vnth

I don't know which difficulty you played on either but BG 1 and 2 were a breeze in comparison to PK. In the former, corerules was a little more difficult than normal. In PK, weak is closer to corerules than normal. And even on weak the endgame difficulty spikes can still do a number on you. If you played the game on the early patches, you pretty much have to figured out the sliders yourself and changed it every so often. Presumably the idea is for you to come up with a better strategy or buff up every time you failed, which is very much typical in any other game. Somehow it didn't occur to Owlcat that doesn't work well in a pnp rpg, when you are not supposed to redo things when things went wrong. If you want to role play, that is just not possible, because it is impossible to tell when to accept your bad rolls and when you need come up with a better strategy.

Well, just answer this. If you hypothetically got your companions permanently killed, would you accept that as part of the game realism or reload your save? I don't think there's anything particular unusual about what I said. Even someone with a lot of goodwill toward the game (such as myself) would have difficulty calling it good (like I do).

It fails in the manner I just said the sentences before. Just how should people approach encounters and whether should they accept perma death? Again, as I also have said already, I do like the game and I have finished it quite a few times. If I haven't even finished it wouldn't that made me less qualified to say whether the game is good or bad? But liking something doesn't preclude seeing its problems. Different people can tolerate different things. Just because I can forgive the game's mistakes doesn't mean I can recommend it to others who might not share my sensibilities.

As I already said, whether something is an issue for you or anyone personally is irrelevant because different people can tolerate different things. Criticism should speak to the objective nature of the design that affects everyone. What's important is how the devs themselves think the game should be played? How should people approach encounters? If you get yourself into a very dicey situation and got your companions killed, are you supposed to just accept that as a legitimate feature of the game? The game is bad because it failed to help players differentiate between their legitimate mistakes and cheesing. As a rule, balancing is a very tricky business without level scaling. Adding randomness to it all is just asking for trouble.

How often you or I or anyone save scum is neither here nor there. I speak to the nature of the design. The issue is that if you are expected to do it at all then how are you supposed to know when not to do it? If you face any kind of problem, how do you know that it's because of you doing something wrong or that it's just supposed to be that hard?

I imagine that's how it is in the pnp. Personally, I hated it but then I also hate the whole dice roll thing.

Well, you would, for instance, receive permanent damage way before you have greater restoration and heal spells or have the money to buy those scrolls . Generally speaking, how difficult you find the game often depends on how you play it. Even the hardest encounters are quite tolerable if you know before hand what you are facing. Except often time the only way for you to know is by reloading your save. There is no retreat from combat option. But if reloading is necessary then what's the point with the whole dice roll thing? Once you start reloading saves, you are going to do that with everything whenever you got a cripplingly bad roll, which renders the whole premise of the game into a pointless time sink. Did you finish the game? If not... boy are you in for some surprises with difficulty spikes. With all of these issues, combining with no customizable tactics despite incredibly dumb AI, I'd say it'd take a lot of goodwill to call the game good, or even decent, let alone great.

Actually, that game's biggest problem is that Owlcat has never figured out what the game is supposed to be. At times it tries to replicate an authentic pnp experience where the player is supposed to get on with the bad rolls, but then it also takes save reloading into design consideration. The result is the numerous well-known balancing issues, difficulty spikes, and other "realism" nonsense. This is really sad, because I actually do like the game, and the dev's ambition is admirable. Ultimately, however, calling the game great is kinda laughable. The game is badly made from both conceptual and technical standpoints. The only good thing is the story (minus the companions), and the story isn't original.