Grimrock

J. Trudel wrote:Would it be possible to have monster difficulty scale according to party level?

No, please do not implement that. At the beginning your party is supposed to be weak. If your beginner (level 1) party had encountered a ogre, they would be dead in a second. He shouldn't be wimpy, just because you are. If you meet a monster you are not ready for, you die.

This works in reverse as well. You worked your way through many dungeons and have lots of experience and decided to get back to first dugeon. The snails there should be easily killed if you decide to unleash your wrath on them.

Also, scaling monsters with party experience will take away the major benefit of leveling up. What's the point of gaining experience if monsters will always be on the same difficult to defeat?

Think about this from a different perspective. Why games like Fallout and Fallout 2 have so many fans? Because they felt real and wasn't artificially made too easy. If you met super mutants too early, you died. Even though player knew some locations, he wasn't ready for them, so he had to gain experience and better gear before getting into tougher regions.

A comment to developers: If you really have to implement monster difficulty scaling to party level, please at least make it optional, so people can disable it. Many players would like wimpy monsters to stay wimpy and those powerful stay powerful.

thomson wrote:

J. Trudel wrote:Would it be possible to have monster difficulty scale according to party level?

No, please do not implement that. At the beginning your party is supposed to be weak. If your beginner (level 1) party had encountered a ogre, they would be dead in a second. He shouldn't be wimpy, just because you are. If you meet a monster you are not ready for, you die.

This works in reverse as well. You worked your way through many dungeons and have lots of experience and decided to get back to first dugeon. The snails there should be easily killed if you decide to unleash your wrath on them.

Also, scaling monsters with party experience will take away the major benefit of leveling up. What's the point of gaining experience if monsters will always be on the same difficult to defeat?

Think about this from a different perspective. Why games like Fallout and Fallout 2 have so many fans? Because they felt real and wasn't artificially made too easy. If you met super mutants too early, you died. Even though player knew some locations, he wasn't ready for them, so he had to gain experience and better gear before getting into tougher regions.

A comment to developers: If you really have to implement monster difficulty scaling to party level, please at least make it optional, so people can disable it. Many players would like wimpy monsters to stay wimpy and those powerful stay powerful.

I won't rule out a scaling of monster difficulty by general but it has to be implemented with great caution. Right now the monster placement and character development within the original Grimrock dungeon gives a good representation of their difficulty.


I wouldn't want monsters to be any easier at all, yet at about char level 10..12+ (about the time the first characters max out in their primary ability) monsters could start to get a bit beefier. Depending on how high characters can or will develop they are able to dish out quite high amounts of damage so only the toughest monsters last long enough to not be seen as "annoying". The final fight in the original dungeon represents this very well. Only the Goromorgs and Ice Lizards there are strong enough to pose some threat to a >well build< endgame party, the rest is swatted pretty easy if not ignored at all.

petri wrote:Yes, unfortunately many item effects are hardcoded in the engine and it's a lot of work to reimplement them using hooks and scripting. The items are detected by name so since the cloned item has a different name, the effect doesn't work.

So if the author is not planning to place any of the original items, he could just use the same name (but with a new description and some other new properties in addition perhaps) and it should work, right?

Komag wrote:

petri wrote:Yes, unfortunately many item effects are hardcoded in the engine and it's a lot of work to reimplement them using hooks and scripting. The items are detected by name so since the cloned item has a different name, the effect doesn't work.

So if the author is not planning to place any of the original items, he could just use the same name (but with a new description and some other new properties in addition perhaps) and it should work, right?

Yes, if the cloned item replaces the original item with the same name, then it works.

Dr.Disaster wrote:The final fight in the original dungeon represents this very well. Only the Goromorgs and Ice Lizards there are strong enough to pose some threat to a >well build< endgame party, the rest is swatted pretty easy if not ignored at all.

And this is a great thing, it gets you the feeling that you've gained something, got stronger, but still imposing some challenge to the party. I'm also against the scaling of the monsters. AH captured in Grimrock that old school charm, the difficulty and just about everything else, right how it should be. Of course, if AH has the time and will to implement scaling, then it should be an optional thing.

petri wrote: Maybe mod descriptions could have a "recommended for character levels 1-3" type of thingy, like in oldschool D&D adventure modules

This is the way to go, I think. It would emphasize even more the old school vibe, that I so love.

What I meant by the monster scaling in difficulty was not the usual snail is still hard when you are high level. But rather a script so that once in a while you fight a unusually strong specimen or even a different monster. Lets take mount Grimrock Level 1 for example. When you open the door where is the undead soldier, this particular specimen is very hard, regardless of your party level. Or another solution would be that it's not an undead soldier but 2 Goromogs that are waiting behind the door.

This way challenge would be implemented for high level party, and you would still get this feeling of progression. Because let's face it, maxed out characters would probably be boring to play even in mount Grimrock.