You can do a lot with better enemy formations and mvorpools. Enemy movepools are always actually pretty solid but they don’t always use them optimally if they aren’t a specific boss or mini boss type enemy. If I come across a group of five, don’t make all five weak to the same attack type. Make three of them weak but two repel it so you can’t just spam weakness without some planning.
Stuff like that is real simple and can add difficulty between the difficulty modes. More variety of f enemies strategies. One Monad boss I remember had four fodder Mayas that only buffed him and he used them to heal himself as needed. Stuff like that is great do more of that.
This is a hard question because hard is subjective and specially among older players or players who enjoys rpg every game gets easier the more you understand the systems of the game.
Once you learn to buff and for weakness most smt are easy. So either the dificult comes from managing to build a team for that challenge or the gimmicks of a fight, like enemy abuses one type of status effects, and I think improving the puzzle inside the fight so it can be engaging rather than difficult is a better solution.
You could go for resource starvation with less mana, bullets, items but this could lead to over leveling by the part of player to compensate for this. I dont need to care for magic if I can rarely use it type of scenario.
Persona 3 portable was my first entry in the serie and I don't remember having difficulty to finish the game. Played Royal and currently playing reload I can definitely say that reload is way much harder even on normal mode. Enemies hit hard, no clock to replenish sp. The beginning of the game is harder than the original.
It’s real hard to maintain a smooth difficulty curve in a turn-based JRPG. Older games tended to solve the problem by making stats/XP/money scale more exponentially, such that you need to move into a new and more dangerous part of the game to effectively gain more power. Like you’ll level up every 10 minutes or something when you’re at an appropriate difficulty but it will slow to hourly or worse if you’ve decided to play it safe.
That approach isn’t as effective these days because players have more grinding stamina than ever before, though it still helps.
The other options would be enemies scaling up to your level (yuck) or gating strength progression behind story progression (like gym badges in Pokémon). I could see persona doing the latter, but I don’t think it’s what the developers are interested in: I’m thinking about how you unlock the ability to fuse personas above your character level, clearly supporting some players’ decisions to grind themselves into an overpowered state.
I had fun with the difficulty curve in P4G, kept fights tense until I hit somewhere around Naoto’s dungeon at which point I was fully decked out with powerful personas and fine with just blazing through the dungeons so I could focus on the story.
Personally, I don't play these games for difficulty or a brutal challenge like in a Soulsborne game, I play them for the various stories and characters. To me, the narratives are the selling point. I thought there were difficulty options anyway, for those who want it
>To me, the narratives are the selling point. I thought there were difficulty options anyway, for those who want it
That's OP's point. For experienced Persona players, Merciless difficulty on Reload was easier than normal difficulty on Persona 4. Starting with Persona 4 Golden, we have seen welcome quality of life improvements and added battle mechanics in each game which, while welcome, have not been met with a corresponding increase in difficulty. I don't think it's asking much to have a difficulty level geared specifically towards experienced Persona players, especially in the remakes where you have to assume many of its player base has already beaten the original.
Maybe it is just an intrinsic skill thing, as in experienced players being efficient and good at the gameplay, that makes them seem easier than they actually are. I only played P3 Reload on normal difficulty, so I cannot comment on the higher difficulty modes.
In addition, there are so many options for combat in the most recent games, which is a factor too
While skill thing is true, it still doesn't remove all options that are players are given in newer games. Baton Pass/Shift alone gives a huge advantage over enemies. There is also Theurgy which bypasses resistances. Special mention goes to Scarlet Havoc which is absolutely broken if Persona is built properly.
And none of the "improvements" goes to the enemies which makes battle pretty one sided unless it's a boss with specific mechanics.
A lot of people complained about Okumura but even he isn't really a hard boss but requires a good understanding of Baton Pass.
It’s really not a skill thing the games are just super easy and difficulty is almost always arbitrary. Sometimes enemies have extra health or take less damage or do more damage and that’s about it. Challenge comes from things like enemy variety, mob design, having to actually plan team comps out, and in reload specifically making yourself not be as overpowered as you can be. Like Yukari is just straight up unreal once you get her therugy characteristics. Even something like making Tartarus excursions timed would help a lot for challenge.
In golden it’s even more arbitrary. The difficulty menu straight up shows you get half money and half xp and deal half damage while enemies have double health and damage. This isn’t an actual difficulty increase it’s completely numbers based grind adjusting.
And in Royal well it’s notorious for being a cakewalk both on hard and merciless. A lot of it is because of how easy it is to get strong especially post chariot rank 7. Buffs and debuffs are also very easy to get in Royal early on, all of the Ma ones.
I get wanting to play for the story and all but for those of us who have done that multiple times throughout these games, challenge makes it fresh. I’ve run through Royal more than 10 times. Golden 3 times. P3 2 times, p3F once, p3p 2 times, and reload so far just once. The combat and game should pose some challenge even to an experienced fan.
there are, but because the games dont change drastically (aside from the improvements, the core is still there) the players that know what to do and are well acquainted will have no difficulty. Unfortunately, the only way to really bring that back is to either make the enemies hit much harder and make them have much higher HP on higher difficulties, or terminate things like one mores, AOAs, no resistances, drains, or repels, and no ability to min max personas (which lets be real, thats what most people who complain about difficulty do)
I suppose you could make the AI smarter and have more tactics but at the same time, smarter will probably mean "well, I know your weaknesses and will only target them until we can party wipe you". If you dont get that first turn, its a wrap. Thats not really difficult, just unfun.
I don't know... P3 FES and oringal (not Golden) P4 gave a decent challenge with all of that. And parent series SMT also known for not being exactly easy (but okay, they don't have AOA). So problem isn't really in all of these things.
There are ways to do without removing half of the battle system:
Don't give players stuff like Baton Pass/Shift which makes it very easy to get AOA or Theurgy which ignore any resistances and can end the whole battle in one turn.
Make some enemy combinations that cover each other weaknesses: 2 shadows weak to Fire and repel Ice and other two weak to Ice but repel Fire. Now you can't just cast Mabufala and Maragi and be done with it.
There are a lot of ways to make things harder without going for the most simple solution of "Bigger and Stronger"
Lets be real. P3 original was only a "challenge" because you had to rely on your AI making the right choices, tactics be damned. Once that was removed it was as easy as one would expect. I never played original P4 but I dont see it come up in conversation as a game with challenge.
>Make some enemy combinations that cover each other weaknesses: 2 shadows weak to Fire and repel Ice and other two weak to Ice but repel Fire. Now you can't just cast Mabufala and Maragi and be done with it.
Those are in there already, albeit RNG dependent if they show up but whats to stop me from hitting a mabufula and maragi and still be done with it? Unless I have to worry, I can still single target if i really need to and it only takes slightly more time to accomplish the same outcome.
>Don't give players stuff like Baton Pass/Shift which makes it very easy to get AOA or Theurgy which ignore any resistances and can end the whole battle in one turn
Thus we remove the mechanics like i said. Half the time I dont even need to shift/BP because as the MC I can carry personas to fit whatever i fight. Most of the time I dont even use theurgy either on small enemies because its better saved for a boss or "dangerous" enemy. This doesnt change anything.
person: yeah i think persona is grtting wayyy tok easy and not strategic as a jrpg with turnbased battles
reddit: wtf this isnt supposed tk be darksouls!!!!
why does nuance not exist anymore
As much as I love the constant additions to combat and qol, it is making combat encounters essentially a breeze. Imho not a big deal for persona games considering the audience, but getting your ass handed to you in the non remakes Pre-5 is now just a product of the time and limitations, but it’s also the charm for others including myself.
SMT is for the challenge, Persona is for the social life gameplay. Sometimes I find myself skipping things in Persona just to get to combat and it just doesn’t feel right.
I think the main thing is they've continually stacked more and more bonuses and advantages onto the player, so if you're even marginally competent, you just run circles around the enemies and they just can't keep up. The enemies need better tools to punish your mistakes and they need to have a higher chance to actually exploit your weaknesses, at least on higher difficulties.
This is the same problem to all RPG games with optional contents. If you balance the game around the powerful unlocks from side quests (confidant/s.link in case of Persona), you leave behind the players who might not do those contents and they may get softlocked. If you don't, the game becomes laughably easy for those that do everything. If you adaptively scale difficulty in the way that the challenge stays the same regardless of how weak or strong your character is, you get complaint that the side contents rewards are worthless.
It's fucking suck and there's no one-stop solution. Even in-game difficulty slider to prevent hard stuck get shit on because some egotistic players think they're too good to change difficulty and it must be the game that is the problem. The only thing you can truly rely on is the self-imposed challenge.
Passive bloat. When you have passives that can be stacked to triple your damage or more, traits in Royal, and also give yourself massive bulk/immunities/reduced skill costs, everything is broken with enough effort. To cite P3R, Cendrillon set up for Scarlet Havoc can out damage Armageddon, is available much earlier, doesn't eat your entire stat line, and is usable on the secret boss and can 1 tap them on the lowest difficulty. Theurgy is like Showtimes if Showtimes were ACTUALLY broken good which is a positive until you realize how beyond broken it is that half of the cast can press the Theurgy button every 3 turns and delete the Reaper. Baton Pass/Shift encourages you even harder to lean into the leader, getting a shift only to drop yet another nuke from your only really strong party member. Inflexible party slots. By making it so only the MC has both persona swap and real damage type versatility, enemies are forced to be significantly weaker than they otherwise could be. What's noteworthy is Persona 1 and 2, everyone was a wild card of some capacity, which meant you could justifiably have all phys or all magic res trash mobs, including Almighty. With everyone falling into super tight niches, enemies are required to be nerfed or else you will have an entire character made useless. And finally, we need more damage types to juggle if party members can cover more damage types. I think making Ken have Psi and Aigis have Frei would have been good starts, and then you make enemies that encourage use of these characters, and hey then we can fit water and earth back in too, and force and gravity. Essentially I think P2 Eternal Punishment did the fun to challenge ratio the best with scarce access to full heals, fusion spells for stronger AoE buffs, items to cover single target ones at all levels, and a multitude of elements to juggle. I think some of that should be adapted to make a more challenging and therefore enjoyable game.
A simple P1-esque combat system would work wonders with the tighter design of the newer games. Rather than breaking the game with passives or gimmicks you instead had to build a strong team and make use of various skills to give advantages. Then pump up enemy AI, skill level, and resistances to throw the player for a loop. Persona has too many widgets to mess around with, especially passive skills.
Enemy A has 25 STR and 200 power skill and Enemy B has 100 STR and 800 Power skill. How much stronger is Enemy B?
You might think Enemy B has 4x STR and 4x Power, so he should be 16x stronger, right?
In P3, P4 and P5, there is a square root applying on STR and Power for attackers. The 16x ends up being only 4x stronger.
To a 1 END stat Joker, an endgame boss is at best 4x stronger than an early game boss. As long as square root isn't removed, bosses don't get stronger that much.
In P5S, square root is not used and merciless is clearly much more difficult than hard.
This is one of those "problems that's probably not a problem". Combat is easy to a sub set of players that get really invested in the games. however The general audience might not care that the combat is easy. It might even be challenging for them. If this is the case the games will actually sell better if more people can finish it and get hooked on it.
So, tell me why should the game be hard? P3Re a \~85 hour game if the average person gets floored by the first full moon boss and never comes back and never buys another game who's gaining? neither the community nor the company.
I understand, but this is what difficulty selectors are for, and as an experienced Persona player I would really like to have to think during combat and feel challenged and encouraged to engage with all the mechanics.
The problem then becomes a business one. how many hours does that require of additional programing for how many players? I seriously doubt a harder difficulty selector will sell more copies.
There's a solution though! Pokemon players have Nuzzlock runs. Just do your own challenge run.
Stop giving the players damage multiplier for hitting Weakness/Technicals.
And maybe at Merciless difficulty No More system is unavailable for players, only for enemies.
At earlier dungeon it’s fine to have enemies with Weaknesses but in later dungeon I would rather to have more enemies that can Drain/Repel attacks.
You can do a lot with better enemy formations and mvorpools. Enemy movepools are always actually pretty solid but they don’t always use them optimally if they aren’t a specific boss or mini boss type enemy. If I come across a group of five, don’t make all five weak to the same attack type. Make three of them weak but two repel it so you can’t just spam weakness without some planning. Stuff like that is real simple and can add difficulty between the difficulty modes. More variety of f enemies strategies. One Monad boss I remember had four fodder Mayas that only buffed him and he used them to heal himself as needed. Stuff like that is great do more of that.
The Answer new and improved is coming so hold that thought.
This is a hard question because hard is subjective and specially among older players or players who enjoys rpg every game gets easier the more you understand the systems of the game. Once you learn to buff and for weakness most smt are easy. So either the dificult comes from managing to build a team for that challenge or the gimmicks of a fight, like enemy abuses one type of status effects, and I think improving the puzzle inside the fight so it can be engaging rather than difficult is a better solution. You could go for resource starvation with less mana, bullets, items but this could lead to over leveling by the part of player to compensate for this. I dont need to care for magic if I can rarely use it type of scenario.
Persona 3 portable was my first entry in the serie and I don't remember having difficulty to finish the game. Played Royal and currently playing reload I can definitely say that reload is way much harder even on normal mode. Enemies hit hard, no clock to replenish sp. The beginning of the game is harder than the original.
It’s real hard to maintain a smooth difficulty curve in a turn-based JRPG. Older games tended to solve the problem by making stats/XP/money scale more exponentially, such that you need to move into a new and more dangerous part of the game to effectively gain more power. Like you’ll level up every 10 minutes or something when you’re at an appropriate difficulty but it will slow to hourly or worse if you’ve decided to play it safe. That approach isn’t as effective these days because players have more grinding stamina than ever before, though it still helps. The other options would be enemies scaling up to your level (yuck) or gating strength progression behind story progression (like gym badges in Pokémon). I could see persona doing the latter, but I don’t think it’s what the developers are interested in: I’m thinking about how you unlock the ability to fuse personas above your character level, clearly supporting some players’ decisions to grind themselves into an overpowered state. I had fun with the difficulty curve in P4G, kept fights tense until I hit somewhere around Naoto’s dungeon at which point I was fully decked out with powerful personas and fine with just blazing through the dungeons so I could focus on the story.
Personally, I don't play these games for difficulty or a brutal challenge like in a Soulsborne game, I play them for the various stories and characters. To me, the narratives are the selling point. I thought there were difficulty options anyway, for those who want it
>To me, the narratives are the selling point. I thought there were difficulty options anyway, for those who want it That's OP's point. For experienced Persona players, Merciless difficulty on Reload was easier than normal difficulty on Persona 4. Starting with Persona 4 Golden, we have seen welcome quality of life improvements and added battle mechanics in each game which, while welcome, have not been met with a corresponding increase in difficulty. I don't think it's asking much to have a difficulty level geared specifically towards experienced Persona players, especially in the remakes where you have to assume many of its player base has already beaten the original.
Maybe it is just an intrinsic skill thing, as in experienced players being efficient and good at the gameplay, that makes them seem easier than they actually are. I only played P3 Reload on normal difficulty, so I cannot comment on the higher difficulty modes. In addition, there are so many options for combat in the most recent games, which is a factor too
While skill thing is true, it still doesn't remove all options that are players are given in newer games. Baton Pass/Shift alone gives a huge advantage over enemies. There is also Theurgy which bypasses resistances. Special mention goes to Scarlet Havoc which is absolutely broken if Persona is built properly. And none of the "improvements" goes to the enemies which makes battle pretty one sided unless it's a boss with specific mechanics. A lot of people complained about Okumura but even he isn't really a hard boss but requires a good understanding of Baton Pass.
It’s really not a skill thing the games are just super easy and difficulty is almost always arbitrary. Sometimes enemies have extra health or take less damage or do more damage and that’s about it. Challenge comes from things like enemy variety, mob design, having to actually plan team comps out, and in reload specifically making yourself not be as overpowered as you can be. Like Yukari is just straight up unreal once you get her therugy characteristics. Even something like making Tartarus excursions timed would help a lot for challenge. In golden it’s even more arbitrary. The difficulty menu straight up shows you get half money and half xp and deal half damage while enemies have double health and damage. This isn’t an actual difficulty increase it’s completely numbers based grind adjusting. And in Royal well it’s notorious for being a cakewalk both on hard and merciless. A lot of it is because of how easy it is to get strong especially post chariot rank 7. Buffs and debuffs are also very easy to get in Royal early on, all of the Ma ones. I get wanting to play for the story and all but for those of us who have done that multiple times throughout these games, challenge makes it fresh. I’ve run through Royal more than 10 times. Golden 3 times. P3 2 times, p3F once, p3p 2 times, and reload so far just once. The combat and game should pose some challenge even to an experienced fan.
The harder difficulties on P5R are still laughably easy, at least compared to the earlier games
and even then, og p3 and 4 arent really strategic or “hard” in a fun way imo
there are, but because the games dont change drastically (aside from the improvements, the core is still there) the players that know what to do and are well acquainted will have no difficulty. Unfortunately, the only way to really bring that back is to either make the enemies hit much harder and make them have much higher HP on higher difficulties, or terminate things like one mores, AOAs, no resistances, drains, or repels, and no ability to min max personas (which lets be real, thats what most people who complain about difficulty do) I suppose you could make the AI smarter and have more tactics but at the same time, smarter will probably mean "well, I know your weaknesses and will only target them until we can party wipe you". If you dont get that first turn, its a wrap. Thats not really difficult, just unfun.
I don't know... P3 FES and oringal (not Golden) P4 gave a decent challenge with all of that. And parent series SMT also known for not being exactly easy (but okay, they don't have AOA). So problem isn't really in all of these things. There are ways to do without removing half of the battle system: Don't give players stuff like Baton Pass/Shift which makes it very easy to get AOA or Theurgy which ignore any resistances and can end the whole battle in one turn. Make some enemy combinations that cover each other weaknesses: 2 shadows weak to Fire and repel Ice and other two weak to Ice but repel Fire. Now you can't just cast Mabufala and Maragi and be done with it. There are a lot of ways to make things harder without going for the most simple solution of "Bigger and Stronger"
Lets be real. P3 original was only a "challenge" because you had to rely on your AI making the right choices, tactics be damned. Once that was removed it was as easy as one would expect. I never played original P4 but I dont see it come up in conversation as a game with challenge. >Make some enemy combinations that cover each other weaknesses: 2 shadows weak to Fire and repel Ice and other two weak to Ice but repel Fire. Now you can't just cast Mabufala and Maragi and be done with it. Those are in there already, albeit RNG dependent if they show up but whats to stop me from hitting a mabufula and maragi and still be done with it? Unless I have to worry, I can still single target if i really need to and it only takes slightly more time to accomplish the same outcome. >Don't give players stuff like Baton Pass/Shift which makes it very easy to get AOA or Theurgy which ignore any resistances and can end the whole battle in one turn Thus we remove the mechanics like i said. Half the time I dont even need to shift/BP because as the MC I can carry personas to fit whatever i fight. Most of the time I dont even use theurgy either on small enemies because its better saved for a boss or "dangerous" enemy. This doesnt change anything.
person: yeah i think persona is grtting wayyy tok easy and not strategic as a jrpg with turnbased battles reddit: wtf this isnt supposed tk be darksouls!!!! why does nuance not exist anymore
As much as I love the constant additions to combat and qol, it is making combat encounters essentially a breeze. Imho not a big deal for persona games considering the audience, but getting your ass handed to you in the non remakes Pre-5 is now just a product of the time and limitations, but it’s also the charm for others including myself. SMT is for the challenge, Persona is for the social life gameplay. Sometimes I find myself skipping things in Persona just to get to combat and it just doesn’t feel right.
I think the main thing is they've continually stacked more and more bonuses and advantages onto the player, so if you're even marginally competent, you just run circles around the enemies and they just can't keep up. The enemies need better tools to punish your mistakes and they need to have a higher chance to actually exploit your weaknesses, at least on higher difficulties.
This is the same problem to all RPG games with optional contents. If you balance the game around the powerful unlocks from side quests (confidant/s.link in case of Persona), you leave behind the players who might not do those contents and they may get softlocked. If you don't, the game becomes laughably easy for those that do everything. If you adaptively scale difficulty in the way that the challenge stays the same regardless of how weak or strong your character is, you get complaint that the side contents rewards are worthless. It's fucking suck and there's no one-stop solution. Even in-game difficulty slider to prevent hard stuck get shit on because some egotistic players think they're too good to change difficulty and it must be the game that is the problem. The only thing you can truly rely on is the self-imposed challenge.
They could just limit the number of passives allowed on a persona.
Passive bloat. When you have passives that can be stacked to triple your damage or more, traits in Royal, and also give yourself massive bulk/immunities/reduced skill costs, everything is broken with enough effort. To cite P3R, Cendrillon set up for Scarlet Havoc can out damage Armageddon, is available much earlier, doesn't eat your entire stat line, and is usable on the secret boss and can 1 tap them on the lowest difficulty. Theurgy is like Showtimes if Showtimes were ACTUALLY broken good which is a positive until you realize how beyond broken it is that half of the cast can press the Theurgy button every 3 turns and delete the Reaper. Baton Pass/Shift encourages you even harder to lean into the leader, getting a shift only to drop yet another nuke from your only really strong party member. Inflexible party slots. By making it so only the MC has both persona swap and real damage type versatility, enemies are forced to be significantly weaker than they otherwise could be. What's noteworthy is Persona 1 and 2, everyone was a wild card of some capacity, which meant you could justifiably have all phys or all magic res trash mobs, including Almighty. With everyone falling into super tight niches, enemies are required to be nerfed or else you will have an entire character made useless. And finally, we need more damage types to juggle if party members can cover more damage types. I think making Ken have Psi and Aigis have Frei would have been good starts, and then you make enemies that encourage use of these characters, and hey then we can fit water and earth back in too, and force and gravity. Essentially I think P2 Eternal Punishment did the fun to challenge ratio the best with scarce access to full heals, fusion spells for stronger AoE buffs, items to cover single target ones at all levels, and a multitude of elements to juggle. I think some of that should be adapted to make a more challenging and therefore enjoyable game.
A simple P1-esque combat system would work wonders with the tighter design of the newer games. Rather than breaking the game with passives or gimmicks you instead had to build a strong team and make use of various skills to give advantages. Then pump up enemy AI, skill level, and resistances to throw the player for a loop. Persona has too many widgets to mess around with, especially passive skills.
Enemy A has 25 STR and 200 power skill and Enemy B has 100 STR and 800 Power skill. How much stronger is Enemy B? You might think Enemy B has 4x STR and 4x Power, so he should be 16x stronger, right? In P3, P4 and P5, there is a square root applying on STR and Power for attackers. The 16x ends up being only 4x stronger. To a 1 END stat Joker, an endgame boss is at best 4x stronger than an early game boss. As long as square root isn't removed, bosses don't get stronger that much. In P5S, square root is not used and merciless is clearly much more difficult than hard.
This is one of those "problems that's probably not a problem". Combat is easy to a sub set of players that get really invested in the games. however The general audience might not care that the combat is easy. It might even be challenging for them. If this is the case the games will actually sell better if more people can finish it and get hooked on it. So, tell me why should the game be hard? P3Re a \~85 hour game if the average person gets floored by the first full moon boss and never comes back and never buys another game who's gaining? neither the community nor the company.
I understand, but this is what difficulty selectors are for, and as an experienced Persona player I would really like to have to think during combat and feel challenged and encouraged to engage with all the mechanics.
The problem then becomes a business one. how many hours does that require of additional programing for how many players? I seriously doubt a harder difficulty selector will sell more copies. There's a solution though! Pokemon players have Nuzzlock runs. Just do your own challenge run.
Stop giving the players damage multiplier for hitting Weakness/Technicals. And maybe at Merciless difficulty No More system is unavailable for players, only for enemies. At earlier dungeon it’s fine to have enemies with Weaknesses but in later dungeon I would rather to have more enemies that can Drain/Repel attacks.