So, I thought 4 or 5 selectable difficulties would be a good idea. What I had in mind:

Beginner: The easiest difficulty. You recieve double bonus stats from defeating bosses, double EXP and all the enemy stats are halved. Bosses have their attacks downgraded.

Normal: The Normal Difficulty.

Hard: Enemies have slightly higher stats, 75% of your bonus stats, 75% EXP and enemies have their attacks upgraded.

Difficult: Enemies have even higher stats, 50% of your bonus stats, 50% EXP and bosses now have much more intelligent movelist AI.

Lunatic(only avaliable after beating the game once): Enemies have very high stats. You cannot level up. Skills take longer to level. Bonus stats however remain at 100%. Bosses will now do evil things like reducing your resistance to an element, then hitting you with the ultimate attack of said element.


Bonus stats are a special mechanic you get when you kill a boss. You get HP/SP/ATK/DEF/INT etc stats. It's the only way to increase your stats in Lunatic minus the consumable items, which are hard to come by unless you do 100% completion. Opinions?

It is a nice idea but percentage based difficulty isn't really difficulty, it's just drawing out the battles themselves, and gets a bit tiresome - selectable difficulty could instead do things like decide how powerful enemy AI is, how often random encounters occur, which status effects can be invoked, or whether or not the CTB is turned on and things like that.

Cutting exp given and things like that are sortof... well, they replace "difficulty" with "need to grind". And since people will view more difficult as being the aim of the game, it kinda implies the real game is the grinding, if that makes sense. Idk.

I realise this yes, but I can't think of any other way of doing a "You're weaker and your enemies are stronger" increase other than giving enemies new skills, which already happens. If you select difficult the AI is stronger and their skills are stronger, if an enemy was going to use the low class fire spell on you it'd be the medium level one in difficult, for instance. I'm thinking of changing it to the bonus stats get unchanged, and you recieve less xp in difficult/lunatic, because the game is beatable on just the bonus stats alone, albiet much harder.

Also there are no random encounters, instead you run into a enemy on the map and get into battles that way. I guess if you play difficult or lunatic there should be more enemies on the map.

But anyways, thanks for commenting.

I think the worst thing you can do to a RPG is add a difficulty settings, I just look at my screen and say WTF! For any other type of game its ok.

Why? There have been many times when I'm playing a game and I think "This is too easy" or the opposite "This is too hard" and would appreciate difficulty levels. I don't know, it just seems like a good idea to add them.

In adding difficulty levels, if you just increase the hp and damage the enemies can do, its not really a difficulty. Its longer and feels more difficult but it really isn't.

A good way to do it would be like this – take a boss, increase health by, say, 10%. Not a terribly high number. Then change the way the battle works. Introduce new mechanics. Not things that do more damage, but things that chance the way you have to fight them. Make players pay more attention to whats going on. The extra health makes the battle go on a bit more so players have to keep up with the fight a little longer, but it doesn't extend it a huge amount.

If you wanted more difficulties than normal and difficult, then you could introduce one new mechanic per difficulty. Then at the highest tier it feels kind of like a different game almost and its much more difficult.

Well, I do intend to add new Mechanics. Enemies don't have their stats increased by a massive amount, just enough to make it noticable that you're weaker. I don't like Overly Long Drawn out bosses either, so I try my best to avoid them.

I love the idea of difficulty settings, and some of your ideas are rather original. It may be difficult for you to balance out each difficulty level given all of those variables though. Also, I wanted to make something like this for my game but had no idea to change the amount of EXP monsters drop based on player choices. Do you?

If you're using an ATB, another difficulty consideration is speed of battle. I like games that allow me to set the speed which require me to make quicker decisions in battle.