Lies of P Developers Added Difficulty Settings After Struggling to Beat the Game

Few test participants were able to cope with the game.

NEOWIZ recently shared a reminder about Lies of P by releasing a documentary about the development of the soulslike game.

Lies of P won over many players, earning “very positive” reviews on Steam with a 91% rating after more than 80,000 reviews. Several years after the initial release, the developers introduced the Overture expansion alongside new difficulty levels.

This documentary explains how Round 8 Studio (referred to as Nough Studio in the source) arrived at the decision to add difficulty options. During internal playtests that the studio called game days, the developers found that experienced participants easily cleared Lies of P, but many others could not get through even half:

Initially, we asked everyone to play all the way through the game on a fixed difficulty level. For combat designers and more experienced players, the playthrough was not particularly difficult. However, those who did not possess such good mechanical skills mostly failed to even make it through half of the game before the allotted time expired. Therefore, we added a lower difficulty level so that everyone could experience the game to the end.

Combat design director Lee Jeonghyeon noted the positive response to the introduction of difficulty settings:

When people started using these difficulty settings, we began receiving significantly more positive feedback. This convinced us that adding various difficulty levels would indeed benefit players.

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