Essentially, difficulty is based on food scarcity -- namely, those old carcasses that you find lying around in the environment. On easy levels, those carcasses are relatively easy to find (though far less common than in v2.5). But on hard levels, they are much scarcer -- only one anywhere in the world (and maybe we'll set that at zero). And when you find a carcass, it only has about 50 health points, which makes it harder to rely on them to fill up to full health. If you want to feed your pups, you'll have to find several carcasses--or go hunting.
Along with that are several other changes to gameplay:
- • You take less damage (about 35-40% of your health) during a typical elk hunt, so you can start a hunt with 50% health and be likely to get that elk without dying. We hope that also makes elk hunts more appealing. And more realistic.
• You now have a chance of chasing a grizzly off a carcass. Each time you attack, there’s a 20% chance that the grizzly will give up and go away, leaving the carcass to you. (This was the original idea of grizzlies that somehow got lost along the way.) So there's more of a temptation to go after those grizzlies now.
Overall, I'm really excited about this new feature and I hope you all are too.