cokane

The loot isn't the issue. Penetration isn't the issue. The issue will always fundamentally remain in the game. So long as the player has maximum resources in every fight *and* the designers want to create battles of varying difficulty the game is going to feel easy to veteran players. Because that means any non-boss fight is going to effectively be a trash mob. The only way Deadfire combat can be made to have consistent difficulty is to make every fight a "boss fight" and that monotony is not going to be fun. Unless there's radical changes to the underlying systems of player abilities, this is how it's going to be.

-Improved factions -More sophisticated use of the scripted encounters, the gullet underground is a solid example -Better audio design -The ship > Cad Nua -Neketaka > Defiance Bay -The exploration, mapping quests -Ship combat as an idea (it's raw and flawed, but could be great with some iteration) -Color, art design, much clearer backgrounds, much more legible areas -Expanded and more sophisticated thieving/stealth -Companions have more interesting interactions

This isn't really true imo. There are strong story elements in Deadfire, and its predecessor. But the only part of the game that is/was a challenge is the combat. There is minimal challenge to the quests, companions, dungeon puzzles, etc. A story-based RPG would actually have a hard-to-solve main quest, as opposed to the simple go to zone x, y and z, and fight thru bosses a, b and c. Sure, there are moral/faction decisions that players may agonize over from a role-playing point of view, but there is no deep-level detective work in this game. Choosing your quest outcomes is not challenge. Deadfire very much depends on its combat for it to qualify as a game.

I can understand this optimistic viewpoint. I think a key line from my original post was "...and not having a replacement for those." They added tools for the party (spells/abilities/full healing every battle) but added no new consequences to balance. Thus stripping out a whole layer of gameplay concern. I do think a more challenging Deadfire can emerge, and I'm likely to revisit the game after all the DLC's come out and give it a go. However, we should not underestimate the problem created by having access to all your spells for every battle. I've said this before several times, but it bears repeating. You cannot have consistently challenging combat *and* diversity of combat under this system. You cannot make the dungeon boss tough without making his preceding minions weak under this system. That kind of variety worked in the BG types and PoE, because the player still had a "reward" for playing those weaker battles as efficiently as possible. This, IMO, is the main reason combat feels easy in Deadfire. The player is only rewarded for being effective up to a certain point in the majority of battles. You don't have to worry about hitpoint loss, spell/ability conservation, so you only have to be just good enough to win every fight. Whereas in Pillars and the BG games, every single bit of efficiency was rewarded by being able to clear out hostile areas on fewer rests, i.e. more rapidly. Ironically, Deadfire's combat system would really only work if every fight was an all-out brawl to the death. But players of these kinds of RPG's are not going to enjoy that monotony, meaning lots of easy fights where you can half-ass your way thru it, at no penalty.

Just because it's been said several times, doesn't make it true. Deadfire actually creates a narrower window of fun difficulty for its designers. This makes it harder to have a challenging game, not easier. As the real world evidence shows.

Yep. I also sympathize with the OP, and I'm in an almost identical situation, shelving the game after level ~14. Without a strategic layer of spell loss, ability loss and hitpoint loss, and not having a replacement for those, the game was never capable of producing the layered difficulty of its predecessors. And once you're hitting levels where you have a dozen or more core abilities to burn every battle for every character -- not to mention all the stuff you can acquire from gear -- it's only possible to generate difficulty in the "boss fights". And even then, it isn't easy. Let it be a lesson for future developers. Sometimes the things that players complain about as "tedious" in the game are the parts that allow true challenge to emerge. It also hurts that Obsidian had already abandoned other forms of challenge even in the predecessor. Quests can't be failed. Puzzles are rare and not taxing. Companion management is too easy. Heck, even riddles don't exist. It's fine to make a game where the only hard puzzle is combat, as PoE1 was, since that puzzle was complex and could be difficult. But once you simplify that puzzle, on top of the previous design choices, you have a game without challenge, which makes it hardly a game.

Seriously, the game isn't difficult at all. As long as youre spamming your top abilities every fight and making sure you're not dumbly putting your squishy guys in danger, it's not hard. Spam some of your best buffs/debuffs/summons for the first couple of rounds of combat, then your best damage spells/abilities. Use healing as needed. Then mop up. Heck, take turns burning empowers from one guy every fight, unload them on boss fights, if you're finding it so hard.

The problem with resting in Deadfire is that they have trimmed so much of why it was necessary in previous games that it's now nearly a vestigial part of the game. It's a shame, because the bonuses and thus decisions you can make during resting are interesting in Deadfire. As well, with food they had a perfect way to punish players (a gold cost) for not managing their parties well, as opposed to forcing them into a time-consuming hike of shame for more camping supplies. There's really no way to fix it, from my point of view, since it's tied intricately into the combat mechanics. Abandoning per encounter spells and abilities almost completely means that players no longer have to fight battles with any strategic concerns in mind. Since there's no strategic concerns to juggle, there's no difficult decision-making to engage in with resting. As well, once a player learns to avoid knockdowns/wounds, you can eventually hit a point where you rarely need to rest.

This "wizard-centric" discussion is really missing some key point. First off, the base classes of 2nd edition DnD are: fighter, thief, cleric, and mage. So, of course, developers at the time built a game that expected you to have at least one representative in the party. As I said earlier, you can easily beat the game, even on your first playthrough with just one wizard in the party. Heck, you can even do it with only using one of the dual or multi wizards. Technically, you need a thief to overcome specific obstacles just as much as a wizard. Is the game thief-centric? Lastly, I've never felt more than two mages in BG2 was an optimal party composition, so I still don't see this. In fact, I've always felt having two divine casters was nearly as important as the two mages. Now, Pillars was built specifically so that you don't have to have any particular class in the game. Though I'd argue this has resulted in a lot of classes playing much similar to each other, more so in Deadfire than in the original. I'd also add that priest was pretty much a requirement on high difficulty runs of the original Pillars, just as much as at least one mage felt necessary in BG2.

Note the "even more true of Obsidian games" in a thread specifically about the comparison between Baldur's Gate II and Deadfire. Anyhow the above is also rather untrue as in several cases you can use your class abilities within dialogues and scripted interactions, and you can likewise find ways to employ offensive abilities as diversions for stealthing for example. Whilst it's true that most class skills are combat-oriented (combat is still the deepest gameplay system within the game after all), it is yet again demonstrably untrue that they have "zero use outside combat" as you state above. Feel free to talk about "non-arguments" but when you spout easily debunkable nonsense like what you do above you're hardly giving us anything else. You really don't have more freedom to cast and use abilities outside of combat in the Pillars games. It's just a fact. Yes there's several moments in Pillars and Deadfire where in dialogue or in a scripted encounter you essentially get a "win this encounter by clicking this choice because you have some specific spell/ability." I dunno, I never found that an elegant inclusion. And it's literally true that you cannot cast spells or use several abilities outside of combat and even ones that you can, say the priest traps, are combat related. The handful of quests or scripted encounters that have a "win by clicking this option" doesn't really compare, imo, to the far more diverse and fun uses you can make of invisibility, charm , detect alignment, heck even moments of true sight, which you use without the game needing send a bat signal that now is the time to use spell X. This problem became even worse in Deadfire, where using a spell in a scripted encounter didn't even mean anything. It came at zero cost.

"Next, how is the character creation in Deadfire "more true" to your assumption that "more than half of your character creation is all about how your toon performs in combat" over the likes of Baldur's Gate II exactly?" I didn't say this. You repeatedly create strawmans in this thread, not just of my statements but of others. I'm not going to respond to these kinds of non-arguments. Notice how the end of that paragraph descends into a cascade of ad hominem as well. "Precisely one of the things Deadfire does really well is to approach other challenges and forms of gameplay beyond dialogue trees and combat with greater attention and equal reward" Name one way a quest is challenging in Deadfire that does not include combat. The quests don't have fail states. Being given a task =/= challenge. Almost all of the quests in Deadfire (as well as BG for that matter) are basically go to various places, have some dialogue, make some moral or faction-related choice, and that's it. There aren't fail states for these quests, and thus they are literally incapable of being challenges. There's no deep puzzle solving or private investigator type actions in nearly all the quests. There's no timer for a fail state. There's almost always NO fail state. That is literally not challenge. You do them, at whatever pace, and often with whatever moral choice you like, but that's it. Don't get me wrong, this isn't terrible design. There's nothing wrong with making RPG's this way. And the IE games were mostly similar. But, when you can't screw up a quest, except in very obvious stupid-evil ways, don't tell me that the quests in Deadfire offer a challenge. Hell, at least the BG2 Paladin stronghold offered a quest-line that had an actual non-combat failstate in it. One that couldn't be easily save-scummed on your first playthrough. There's nothing like that in Deadfire.

This is another sub-species of complaint that never made sense to me. I never understood why people play these isometric, combat-focused RPG's and then insist that what they really lack is a way to play the game with almost no combat. In the IE games and Obsidian's games, none of the quests or puzzles or dialogue segments are difficult in any real sense of the word. The only thing that's an actual difficult puzzle in these games is the combat. If you strip that out, these games are not much more than a choose your own adventure novel or an interactive movie. There's not much game left in them. Look, I think it's perfectly acceptable to have RPG's where you can eschew combat, but that's not what these games do well. An RPG that welcomes pacifist playthroughs should be ones where there's other actual challenges -- quests with failstates, deep puzzles, dialogue/factions that you can easily screw up. More than half of your character creation is all about how your toon performs in combat. This is even more true in the Obsidian games, as your class skills have zero use outside of combat! Games should know what they do well and know how to limit themselves to focus on their strongest elements. These aren't RPG's built to be that fun on pacifist playthroughs, and I'm glad the BG series had that self-awareness. Trying to have an RPG where you can do everything, and you end up with something super shallow like Skyrim. Edit to add: As you can see among Steam players for the original, the pacifism playthrough isn't that popular. https://steamcommunity.com/stats/291650/achievements Fewer than half as many players did as they did Trial of Iron. Hell more players did Triple Crown Solo! If this is what you're wielding to say Pillars is better, you're not making good arguments.

This strikes me as untrue. Yes, the ideal party composition was probably something like 2 wizards, 2 divine casters, 2 frontline guys, with half a thief squeezed in there somewhere. But that's hardly "caster centric" much less wizard centric. That's just balanced. And frankly, Pillars is arguably more "caster-centric" considering more classes play akin to IE-era clerics and wizards than they do to even IE Paladins and Rangers. You can playthrough BG with just one wizard and just one divine caster if you want to, even on your first playthrough. And it won't make the game all that more difficult. And plenty of the recruitable fighter NPCs can give you skills to offset the lack of casters, such as Keldorn with True Sight and Dispel, Mazzy and her buffs, Korgan and his invulnerability rage.

I still never understood this complaint. Playing as a fighter is perfectly fun in the BG games. But regardless, when it comes to combat, for 90% of the game, it doesn't matter what class you play the Watcher or Gorion's ward. You will generally have a wide variety of party members in combat, and thus access to priest/wizard spells regardless. Just to add: The consumables IE fighters have access to, and the fact that turns include a "spell cast" timer that's separate from your attack timer, where you can chug potions or use plenty of awesome charged items, makes fighters perfectly fun and powerful, and using active skills in combats. Whereas... even on the highest difficulties in Deadfire, you don't have to use hardly any consumables, and in fact because skills are so plentiful and powerful, it's often just better to stick with your core skills. Thus you never need to explore a whole subsection of the game's combat toolkit.

By the same coin you can take the entire set of skills of any of the fighter classes and compare them to BG2 and say BG2 doesn't hold a candle to Deadfire. Arguably that's an even more important case since it distributes the complexity and micromanaging more towards all classes and thus all characters, and thus in practice non-caster types are made into active roles opposite to the usual auto-attack bots that they are in the IE games. Even if the depth of the wizard/mage is reduced (I don't see how it is, but let's pretend it is so), it is pretty clearly made up for in other areas. Not sure I agree that this is good though. Spamming the same set of buff + knockdown type skills (just for an example) isn't adding interesting depth. It's an illusion of depth and ultimately more tedious combat. I found myself doing the same thing with Eder roughly every battle in Deadfire, and it was effective, considering I've had zero wipes. But, from a tactical standpoint, it's not any different than "auto-attack bot", it's just more tedious because it requires more clicking. You're not making interesting decisions with those skills. I'll add the interrupt mechanics and fighters' effectiveness at that is substantially more interesting in the BG games. Giving them a role beyond just tank + hit. I've never understood this push by developers and some fans that all the classes need to have actives skills as cool as the mages and priests. You're controlling at least 5-6 units in every combat. I don't want all my units to play the same way. That actually strips strategic depth from the combat. Going back and doing my first run at BG in years, it's striking how much faster and more deadly combat is when compared to Pillars and Deadfire. In Pillars, the weaker status effects and bullet-sponge nature of enemies and your own PC's has created a combat that really drags by contrast.

Nah. Give us an Eora-set, non-watcher game. The developers have crafted a rich world. Give us a campaign that doesn't center around the same themes and powers, please.

The problem with the Ascension mod and the final fight is that it severely punishes you for deviating from, essentially a lawful good playthrough. Any kind of evil or quasi not great decision can come back and bite you. On the one hand, there's definitely something cool about adding consequences to some of the dialogues and choices you made in the game, on the other hand, it's hugely imbalanced in the fight's difficulty depending on those choices. Personally, I tried it once on a playthrough way back before the EE days and have never wanted to do another like that.

One thing that's underrated about the whole IE series is the sound design. Not just the stellar voice acting, but every little detail from the various spell casting chants, the diverse and highly detailed background noises, the music. It especially achieves its pinnacle in BG2 because of the Irenicus actor, of course. Really a forward thinking aspect of the games, and perhaps one aspect of the games that has aged the best.

Hmm... disappointed with those initial Magran's Fires challenge ideas. The old inclusions are fine, of course. But the new ones? Seems more and more that the designers aren't interested in creating a combat system that has strategic/tactical depth. And so instead we get some twitchy gameplay challenge? I don't think that's what people are looking for in these kinds of RPG's. It's not what these kinds of games do well. If I want that, I'll play something like Dark Souls, which is built around that.

"One-dimensional" is a rote criticism that, I think, sounds good in the abstract, but doesn't apply when thought about at length. Even in high-brow literature, there are characters that are arguably "one-dimensional". In fact, it's a common technique to create a character with one exaggerated characteristic and then make that characteristic the center of the narrative. Think Ahab and obssession, or Hamlet and indecisiveness, or Odysseus and cleverness. It's not the only way to write characters and narrative, but it is a legitimate way. I'm not saying Baldur's Gate scaled to the heights of those works, but it isn't true, imo, that because Minsc or Jan are almost cartoonish and one-dimensional that they somehow fail as characters. Personally, I don't like wading much into debates on RPG characters or plot because it's too subjective, but I just wanted to defend BG's writing against what I consider to be unfair attacks. One other point I want to add, and throwing my support in with BG as having the better characters, is that Pillars just didn't have as much guts when creating reactivity regarding your NPC's. I mean, NPC's come to blows eventually in the BG games, in ways that are somewhat telegraphed to the player. And there are moments where certain NPC's can ruin your attempted quest (Kivan and the bandit camp) or be an enormous help (Viconia and the Drow city). These moments just don't exist as much in Pillars, and it's partly because Obsidian seems really really reticent to thrust any significant negative consequences on the player. I think the writing and characters end up suffering as a result.

Assuming that everyone rests before every boss fight is untrue. And it's another example of hyperbole being used instead of actual arguments. It was impossible to always predict when there would be a boss fight in the BG games, as you could not sneak up on every single fight with the ease of Pillars. You could not rest in certain sections of BG dungeon crawls, because the ambush rate was 100%. Moreover, the fact that you *can* rest in the original Pillars does not break my thought experiment. You would still be spending -- especially on higher difficulties -- a precious resource. Camping supplies probably should have cost more gold and been rarer in the world, but that's a different complaint. Regardless, you were still forced to make a choice (push on at half-strength or burn a key resource) and deal with its consequences (maybe lose the fight or maybe regret having burned a resource you later needed). In fact, how well you tackled those goblin fights will very much effect this decision's calculus. This is a far more interesting dynamic than approaching every fight with the same basic strategy -- unload your best spells and abilities always. And it's far better for sustaining fun over tens if not one hundred hours of play, in my opinion.

Even if I agree with all of your assumptions here, this isn't true. It will be easier than the very first goblin encounter in the dungeon? You're obviously not interested in honest debate, so I'm done.

Let me illustrate what I'm talking about with a thought experiment. Let's say you want to design a stereotypical dungeon. A big bad dragon in a cave guarding a hoard of treasure. Leading up to the dragon are a series of fights against his goblin henchmen. How do we design this so that the dragon feels much more powerful than the goblins, while the goblins are still fun encounters? Under a system like BG or the original this is easy. Any damage the goblins do matters, whether it's the hitpoints or health-endurance systems. They will add up, so that the player can arrive at the dragon at 50% health or 75% health or even 100% depending on their performance. That is to say, there's always a reward of sorts for fighting those goblins efficiently, perhaps even burning some of your spells there, so as to arrive at the final fight in the best shape possible. But in Deadfire? How do we make the dragon a *very* tough fight and *still* make the goblins interesting? Because of the systems, it's a MUCH harder problem. And we've seen what the result of this has been so far. Basically, the goblins become meaningless trash, that you only have to fight well enough to prevent a knockdown against. This is beauty of the vancian spell system and some kind of lasting health system. It allows DISPARATE types of encounters to exist in the same world and for both kinds to still hold weight for the player.

Deadfire has not yet achieved good difficulty. Thinking that the 1.2 patch has nipped that problem in the bud is false. Arguing that Pillars 2 is done patching balance and difficulty is ludicrous and is just going to make you look like a fool months from now. People are still complaining about the lack of difficulty. Difficulty was not as significant a problem in the original game at launch. The problem was useless vs overpowered skills. You're now throwing in a bunch of unrelated points about class and skill balance, which is an obfuscating tactic. Those points have nothing to do with difficulty. Again, I was contending that the game's difficulty was easier to balance because of the spell system. It isn't. Encounters now have to fit into a much narrower window when the player doesn't have a strategic layer to play with. Easier encounters that would have held significance in a system with attrition elements are now just tedious, rote chores for the player. Exactly the player experience of Deadfire at launch when it comes to combat and much of the middle and higher level experience currently. PS: Tyranny had terrible combat.

It's literally true by default. Unless you are seriously suggesting that a designer will have a harder time balancing something when they have a better grasp on what tools the player has access to. No, it isn't. Deadfire's atrocious difficulty on launch shows that this isn't the case. Especially when contrasted against the difficulty at launch of the BG games as well as the original Pillars. None of those titles required the difficulty overhaul of Deadfire. This is especially damning because Deadfire had the advantage of hindsight over all those previous titles. You can state hypotheses all you want, but you might want to consider questioning them when real-world evidence points in the opposite direction.