Im thinking of making a Hardcore mod, does anyone have ideas for things i can change or implement to make the game hardcore?
For Sinisistar2, i think it would be good to up the difficulty by making debuffs harder to avoid, and harder to remove while increasing and diversifying their impact.
A couple of suggestions:
1. Currently gameover from bosses clears their corresponding debuff stack completely. It would be better to tweak their gameovers so that after respawn you are left with max possible debuff stack (like zombification 2/3 in case of gravekeeper). That would make such debuffs harder to avoid, and also will close the loophole player can use to easily remove debuff without any repercussions.
2. For making debuffs harder to remove, or rather disincentivize removing them, here are some ideas:
- removing debuffs is costly, probably the easiest way to implement;
- removing debuffs can cause delevelling (every time, or maybe with some probability) - that will additionally incentivise playing at level 1;
- removing debuffs can cause temporary weakening (reducing of stats), for a set period of time, or amount of location changes (preferably not counting going back and forth between same locations if possible), or a set number of killed enemies - that would also mean player can't just remove debuffs and go fight boss straight away without any consequences;
- removing debuffs can cause some small fraction of their effect to remain permanently - that would limit how much debuffs can be cleansed before the effects stack to debilitating levels.
Speaking of Mission Mermaiden, the primary reason for the hard mod was that grabs were very easy to get free from, so you'll need to lose on purpose to get the fun. Hard mod instead made it so punishing that it essentially forces playing it like normal game, actively avoiding being caught and cleansing any debuffs as soon as possible, as a result missing all the fun from grabs and debuffs, which is doubly sad cause mod made some nice tweaks and additions to debuffs. Personally, i'd hope to avoid such scenario for Sinisistar. Also current system of respawning player in the same location after death is very good, so please don't change that (like no permanent gameovers and no forcing replaying from last statue and such).
