Balance

The final round of beta testing is out! It seems almost unbelievable that I'm finally going to sell my first indie game. And that it's not Siphon Spirit. Some of the feedback I've been getting has been a bit confusing though. I have had the same amount of people say that the game is pretty hard as I have say that it is too easy.

What can I do about that? What SHOULD I do about that? My first thought it that there is no way that I'm going to be keeping everyone happy. If I take the suggestions of the people saying that it's too easy, the people who think it is pretty hard (but not too hard) will suddenly find it to be too hard. I wouldn't want to play a game that's too hard. On the other hand, if I make the game easier to make the people who think it's pretty hard happy I'll completely lose the people who think it's too easy right now. I'm highly tempted to leave it just as it is. I might drop the XP gain by 10-15%, but no more than that. As it is, I'm expecting people to be level 100 when they reach the final boss.

Normal mode is just going to be the easiest mode. This is something that I struggled with while I was designing how much HP enemies should have. If I assume that everyone is going to build up only one or two abilities (such as Bow and Multi-shot) then I should boost all the enemy HP as the hero has no actual stats to boost the damage even more when they reach higher levels. But if I do boost all the enemy HP to assume that they have maxed out skills from the beginning then no one can play a character with four different active abilities. Each play style should be able to beat the game.

Also, I really don't know how far these people are getting. Or, for the most part, what they are playing as. The player that says it's too easy while using the hunter and just shooting multiple arrows will find they will need to diversify on later levels when their maxed out arrows don't quite do the job any more.


Of course, a big part of me wants the game to be absolutely perfect. So when I'm sitting here seeing feedback on the final beta test that has some really good ideas, I have to reluctantly realize that it's too late to add them. Looking back, some of the ideas are things that I already vetoed for this game because I wanted to finish it eventually. Perhaps we'll be seeing a bunch of new features in the sequel....