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

Nah I don't think restricting players is a good thing, because what players liked about the previous system was the freedom to go to insanely difficult planets.

I think they should do threat level 1-10 per sector, and then allow better loot (for that tier) to spawn on higher threat level planets, but it MUST be a chance, and not a guarantee like it was before. Maybe they need to act tier-specific rewards, and then something relevant for that sector/tier would drop often on the highest threat level planet, but you would never be able to have an easy time with the best gear for that sector/tier.

 

I highly doubt they'll never go back to armor pen, because they've already committed to the new system, and they've said that they can't do ten levels of difficulty per sector on the health system (due to the hugeness of numbers at higher levels), but yes. I agree with that entirely. I just, unfortunately, don't see it happening.

It's what I was trying to get across. Well other than the 'chance at higher gear'. I hadn't really considered that so I wasn't trying to get THAT part across. Still agree though.

 

Well, they don't need to bring back armor pen for this, They could just increase the chance to get loot with above average stats for the more difficult planets in that sector. The issue won't be with the larger numbers though, it will be with the smaller ones It will be hard to make the difference look significant for those. Basically, with large numbers it will still happen on the same scale as with the small numbers, so even while a difference could look very big, it should not bring any problems along.

And if threat level 1-10 is too much, they could just go for "easy, medium, hard, brutal" difficulty modifiers for planets per sector, would add so much depth already.

There could also be rare "peaceful" planets that have no hostile activities on them, but they wouldn't be very much rewarding either.

 

To me, the game's difficulty is more annoying than actually hard. The AI does little else than mindlessly charge you, so just buffing their damage just makes it more frustrating. Game would be better off if the AI was any good at fighting you, instead of having the game itself fight you with numbers and stats.

 

I actually like it, it's challenging at first but then gets easier.

 

I find it a flails a bit. On one hand you'll often have fights that should be tough, but are totally trivial. (For example the avian tomb guardians just mindlessly walk onto your sword), and then you'll meet some random cute little bird, that can fire a stream of death-lightning that can almost one-shot kill you, and you have no way to safely attack without being hit (due to the fact guns are a mixture of incredibly rare, and made out of concentrated suck).

Overall though it's about right, the monsters just need more tricks and behaviours

 

could be alittle harder
then again its not finished yet
i hope the eletists stay away honestly =(

 

Yeah and maybe they can add this to make the combat more fun and less wonky: http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/faster-swing-speeds-for-melee-weapons.58924/

They also need to look at the issue where projectiles sometimes hit the monster but don't damage it, this is most frustrating with a steel bow and its ridiculous energy consumption.

 

Feels a bit too easy right now imo.

 

Game is too easy.
One weapon blow, if two monsters are there, they both take the damage. Easy.
the pattern of attack on all AI in the game predictable.
The ability to have weapons, tool and bandages in tumble form allows you to just walk unabated across any planet.

Really the most difficult, challenging thing about the game is how they wipe stuff periodically. THATS a challenge!
I'm having to go kill all the previous bosses to get all my stuff back.

But instead of that, I've decided to stay on tier 1 planets with my mech and just. wipe. the. planet. clean.
I'll take the game serious when they announce no more wipes.

 

Needs hardcore mode

problem solved

 

I feel it's more the lack of enemy AI diversity that's troubling the game currently. The game is easy because nearly all monsters behave the same way, and then you can figure out ahead of time what they're going to do, because you've experienced the exact same AI a hundred times before. I definitely prefer the current system of the previous, as it had an extremely broken curve of damage. In my opinion, a "hard" game should challenge your skills, not throw ridiculous amounts of damage in your face and just expect you to deal with it.

I also feel that the fact that all weapons behave the same way is kind of a shame, really. There is very little room for creating a character around a type of weapon currently, and that kind of puts a damper on your options in combat, too. It's really just running and jumping around an enemy, hitting it with your sword until it's dead.

I know it's early beta, and these things will obviously get much better along the way, but the biggest problem for me with Starbound currently is just the lack of diversity. Sure, visually, it's very nice with all the different stuff, but the enemies and items themselves are just SO bland. The legendary weapons are pretty useless with their low damage (at least the ones I found), and most weapons you find can't compare to the weapons you've crafted yourself, anyway. Over-all I feel very little excitement when I encounter a chest, because it will most likely just contain some metal bars and a couple hundred pixels. Comparing that the game in its current state to Terraria is, of course, unfair, but I can't help but mention that nearly every chest in Terraria was exciting. It most likely had a trinket, or a useful, unique weapon that you could use. I think, currently, Starbound is the game in which I'm the least excited about encountering a chest, it just doesn't fill me with excitement like other games do, because it's always trivial stuff that lies in them (with a few exceptions like tech and recipes, of which the latter are way too rare and expensive, btw.)

Because beneath all the visually stunning environments of all the planets, nearly every planet is the same. It just gets tiresome after a while to not see any actual, gameplay-related uniqueness besides the occasional Apex research lab, or a Glitch village filled with junk. There is currently no incentive to actually do anything in these villages, as everything they sell and have in their chests is useless. I'd argue that currently the only random encounters (that I've encountered) are the Avian airships, because of the guns they sell, and the Apex research labs with tech chests in them. All the others are still fun to see, but honestly, once you've seen one Floran village, you've seen them all. There is just no real incentive to advance for me, because I know that once I get to the next sector, everything, mobs weapons, gear, NPCs, is the same except for their stats. You craft a new set of armor with the same stats, compared to the new enemies. You've just raised the stats of your gear to compare to the new enemies' stats, it's not a difficulty increase, because the actual numbers are all that change. Everything else remains the same, because the relations between your damage, health and armor and the NPCs' are the same, except with higher numbers.

So, in conclusion, I don't think the game's current difficulty is too easy, but it lacks variety. It's "easy" because it's too predictable. You always know what the enemies will do, because they seem to all follow the same AI pattern, and so it seems easy because you can easily just maneuver around them because you have dealt with a clone of their AI countless times before.

It's repetitive, not easy. If the gameplay itself had more variety, and not just visually, it wouldn't feel as easy, and luckily, this is something that can and, most likely, will change, because the developers are constantly adding more things to see, find and use. But currently it's just a grindfest that does not do it for me.

However, as I mentioned before, I know it is a beta, and things are gonna change to be more interesting, I hope.

 

Didn't read all thread.
Very easy difficulty.

 

Some parts are too easy and some parts are too hard.

 

The AI is improving, slowly but still. Angry koala version Kluex temple guards now use special machine guns at long range, but pull out stronger melee weapons after closing in. Used to be a problem with ranged enemies when you can stand beside them and have their bullets originate behind you; this behaviour can still be seen in USCM marines. I wouldn't mind seeing it applied to all ranged enemies.

 

But that was a problem with the multipliers used and going to planets well beyond your means. Not with the old system.

The old multiplier had damage being roughly doubled per point of armor pen past armor. Change that 2x multiplier to a 1.5 or 1.2, and you'd suddenly have a much more workable and rewarding system. Instead they scrapped the whole thing and removed the ability to explore enemies that were outside of our gear level.

It's like if you were playing Terraria and they didn't let you go out at night or past the dirt level going down until you had crafted full iron gear. Then you were allowed into the rock layer but only there until you had gold. THEN you could go into the corruption. Etc. Etc.

Tiering off certain points is okay, but tiering off EVERY progression of difficulty is not. And right now with us only having ten levels of difficulty and ten tiers of equipment. . . welp.

I do agree with the things you said about the AI though and mechanically identical areas, though.

 

As I mentioned before, numerically the difficulty is fine where it is now. There are a few things that could bear to be smoothed out, but by and large the numbers are good. You're not getting one-shot in most cases, but 4-7 hits can kill you, depending on the strength of the enemy. It's soft enough that you have time to see your mistakes and learn from them, but hard enough that you can't be sloppy or let yourself get overwhelmed or you will be mauled.

A few things could still use some numeric adjustement. Healing for one thing - right now, at Tier 1 you can use 3-4 regular bandages and be at full health from the brink of death. At tier 10, you'd need a red stim and and about 15 nanowrap bandages to get to full health. Since all healing is heal-over-time, that gets really dull and tedious. More efficient healting please. Ranged weaponry is another sore spot, as finding weapons that are both energy efficient and yet damaging enough to be effective is a chore.

Most of the difficulty in the game, currently, comes from two things - crash damage attacks, and mobs that fire multiple projectiles that can hit you repeatedly in the course of a single attack (stuff like Bubble Spray, Shocking Bolt, Barb Spray, Fire Spray, and Bloody Vomit). A mob with nothing but crash damage attacks defies one of the things about Starbound that I initially liked - the idea that enemies cannot harm you without physically attacking you. Unfortunately, crash damage mobs are always attacking, and if a crash damage attack is active, you simply cannot touch the mob until the attack turns off. Honestly, I feel that crash damage attacks should be converted into a 'weapon swing' of some kind, similar to the swings of player weapons, that you can both see the area that it covers and dodge it, instead of making its hitbox be the same as the body of the creature launching it. Reward skill by letting players avoid damage by understanding how attacks work.

Most of the lack of difficulty comes from the fact that there's so little variety in creature behaviors. Right now, despite the huge variety in creature appearance, there's only three things you need to consider. Its type (small, normal, flying, miniboss, flying miniboss), its aggressiveness (aggro or not), and its attack setup. Every attack has a specific behavior associated with it, and a specific way to dodge it, and lots of attacks are pretty much identical. For instance, Fireball and Dark Plasma and Rock Blast are dodged the exact same way, and creatures that possess these attacks fire them the exact same way. Charge, Bash, and Body Slam are all crash-damage attacks, and the only difference between them is how the creature moves when executing them; even then, Charge and Bash are basically identical in behavior except that Bash can be spammed more rapidly.

What this means is that a lot of enemies wind up feeling samey. For instance, when I drop on a new planet, and I see a mob growl and then leap into the air, I don't think "oh god I'm getting pounced by a saber-toothed turtle-ant!" I think, "Yawn, medium-sized aggressive body slam enemy #532516." I feel like I'm fighting a category of enemy, instead of something truly unique.

Enemies need more behaviors, even within the same attacks. It can be as simple as having an enemy climb walls instead of jumping after you. Or a charging enemy being able to break blocks to get at you instead of being stopped by obstacles. Or a Bash enemy swinging at you, then hopping backwards after the attack. Or maybe a Barb Spray enemy, instead of firing directly at you in a stream, will actually 'spray' the barbs a bit, in order to suppress any evasive maneuvers you attempt. These sorts of little things, quirks of behavior, make enemies memorable and can increase or decrease difficulty without screwing up existing numeric balance. Two otherwise-identical enemies can be very different, presenting unique challenges and surprising the player.

Buff the AI, not the numbers.

 

range- all monsters should attack. "friendly" ones dont attack unless you step on one, more aggressive charge varying degrees away.

 

The problem with having expanded threat levels in each sector is the ability to get weapons that will oneshot lower level mobs. Originally in the Alpha sector I would go to a 10 threat planet, get a crappy white weapon from it (from chests or vendors) and be able to decimate lower level planets. The downside to this is that my armor was never up to snuff so it became this un-fun, unbalanced, "one-shot or be one-shot" combat system. This is the behavior they're trying to avoid by pigeon-holing people into a one-tier-per-sector system. Swapping to a scaling health/defense/damage system is going to in the end be more balance-able than using damage/defense multipliers on weapons and armor.

 

I think it's a little too easy, but I know the bulk of the creature behaviors haven't been implemented, and the frame work for diverse behaviors is already in place. I had a pack of smaller animals flee the scene when I attacked one of their own on my home planet. First time I had ever scene that.

The Robot boss is way too easy, but I today I drilled down to the planet's core with the burrower mod, and while I was fighting him he fell down there, so I plummeted after him in what was a very Final Fantasy esque free falling fight (which was actually kind of exhilarating and fun!).

Between the environmental tweaks, mob behavior and AI tweaks, and weapon tweaks, I think we'll have our fair share of balanced difficulty with a nice level of depth. That's what I foresee anyway.