Analyzing boss difficulty. (Patreon)

In a recent poll, I asked players to rate three challenging bosses from the game on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being easy, 3 being "just right," and 5 being challenging. I've assembled the results in the above chart. I normalized the results as later bosses got fewer responses, as you might expect, and I didn't want that to skew the takeaway here, but each boss got between 80 and 100 ratings.

I also asked players to identify the boss they found the hardest. After removing the 'other' write-in replies, this is what that chart looked like:

It's no surprise to see Astraea dominating these charts. She has massive, difficult to avoid damage and can set you up for a sudden kill-shot if you aren't prepared going into her tidal attack. And as expected, she is definitely the outlier her.

Despoena was interesting, as the chart would indicate, she's widely seen as the easiest boss, and that's likely true, but she also has the highest number of "just right" rankings (a true majority, in fact), and players also anecdotally mentioned finding her to be an interesting fight.

Momoko is like a perfect bell curve.

You could read this as me getting better at dialing in boss design and challenge levels as the game goes on. Astraea was the roughest. I wanted to make a tough fight and relied on unavoidable damage. Despoena was better but maybe too easy, and her gimmick can sometimes barely matter in a fight, rendering her too simple to deal with for some players. Momoko is sort of a happy middle. She punishes bad and slow play with an ever-increasing chance to deal damage that you can't mitigate, but she's also easy to wrap your head around, and her defense and HP are manageable if you handle her properly.

I think you could also read it as me feeling more free to make Astraea as hard as I wanted too, since she was initially pretty optional, and largely still is. Momoko and Despoena both block access to more critical storylines or areas, so I did feel pressure to make them less challenging, and you can even lose to Momoko and still move on with the game.

I will not immediately be rushing to go rewrite Astraea's boss fight with what I've learned here or anything, as I do think the fight is still largely what I want it to be in some ways. Fights aren't just balance, there's a certain vibe they need to have, and an Astraea who isn't able to cheaply kill you does feel like she'd be missing something. But I do think I should rework the fight a bit in the future, after some consideration, making changes with a scalpel, not an axe, so I can preserve the fight's feel while bringing it in line with the others.

Overall, I feel pretty good about this feedback. It mirrors my assumptions about the game pretty closely which is a good sign. It also shows that, while there are exceptions, most players don't find the game to be excessively challenging or excessively easy, as the number of 1s and 5s were both thankfully very low. We're in the ballpark in terms of balance, and I think we can get the game closer to where it should be with tweaks, not massive, drastic changes.

I got other great information too, and I'll cover what I've learned about the active defenses and overall difficulty of the game in a future post!