Multihog

This whole thread is pretty silly. The entire point of Path of the Damned, and Veteran to a lesser extent, is to provide the player with a tactical challenge, to put his skills and character builds to the test. The game failed to deliver that at launch, and was instead a breeze, so now the developers are addressing that issue. I doubt they are "changing the game for the pleasure of minority" as I don't think many people would object to free, high-effort post-release development such as this. I also never understood this infatuation with some of the broken and poorly balanced aspects of BG2. Sure, you could finish the whole game by spamming cloudkill and closing the door to the room, but where's the fun in that? To me—and probably anyone who picks Path of the Damned—games are fun when they're challenging, and stop being fun as soon as they're not. Blowing stuff up effortlessly is fun on the first time but gets old by the third. For those who aren't even seeking particularly challenging combat, there're the Classic, Relaxed, and Story difficulties.

If your build was based on exploiting something overpowered, then too bad. Besides, you're exaggerating here. There will never be such a dramatic change that one would need to start a new playthrough. Also, the game is easy enough that it's probably impossible to make a character weak by skill distribution only, and it's not like these changes will affect the attributes in any meaningful way. Saying "when the build you're using suddenly stops working at all" is nonsense. Obviously, what these changes aim to do is bring the overpowered stuff in line with the rest, not render them entirely useless. Fine-tuning the balance is absolutely worth it in the long run. New people will still be picking up the game 10 years down the road, and they all will benefit from these changes—as will everybody else who appreciates challenging combat. It's not worth it to leave the game in a sub-optimal state just so that someone's broken build's OPness can be preserved. Moreover, these changes only affect the Veteran and PotD difficulties as far as I know. The alternative is that PoE2 will go down in history as as something that's otherwise solid but suffers from poor balance and difficulty. Making sure that doesn't happen massively outweighs preserving the full power of those few OP builds that some people may be using in their playthroughs.

This is one of the stupidest arguments in existence in regards to balance. Why does it not matter if the balance issues only affect my game? You think it's fine if playing a certain character class removes any semblance of challenge from the game and if that class clearly stands above other classes in terms of sheer power? Saying the player should balance the game himself by avoiding certain tools the game gives him is completely asinine. It's not up to the player to make sure he's not using the overpowered parts of the game nor is it his job to rebalance it with mods. What if I really like some part of the game, but said part is game-breakingly overpowered? Now I need to avoid utilizing it in order to retain some sense of challenge in the game, which is a requirement for me to even enjoy the game. How can you not see these problems? Challenge absolutely matters, competitive game or not. This is a GAME, not a visual novel. The game challenging the player is an integral part of any game.

That's all I wanted buddy, that's all I wanted. =P ? This has nothing to do with comdemning anyone specific, and if you are feel you are being condemned that's completely on you as I never mentioned you or anyones names, You stated that you "tried to be constructive 3 months ago and were shouted down by inferior intellects." Now, you're taking it out on people who had nothing to do with whatever problems you had 3 months ago. Yes, you are condemning the whole forum. I never said "anyone specific." You think highly of yourself and obviously think you posses superior intelligence compared to most people, yet you fail to see that simple connection. You really need to be cut down to size. Enough about this, though, as it has nothing to do with the topic of the thread.

Yeah, the old narrator was good. I never even acknowledged the narration in the first game because it worked well and felt natural. The narrator in PoE2 is anything but that and immediately stuck out, and not in a good way. As some people already mentioned, it's severely overacted.

I don't even know you mate, but I'm curious on what you said to sound so resentful now and make your post a bit more productive and with more context. There is no point in being constructive, I tried to be constructive about 3 months ago and was ganged up on by inferior intellects and shouted down. So just because you had a bad experience with certain individuals 3 months ago, you've condemned the entire user base of this forum for good and now attempt to use that as justification for hostile posting? I'm afraid that's not how it works. Chances are that you're largely talking to different people now. Also, "inferior intellects." lol.

In the same way I despised vampires and other level-draining creatures for the way they'd force me to have to re-select my spells to memorize all over again. Really? It was that bad? I played the original BG2 and other IE games back in the day, but having played the Enhanced Editions ever since they came out, I had completely forgotten about this. Wow, that was a major inconvenience. Regarding gear being dropped on death, it's always fun to have 3+ party members die in battle in the IE games. The rule I've set for myself is that I'm not allowed to load if one or two party members die, but I will load if 3+ die in the same fight because I don't want to spend 5 minutes re-equipping my characters. Not having having any means of resurrection with me makes it worse because I need to haul all their gear back to a temple.

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. Yeah, I feel the same way. I only had to backtrack to an inn a couple of times on PotD, but when that happened, it was extremely irritating because the loading screens are frequent and take forever. And yes, you make a good point about health. It doesn't necessarily require spell spamming to be forced to rest. When your front liners' main health pools run out, you WILL rest. After this has happened a couple of times, enjoy your backtrack.

Correct, but it has some heavy RPG elements and provided nice contrast to how cRPG's operate pertaining to lasting consequence from battles, so I decided to mention it. But yeah, I don't see anything wrong with a binary result in battles, meaning you either win, or it's a game over. This is how almost all games operate, anyway. Sure, some games benefit from more emphasis on resource management and attrition, but others don't. It depends on how well those systems fit in with the design of the game overall and whether they add anything positive. In cRPGs in general, party members dying mid-battle often spirals the situation out of control anyway and results in the rest of the party dying. Is it really needed, or desirable, that you're severely crippled after an intense, close battle in addition to drinking multiple potions, etc? I don't think so. I also don't think that every battle needs to be an equal threat or equally draining to your resources, regardless of per encounter or per rest. I don't mind killing some trash between the more significant fights.

Then I suppose most cRPG's don't have this "essence" you speak of because they either impose no resting limit, have no limit to casting spells other than cooldown, are per encounter-based like PoE 2, or just have no penalty for dying (other than game over) - All the Infinity Engine games have unlimited resting, BG1/2, IWD1/2, PS:T. You can spam healing/resting freely until your health is full. Spells are refreshed. Occasionally, mobs will spawn when you rest, but they're easily stomped. - Neverwinter Nights only has a short waiting time as a penalty for resting, no real limits. Spells are refreshed for free. No attrition. - Divinity: Original Sin 1 has no resting, but you have unlimited healing and spells are per encounter, so there's no attrition of any kind. - Divinity: Original Sin 2 is fully per encounter with automatic healing post-combat (if I remember correctly.) - Dragon Age: Origins is per encounter, like D:OS2. Yeah, you get some injuries if party members die, but injury kits are overabundant. - KOTOR barely has any consequence for dying iirc. You just have to use some medkits, of which I always had more than enough on the hardest difficulty, and/or spam the healing force power for free. If the game doesn't consider the area you're in a "dangerous area" (mostly only applied to underground areas, as far as I can remember) you can instantly teleport to your hideout and back with full health. All of these games suffer from the same "problem" if you scrutinize them. What consequence is there from fights in these games other than maybe having a couple healing potions less? You either get wiped, or the fight had next to no consequence. DA:O has an injury system, but I always found it extremely trivial and was swimming in injury kits, which were also inexpensive. I guess the Infinity Engine games MAY have some consequence to dying if you aren't high enough level yet to cast Raise Dead (or whatever the priest resurrection spell was called). In BG2 you may have to use charges of your resurrection rod, and in others you may need to use temples to resurrect people, which is quite substantial due to having to walk there, actually. So yeah, there's something in the early game, I guess. But Jagged Alliance 2 is like the only RPG with significant, potentially devastating, and lasting consequences for having a bad fight—injuries that can take weeks in game to heal and may have caused temporary or permanent stat loss, having to use lots of medical supplies and time for healing, permanent deaths, destroyed armor and other gear, wasted ammo, etc—but it's not really a cRPG in the same sense. EDIT: Actually, the Infinity Engine games have one very severe consequence for party members dying: having to pick up all your gear from the ground and re-equip it. That's a major inconvenience but hardly by design a punishment for dying. It's more of a silly design choice the devs made for whatever reason.

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? POE2 combat seems to require more micro something I really enjoy. POE1 really did not. Uh, PoE1 did require a lot of micro, at least on Path of the Damned.

In order of importance: give me good characters with remarkable development, good combat with tons of spells to choose from to tailor my own playstyle, and a half-decent story. Characters/companions >>>>> story. Oh yeah, it's also super important that companions knowledge each other's existence, and interact.

Reinstalled BG2EE, and a bunch of mods via the Big World Setup mod manager. That's a super handly tool: it has a database of nearly every BG2 mod in existence, and you just choose from a list what you want. It'll automatically download the mods, install them, and solve any conflicts. I've yet to finish PoE2, but I find the writing of PoE2 pretty boring—I'm exploring Neketaka right now, so there's a lot of it—so I started yet another BG2 run. Never gets old. I'll keep alternating between PoE2 and BG2.

I'm thinking it simply means attacking. The reason I'm thinking it must simply mean attacking/being attacked is because there is no other condition for that. "Engaging" obviously refers to the Engagement mechanic, but there must also be something for the situation when someone is attacking but NOT Engaging—or the more likely scenario is that Threatening also includes Engaging. Not all enemies are capable of Engagement, right? Threatening fits the bill. So, Threatening = Attacking. At least that's what makes the most sense to me. What I still don't know is whether Threatening excludes Engaging enemies. I hope it doesn't because it would be kind of silly and cumbersome to always make rules for both Engaging and Threatening separately if you want to include both. I'd imagine most of the time people would want to include both, and it would be a special case when people only want to target enemies who are attacking but NOT Engaging. It's a serious flaw that this stuff isn't properly documented, though. It shouldn't be up to the player to figure out what these conditions mean. Like why not just call it "Attacking" or "Targeting?" "Threatening" is like the most vague thing possible and particularly confusing due to "threat" usually referring to some sort of aggro mechanic.

You should try Darkest Dungeon if you haven't yet. That game is attrition-heavy, in a good way. Amazing combat too.

As much as I like the non-combat music, I'll have to agree on this one. The combat music sounds like it's a little bit subdued, afraid to go all out. To me, it seems like the idea was to have a sense of unity between the whole of the OST, so the combat music is kind of trying to stay in line with the non-combat music, which led it to having this neutral, almost relaxing vibe tonally. There's some darkness in combat #2, but that's about it. Another thing about the combat music is that the tracks lack any remarkable progression in terms of form. They're all based on some sort of rhythmic motive that they keep up near-continuously throughout the track without much change. They're also tonally quite static, repeating the same ostinati, bass patterns, and chord progressions throughout, sometimes melodies dropping in and out. All of this leads to a lack of sense of progression and tension/release. The tracks sort of feel like intros that never go anywhere. To demonstrate my point about form. This track never really takes the listener anywhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EHwOgHlub4 This one has a definite sense of progression and feels dynamic, rising tension: EDIT: typos @Ninjamestari: You call this circlejerking?

Good points! I definitely agree that tying everything to attrition, or the amount of camping supplies the player has at his disposal, isn't good either. Another good point you made is that encounter difficulty is by necessity toned down for most fights because it can't operate under the assumption that the party is rested for every battle. I think that overall, per encounter is a step in the right direction. It removes the element of having to save up your spells constantly. I'm enjoying this newfound freedom in spell casting. I may not be able to nuke as hard, but I can at least nuke at a consistent level without feeling hesitant about it and wondering if I could've used less spells in the previous fight. I think the lack of difficulty stems from the encounters themselves, not the absence of attrition bogging you down in dungeon crawling—or at least that's how it should be.

Sure, but getting random injuries just from getting hit doubles it. It's like taking random, undodgeable homing bullets in an FPS game that cripple your aim just to make the game harder. There are ways to introduce consequence and difficulty. This isn't it. This is simple random inconvenience and annoyance that's outside of the player's influence other than by upgrading armor—and even then you're at the mercy of RNG. The consequence and difficulty comes from mitigating the chance of injury. It makes in combat buffing important, it makes in combat healing more important. You might need to make the injuries a little less... injurious, but I think in this sense it increases consequence of actions ( where healing and per encounter actions have reduced them). However, I get what your saying that if it's low probability and somehow the computer rolls 3 graze injuries in a row, that would leave someone fuming. Dota 2 has an interesting mechanic where each hit modifies RNG chance, so you're guaranteed a "random chance" in a certain numbere of hits, something similar could be done. IE , 5 crits increase injury chance. I still see that as a bad thing because it would pigeonhole the player into always beginning combat with the same sequence of buffs. It would undermine more aggressive openings and other playstyles by necessitating defensive buffing or running the risk of suffering random injuries. I simply fail to see how that would be a good addition in any way, especially with the game not allowing pre-buffing or long-term buffing. The same mechanics still exist currently, either buffing is meaningful or its not, whether or not that means more crits for you or less grazes for the enemy (currently) or more injuries (suggested). I think its the magnitude of the injury that puts you off, and that can be mitigated by making injuries not autokill and maybe nerfing them a bit. The most important thing is somehow adding more elements to the current combat that are meaningful for the next one. I'm also a big fan of making combat results thematically meangingful, rather than having an auto health bar go up and down, injuries are far more interesting. It links the combat to the story to have your character push through a broken rib and a bruised eye to finish of a deep dungeon, rather than auto healing each time. How about every time a character suffers 3 crits, ( with 3 hits being 1 crit and 3 grazes being 1 hit ) = one injury? Yes, I prefer the current state. It's not the magnitude; it's the whole idea of receiving random injuries from normal blows in a game where fights are spent mostly standing still and trading blows. You're doing nothing more than introducing yet another RNG-element which the player can only minimally influence by casting defensive buffs and upgrading armor. It adds nothing more than a redundant inconvenience of an RNG-lottery into the game. It adds no tactical depth whatsoever. There's no "fun" here nor does it incorporate any interesting gameplay. All it adds is a potential annoyance that occurs every now and then, that the player then has to deal with or be hindered by. The only counterplay to that is casting defensive buffs and equipping armor, both of which you will probably do anyway. So all your suggestion essentially adds is a chance to receive random injuries for the sake or what? Artificial difficulty? Artificially increased use for medical supplies in order to remove the injuries? I see no gameplay added whatsoever unless you count opening the resting menu and removing the random injuries gameplay. Adding elements is one thing, but adding for the sake of adding is not conducive to good combat. As for your second point, yes, I can see how that makes sense from a realism standpoint; I mean, you should get injured in combat. But I'm afraid it doesn't contribute enough in terms of interesting gameplay to warrant this change. (IMO. I'm not trying to assert absolute truth here. These are all just ideas after all)

Sure, but getting random injuries just from getting hit doubles it. It's like taking random, undodgeable homing bullets in an FPS game that cripple your aim just to make the game harder. There are ways to introduce consequence and difficulty. This isn't it. This is simple random inconvenience and annoyance that's outside of the player's influence other than by upgrading armor—and even then you're at the mercy of RNG. The consequence and difficulty comes from mitigating the chance of injury. It makes in combat buffing important, it makes in combat healing more important. You might need to make the injuries a little less... injurious, but I think in this sense it increases consequence of actions ( where healing and per encounter actions have reduced them). However, I get what your saying that if it's low probability and somehow the computer rolls 3 graze injuries in a row, that would leave someone fuming. Dota 2 has an interesting mechanic where each hit modifies RNG chance, so you're guaranteed a "random chance" in a certain numbere of hits, something similar could be done. IE , 5 crits increase injury chance. I still see that as a bad thing because it would pigeonhole the player into always beginning combat with the same sequence of buffs. It would undermine more aggressive openings and other playstyles by necessitating defensive buffing or running the risk of suffering random injuries. I simply fail to see how that would be a good addition in any way, especially with the game not allowing pre-buffing or long-term buffing.

Yes, not a fan of "random" injuries... but I like the rest of his idea... Imagine the same as the current system (injuries from knock-outs, traps & scripted events), with his idea of only clearing one injury per rest - Rests in taverns, and on your ship (for while you're out exploring) clears all injuries. I like it... Yeah, I can get behind that. I'm all for resting in taverns granting greater benefits (more than just the stat bonuses.) Gives them more purpose.

Sure, but getting random injuries just from getting hit doubles it. It's like taking random, undodgeable homing bullets in an FPS game that cripple your aim just to make the game harder. There are ways to introduce consequence and difficulty. This isn't it. This is simple random inconvenience and annoyance that's outside of the player's influence other than by upgrading armor—and even then you're at the mercy of RNG.

^ Random injuries from getting hit? Not a fan of that. How exactly do you avoid getting hit in this game? It'll be just pure RNG. Not good. It's not some Dark Souls, where you can dodge hits with good mechanical skill. It's a game of the dice.

It hasn't happened to me since I started using the beta, which I guess now is the live patch. I've also disabled Steam overlay, though.

Right on BTW I love Dark Souls. It's my favorite game of all time, and I adore it's use of music in that you almost never hear it unless it's a boss, shrine, or cutscene (which there are very few of). It was very courageous of From Software to make that creative choice, I can almost guarantee there were people on the development and publishing side asking why there wasn't more music. Expertly crafted sonic experiences even though they are so simple. Agreed. I never even actually gave that much thought, but you're absolutely right. The absence of music in most parts definitely made it more impactful when it did play. That sad strings piece is a big part of Firelink Shrine for me. Speaking of courageous design choices, Dark Souls certainly is full of those, and that's what made it stand out. None of it feels forced either. Everything just works.

It's all good. Music of the game was a central topic in the thread all along, and it was very interesting to hear from the composer himself!