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Read moreAlright, strap yourselves in cause this is a long one. I have some general questions regarding difficulty in the main story (and in some way open world). It’s a wall of text, sorry, been sitting on these questions for a while and am always asleep when the AMA is posted. Answer what you can, don’t answer what you can’t (or don’t want).
Difficulty progression question: What’s your stance on difficulty progression in regards to expansions and living world? Is the idea that the game becomes harder in chronological order (PS, LWS1/2, HoT, etc.) or are you in favor of “resetting” the difficulty per expansion, as to make it more accessible to newer players (ie. so people who buy PoF instead of HoT wouldn’t instantly be overwhelmed). If the latter, does that mean the living word building up to the expansion is more difficult (because part of expansion) or easier (leading up to new expansion, depending on story).
Death in personal in...
1) Generally we try to make the golden path story approachable by majority of our player base. I think we generally try to approach content more like your latter suggestion, instead of the former. Ideally achievements could be used to add challenge to an encounter and not block players from experiencing the story.
2) This is tied to the previous answer. If we do scale an encounter towards the harder side, we know that death doesn't reset an encounter which can be extremely punishing. Again, we can always put in achievements for "don't dying" or "don't get hit by X" instead to give that challenge without blocking players from experiencing the content.
3) The skill variance in our players can be quite large. If you know your profession really well, and how it combos with others, you can output something like 5x the damage and sustainability that an average player could.
4) I'm a fan of challenge motes in story instances but it does at scope to a release. I wo...
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