37 réponses à ce sujet

[Abraham_uk]

Here are the rules.

For inspiration see Kronner's Spectre Difficulty

• Come up with a new single player difficulty that surpasses insanity.
  
• Explain what makes your concept harder.
  
• (Optional) Come up with strategies to combat your new difficulty.

Modifié par Abraham_uk, 11 janvier 2013 - 05:04 .

[RedCaesar97]

This has been discussed before. I do not currently have the time to dig up the other threads.

[shepskisaac]

Been asked and requested for so many times before. The only thing we can do now is hope that Bioware heard our voice

[HolyAvenger]

Will not happen in ME3. Hope that difficulty is rebalanced for ME4.

[Abraham_uk]

N7 Elite

How to make it more difficult:

Shield pylons on every map.
That way even the troopers who are normally unshielded will have shields.
AI to fire longer bursts and move faster.

The Reaper faciton having collector forces (from multiplayer) fighting alongside them.
The Cerberus faction gaining the Dragoon
The Geth faction gaining the Geth Bomber


Strategy

Players should have a disruptor power (energy drain/overload) or disruptor ammo for every faction.
Players that use a mixture of biotic combat and tech powers will have the advantage.

Target shield pylons first.
Then target melee enemies who are close and personal.
Then troopers
Then the tanking foes last.

[Abraham_uk]

IsaacShep wrote...

Been asked and requested for so many times before. The only thing we can do now is hope that Bioware heard our voice

Do these discussions include suggestions for boosting the difficulty?

[CoffeeHolic93]

There's a few problems here that I would like to address.

First of all, the new difficulty cannot simply add DPS to enemies while inflating their health/defenses. This would make the use of sustained fire weapons suicidal as they require you to be out of cover to unleash your DPS. Inflating health and DPS would make it 'harder' but it would just make weapons like sniper rifles and shotguns 'No-brainers' as they require you to be out of cover for a very short amount of time with the reward of some solid Burst DPS.

Secondly, as this is a third-person shooter with cover mechanics, we have to get rid of a decent chunk of the cover-busting in the game. While the dragoons are nowhere to be found in the single-player, there's still a lot of grenade-chugging that forces you to leave cover.

Dynamic? Maybe. They have to give you some incentive to move around, but forcing you to switch cover constantly is annoying, and can become fake difficulty if a Turret has been put up/A phantom is prowling. If anything, make the Grenades more like ME2 - bust your shields, ruin your FOV and less precise.

As for boss-units... Sync-kills aren't really a way to balance enemies. Getting one-shotted because of something you cannot control is quite simply annoying and will leave many players frustrated. I don't mind a dangerous enemy, I mind enemies that are dangerous for the wrong reasons.

Oh, and "Nope" bubbles against power and melee have to be thrown out the airlock, too.

You'll quickly see that I am no game designer, but what I would do is that I would make sure that all enemies have some way to guard themselves against what you've done.

Long-range enemies are more agile to prevent easy-pickings for a sniper-rifle, short range enemies shouldn't bum-rush you for you to mow them down with your Shotgun, so on so forth.

Everything should be viable, but have distinct disadvantages. The shotgun smart-choke, while effective defeats the purpose of a shotgun. I'd honestly prefer it if it was removed and the base accuracy of shotguns was improved. Other mods like Shredder mods, nullify that which makes guardians annoying for a shotgun-user, thus making them easier to deal with without powers.

I haven't really come up with a concept for a harder game, just clarified what I think are some of the current flaws with the game and it's difficulty. I'll leave that to the people who know what they're talking about.

[Biglose]

IronMan mode. Reduce the amount of quicksafe spots.

Insanity is not "easy". You might walk through some levels, but I guess most people die around every 30 to 60 min once (more often if they got stuck at a scene, less doing a lot of exploring).

Thats not really easy in my book. You do not notice it because your last checkpoint is only 1 min away. Try to play mass effect 3 iron man. I say total Iron man (no safe only when leaving) would make every difficulty above easy frustrating. Save only at the beginning of each mission, you probably would like to switch from insanity to hard or even normal...

The specter difficulty just makes caster weaker and figher stronger. Due to the increase in damage resistance for the barrier and tech armor the sentinel gets nearly in the fighter league. (Armor 45 reduction, barrier 35 reduction adds up to 80% reduction translating into an effectiv 60% damage reduction. Which will be quite notable, espacially considering cover)

So... well. What am I saying?
The game is percieved to be easy, because it is easy to just do the hard parts again. And after the three times you just have adopted and you know where the enemy come from.
That does not change the fact, that they killed you three twice.
Get stuck in the line of fire, and you are dead. Can happen quite fast, won't happen again because you know the map.

It is quite a different thing if I now, that there will be 2 brutes comming around the corner or if the first charged me because I was searching for upgrades in the other direction. Sure, if I know it is like liara warp, edi incinerate or duplicat and then throw (if I am an adept or infiltrator), just use adranalin rush (if soldier), cloak-power- shoot (if inflitrator). Probably an other incinerate for the an enginier.

[capn233]

So is this supposed to be something that could be implemented with coalesced tweaks, like Spectre, or a vast redesign? Coalesced tweaks are possible from Bioware of course, so they could tweak the difficulties (even if I doubt they would).

As for comments specifically to Spectre, it did make casters weaker, but that was largely because in many ways casting was superior to weapon based classes around release, when they started developing Spectre. We have had a few tweaks, and most importantly powerful DLC guns, that have upset that balance.

All in all, I sort of agree with Coffee that simply boosting health and damage of enemies doesn't work that well. I would argue that enemies should probably be a little faster and aim more accurately as you increase difficulty, as well as give them a little more health. But I also think a lot of difficulty ratcheting should apply to the player's stats. Cooldowns should probably be longer on higher difficulty. Not gamebreakingly different, but different nonetheless. They could have implemented different starting capacity bonuses instead of a flat 75.

Additionally there really need to be more units. It feels like you aren't hardly fighting anybody on many levels. I realize the can't put too many on screen at once, but new ones should pop up to replace ones you have killed more often.

[Abraham_uk]

Biglose wrote...

IronMan mode. Reduce the amount of quicksafe spots.

Are you suggesting removing the mid mission check points?
Hmm.

Imagine getting stuck on the Atrium part of Grissom Academy and then because you got killed you start at the beginning.


A friend of mine said that if some of the old  preceived as difficult games (first three gaming generations) had loads of checkpoints they'd be easy.

[Abraham_uk]

capn233 wrote...

So is this supposed to be something that could be implemented with coalesced tweaks, like Spectre, or a vast redesign? Coalesced tweaks are possible from Bioware of course, so they could tweak the difficulties (even if I doubt they would).

As for comments specifically to Spectre, it did make casters weaker, but that was largely because in many ways casting was superior to weapon based classes around release, when they started developing Spectre. We have had a few tweaks, and most importantly powerful DLC guns, that have upset that balance.

All in all, I sort of agree with Coffee that simply boosting health and damage of enemies doesn't work that well. I would argue that enemies should probably be a little faster and aim more accurately as you increase difficulty, as well as give them a little more health. But I also think a lot of difficulty ratcheting should apply to the player's stats. Cooldowns should probably be longer on higher difficulty. Not gamebreakingly different, but different nonetheless. They could have implemented different starting capacity bonuses instead of a flat 75.

Additionally there really need to be more units. It feels like you aren't hardly fighting anybody on many levels. I realize the can't put too many on screen at once, but new ones should pop up to replace ones you have killed more often.

Let's see:

Enemies get major AI buffs in terms of speed and accuracy. Modding tools cannot achieve this but Bioware can.
Moderate debuffs to the player cooldowns.
Weight capacty being debuffed.
Moderate buffs to enemy health.

I personally like this.
I like to think that subsequent playthroughs work me towards becoming a better player.


Insanity isn't easy. If you're a new player it's very, very challenging.
But if you're a Mass Effect veteran who has played multiple playthroughs across ME 1 and 2, not to mention playing Gold and Platinium Matches (okay I'm only just about good enough for gold), insanity isn't that much of a challenge.

The reason for a higher difficulty is to accomodate for people  who have play higher difficulties in multiplayer.

Beating the highest difficulty should be something to really brag about. It should be something so challenging that very few gamers are capable of beating it.

If you're one of those people who beat Dark Souls and Daemon Souls, hats off to you. I could never do that. That is a genuine gaming achievement. You can brag about it as much as you like.

[Abraham_uk]

The main problem with coming up with higher difficulty settings is how do we make it fair?

If a player is getting beaten because the game is unfair and not because of lack of skill, then the difficulty setting is just cheap and broken.

If a skilled player is getting beaten by a higher difficulty because they were genuinely challenged by a seemingly unsumountable (but ultimately defeatable) situation that few players are skilled enough to beat, then that's good.

If you're simply incapable of beating a certain difficulty, then there are other difficulty settings that are more your level. The alternative way of thinking is, if you're incapable of beating a difficulty, seek advice on the forums and change your strategy. Try, try and try again so that you can be one of the few that beats the game.

[sentinel_87]

Add additional layers of defenses to enemy units along with a slight increase to existing ones.
- This would encourage the player to use different powers/weapons to bypass each unique layer of defense.

Increase the amount of enemy units on each level.
- Self-explanatory

Increase the amount, but not blast radius, of grenades thrown at the player.
- This would help make sure the player is aware and not simply holding one spot and letting the enemy run at them.

Remove heavy weapons like the Hydra and Blackstar.
- This would force the player to use their squads own weapons and powers over these.  Shepard's/squadmate's powers are strong already.

[capn233]

Yeah, protections on more units would have been somewhat useful, but really the only ones in dire need of it are the Cerberus Assault Troopers and Geth Troopers. Reapers have Barrier Engines every now and then (which is ok, but proliferation would be worse than just giving Cannibals 100 shield).

The combo system is another thing that would be ripe for reworking. As it stands they are excessively easy to pull off, and a couple of them are nearly always worth performing (Biotics and Fire).

Tying the two together you would have a bit more difficulty, and it would be more "fair" difficulty and balanced. You could do this with further refining of the combo multipliers and damage / force numbers.

For instance, Biotic Explosions should probably do basically all force damage and at the least have essentially a 0 multiplier to shields. Armor should also be a middling multiplier, as would barriers. So while BE's would be a good choice for groups of unshielded enemies, it would be less useful just to spam them on every protected target (For reference, BE has a 2x armor, 2x barrier, and 1x shield multiplier currently...). On the other hand, Tech Bursts should be able to do a lot of shield damage over a wide area, but do little to health, and nothing to armor (it is 2x to shields and barriers, and 1x to armor currently... should be more like 3x, 1x, 0x, with a 0.5x to health). For Fire Explosions, it should do nothing to shields and barriers, but be good against armor and health (currently 2x armor, 1x shields, 1x barrier...). Cryo Explosions are sort of the odd man out, they should be reworked into a pure CC combo with freezing unprotecteds and slowing protecteds. And of course lastly they should drop the combo scaling with difficulty. No other damaging ability or weapon gets better as you increase the difficulty, but combos do (relative to everything else).

I have also posted numerous times that I would have been more judicious with which powers could actually prime and detonate combos (this mostly applies to biotic "anything goes" explosions) such that physics combos were retained. The specifics could be debated, but something like Throw should not be simultaneously the fastest c/d power available to a biotic as well as a detonate-o-matic. Plus it would have toned down the Michael Bay-ness of the game if when you Pulled an enemy, and hit Throw that he was flung with great velocity, but did not blow up for no apparent reason.

[Biglose]

@Abraham_uk
Yes, thats what I am suggesting. Insanity is not that easy. If you got out of cover enemys can kill you in a matter of seconds. Even if you are only dealing with 3 cannibals.

The point is (and the reason why everybody thinks caster are overpowered) that you just reload. Than you distribute your attention according to the danger the single enemy poses. And that works even better with casters (using the whole team) than with fighters. The infiltrator might be as easy due to his huge damage boost, making it possible to take enemys down fast.
A caster who got surprised is in trouble.
Thats mostly like saying, that Baldurs Gate would be easy, because you can clear hard fights by using 3 AOE damage spells before the enemy can react. Yeah, thats easy. As it should.
If you set up a kill zone and just slaughter your opposition, well it ain't a fight anyway.
Same thing with caster in general. If your opposition is in a spot where there is no cover against casts (for example you are slightly above them) and the have problems getting to your possition, it is more slaughter than a fight.
On the other hand, if there are three brutes surrounding you or three geth primes... Well, lets say you won't stand a chance.


@capn233
The point is, that bioatic damage against shields is very low without explosion. Even warp against armor does not always take one stribe from a brute. Without those explosions caster will have nothing to do damage with. Throw against unprotected enemys works a bit... But other than that...

Thats the problem I have with many rebalance suggestions: They do not take into account what it would actually do. You can't assume that everybody will have the perfect team with them, skilled perfectly on their second playthrough.
It needs also to work for folks who play the game out of the shop.

In the end the game will be reduce to: Use a weapon or loose.

Reducing the primers and combinations... Well, it aint't that simple. It has to work for every class. It is great to prime people with incindiary ammo and explode them with throw, no doubt. But well, you need to be an adept or a sentinel and you need to bring vega along the ride.

No other damaging ability or weapon gets better as you increase the difficulty, but combos do (relative to everything else).

And again, this is necessary. Because if you do not scale with difficulty they will make every lower difficulty totally ridiculous. Higher difficulty means for shooters, that they need to get more headshots and make more of their shots count. For biotics to get more combos.
True, you can get a headshot also on normal. But it will only kill one guy. Even if your damage killed him three times. But if you explode a group, well the group is done.
So on easy the biotic can blow the unprotected away with a simple throw or he can take the time to set up a combo. Same for the shooter. Just hit dead center and kill or aim for the head (with damage bonus).
But if biotic combos start taking down boss enemys in normal... Well, thats too good.

The same goes for your other restriction. You would need to increase the damage of those combos drastically or increase the damage of the abilities. Because an adept needs still a possibily to take down shields or the game gets frustraiting. (Well, no overload in the group... Well bad for you)

This will further make the game much easier if you go for the right team, correctly skilled.

Thats why I am saying: Get rid of the possibility to save every 5 sec and the game gets harder.
Everything outside giving the enemys a bit more Hitpoints just enforces different tactics.

[PnXMarcin1PL]

alt + f4 mode - each time player dies, game closes

[Abraham_uk]

I have an idea.
It can't be implemented for Mass Effect 3 but could be implemented in Mass Effect 4 (which might be a prequel to Mass Effect 1).


Prepare for a controversial idea.

Energy Points replacing cooldowns.


Biotic, tech and combat powers use energy points.


All classes use up energy every time they cast a power.
Once the energy is depleted powers cannot be used, unless replenished by some resource (a Mass Effect equivilent of a mana potion). Also there is no self regeneration energy points.

The only way to replenish energy points is to consume this resource.

This means you must think before using a power.


In addition to energy points being limited, so would ammo. So if you run out of gun ammunition, grenades and energy points, your only available attack is your light melee attacks (also heavy melee also uses energy points).

Modifié par Abraham_uk, 12 janvier 2013 - 06:48 .

[Abraham_uk]

The reason my idea won't work in a sequel:

All of the known fighters of Mass Effect 1-3 (except some builds for the Krogan Sentinel) rely on cooldowns.

This shows that soldiers have developed ways of efficently casting powers without resorting to heavy consumption of a particular resource.

So if the protagonist of Mass Effect 4 has energy points instead of cooldowns, it quite simply won't make sense.


In a Prequel:

The biotic, tech and combat powers are still relatively new. So casters find that every time they use a power, they use up energy. This energy is depleted because they haven't found a way to efficiently manage their powers.

In a prequel there will also be no power combos. Why would there be combos in a Mass Effect prequel when they weren't even present in Mass Effect 1?

Modifié par Abraham_uk, 12 janvier 2013 - 06:52 .

[capn233]

Biglose wrote...

@capn233
The point is, that bioatic damage against shields is very low without explosion. Even warp against armor does not always take one stribe from a brute. Without those explosions caster will have nothing to do damage with. Throw against unprotected enemys works a bit...

That's what your guns or tech squadmates are for.  Warp debuffs armor if you take the correct evolution.  Guns and squad powers strip shields efficiently.  Thinking otherwise (like the 'cry baby adepts' from ME2) leads to the poor balancing of ME3.

In ME1 and ME2 there was never a pure caster class.  Not even in ME1 where biotics could affect anything, including giant Geth platforms.  You still had to use your weapons to actually do damage.

And again, this is necessary. Because if you do not scale with difficulty they will make every lower difficulty totally ridiculous. Higher difficulty means for shooters, that they need to get more headshots and make more of their shots count. For biotics to get more combos.

It isn't necessary in the least.  The difficulty multiplier is there so that combos do similar damage on high difficulty as on low difficulty, in effect to adjust for the increased enemy health on higher levels.  You are getting bonus combo damage on higher difficulties, not on the lower ones.  Removing that would not make any of the lower difficulties much harder... Narrative and Casual would be nearly the same, and Normal wouldn't really be appreciably different. Combos might not feel as powerful on Hardcore and Insanity, but that is the point.

[KenLyns]

For Bioware, there are better ways to increase difficulty, like deleting waist-high barriers.

[Soja57]

Biglose wrote...

Thats why I am saying: Get rid of the possibility to save every 5 sec and the game gets harder.
Everything outside giving the enemys a bit more Hitpoints just enforces different tactics.

Yeah, I would like them to do this before changing anything else. For example, Dead Space 2's hardest difficulty mode limited saves to 3 throughout the entire campaign, and if you died, you would have to restart from your last save point. This puts a lot of pressure on the player to choose their save location wisely. Also, health packs and ammo were severely limited, which forces the player to skillfully deal with enemies or would have to fall back on melee attacks.

Bioware can implement similar difficulty elements into Mass Effect 4. For example, perhaps reducing the amount of credits and experience earned, and ammo restored. Save feature would change to limiting saves to at the start of missions and specific save locations (i.e. typewriters from Resident Evil games)?

Modifié par Soja57, 12 janvier 2013 - 09:39 .

[Biglose]

@capn233
First of all guns are still the best way to deal damage even with casters, if your aiming doesn't suck. Different story in multi player but we are talking single. 
Yeah you need to aim for the head and put some thought in yor loadout...
But even on Ommega I find myself using mostly guns even with 200% cool down reduction due to light weight with my Sentinel.  Just much faster....
What you are suggesting is ME1. Guns are like Powers you need to skill. Or you just want to make the soldier and Infiltrator the only viable classes. 

[capn233]

Biglose wrote...

@capn233
First of all guns are still the best way to deal damage even with casters, if your aiming doesn't suck. Different story in multi player but we are talking single.

I don't know if we are playing the same game, really.

Guns aren't the best way to deal damage in SP if you are any class that isn't Infiltrator or Soldier.  Combo damage has never been reduced in SP, but you get the bonus of easy fire explosions.  In MP it is slightly different, but you will find more people claim that guns are better than powers in MP... even it if isn't entirely accurate.

What you are suggesting is ME1. Guns are like Powers you need to skill. Or you just want to make the soldier and Infiltrator the only viable classes. 

I don't recall suggesting anything like ME1.  Nor did I suggest having weapon skills.  If anything what I suggested is more like ME2 where combat wasn't simply mashing any combination of buttons and getting an explosion.

And it is utter nonsense that "casters" wouldn't be viable.  The same bull**** was said about ME2 and it wasn't remotely the case in that game either.  People claim that when they expect to just get by via pure space magic as if an Adept and Engineer are really wizards from some hokey fantasy game.  Congratulations to the whiners, ME3 delivered the ability to run as an efficient pure caster.  It is more than possible to get through the game without firing a shot with any class.  It isn't even tedious with some classes (Novaguard...).  Of course, it was possible in ME2 as well with any class including Soldier (experience speaking...), but it wasn't nearly as efficient since you are leaving out a chunk of the damage equation.

Guns rivaling powers is the exception for most classes, not the rule.  The exceptions are largely DLC weapons (what a surprise, they aren't balanced compared to vanilla guns), and some from release that are countable on a Quarian hand.

Looking objectively, reengineering the combos only served to dilute the gameplay.  You end up just creating the same effect with whatever powers.  The game ends up less difficult and less interesting for it.

[Soja57]

capn233 wrote...

Looking objectively, reengineering the combos only served to dilute the gameplay.  You end up just creating the same effect with whatever powers.  The game ends up less difficult and less interesting for it.

I totally agree. Biotics have been dumbed down to biotic explosions, whereas in ME1 and ME2, physics-based combos were still viable in efficiency compared to Warp explosions. And the addition of tech bursts, fire explosions, and cryo explosions reduces the majority of powers to combo primers and detonators.

It would be better to limit combo explosions to only a few powers, as in ME2's Singularity/Pull and Warp, and keeping in physics combos like Throw and Shockwave. I can understand giving these two powers a biotic explosion via a power evolution or even passives/specializations, but as a vanilla power, no.

Regarding tech powers as combos: I would remove tech combos entirely, and buff tech powers overall to compensate. The key aspect of tech powers in ME2 was the ability to easily strip defenses and provide crowd control/debuff enemies, allowing the use of biotics or weapons to easily finish off the enemies. With the inclusion of tech combos, now it seems that tech powers and biotics are simply "reskins" of each other.

[Biglose]

The point is that if you make guns essential every class needs to be able to use them equally or powers need to give a huge tactical advantage. Overload against shields warp against armor etc. What capn223 suggests is just forcing casters to relay on guns. You can do that. But I consider it whining of somebody who can't aim for the heads unless we are talking about making debufs mandatory to deal with other enemys. For example warp to stop regeneration pull singularity to prevent ground contact etc. This would give tactical depth. And I don't get what the problem with pure casters is... beyond me. But cutting biotic explosions will just lead to adepts beeing a silly choice.