37 réponses à ce sujet

[Sylvius the Mad]

Could we have a technical description of the differences between the difficulty levels, please?

We were told that DA2 would have much more mechanical transparency than DAO, and so far I'm not seeing it.  So, I'm going to ask for some, bit by bit.

I'm starting with the difficulty settings.  What do the difficulty settings actually do, relative to each other?

Thanks.

[Syonica]

As in every other game, raising the difficulty increases enemy hp, and enemy damage.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Syonica wrote...

As in every other game, raising the difficulty increases enemy hp, and enemy damage.

By how much?

And that's not all.  There's a change to how Force works.  But I want details.

There's also a change to loot drops (potion frequency), and some enemies get extra abilities at higher difficulties.

What are they?  Surely BioWare has this all written down somewhere.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 15 mars 2011 - 11:20 .

[Jamesnew2]

Casual took me 32.5 hours doing everything.... Nightmare took me 72 hours.... thats doing everything in the game btw.


Nightmare....is nightmarish.

[mmmmmmPie]

Heres what the difficulty levels do.

They make no sense.

The scaling is completely messed up.

I dont understand what's "Normal" about AoE spells/abilities not effecting your party members. That should have been "Casual" (btw I find it funny how they renamed "Easy" into "Casual")

Nightmare mode is... ugh. It's not difficult in a fair way like the new Ninja Gaiden games for example, it's difficult in completely cheap arbitrary ways. Party getting 1 shotted etc.

[RhythmlessNinja]

Ninja Gaiden & fair, never ever go together when youre playing on master ninja part 1, maybe, part 2? No, just no. On topic, kill the low hp asap, then mages > rogues in that order on harder difficulties. If it's a blood mage kill them asap over everything else or you will all just drop dead. Mages & rogues are ridiculous. Blood mages especially.

[JrayM16]

mmmmmmPie wrote...

Heres what the difficulty levels do.

They make no sense.

The scaling is completely messed up.

I dont understand what's "Normal" about AoE spells/abilities not effecting your party members. That should have been "Casual" (btw I find it funny how they renamed "Easy" into "Casual")

Nightmare mode is... ugh. It's not difficult in a fair way like the new Ninja Gaiden games for example, it's difficult in completely cheap arbitrary ways. Party getting 1 shotted etc.

Wasn't it called casual in Origins?

[Locke1775]

I wish hard had friendly fire, or at the very least partial friendly fire.

[Jamesnew2]

^ it was.. and he was just caught out.

[mmmmmmPie]

JrayM16 wrote...

mmmmmmPie wrote...

Heres what the difficulty levels do.

They make no sense.

The scaling is completely messed up.

I dont understand what's "Normal" about AoE spells/abilities not effecting your party members. That should have been "Casual" (btw I find it funny how they renamed "Easy" into "Casual")

Nightmare mode is... ugh. It's not difficult in a fair way like the new Ninja Gaiden games for example, it's difficult in completely cheap arbitrary ways. Party getting 1 shotted etc.

Wasn't it called casual in Origins?

Nope it was called Easy.

It's a minor thing really but it shows where their head was at.  And with Normal being what it is there's really no need for Casual Mode.  Thats just one of the reasons I say they screwed up the difficulty level scaling.

And Ninja Gaiden, even on master ninja, was always fair.  You either had the skill or you didnt and you could always see what you did wrong.  But it was never cheap like DA2 Nightmare (and certain other encounters without spoiling too much are just cheap no matter what the difficulty level).  :Lets not overlook DA2 enemies that just pop up out of tin air, Assassins, or the lightening orb spell thing.

Modifié par mmmmmmPie, 15 mars 2011 - 11:35 .

[Kendaric Varkellen]

JrayM16 wrote...

Wasn't it called casual in Origins?

Nope, it was called "easy". I think "casual" is easier than "easy" in Origins though, so renaming it makes sense.

[Vaeliorin]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Syonica wrote...

As in every other game, raising the difficulty increases enemy hp, and enemy damage.

By how much?

And that's not all.  There's a change to how Force works.  But I want details.

There's also a change to loot drops (potion frequency), and some enemies get extra abilities at higher difficulties.

What are they?  Surely BioWare has this all written down somewhere.

Characters also bleed out when below 10% HP on Nightmare.  There was a thread pre-release where Peter Thomas gave us some of the details, but I'm not sure where exactly it ended up.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Vaeliorin wrote...

Characters also bleed out when below 10% HP on Nightmare.  There was a thread pre-release where Peter Thomas gave us some of the details, but I'm not sure where exactly it ended up.

I remember, but he was also only giving details for Nightmare.  Not the lower levels.

And even then, I'd like to know the rate of that bleeding, and whether its affected by the character's stats.

You know, maybe BioWare doesn't have this written down anywhere.  I had a ton of difficulty with that first real Ogre on Hard because the only spells I had were Mind Blast, Heal, and Horror, and the Readme is very clear that Ogres are 100% resistant to Stun - so I could use my Horror spell on it.  Until, on my 7th attempt, I noticed that Carver could stun the Ogre, so I tried it too and it worked and that made it easy.

Where's the mechanical transparency we were promised?

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 15 mars 2011 - 11:53 .

[YohkoOhno]

According to the DA2 Collectors Edition Strategy Guide, Nightmare makes the following changes.

Friendly Fire is on, both sides.

Standard Enemies now have elemental immunites. (Details are in the guide). Unless you play on nightmare assume non-bosses have no total immunities.

Assasins can steal potions, and commanders can order troops to make coordinated attacks.

That's about it.

[ragnaven]

It also limits the max potion number you can carry for health pots.

[ShrinkingFish]

Experimenting with the settings on a single playthrough I found that at lower difficulties skills/spells cost less stamina/mana and stamina/mana regeneration was quicker as well. Enemy health/armor/resistance/damage seemed to drop and they seemed to become less organized.

No idea what the number scales are though.

[Mx_CN3]

Nightmare also makes any enemy attack stagger/interrupt you unless you have... some certain amount of Strength (i.e. you are a warrior). Also, many enemies can also knock you down with a standard attack (again, depending on Strength).

Modifié par Mx_CN3, 16 mars 2011 - 12:22 .

[mmmmmmPie]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

You know, maybe BioWare doesn't have this written down anywhere.  I had a ton of difficulty with that first real Ogre on Hard because the only spells I had were Mind Blast, Heal, and Horror, and the Readme is very clear that Ogres are 100% resistant to Stun - so I could use my Horror spell on it.  Until, on my 7th attempt, I noticed that Carver could stun the Ogre, so I tried it too and it worked and that made it easy.

Where's the mechanical transparency we were promised?

That right there and the inconsistencies in their own mechanics is why they are not being forthcoming with any sort of information in regards to pretty much anything about the game.  They cant explain what makes no sense.

There's a lot of areas about the DA2 release where transparency would have been nice.  Instead all I see are lies, silence, and attempts at censorship.

[cpz01]

have only really played in in nightmare and hard and the major differences between the two are
1- enemy health increased as is damage output

2-enemy immunities to different damage type increased, ie on nightmare humans are often immune to both cold damage and fire ( i think its fire, might have been electricity, will get back to you).

3- friendly fire, this for me and playing as a mage became game breaking for one very simple point. the game has a odd health and damage balance where player characters (your party included) have significantly less health and do significantly more damage the NPC opponents. meaning that if you were to cast any aoe affect that happens to touch one of your party members, more often then not your party member is dead.
The friendly fire mechanic pretty much rules out half the mage and warrior arsenal and makes encounters where lots of adds gets beamed down quite frustrating.

[AgenTBC]

Characters also bleed out when below 10% HP on Nightmare.

Ahhhh!  That's what that is!  I could not for the life of me figure out what was killing my party members sometimes!  Cool.

Do injuries work the same on easier difficulties?  On Nightmare I know they lower your max HP by 20% per injury.

I disagree completely with the idea that friendly fire makes mages or some fighter skills impossible to use.  Mages and fighter skills are imperative on nightmare... you just can't have the computer do it for you.  You have to micro them.  I love it.  Not so much when idiot Isabela runs right up next to Carver when I've just ordered him to do a whirlwind attack, but most of the time.

I do wish we had a complete list of the differences, though, because as I said I couldn't figure out what was damaging my injured characters.

[AgenTBC]

Oh, the solution to your AOE spells one-shotting your party members sometimes if you hit one of them is to not hit your party members. That's why it'd not the easy setting.

I've only played on nightmare but I can't imagine the game isn't trivial on lower difficulties. Just off the top of my head it seems like the contagious walking bomb would wipe most enemies almost instantly. Can't do that on nightmare since your whole party will probably go up too, but on anything else you could just go nuts.

[AgenTBC]

edit: oops, double posted.

Modifié par AgenTBC, 16 mars 2011 - 01:32 .

[Khayness]

YohkoOhno wrote...

and commanders can order troops to make coordinated attacks.

"Kill the fiend!"

Bloody templars.

[Matroska]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
You know, maybe BioWare doesn't have this written down anywhere.  I had a ton of difficulty with that first real Ogre on Hard because the only spells I had were Mind Blast, Heal, and Horror, and the Readme is very clear that Ogres are 100% resistant to Stun - so I could use my Horror spell on it.  Until, on my 7th attempt, I noticed that Carver could stun the Ogre, so I tried it too and it worked and that made it easy.

Where's the mechanical transparency we were promised?

I totally agree that there should be more explanation of how things work than there is. It's better than Origins was in that regard, which gave very little information and was almost always incorrect or contradictory, but it's still too basic. I mean, JRPGs give far more information about the enemies and battle systems than Bioware games have post-NWN. I actually bought the Origins official guide for this kind of info, particularly on spells, but it was a pretty poor guide to be honest. It was more like a tourist brochure for Ferelden than a detailed game guide. The DA2 guide is far, far better. It's made by Piggyback who've made the best guides I've ever seen - the FFXII and DQVIII ones - so I was expecting something good to begin with.

As for the Ogre, that sounds like an error in the readme. The guide says it's immune to Slow, not Stun.

[RurouniSaiya-jin]

 Don't know if this helps but I dug up this quote from Peter Thomas concerning Nightmare difficulty. Although he didn't give any specifics, he did mention Hard difficulty is pretty much this except maybe to a lesser extent minus the Nightmare exclusives. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything specific to Easy or Normal

Peter Thomas wrote...

Enemy health is increased. Enemy damage is increased. Enemy force is increased. Enemy cooldowns are decreased. Hostile effect durations on enemies are decreased. Less health potions drop. Enemies heal themselves more often. Party members can have more injuries. Some enemies have additional effects on their abilities (dispel, bypass damage resistance, steal health potions, etc) as well as some miscellaneous things (like the combat cooldown reset not being present). There may be others.

Peter Thomas wrote...

JSLfromBx wrote...


that's great of new information, thanks a lot. Would you by any chance be willing to do the same for the Hard difficulty setting? what's the difference betwen hard and normal?

The adjustments from Normal to Hard are similar to, but less than, Nightmare. The extra stuff like additional abilities/effects and friendly fire are Nightmare only.