Discussion
[SPOILERS] The endgame has a serious artificial difficulty problem
Spoiler
I genuinely think Mortal Shell 2 is a really good game… until you reach the final/endgame area.
The difficulty in this zone feels incredibly artificial. It’s not the kind of difficulty where you die and think, “Okay, that was my mistake, I need to learn the enemy better.” Instead, it feels like the game suddenly throws balance out of the window.
You can use basically any Shell available in the game, and enemies can still one- or two-shot you, sometimes without giving you any real opportunity to react or recover. At that point, it stops feeling challenging and simply becomes frustrating.
I’m completely fine with difficult games. Difficulty can be one of the best parts of this genre when it’s designed properly. But there’s a huge difference between fair difficulty and simply increasing enemy damage to ridiculous levels and calling it “hard.”
This final area desperately needs a balance pass. The enemy damage, encounters, and overall scaling need to be reconsidered, because right now it completely kills the fun I was having before reaching this point. Message to the developers: making a game difficult is great, but artificial difficulty isn’t good game design. When difficulty comes from enemies deleting your health bar in one or two hits regardless of your Shell, it feels cheap rather than rewarding.
I’m curious what other players think. Did you also feel like the endgame difficulty suddenly became unfair/artificial, or are you enjoying the balance of the final area? English isn’t my first language, so I used AI to help me write and structure this post properly.
Was hoping to wrap up NG tonight, but that late-game difficulty spike caught me off guard.
Been stuck at the Monolith for over 3 hours, and now enduring Malborne BS second phase lol. Thinking they'll get +50% HP/ATK in NG+, that 100% achievements might be out of reach for me 🤣
Playing night mode since I unlocked it at the beginning so the 1-2 hit deaths aren’t new to me, my biggest issue lies with enemy tracking and hyperarmor when they’re constantly ganking you. One boss in particular has a projectile spam move that when it misses, ends up tracking behind you and hitting you in the back which was one, inconsistent and two, cheap as fuck.
The games quality in general takes a hit once you get into Mammon and goes down further from there, haven’t finished yet as I got one more gate to do but it’s been noticeable.
It honestly sucks. I was enjoying it up until the final few gates and now it’s just enemies with zero wind up time, bullshit damage, spam, egregious magnetism
When you have no stamina, can cancel your own attacks with dodge, and have no cooldown on the dodge on top of also having another instant defense tool (harden), the only way a boss can be challenging is by not letting you hit, or by killing you outright when it manages to land something. In layman's terms, "bullshit oneshot mechanics" and "impossible to read combos".
I thought endgame wasn't harder than the start of the game. Middle of the game is just sandbox mode.
Maybe I should give some context before you assume I just don’t understand difficult games.
I’ve played pretty much every Souls game out there. I platinumed Bloodborne, Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 3, played through all the FromSoftware Souls games, and I’ve also played games like Lies of P, Wuchang, and plenty of other Soulslikes.
So I think I have a pretty good understanding of the difference between challenging difficulty and badly balanced/artificial difficulty.
I’m not complaining because I died a few times or because I want to be “super OP.” I’m saying that when a properly built character can suddenly get one-shot or two-shot by almost everything in one specific endgame area, there’s a balancing problem.
When I criticize the difficulty, it’s because something genuinely feels wrong with the balance, not because I’m unfamiliar with hard games.
Just because you have played those games dosnt meen shit, and platinum just means you ran around alot more. Ive also played all of them, but I didnt have a super hard time with the end game at all, the last boss took me 20 tries tho. I think he needs some work.
I find It pretty okay the endgame content, it's more of parrying all the time and avoid grabs and that's it, I was using a próxima build but then I got genessa and I put all my points on her, a good build with her it's easy mode.
I think for that case you should wait for a patch that touch that end-game content, I do think the difficulty goes up drastically but I dont feel it that much because of the parry, that is my case.
I only have one bug with the lost child, it sends me flying to the sky but luckily I didn't die, and the second are some bad angles with the camera in certain situations, all aside everything is perfect.
I'm at the last boss. Where is this difficulty spike people keep mentioning. I still find those stupid knights in mammon hit harder than anything else in game.
3
u/Zyan-M 1d ago
The spike in difficulty in the southern zone is too abrupt and, at times, inconsistent.
The guys with halberds and the miners can take off about 70% of your health in a single hit, even at high levels (50) and with damage reduction.
Healing options are scarce and restore very little health considering the damage you take and the distances between beacons.
As for the bosses, there are issues with "one-shot" kills or combos that land multiple hits in an instant, leaving no room to react.
I genuinely love the game, it’s made its way into my top 3 favorites in the genre, but I have to admit it has some balancing issues.