Tigranes

Sven: I totally agree. And I appreciate games that go however limited the length they can to include some of this in their games. THe thing is, again, those two mechanics work together. If the troll is easily beatable by anyone, then you might never even stop to discover the interesting things you can do to lure it away or whatnot. Even within the realm of combat, there are countless examples of how players never discover how hafl the spells work if there is not enough challenge. You can play POE without ever learning how reflex/fortitude/etc works, how to set up different kinds of attacks, etc., and just spam attacks without understanding what is going on. I think without meaningful challenge, there is no sense of thrill and creativity, and you are reduced to rote repetition. Ideally, the troll wouldn't just be "more HP, more attack". At the least, it would have, say, an attack pattern that players learn to avoid. Or maybe you have some semblance of ecological design, so that you know you can summon/lure deer to the spot to make the trolls wander off. So on.

Well, my 10 point votes were for nought, it seems.

The Torchlight cat was interesting, though probably best suited for the fact that in the game most of the time you were 80m underground.

Yep, that's really the root point. Do you want a steady stream of just-right challenging encounters delivered to your front door wherever you are and no matter what level you are? If so, level-scaling is the obvious answer. To me, at some point, that just feels so artificial and monotonous. There is no real sense of a living, breathing world, but it feels like I'm just playing in some cardboard-cutout film set. There is no sense of "Whoa", when you meet a troll, because you know it will be about as challenging, more or less, as the wolf you saw before, or the human bandit, or the ogre. It starts to feel all samey samey - which is exactly what happens in Oblivion, where you really don't care what you're fighting. I like the experience of fighting a troll 20 times to try and beat it, and coming up with clever ways to do win a battle I had no right to win. And an important part of that, of course, is that I could also choose to walk away from the troll, and come back later - so I don't have to be frustrated by it. I like the fact that there is that memory of the scary troll as I play on, looking forward to coming back and beating it later. It's just like being able to lure wolves back into the village and watch the town guards fight it out: it's procedural storytelling that is only possible because the world is set up in sensible and reasonable ways for the player to use as they like, not scripted in such a way that everything is the same. Now, differing tastes and priorities and all that, so this isn't to say people who like the steady stream are evil awful human beings, but I"m trying to point out that this really isn't about "I want everybody to have to fight super difficult enemies and fail all day long" or whatever, and I"m trying to point out that well balanced challenge doesn't mean every enemy is 'just right' - a degree of asymmetry is really important to a good experience.

I mean, after all these years, his prose just sounds normal to me now. We're like an old, married couple, except in a polygamous commune.

It depends on the source of your issues. Can't say without more info, but that kind of performance almost sounds like what would happen if I ran it off my laptop w/ integrated graphics card, or if I was unlucky enough to have a seriously buggy version of the game.

I will drain the swamp, beginning with a forum member I shall not name!

Unique, you say, there can only be one answer: King of Dragon Pass. Manage the tribe, diplo with other tribes, embark on raids, pray to the Gods. Navigate the complex system of honour, offence, and hospitality amongst the plains tribes. Go on tripped-out Vision Quests into the spirit realm, and use the lore (a mishmash of Celtic and other influences) to navigate its dangers and gain blessings for your tribe.

Gromnir, of all people, reading too much into something? Say it ain't so!

Sure, I understand that. If what matters most is seamless storytelling, then you'd want the gameplay to do what film scripts do: provide controlled bumps in the ride for pacing and tension purposes, but be balanced in such a way that they're always still moving the story along to the player's eventual victory. Actually, I thought TW3 would have worked far better as a kind of exploratory adventure-RPG; get rid of a lot of the looting and levelling and other trappings. It was so weird to have it go full open-world, because TW3, even more than its predecessors, made it clear that it was designed with the above approach in mind. So to me it also has a lot to do with what the rest of the game is designed around, and what kind of experience it is trying to give. The difficulty with POE is that so many players played the IE games as a series of combat challenges, and so many also played it as a story-driven adventure. So this tension is inevitable. My argument is that designing combat and encounters from my perspective of asymmetric challenges, and then providing Easy difficulty modes and other tricks for players who want to mitigate/bypass it, is the best compromise - but of course, I would be so biased.

It's almost inevitable if we count # of votes over points, in an Obsidian / CRPG forum. I'm still pleasantly surprised AP is so high.

Just play, smell the roses, and relax. There are very few things that you will do in the first few hours that will severely hamper your enjoyment or cripple your characters in the long run. One thing I guess is learning how the system of accuracies v. defences work. This is simple, but it's easy to just play and not pick it up. Knowing to look at the bestiary or the combat log when you are having trouble with a creature, working out that they are weak to Reflex, and then making sure to use Reflex-targeting spells to attack them, can make a big difference in higher difficulties between being frustrated and enjoying the challenge. The Stronghold, it's up to you. Beelining for it then fussing over it and maximising it will get you a bit more gold, XP, and items, I guess. But you also end up with more gold, XP, and items than you need by mid-game, and will be swimming in it thereafter. My point is that you can choose - if you don't want to bother with it, you can just do minimal upgrades whenever you have some spare cash, and not really worry about it; if you want to, you can go back to it all the time. Don't feel like you're forced to.

No, I fully believe in 1) and don't consider it extreme, and wish it were simply common sense. Ok, good to know. But wouldn’t that require a pretty much linear game? In case of Deadfire, yeah we opened up the world but if you go in any other direction than we plan for you to, you die because only this location is at your level? On the other hand, if you open a lot of content for lvl 1-5, than once you ge past that point those areas won’t be fun. In addition if the world is very open you risk spending a lot of time going to different places, getting killed and looking for a place you actually can complete. For a story driven RPG seems like a big misstep. I get that some creatures need to be powerful, and some need to be weak. But how about human robbers, bounty hunter etc. Does their relative “lvl” to each other really matter, if their only role is to create an obstacle for you alone? No, it wouldn't be a completely linear game. Firstly, this doesn't mean that level 3 enemies cannot kill level 4 enemies. This only happens in games like Witcher 3, where the power progression model is too level-dependent and difficulty is generated crudely by methods like HP Bloat. Compare this to Gothic, where yes, levels matter and HP increases, but a clever and tenacious player can find ways to kill enemies well above his paygrade - not because they are watered down for your consumption. That is what real challenge and a living world feels like. And of course it feels good to be pounded by a troll, be forced to give up, understand why this area is so dangerous to the locals, and then come back later to see if you are up to the challenge. Secondly, yes, of course there is some degree of linearity, in the sense that you can no longer get a challenge fighting rats at level 20. Is that really a problem? I feel that it becomes overstated - not because you or anybody is being disingenious, but because we tend to talk about this at a really high level. Is it really important to be able to go back to every single area in a game and find more enemies to kill at an appropriate level? Conversely, is it really important that I can go anywhere I want in the whole world without it being too dangerous for me, at any time? Why? I prefer, again, a sense of a living, sensible world where there are places I can't travel. And of course, again, the great example of Gothic is that the world isn't designed as "Rat Zone" and "Troll Zone". When you are level 3 next to your starting town you run into a troll and get the hell out of there; you know where he is, and look forward to returning later. It doesn't worry you that there aren't 50 more rats levelled appropriately to kill all over again. Thirdly, your query about human bandits and other obstacles. I think this is actually a really good illustration of the different design philosophies at stake, and the different kinds of worldbuilding as a result. Let me exaggerate for clarity. A fully level scaled world a la Oblivion, where human bandits can be uncoordinated hobos if you are level 2, or wield Daedric armour if you are level 20. If we conceive of the gameworld as merely a set of challenges for a player, and the human bandit or a wolf are not humans or bandits or wolves but just reskins for your next battle, and what you are playing the game for is just to be able to quickly and efficiently find the next challenge that is always just right for you, then of course this is great. And in this model, it is very frustrating and suboptimal to find enemies too strong or weak, because what you want is a steady flow of enemies at your level. But what if I don't want my RPGs to be like that? I care about a sensible and living world. This doesn't mean "realistic" in the sense that everybody has to go poop and eat their vitamins. It means I want to feel like an adventurer who explores a world that doesn't feel like it was custom-made for my consumption and it is all a film set, but a world where I look at a troll and understand why it is such a fiersome creature for the locals, why the town guards can't just go out and bash it with their daedric swords, why daedric armour costs so much and is so rare, etc, etc. And even in terms of my own combat experience, my argument is that if you are always fighting appropriately levelled enemies, then the game actually becomes more monotonous and without variety, even as it is technically 'less linear'. After all, does it really matter that I can go anywhere I like, if I get the same level of challenge wherever I go? Again, I am exaggerating for effect; I'm trying to say that I really appreciate being beaten to a pulp and learning not to go there, or finding creative ways to get there anyway, and that this can actually aid the variety of your experience. There are, of course, a few instances where non-scaled distribution is not done well. I'd say King's Bounty (the new games) can sometimes be an instance of this: if you are having to backtrack and scour the world all over to find that ONE enemy group that you can beat in order to level up to take on the rest, then this is a problem. (In fact, a major reason this is a problem in KB is again because of the power progression curve; you have to combine a flatter curve with non-scaling.) But there are many great examples of non-scaled or very limitedly scaled games offering this kind of diverse experience - again, the hallmark being the Gothics.

No, I fully believe in 1) and don't consider it extreme, and wish it were simply common sense.

Really, the crux of the matter is that having every xaurip drop a spear realistically would also be a lot more interesting if there was ever a reason to want that spear to drop, whether because you need to dress yourselves up as xaurips or whatnot. Of course, whenever CRPGs do this, they use specially tagged items instead. I like some degree of fluff items, because otherwise everything just seems too convenient, but POE probably had a bit much.

Language does evolve, but a bunch of people using a word in a new way doesn't suddenly make the old meaning disappear / invalid, and it doesn't make the new meaning universal. Generic continues to be a neutral descriptor in many situations. Anyway, now we all know how it's being used in this context, further hairsplitting seems inconsequential.

The backtracking in IWD is annoying, but that's not really a pacing issue, just a specific piece of bad design. They both suffer from being a combat-heavy game where you have to fight waves upon waves of enemies, but the absolutely superb music and artwork does a lot to enhance the experience - the portraits, the melodies, the colour palette, they are incredible.

Massive piles of snow all over the place, it's fantastic. Best thing to happen all year (until the power goes out, I guess).

I don't know about the hat, but the last time I played (after release of WM2) soulbound items never really required me to artificially stand around and farm their requirement. Has something changed? The hat does seem more obscure a requirement. Some people will farm and grind them no matter how they're designed, to try and 'optimise' their party (forgetting that they wasted 2 real life hours to enjoy 15 more minutes of the upgrade).

Having more robust auto-loot-sorting mechanisms would help. E.g. pick up a xaurip spear, mark it once as 'loot', and it goes automatically to your stash thereafter, and at a shop you can sell everything labelled loot with a single click of a button. POE already goes some way towards this solution with the auto-send to stash.

Enemy level scaling is only really done well when it is applied in a highly limited way as part of a system that is generally hand-crafted; e.g. having a level range, or even better, a pool of enemy groupings to draw from, so that a group of bandits in spot X could involve three level 3 enemies or four level 4 enemies, one of them an archer. (Similar to how encounter pools mediate difficulty in games like POE.) In this sense, the level scaling isn't even the primary component of it. Using scaling is a universal tool, or as the primary tool, is guaranteed to produce subpar results - so the question isn't really scaling or no scaling, it's about what kind of balancing / pacing system we have as a whole and then how some scaling can fit into it.

In Divinity: OS 2 and Elex, I had to read some disgusting lines of NPCs throwing their panties at my feet and begging for sex despite my refusing to ever pick a dialogue choice that pandered to their emotions in the slightest - because, I guess, I completed their quests and a couple of other things somehow built up the global variable. I had to read very carefully and select the most mean rejection line possible, and one of them called me a wanker and we moved on, thank God. Not that I think that's an argument against having romances, mind you. That's a problem with crap scripting and crap writing, not the existence of romances. At the same time, I don't really think "if you won't play with that specific option, you should have no voice in this & having opinions makes you a party pooper" is a reasonable argument. I could fast-forward the movie or TV show or flip the pages in the book whenever there's a cringy sex scene (and I often do), but that doesn't mean that I am forbidden from criticising it. Media texts are not supposed to be a gigantic Library of Babel that contains every possible kind of content, where if you don't like something you aren't allowed to complain about it, only skip it. Games are made and produced as a holistic experience driven by a creative vision and offering an immersive world, and that means offering my opinions about crappy romances is a legitimate activity. "If you don't like it skip it" is a legitimate piece of advice for my personal enjoyment, but it's not a valid tool to shut down criticism.

A list like this will never have any consistent set of standards - it's possible for a game almost everybody finds piss poor to have a special place in two people's hearts and get a place. Diablo II, in my view, is an incredibly slick, addictive, fine-tuned experience in multiplayer loot grinding. As a single player game, the hollowness of that "one more loot drop" experience becomes clearer to see, but the incredible FMVs, music, and the magical perfection of Pavlovian stimuli was enough for some people to love the SP as well.

Things I've done in the past: -> Scaled down XP gain. This one is big, because so much of POE's power progression is level-based, and 1 or 2 levels can be the difference between mindless stomping of enemies and having to think and maximise your accuracy/debuffs. Sadly there's no easy way to do this, so I tend to regularly console edit the party's XP down. (Oh, it looks like you're already doing it.) -> Smaller parties and ironman are the best ways to get a different and cool playing experience - and at this point, you've already heard all the banter, so isn't it more important to have a fresh experience? Up to you, I guess. -> Themed parties. I'm currently playing a Level One party in Icewind Dale, a party that never levels up - and it's great fun. (Sadly, you can't do this with POE because of how it ties accuracy to leveling.) But you can think of an antimagic party that hates spellcasters and even magical scrolls, or mages that recreate AD&D's specialisations (i.e. they cannot use a certain school of magic). A no pause game, though everything on slow mode?

POE1 stronghold wasn't very good, and I think we could generally do with less half-baked strongholds with browser flash game style button-clicking in RPGs. Hopefully they manage to make the ship more consequential and exciting - at least the concept definitely is.