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Saturday 31 March 2012

Inferno difficulty ramped up in the later stages

via Bashiok: This is may be a good a time as any to REVEAL TEH SEKRITS! that Inferno monster levels aren't linear any longer. They get progressively more difficult. This was really a reaction to Inferno playtesting. Our original intent was to have a flat difficulty level where you could go wherever you want, farm for items, and it'd be no more or less difficult than any other area in Inferno. This caused a few inherent issues for us, though:

It just felt wrong. It didn't feel right to be progressing through the game and have it stay pretty much the same difficulty the whole time. It felt like a letdown to get to the final boss of the game and it be no more difficult than the first.There’s a wide variety of players out there and we wanted to make sure everybody had something to sink their teeth into. We expect that anybody with enough time and dedication will reach level 60.  But the jump in difficulty to Inferno needed to be different amounts for different people.  For the crazy people they need a HUGE ramp in difficulty, for a more “casual but still hardcore” audience you want an obvious but milder increase in difficulty.  So for the crazy people who play non-stop they’ll hit Act I and get a challenge, but 1 month later they’ll still have something to work on (Acts II, III and IV).  For the “hardcore-casual” they will reach level 60 later and not get brick walled when they reach Inferno.  They can experience some “small victories” working on Act I with the dream of maybe someday reaching the later acts.Longevity.  We know people really want goals to work towards and challenges to overcome.  We made Act III and Act IV really, really brutally hard, for the most elite players only.  It felt wrong to make ALL of Inferno that brutally hard.

Now, you may be saying “I thought you wanted us to be able to farm anywhere we wanted.  Now we only have half as much area in the game to farm in? What gives?” Our goal is to make the loot mathematically better in the later acts without making the earlier gear completely obsolete. We feel Diablo II actually did a very good job with this and we expect Diablo III to perform similarly.

Specifically, people in D2 did Diablo runs, Mephisto runs, Pindleskin runs, Pit runs, Baal runs, etc. because the loot in Diablo is extremely random. Even though the theoretical best items might come from the later Acts, well-rolled items from earlier acts will still be better. Internally we find sometimes after an intense session of brutally hard Inferno it can be really fun to cruise through Hell Act III or IV and it’s not too uncommon surprise when an upgrade drops. We expect this to carry through to Inferno difficulty where somebody who can theoretically farm Act IV will likely still enjoy romping through Act I simply because the drop potential is still there. It’s all because of the highly random items having lots of overlap in their power distribution curves.
                               


Sounds fantastic! I tend to be quite a hardcore player anyway so I'm delighted to have more to get my teeth into. Eceonomically I think this move pushes more earning power into the hands of the most successful. See you in Inferno Act 4!

9 comments:

  1. They are back-pedalling on that design decision too? That's too bad.

    Their logic was pretty good, and now they replace it with "difficulty progression" till the end. Which makes game more likely to feel "done" the moment you kill final boss of Inferno Act IV, no matter how difficult. Plus, since many people will be unable to kill him, in the end he'll be most farmed as well - while earlier perfect-roll items might be technically better, later items will be rare.

    And coming back to earlier acts to "easy up"? Wouldn't many people be stuck farming hell/ActI then with less-then-hardcore friends, killing farming diversity and feeling of progression? :)

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  2. I don't know. I thought Vanilla WoW peaked when raids ran from Molten Core (easy) to Naxx40 (mega hard, only 40 or so guilds world wide made the staff).

    Did you prefer when there was just Molten Core and Onyxia to raid and all raids were the same difficulty?

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    1. It depends on how hard Inferno used to be before this change. I reckon a lot of people think whole Inferno was Naxxramas40-hard and now the beginning was nerfed. They could have worded it a little better in my opinion.

      "We made Act III and Act IV really, really brutally hard, for the most elite players only." suggests that this was done at the time of the new design, although the next sentence "It felt wrong to make ALL of Inferno that brutally hard." again sounds like he's talking about the original design.

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  4. OK, let's suppose Inferno when it was at an even level was Naxx40 hard.

    That means out of the 16 acts that come with the game 4 of them are for 0.1% of the player base.

    I don't think that's too healthy.

    I'd actually guess Inferno used to be BWL hard now they've nerfed the difficulty early on to MC level and ramped the late game to Naxx40.

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  5. I'm ok with this change. From what they're saying, we're gonna spend weeks farming each act anyway. Meh, it's impossible to judge without playing. Maybe Act 1 is so brutally hard that very few people will finish it. That would make Act 4 impossibly hard.

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  6. As long as there is a good diversity of items that drop in all these "difficulties", this change should work rather well.

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  7. Good news everybody! They didn't nerf the beginning, only made the end harder. Sweet!

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    1. I'm sure they want to keep most of us gated from the end by difficulty. People tend to stop playing games like this when they finish, there's no end game that would be created by allowing people to complete the game. Sure, item finding is an end game of sorts but it's actually a more interesting element when you haven't finished the game, to power you up that little bit more, than after you're done.

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