cokane

I do not feel like this is an accurate characterization of how combats went down in PoE1 at all. I also think it might hint at why some of the same players on this board seem to rely on two criticisms of the original game. 1. "80% of the game" was auto attack fights. 2. Limited camping meant you had to go back to town alot. These things are related, and I think they demonstrate that certain players are simply not interested in exploring the wealth of options for optimizing your gameplay in the original. It's simply not true that 80% of the fights in PoE1 were just attack-move fights. It's likely not even 50%. Most fights and most areas actually wanted you to use SOME spells and SOME per encounter abilities in nearly every single fight. Yes there were a few lone trolls or lone shadows, but those were there to introduce monsters to the player. The Temple of Eothas below the first town is a perfect example of this. It doesn't actually have "the big fight where you blow all your abilities" instead it has a series of fights that, if done strategically and with SOME spell usage in EACH fight, allow the player to coast through the dungeon without needing to go back to town. Instead of just casting the same max abilities you use in every fight, you are judicious and focus on specific casts, i.e. fire damage for the spirits. But, if you just attack-moved every fight, yeah, you would run out of health very quickly. If folks were just auto-attacking for 80% of the fights in the original game, it's no wonder that those same folks had to go back to town regularly due to limited resting supplies.

This is excellent and I think an important point. People talk about backtracking on dungeons in PoE1 but I'm skeptical many players actually did this. *Person complains about personal experience that they disliked* Random stranger on message board: YOU'RE A LIAR! THAT NEVER HAPPENED! WHY ARE YOU CONSPIRING AGAINST THIS GAME?! What I don't see here is any talk about the frequency of pulling out of dungeons. You sure showed that straw man who's boss though.

Can you quote something where you actually "outlined" the difference? Because I went back and read your posts. These are things you wrote: "Exactly. Challenge is good, frustration is bad." "All of that sounds frustrating and unfun." "I say those things are un-fun, because I find them un-fun. I'm not going to argue about whether I find something fun or not. That's insipid." Where is the outlining? What I see here is "things I don't like are bad and unfun, things I do like are good and fun."

Well said. I said this earlier in the thread, but there are some mechanics that exist, that if tweaked, would add back the strategic layer that the original game had. Tweak empowers to have a broader use, weaken heal and/or increase enemy damage, increase the cost and/or limit the effect of camping resources, increase the cost of ship maintenance, encourage more investment in the ship. I actually think some tweaks *could* make the combat and dungeon crawl experience even better than the original. So we shouldn't lose hope entirely.

"Where every fight is a big fight" put another way "where every fight is the same". That does not sound like a good recipe for a lengthy, open-world RPG.

I do mean combat though. Yes, it's the ancillary mechanics of combat that need to change. But the thing that suffers now in Deadfire are the combats because of the dearth of consequence, i.e. 9/10 fights do not require me to do any actual decision-making. Also, I didn't pay much attention to the game pre-release because I wanted to do a first playthrough as blind as possible. But ya, kudos to you for being prescient.

Ok, you want a number? I finished PoE1 three times. Once on Normal, then on Veteran with a custom party, then on PotD with a custom party. On PotD, I wrote down in my Notes every location of camping supplies I found and couldn't pick up, and returned to pick them up about 50 % of the game (only really stopped for White March II and the second part of the main campaign). Due to min/maxing, my damage dealers were cold-blooded killers, but squishy, which I addressed by making one of them semi-focused on CC (Cipher) and by taking on an off-tank. In harder fights (and I don't just mean bounties or bosses, a good deal of Endless Paths and White March I and II fell into this category) or fights that did not exactly go my way, it wasn't rare to force an immediate rest after to clear out key injuries on my DPS or to replenish health or key abilities. By the end of the game, I mopped up all but one camping supply stack that I found in the first half of the game and I regularly went to inns or stronghold for key resting bonuses to make my DPS more efficient or pass important stat checks. I'd backtrack every time I ran out of camping supplies, which happened every few hours on PotD. Yes, it is a thing. That happens. To humans. Endless Paths is clearly designed to be a dungeon that you leave and come back to. The fact that it took place there seems to me a testament to the game matching the designers' intent. That's why Endless Paths had the master staircase, to give you an easy way to jump back into it, and also to give you a "goal" to try to push for while you're in the dungeon. White March is the same. I get the sense that the designers never intended players to clear out total areas (i.e. Russetwood and the ogre dungeon, "Durgan's Battery" and its three dungeons) in one go. That's why Galvino gives you a quest to go back to town. That's why the rogue NPC's quest sends you back to Russetwood. That's why there's a second round of bounties. The dragon is clearly not intended to be fought on most players' first visit to Longwatch Falls, even though some skilled players could do this. This is why even the bear cave is a much tougher fight than the rest of Valewood, the designers were trying to teach the players this principle from the very beginning. I'm also not talking about resting at inns *before* setting out again into the wilderness or dungeons. Obviously everyone did that. It's not part of the tedious mechanic (traversing empty maps, loading screens) people are talking about when they're talking about abandoning dungeons. But what I'm talking about is did people bail out of Cliaban Rilag in the middle of it? Did people bail out of Raedric's hold in the middle of it? Regularly? It's clear, to me anyways, that the designers always intended entire hostile zones (i.e. a map location + every dungeon/cave within it) to be re-visited by the players, instead of clearing everything in one trip like you regularly did in the Baldur's Gate games. This is why I think it's important to measure the *frequency* issue here. If people are complaining about needing to go back to town while doing the Endless Paths, the White March or that you can't clear everything in Dyrford Crossing in one trip, well, that's what was intended. And they'd have to go back and forth, even without the battle and attrition mechanics, simply to complete quest objectives!

To clear this one up...you don't have to rest spam to run out of Camping Supplies. On PotD, you can carry 2 Camping Supplies at a time. So yes, there were plenty of occasions where I'd be walking past 2 or 3 stacks of camping supplies, wondering why the hell I'd need them in the given area. Then I'd be in a more difficult area, like in Endless Paths a bit earlier than is healthy, and I'd camp twice on one level and need to backtrack a couple of levels to pick up what I left behind. And not due to ability spam, mind you, but because of health. Some classes get a better deal on health:endurance ratio than others, and if you dip your toes in min/maxing, your DPS class, with poor health:endurance ratio will have little in terms of HP and defense, relying on your tanks and cc to keep things in order. If stuff goes sideways, it's not rare for your DPS to get laid out twice in a fight, essentially depleting the majority of their health and inflicting some rather debilitating injuries that need clearing up for them to be effective as DPS. In addition to that, it only takes one unfortunate fight to force you to rest to get your squishies back up. Now say there was a stat check that you were making your way towards. Now you gotta haul butt back to the inn to reacquire to bonus to pass the stat check you were going for in the first place. Potions of Infuse with Vital Essence are your friend here. You can craft them cheaply. A great sign of how attrition systems force the player to use in-game mechanics to solve problems by the way. Does anyone need to craft anything in Deadfire?

If you can't articulate your points beyond "This is my taste", then you're not actually trying to make constructive arguments and you're not adding anything to the thread. You're also not taking the measure of any game mechanic. Again, in my original post, I did not just make a generic comment about how the combat/dungeon crawling is weaker in Deadfire, I wrote about how *specific* challenges cannot exist and how dungeon/wilderness design is limited to narrower experience because of it. Your pushback in this thread hasn't gone beyond vague attacks on others and vague rejections of others' suggestions.

This is excellent and I think an important point. People talk about backtracking on dungeons in PoE1 but I'm skeptical many players actually did this. I asked previously for people saying that this happened to tell me how *frequently* it happened and, unless I missed it, got no one saying anything. Pointing out that things *can* happen under a certain system, while ignoring the *frequency* which they actually happened is a derailing tactic.

If you don't want a game that ever frustrates you, play story mode. Deadfire has plenty of options for players who merely want to march through the game without resistance. But what is universally acknowledged, is that the high level difficulty isn't difficult. This is acknowledged even by the developers. I don't understand why you've insisted in participating in this thread in an entirely negative way about game changes that are unlikely to affect or affect significantly the level you enjoy playing at. There is a difference between challenge and difficulty and frustration. One is good; the other is bad. They are to some degree subjective, but that's why you work with large sources of data (like telemetry from beta testers) and make choices based on large portions of your fan base. Literally everything you posted does not sound difficult and challenging, it sounds annoying and frustrating. That's just my opinion, of course. Except the two of you have merely posted assertions and not actual arguments. You haven't articulated in any way how my suggestions would be "frustrating" and "not challenging".

If you don't want a game that ever frustrates you, play story mode. Deadfire has plenty of options for players who merely want to march through the game without resistance. But what is universally acknowledged, is that the high level difficulty isn't difficult. This is acknowledged even by the developers. I don't understand why you've insisted in participating in this thread in an entirely negative way about game changes that are unlikely to affect or affect significantly the level you enjoy playing at.

I want to thank everyone for adding some really insightful comments on this thread. I'd especially call out the long Marcus post on page 7 as worth the time it took to read. I do think the roots of a strategic layer exist in Deadfire that could, if tweaked, bring back some of the challenge that the original had. So I wanted to throw out some suggestions. Some of these might only be applicable on the higher difficulty settings. These are just some thoughts after continuing on in Deadfire but also after taking up a session of the original game recently. 1. Encounters and enemy AI really needs to focus on scoring knockdowns. If this happened at a pretty frequent rate, it would make the wounds system superior to the original's health system. An across the board damage increase or a nerfing of healing options could help here. 2. Food needs a redesign. Food should be more expensive but also more limited in curing injuries. Perhaps the solution is to have only recipe foods cure injuries. And you can't rest unless you feed everyone at least something. Players might be extra loathe to squander certain bonuses from the food to cure just one injury in the party, for example. 3. Ship crew wages should be greatly increased and should be charged more often. This will help create a tension between resting alot to cure injuries and wanting to wrap up a dungeon or island crawl ASAP. Right now this is a nominal, nearly meaningless fee. 4. The high seas should be more dangerous. There would have to be a certain grace period after the first island before this kicks in. But something needs to be there to motivate the player to spend money on their ship and crew so that changes in 2 and 3 have more bite. These above changes would really change the dynamic of setting out from Neketaka in a cool, immersive way, imo. Player would have to plan ahead for their dangerous voyages and would regularly return to the game world's hub as a place of refuge to restock for the next adventure. 5. Empowers need a tweak. I'm not smart enough to give specific advice here. But something should happen that motivates players to use empowers more frequently. Perhaps give them more diverse uses. But as they are essentially Deadfire's "per rest" ability, the game will benefit greatly if players are using them more frequently and thus treating them the way they did high-level "per rest" spells and abilities in the original. Right now I'm only using these as emergency party wipe avoidance. It's possible this last point becomes moot if encounters are redesigned to be more dangerous in general. I'll reiterate, some of these suggestions might only work for players on the higher difficulties.

My point is that both encounter designs can and did exist in the original and engaged in the player. Only the latter can in Deadfire. That's basically it. Edit addition: As well a whole rich grey area between those extremes existed in the original (especially in White March as Taurus notes). Deadfire's design means only the "BF" extreme can possibly engage the player with combat challenge now.

You're still missing an important point. And I wish people would stop talking about over-leveling so much in this thread. It's a red herring. In all these CRPGs, *even if you were at-level for the content*, dungeon and wilderness areas could still offer you a variety of sizes of fights where all of them could still be engaging for the player. Because of Deadfire's extreme focus on per encounter, the kinds of dungeon/wilderness crawling experiences it can offer are going to be less varied. And this limited variety in combat challenges is ultimately going to give this game a shorter shelf life.

Except this is demonstrably un-true. I've been playing crpgs since BG first came out, and I've had to re-load fights because I've wiped a few times on Normal dificulty. I mean no offense, but it's not possible that you're having this issue and using the game's systems effectively. The game's difficulty is very low at the moment -- a point that has wide support among not only fans here but also conceded by the designers themselves. Are you casting all your spells in these fights? Are you upgrading gear? I'm playing on veteran, have yet to wipe, and haven't even upgraded my main character's weapon. Most of the fights only require me to attack-move essentially. The few hard seeming fights require nothing more than casting those high level spells then attack-move mop up.

Unfortunately, your initial post logically creates instant clash of philosophies... Due to leveling up, low level fights become cakewalks. With the current per-encounter design style, those are meaningless cakewalks ( well made point in your OP) As far as I can see there's only really 2 ways to address this: 1. auto level up everything lower to your level. 2. have some kind of attrition that makes even low level fights meaningful. These two solutions appeal to incompatible psychologies, hence the discussion degenerating into drawing lines in the sand. I'd be interested in hearing if anybody else has any other suggestions (asides from "better encounter design" which isn't meaningful) One thing I want to add, is that the original game offered a dungeon/wilderness area a greater variety of challenges. Let's put over-leveling aside for just a second. In the original, designers could create either very very difficult battles that would require using your best abilities in order to overcome a fight, or it could throw multiple, smaller challenges at you that encouraged you to manage your resources over multiple battles. And a wide grey area between these extremes. In Deadfire, because it's so easy to wipe away the effects of every battle, the game is doomed to narrower dungeon and wilderness variety. Now, when we add back in over-leveling to the equation. The original game's attrition systems still have something to offer. Even when you were over-leveled for an area, the game was still chipping away at those long-term resources and you'd usually still be forced to rest. So, instead of a dungeon requiring two rests, if you were over-leveled you could do it with one rest, for a hypothetical example. Obviously, I'm not talking about being extremely over leveled. This actually helped the game's non-linearity, imo. As you could be over leveled but still feel the game's systems pushing back against your over leveled characters. As for people talking about how the previous rest system was tedious or a chore, I guess I'm at a loss for understanding. Were people actually frequently abandoning dungeons in the original to go back to town? I'm genuinely curious. This wasn't my experience. With the exception of Caed Nua (which is designed to be that way) I don't remember frequently pulling out of dungeons to go all the way back to town. Now, I did have the experience of not clearing whole map areas (for example the Dyrford wilderness and its dungeons) in one go, but I think the game was designed to have those areas be visited more than once. And camping outside wasn't tedious at all. You clicked the button, clicked the past the cutscene and boom, it's over in seconds. On the other hand, the same old combat that you know you're going to win and you're casting the same high level spells as you did in the previous dozen fights... those last longer than a few seconds.

People seem to have missed the initial points in the OP and I encourage some of the folks criticizing per rest and attrition systems to re-read my original post. I made very specific criticisms of what is going on in Deadfire that aren't being rebutted. Instead, some folks are insisting on talking about these systems in a vague, general way. Specifically the bite-sized encounter problem. Right now, any player who takes even a cursory effort to learn the game's systems is *never* going to be challenged by any encounter that isn't maximum difficulty. And without significant changes to something in the game, this is a problem that will remain. This is most of the game's combat encounters! That strikes me as a significant problem.

I cannot disagree more with this post. First of all, hack and slash games rely upon testing the player's skill in a realtime setting. However, realtime with pause is not the same thing. Realtime with pause is designed to test thoughtful tactics and strategy, it is essentially a less tedious way of having turn-based combat. Hack and slash games are about testing quick reflexes and quick thinking. This is a significant thing to misunderstand. Second, restriction can indeed equal great gameplay. If all the pawns on a chessboard could move like a queen, the game would not have the same level of strategic depth and never would have become a timeless classic. Games are *all* about restricting the player. Too much restriction or too little restriction isn't a virtuous characteristic of a game in of itself. Whether restrictions or freedoms work for the game is what matters. Again, this is a significant thing to misunderstand.

I also played a decent chunk of XCOM 2. Without any Deadfire story spoilers, but perhaps giving away a gameplay element I can tell you, that early game is a breeze but you could easily make your mid-game hard for a stretch by using the visible quest difficulty markers to tackle harder areas first. Thus maybe skipping the low level sidequests entirely in your first playthrough?

I'm going to have to disagree with this characterization of how dungeon crawls went down in much of the original game. A number of dungeons did not have typical trash mobs leading up to one final boss fight. As I said in the OP, the temple of Eothas is one example. Another pair of dungeons like this are the catacombs below Copperlane and the Ciant Lis (sp?) ruins. Neither dungeon has a traditional "final boss". Moreover, even dungeons/sequences that did have a true final fight such as Raedric's hold also had several fight where you most definitely had to engage at a higher level even if not total max effort, such as the animancer in his dungeon, some of the guards on the rooftop areas, should you chose to engage in those fights. And again, I think you should trust me on this. The "fun" of seeing "all the awesomeness of your characters" in *every single* fight is not going to be a sustainable kind of fun, at least imo.

I think the gap between players here is so big it's difficult to bridge. A lot of players, as you say, find it a 'chore' to prepare for combat, use their resources efficiently, and fight a big challenge every single fight. I don't say this as an insult - it's not my business to judge how you play. But as someone who gets incredibly bored and frustrated when I realise I could just win these fights not using half the available resources or spamming left click, I feel like my style of play has not been served well by these changes. To me, "making every encounter efficient" is the fun, and without it, I feel like I'm playing chess against a 3 year old and wondering why I'm bothering. Again, that describes a certain group of players, who are no more or less legitimate than others. I do wish they made the game easier to mod on this front, i.e. easy to edit variables for things like enemy HP, empowers / power sources per level, things like that. Appreciate much of what you said here. I just want to agree with what you said about synergies here. I'm not necessarily against any individual mechanical change itself -- health, wounds, per encounter casts, limited camping. But all of them together have resulted in removing a level of depth that the original game had.

These are also good points. And I'm not ready to totally give up on combat, it could be improved. I want to focus on one suggestion you made which gets at the core of what I was originally trying to say: "If they want to, to make every fight difficult enough for you to actually have to use the abilities you have." Making every fight in the game the same difficulty is exactly the design problem that has doomed the game. A monotone combat difficulty doesn't seem like a good recipe for sustained fun in what's supposed to be a long and epic RPG. But it's precisely the *only* way they can now make combat challenging given the decision to remove most of the consequences between combats, such as spell loss, ability loss, health, etc.

So I do agree with this in part. The most difficult fights in the game are an improvement over the original. But I think your post itself gives away a long-term problem of the combat system and its related mechanics. As you say, the challenges were when you were underleveled. That's going to be a vast minority of the fights. And it means the game is not going to lend itself to the deep replayability that the original had. Why try out different classes and different builds if 90% of the combats don't offer the player any reason to actually engage in tactical creativity?

Could you elaborate? I can perhaps see the "chore" part, as combat required more of the player's attention in the original. But, since most fights in Deadfire do not reward or punish the player for paying attention and actually using tactics, I'm failing to see how most combats are actually interesting in Deadfire?