The growing concern that "I" have with Skylords Reborn

[Riviute]

Hey guys, I would like to talk About an issue that I feel like gets bigger and bigger, but at the same time its probably something that only affects a small group of players yet I still believe its important to talk about.

Now before I talk about the main topic I just wanna mention how grateful I am to the dev team that brought this game back to life. When it was shut down all those years ago I was constantly looking for private servers or similiar games until I found this project. I watched the progress with great joy and excitement and when I was invited into the closed beta it was one of the best days ever. But its not just that you brought back the game, you added new stuff to it as well! New cards, new maps, events, dailyquests, the reservesystem and even changed a lot of the original stuff. The new Ravenheart for example is still one of my most appreciated buffs in the game so far and its only one of many. Sure there have been things that can be seen as controversial, like the Batariel change or the Amii Monument nerf, and even if I miss the old Amii Monument from time to time, I still think it was a healthy choice. And if I really wanna use the old stuff again, thats were the legacy server comes in. 

So no matter what I'm about to say in this topic, because its gonna sound like I complain a lot and I'm very whiny, just know that this is like the ONLY THING that I could even complain about and I absolutely believe that you guys are doing a phenomenal job here. (Just imagine I'm patting you guys on the back right now, cause you deserve it)

Lets dive in, what is that issue that I have in Skylords Reborn. Simply put... the Difficulty. When it comes to RTS games I'm not very skilled, I love playing them but usually I am just as bad at them like in egoshooters where I constantly blow myself up with my own friggin grenades. I love the freedom these games offer, the army compositions, the creativity in approach and the epic battles. Its my most favorite genre, but I'm just not one of those microgods who has an APM of over 9000 and escpecially in more complicated missions where you have to have your eyes at thre or four different spots at the same time I tend to miss out on one of the most important aspects of RTS, the Spectacle. Hard missions can be very hectic and it at times can feel more like a checklist, like ok now I have to do this, then this guy dies, then I have to be at my base for the attack at 3min 40, you get the idea. Even nowadays I always feel that the graphics and visuals of Skylords Reborn hold up, it still looks nice and it sounds great but when things get stressful you tend loose sight of these things. When I play RTS games I strangly play them just for the sake of relaxation or creativity, I still love the impact the inferno spell has,  I still love to combine soulshatter + frenetic assault + infect + plague even though I know its overkill or just build a massive rootnetwork that goes across the entire map.

I can understand why people enjoy high difficulties in these games, discovering the map, coming up with plan, fail, rework the plan, try again and succeed. There is a feel of accomplishment when you overcome such an obstacle but for these challenges I just have different games like monster hunter or elden ring. So when new maps were added (the two new twoplayer missions) I was overjoyed and a bit disappointed at the same time. Cool new missions, new stuff, new story but then... oh... no standard difficulty. Thats not a new thing right? I mean there were missions already in the game that didnt have a standard difficulty, Behind enemy lines, Dwarven Riddle, Insane God and Guns of Lyr. But just because thats how it used to be doesnt mean it was healthy for the game. 

(sorry now comes the complainy stuff)

Even though the two new maps Unexpected Visitors and Into the jungle have been out for quite a while, I only recently got to play them for the first time with my nephew. I wanted to save this one to explore and experience it together and it was... rough. There is a bunch of mechanics and events shoved into the first one with the lost souls and it was quite overwhelming. Its a lot of stuff after you get your T2, the enemy overall power level was also very high and oppressing. The voice actors (by the way did a great job with their acting) tell you about the mission, but its really hard to keep track if you arent super fluid with english which in this case was my nephew and I had to try to tell him on the fly what was going on but even I couldnt keep track. We reached the amii city but never went T3, we couldnt, we were overwhelmed. Also we ran into the trap with the two power wells on the side that are ridiculously strong defended. So yeah, we didnt make it and lost. Further attempts only lead to frustration until I gave up and looked up a guide online to figure out what we were supposed to do. Appearantly there was even an optional area with frost units that you could go for and get some assistance, I knew that there was more in that area but I just didnt know. Only after looking at that guide we were able to beat it. And quite frankly I dont think thats how it should work, I mean it was an advanced mission so I guess the devs expect you figure it out and there are many people who can do that, but thats just not me. I wished so so so hard for a standard difficulty, just so I can adjust myself to the map.

Campaign missions in other games never had a situation were the game just said "Alright buddy, playtimes over, we are taking this big ol hammer and shatter your beloved buttons for easy and normal difficulty, now there is only the hard difficulty and the pain difficulty level, grow a pair of balls will ya?" That is still just so strange to me, I cant imagine I am the only one who played Dwarven Riddle for the first time and was just completely flabbergasted and what the hell was going on, why is it so hard??? The same goes with insane god, that map broke me and my buddy back then, everything is fine until you get to your T2 and then its just complete madness. Experiencing missions that already have a hard setup without lower difficulty options feel problematic to me, I never liked this designchoice and I never will. Why cant we just get used to the map, the layout, the mechanics first and then tackle the higher difficulties, I know there are some hardcore gamers out there who just jump in and go for highest difficulty right away, but I cant do that. (Just fyi, into the jungle felt easier but also wasnt first try)

The thing is that the new campaign maps isnt the only place where that happens. I dont really know when it happened but I am also not the biggest player of 12 player maps but those dont have standard difficulties anymore as well??? I mean, I get it, its already tough enough to find 12 players to play ascension, but if you need it on advanced but once again you see the map has one lobby open and its standard difficulty again, that can be frustrating. I think I heard something before (not sure if its a rumor or not) but there was an idea of splitting up ascension into 3 four player maps and passage to darkness turned into a single 4player mission, which I think would still be the healthiest thing to do. Removing the standard difficulty however still felt like the wrong thing to do. I just have to wonder at this point, is this the direction going forward? Are all future missions gonna be advanced/expert exclusives? I mean which game has ever removed a difficulty option? There are games that in fact added new ones just for accessibility. In Warcraft 3 Reforged (I know, this is rough one to think about) they not only added a Story difficulty but also gave the Nightelfs in the Sentinels campaign two new units, a short ranged support unit that can use the shaman spell Bloodlust and a massive Wildkin with chaos damage that is meant to be a counter for the very spooky Naga Royal Guards. I also played the turn based strategy game Songs of Conquest and initially the devs were set on the idea "This is a game for experienced Heroes of Might and Magic 3 players and barely have and handholding." So there were no difficulty options, but even experienced Homm3 players like Lexiav were struggling to beat the campaign, now the devs changed things around and now there are 7 difficulty options, which of course is easier to design in these kind of games cause they only needed to give them like handicaps to their economy but still its impressive and much appreaciated by the community.

Now I am aware that difficulty scaling in RTS isnt an easy topic. Sometimes there were just ridiculous jumps in difficulty, like the first mission of the undead in warcraft 3 frozen throne expansion were you have to stop the humans from fleeing in three seperate areas while attacking and destroying the villages. Or the infamous dreaded mission 18 in the original Stronghold 1, where you have to siege the castle of the Pig with almost only melee units and barely any ranged, even on easiest difficulty, many people could only beat that one through save scumming including me and I love Stronghold. Even on standard difficulty in Skylords, Nightmare Shard always felt like a huge step in difficulty same goes for Blight.

But Skylords is very different compared to other RTS games, what makes the difficulty here so unique? 

The biggest difference is the Techtree basically, lets compare Starcraft 2 with Skylords. In the first three missions Liberation Day, Outlaws and Zero Hour you only unlock 3 things, the Marine, the Medic and the Bunker. Thats it. Thats how more classic rts campaigns work. In Encounters with Twilight however (which I will just call the first mission) you technically already have T4, you can summon the Tempests, Emberstrike or even the Giant Wyrm. You can go T4 right from the get go, its like imagine you could go for rip off Battlecruisers without any upgrades in Starcraft on Mission 1. The difficulty has to be scaled around the fact that you always can be at endgame tech and that makes it difficult to balance. On top of that, we also have multiplayer campaign missions for two or four players and that also needs to taken into consideration when it comes to mapdesign and enemy selection. And there is also so many cards that you need to keep in mind that could ruin a map through cheesing or they circumvent important triggers and stuff. But the thing is I dont think it would be that hard to add a standard difficulty, changing enemies to lower tier ones, delay attack waves, weaken preplaced enemies or change map depended timers. (I think I make it sound too easy, but I feel like creating a harder difficulty is rougher than a lower one) 

The thing is the shift of difficulty is also seen in events or in this current season that we have. First off, I LOVE the idea of seasons and I think its very well done, though I do wonder if it means that all new cards in the future will be introduced in seasons or if we will ever have cards outside of a season again. The point system feels good and rewarding but at the same time, I look at the Nightmare challenges and instantly think... Yeah I'm not getting those. So of course I take a look at the regular challenges and there are some that I can do but others already put me in a bad spot, like slavemaster? on advanved? only fire? NO BUILDINGS? I like playing fire every now and then but I'm not confident that I can beat this one with only fire units and spells. I dont wanna be a burden to other players when attempting it with a random player cause I suck. So I a little bit of these challenges and some of the repeatables and thought, okay I guess I have to rely on the repeatables until I realized that their goals become bigger the more often you complete them its bigger jumps now like at first 30000 power in spells for a couple points, now its 40000 for the same amount. So what does that mean? Is is gonna grow infinitly? Is there a limit? Do I at some point have to destroy 8000 buildings for 4 season points? I'm a Monster Hunter player, I dont mind the grind, but even for me this seems kinda rough. But again, maybe I am just one in tenthousand who thinks like that and cannot deal with these challenges that well. 

Well what do I hope for? What would I change? Of course I'm not a game designer, but I think would add standard difficulties to all maps just for accessibility and a learning tool. Regarding the season I think would grant the player the option to just cancel one of the challenges through a buttonpress that give him access to a similiar challenge but on a lower scales with lower rewards. Or add maybe one or two more challenges that also could be done on standard difficulty, make them tedious or grindy, I dont mind like beating Ravens End on standard without T4 or Encounters with Twilight on Standard while only using Medium Units. Or maybe let us just speedrun a mission on Standard and give different rewards on how fast you just like with the rpve map. I think there is still a lot of potential for things like that. I am also aware that the season basically just started and there is still a lot of time left, but I just wanted to share my concerns with you.

Again, its a problem that doesnt affect many players, and I do respect and love everything the devs did for the game, its in the best state it has ever been in imo. A game that still brings me so much fun and joy, and is completely kept alive by the community and some volunteers is something I have only experienced once, and that was the Horn of the Abyss team that did something similiar to heroes of might and magic 3. I just wanna take the time right now to applaud the devs, the designers, community managers and everyone else for this incredible peace of hidden gem in video game history. 

PS: I wrote all of this in one go and hope I kept the grammar mistakes to a minimum, thanks for reading and sorry for it being so much. :)

[This Is Halloween_2]

The 2 new maps were the very 1st released by the dev team, and they did learn from it.

The fact that new maps require learning its mechanics 1st, which is intellectually time consuming in game (where you are often on a timer), means people must have access to an easy discovery phase of the map through a standard level.

This has been acknowledged by the team from what I heard, so you’re likely to have standard level for future maps.

For 12p maps, Path to Darkness is easy enough. edited.

I think most challenges from the new season are alright. Only the nightmare ones are really hard, but those are made for pro.

Edited June 6 by This Is Halloween_2

[WindHunter]

We did in fact remove standard difficulty for the 12p maps. Ascension standard was missing several key mechanics, like Viridya on map 2, so it did nothing to teach players how to beat the map on advanced and expert difficulty. On the other hand, Passage to Darkness on expert is equivalent to standard difficulty. The map has a less than 1% failure rate. In both cases, it was impossible to find standard matches, so we removed standard. We are doing a long term rework of the maps in line with community feedback though so changes will eventually be made again. 

As regards the other feedback:

1. Future campaign maps with both be simpler and come with standard difficulty. 

2. We are examining the seasonal challenges and we will likely add standard versions for many of the one-time versions going forward. I do not know if we will be able to make this change for this season but we will discuss it. Per the Nightmare challenges, just as we need to make sure lower skilled players have content to engage with, we also need to challenge our most skilled players and these challenges exist for their sake. 

[Cocofang]

Simply removing/replacing some units from ITJ and UV could create a Standard difficulty. Mechanics can stay the same. I'd be in favor of that.

I usually prefer things to be accessible and lenient since, as a non-profit volunteer project, we have the luxury of not having to care about gating content behind a paywall or haggling for every ounce of retention and engagement. I'm against introducing unnecessary grind. Too many games on the market court for endless player attention, it gets grating and exhausting. But opening up season challenges to be done on Standard seems good. Players that can will skip to the hardest set-up anyways, so they are not impacted. Meanwhile, everyone can participate and get some points. Although, while I'd personally like the Promo Sunderer to be accessible with like 60-70% effort, it won't be in reach by only doing easy versions of challenges.

[This Is Halloween_2]

16 hours ago, Cocofang said:

Simply removing/replacing some units from ITJ and UV could create a Standard difficulty. Mechanics can stay the same. I'd be in favor of that.

I usually prefer things to be accessible and lenient since, as a non-profit volunteer project, we have the luxury of not having to care about gating content behind a paywall or haggling for every ounce of retention and engagement. I'm against introducing unnecessary grind. Too many games on the market court for endless player attention, it gets grating and exhausting. But opening up season challenges to be done on Standard seems good. Players that can will skip to the hardest set-up anyways, so they are not impacted. Meanwhile, everyone can participate and get some points. Although, while I'd personally like the Promo Sunderer to be accessible with like 60-70% effort, it won't be in reach by only doing easy versions of challenges.

Same for the difficulty (though you can also touch the timers too). The mechanics are great, it’s just that players must have a way to easily discover them. After that they’ll plan for their advance run a bit (do I need T2 or T3 defense, should I go 100% on the offensive in my deck,do I need air units or not, …).

Right now I feel that most of the content of the fire season is accessible to most of the player base except for nightmare, which is fine at the end.

I do disagree a bit on reserving promo just for the elite, I am fine the way it is with the need to reach almost the end of  the season. After all we « gifted » promo jorne and promo frost mage to everyone who seriously played an event, creating game time on that content.

[Metagross31]

On 6/7/2025 at 12:16 PM, This Is Halloween_2 said:

I do disagree a bit on reserving promo just for the elite

If I understood it right, it will be added to regular and fire boosters after the season ends, so after the market had some times to adjust, it will be as accessible as e.g. Firedancer and Juggernaut promo. The only thing that is reserved is the opportunity to play with the promo earlier than others and the option to sell the card for potentially a lot of BFP.

[This Is Halloween_2]

1 hour ago, Metagross31 said:

If I understood it right, it will be added to regular and fire boosters after the season ends, so after the market had some times to adjust, it will be as accessible as e.g. Firedancer and Juggernaut promo. The only thing that is reserved is the opportunity to play with the promo earlier than others and the option to sell the card for potentially a lot of BFP.

What I meant was locking the promo behind nightmare challenges. As it is right now, I think anyone playing the normal challenges, as well as playing a bit everyday for the repeatable ones can get him.

[Majora]

I'd like to clarify two things:

- Promo Sunderer will not drop from boosters after the season. It will be purchasable with Relics though. 

- You will be able to collect Promo Sunderer in the season without doing Nightmare missions. You will need the 2nd and 3rd batch of challenges (in addition to some repeatable) though, which are releasing in July and August.