Dontnod Entertainment's Vampyr was the company's next big follow-up to the highly acclaimed Life is Strange series. The company isn't just a one-trick pony, though, and has been experimenting with a lot of different genres and game types, including taking gamers back to World War I with Vampyr, the action-oriented RPG. For gamers who already completed the game but wanted to either replay it with a much more distinct focus on combat or a more distinct focus on narrative, those options are being made available for home console and PC gamers.
According to Gamespot, there will be two new difficulty settings added to Vampyr by summer's end. The difficulty settings will go from the two extremes, offering one set of gamers the opportunity to play through the game with hardly any challenge at all, and the other group of gamers to play through the game with far more difficulty than what was present during the normal run.
On the one side, there is the "Story Mode", which centers around gamers being able to engage in the story aspects of Vampyr far more than what they were allowed to do in the normal game. As such, combat will be put on the back burner and you don't have to worry about any of the RPG leveling or grinding required to get strong to progress through the game. Instead, the focus will be on playing Dr. Jonathan Reid and interacting with the residents of London and progressing the story towards its logical conclusion. I do wonder how the whole killing citizens thing will play into the story aspects, because a large part of the multiple endings are based around whether or not you kill citizens, and you only really had to kill citizens to get strong enough for the combat segments. So that will be a fascinating turn of events on how it affects the overall story.
The second difficulty setting is called the "Hard Mode", even though it could technically be called "Combat Mode". The reason for this is that it makes the game a lot harder and far more challenging in the combat arena, moving Vampyr closer to the notch on the dial that puts it into Bloodborne or Dark Souls territory. You'll have far more enemies to face off against, and they will be a lot harder. Additionally, XP gains will be a lot smaller and there will be fewer sub-boss rewards. What this does is that it forces players to have to either fight more or kill more in order to get stronger. So you'll really need to pick and choose which civilians you let live and which ones you'll feed on in order to increase Dr. Reid's power. It sounds like the "Hard Mode" will also really force players to work harder in order to unlock the "peaceful" ending.
As noted by Gamespot, the update with the new difficulty settings will also arrive with some new optimization and gameplay fixes. Dontnod Entertainment will be modifying the game so that some of the bugs and glitches that were present in the game during the initial release.
Vampyr was quite a departure from the typical sort of action-RPGs we're used to. Instead of being a medieval fantasy romp like Lords of the Fallen, the game put players in the role of a war veteran who was bitten by a mysterious vampire and forced to live in the grimy streets of London during the spread of the Spanish Flu. The game combines some real-life historical elements with the dark Gothic fiction of vampirism. It's a wholly original tale, too.
You can pick up a digital or physical copy of Vampyr right now for PC, PS4, or Xbox One. The difficulty patch with the optimization tweaks is due for release at the end of the summer.
