Is Pagan Online Too Hard?
52Hey everyone, Thyworm here, talking about the new difficulty balances in Pagan Online. Emil, bringer of pain, according to Mad Head, lived up to his name. But I think he went a little bit overboard here, so let’s dive into it.
As always, I’m trying to provide a bit of context here. Let’s wind back the clock a week, envision patch 0.2 and look at the difficulty issues the game had at that time. I think they can be divided into 3 categories.
1. Overall difficulty in Hard & Master was too easy
2. Difficulty settings were not rewarding enough
3. People were oneshotting bosses
Those were the issues. And what did those issues actually mean? I think mostly, it meant that the game wasn’t challenging, especially for people with high geared characters. Emil literally said it himself in the devlog
[devlog section]
Let’s also take a moment to recognize that balancing in a game like this must be one hell of a job, right? There’s 8 characters, that aren’t balanced between them, as of now. And then there’s a very mixed player base, with probably casual and more seasoned players. And there’s just a natural human tendency to like things to be easy. It’s hard to get away with a challenging game, which is why so few developers make that attemps. Dark Souls is the exception to that philosophy, and it works, but more often than not, it backfires. Pagan Online wants to be a challenging game as well, where you’re supposed to die quite a bit. That might cause frustration. No, it will cause frustration, but it also brings something very valuable, something casual games simply don’t have, and that’s a sense of achievement. Which is not to be underestimated. I’ve said this before as well, but I keep stressing it, because that is really what can separate a game like Pagan from its counterparts.
Alright, with this design philosophy in mind, let’s see what has changed in patch 0.3 and how it has impacted the game.
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