(If you already know what self-balancing difficulty is, you can skip to the section "My Suggestions.") One advantage that games with leveling mechanics have over those without is that they don't need "difficulty levels." The basic concept is called "self-balancing gameplay" or "self-balancing difficulty." Players who seek challenge can rush ahead and face enemies several levels higher than them, requiring they use strategy, tactics, and a good knowledge of mechanics. Players who are playing for the story, or who don't like combat challenge, can loiter in each area until they are high enough level that the next area doesn't pose a challenge at all. The amazing thing about self-balancing difficulty is how easy it is to do: Step 1) Don't scale content based on user level. This is where The Elder Scrolls series fails miserably (see disclaimer at bottom of post). You can scale the difficulty against anything else (story progression, optional boss challenges overcome, player dialogue choices, etc.), but scaling to player level prevents self-balancing difficulty from coming into play. Step 2) Don't hard-gate player level/capability by story progression and/or boss battles. You can soft-gate it (i.e. make it increasingly more tedious to acquire that next level), but hard-gating forces an ability-cap on all players. Again, this prevents self-balancing gameplay. My Suggestions So how can we implement this in Starbound and thus make the game much more attractive to a wider audience? (the following are not joined by "and"; you needn't implement all of them to gain the benefits of self-balancing gameplay) a) Remove the hard-gating of tech progression. Right now, in order to acquire any armor better than iron, I need to fight a boss battle. For some people, iron armor and the best weapons of that tier will make the boss easy enough. For others (like me), their only option is to cheese the boss or outright cheat. If we made tech progression soft-gated by increasing the ore-cost of armor based on your boss-progression, then those players could still fight the boss without cheesing and progress like everyone else. They'd just take 10x longer than the challenge-hounds. b) Add some form of leveling mechanics or other way of increasing stats through grinding. This needn't be a permanent boost. You could have some sort of stim-station which boosted your stats based on how much money you put into it (again, without a hard cap). c) Provide a Crackdown-style way of decreasing the boss's power by beating up its lieutenants. To make it self-balancing without making it necessary, you'd have to provide decreasing rewards for each lieutenant, placing the curve so that (for example) 5 lieutenants killed brings it down to the original difficulty you planned, 20 lieutenants killed brings it down to "easy mode," and 50 lieutenants killed (for the crazy completionists like me) brings it down to "cakewalk" or "one-hit KO." Thank you for listening (and considering). ~David Disclaimer Regarding The Elder Scrolls I just know someone is going to want to comment on that "fails miserably" bit, so let me say a few things first: 1) I own all three of the modern TES games (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim). In fact, I own multiple copies of all of them except Skyrim. 2) I love the art, the music, the concept of the leveling system (skills are increased through use, which increases overall level, which allows selected attribute increase), and a lot of the story. 3) I have personally finished the main quest lines of each game (Skyrim twice) and I'm planning another run-through of either Morrowind or Skyrim (I haven't done Dragonborn yet). 4) All of the above is in spite of the level-scaling. The games would be far superior if they removed level-scaling (and properly redesigned their world with that in mind), but they are still awesome games.
Are you proposing that (random example), it takes 67 Silver bars to craft a full set of armor after defeating the Penguin boss, but for players that have difficulty doing so, they need 100 bars? While I think it's good to add an option for players that want to stomp bosses AND use all that extra ore they've found, I'm not sure this is the path I would prefer. Would it be better if the ores were more like the current Sector X setup, where Aegisalt is only found on T5-T6 planets, and Cerulium only found on T7-T8 planets? That separation of ores removes a lot of the "problem" of having shiny ores that you can't use yet, but still doesn't address giving players the option to have stronger armor for bosses. If we, instead, consider going down Path B, what if there were weapon and/or armor enhancements that could be made? Players can choose to go to war with their Iron armor, or they could mine some Silver, and use that to upgrade their Iron armor and weapons? This would require (Tier X+1) ore to enhance Tier X equipment, and we would probably have to make up a new ore in Sector X to enhance Impervium. Thoughts? I think Path B has a pretty "safe" path using the stuff we have in the game right now. "Safe" meaning easy to understand and wouldn't need extra implementation beyond an Upgrade mechanic. We wouldn't add new bosses, or anything else. Tiy did mention in his AMA that he felt a set "lineup" of bosses allows him to tell a story without anyone skipping chapter 2, etc. That being said, I really like option C. This adds a Challenge Mode for some players, but also allows for players that aren't as good at combat, or just haven't had any luck finding weapons appropriate for a given boss. Would these be on random planets, or would there be quests that point out their locations?
All three options provide players the ability to decrease the boss difficulty be spending more time in their current sector. Option A requires more time mining; Option B requires more time grinding for pixels, drops, or levels; Options C requires more time hunting down and killing lieutenants (see below for some options on what those could be). (I had around three paragraphs written up trying to explain Option A more clearly, but it was a miserable failure, so I deleted them. I'll try again if you want.) Silver is already used to craft beginning-of-tier-2 armor. Are you proposing that players could "upgrade" their iron armor to a sort of "silver-lite" armor set? Why not just go with Option A and let them craft actual silver armor? (I guess I'm kind of confused on what you are proposing here.) There are a few options available for lieutenants: I) They could wait until they have the quest system fleshed out with branching quests, more quest-completion conditions, procedurally-generated quests, more quest-reward options, and all the other goodies that are necessary for decent quests. II) They could add a sort of "weak beacon" which attracts lieutenants instead of the boss. They could be made from the beginning-of-tier ore, which would require more grinding on the part of the player. (again, the idea is to provide the player a way to trade time for ease-of-combat) III) They could keep track of how many mini-boss monsters you've killed (the large, glowing versions; I forget what they're called), and use those for your "lieutenants killed" count. My favorite is (III) because it's so easy to implement and encourages planet exploration. The functionality might even already be there and just has to be redirected. If the devs have any foresight whatsoever, they're already tracking how many mini-bosses you've defeated. To implement (III), they'd just need to group those kills by sector and alter the boss's stats based on the average mini-boss kill count of all players present. I might even be able to implement it, if I took the time to understand their lua scripts. I should note that I currently use a personal mod which adds crafting recipes for the boss items. The recipes are just exorbitant pixel costs (10000 for first boss item, 80000 for fourth boss item), but it means I don't have to cheese the bosses in order to experience all the content. Sitting in a bunker and firing arrows at the boss through a slit in the wall for half an hour is not my idea of fun.
Sandbox games absolutely require self-balancing difficulty, in my opinion. Terraria did it fairly well - you could skip 3 bosses and roughly 5 tiers and reach the boss you were supposed to fight 5 hours later into the game. And if you did well, you even had a chance to defeat it.
