Dungeons of Dredmor - Quick Word on Difficulty

There's a short Dredmor update that talks about difficulty levels in this should-be-released-soon graphical roguelike:

To lay it right out, there are three difficulty levels. The thinking on each:

• Easy
  This is for the more casual player who is interested in exploring and enjoying the non-crunchy content of the game. I should say though, “casual” does not mean “Bejeweled”; the dungeon certainly does fight back and you’ll have to pay attention on any difficulty level. This one is just more forgiving.
• Medium
  This is the baseline which I’m balancing the other levels against and how I usually test the game while choosing random skills (which are not necessarily optimal). There should be reasonable difficulty and the game should be winnable at this level with any chosen skill set … and enough inside knowledge of game mechanics. Some character builds will probably be pretty rough though, like the ley-line walking, blood-magic-using non-spellcaster who specializes in both shields and dual wield.
• Hard
  This is for players who want to die. Repeatedly. I want to make this very difficult even for myself with said inside knowledge. Insane fans should have to exploit game mechanics to beat the game. No doubt this is the sort of thing that the classic roguelike game is all about.

These are all produced by tweaking variables in a file appropriately named “tweakDB.xml” which contains entries for a large number of variables from “minimum horde size” to “bbq chance”. Naturally you can edit these as you see fit, for example to change the “tooltip border size” to different values for each difficulty level, if that was something you think is sorely needed in Dredmor.

More information.

Hey, duel wielding shields could be badass, if they had enough pointy things on them

I think I'll have to play this on Normal, as Hard just sound too tedious and annoying to defeat. There are too many other titles releasing this year to play through, so spending weeks or months trying to beat this on hard wouldn't do.

This looks pretty cool (not counting the avatar's ridiculously-sized eyebrows; those remind me of old Soviet leaders like L. Brezhnev etc). After a really quick browse of their website, I couldn't find any info on the pricing of this game. Anyone know how much they're going to ask for this?

Price has not been announced per se, but based on the Immortal Machines podcast, I'm strongly doubting they are going for what anybody would consider to be a high pricepoint in general.

In any case, we'll probably get official word in the next couple weeks, if not any day now given the "sometime in May" release target.

To me it sounds like there should be a setting between "normal" and "hard".

I'm glad this is coming out so soon because the more I read about it the more I want it.

Originally Posted by Grandor Dragon
To me it sounds like there should be a setting between "normal" and "hard".

Sounds like you can adjust the specific difficulty features manually in tweakDB.xml, should you so choose. I love when I can do that in a game.