Talking with my customer/testers in forums, I’ve realized that there are basically 2 groups of people:
- those who like hard challenges, and are willing even to replay the game several times. They prefer less battles but higher difficulty for each battle, and maybe a time limit
- those who like just to play RPG and yes, even build up an invincible party. They like to kill thousands of enemies with their super characters, and don’t worry about time limits.
I am actually in the 2nd group too 😀 but I can understand also the needs of the 1st group of people. So I’m going to implement just 2 difficulty levels in TOD: normal and hard. The normal will be the classic standard CRPG, no time limit, no breakable items, etc.
The hard instead… MOUHAHAHA!! 😀 Will have a time limit, breakable items, tougher monsters.
Breakable items is a very important factor: if you find at one point in the game the superbastardsword +5, and you have a character master in slashing weapons, you’re done – because the weapon will never break. Instead if weapons can be destroyed using them too often, you have to carefully manage the items – maybe saving that super sword only for the most tough battles.
I am also thinking to eliminate the need of manually moving in dungeons by putting a sort of automatic mode to go back in specific (know) points. Like if you enter dungeon and arrive at the entrance of level 2, you can just go back to entrance with one click – the party will travel to the entrance and you won’t have to do anything but observe.
That is, if you don’t met a wandering monster in your way back 😉