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Should the beginning of hard modes be hard?


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Here's a topic I wanted other people's input on: one of my biggest pet peeves of a Fire Emblem game is when the beginning of the harder difficulty modes starts too hard. My issue is that it's the beginning of the game. Any strategies you come up with here are going to be usable on literally every single one of your runs of the game, because your army hasn't gained enough levels for any of your army development choices to have any impact. So overwhelming the player with extremely tough enemies feels to me like it detracts from the experience rather than enhancing it. It makes the beginning of each of your replays feel pretty much the same.

I feel the difficulty shouldn't start cranking up until your party starts to gain an "identity" of sorts. When the party you're using can vary wildly by this point between playthroughs. Until then, it should be enough to keep you on your toes, but not so hard that it becomes an exercise in working out one of the very, very few "right answers" to a puzzle, rather than a battle.

Any thoughts on this?

Edited by Alastor15243
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hard modes should be hard, but the beginning of a lot of fire emblem hard modes massively belies how hard the actual game is. taking fe11 h5 as an example, once you get into a rhythm in chapter about 9, give or take, i think the game is really well designed - but that doesn't excuse the fact that for the first few maps you're just hedging rngs on 3rkos, which isn't great design. and fe11 h5 is one of the better designed hard modes in my opinion.

 

the cycle of tedious hard early game -> challenging and fun midgame -> super hard endgame is kind of indicative of the fire emblem hard modes tho

 

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I feel like fire emblem games getting easier as they go on is just the nature of a game where your units are leveling up and earning new classes. And if your game has grinding to any degree, you kind of forfeit the ability to have curated difficulty. Especially in the eyes of players, who will say its "great for a while, but expects you to grind with enemy stat inflation" or "great for a while but becomes stagnant - especially if you decide to grind". Maybe Fire Emblem games should look into enemy scaling, but how should the scaling be determined? Should the enemies be as tough as your highest level unit, or the average levels of your units - and how do pre-promotes fit into that formula? Should enemy strength be determined only after the player starts a map with their selected roster - thus hiding the stats of enemies on the field while the player is on the preps screen? And does that cut into the player's ability to plan out their strategy on the prep screen?

Maybe the answer is ultimately just having good map design, objectives, and enemy placements. That way the nature of the challenge is always tricky no matter what the discrepancy is between yours and the enemy's stats. But just like asking players what's the best hard mode of Fire Emblem, I've never heard any sort of consensus on which fire emblem has the best maps in general to prove the correlation. 

That all having been said, I like the puzzles presented in early maps of hard modes. Because even if the difficulty curve eventually resembles a playground slide, those maps can be satisfying to complete purely because of your limited resources. It's so rare for Fire Emblem to present itself like a strategy game first.

 

Edited by Glennstavos
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23 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

I feel like fire emblem games getting easier as they go on is just the nature of a game where your units are leveling up and earning new classes. And if your game has grinding to any degree, you kind of forfeit the ability to have curated difficulty. Especially in the eyes of players, who will say its "great for a while, but expects you to grind with enemy stat inflation" or "great for a while but becomes stagnant - especially if you decide to grind". Maybe Fire Emblem games should look into enemy scaling, but how should the scaling be determined? Should the enemies be as tough as your highest level unit, or the average levels of your units - and how do pre-promotes fit into that formula? Should enemy strength be determined only after the player starts a map with their selected roster - thus hiding the stats of enemies on the field while the player is on the preps screen? And does that cut into the player's ability to plan out their strategy on the prep screen?

I mean, the devs know, generally, what resources the player's had to build their party up as long as this isn't a game with grinding. Throwing challenges at them balanced around that kind of power level shouldn't be inherently impossible, they just can't have the ridiculously low room for error that the beginnings of a lot of early-game hard modes do, but that style of difficulty is something I'm not really that interested in seeing anyway. And a lot of games manage to make perfectly satisfyingly engaging late games, so I don't really feel this is an inherent issue we just have to accept.

Edited by Alastor15243
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16 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

I mean, the devs know, generally, what resources the player's had to build their party up as long as this isn't a game with grinding.

Those resources can be allocated in massively different ways though, and luck can massively alter how effective those resources are.

I do generally agree that difficulty should gradually ramp up but I get how the random and divergent nature of Fire Emblem makes that sort of balance extremely difficult. I think the reason for the series generally has a problem with the end game being very easy and the early game being comparatively much harder is because it has to account for bad level ups or "poor" team compositions, so the later game enemies can't have benchmarks as comparatively high as the early game unless you have a lot of pre-promotes.

I think Conquest generally got harder as it went on, though sometimes I think it became a little too frustrating for its own good. It does show you what that style of map / unit design (units generally having low HP for instance) can do, though. Basically the opposite problem of regular Fire Emblem.

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Hard mode's beginning should definitely be hard, the main issue with Fire Emblem is that the beginning is commonly far harder than the rest of the game. These things should happen on a curve, and not a downward slope. The idea of your party not having an identity is one that could be remedied easily enough. Two things that come to mind would be to have it so you can choose your lords class right out the gate (like in New Mystery for Kris) or to have a Samson and Arran character choice near the beginning of the game. Tear Ring Saga in fact let's you choose between one of four characters to join you after the first chapter which I'm sure would have some influence over how the following chapters play (though it also does seem to throw a lot of character at you in general so maybe not too much). A lot of people don't like Samson and Arran style characters because it feels they lose out, and that issue would be compounded more if you have a choice of four, but that could be solved by having the characters you don't choose still in the game joining later. Then you get to experience what a character feels like as an early game unit and as a prepromote later.

Edited by Jotari
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15 minutes ago, Jotari said:

The idea of your party not having an identity is one that could be remedied easily enough. Two things that come to mind would be to have it so you can choose your lords class right out the gate (like in New Mystery for Kris) or to have a Samson and Arran character choice near the beginning of the game. Tear Ring Saga in fact let's you choose between one of four characters to join you after the first chapter which I'm sure would have some influence over how the following chapters play (though it also does seem to throw a lot of character at you in general so maybe not too much). A lot of people don't like Samson and Arran style characters because it feels they lose out, and that issue would be compounded more if you have a choice of four, but that could be solved by having the characters you don't choose still in the game joining later. Then you get to experience what a character feels like as an early game unit and as a prepromote later.

New Mystery does both of those things, but it does them poorly. The extremely variable nature of Kris warps earlygame design for the worse, and the Prologue character splits are awful.

  1. Admittedly, part of the problem with Kris is that they are both a variable unit and the "Jeigan" for the 7th Platoon. Specifically, a growths Jeigan, which has always been a problem for FE games.
  2. Arran/Samson splits tend to be uneven, and having them early just exacerbates the imbalance. Picking the worse option is more excusable when the choice is mid-to-lategame. Tear Ring Saga also doesn't have multiple difficulties and the earlygame is relatively easy.

I think the best way to have a party with an identity is to give the player a varied cast to work with from the get-go. A mix of classes, each with their own unique tools to make use of (be it skills, weapons or combat arts) that can't count on one hand. Throw in an Echoes style villager or two if you want a choices character.

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1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

 And a lot of games manage to make perfectly satisfyingly engaging late games, so I don't really feel this is an inherent issue we just have to accept.

I agree, what did you think of the solutions I proposed? Enemy scaling is the go to choice for most rpgs. If we looked at other genres, there's also adaptive difficulty like in action games, where the game difficulty slides between 10 or so "levels" depending on the player's performance. If the player is playing well, the next map will have higher enemy density and stats, maybe harsher objectives. Of course that begs the question what "good performance" is in Fire Emblem. If it's simply keeping your units alive, wouldn't that punish players resetting or using the turnwheel? If it's number of turnwheel uses, then players can expend uses to keep the game from getting its hardest. Maybe turncount is a good answer, but again, if there's no incentive to finish quickly, the player can just wait around before finishing a map. Then again, most adaptive difficulty settings are not made known at all to the player in-game, and it's the work of hackers to figure out how it works or if it can be abused. So maybe turn count and turnwheel uses are a valid metric for player performance. They may even consider making a full on ranking system like in the SNES/GBA games that they could base adaptive difficulty levels on.

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Part of why the earlygame is harder is, you haven't had time to kill off your good units yet. That sounds counter-intuitive, but let's assume that they design mid-game chapters to be beatable, even if you've lost several heavily-invested units. Then, recall that most people don't let their units stay "lost", but reset the game - especially when strong/invested units are in play. The middle and lategame feel easier, by compare, because you're still playing with all your good tools. Attempting to "turn up the heat" beyond the earlygame runs the risk of creating practically-unwinnable scenarios, for those players who let their units stay dead.

What's the answer? I don't know, exactly - a game that's beatable, in any given chapter, with a minimal surviving cast; yet, also offers a challenge for those who've kept everyone alive and well-allocated resources? A "well-designed" chapter in the former scheme is trivial in the latter; "well-designed" in the latter is impossible in the former. I know @Glennstavos mentioned level scaling - an interesting concept, and potential solution to this predicament. Still, one could argue (reasonably) that the player should be rewarded with an easier experience by keeping everyone alive (and allocating resources optimally). And there's the risk of creating "perverse incentives", where killing units off, or avoiding getting too much EXP, actually makes the game easier. I would second, though, that this sort of thing could work with a ranking system - including turncount, survival, and "power level", at a bare minimum.

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5 hours ago, X-Naut said:

New Mystery does both of those things, but it does them poorly. The extremely variable nature of Kris warps earlygame design for the worse, and the Prologue character splits are awful.

  1. Admittedly, part of the problem with Kris is that they are both a variable unit and the "Jeigan" for the 7th Platoon. Specifically, a growths Jeigan, which has always been a problem for FE games.
  2. Arran/Samson splits tend to be uneven, and having them early just exacerbates the imbalance. Picking the worse option is more excusable when the choice is mid-to-lategame. Tear Ring Saga also doesn't have multiple difficulties and the earlygame is relatively easy.

I think the best way to have a party with an identity is to give the player a varied cast to work with from the get-go. A mix of classes, each with their own unique tools to make use of (be it skills, weapons or combat arts) that can't count on one hand. Throw in an Echoes style villager or two if you want a choices character.

An echo styled villager would be better than a variable lord now that it's put to me. I do like Lord's having some kind of defined combat identity even if the option to mix it up exists. Though I would counter the notion that Arran/Samson splits are bad with the novel idea that we could just make them better. By the way what Arran/Samson choice does New Mystery provide? I don't remember Prologue character splits (I barely remember anything at all about the prologue).

3 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Part of why the earlygame is harder is, you haven't had time to kill off your good units yet. That sounds counter-intuitive, but let's assume that they design mid-game chapters to be beatable, even if you've lost several heavily-invested units. Then, recall that most people don't let their units stay "lost", but reset the game - especially when strong/invested units are in play. The middle and lategame feel easier, by compare, because you're still playing with all your good tools. Attempting to "turn up the heat" beyond the earlygame runs the risk of creating practically-unwinnable scenarios, for those players who let their units stay dead.

What's the answer? I don't know, exactly - a game that's beatable, in any given chapter, with a minimal surviving cast; yet, also offers a challenge for those who've kept everyone alive and well-allocated resources? A "well-designed" chapter in the former scheme is trivial in the latter; "well-designed" in the latter is impossible in the former. I know @Glennstavos mentioned level scaling - an interesting concept, and potential solution to this predicament. Still, one could argue (reasonably) that the player should be rewarded with an easier experience by keeping everyone alive (and allocating resources optimally). And there's the risk of creating "perverse incentives", where killing units off, or avoiding getting too much EXP, actually makes the game easier. I would second, though, that this sort of thing could work with a ranking system - including turncount, survival, and "power level", at a bare minimum.

That's where, ideally, prepromotes should step in to keep things possible to beat.

Edited by Jotari
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Well, if hard mode is supposed to test your flexibility in adapting, you really can't early game since you lack any real options to do so. It's not interesting from a strategy POV since there are usually little options you can really use to win. Later on it's a bit easier to manage.

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11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Any strategies you come up with here are going to be usable on literally every single one of your runs of the game, because your army hasn't gained enough levels for any of your army development choices to have any impact. So overwhelming the player with extremely tough enemies feels to me like it detracts from the experience rather than enhancing it. It makes the beginning of each of your replays feel pretty much the same.

I feel the difficulty shouldn't start cranking up until your party starts to gain an "identity" of sorts. When the party you're using can vary wildly by this point between playthroughs. Until then, it should be enough to keep you on your toes, but not so hard that it becomes an exercise in working out one of the very, very few "right answers" to a puzzle, rather than a battle.

Any thoughts on this?

that's pretty much the whole point.

the first chapters of a hard mode should be hard indeed, as long as the overall difficulty is managed properly. that means they should still give the player the benefit of having different options/tactical routes available to approach the enemies, rather than turning the whole map into a puzzle game where you need to do specific things in a specific order if you want to survive and complete the chapter.

usually hard modes are all about enemy stats, placements and their amounts, but it also depends on the current units available for deployment, the type of map you're playing on, items available, etc. if there's no sinergy between all these factors, then the gameplay is bound to become tedious soon or later. the player should always have the freedom to approach the chapter in different ways, instead of being forced to follow just one path to victory.

when it comes to strategy rpgs, if you remove that very element, you're not really playing a strategy game.

rather, it's the game that's playing with you, if you get what i mean.

 

if i were to mention Lunatic, for example, usually that kind of mode doesn't really add anything in terms of actual difficulty, because it simply turns the element of "strategy" into "puzzle".

in the end it's all reduced to figuring out what works and what doesn't by simply using a trial-and-error approach, wich ultimately can become very frustrating due to RNG going wrong, with the result of further time consumption just because luck has decided to screw you over, along with all the progress you've made so far.

in the long run, it may not even give you that much satisfaction either, because by the time you get to the final chapters of the game, you would eventually end up being too much disappointed and bored by the mode itself to really enjoy your victories(wich is also why i usually stay away from Lunatic or similar modes, and play mainly on Hard/Classic).

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7 hours ago, Jotari said:

An echo styled villager would be better than a variable lord now that it's put to me. I do like Lord's having some kind of defined combat identity even if the option to mix it up exists. Though I would counter the notion that Arran/Samson splits are bad with the novel idea that we could just make them better. By the way what Arran/Samson choice does New Mystery provide? I don't remember Prologue character splits (I barely remember anything at all about the prologue).

That's where, ideally, prepromotes should step in to keep things possible to beat.

P-4: Athena or Gordin
P-6: Ogma or Draug
P-7: Cain or Est

I called them bad because they're all badly lopsided choices (especially the first two) to the point where picking wrong without a good Kris build is detrimental to the following chapters. It's also poorly telegraphed, they're presented as Yes/No choices at the end of the chapter before the split, so you have to go back and replay the last chapter if you didn't like the result. Giving you both would do no harm to the gameplay with how tight deployment limits are, and the one map where you do get an extra unit (P-5) is tight enough I'd call it a positive change.

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1 hour ago, X-Naut said:

P-4: Athena or Gordin
P-6: Ogma or Draug
P-7: Cain or Est

I called them bad because they're all badly lopsided choices (especially the first two) to the point where picking wrong without a good Kris build is detrimental to the following chapters. It's also poorly telegraphed, they're presented as Yes/No choices at the end of the chapter before the split, so you have to go back and replay the last chapter if you didn't like the result. Giving you both would do no harm to the gameplay with how tight deployment limits are, and the one map where you do get an extra unit (P-5) is tight enough I'd call it a positive change.

The prologe for New Mystery has made such little impact on me to the extent that I don't remember that at all. Though I question if it can be counted since you don't gain those units for the rest of the game, right? Cain and Est definitely don't show up again until you reclaim Altea halfway through the game.

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I guess but there should be an effort I guess to ensure the difficulty doesn't drastically drop. (So it should stay hard if that makes sense, A few easier stages aren't too bad but a game shouldn't become a cakewalk.)

I kinda actually liked Echoes for it, stuff like the final Berkut battle where you have to watch out for the Entrap spell or the poison swamps kinda force you to do more than just "throw units at them and hope for the best." (Such as using the fact your clerics will heal anyone near them at the start of your turn and since the swamp does 5 damage and the Cleric skill heals 5 damage it sorta helps keep down the damage from being on a swamp tile.), so maybe having some more of these elements on a hard mode so you have to account for the actual map more would be nice.

 

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2 hours ago, Jotari said:

The prologe for New Mystery has made such little impact on me to the extent that I don't remember that at all. Though I question if it can be counted since you don't gain those units for the rest of the game, right? Cain and Est definitely don't show up again until you reclaim Altea halfway through the game.

The splits only apply to the Prologue but that doesn't invalidate anything, you still have a portion of the game with mutually exclusive units and unlike other games' prologues you don't have the option to skip them.

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I have seen the word tedious used a few times, and I would use that word along with monotonous to describe the beginning of a hard mode difficulty in most cases instead of challenging. I don't find the predominant strategy of dogpiling on a small amount of enemy units to be very compelling, so I would rather enemy stats be toned down.

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On 6/27/2020 at 8:47 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Until then, it should be enough to keep you on your toes, but not so hard that it becomes an exercise in working out one of the very, very few "right answers" to a puzzle, rather than a battle.

On 6/28/2020 at 9:31 AM, Fenreir said:

if i were to mention Lunatic, for example, usually that kind of mode doesn't really add anything in terms of actual difficulty, because it simply turns the element of "strategy" into "puzzle".

I actually like puzzle-style maps. I think it's a good direction, especially for later maps which need twists and turns to keep them interesting. Just have some villages to visit that you need to move forward as far as possible every turn for, that'll boost the challenge real quick. If you want the earlier game to be easier, that's fine, but I quite enjoy the maps which require intricate but understandable solutions.

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On 6/27/2020 at 5:47 PM, Alastor15243 said:

t makes the beginning of each of your replays feel pretty much the same.

I agree with this but also think it's an inherent problem with the start, specifically having a small of units that are unequal in talent. I'm not really sure what you can do about that without fundamentally changing the game or just nerfing early game enemies. 

On 6/27/2020 at 5:47 PM, Alastor15243 said:

I feel the difficulty shouldn't start cranking up until your party starts to gain an "identity" of sorts

I actually think this is increasingly impossible as newer entries give the player an over abundance of tools. First skills, then combat arts, then battalions; the players have such ridiculous stuff at their disposal that it would be extremely difficult at this point to make difficulty that isn't just pumping stats. I think CQ lunatic was on the right path with capped enemies / enemy exclusive skills / tight formations, but clearly the went away from that in 3 houses. 

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On 7/2/2020 at 6:00 AM, Boomhauer007 said:

I agree with this but also think it's an inherent problem with the start, specifically having a small of units that are unequal in talent. I'm not really sure what you can do about that without fundamentally changing the game or just nerfing early game enemies. 

I actually think this is increasingly impossible as newer entries give the player an over abundance of tools. First skills, then combat arts, then battalions; the players have such ridiculous stuff at their disposal that it would be extremely difficult at this point to make difficulty that isn't just pumping stats. I think CQ lunatic was on the right path with capped enemies / enemy exclusive skills / tight formations, but clearly the went away from that in 3 houses. 

While I've not played much of TH, I can state in personal experience from other games. (Such as Hitman 2016) that maybe they should start cutting down some of the tools.

I'd rather have a game with less options but a better difficulty curve then a game with a ton of options...but so easy I barely need to use most of them.

Just give me a few tools and make me use them well rather than way too many that the game can't be built to be challenging in any way that isn't unfair.

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