Nightmare Difficulty Mode (Submitted)

Some games where they lock out endings and story details in difficulty modes are Max Payne 1 and 2 and Allan Wake from Remedy Entertainment. I get what they were trying to do, but that was a dick move especially for the former since those games are already games that adjust to how you play by making them as hard as it deems you good. You get 3 kills? Well good for you, here's instant death!

I kid, but it really is something like that. The weird thing is, all of those games have difficulty modes too in addition to that system. Difficulty modes that seem to be a nightmarish term for gamers who want a REAL CHALLENGE.

I have no idea how Iga is going to handle Nightmare Mode. If it were me making this game, this mode would be a joke. You know how if you pirate Serious Sam 3, an invincible Pink Scorpion will chase you forever? I'd probably make it so that a demon like Mara or Lilith or Freddy Krueger chase you endlessly and there wouldn't be any save points or safe rooms.

Yes, I'll agree with Dvv here. Try to avoid personal attacks, and if something is really rankling you then handle it via PM rather than publicly. If someone's worded a post in a way you feel is poor, contact them personally to advise them about it. That has the added virtue of being less likely to draw other people in your argument, which makes it harder to make points

Now, what I'd like to see in Nightmare difficulty mode...hmm. Honestly, just buffing the enemies isn't really appealing to me, for the reasons dvv said above. I'd rather see wholesale changes in level design and enemy placement. One great example of this would be the differences in the last boss fight between Dracula X and Rondo of Blood. In Rondo, you fought Dracula on a flat plane, making him almost trivially easy. In Dracula X, however, you fought him in a room full of pillars you could fall from, making the battle much harder. Dracula Chronicles added a whole new third phase to the fight, which also worked. Still, that's pretty difficult and consuming of resources, so I can understand if they don't want to do that.

Basically, for a Nightmare Mode, I don't think it just needs to make monsters stronger where you will only need to farm and XP until you beat their terrifying level. I think they got to have harder AI so you HAVE TO learn to dodge their attacks correctly, know their weaknesses, use a thinked strategy and not just "go in and smash until it's dead". Well, a REAL change, that is all.

Medusa's Heads are annoying. To me, a zone full them was too much but if you put one or two in a melee it can supports other monsters and be a real pain to your life gauge, if you are stonned in middle of dangerous monsters.

Only attacking monsters is pretty predictable. If they have tank monsters like knight armors, with medusa's to stone you while skeleton snipers shoot at you in the same time, it can make a difference.
Monsters names are only exemple and this is only one situational possibility.

Well, from what I see usually in difficulty modes, it's only makes monsters stronger, tougher, more numberous with better loots.
In Devil May Cry 3 for instance, bosses use more skills (more dangerous and / or powerful ones), are stronger, faster and are less predictable if you pick a higher level of difficulty.

We could see environment dangers too (spikes, lava, poison clouds, etc...). Well, you get the idea.

death hallway is not bad. That last room before dracula though with the fleaman flying in on rocs. omg rage... I suppose that's ok though since it IS like the final non-boss room in the game though.

New attack patterns, spells and so on, so the same enemy could surprise us again!
Also, more aggressiveness, toughness and exclusive rewards. Being possible get REAL powerful only in Nightmare mode. Power-leveling feeling.

My suggestion is an idea that basically tries to completely set apart Nightmare difficulty mode from the others. Something similar to a rank system seen in STGs where, while in-game, the difficulty adjusts based on some player metrics. For example:

Easy --- Normal --- Hard --- Nightmare

From left to right, we would expect an increase in difficulty based mostly off of certain enemy and player stats. And we would know pretty much what we're getting into when we start a game in either Easy, Normal, or Hard mode. However, Nightmare mode wouldn't work similarly. If we say that the difficulty factors for Easy, Normal, and Hard are 1.0, 1.5, and 2.5, respectively, we can correctly assume that those values will not change throughout entire playthroughs within Easy, Normal, or Hard.
But Nightmare has the possibility to range between 2.5 and, say, 10.0 (!) from around the beginning of the game to the final boss (or true final boss maybe ).

Easy --- Normal --- Hard --- Nightmare

While in general there's a predictable linear spike in difficulty from Easy to Hard, Nightmare on its own has a dynamically-changing difficulty, a mechanism that no other difficulty setting in Bloodstained has. The difficulty actively changes during gameplay while playing in Nightmare. My example of ideas for this new mode are that, in Nightmare mode (while playing as Miriam):

Difficulty increases

1. Heavily when Miriam defeats a set number of enemies and mantains a health level of above 90% all within a certain timespan any time during gameplay.
2. Moderately when a boss is defeated.
3. Lightly when Miriam uses special weapons (like Axe, Dagger, Holy Water, etc.) and tends to replenish hearts/MP at a fast rate (assuming that hearts/MP are not regenerative and are only replenished by item drops).

Difficulty decreases

1. Heavily when Miriam dies and restarts from her last checkpoint OR experiences a massive health decrease throughout a short time duration (such as going from 100% to 10% health within 0-4 seconds).
2. Moderately when Miriam's health is less than 20% and sustains a high hit-to-miss ratio for a certain time period (hit-to-miss meaning able to hit enemies' damage collision boxes just about every time Miriam attacks or uses a special weapon and having hardly any where she whiffs an attack).
3. Lightly when Miriam's health is under 10% and manages to avoid taking damage for a set period of time.

NOTE: At any point of a run, the difficulty factor never goes below Hard level of difficulty AND caps at a certain point.

Higher difficulty may mean more enemy spawns per a given area, enemies fire more projectiles, enemy projectiles/attack patterns/attack animations are faster, enemies hit harder...

Nightmare difficulty mode can truly be a nightmare


(This suggestion is mentioned assuming that a player can only be able to set the difficulty level once during a playthrough around the time the game starts and not be able to change difficulty settings once initially set and at any time mid-game.)

crocodile, I pretty much agree entirely. I also like the idea of something story related being tied to New Game+ in either Normal or Hard/Nightmare modes.

I want to reiterate how I think it is necessary to reward the player with something in Nightmare. It doesn't have to be a huge deal. If the gameplay experience is different enough in itself, then that would be sufficient, but like I said earlier, it would be unfortunate if all of our input and the team's work implementing it went to waste by the average player writing this off as "the same thing, but more annoying to get through".

Also, I'm not really a fan of dynamic difficulty adjustments. I like for things to be consistent. It seems like an arbitrary, breaking of the fourth wall type thing for enemies to ease up on you when you're about to die/just took a lot of damage. Why should they do that? It's also not cool to me how the game can decide to amp things up exponentionally when you're playing well. If I'm doing well, I'm doing well. The game has to hold that. If I'm getting hit for a lot of damage, I should die. I think most that play higher difficulties are looking for that balance of risk/reward in it - you want to learn what to do and do it better, having an easier time when you do as opposed to having an easier time when you don't.

I hope there are curse aspects, like draining life, reversed controls, no jumping, no secondary weapons, cannot stay in place for more than 2 seconds or else you start petrifying, frog curse, etc

Sorry then, I completely misunderstood what you originally said.