New Difficulty idea - Semi Hardcore

I find myself bored if I play softcore as I just don’t ever feel genuinely at risk.

Hardcore is great, but the limited available time with family and other commitments means a significant loss of invested effort/time given the time required to build a char in GD and the amount of build options available.

So I propose the idea of a difficulty that meets in the middle. It’s still HC, but you only lose your session’s progress. This of course will be variable depending on how long you play for, but that’s your own risk appetite.


Semi Hardcore: your character is saved at session start, but a death at any time during the session will reset you to the state at session start, including shared stash.

You have a real penalty and loss of progress from dying, but not so much you lose 30+ hours and/or the interest to go through it all again.
Sure you can just start a new build, but for me I have multiple builds running anyway and it really means I just won’t go back to that build to realise it fully, even though I would like to.

I’ve seen games do multiple “hardcore modes” with graduating difficulty before. Warlords Battlecry 2 had a really good system that I’ve talked about on this forum in the past. That said, I don’t think it works that well in ARPGs.

For an example, in Terraria (which is kinda stretching the definition of an ARPG but bear with me) you had an easy mode, where you drop coins on death, a medium one, where you drop everything on death, and a hardcore one, where death is permanent. I never saw the point in the medium difficulty because it’s a pain in the ass compared to easy mode and it doesn’t keep you on edge the way hardcore did, it was kind of the worst of both worlds.

Your idea isn’t bad, really, but I have a feeling there isn’t much of a niche for it among the playerbase.

Full disclosure: I never play hardcore.

The question is then, would you try it if such a ‘semi-hardcore’ option existed?

The only way I see something like this getting implemented is if our characters were stored on a dedicated server, but our characters are saved locally, so…

Ironically this is my main rule while playing SC. If any of my characters die during a game session, i have to exit the game and replace the savefiles in the game folder with the backup saves.

It means i have to do everything i did in that game session and i lose whatever items i got before i die.

It’s probably a stupid rule to some and some are going to say why don’t i just play hardcore, but i like self imposed challenges. Makes things more fun.

You can already do this yourself. Make a character HC. Copy over the save files. If you die, replace the save file with your last saved one.

Semi Hardcore? lol no, you want Softcore with some risk elements and you must name it properly

I have tried here a couple of times to stress how the difficulty levels in this game are too extrem and basically pretty stupid.

It looks like that you are not aware yet of the massive fear for change that the community here has.

All they want to hear about are more bonuses, more items with more bonuses, more devotions with more bonuses and possibly more masteries with more bonuses. Because getting +2000% on their main damage is not enough. That’s their only concern. The fact that there are many mechanics in this game that are broken is no problem to them as long as they can get more bonuses.

How about SemiSoftCore?

Imagine, you die, a 5 second counter starts, and you are back in action, right where you died.

No that generally means you keep stuff when you die and just lose experience etc. I’m referring to losing progress entirely, for up to X hours depending on how long you stay in a session.

But thanks for the dismissive attitude.

Not sure how all that is relevant here?

Imagine that! Surely no one would support something so silly…unless you extend the time a little bit each death! :stuck_out_tongue:

technically you can do the same with a SC char, you just are not forced to :wink:

difficulty levels as in Normal/Elite/Ultimate or the distinction between SC and HC ? Not sure what is stupid about either really, but definitely puzzled if you mean the latter…

It looks like that you are not aware yet of the massive fear for change that the community here has.

All they want to hear about are more bonuses, more items with more bonuses, more devotions with more bonuses and possibly more masteries with more bonuses. Because getting +2000% on their main damage is not enough. That’s their only concern. The fact that there are many mechanics in this game that are broken is no problem to them as long as they can get more bonuses.

not sure how any of this is relevant, let alone accurate

Care to provide examples, or are you just upset that your ideas did not get the widespread support you somehow assumed they would ?