Should an RPG exist that normalizes skills somehow? You can increase skills, but it doesn't make some enemies so easy they just fall down after one hit. I get how in D&D that you can tank more the higher level. But it was rare to increase attributes. Now it seems every RPG increases attributes. So early enemies fall down very easy.

How to keep things challenging without making enemies too easy? At some point everything is one hit and dead.

make impossible enemies

roguelikes allow you to break the game with their mechanics. it's kind of expected

@jestdotty that is the thing. Most RPG ish games run out of difficulty. The difficulty settings often just make enemies sponges and player weaker. The game mechanics often open up op techniques that players complain when they get nerfed. Even in modded minecraft this happens. Not really an RPG though.

@YourMom divinity original sin 2 is a RPG. better choose the right dialogue options or you die! cuz it changed things in the world with the NPCs and navigating the world NPCs was the actual game

I tried to refund it but it took me like 7 hours to get off the tutorial boat before I realized I didn't like the game lol

kingdoms of amalur was pretty dope

I don't remember if it had stats. combat was like action packed dark souls but with vibrant colors

I don't know if it was my build so much or what. it was a lot of guessing enemy coordination so if you went to new areas you didn't know how you'd be attacked. you'd need to beware of different things

later boss fights in the game basically if I missed dodging a npc at the wrong moment I'd die in one hit (there was some invisible assassin boss). or if I missed 3 NPCs rushing me at once I insta die (some queen and her lackey plant shooting me together? the plant was off screen and if it hit me I'd be stunned... the queen had a charge up attack that was easy to dodge but if the plant hit and stunned me then I couldn't dodge her charge up. omg. or I would just be rushed by the minions in quick succession -- they did mini stuns but if they timed it just right I could be stunlocked for long periods of time. goddamn)

horizon zero dawn has combat highlights similar to kingdoms of amalaur

but they didn't really seem to know what they had to make all of combat that cool which is a bit of a missed opportunity

there was a few very fun battles in it though, with quite frankly basic enemies

fuck I had a favourite video but YouTube is useless now

@jestdotty the ONLY way I can get relevant searches on youtube is to turn off ALL tracking. Then my searches don't include stupid ass shit like Mr. Gay Ass Beast. With tracking on they put unrelated shit in the search. It is intermixed with garbage. Turn off tracking and it ONLY returns relevant stuff. So youtube is incentivizing turning off tracking.

You need to either implement level scaling, or rely on non mathematical mechanics like expedition 33.

Any monotonously increasing function (such as level based rpg stats) will always outpace a static value, and thus the problem.

WoW does it kinda right, in the sense that you can party with a lower level friend (or choose to scale yourself, such as in timewalking) so things stay "challenging" (nothing in wow is challenging if you have two brain cells).

Super bosses that do not rely on unique mechanics require the game allowing you to abuse mechanics (again like expedition 33).

Or having an endless difficulty scale like Diablo rifts, but that feels a little artificial since it's unnaturally boosted by ridiculous bonuses in sets.

PoE does it better, but it doesn't have endlessly scaling difficulty, and if you pay enough, you can trivialize even super bosses.

Seems that more people researched that, here is an perplexity answer: https://molodetz.nl/page/...

@YourMom I just found out recently who Mr. Beast was :P I don't get such shit ever :P That's really some degenerate shit, i have no idea what it is.

@CoreFusionX ii, nothing in wow is challenging if you have two brain cells -> You just killed one of my former friends with this comment :P I had a WoW server for a while with three players on it. Every player on the server was so heavy somehow. I did not play it much but I really loved the concept of such huge world itself in a game.I liked how it looked like. But it was a very special game back in the day.

@retoor there is hope if ppl don't know who mr beastiality is.

@YourMom Look into how silksong does the damage upgrades, but most often it's the intent that you can one shot early enemies, even in dark souls you can do that eventually

Last Epoch has a solution for that (which I don’t particularly like).
IIRC Path of Exile has something similar too.

Basically boss gets shield bar when he loses HP too quickly.

It's all about the dungeon master

@BordedDev

That's another whole can of worms, because it turns apparently continuous math into actual discrete math. And that's another whole puzzle to solve while still having wiggling room to make regular enemies non-trivial while keeping upgrades feel impactful against entities like bosses with disproportionally huge HP pools.

I'm sure I've played at least one RPG that had been using dynamic opponent difficulty. Obviously it was retarded, as maximizing your stats was worthless, given the enemies would be beefed up to either match or be in the same range as your characters. Can't remember the title of that RPG, though.

To keep things interesting, you could always bosses, or normal opponents that require special tactic to beat, or some special dungeon w/ ridiculously difficult enemies w/ stats way above the maximized ones available for player characters.