2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was one of the most pleasant surprises in gaming last year.
That’s not to say that we expected the game to be bad; MachineGames has a proven track record from their work on the Wolfenstein franchise. If anything, it was more an issue with the state of the Indiana Jones franchise, which has suffered from two poor movies (Crystal Skull, Dial of Destiny) in the past twenty years.
It turns out that the secret to making a good Indiana Jones movie in the modern era is to adapt it into a video game, and that the best thing to do with the Indiana Jones character is to have Troy Baker voice him.
Given the game’s success on the Xbox, plus its release on the PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, attention has turned to its upcoming DLC release, The Order Of Giants, coming September 4th to Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PC, and Game Pass.
IGN had the opportunity to speak with creative director Axel Torvenius and lead game designer Zeke Virant, who discussed one of the game’s DLC’s more interesting aspects: its scaling difficulty.
Here’s Why Indiana Jones: The Order Of Giants DLC Has Scaling Difficulty
The Order Of Giants isn’t your typical DLC content, as it actually takes place during Great Circle’s Rome section. You’re not stepping into a new storyline that takes place after the credits roll; the new content exists in the middle of the game. Think of it like big side missions being thrown into an already established portion of the main quest.
As a result, one of the possible concerns was that people who have beaten the game would be too strong for the enemies they would encounter in Order of the Giants. However, Virant says that won’t be an issue.
Players who are at the end of the game don’t need to worry about the difficulty [being too easy] as actually we have a new system in place where players are dynamically scaled based on how far they progressed. We know a lot of players are coming back from the endgame and would like to have a continuation of that difficulty, especially if they have health upgrades and a lot of abilities.
Virant adds that the team tried a couple of different approaches to address the difficulty for the Order of the Giants DLC. Eventually, they believe they landed on this simple solution:
“What felt right was that if you’ve progressed to the Vatican but you haven’t gotten to Giza yet, we keep it on a first tier of difficulty. If you’ve gotten to Giza, then we adjust it up to a second tier. And then once you’ve gotten to Sukhothai, we adjust to a third tier. From there we [can tune] the different amount of combos enemies can use, different amounts of health and also how many will gang up on you at the same time.”
It’s an experience that other developers should be inspired by, especially if the DLC content enhances the base game rather than simply taking place after it. For those who missed out on Great Circle, such as PS5 owners waiting for the DLC to be released, it will feel like one seamless, uninterrupted experience. For those returning to the game for the DLC missions, it’s certainly a better experience than being overpowered for the enemies and blitzing through things with no challenge.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
