@Tjuz I actually have not seen anything official about why they haven’t returned to the World/Character Tendency system. I can only assume it was not a popular aspect of the game. As with any game mechanic, I know it likely has its staunch supporters though and it would be interesting to see if they could bring it back in a modified form. Other games have had similar world changing effects based on how combat turns out, like one that comes to mind is Dishonored. Even though I only played that for the opening few hours, I heard that the more aggressively you play it and kill rather than stealth then the more rats show up and infest the area, or something like that. There’s probably other games I can’t think of right now where the world and/or the enemy behavior change if you are more aggressive or kill more. I think some games have systems built in where the game auto-adjusts to make encounters easier if you fail multiple times. But I don’t suspect there’s any other games with a system where the more you die the harder the game gets! That’s basically what World Tendency is, that the more times you die, the blacker the world gets, and the more enemies show up and the harder they are to kill! It’s the complete opposite of what you’d expect! But there are benefits to having a fully black world where certain NPCs or items will only show up on a map if the world is full black (or sometimes full white), which is a pretty cool concept.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution I love Dishonored! One of the few games I've replayed multiple times (though I had to cut my third playthrough short due to a specifically run-breaking bug). It's funny to think that this Demon's Souls system is still a more evil take on that philosophy however. Where you're correct in saying that Dishonored has more enemies and dangers show up as you becoming more of a monster killing everything with a heartbeat within the level, it sounds like that's still the opposite of the suffering DS puts you through. Dishonored simply enables you to play your way, whether that be highly lethal or inexistent, by balancing the game and its encounters to work for either type of play, while you're telling me DS will actively make the gmae harder for you if you dare to suck. Two very different ways to approach difficulty, and as someone who regularly sucks... at games(!!!), I know which approach I'm sure I'll prefer.
@Tjuz So with the world and character tendency, it does eventually hit a max effect when the world is pure black or the character is pure black, so it’s not like to will ramp up difficulty to an infinite level. But still, the game was challenging enough for me, so I manipulated by deaths to keep things neutral to white. You can do that by not dying in physical form in a world, so a lot of player just jump off the ledge in the Nexus hub and only enter the worlds in spirit/soul form. Then you can die all you want in soul form and it won’t shift the world tendency. You just have to get accustomed to the slight HP debuff in soul form, for which there are a few items to minimize that effect.
But certain items and enemies will only show up in a pure black world, so I missed out on some of those. If I ever play the game again then I should try to push everything pure black and see how it differs.
I should retry Dishonored one day. Maybe it would click for me on a second attempt
If I'm not mistaken, they did the fabulous Ico/Shadow of the Colossus remasters and I thought they were in for a great future. I was hoping they'd be the ones doing some more remasters of older titles along the same lines.
I'm under a rock with a lot of development press though.
@DemonStar89 Yeah, as Yousef mentioned, they were shut down by Sony. No more games coming from them. From what I've followed and seen in terms of press, it just seemed like they weren't really able to get a project off the ground since the Demon Souls remake. Pitches were rejected, projects were canceled, etc. Just a lot of lost time, energy and budget with no reward in sight. I believe it was a combination of Bluepoint itself being a bit mismanaged and Sony being a bit of a pain in the butt. It didn't sound like there was really any one issue or leadership at fault, so it's a shame that it has turned out this way. I've never played any of their games admittedly, but they always seemed exceptionally well-crafted from the sidelines. Truly a loss for the industry!
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