Hello!
Lately, we’ve been discussing difficulty modes and how they affect the game. We decided a while back to add a lower difficulty mode to allow a wider group of people to experience the game.
Hand of Merlin effectively has two different games in it. One is the tactical layer where you fight against enemies in a turn-based fashion on a grid, and where the chances are high that you’d lose Heroes. The other is the strategic layer where you move between a network of nodes and carve your path from start to end of the area, picking which locations and reward types you’d like to go for. There’s also a lot of reading here since all encounters are small short stories influenced by your choices. You can also lose Heroes on this layer, but it’s much more difficult to do so because that requires you to travel without supplies while your Heroes are low on health. Each jump to a new location without supplies does 1 point of health damage to all Heroes, and health does not regenerate without explicit healing actions.
So our primary method of game difficulty stems from the combat itself. We want the game to be a bit on the harder side, because we want the loop of dying and trying again, having learned something new about the enemies and their skills. That said, some people might find the default difficulty too hard, and would otherwise put the game down. To that end, we talked about adding a Story mode of sorts, where the difficulty of combat is reduced to some degree. We’re calling it Story mode because its purpose is to allow people to focus more on the story of the game rather than the combat aspect (some people just want to read what Jonas&Verena wrote). In this mode, more resources would be granted, your Heroes would have more life and enemies would have less life.
This introduces a slight issue for us: unlocking Heroes, new Guardian cores, achievements, etc. Without a Story mode, we’d just have everything unlock normally as you play the game, and you’d go through the loop of dying and restarting with new knowledge. If Story mode would make the combat aspect much easier, then a lot of the balancing for the intended experience goes out the window. Additionally, if you could unlock everything in the game by playing the lower difficulty, then there’s no real incentive to play the harder mode at all.
(descriptions are temporary and made by me, so don't worry :P)
We still haven't made a decision about this. We've been fighting about it for a couple of days now. If you have a suggestion about this, do tell us!
A short summary of our unlock mechanisms:
Unlocking a Hero means you’re able to start with that Hero from the beginning of the game, having him in your default roster.
Unlocking a Hero’s Prowess gives you another version of that hero with an alternate model texture and some bonuses to health and armor, and can only be unlocked by having the Hero survive from start to end.
Achievements should be self-explanatory.
Guardian cores are an alternate set of Spells you can play with. Each core has a selection of 9 Spells (with a default passive one), from which you can pick 3 to use in combat. These are unlocked by encountering other Guardians during your encounters and talking them into giving you their support.
Thanks for reading. If you've got ideas, do share! Let us know what you think about the whole concept on our Discord server. We’re very open to feedback and scrutiny.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/