I personally think that this thread and its OP-post don't hurt.

It just should be considered as what it is: an opinion and I think it's always a good thing if opinions can be expressed in the way someone prefers, even if it sounds drastic.



Maybe I'm a bit picky in saying this because it's an opinion I share. And while I would have expressed it much more diplomatically, I like seeing it expressed in such a way aswell, since I think more awareness to the point that this is an issue for people can't hurt. ^^

Alright, that's enough.



If you would like to continue this discussion, on the game difficulty, please check out this thread: /#/dungeon-of-the-endless/forum/46-general/thread/17122-poll-was-it-hard-to-finish-the-alpha



Thank you!

reykjavix wrote:
Exactly. Every comment that "reminded" me the easy difficulty is due to the alpha status was completely superfluous because I mentioned that fact in my original post. Those comments brought nothing new to the table because, again, I already acknowledged that. Four separate people used my own acknowledgement as a counter argument. This is what I'm talking about when I say being overly defensive hurts the development of games. Listen, this isn't a religion. It's a piece of entertainment. When I criticize it, I'm not criticizing you, your beliefs, or your culture. I'm pointing out flaws in something you like, and this has nothing to do with you. It would be perfectly fine to point out flaws in my criticisms -- if I hadn't already pointed out the exact thing you're bringing up! You can still enjoy Dungeon of the Endless if I don't like it. But you have to let my criticisms have a chance to be heard before you immediately try to silence them en masse with, again, my own acknowledgement. When you do that kind of thing it sharply reduces any credibility you have because it illustrates you're so desperate to prevent criticism that you'll break the fundamental rules of debate and reiterate something the original speaker said as your own counter argument. This is called being a fanboy and when you cross that line nothing you say matters anymore because you blindly defend everything about something with no thought.

So you quote the person asking to keep the insults out of the thread, agree with her and continue to basically insult people?

*sigh*

Engell wrote:
0.1.14 is much harder in my opinion

I don't think it's harder honestly, yes they rebalance difficulty since the skills have been added, but I think it's still about the same.

reykjavix wrote:
I played this game on my friend's computer over the weekend. I beat it in one sitting over the course of about three hours. Here's my honest feedback on this game:



- The difficulty level in this game is a joke. The strategy that carried me through the entire game was leveling my dudes up quickly, recruiting new ones, and then just putting them on the crystal whenever waves spawned. I barely built towers and honestly didn't need to because my fighters were so powerful. This game desperately needs more challenge to force you to master the tower aspect as well as the dungeon crawling one.

Wait...you just put your heroes in the crystal room? And that was it? Weird. That's never worked for me, and I only do that when I have absolutely no other options. You can't level your heroes without building food generators, you can't build those in any real numbers without industry generators, and you can't keep those intact if you have all your heroes in the crystal room because of all the monsters that actively seek them out.



On top of that, the crystal room is the only room that's guaranteed to not have any structure-points for defensive modules. I lost my first game or two just because my heroes weren't that great and the dungeon spawned a handful of the zombie-things that go straight for the crystal. My heroes just couldn't kill them fast enough, and the crystal just took too much damage to salvage the situation by powering new rooms.

reykjavix wrote:
- The enemies are really bland. Big bugs, crystals, golems, and zombies? Come on. Enemies should be unique and freakish so that discovering new ones is a surprising experience. I hope you guys have some more imaginative enemies in the pipeline because frankly these are awful.

Fair enough. I liked the different attack patterns/priorities of the monsters, but once there's a bigger monster pool to choose from, I think it'd be neat for them to be grouped by appearance. The floating crystals and golems look visually similar, but the crystal-seeking zombies and ravenous bugs don't really seem like they'd be working hand-in-hand with them.

reykjavix wrote:
- Boss enemies would be nice. The crystal transport phase is an anticlimactic conclusion to a floor despite the enemy spawns and red lighting.

I'm with you on this one. The visuals of the transport phase look like the climactic defense scene from 'Aliens'...but they're really not all that challenging. I originally thought that if you didn't have all your heroes in the exit room when the crystal got there, you lost them, but I realized that that's not actually the case. A relief at the time (I would've lost one of my better heroes), but it was kind of a tension-killer in the long run.

reykjavix wrote:
Besides these gripes, this was a fun, innovative little game and I'm looking forward to how it turns out.

Thanks for the feedback. And I think the dev team is getting their update schedule back to every other week, so you could probably try it again sooner than that year you mentioned earlier. A month or two might be enough to solve a lot of the things you mention.

0.1.14 is much harder in my opinion

So far i think that the difficulty is about right, so long as it scales with each additional dungeon level, I can't see there being a problem.



It would be a nice addition that with each new dungoen level dead heroes could be respawned at a cost of dust though.

Steph'nie wrote:
So please, leave the unnecessary comments/insults out of this thread if you would like to have a constructive discussion. Thank you.

Exactly. Every comment that "reminded" me the easy difficulty is due to the alpha status was completely superfluous because I mentioned that fact in my original post. Those comments brought nothing new to the table because, again, I already acknowledged that. Four separate people used my own acknowledgement as a counter argument. This is what I'm talking about when I say being overly defensive hurts the development of games. Listen, this isn't a religion. It's a piece of entertainment. When I criticize it, I'm not criticizing you, your beliefs, or your culture. I'm pointing out flaws in something you like, and this has nothing to do with you. It would be perfectly fine to point out flaws in my criticisms -- if I hadn't already pointed out the exact thing you're bringing up! You can still enjoy Dungeon of the Endless if I don't like it. But you have to let my criticisms have a chance to be heard before you immediately try to silence them en masse with, again, my own acknowledgement. When you do that kind of thing it sharply reduces any credibility you have because it illustrates you're so desperate to prevent criticism that you'll break the fundamental rules of debate and reiterate something the original speaker said as your own counter argument. This is called being a fanboy and when you cross that line nothing you say matters anymore because you blindly defend everything about something with no thought.

Okay everyone. Now let's try how things have changed in 0.1.14!

beason4251 wrote:
Given that many features are still missing (research, many character item slots), it makes sense that the alpha would be a very easy difficulty. The features not implemented yet mainly serve to benefit the player, so preemptively balancing for them would make the game unbeatable. It is not a constructive use of time to balance the game for each alpha release since difficulty is something which will change rapidly with the development process. Further, since the point of an alpha is to test whether the devs have broken anything, making the game relatively easy to beat means players can test more game mechanics.

Couldn't agree more. But then, I am just an overly defensive fan-boy

Given that many features are still missing (research, many character item slots), it makes sense that the alpha would be a very easy difficulty. The features not implemented yet mainly serve to benefit the player, so preemptively balancing for them would make the game unbeatable. It is not a constructive use of time to balance the game for each alpha release since difficulty is something which will change rapidly with the development process. Further, since the point of an alpha is to test whether the devs have broken anything, making the game relatively easy to beat means players can test more game mechanics.

I played this game on my friend's computer over the weekend. I beat it in one sitting over the course of about three hours. Here's my honest feedback on this game:



- The difficulty level in this game is a joke. The strategy that carried me through the entire game was leveling my dudes up quickly, recruiting new ones, and then just putting them on the crystal whenever waves spawned. I barely built towers and honestly didn't need to because my fighters were so powerful. This game desperately needs more challenge to force you to master the tower aspect as well as the dungeon crawling one. However, I understand this game is still in very early development and am optimistically looking forward to how it develops. I'm probably going to try this again a year from now.

- The music cuts out at odd points, leaving complete silence. This is jarring and takes you out of the experience.

- The enemies are really bland. Big bugs, crystals, golems, and zombies? Come on. Enemies should be unique and freakish so that discovering new ones is a surprising experience. I hope you guys have some more imaginative enemies in the pipeline because frankly these are awful.

- Boss enemies would be nice. The crystal transport phase is an anticlimactic conclusion to a floor despite the enemy spawns and red lighting.



Besides these gripes, this was a fun, innovative little game and I'm looking forward to how it turns out.

reykjavix wrote:
I'm not trying to start a flame war.

tetracycloide wrote:
Nothing is hurt by pointing out the difficulty tuning hasn't be done yet but your ego. There's plenty of criticism of the game's difficulty level on the front page without your thread. You insult two other forum goers and put words in the mouth of a third in a superfluous thread, you'll forgive me if that sounds like trying to start something.

Before this escalates even further, leading to infractions (check out the forums rules), I'll just point out that we are aware of the improvements that need to be made. We're still in Alpha (you all know it!) and have plenty of features to implement, the difficulty to tweak, levels/mobs/heroes to add, and so on. We appreciate the OP's comments and invite you to check out this thread also: /#/dungeon-of-the-endless/forum/47-game-design/thread/17839-g2g-amplitude-s-list-of-community-feedback This is where we gathered the players' suggestions/comments; t'll give you an overall idea on our roadmap.



So please, leave the unnecessary comments/insults out of this thread if you would like to have a constructive discussion. Thank you.

Nothing is hurt by pointing out the difficulty tuning hasn't be done yet but your ego. There's plenty of criticism of the game's difficulty level on the front page without your thread. You insult two other forum goers and put words in the mouth of a third in a superfluous thread, you'll forgive me if that sounds like trying to start something.

tetra: Again, the point is that I acknowledged in my original post that the issues with difficulty are due to the game's unfinished state, therefore I didn't sound ignorant.



I'm not trying to start a flame war. I genuinely want this game to improve and I think that comes from honest feedback. Frankly comments like "I love this I want more" are fairly useless from a developer standpoint. It's important to criticize things so that they improve. And it hurts the game's development when any criticism is immediately met with knee-jerk defense.

Hey reykjavix: don't say something in a totally crass way and then call people out when they disagree with you as if you just said something perfectly innocuous. The fact of the matter is you lept right into this forum with both feet complaining about something in an early access title the developers have already explicitly said hasn't been tuned yet and will be in the future. Given the fact that it's on the to-do list i.e. hasn't been done yet and you're here complaining about it it very much sounded like you needed to be reminded it's still in early alpha. You just sounded ignorant.

Hey FreakWhenSee and Tredecim: don't get so defensive. I already stated in my post that I get it's still in early alpha, yet both of you brought it up as if I hadn't considered it. You guys sound like fanboys.



But like Ail said, there's still definitely a long way to go for this game to be legitimately great.

I'm really interested to see how the difficulty will turn out to be in the end.

One thing is for sure: It cannot possibly stay like it is in 0.1.3.

Try it again. The game's pretty hard on some playthroughs. Try starting with two squishies like Sara and DV8, or getting no merchants for the first 2 levels. Maybe you'll be starved for dust in the next one. Who knows? It's early access; you're helping to build the game, not review an Alpha.

According to the roadmap on the amplitude website, one of the next tweaks is the difficulty - remember, this game is still in an really early stage and will improve a lot over the next few months!