TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 2,005
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
There may not be an RPG with a proper difficulty curve.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, Obsidian senior systems designer Robert Donovan spoke about dialing in the difficulty of The Outer Worlds 2—a great game you ought to play—but one I found to have a particularly noticable reverse difficulty curve.
Instead of the challenges ramping up as you get more familiar with the game, RPGs tend to start out hard and get easier. They're fantasies of growth and accumulation—number go up—which runs counter to a game getting harder as it goes on, and I don't think I've ever played one where the challenges keep up with how strong you get.
The Dreadlord of the Doomkeep is just never as tough to beat as a level one goblin with an iron dagger that can kill you in one hit. It's not just a TOW2 problem—you can see it in Fallout, Baldur's Gate 3, even talkies like Disco Elysium.
It shouldn't be surprising that people who make RPGs for a living are thinking about this even harder than we are as players. Donovan's talk focused on how he approached hit points and damage while making The Outer Worlds 2, and how that translated into difficulty.
"My game director, Brandon Adler, said that we wanted to maintain the feeling of Emerald Veil throughout the entire Outer Worlds 2 game," said Donovan. Emerald Veil was the opening area of the first Outer Worlds, and the team thought it stuck the landing in terms of difficulty and balance. "Weak things are weak, and strong things are strong," as Donovan put it.
When first designing The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian mapped tiers of enemy health and damage directly onto a curve pulled from Emerald Veil, with an initial target of a more "flat" character progression: Instead of having your guy be exponentially more powerful at level 30, like they might be in D&D, you'd be twice as strong numerically.
But that "crushed" progression just didn't feel good. "When you play the game and you pick your upgrades, getting a 1.5% upgrade didn't feel meaningful to the player," said Donovan. "We wanted the choices to hit harder than some other competitors in the genre, and so what we wanted was something like a 10% boost so as soon as you hit that level, as soon as you pick that skill, you felt it immediately." And this really did translate to the final game: One of my favorite parts of TOW2 is its allowance of varied, weird, a...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, Obsidian senior systems designer Robert Donovan spoke about dialing in the difficulty of The Outer Worlds 2—a great game you ought to play—but one I found to have a particularly noticable reverse difficulty curve.
Instead of the challenges ramping up as you get more familiar with the game, RPGs tend to start out hard and get easier. They're fantasies of growth and accumulation—number go up—which runs counter to a game getting harder as it goes on, and I don't think I've ever played one where the challenges keep up with how strong you get.
The Dreadlord of the Doomkeep is just never as tough to beat as a level one goblin with an iron dagger that can kill you in one hit. It's not just a TOW2 problem—you can see it in Fallout, Baldur's Gate 3, even talkies like Disco Elysium.
It shouldn't be surprising that people who make RPGs for a living are thinking about this even harder than we are as players. Donovan's talk focused on how he approached hit points and damage while making The Outer Worlds 2, and how that translated into difficulty.
"My game director, Brandon Adler, said that we wanted to maintain the feeling of Emerald Veil throughout the entire Outer Worlds 2 game," said Donovan. Emerald Veil was the opening area of the first Outer Worlds, and the team thought it stuck the landing in terms of difficulty and balance. "Weak things are weak, and strong things are strong," as Donovan put it.
When first designing The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian mapped tiers of enemy health and damage directly onto a curve pulled from Emerald Veil, with an initial target of a more "flat" character progression: Instead of having your guy be exponentially more powerful at level 30, like they might be in D&D, you'd be twice as strong numerically.
But that "crushed" progression just didn't feel good. "When you play the game and you pick your upgrades, getting a 1.5% upgrade didn't feel meaningful to the player," said Donovan. "We wanted the choices to hit harder than some other competitors in the genre, and so what we wanted was something like a 10% boost so as soon as you hit that level, as soon as you pick that skill, you felt it immediately." And this really did translate to the final game: One of my favorite parts of TOW2 is its allowance of varied, weird, a...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?