What are some stradegies for balancing difficult gameplay?

[Egregor]

I should mention that I am in the middle of balancing an episode for Heretic, not Doom, and while that could complicate this discussion some aspects of both Doom and Heretic are similar enough to be compatible, while other aspects are not.

 

I've been balancing an episode with some levels that I created myself, while the rest are from others. They have strong level design but they are balanced to be *as hard as possible*. It appears the mappers have enemies, items, and secrets memorized and have left only fractions of seconds and extremely narrow tacticle paths to succeed. While this is true, when these same levels are tried on medium or easy skill they play very well balanced, but still excessively hard.

 

Right now I'm thinking of making the medium difficulty the new hard, the easy difficulty the new medium, and redesigning an easy difficulty. I could also try just adding more health all around, but often enemy crowding prevents that from being a practical solution. I also feel the secret items are overpowered making them feel necessary, even though they aren't navigationally mandatory.

 

Based on this circumstance does anyone have any suggestions before I just start hacking and slashing? What are some stradegies you've used that works quickly and efficiently? Do you design enemy encounters first and items later or vice versa? Do you balance from start of map to end? Do you balance from easy to hard or hard to easy? I'm curious about how other mappers approach this.

Edited August 3, 2021 by Egregor

[Cacowad]

Hello there, it may not amount to much, but i can share how i usually try to balance my maps.

My design filosophy is as follow:

1) Default difficulty level is medium, this is where i can usually finish the level confortably, while dying if i am not being carefull.

2) Easy difficulty may remove or change monsters to weaker variants (ghost to normal, sabreclaw to golems, etc), while trying to preserve the dynamics of the combat encounters.

3) Hard difficulty may remove some health/ammo to make use of infight or move it to secrets, making them very usefull or essential to resolving the map. Also the inverse of point 2 may work here.

In my case, Hard is where my I, myself, as the creator, would get my ass handed to me. It's meant to be challenging to myself so to speak.

4) Player must be moving constantly: never give more ammo than necessary in an area, to discourage camping. Player must move to new areas to acquire resources.

5) Artifacts are king: bombs, ovums and tomes are to be used to complete the map. flasks and urns give the necessary sustain in fights, and torches are needed in long and dark places.

6) Shields are STRONG, give them in secrets before big fights or normally in long segments where damage will be taken.

 

I will try to elaborate further once I'm home, on mobile is a little difficult to make everything coerent...

 

Edit:

Allright, lets see what i missed...

 

7) Usually when i start monster placement i do it in a progressive manner, from start to finish, adding progressively monsters first and items later.

This style of testing work usually well in Doom maps, as enemy drops are garanteed and the enemy-to-ammo ratio is pretty easy to figure it out; unfortunaterly in Heretic i often need to test multiple times the map on every segment introduced due to the heavy randomness of enemy drops. This usually result in adding a bit more ammo or risk some heavy infight.

 

All in all, i am a slow mapper, so i would also appreciate tips and tricks from others ;)

 

Edited August 5, 2021 by Cacowad