Editing Greg Fulton/Fanstratics Newsletters/9 (section)

== Fanstratics Feature: Hardcore Mode ==
Similar to the previous two features (Rally Attack & Boss Battles), a Hardcore Mode is not a new idea.  Anyone familiar with late 70’s, early 80’s, coin-operated arcade games, have experienced video game ‘permadeath’.  While this design choice has a long history, in my personal experience, it wasn’t formalized as a mainstream feature until Diablo 2’s ‘hardcore mode’ in 2000.

There is something masochistically romantic about risking your precious time attempting to conquer an intentionally difficult video game.  While I personally don’t have the time to grind out repeated hardcore wins, hardcore play has been responsible for some of the most memorable video game streams I’ve ever seen: Diablo 3, Fallout: New Vegas (Hardcore Mode), XCOM (Ironman), Darkest Dungeon (86 or 100 Weeks), etc.  Most recently, Moonmoon played Doom Eternal in a pseudo-permadeath mode... and failed during the final fight.

While I suspect only a minority of players will utilize this feature, I would like to see hardcore streams of Fanstratics.  So, a hardcore mode is planned; one persistent save for your current game, with the difficulty settings of your choice.  There may also be other ‘hardcore’ wrinkles, such as ‘permadeath’ for Heroes.  If you lose a Hero in battle, they no longer appear in your Kingdom’s Hero Pool.  Bottom line... if you lose... you lose.

Personally, I want to see people play and stream Fanstratics in hardcore mode, on the toughest difficulty, against multiple AI opponents, with an in-game time limit.  It could make for some gripping entertainment.

Will there be a map editor and random map generator in Fanstratics?

HoMM3’s map editor and random map generator were released with its first expansion pack ‘[[Armageddon's Blade]]’.  For Fanstratics, I expect to rollout both a Community Map Editor and a Random Map Generator, well after the game’s official public release.  When?  I cannot say at this stage.

If there will be a random map generator, how will it be configured?

It’s been a very long time since I crafted HoMM3’s original [[Random Map|RMG template]]s (using Microsoft Excel).  Since then, different methods to random map generation have been developed, and I would like to research a number of them, before I decide on a final design direction.  So, details regarding the internal logic and implementation of the Random Map Generator are currently unresolved.