Difference between revisions of "Difficulty"

Revision as of 01:21, 30 January 2011

Diablo III will have three difficulty levels, just like Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 did. They'll even still be called Normal, Nightmare and Hell.

Official Comments

Jay Wilson talked about his desire to ramp up the difficulty and complexity later in the game in a December 2008 interview with 1up.com.[1]

"The combat model doesn't have a lot of depth in the previous games. It was very much a "one-skill spam" kind of game, which I think works great for the Normal [difficulty] playthrough. I think most of the audience is just fine with that, and through most of the Normal difficulty, it's going to be like that. But as you go into Nightmare and Hell difficulties, I think that the more serious player will appreciate a game that's a little deeper on the combat-mechanic side."

Difficulty Levels

There are going to be three difficulty levels in Diablo 3, most likely called "normal," "nightmare," and "hell" as has become standard in the Diablo series. How much more difficult and what sort of variety the higher difficulty levels will add remains to be determined. Jay Wilson addressed this issue in a November 2009 interview. [2]

What are the differences in the difficulty levels in Diablo III other than just monsters doing more damage? ie: What reason will people have to play through these modes after having already beaten the main story of the game on an easier difficulty setting?

Jay Wilson: We haven't really gotten into the difficulty settings a lot; we're still just working on the core content for the game at this point. The primary reason as to why a player would want to progress through the game, through the several difficulties, would be for more of a challenge.

There will be also better item customization, for example a Level 100 character in a higher difficulty would see and wear items that a Level 30 character would not have a chance at seeing in the lower difficulty. Said items will also look and feel completely different whereas in Diablo II a lot of times you just had a remodel of the same old items with different names.

Difficulty Scaling in Multiplayer

How will the game's difficulty increase with more players in the game? The team has said that it will increase considerably, to the point that playing solo in a group game will be a very bad idea. But what mechanism will create this? More monster hit points? More monster damage? Improved AI?

That's not been revealed, but @Diablo did confirm, in November 2010, that difficulty was probably going to be based on the number of players in the game, not their Clvl. [3]

Level of Difficulty

How hard they will be remains to be seen, and hasn't been much discussed by the D3 team. It's likely they haven't planned it out in that much detail; difficulty balancing is usually one of the later details to finalize, since it requires almost everything to be finished in the game and then extensive play testing.

We do know that many of the basic game changes in D3 have large effects on the difficulty of the game. There will not be many potions, life leech will be quite rare (or non-existant), and most healing will come from health globes. On the other hand, monsters won't be full of immunities and blessed with cheesy one-hit kills. The D3 team has discussed this issue several times, and always pointed out that the abundant potions and life leech made D2 characters essentially immortal. Death came only from cheesy super damaging kills, most of which were bugs, and that's no way to balance a game.

In D3 they want a much steadier progression of difficulty, so that monsters can be challenging, without being buggy insta-death dealers. The D3 Team has also talked about the difficulty ramping up smoothly. They want normal to be fairly easy, so new players can have success and find their way into the game. The D3 Team doesn't want D3 to be a total cakewalk, since that gets boring too, but they're not looking to turn normal into a tooth and nail struggle to survive. Nightmare and Hell? Perhaps.

BlizzCon 2008 Demo Difficulty

The only public play yet on Diablo III came at the BlizzCon event, in October 2008. That play time can't be analysed very closely for clues to the difficulty, since the demo was set up easier than the version of the game the D3 team has been testing. New characters started off at level 5 in the demo, even as they took on level 1 monsters. The D3 Team has acknowledged that the early going was fairly simple, and that the difficulty curve will ramp up slowly in the final game, but they do say that the game will become far more challenging on higher levels.

How challenging is not a question that can yet be answered, even in the abstract.