I’ve been doing some balance testing with the team and some folks that I trust from previous projects. The original balance was pretty awful, all things considered, but so far everyone is really liking the balance changes I’ve been working on.
If you’re coming into this from Prototype 2, here’s a rough idea of what’s different:
- There’s a lot more enemies.
- Enemies are generally weaker.
- Mei and Florentina get a lot more from level-ups.
- Mei and Florentina level up a lot faster.
- There are more mechanics added (Powerful Blows, new abilities, loot drops, upgrades) that add a lot of variety to the battles.
- There are more enemy types available. There are also higher tiers of enemies (Cultists of Rank 2 now exist).
- There are three bosses in the game now. Each one requires a particular strategy to beat: You probably won’t be able to brute-force the fight!
- There are more support items to use to heal yourself and buff yourself during combat.
- Combat flows a lot faster and smoother (animation timers were reduced, health-bar animations are paced better, etc).
- Most of the display bugs from combat are gone.
- Enemy positions were shuffled around so you likely won’t run into super-tough enemies unless you’re really not paying attention.
Hoo-wee, that’s a lot isn’t it?
I also have been tracking roughly how long it takes various players to get to various stages. Urimas, who likes to kill things but doesn’t read most of the flavor text, says it took him 2 hours to reach the Quantir Mansion (following the game’s advertised path), while Scarrfish, who tends to read more flavor text and explore more, had just met up with Florentina at the 2 hour mark.
If you’re just playing the main storyline, you’ll probably take about 3 hours to finish Chapter 1.
If you’re looking to see all the content, I’d estimate it’s 6-8 hours to finish everything, depending on how good you are at combat and avoiding enemies (and how fast you can read).
Pretty darn good for an indie game, right?
Pandemonium Development 