cokane

Ah, your classic approach of utterly failing to engage with what other people are saying. You're certainly consistent, I'll give you that. Just curious though, you do realise that there are quite a lot of topics of discussion that are not actually matters of empirical fact, right? Or has that rather basic observation somehow managed to escape your undoubtedly towering intellect (burdened down perhaps by its vigorous and unrelenting fact-finding)? You've written far more words in this topic attacking people than I have. Far fewer words talking about Deadfire than I have. Your post above with the series of rhetorical questions about meaningfulness has no relevant substance. It doesn't even contain the words Deadfire or Pillars or anything, because it's nothing more than a long-winded personal attack.

"I have no particular need to cite extensive real world evidence." Nothing more needs to be said.

No, it doesn't. You guys have no real world evidence for your arguments. In fact, the real world evidence points in the opposite direction. But yall continue to assert that somehow it must be true. The fact of the matter is that Deadfire's nearly complete "per encounter" system makes it much more difficult to design *meaningful* encounters. I think this discussion about "difficulty" or "balance" is actually missing the point of why combat feels inferior in Deadfire. I laid out some of these arguments in this thread: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/99893-combat-is-now-mostly-a-dull-chore/ And I think those statements still hold up. But I'd like to add a little more here. Making combat *meaningful* in PoE1 and even the BG type games was much much easier. One of the simplest reasons is that every amount of damage mattered in some way. Players were naturally driven to rest as little as possible, since that wasn't the fun part of the game, so most players would try to push their parties to their limits. This was all the "challenge" ever was in these games. What this meant is that the designers had a broad window to design meaningful encounters. So long as encounters met some minimum threshold of causing damage or risking damage, player decisions within combat had the same choice and consequence dynamic that Obsidian is striving for in all aspects of its RPGs. This had all kinds of excellent downstream effects, by the way. You didn't need to mess with potions, food or scrolls to beat the game, even on POTD. However, if you did mess with those things, you would be rewarded by being able to clear out areas faster, resting less frequently, and often never having to worry about doing the hike of shame if you ran out of camping supplies. This isn't just true of consumables, but also carefully buying the right gear, enchantments, and discovering great individual character builds but also party synergies. And these investments had payoffs the player could feel almost regardless of the monster level. However, in Deadfire, because there is no health loss, and almost no per rest resources to burn (and recovering them is just too easy), encounters have to exist in a much much smaller window to be *meaningful*. They have to, at a very minimum, threaten to knockdown a party member. Encounters that don't do this are literally wasting the player's time. So, it's actually the exact opposite of what some of you are suggesting. Combat is actually harder to balance in Deadfire, and the real-world evidence agrees. Moreover, because so few combats feel *meaningful* players get little visible payoff from the investments I spoke about above. This is why the game feels ludicrously easy in comparison, even though the original PoE wasn't a particularly hard game.

.... Resting in POE1 is not strategic. It's just tedious. Nothing is stopping the player from just going back to the inn and back to the battles again. Many people did that in POE 1 and they found it tedious hence why Obsidian changed it what we now have for POE2. Also since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that. Whereas in POE1, the resting system screws up the balance. There are plenty of combat which are very easy if you go back to an inn but are hard if you keep continuing with low resources. That's not strategic as well. It's just tedious work and a waste of player's time. Having an option is a good thing. So for POE2, you can limit yourself and play it like POE1. Problem Solved. "And Since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that." Again, just assertion. Because the evidence suggests it's been much harder to balance difficulty. It's basic maths. The less variables involved, the easier to balance things. ie. if Obsidian knows that the player is going to be at full hp and has max resources for that encounter, then they will have the knowledge to balance the game based on that information whereas let's say if they didn't know, it would be much harder to balance the game because there is no starting point to rely on. Again, the real world evidence belies your claim.

.... Resting in POE1 is not strategic. It's just tedious. Nothing is stopping the player from just going back to the inn and back to the battles again. Many people did that in POE 1 and they found it tedious hence why Obsidian changed it what we now have for POE2. Also since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that. Whereas in POE1, the resting system screws up the balance. There are plenty of combat which are very easy if you go back to an inn but are hard if you keep continuing with low resources. That's not strategic as well. It's just tedious work and a waste of player's time. Having an option is a good thing. So for POE2, you can limit yourself and play it like POE1. Problem Solved. "And Since Obsidian knows that we'll always be at max hp and max spell allowance, they can tune the game for that." Again, just assertion. Because the evidence suggests it's been much harder to balance difficulty.

But I would say that DM is the crucial difference there. I have never done any P&P roleplaying but I have no doubt a per-rest system can work very well in that context, because you have the DM there who's probably not going to have you take a nap after every fight (and presumably, in that sort of setting the roleplaying component will be much more pronounced so most people wouldn't want to either). But of course P&P also offers much more flexibility in getting around a fight and such. If your party is exhausted and your casters low on spells, and they spot some unfriendly ogres on their path, they can maybe just go around, or prepare an ambush, or attempt to scare them away / convince them to leave (using an illusion spell maybe, or just a really convincing / intimidating character). Hell, they could set fire to the surrounding forest and drive them off that way. And I should imagine that in P&P gaming, beating a tactical retreat is actually possible as well (realistically, having seen you off the ogres are probably not overly interested in chasing you to the ends of the earth). I would love for this to be actually possible in computer games as well. But you'd need an equivalent of a DM in the game to be able to do that, and in general an engine that allows for vastly more flexibility. That is very hard to actually do, of course. I seem to have side-tracked somewhat, but yeah... per-rest systems work just fine in that context. To me, it never felt it translated at all well to cRPG. The cost of resting and time elapsing is just too ambiguous for it to balance very well. Which isn't to say that per-encounter doesn't have flaws, it clearly does. Having longer-term tactical aspects and being incentivised not to use the same abilities every fight are certainly things I would like to see very much as well (and in general, more organic design than discrete resource pools and spell levels and power levels and such). I don't thing 'per-rest' can properly accomplish that though. Again, assertions. Ones that fly in the face of the history of the genre. How come cRPG's from Pool of Radiance, to Baldur's Gate, to even the original Pillars, all had these systems, all were praised at their time for delivering interesting, strategic combat, and some are considered among the best RPG's and video games ever made. Obviously their resting systems weren't that bad!

Why are you constantly talking about the upper level difficulties when you don't play them?

While prior poster seemed to think limited rest supplies was a constraint (I personally played it as such), aside from this example (the only one I can also think of), most players treated limited rest supplies as "time to go through some load screens to travel back to town" which is why Obsidian decided to ditch it. Deadfire is actually closer to state of the art, imo, with its heavily per-encounter system. Because when designers know that players have full resources for every fight, they can balance for that, instead of assuming that a player is at like ~80% or less, and thus rest-spamming becomes incredibly powerful (rest-spam and turn on "fully heal on rest" for most IE games and you'll obliterate most encounters). BG2 was only notable because a lot of its wizard fights "cheat" because wizards are expending all their resources as if that's the only fight they'll have to deal with (which is true, from an AI perspective) and theoretically your own casters were a bit more constrained. Up until a certain point in 1.1 PotD, every fight is like a BG2 fight because everyone is spending all their resources possible. Again, I maintain that the main thing missing from 1.1 PotD isn't encounter difficulty, just a lack of a significant amount of encounters tuned specifically for e.g. levels 14-20, and not just ones that are level-scaled to tha tlevel. Except it didn't work out this way at all. It's funny that some people on here assert certain things: "it was easier for designers to balance combat in Deadfire" when the reality is the complete opposite.

No, I just have a different view of what works well in a game, 'dude'. Saying "I just have a different view" and "this system cannot work" are mutually exclusive arguments.

There's so much wrong in this post, I don't know where to begin. For one: "but if that's all there is to it you're essentially just forcing the player to make his own difficulty level. That's not good game design." Switch the word "forcing" to "allowing" and I actually think it's *good* game design. The player controls HOW RISKILY they want to play. Whereas in Deadfire, you are actually *forced* to one play style. The idea that "per rest systems simply cannot be made to work"? CRPG's have had per rest systems from at least Pool of Radiance to Pillars of Eternity, dude. That's about 30 years of consistent design, with several award-winning, greatest of all time titles in there. How can anyone say this system "cannot be made to work" is to simply ignore facts. Yes, the camping supply thing wasn't ideal in PoE, but it was a good iteration on the previous resting=random encounter chance system. And for all its flaws, it DID work. The game got great reviews and sales on launch and enough of a following for expansions and a sequel. And it's basically the flagship title for Obsidian right now. I'll never understand people complaining about the tedium of having to go back for camping supplies on here. That's the whole point! The system doesn't work, i.e. rest-spamming would be easy, if you didn't have some punishment for over-using camping.

I agree that resource management and rest management are important for me to as I like to make things interesting and challenging to level I am comfortable and happy with. But I do see some people point that resource and rest management is boring and not what everyone wants, therefore why argue if simple tick box system lets people choose what they prefer and everyone wins. People that like and argue for resource and rest management are minority most want fast game and not keep going back and forth, therefore people want resource and rest management keep arguing they mostly lose and hence most games don't have lots resource management. Both systems need reworking as both got there issues to. This is a nice thought, but it's fundamentally untrue. You can't make two games at once. Or if you try, you will end up making zero quality games. There's more to a system than simply moving some spells and abilities to be "per rest" versus "per encounter". There's more to it than just switching back to two camping supplies instead of food. You have to rebalance skills around this. For example, fireball can be quite strong when it costs your mage significantly more than it costs your fighter to use knockdown. If the two cost roughly the same? Then they have be roughly the same effectiveness. Moreover, fights themselves and even entire dungeon designs have to be crafted around what tools the player has available. This is why, as I've said previously, you can have a dungeon like the Temple of Eothas actually be challenging in the original, whereas it would be a cakewalk in Deadfire. I sympathize with your thinking, and it'd be nice to create a game that could please a broad cRPG fanbase, but there's only a finite amount of labor game companies can devote to a game. You can't make a Deadfire-set RPG that has both the rulesets of PoE1 and the sequel.

Well said. On both Kangaxx and mind flayers. And it's excellent analysis to show that Kangaxx was a puzzle that the designers hid within the game's combat/bestiary. The great thing about these fights is they forced you to get out of whatever rote power protocol you were running against most of the tough fights. It's not just about buffing your party and casting AOE damage spells. And yeah, the proof is in how memorable these things are, years later. Does anything in Deadfire even come close to this? Honestly?

Some learning and "mystery" is definitely an important factor. You could have a completely symmetric game (by which I mean the enemies and you have all the exact same things available), but that's more in the realm of designing an RTS than a cRPG. The problem is when in like BG2 that "mystery" is where alot of the difficulty is (random luck in failing a save or the enemy succeeding a save takes care of another good chunk of the difficulty). Like the demi-lich has immunity to weapons less than +4 and can cast Wail of the Banshee and occasionally Imprisonment at will. If you have slayer form or even one of the priest kit's starting ability, you've taken care of the +4. There are plenty of ways to get immunity to instadeath or imprisonment (slayer form also does that). Once you have those the fight is stupidly easy. If you don't have any of that, the fight is virtually impossible. That's an extreme example, but is probably the simplest way to demonstrate the difference between "this fight is hard because i don't know the trick" and "this fight is hard because the encounter is challenging." But the demi-lich is a side quest. It's not required to beat the game, it probably wasn't designed thinking the average player would even attempt it on their first playthrough. It also only comes after fighting several other liches, meaning you had a chance to tune up and learn some of the tricks. Yes, the imprisonment is special. I'd also disagree that the fight is trivial once you know how to equip protections and the right weapons. Even if you prep some of the things you need, it's not a fight you can tackle immediately with low level characters. But it's a super bad example. It's a reward specifically designed for completionists, you basically need to explore much of the city to even bring the fight up, unless you engage in the dumb dialogue options initially. So, it's already meant for players who would (at least after the first failure) learn to deal with some of the esoteric demands of the fight.

In modern game design it's "for people who actually like RPGs / combat". No. Just no. RPGs can be fun without a high difficulty, heck story quality and game difficulty are not linked. Combat can also be fun without being masochistic. Don't conflate your taste with everyone's standard of fun. They make RPG's for people like you nowadays, such as the Persona series, which is supposedly quite good. Wanting a game that focuses on party-based, tactical combat to not have challenging combat is asking a genre to try and be something that it's not. You're on just about every thread on here insisting that the game cannot cater to others' tastes. Just stop. Did, did you just claim that a MegaTen game wasn't difficult? So many of these threads are turning into echo chambers and I'm providing alternate viewpoints. THese are supposed to be discussions, and you are here telling me to shut up. I've never once said that the game cannot cater to others' tastes. My stance has been the exact opposite, the game shouldn't hold any one partie's taste above the another's. So stop putting words in my mouth. Again, you're the one on these threads who doesn't play the high difficulties, constantly interjecting into threads exclusively about high difficulties. And yet you lecture me about holding one person's taste above another's. Physician, heal thyself!

Yeah okay, but class and balance changes aren't happening ONLY on PotD or Veteren. Changes and nerfs to classes and abilities affects every difficulty level. Changing to a lower difficulty DOES NOTHING if your favorite class no longer works the way it used to. You can no longer that way, EVER AGAIN. Boo hoo. Your over powered skill is no longer over powered. Why is this a bad thing? One, if you're playing on lower difficulties, it shouldn't matter. You can still use that build and beat the game with little effort. I don't understand why some players insist on having a game where every choice they make has to have immense rewards. As Tigranes wrote very well above, if there was some weapon that was so over-powered it made the rest of the weapons obsolete -- that's a huge design problem. And one that the designers are right to prioritize fixing, even if it means your character built around that weapon isn't going to be as powerful as they were. Your playstyle is not more important than mine or anyone else's. An ability doesn't have to overpowered for Obsidian to nerf it apparently. I'm not the one asking that Obsidian do things or not do things because of how they are affecting *my* play experience. You're the one doing that. Actually the op is. Though I DO think it is reasonable for Obsidian to consider the less masochistic playerbase when introducing balance passes outside Veteren or PotD. Again, you made this argument: "your favorite class no longer works the way it used to. You can no longer that way, EVER AGAIN" This is an argument about someone's particular gameplay experience, and you are arguing on behalf of maintaining that individual experience. Whereas I am arguing on general design principles -- if one ability is too strong, it's functionally equivalent to the other abilities being too weak. If one weapon is too strong, it's equivalent to the rest of the weapons being bad. Nobody has complained that normal and below difficulties have become too hard. If you want to make that case go ahead. But so far you have ONLY argued on behalf of players being able to maintain same particular build and effectiveness they previously had. This is arguing *for* a particular playstyle and moreover, it is arguing that this maintenance is "more important" than other considerations. Exactly the thing you claim to be against.

In modern game design it's "for people who actually like RPGs / combat". No. Just no. RPGs can be fun without a high difficulty, heck story quality and game difficulty are not linked. Combat can also be fun without being masochistic. Don't conflate your taste with everyone's standard of fun. They make RPG's for people like you nowadays, such as the Persona series, which is supposedly quite good. Wanting a game that focuses on party-based, tactical combat to not have challenging combat is asking a genre to try and be something that it's not. You're on just about every thread on here insisting that the game cannot cater to others' tastes. Just stop.

Yeah okay, but class and balance changes aren't happening ONLY on PotD or Veteren. Changes and nerfs to classes and abilities affects every difficulty level. Changing to a lower difficulty DOES NOTHING if your favorite class no longer works the way it used to. You can no longer that way, EVER AGAIN. Boo hoo. Your over powered skill is no longer over powered. Why is this a bad thing? One, if you're playing on lower difficulties, it shouldn't matter. You can still use that build and beat the game with little effort. I don't understand why some players insist on having a game where every choice they make has to have immense rewards. As Tigranes wrote very well above, if there was some weapon that was so over-powered it made the rest of the weapons obsolete -- that's a huge design problem. And one that the designers are right to prioritize fixing, even if it means your character built around that weapon isn't going to be as powerful as they were. Your playstyle is not more important than mine or anyone else's. An ability doesn't have to overpowered for Obsidian to nerf it apparently. I'm not the one asking that Obsidian do things or not do things because of how they are affecting *my* play experience. You're the one doing that.

Yep, arguing that the BG games were easy compared to PoE is just factually incorrect. PoE and Deadfire have no instant death spells, things like imprison and all the various things that could force you to immediately reload. Not to mention it was much easier to end up at -10 HP than it was to lose all your health in PoE or wound-death in Deadfire. I won't even talk about Deadfire, since we know that's easy. But in the original, even on PotD, you could basically charge into every fight and expect to win so long as you had the right level and didn't make immensely dumb decisions. Aside from maybe immunity to paralysis and charm spells, there were no key spells or key abilities you had to for sure equip in order to take on certain fights. Contrast that with dealing with beholder rays, lich spells, high damage dragon breaths, and the difference is immense. Don't get me wrong, I think the original PoE results in an overall more fun, if easier, combat experience. But you cannot argue that the BG games were in any way easier.

Well, a big reason for this is that they made seemingly small but rather fundamental changes to combat mechanics. Moving virtually everything to be per encounter and adding the empower feature. It's clear, IMO anyways, that they didn't quite appreciate the depth of changes that would be required to balance a system that had previously relied on abilities having different costs for the player. Couple this with adding subclasses, multiclassing and redesigning the armor/penetration system, and yeah, they set up a ridiculous amount of labor for themselves, because the combat system needed to be redesigned almost from scratch. It's really a great shame that they didn't just maintain the core mechanics of the previous game and iterate on them. I think their labor would have produced a much better, more balanced game that way.

Yeah okay, but class and balance changes aren't happening ONLY on PotD or Veteren. Changes and nerfs to classes and abilities affects every difficulty level. Changing to a lower difficulty DOES NOTHING if your favorite class no longer works the way it used to. You can no longer that way, EVER AGAIN. Boo hoo. Your over powered skill is no longer over powered. Why is this a bad thing? One, if you're playing on lower difficulties, it shouldn't matter. You can still use that build and beat the game with little effort. I don't understand why some players insist on having a game where every choice they make has to have immense rewards. As Tigranes wrote very well above, if there was some weapon that was so over-powered it made the rest of the weapons obsolete -- that's a huge design problem. And one that the designers are right to prioritize fixing, even if it means your character built around that weapon isn't going to be as powerful as they were.

You essentially just described the original game, for the most part, with Gilded Vale, Defiance Bay + Dyrford, and then Twin Elms.

This isn't true. Yes, the game is marginally less about combat than the original. However, gear, consumables, stats, half your level-up skills, and much more have nothing do with anything except combat. Virtually everything you spend gold on helps combat or the ship. There's almost nothing else to spend gold on! Arguing the game isn't focused around combat is simply false. Moreover, combat is the only aspect of the game that has a challenge. People seemingly don't want fail-states for quests, or at least Obsidian doesn't, so there's no actual challenge in the other things you listed: story, character interaction, world interaction and roleplaying. There's no fail-states for these parts of the game. Thus there's no "tuning around" them.

Whether you found them a chore or not, they're what allowed for a breadth of not only dungeon types but also ability types in the original. In order for an awesome fireball to exist alongside something like knockdown, there has to be a way for the fireball to be much more costly. If its cost is only marginally higher than a knockdown, then you have to make both abilities have roughly the same power. Otherwise the game will have terrible balance. And this is what's coming if people want any semblance of challenge at the higher ends.

Open world and per encounter skills is the problem. They can't really coexist in a game. An example is BG2, in its early open world segment. This part includes about eight complex quests (the stronghold quests) that can be completed in virtually any order while still providing players a challenge in each one, regardless of the order they complete them. This is because if you do them early, you'll grind them out, but even if you do them "over leveled" you still end up often resting once in their respective dungeons. Providing some semblance of challenge, and thus some *consequential* decision making by the player. The same dynamic exists in the original PoE, where you can do some dungeons early, and grind them out with multiple rests, or do them later, and burn through them, but still often with one rest or two involved! It's not a perfect system, but it at least has some elasticity that Deadfire doesn't. In Deadfire, if you over-level for a section (or over gear), then every fight just ends up being rote nonsense and good decision making in combat doesn't end up having any effect on the game. As I wrote in another thread, a difficulty spike cannot solve the core problem that most combats take no toll on the party.

Overall, I'd say the ship combat is good, it's just very crude in its current state. FWIW, they greatly upgraded the keep elements in the original game after the White March, so hopefully they get a chance to do a couple of strong tweaks to ship management. I strongly agree with suggestions to make ship/crew maintenance more costly at higher difficulties. At the very least, the nice thing about ship combat is that you can actually lose. Except seeking out ridiculously high-level regular combat, there's very little risk of losing normal combat encounters. And this is part of the problem with ship-to-ship in my personal experience. It's simply smarter to just rush for boarding, it's so easy to win, and you tend to take less overall damage than you do trying to sink the enemy with cannon fire.