Midnight Mansion 3 - your opinion wanted!

[Alanfalcon]

Something I suggested to Vern was the following.  The game map is made up of 4 or 5

regions

(think islands or something), each one with about 8 mansions (maybe 2 large and 3 medium and 3 small).  They start out as

normal

mansions, and when you beat the

boss mansion

for each region, Jack finds some artifact or trinket that, when disturbed, causes on earthquake on that island that changes all of the mansions.  New passages are opened up, new monsters appear, etc.  That way, they become

hard

mansions in an organic way, and you can go back and play them (and they're completely optional) for more treasure and more paths to hidden mansions, etc.

It lets the player progress from Normal to Hard in an organic way, and makes all the hard mansions hard in a very consistent way, and something related to the story of the game.  And, you're essentially doubling the gameplay for one playthrough of the game.

The problem I foresee with this is that some players just want to jump into

hard

mode straight away, without having to play through normal mansions.  Personally I like to play Normal and Hard modes (and occasionally Easy, just to see what is new and different) but it doesn't seem nice to force all players to play through Normal before they can access Hard.  In fact, I think that may even be a

Twinkie Denial Condition

in the Game Designer's Notebook (Bad Designer!  No Twinkie for you!)