Change In-Game Difficulty Descriptions

[Elite]

We all know that normal is not really the "intended" experience. The difficulties are really something like this;

Easy = Journo mode, literally impossible to fail.
Normal = Easy, lots of hand holding and some enemies don't even appear. Player also has 150% HP.
Hard = Normal. The real intended experience. Player has 100% HP, full AI is in use, encounters are more difficult with more enemies, and there is a selling penalty.
DOMINATING = Hard. The difficulty that goes off the rails and forces you to optimize and be as efficient as possible.

Please, either remove the "intended experience" tag completely or shift it over to hard.

[harperfan7]

No, the game has to sell. 

[Elite]

So you know the devs' intentions better than they do, huh.

Please, leave the dumb and pointless difficulty elitism elsewhere.

No, I didn't say that. The back-end numbers do not reflect what the difficulties are described as. I have never seen a game label a mode with a permanent buff as being the norm. If Styg and crew intended that to be the case so be it, but it really doesn't make any sense.

[Turbodevil]

Hard is hard though. I had to reroll couple of characters on that difficulty until I got the grasp of how things work. Multiple early encounters / side areas were too difficult for me to immidately beat, had to go back to them later. I run out of money in early game and once I start smelting super steel.

It only gets easy once I get all the necessary feats and craft my uber weapon but that's a RPG thing.

[Elite]

Hard is hard though. I had to reroll couple of characters on that difficulty until I got the grasp of how things work. Multiple early encounters / side areas were too difficult for me to immidately beat, had to go back to them later. I run out of money in early game and once I start smelting super steel.

It only gets easy once I get all the necessary feats and craft my uber weapon but that's a RPG thing.

Difficulty is of course relative. All I'm saying is that having the "normal" and "intended experience" setting have a permanent buff for the MC, missing enemies, and gimped AI.
Like I said, if thats how Styg and crew want it then whatever, but from a logical viewpoint it makes no sense.

[Crows]

Hard is hard though. I had to reroll couple of characters on that difficulty until I got the grasp of how things work. Multiple early encounters / side areas were too difficult for me to immidately beat, had to go back to them later. I run out of money in early game and once I start smelting super steel.

It only gets easy once I get all the necessary feats and craft my uber weapon but that's a RPG thing.

Difficulty is of course relative. All I'm saying is that having the "normal" and "intended experience" setting have a permanent buff for the MC, missing enemies, and gimped AI.
Like I said, if thats how Styg and crew want it then whatever, but from a logical viewpoint it makes no sense.

I don't think your logic tracks here. There is no definition for "normal" besides what the devs assign to it - it's just a category. You could number the difficulties from 1 to 4, say that difficulty #2 is the intended experience, and nothing has fundamentally changed. Normal, just as a term in gaming itself, is associated with "this is where people should start" and has a 50% health buff because the devs feel that's the ideal way for people to enter the game. It doesn't imply parity between player character and NPCs or the AI using all of its available resources.

[Elite]

The back-end numbers do not reflect what the difficulties are described as. I have never seen a game label a mode with a permanent buff as being the norm. If Styg and crew intended that to be the case so be it, but it really doesn't make any sense.

You see, this really fucking ticks me off because I'm the reason anyone even knows those "back-end numbers" and a bunch of morons turned them into a meme. I aim to educate, but oh how wrong it turned in this case.

A short Underrail history lesson.
From the start, the game's combat was designed for multiple NPCs vs single PC who has higher health (150%) than the NPCs. It's not rare for games to have different HP for PCs and NPCs. Normal was the only original difficulty and it always had that 150% HP modifier. Other difficulties were added later - first easy (a year after the game's initial public alpha release), then hard (2 years later), and finally dominating (another 2 years later). The game was around for years before hard difficulty even existed. Nowadays the PC HP modifiers on other difficulties are mostly just holdovers from early development, back from before they started tweaking each combat encounter (and other parameters) for each difficulty.

Read the in-game difficulty descriptions. Normal is standard HP, easy is doubled from that and hard/dom is reduced. This dumbass topic would've never been a thing if I had explained the PC HP modifiers as 2x, 1x, 2/3x (relative to normal PC, akin to the difficulty selection) instead of 3x, 1.5x, 1x (relative to default NPC).

Jesus. way to sperg out. Sorry I struck a nerve there buddy.

Drop the condescending tone and take a breath. Not everyone has been engrossed in this game since it was playable.

So, Styg intends for 150% to be what is considered a normal HP amount for balancing purposes and the difficulties are not labeled as they are to be more appealing to a wide audience.

[Crows]

Jesus. way to sperg out. Sorry I struck a nerve there buddy.

Drop the condescending tone and take a breath. Not everyone has been engrossed in this game since it was playable.

So, Styg intends for 150% to be what is considered a normal HP amount for balancing purposes and the difficulties are not labeled as they are to be more appealing to a wide audience.

Thanks for understanding. Sorry if my tone offended you, it's nothing personal. This dumb >150% thing is all my fault, that's what haunts me. Sometimes the consequences of the most insignificant dumb mistakes I've made piss me off to no end.

So yes, 150% compared to NPC health formula. It's the baseline HP so it really should've been called 100%, like the difficulty selection screen does, to avoid this confusion. Ah well, too late to fix that now. Comparing against NPC HP makes even less sense now that DOMINATING has its own NPC health modifiers as well.

I should take a moment to note that other difficulty settings on normal are the defaults as well:
- Healing consumable power/cooldown values are defaults as defined in the items.
- The NPC AI used on normal is the old standard AI, before Styg started changing AI behavior by difficulty.
- The combat encounters on normal went mostly untouched when he started changing those for each difficulty.
- The trading values are old default.
The only difficulty setting that normal changes from old default values is zone transition AP cost. It used to be free across all difficulties. Now it's 0/25/40/40 AP.

Normal really is the design baseline. I'm not making this shit up to argue. I just want to set the facts straight, to fix misunderstandings I've ultimately caused.


Now, a question.
If you thought that the difficulties were labeled as they are to be more appealing to a wide audience, why did you make suggestion with the intent of making the game less appealing? I'm going to stand by my earlier words: Please, leave the dumb and pointless difficulty elitism elsewhere.

I think you used a perfectly reasonable point of reference for the health values. Also, thank you for all your effort digging through this stuff!

[Elite]

Jesus. way to sperg out. Sorry I struck a nerve there buddy.

Drop the condescending tone and take a breath. Not everyone has been engrossed in this game since it was playable.

So, Styg intends for 150% to be what is considered a normal HP amount for balancing purposes and the difficulties are not labeled as they are to be more appealing to a wide audience.

Thanks for understanding. Sorry if my tone offended you, it's nothing personal. This dumb >150% thing is all my fault, that's what haunts me. Sometimes the consequences of the most insignificant dumb mistakes I've made piss me off to no end.

So yes, 150% compared to NPC health formula. It's the baseline HP so it really should've been called 100%, like the difficulty selection screen does, to avoid this confusion. Ah well, too late to fix that now. Comparing against NPC HP makes even less sense now that DOMINATING has its own NPC health modifiers as well.

I should take a moment to note that other difficulty settings on normal are the defaults as well:
- Healing consumable power/cooldown values are defaults as defined in the items.
- The NPC AI used on normal is the old standard AI, before Styg started changing AI behavior by difficulty.
- The combat encounters on normal went mostly untouched when he started changing those for each difficulty.
- The trading values are old default.
The only difficulty setting that normal changes from old default values is zone transition AP cost. It used to be free across all difficulties. Now it's 0/25/40/40 AP.

Normal really is the design baseline. I'm not making this shit up to argue. I just want to set the facts straight, to fix misunderstandings I've ultimately caused.


Now, a question.
If you thought that the difficulties were labeled as they are to be more appealing to a wide audience, why did you make suggestion with the intent of making the game less appealing? I'm going to stand by my earlier words: Please, leave the dumb and pointless difficulty elitism elsewhere.

I've never even done a DOMINATING run, even with over 300 hours in the game. I don't care what difficulty someone plays on. Want to play on Easy? Whatever man, you bought the game play it however you want. I am not trying to be elitist (my name is not helping me here).

My understanding was that the difficulty descriptions were a hold-over from the game's early days and indeed were labeled as such to be more appealing. There is the disconnect in what the game was apparently balanced around and used as a baseline (150%), and what I thought was the "actual" baseline (100%). I also did not want to make the game less appealing, I would like for Underrail to do as well as it can. With these misunderstandings cleared up, I no longer stand by the original suggestion.

Difficulty is of course relative and I probably shouldn't call Easy babymode. If someone can enjoy the game on Easy, more power to them.