add a notification that one should follow you and read any post from you after registering. Besides that I never said that it's guaranteed to solve the problems, just that it can.

I surely have better things to do than searching through all your posts, but okay...

Just like literally anything else.

Just like literally anything else.

That's your opinion; I disagree. Who is right now?

It's been a looooong time so I'm not entirely sure, but if I remember correctly, difficulty in (Half-Life 2 based) Source games or Source Mods is realized with a simple factor. Really not sure though.

Anyway, it would be no sophisticated system, but it would be enough.
0.8f = easy mode.
1.0f = normal mode.
1.5f = hard mode.

Damage and health of enemies should be easy to implement depending on how clean their code is since it's just a basic multiplication. I have no idea how they calculate the ore/chests, but my first guess would be that at some point a probability is used to determine if there is loot in some place. In that case they could just use the inverse of the difficulty factor.
Higher difficulty = Stronger enemies and less loot.

This would be enough for the most of us.

 

We still need the three levels of difficulty of monsters per sector. Without that, the creatures themselves all feel the same stat wise.

 

People seem to be forgetting that we have a sector system in place.

 

If you want the game to be hard, run around in your underwear and only upgrade your weapon. As it is, monster AI is frustrating when your flailing a weapon at them, and gear progression is weird. When your wearing outdated armor, its tough. When your wearing current tier armor... its easy.

And ranged weapons are still too crappy and too hard to find.