#which is partly where the term 'soul retrieval' comes from in the first place

[not-poignant]

‘I am ill-informed about ghosts, truthfully, it was his area of study. But he could take this fragment of me, and fix it to something real, and make me-’Oh. My. God. PIA did Olphix make a horcrux of Davix and stick it into Mosk? Pia you didn't say you were wrting HP fanfiction!!?! haha jk it just popped into my head because i just finished a HP fanfic and then reread some davix/olphix scences. no but really, did he?

Oh. My. God. PIA did Olphix make a horcrux of Davix and stick it into Mosk? 

Lmao, I am very happy to say that there are no horcruxes in the Fae Tales universe. (Does anyone else wonder what would’ve happened if a dementor had just sucked the horcrux out of Harry Potter? I do).

I have to say though, the idea of splitting souls off and ‘storing them’ in different places is not something JK Rowling invented. You can actually find it in different animist traditions, particularly those associated with shamanism, especially any that believed in multiple souls in the first place (the idea that we have only one is actually pretty contemporary, and not common across all religious belief systems).

I daresay, with Rowling’s extensive research into folklore and mythology, this was something she discovered for herself, and adapted into the horcrux concept. You’ll see it elsewhere, too. Just not under that name. There’s actually not a huge jump between some folklore, mythology, and some religious and spiritual practices that are still ongoing today. When you start getting into the theology of souls and working with them actively (to rebuild or even shatter them into pieces, etc.) it becomes pretty deep, pretty quickly. I was raised believing in the idea of 3-4 souls per person, and I’ve never been particularly attached to the ‘one soul each’ view as a result.

Anyway, so basically a very short spirituality/history lesson to say that this idea while it gets a cool new name in the Harry Potter series, is not a wholly original concept, and you’ll find it elsewhere if you look!

Also, Olphix doesn’t know that Davix is talking to Mosk. If he did, the story would be over. Just 100% over, and I’ll leave folks to decide how.

[theatrelove3000]

Battle Wounds

Helllloooooo! I have returned! I really need to make a set schedule to post these... I’ll figure it out. So! This is a favorite of mine and one of the first fics I wrote for Loki. I wrote Jelsa for one of my good friends when we were in high school as a sort of bribe to help her stop causing herself harm so that was a very productive way to practice my craft XD. 

Just a disclaimer, I mention a “connection” between Loki and Noelle in this one and through many of the next ones. The “connection” is called a binding. It  means that the two of them were cursed: their souls split in half and trade places. Basically they have half of each others’ souls in their own bodies. This gives them the ability to hear each others thoughts and feel each others feelings. They can block it off but it is tiring to do so. Unless they are in battle and working off an adrenaline rush or trying to keep a secret, they typically let the connection flow. 

Summary: Loki and Noelle are called to Nilfheim to assist in a battle, during which our Dear Loki is injured. Noelle fixes him up since the healers are busy with the other warriors.

Battle Wounds

Noelle POV:

"Hold still!"

Loki grunts in pain, "I am not sure how you expect me to stay still when it hurts so much."

"If you held still it wouldn't hurt as bad," I tell him calmly. I am cleaning the wound on his forearm, the worst of all of them. "I still don't understand how this round of negotiations escalated so quickly."

"Well, the leader was being unreasonable in his terms of agreement."

I nod, knowing that if I said anything else, it will turn into a fight and I do not want to fight two battles in one day.

'You were not supposed to come. I specifically told you to stay home,' he says using our connection. I can feel his anger bubbling in my head.

'You couldn't expect me to stay home when you and my friends ran off to battle. You should know that.'

"That is not the point, Noelle!" He exclaims, out loud this time. I have to put my hand on his leg to keep him from standing, "What if you had been wounded yourself. What if you had been killed? I could not have gotten to you in time..." he trails off, shaking his head as though dispelling the thought from his mind.

As I stand, I put down the cloth in my hand and move my hands to either side of his face, forcing him to look me in the eye. "Nothing happened. I am fine. I can take care of myself," he takes a deep breath before leaning his head against my stomach, continuing to pant a bit. I run my fingers through his hair, feeling his love and relief that I'm alright course through the connection, "Besides, if I weren't here, that could have been way worse. That giant would have taken you out completely." I joke, making him look up and scowl at me before pressing his forehead back to my torso, the hand of his good arm resting on my hip.

I laugh a bit as I pull away so that I can continue mending his arms. I sit back down and  continue cleansing the gash in his arm from elbow to the inside of his wrist. He watches me work silently, no long complaining of the pain I know I must be causing.

After completing my task as Loki's personal healer, I helped him into his shirt again and watched him button his vest. He finishes dressing and offers me his good arm, leading me out of the tent reserved specifically for healing purposes. In a way, it reminds me of a hospital running a code black: too many patients, not enough medical staff. There are five or six healers summoned from Asgard after the situation was considered safe and secure for their arrival. The tent itself is not that big, 20x20 feet at most, and packed with beds like in a World War II movie with three or four private beds shielded with curtains for special cases. The wounded Prince of Asgard happens to be such a case, and received his own private bed. However, he did not have much patience after the battle to wait for a healer so he asked me to do it. I did not have much trouble with it,  considering it was not the first time I've had to clean him up after a brawl.

'It certainly will not be the last, I'm afraid, darling. I do not take kindly to people with no brains speaking ill of you.' He whispers in my head.

'I know. But you do not always have to protect me, they say it after you fight them anyway.' I inform him, doing my best not to think of any names. I cannot have him making his arm worse.

"Do you really think so low of me to assume that I would duel someone in my condition?" He looks down at me out of the corner of his eye.

"If someone was talking bad about me, I would not put it past you."

He shrugs, agreeing silently and then makes a sudden turn around a corner to a part of camp he knows that nobody would have been in and was not likely to come to.

As soon as we are out of sight, he drops his arm and wraps it around my waist, pressing his lips against mine forcefully. My arms fly around his neck and pull him closer to me. He easily lifts me off my feet and my legs wrap around his waist. From this new position he had to look up slightly to reach me and he must have tired of that quickly because it isn't long before his lips trail down my jaw to my throat to my collarbone. I run my fingers through his hair and tighten my hold on him. We must have been like this, lost in our own world for a while because by the time I open my eyes again, the sun is setting and we are sitting on the ground.

Loki maneuvers our position from me sitting in his lap facing him with my arms around his neck, head on his shoulder, to his legs apart and bent at the knees, back against a beam of a nearby tent with me sitting between his legs with my back pressed against him. I lean my head back against his shoulder, my forehead pressed into his neck. He rests his head on mine. His arms wrap around me again and we stay this way, watching the sun disappear over the horizon.

I must have fallen asleep because when I wake up, I am in another place entirely. I am surrounded by green fabric and realize that I am in a tent. I look around and recognize Loki's green and black leather jacket on the chair in the corner. I peer into the darkness of the tent, trying to find him. I spot him from my place in what I realize is his bed, on a small couch that he must have conjured to sleep on. It isn't far from the bed, close enough for me to reach out and brush his silky hair out of his face. He moves slightly, grabbing my hand to keep my hand where it was on his cheek.

"Loki," I whisper, fully aware of his consciousness, "I'm cold."

He smirks, knowing that it is just an excuse to get him to come lay down with me. He makes a noise that sounds like he's snoring and I giggle, trying not to make too much noise. I am not sure if he put a sound barrier charm on the tent.

'You think I would bring you in here if I didn't? I knew you would wake up eventually. You did not have anything to eat after the fight.' He says into my mind, finally opening his emerald green eyes.

I did not notice my hunger until he said something and he seems to know it. He stood up and walked across the tent to retrieve. He turned back to me with a tray of food. I get up off the bed and make my way to him. I kiss his jaw when I reach him and take some food off the tray as I sit on the floor next to the small table that was not there a moment ago. He sits next to me, occasionally picking something off the platter. We talk a bit about the battle and the failed talks before it occurred. I'm not sure how we got there but we eventually talked about his parents and mine.

We have already met each other's parents. My father being of Asgard was helpful in part to this. He met my mother before we began courting; he followed me to Midgard when I went for Christmas a few months after I first travelled to Asgard.

I knew his because they were the Allfather and Queen of Asgard but I never got to a personal level with the Allfather that I did with Frigga. She was a truly wonderful woman and she raised such wonderful sons. Loki is the love of my life and Thor is like a brother that is partly a big brother and partly a younger brother, meaning that he is willing to fight back to back with Loki to protect me but Loki and I are constantly having to reign him in to keep him out of trouble.

"She likes you, you know." Loki interrupts my thoughts, "She thinks you are good for me. She is happy for us." I smile at this. I'm glad to know one of his parents approve of me. "My brother is, as well. He had a crush on you when he first met you but you were taken before he knew what happened." He chuckles at the end and it makes me laugh.

"He does not anymore. He has eyes for another lovely woman we know." I say.

Loki cocks an eyebrow at me questioningly. I laugh at the look on his face and say, "You cannot tell me that you haven't noticed his behavior! He is so obvious." He still looks confused and I laugh harder. "I'm not telling. You have to guess. But I will tell you that he spends more time with her than on the training grounds."

"Lady Sif!" He exclaims, figuring it out.

"Ding ding ding!" I can barely breathe from laughing so hard. I fall sideways into him and use his body as support to stay upright. "I cannot believe I did not notice before. He is so clearly infatuated by her now that I look back." He looks shaken and joins in with my laughing.

We talk and laugh for a bit longer before finally tiring out again. I'm still leaning on him, his arm around my shoulders.

"Are you really going to make me sleep all by myself in your bed while I can see you on that couch?" I ask him, mostly teasing but also a little serious. I do not want to sleep alone when I can see he is close enough for me to reach out and touch him.

"You proved today that I cannot truly make you do anything," he mumbles, glancing down at me, his thoughts flashing to our earlier argument about my being in the battle.

I smile a bit and nod my head, "So is that a no?"

He smirks. "No, love. I will not make you sleep alone in my bed if you believe that you will get cold without me there," he jokes.

I grin widely and pull him to his feet with me then proceed to drag him to the bed. I lay down and he follows suit. As soon as he is comfortable, I move closer and tuck myself under his arm, resting my head on the place where his arm and shoulder connect to the rest of his body. I close my eyes and he covers us both with the sheets before drawing his arms around me. I'm not sure how long he laid awake but I assume not long after I passed out.

I hate sleeping without him.

[componentplanet]

How an Article on Game Difficulty Explained My Own Modding, 18 Years Later

As the pandemic leaves an awful lot of people at home with not-much to do, we’re resurfacing some older coverage on topics and news that isn’t particularly time-sensitive. Last fall, I read an article that literally explained to me why I got into modding two decades ago. If you’ve been a PC modder yourself or simply enjoy using mods, you might find it an interesting discussion of the topic. 

A game’s difficulty level can make or break the title. Games that are perceived as too difficult become boring, depressing grinds, while games that are too easy become boring and tedious, with little challenge. One of the most profound differences between World of Warcraft Classic and Retail is the difference in difficulty. Of course, every player has their own ideas about how hard a game should be, but there’s no arguing that the difficulty of a title is important.

But according to game developer Jennifer Scheurle, game developers think about game difficulty very differently than players do, which may be part of why conversations on this topic sometimes seem to break down. Her piece resonated with me, partly because it reminded me of the reasons why I became a game modder, once upon a time. According to Scheurle, difficulty is all about trust.

“At the core of the difference between how game designers and players speak about difficulty,” she writes, “is the fact that we discuss it in terms of skill progression. All difficulty design is essentially that: crafting how players will learn, apply skills, and progress through challenges.”

Graphic by Jennifer Scheurle for Polygon

She then walks through examples of how this plays out in games, using the Dark Souls series as an example. DS games ask you to accept that you will die (frequently) as part of learning how encounters function. You aren’t simply being killed by mechanics you can’t master, beat, or counter, you’re learning how the game functions and how to counter incoming attacks. The game, in turn, obeys its own internal rules. Players often become angry at a game if they feel it isn’t holding up its end of the bargain in some particular, whether that refers to drop rates, spawn rates, boss difficulty, or the damage you take versus the damage you deal. She also discusses the importance of how a game teaches players to play it, and the various in-game ways that developers communicate game difficulty and associated rules. It’s a very different view of the topic than simply boiling it down into whether a game is “hard” or “easy,” and it leads to a much more nuanced view of how and why different titles may put difficulty in different places.

The article resonated with me in part because it describes part of why I became a Diablo II modder and taught me something about my own motivation. I don’t want to seem as if I’m hijacking Scheurle’s excellent discussion of game difficulty because it’s worth a read in its own right, but I’m going to switch gears a bit and talk about my own experience. To put it simply: I was pissed.

Diablo II’s Trust Fail

This was the early days of Diablo II, before the Lord of Destruction expansion had even come out. Patch 1.03 dropped not long before I started modding, to put a date on things. On Normal difficulty, Diablo II worked pretty well, but as you progressed into Nightmare and Hell difficulty modes, deficiencies became apparent.

Back then, Diablo II used a linear leveling curve in which the amount of XP you needed to gain for each additional level increased by a flat amount — the amount you needed for your previous level, plus a flat modifier. This was exacerbated by a leveling penalty, introduced in Nightmare, in which you lost XP gained towards your next level if your character died. You couldn’t drop a level due to this XP loss, but you could theoretically be 99 percent of the way to Lvl 50 and fall back to 0 percent through repeated deaths. The net result of this was that the amount of time required for each additional level increased sharply, and this became increasingly noticeable as you moved into the later game.

Now for the coup de grace: The game was poorly balanced outside of Normal difficulty. I became a game modder specifically because my Barbarian character with maximum Fire Resist was being one-shotted by mini-bosses with Fire Aura even when he used abilities that temporarily increased his HP. These mini-bosses and bosses could one-shot a character virtually as soon as you saw them. Death meant losing a portion of gold and dropping equipped items. Attempting to retrieve those items (using whatever alternate gear you had access to) was virtually guaranteed to get you killed at least once more because you’d have to drag monsters away from your corpse in order to try and retrieve what you originally had. Mini-bosses could also spawn with these modifiers in critical areas, where it was exceptionally difficult to move them away from a critical spawn point. There was no way to see the exact location of the fire aura on the ground; you knew you’d touched it when you died.

It was cheap. That’s what I called it. I didn’t consider it any kind of legitimate difficulty spike. It just felt like a way for Blizzard to make the game harder by killing players in a manner they couldn’t even fight. I became a modder because I was angry about the way that these imbalances had changed the game. I felt betrayed.

Looking back (and using Scheurle’s article for reference), I’ve realized that I was angry because Diablo II had broken trust with me. Some of these flaws existed in Normal as well, but they weren’t as apparent due to the influence of how other scaling factors impacted the title. Some of the changes between Normal and later difficulties that impacted how poorly the game scaled included the much-slower pace of leveling and the fact that there were no unique items in-game for the Nightmare and Hell difficulty modes. This made it pointless to spend gold on gambling (since gambling, at the time, only produced normal weapons). The slow speed of leveling meant that one of a player’s primary means of gaining power was substantially curtailed. There were also notable power imbalances created by the use of percentages for some metrics (like life steal). In original vanilla D2, life steal was absurdly overpowered — and absolutely essential to surviving the late game. Certain classes were locked into endgame strategies as a result of bad math and poorly balanced game mechanics. It grated on me.

The changes to Diablo II from Normal to later difficulties weren’t just the result of Blizzard trying to be jerks. It’s common for RPGs to have poorly balanced endgames because most people do not play them for long enough to actually experience the endgame. This was a topic of discussion around Skyrim when that game was new, and it explains much of what happened with Diablo II way back then.

I developed the Fusion 2 mod for Diablo II, followed by a much larger overhaul, Cold Fusion. I and a team of three other people — Justin Gash, John Stanford, and Matt Wesson — cumulatively poured in several thousand man-hours of development time into Cold Fusion. I led the effort, which was a core part of my best friend’s senior project in computer science and consumed no small chunk of my own senior year in college. I’m not sure the game files exist on the internet any longer, but you can see the original website archived by the Wayback Machine. Fair warning: I was not a web designer. Still, it gives some idea of the scope of the project, if you’re familiar with Diablo II.

While I don’t expect anyone reading this to have ever played the mod — I never released an LoD-compatible version of the project — it was a pretty major part of my life for the time I worked on it. We overhauled the entire title, tweaking drop rates, fixing bugs, and implementing a new leveling curve, a new difficulty curve, new monsters, and new unique items intended for both Nightmare and Hell difficulty levels. We developed new audio effects, visuals, and skills using pieces of code that developers had left in place in the engine and audio effects another friend created. We pulled certain unique items over from Diablo I (with Diablo I art) and reworked the skill trees to better balance the game. Our goal, in every scenario, was to build a more consistent Diablo II that didn’t just funnel characters into a single endgame build but allowed other skills to compete as well. I was quite proud of the fact that when Lord of Destruction came out, it adjusted Diablo II in some of the same ways we had, and even introduced new spells that were similar to some of the ones we built. I’m absolutely not claiming that Blizzard took inspiration from our work — it was just neat to see that we’d been thinking along the same lines as people at the company.

For example: We implemented a logarithmic curve for CF’s level scaling — one that was designed to allow a player to run the game once at each difficulty level and finish “Hell” near maximum level. Blizzard wanted a game that would require many, many, many runs through maximum difficulty to reward Lvl 99 and used a differently-shaped curve to do it — but they still moved away from the linear curve they used in the early phases of the title when they launched the expansion, Lord of Destruction.

Until now, I never really understood why I was so unhappy with the base game in the first place. Now I do. I felt as though the collective changes to Diablo II that happened after Normal weren’t just the result of making the game harder — they made the game different, in ways that felt like they’d broken the trust Blizzard had established in building the game.

It’s not often that you discover the explanation for why you spent a few thousand hours rebuilding someone else’s project in an article written 18 years after the fact. I suppose Cold Fusion has always felt a bit like a road-not-taken path for me. It had its fans, but it was one reasonably popular mod among many, not a DOTA or a Counter-Strike. Either way, I appreciate Scheurle’s discussion of difficulty and how developers think about the topic. It shed some light on an episode of my own life.

Now Read:

Meet the PiS2: A PS2 Portable Built with a Raspberry Pi 2 Server

World of Warcraft Classic vs. Retail, Part 1: Which Early Game Plays Better?

PC Gamers Who Didn’t Play Classic Console Games Missed Out on Great Experiences

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/299138-how-an-article-on-game-difficulty-explained-my-own-modding-18-years-later from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-article-on-game-difficulty.html

[componentplanet]

How an Article on Game Difficulty Explained My Own Modding, 18 Years Later

A game’s difficulty level can make or break the title. Games that are perceived as too difficult become boring, depressing grinds, while games that are too easy become boring and tedious, with little challenge. One of the most profound differences between World of Warcraft Classic and Retail is the difference in difficulty. Of course, every player has their own ideas about how hard a game should be, but there’s no arguing that the difficulty of a title is important.

But according to game developer Jennifer Scheurle, game developers think about game difficulty very differently than players do, which may be part of why conversations on this topic sometimes seem to break down. Her piece resonated with me, partly because it reminded me of the reasons why I became a game modder, once upon a time. According to Scheurle, difficulty is all about trust.

“At the core of the difference between how game designers and players speak about difficulty,” she writes, “is the fact that we discuss it in terms of skill progression. All difficulty design is essentially that: crafting how players will learn, apply skills, and progress through challenges.”

Graphic by Jennifer Scheurle for Polygon

She then walks through examples of how this plays out in games, using the Dark Souls series as an example. DS games ask you to accept that you will die (frequently) as part of learning how encounters function. You aren’t simply being killed by mechanics you can’t master, beat, or counter, you’re learning how the game functions and how to counter incoming attacks. The game, in turn, obeys its own internal rules. Players often become angry at a game if they feel it isn’t holding up its end of the bargain in some particular, whether that refers to drop rates, spawn rates, boss difficulty, or the damage you take versus the damage you deal. She also discusses the importance of how a game teaches players to play it, and the various in-game ways that developers communicate game difficulty and associated rules. It’s a very different view of the topic than simply boiling it down into whether a game is “hard” or “easy,” and it leads to a much more nuanced view of how and why different titles may put difficulty in different places.

The article resonated with me in part because it describes part of why I became a Diablo II modder and taught me something about my own motivation. I don’t want to seem as if I’m hijacking Scheurle’s excellent discussion of game difficulty because it’s worth a read in its own right, but I’m going to switch gears a bit and talk about my own experience. To put it simply: I was pissed.

Diablo II’s Trust Fail

This was the early days of Diablo II, before the Lord of Destruction expansion had even come out. Patch 1.03 dropped not long before I started modding, to put a date on things. On Normal difficulty, Diablo II worked pretty well, but as you progressed into Nightmare and Hell difficulty modes, deficiencies became apparent.

Back then, Diablo II used a linear leveling curve in which the amount of XP you needed to gain for each additional level increased by a flat amount — the amount you needed for your previous level, plus a flat modifier. This was exacerbated by a leveling penalty, introduced in Nightmare, in which you lost XP gained towards your next level if your character died. You couldn’t drop a level due to this XP loss, but you could theoretically be 99 percent of the way to Lvl 50 and fall back to 0 percent at Lvl 49. The net result of this was that the amount of time required for each additional level increased sharply, and this became increasingly noticeable as you moved into the later game.

Now for the coup de grace: The game was poorly balanced outside of Normal difficulty. I became a game modder specifically because my Barbarian character with maximum Fire Resist was being one-shotted by mini-bosses with Fire Aura even when he used abilities that temporarily increased his HP. These mini-bosses and bosses could one-shot a character virtually as soon as you saw them. Death meant losing a portion of gold and dropping equipped items. Attempting to retrieve those items (using whatever alternate gear you had access to) was virtually guaranteed to get you killed at least once more because you’d have to drag monsters away from your corpse in order to try and retrieve what you originally had. Mini-bosses could also spawn with these modifiers in critical areas, where it was exceptionally difficult to move them away from a critical spawn point. There was no way to see the exact location of the fire aura on the ground; you knew you’d touched it when you died.

It was cheap. That’s what I called it. I didn’t consider it any kind of legitimate difficulty spike. It just felt like a way for Blizzard to make the game harder by killing players in a manner they couldn’t even fight. I became a modder because I was angry about the way that these imbalances had changed the game. I felt betrayed.

Looking back (and using Scheurle’s article for reference), I’ve realized that I was angry because Diablo II had broken trust with me. Some of these flaws existed in Normal as well, but they weren’t as apparent due to the influence of how other scaling factors impacted the title. Some of the changes between Normal and later difficulties that impacted how poorly the game scaled included the much-slower pace of leveling and the fact that there were no unique items in-game for the Nightmare and Hell difficulty modes. This made it pointless to spend gold on gambling (since gambling, at the time, only produced normal weapons). The slow speed of leveling meant that one of a player’s primary means of gaining power was substantially curtailed. There were also notable power imbalances created by the use of percentages for some metrics (like life steal). In original vanilla D2, life steal was absurdly overpowered — and absolutely essential to surviving the late game. Certain classes were locked into endgame strategies as a result of bad math and poorly balanced game mechanics. It grated on me.

The changes to Diablo II from Normal to later difficulties weren’t just the result of Blizzard trying to be jerks. It’s common for RPGs to have poorly balanced endgames because most people do not play them for long enough to actually experience the endgame. This was a topic of discussion around Skyrim when that game was new, and it explains much of what happened with Diablo II way back then.

I developed the Fusion 2 mod for Diablo II, followed by a much larger overhaul, Cold Fusion. I and a team of three other people — Justin Gash, John Stanford, and Matt Wesson — cumulatively poured in several thousand man-hours of development time into Cold Fusion. I led the effort, which was a core part of my best friend’s senior project in computer science and consumed no small chunk of my own senior year in college. I’m not sure the game files exist on the internet any longer, but you can see the original website archived by the Wayback Machine. Fair warning: I was not a web designer. Still, it gives some idea of the scope of the project, if you’re familiar with Diablo II.

While I don’t expect anyone reading this to have ever played the mod — I never released an LoD-compatible version of the project — it was a pretty major part of my life for the time I worked on it. We overhauled the entire title, tweaking drop rates, fixing bugs, and implementing a new leveling curve, a new difficulty curve, new monsters, and new unique items intended for both Nightmare and Hell difficulty levels. We developed new audio effects, visuals, and skills using pieces of code that developers had left in place in the engine and audio effects another friend created. We pulled certain unique items over from Diablo I (with Diablo I art) and reworked the skill trees to better balance the game. Our goal, in every scenario, was to build a more consistent Diablo II that didn’t just funnel characters into a single endgame build but allowed other skills to compete as well. I was quite proud of the fact that when Lord of Destruction came out, it adjusted Diablo II in some of the same ways we had, and even introduced new spells that were similar to some of the ones we built. I’m absolutely not claiming that Blizzard took inspiration from our work — it was just neat to see that we’d been thinking along the same lines as people at the company.

For example: We implemented a logarithmic curve for CF’s level scaling — one that was designed to allow a player to run the game once at each difficulty level and finish “Hell” near maximum level. Blizzard wanted a game that would require many, many, many runs through maximum difficulty to reward Lvl 99 and used a differently-shaped curve to do it — but they still moved away from the linear curve they used in the early phases of the title when they launched the expansion, Lord of Destruction.

Until now, I never really understood why I was so unhappy with the base game in the first place. Now I do. I felt as though the collective changes to Diablo II that happened after Normal weren’t just the result of making the game harder — they made the game different, in ways that felt like they’d broken the trust Blizzard had established in building the game.

It’s not often that you discover the explanation for why you spent a few thousand hours rebuilding someone else’s project in an article written 18 years after the fact. I suppose Cold Fusion has always felt a bit like a road-not-taken path for me. It had its fans, but it was one reasonably popular mod among many, not a DOTA or a Counter-Strike. Either way, I appreciate Scheurle’s discussion of difficulty and how developers think about the topic. It shed some light on an episode of my own life.

Now Read:

Meet the PiS2: A PS2 Portable Built with a Raspberry Pi 2 Server

World of Warcraft Classic vs. Retail, Part 1: Which Early Game Plays Better?

PC Gamers Who Didn’t Play Classic Console Games Missed Out on Great Experiences

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/299138-how-an-article-on-game-difficulty-explained-my-own-modding-18-years-later from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2019/09/how-article-on-game-difficulty.html