itch.io

The difficulty was fine. It just that i played the game differently then you intended and very much not forgiving off that.

While you seem to want to direct the player away from unintended paths by making it incredibly grindy when you go off the intended path. If as a player it is not obvious what that path is you end up grinding but not making much progress trying to solve the wrong problem.

Just try to be more mindful of the players time.

• If you want the player to take a scripted loss don’t punish them harshly for it.
• Don’t give the player the possibility to grind to get better to avoid the scripted loss when that is impossible.
• I think whether you have save points in the goblin cave doesn’t change the difficulty.
• While still having unfinished content it is really helpful if you give the player an idea how much content there is left.
• While being rail roaded can be annoying it is fine given your resources linearity is a good way to do that. Just don’t give players an open world which gives off the illusion of non-linearity and choice when the way you set up your game doesn’t allow that.

I just said that the answer is there

Well, let me tell you what went through my mind: I saw i couldn’t take that shaman into my party. So it can’t be a character which sticks around after she actually surrendered to me. Does that mean she will betray me? I didn’t pay much attention to her because if she is unwilling to fight with me how can i trust her?

It’s cool that the answer is there. To bad player feel frustrated about your game if they for what ever reason experience the game differently then you intended. Make your answers more robust. Dark soul doesn’t explain it’s mechanics in text alone and having someone telling you what enemies to expect and changing your build based on that is a new mechanic you are just introduncing at the boss fight. If you could change your party and skills based on enemy descriptions during normal fighting (except in the ambush) that mechanic wouldn’t be that suprising. It would be neat to have different build slots for that now that i think about that.