Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s upcoming expansion, The Order of Giants, will bring with it a new an interesting difficulty system that will be based on how much of the base game has been played. In an interview with IGN, creative director Axel Torvenius and lead game designer Zeke Virant have revealed some details about how this difficulty system will work.
At the core of the new system is the fact that players that have already finished Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shouldn’t find The Order of Giants too easy. In the same way, those that haven’t gotten to spend too much time with the adventure game shouldn’t be stuck because of an incredibly difficult encounter in the expansion. This largely comes down to the fact that players don’t have to have finished the base game in order to access the expansion.
“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,” explained Virant. “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.”
Fundamentally, this new difficulty system works on a sort of tier-based logic, with a player’s difficulty tier for The Order of Giants depending on how far into the base game they are. For example, reaching Giza will bump up the difficulty to its second tier. Getting to Sukothai will similarly bring up to the third tier.
“We tried a few different things, but the one that was simplest and actually just 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,” said Virant. “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.”
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – The Order of Giants was officially unveiled back in June. The expansion will take Indiana Jones to Rome, with the catacombs under the city serving as the primary setting for the new adventure. The expansion is slated to add a lot more of the same gameplay that made the base game so beloved, ranging from stealth and platforming to puzzle solving and even a hint of combat.
The expansion will be coming to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 4. The expansion will also bring with it technical improvements to the base game, including the addition of the latest Nvidia technologies like RTX Hair for more realistic hair rendering for key characters. For more details, check out our review of the base game.
