cokane

As I've said before, there's no evidence this is true. There's no evidence that the game is easier to balance under the current system. There's plenty of evidence that this is exactly opposite. Moreover -- balancing every fight to be the exact same size and same exact difficulty? Man, that sounds like a great way to design an open world 100 hour RPG. The irony of course, is that in an *open-world* RPG, it's actually better to have a vancian system. The original Baldur's Gate achieved this without even trying hard. This is because players can tackle stuff above their level by resting a lot and brute-forcing a section -- if that's how they want to play. As well, even when over-leveled, players still feel the sting of hit point losses and spells spent. This is why the open world of a nearly 20-year-old game didn't require level scaling or any other crutches that Deadfire employs and worked.

People write about the resting and vancian spell casting mechanic as if you had to hit some narrow range in the middle, which wasn't true at all. Even on PotD there was actually a wide range of acceptable spell use pacing and resting that could get you through pretty much every dungeon without having to do the walk of shame. It required you to take advantage of some of the systems -- potions, scrolls, food and efficient spell casting -- but it wasn't anywhere near difficult to achieve this. But that's what players *should* have to do on the highest difficulty setting. Moreover, as I've said before, it's clear Obsidian did not design most of the map sections to be cleared in one go -- that's why so many quests invent reasons to revisit areas. Again, people continue to rely on hyperbole when talking about Pillars or BG.

The history of video games and their relative rankings on "best of" list would disagree! Great games, sure, but the Vancian aspect is made pretty much moot thanks to resting at-will. Then it is pretty much just having the right spells prepared for a single fight. This isn't true. Again there's a history here of games from Pool of Radiance to Pillars of Eternity, with some best of all time titles in the middle there. Insisting that a game mechanic doesn't work in light of this evidence to simply admit you don't care about evidence. You're incorrectly assuming that vancian casting is the aspect that places these games in the list and not many other more important elements such as the story, writing, development of setting, other aspects of combat, significance within the context of their release and so on. Again, Planescape: Torment is usually seen as one of the very finest RPGs of all time, yet people who see it thus don't do so for its combat whatsoever. Heck, I rarely see Baldur's Gate or most other D&D games spoken of positively when it comes to combat specifically beyond the very closed niche of D&D geekdom. That's not what I said. Again, read that entire quoted text. The *original* claim is that Vancian casting is "usually pretty crappy in video games". Seems odd to suggest that given the commercial, critical, and "best of all time" accolades many of these games have received. And plenty of people *have* praised the combat systems of the Gold Box games, BG, and Icewind Dale. In fact, most of the replay value of the BG games is specifically because of the depth of its combat system -- as well as the wide difference of playing as a caster vs a fighter.

Better combat than Deadfire.

The history of video games and their relative rankings on "best of" list would disagree! Great games, sure, but the Vancian aspect is made pretty much moot thanks to resting at-will. Then it is pretty much just having the right spells prepared for a single fight. This isn't true. Again there's a history here of games from Pool of Radiance to Pillars of Eternity, with some best of all time titles in the middle there. Insisting that a game mechanic doesn't work in light of this evidence to simply admit you don't care about evidence.

The history of video games and their relative rankings on "best of" list would disagree!

Ah yes, playing every battle exactly the same for a game that could potentially last 100 hours, that sounds super fun.

I think people may be overlooking how Irenicus and BG2's plot subverted expectation in a big way. The villainy of Irenicus may seem obvious in retrospect but at the time, the obvious expectation for the sequel was that you would fight more Bhaalspawn. The ending cutscene of the original foreshadows this. Irenicus and Bodhi were a wonderful, unexpected way to keep the series focused on the Bhaal legacy while delivering a completely unexpected kind of villain.

It's really not surprising that the game launch had such abysmal difficulty when there's a decent chunk of the fanbase clamoring for removing any aspect of difficulty. If the game followed this, the only challenge would be limited to full party wipes. What of traps and other wound-causing moments under this system? Good job erasing that aspect of the game too. I swear, some people just want a game with choice, but no actual consequences. Easy, make traps part of the encounter. For example, have a group of enemies prepared for you. Have them entrenched in a definsive location. Give the player options on how to engage. Brute force your way through the front guards (paladins and fighters) use ranged attacks to snipe vulnerable but dangerous targets )spellcasters), or find a way around (requiring either navigating around traps placed by the enemy, or disarm them). So many things could be done to make each encounter interesting and challenging in tis own right. THe problems with difficulty isn't because of a lack of a tedious resting mechanic. No extra strategy is added by resting, its not difficult. You just have to take 5 mintutes to backtrck and rest to get your abilites back so that you can do more than auto attack. Again, this is still stripping something out of the game. Making traps only as part of combat encounters makes the game narrower. Going on ad nauseam about how traps tactically affect combat here is just obfuscating. You're calling for less diverse challenges in the game. If traps can no longer exist as separate problems for the player, the game is diminished. (It's already slightly diminished over the original in this department, as non-combat traps can only do one thing: wound.) That's pretty much exactly how it is already, though. In PoE 1 and 2 alike, traps only ever matter when there's a group of enemies sitting right on top of them (and there are a couple of notable cases of this in either game that add meaningfully to particular combat encounters). Otherwise, you just spot and disarm them and that's that. Same thing in the IE games: realistically, you will have a rogue in the party, and you will spot the traps, and you'll disarm them and get XP for it if you're not otherwise occupied. I suppose they impose a "you must have this much Disarm Traps to pass" requirement, which ... is not especially compelling or interesting. The whole "glowing red square on the floor" model of traps only works when there are opportunity costs to disarmament. This isn't true. Traps in BG games could wipe your whole party if you weren't careful. In the original there were specifically traps such as in Lle a Rhemen (dungeon below stormwall gorge) as you enter the second level that was beefy and easy to set off -- because it came right after a scripted encounter. The very low fungus level of Endless Paths. And several parts of Galvino's workshop (a fine example of trap usage), that might be hard to even detect. People here repeatedly rely on hyperbole when talking about the old games' shortcomings and it's not a honest way to discuss these games.

It's really not surprising that the game launch had such abysmal difficulty when there's a decent chunk of the fanbase clamoring for removing any aspect of difficulty. If the game followed this, the only challenge would be limited to full party wipes. What of traps and other wound-causing moments under this system? Good job erasing that aspect of the game too. I swear, some people just want a game with choice, but no actual consequences. Easy, make traps part of the encounter. For example, have a group of enemies prepared for you. Have them entrenched in a definsive location. Give the player options on how to engage. Brute force your way through the front guards (paladins and fighters) use ranged attacks to snipe vulnerable but dangerous targets )spellcasters), or find a way around (requiring either navigating around traps placed by the enemy, or disarm them). So many things could be done to make each encounter interesting and challenging in tis own right. THe problems with difficulty isn't because of a lack of a tedious resting mechanic. No extra strategy is added by resting, its not difficult. You just have to take 5 mintutes to backtrck and rest to get your abilites back so that you can do more than auto attack. Again, this is still stripping something out of the game. Making traps only as part of combat encounters makes the game narrower. Going on ad nauseam about how traps tactically affect combat here is just obfuscating. You're calling for less diverse challenges in the game. If traps can no longer exist as separate problems for the player, the game is diminished. (It's already slightly diminished over the original in this department, as non-combat traps can only do one thing: wound.) And you didn't address my point that wounds are also handed out in other aspects of the game -- scripted encounters and puzzles that aren't necessarily traps (think fire room in the digsite dungeon). The game already provides virtually no failstates in the quest design, same as the original. A far more forgiving combat system than the original. And now the same players whose calls neutered that challenge demand design choices that strip more challenges out of the game.

It's really not surprising that the game launch had such abysmal difficulty when there's a decent chunk of the fanbase clamoring for removing any aspect of difficulty. If the game followed this, the only challenge would be limited to full party wipes. What of traps and other wound-causing moments under this system? Good job erasing that aspect of the game too. I swear, some people just want a game with choice, but no actual consequences.

It's depressing because the history of gaming has shown that iterating on a system often produces superior results than nearly completely reinventing a system. Compare the difference in the BG series with the now difference in the Pillars series. Combat was in a joke state on Deadfire's release. This is because the team set up an enormous labor sink for itself by making fundamental changes to the system. There's a huge opportunity cost here. Deadfire could have had a lot more content, fine-tuning, sophistication, if the team didn't have to reinvent so many core elements.

I'd also add that it's not true these meta-knowledge things don't exist in Pillars, though perhaps there's fewer. But in general combat is just less dangerous in Pillars. However, lagufath can put a party in paralyze-lock and pretty easily cause a wipe. This is beat by simply casting the cleric's protection spell at the start of combat. I don't see how this is different than the complaints about BG -- at least the shield of Balduran required you to spend some money! As others have mentioned the Alpine Dragon fight can quickly knock out your backline casters, and you have no way to know that's coming. Sirens can toss your party into a stun-lock, easily causing party wipes. Again, solved by a spell you always get if you have a cleric, but again, advance knowledge helps. Vampires can charm you, and, again, you're unlikely to appreciate the power of this skill on your first encounter with them, thus leading to easy party wipe situations. Once you know, as with the stun-prevention, it's pretty easily preventable. The fungus plants have the same issue with confusion and at lower levels. I fail to see how any of this is radically different than the issues listed about BG. Though I can say these are way less memorable fights than what we got in BG2. Sure, there's lower odds of party wipes in Pillars, but that is more due to the unforgiving hitpoint system versus health-endurance, and not the actual encounter design.

It's sold in the adventurer's mart, which is the first good shop you see in the game and a shop you are regularly directed to via other characters in the game. You can right click all items even in the store to see their effects and I never considered item descriptions outside the characters' knowledge. I also think people here exaggerate the effect of the item here for the sake of making their arguments stronger. While it makes beholders vastly easier, it doesn't completely trivialize their encounters, as you still need to micro your party so to always have the shieldbearer up front. And this is actually tricky with the Elder Orb who spawns unpredictably. The shield also dings your strength, so it has a drawback, not to mention is quite expensive during a part of the game where you're pressed for gold for various reasons -- if you rush to that quest anyways. I can sympathize with some people who find it cheesy, but there's no "meta-knowledge" required to take advantage of it. Why wouldn't a party of adventurers facing dangerous odds look carefully at all the top line gear in the top shop in the game's central shopping hub? If you entered the game with zero foreknowledge, the shield rewards careful exploration of the shops, which is something you want to encourage players to do.

PoE1 is better because it creates a more diverse toolkit for the player. As we've seen with balance patches, many of the per rest spells and per rest abilities on non-caster classes have had to be dinged. Fireballs are distinctly less cool in Deadfire than they were in the original, much less the IE games. In fact, converting everything to a similar resource pool has made the classes feel less diverse overall, killing replay value and the fun of build strategies, since most everything is equally good.

What people are calling "metaknowledge" here in most cases is just "knowledge". Using the shield of Balduran to beat beholders is something your characters in the game would know. The shield is sold in a freaking shop where you can read the item description. You're told about the existence of Beholders in the Unseeing Eye quest (and even fight a little one) before you have to descend into the pit to fight all of them. Kangaxx is undead and you know this before you have to fight him. There are scrolls of protection from undead. Hell, even loading a bunch of traps in his room isn't outlandish from your characters' point of view. This is something your characters would do if they were actually adventuring in a way where their lives were on the line. None of this stuff has to break immersion or be considered some knowledge outside of the game world.

I think it's obvious that BG2 is the better game, taking a step back and recognizing the quality of life improvements and other enhancements made since then. It's extremely doubtful Deadfire will be a memorable game five years from now, much less fifteen. Of course, for some, encountering BG2 isn't going to be as fun today, because tastes are different and because technology and design iteration have made games different today. But it's really no contest if we take into account the time these games came out, which game will be more impactful. I think the BG games did benefit from some enormous good fortune though. Having a ruleset, bestiary, and entire world meant that the designers only had to create characters, a plot, and pick their setting. Not to mention dozens of DnD titles had paved the way for how to transmit the pen and paper ruleset to a video game -- it's nice to have a classic like Pool of Radiance as a template. Obsidian set up a much taller task, creating a ruleset and world from scratch. I suspect if they keep at it, a classic could emerge out of the Eora world and Pillars ruleset, it just isn't going to be Deadfire. The BG games were also lucky to come out when they did, the RPG genre was at quite a lowpoint prior to the original's release.

It takes away the bonus to the maximum, which didn't really matter anyways. But yes, that's not how it works now, it heals you, essentially.

I still fail to understand that. If you had to rest every other fight and backtrack to town, it's probably you used the wrong difficulty mode... I played hard difficulty, and i can't remember using camping supplies more than once or twice in Act 1 + Act 2 + WM1 (and no, i don't min max at all). I never ended up with spells i could not use because endurance was too low. I never had to buy any camping supply the whole time, and the vast majority i found as loot was of no use to me. What you are talking about is no resource management. It sounds like you actually did not manage resources at all, and then, found resource management was bad. Does not make sense. Sorry, the whole "Forcing you to travel back to town is not a good method for resource management" is as nonsensical as always to me. I meant that your health will fall below the maximum endurance threshold before you could use all your spells. There were simply so many spells that your health was the reason for resting almost every time Potions of infuse with vital essence

Agreed with most everything, except I think you're selling endless paths a tad short. It actually works as multiple expeditions if you try and push your party to the next master staircase area. I want to also co-sign the fact that long dungeons just aren't quite the same in Deadfire, even if they had them, due to the scrapping the old systems.

Yes, very well said. I don't think "you can save scum that away" is a very productive criticism of game design. In games with a liberal save option, like all these RPGs, you can say this about any challenge in the game, whether it's random or not. You can say this about even the role play conversations, about thieving, about any major plot decisions you make. At the very least random encounters meant that it wasn't a huge risk to try and rest just once, but that "rest until fully healed" was generally a bad tactic. It wasn't that bad of a design imo, and it was something carried over from the old SSI games. There's also plenty of in-game, not immersion breaking, role-playing things you can do in the BG games to cut down ambush odds, rest in a corner of the map instead of certain high-traffic areas, for instance. You might not believe me, but it's true! I have some sympathy for players occasionally save scumming or otherwise neutralizing aspects they don't like. However, I think if it becomes reflex for every hard or tedious element, you're short-changing yourself on a better gameplay experience.

It's not about clearance. It's about veteran rpg players using most of their (full) party and resources avaible to them. If you're drinking healing potions then the fight is difficult. This difficulty already exists, and it is called levels 1-8. The whole thread is about what happens with difficulty after levels 1-8(10/12 depending on your game). Unmodded game for now has such XP curve and XP rewards, that you overlevel MOST of the content after 20 hours or so. It's not about theorycrafting here; you simply overlevel monsters hard very quickly. This is really the key. You can beat the overwhelming majority of fights in Deadfire even on the higher difficulties without ever engaging with potions, other craftable items, even enchanting gear. You don't even have to worry about party composition or good builds. Now don't get me wrong, the original game wasn't exactly super difficult. But at the very least, engaging with these extra gameplay elements allowed you to do things like clear out dungeons or wilderness areas more rapidly. So at least the player got to enjoy some benefit from taking the time to invest in powering up their party. The problem is in Deadfire, there's much less palpable benefit to making your party better. So long as you're avoiding the knockdown and thus wounds, there's literally no difference if you win a fight at one health point and exhausting all your abilities, or not. Moreover even when you do use empowers and suffer wounds, camping is such a minimal cost that there isn't any "agony" in the decision making. You rest, burn some very minor resources and boom, you're just as well off as a party that maximized the use of every system. I don't expect the rest triviality to change much because there would be such an uproar from anyone not interested in a challenge, but I would love for there to be a magran's challenge that did something like prevent usage of any common food or drink for resting, or like limit it to food/drink of value >$some_nominal_amount (everything else just becomes rations for sailing) just so resting feels a bit more constrained and thus injuries and per-rest empower limits more meaningful. Ya, I'm totally down for this change, even as an optional setting, it's something I suggested earlier, basically make only crafted foods heal injuries + make food more expensive, probably significantly so. You could even make both those things separate settings. But the food crafting system is good! It's pretty intuitive and if it was more necessary, it actually gives the player great reason to explore a lot of the game, searching for those ingredients. And if you were always spending a decent chunk of cash, or good found items on rests, you'd be a lot more hesitant to always rest. You might push on with a couple of injuries, and for good reason. I think just that simple change at least gives the player a reason to try and max out their parties, even if they won't always see the benefits like they did in previous games of this type.

It's not about clearance. It's about veteran rpg players using most of their (full) party and resources avaible to them. If you're drinking healing potions then the fight is difficult. This difficulty already exists, and it is called levels 1-8. The whole thread is about what happens with difficulty after levels 1-8(10/12 depending on your game). Unmodded game for now has such XP curve and XP rewards, that you overlevel MOST of the content after 20 hours or so. It's not about theorycrafting here; you simply overlevel monsters hard very quickly. This is really the key. You can beat the overwhelming majority of fights in Deadfire even on the higher difficulties without ever engaging with potions, other craftable items, even enchanting gear. You don't even have to worry about party composition or good builds. Now don't get me wrong, the original game wasn't exactly super difficult. But at the very least, engaging with these extra gameplay elements allowed you to do things like clear out dungeons or wilderness areas more rapidly. So at least the player got to enjoy some benefit from taking the time to invest in powering up their party. The problem is in Deadfire, there's much less palpable benefit to making your party better. So long as you're avoiding the knockdown and thus wounds, there's literally no difference if you win a fight at one health point and exhausting all your abilities, or not. Moreover even when you do use empowers and suffer wounds, camping is such a minimal cost that there isn't any "agony" in the decision making. You rest, burn some very minor resources and boom, you're just as well off as a party that maximized the use of every system.

What if only 20% of people beats the game at all, does that mean 80% of the game can be cut content and empty locations like Ukaizo is? The smallest part of players who beats your games and gives you criticism & support are those who will buy your next game, and every other one after it. That's missing the point. I think we can all agree that PotD that is beatable by 100% of the player base is too easy. The more you crank up the difficulty, the lower the clearance (heck, even attempt) rate. But what is an "appropriate" difficult level? A 0% clearance (i.e. literally impossible) is clearly too hard, so somewhere in between. But for all the talk about empirics and "real world evidence" that people like cokane are going on about, there's no actual empirically-derived and measurable/objective threshold people are putting forth, other than essentially "difficult enough for me" which is not anything objective and purely anecdotal; "difficult enough for me" is so wishy-washy that only like 100 people in the world could beat it, and half of those 100 people would be still be going on about how there's no challenge. You're misrepresenting what I said again, which is something people without an argument tend to do. I didn't use the word empirical and I never argued there's some objective standard for POTD. However, other folks *did* argue that Deadfire was objectively, empirically easier to balance. Weird how you haven't said anything criticizing them.

Evading yet again, who'd have seen that coming *gasp*. Just to clarify though, those weren't rhetorical questions, they were very much meant to be answered. The fact that you are apparently incapable of doing so doesn't change that. But sure, go ahead and dismiss everything you disagree with as 'lacking evidence' or 'personal attack'. I've no doubt that's an attitude that will serve you well in life. What is an "independent verifiable source" in this context? You sputtered out a word salad in that post, but I don't think you even know what it means. It's an absurd list of demands you made in that post, and you should know better. I encourage you to go back through this thread, page by page, very carefully. I was *not* the one who first intimated that there is an objectively superior set of mechanics. Other people argued that Deadfire's system was objectively easier to balance. I merely pointed out that real world evidence does not support this claim. It's peculiar that you didn't hit anyone else with your anti-objectivity jeremiad. The original game had launch issues, but it had nowhere near the difficulty issues of Deadfire. This is doubly troubling because Deadfire didn't have to labor through creating an entire world and set of systems from scratch. Balance *should* have been much easier in Deadfire. The *fact* that it wasn't requires explanation. And to assert that its core mechanics lend themselves to easier balance? It's to double down on un-truths, something far too common today. I will end by noting that you managed yet another post that doesn't mention Deadfire, its predecessor, or any game. All while maintaining some high horse attitude. I guess personal attacks are allowed when you do them.