Althernai

I recently purchased the Star Wars Humble Bundle and it included a lot of old games including the original Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). I've played it before, but I don't remember when exactly (2004? 2005? it was definitely around a decade ago) and my memories of it were very vague, though I did clearly remember some of the most striking features of the story such as the main plot twist. I liked this game a lot at the time and I decided to replay it to see if it was still good today. The answer to that is "Mostly, yes." The rest of this post is a rather long explanation of why this is the case. First, some technical details in case anyone wants to play the Steam version; the game is from 2003 and it did not work well on my Windows 7, Radeon 6770M laptop out-of-the-box. The main problem is with the pre-rendered movies; whenever any of these would end (including the ones during startup), there was about a 50% chance that the game would either minimize itself or disable the mouse or both. The hack I found online was to add AllowWindowedMode=1 to swkotor.ini and then switch to windowed mode whenever a movie came up -- for some reason, they look better in windowed mode anyway -- and then back to full screen once the game returned to standard gameplay. Also, I had to disable the Grass setting since the grass wasn't showing, but some very strange graphical artifacts were. Other than that, it actually looked pretty good for something released in 2003: yes, the polygons are visible, but the art is stylized and well drawn so the antiquity of the graphics is not very noticeable. Interface, Combat and Structure The next feature that shows up is also not very pleasant: the interface. I remember disliking it a decade ago and it most certainly has not improved with time. It was obviously made for consoles, but in fact I played KOTOR II on the XBox and I found the interface to be even worse so it's just plain bad. Basically, you have one slot dedicated to each type of actions (1: Attack mode, 2: Offensive force power, 3: Grenade, 4: Defensive or buff force power, 5: Utility items, 6: Healing items, 7: Mines), but your selections for these slots are common for all party members with the relevant ability and do not persist across area transitions. Also, there are 3 characters in your party, but since movement is keyboard-only, you can only direct the movement of one of them at a time (thus making any tactics such as splitting up in the face of a powerful melee opponent impossible). Each character does have a queue of actions and some rudimentary scripts, but in general, combat is pretty awkward and even out of combat they sometimes forget to follow the player character which is quite annoying since by the time I realize it, I'm usually halfway across the map from them. The long-list inventory is also pretty annoying. Combat is based on a fairly simple system D20 system and it is mediocre at best. I remember it being very easy so I set it to the highest difficulty, but KOTOR's idea of a high difficulty is to give enemies tons of hit points and also make them dish out tons of damage so that a single critical hit from a powerful enemy can easily do more than half of a character's total HP in damage. I think they also use more grenades than they otherwise would have. The game was challenging early on because, knowing that a class change is coming, I built my character with high Wisdom and Charisma and also refrained from leveling up past 5. This caused a problem because the game likes to occasionally force the protagonist to do things alone. In particular, the final fight of the Taris dueling arena (Bendak Starkiller) was probably the hardest fight in the game for this playthrough. I wound up giving up on fighting him directly and simply burned through my supply of grenades and shields to beat him. Once the PC got force powers, the game becomes easy even with the high HP, high damage enemies. After I got Force Wave and Master Speed, I could beat pretty much everything with just the main character. I guess the game deserves props for allowing you to use skills like Repair and Computers to kill enemies, but honestly, it's probably faster to just slaughter them the old-fashioned way. So, given that the interface is bad and the combat is mediocre at best, why is the game good? For one thing, if you play the way I do, combat takes up a relatively small fraction of the total playtime. Like nearly all Bioware games, there is an introductory sequence after which the player is told to visit unrelated locations (in this case, planets) to collect plot items (Star Maps) which allow the plot to proceed to the concluding sequence. Unlike nearly all Bioware games, the locations do not consist of an introductory "talking" phase followed by a whole lot of combat and then the resolution. The combat areas are interspersed with the talking and there is not nearly as much combat as in, say, Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect. Furthermore, even with the inflated enemy HP, once you get force powers, combat tends to end rather quickly. Instead, KOTOR emphasizes dialog, running around, puzzles and mini-games. The running around gets a bit annoying, but the dialog is generally fine and the planets are different enough that that Bioware’s hub-and-spokes model doesn’t grate. Story and Characters The story is very good. KOTOR deliberately borrows a great deal from the original Star Wars. You won't get anything particularly deep: this is a setting that routinely inspires questions like "What were the chances of that happening?" and then answers, with a straight face, "The Force did it." It also inevitably involves "capital letter" Good and Evil; the Sith Academy on Korriban does a very nice job of providing a theoretical justification for the Dark Side, but in practice, the Dark Jedi who cannot be turned to the Light are uniformly cruel, petty, murderous psychopaths. However, the hero's journey and the rest of the Star Wars elements turn out to work really well in a video game format. Moreover, the designers paid a lot of attention to detail. For example, the main plot twist was telegraphed many, many times starting from practically the very beginning of the game. The characters are also very well done. This was before the era of influence-based systems so you can learn about them simply by talking to them. There are nine of them altogether (not counting the poor intro guy), but some don’t get the same level of development as others. The ones that do tell you their story generally have a random side quest as well as some participation in the main quest. The characters are again mostly inspired by the films, but one of them (an… interpreter droid) is, as far as I can tell, original. The voice acting is excellent: they managed to get some talented and experienced voice actors for the main roles and it’s definitely noticeable. My one complaint is that you can’t take more than two NPCs with you at a time – they have some very good interactions with other and comments on stuff you encounter, but these are hard to get at without many playthroughs. The player character can romance one of the companions if they choose to do so. I played with a male protagonist this time and the romance is quite good. It’s dissimilar to most Bioware romances in that it’s integrated rather closely with the main plot. Also, I’m not sure whether this is due to technological limitations or prudence, but they refrained from the unintentionally hilarious (or, depending on your perspective, perhaps cringeworthy) “love scene”. I think I have played it with a female protagonist once, but I don’t remember that romance very well. Details and Conclusion The mini-games and puzzles are decent. The puzzles are mostly math. The mini-games are Pazaak (a variation on blackjack), swoop racing and shooting down enemy fighters from your ship. The swoop racing is fine and the fighter game is also fine, if somewhat overused towards the end of the game. I didn’t like Pazaak because there is not enough strategy in it for the player to overcome the disadvantage incurred by always going first, but one of the benefits of solid state drives is that saving and loading is practically instantaneous so, in the one instance where I needed to win ten games… I won ten in a row. The Force did it! So yes, KOTOR has some flaws, but it is still one of Bioware’s better games and one of the better Star Wars games. It’s well worth playing if you can tolerate the quirks of an ancient engine.

I'm currently about 85% through the original Knights of the Old Republic (the one from 2003). The interface is awful, the combat is pretty bad and the engine is obviously dated, but the game as a whole is still surprisingly good. I'll probably make a separate thread with a more detailed review when I'm finished.

I can't pay directly via Kickstarter. They switched to some new system which doesn't take Discover (which is what I used to pay via Amazon) at all and my VISA is also declined (it has never failed me anywhere else before). I don't understand why they can't use a normal payment system.

I actually just finished playing this today. I backed it on Kickstarter and I'm still not sure whether that was a wise decision -- it's a mix of good and bad. There's very little similarity to Baldur's Gate beyond the fact that you get 6 party members in both. Lords of Xulima is a game with turn-based combat where one party member is chosen for you and the others you can either make for yourself or use the provided ones, but regardless of what you do, they will not have any personality whatsoever or even be mentioned in the cutscenes. In a nutshell, I would recommend it for you if you really, really like turn-based combat because this game has so much of it that I barely had the patience to finish it on the lowest difficulty setting. Incidentally, the difficulty setting doesn't so much change the difficulty of individual fights as alter the amount of XP and gold you get -- it's roughly doubled on the lowest setting so you'd need to grind a whole lot more on higher ones. And it's not the short kind of combat either: enemies routinely have 5-10 times as much HP as you do so even straightforward battles take a while. The good parts are that the art is pretty nice, the music is also nice, the puzzles and mini-games are decent and the main story is OK. The bad parts are that despite claiming to be open, the game is more or less linear (you can poke your nose wherever you want, but unless you're going in the right order, you'll bump into either outright gatekeepers or basically impossible fights), practically every interaction with any person or creature outside the villages that has more than a couple of lines of dialog ends with you killing them (i.e. there are no alternate solutions) and these villages are basically identical. Oh, and I cannot recall a single instance of even an attempt at humor -- this game takes itself very, very seriously.

Thank you all. I will start with Dark Forces and hope that they add the rest of the Jedi Knight series (they usually add more games halfway through the sale).

The current Humble Bundle is a bunch of Star Wars games for $12. I've already played KotOR I & II, but it might be worth that much to own them in a downloadable format: I have only the vaguest idea of where those disks are and there's a good chance that even if I find them, they won't easily work with the latest Windows. Since I'll be buying them anyway, I was wondering what people here think of the bundled games: Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Star Wars: Dark Forces Star Wars Republic Commando Star Wars Battlefront II. Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Star Wars Empire at War: Gold Pack The reviews for some are favorable, but many are in genres that I rarely deal so opinions would be appreciated.

This is actually the result of a very difficult general problem: how does a game create an impression of an open world while at the same time allowing the player to become significantly more powerful? There are a few different solutions, none of them particularly satisfactory. The most obvious solution is to make the game basically linear (see, for example SWTOR or Lord of Xulima). That is, the world is supposedly open to the player, but the game is quite clear about communicating to you that you are poking your nose where it does not currently belong and even if you are skilled enough to ignore the warning and go somewhere earlier than you should, all you've accomplished is making the intervening content too easy. Some people like this, some find the illusion too easy to see through. Another solution is scaling enemies to the level of the player a-la the later Elder Scrolls. Again, some people are happy with it, but it cheapens character progression. BG2's solution is fairly unique: there is some limited level scaling, but mostly the many Chapter 2 quests can be done in any order assuming you are good at the game. If you're not quite that skilled, you will occasionally have to start something, go away and finish it later. The real problem is that sometimes (e.g. the Planar Sphere quest), you get stuck in a situation where the only way out is through and the way through is quite difficult.

I hope not. BG2 is probably my favorite game ever -- I must have played it over a dozen times -- but it definitely has its share of flaws. It would be really sad if PoE cannot do better, particularly since PoE has the benefit of being able to learn from the mistakes BG2 makes (as well as all of the other IE games and a bunch of other RPGs released in the past decade and a half).

I don't know about that -- I certainly didn't like it, but that quest seems like something like a group of criminals would have people do before they allow newcomers to join them. It weeds out, say, Lawful Good types who would only ever join the guild in order to destroy it. I think that's some sort of EE weirdness. Before you get to Kangaxx, you need to find some golden body parts. Also, unless you know exactly what you are doing, he would demolish you even with a much higher level party than yours -- the guy is immune to everything but the kitchen sink and casts an insta-kill spell that ignores saves and magic resistance every few seconds. Regarding your "urgency" complaints: yes, that is a weakness of the game. It does dump a ton of situations on you saying that they are urgent and you have no chance of doing them all promptly. The best thing is to ignore it. The only things which are actually on a timer (that I've ever noticed, anyway) are the party member side quests and even those are quite long. The class quests will wait for you indefinitely. I can't quite sympathize with you about the Beholders. Yes, they are tough, but there's nothing stopping you from blowing all of your resources on them and then going back upstairs to rest and resupply before continuing the quest or going back upstairs to buy the proper spells. Be grateful you didn't do the Planar Sphere quest first...

I'm enjoying your writeup so far, but I disagree with you about the writing. It's true that if you play with the sound off, the text written on the page is not very impressive. However, they did a good job interspersing the voice acting and some of the latter is very good. Furthermore, yes, it's cheesy, but they know they're being cheesy and they enjoy it. It benefits from the same dramatic effect as a cartoonish art style does visually with respect to a photorealistic one: it's much easier to ignore the flaws in something that is deliberately not aiming for perfection. Overall, I think they do a decent job of selling the setting, story and characters. Also, the "writing" in the sense of quest structure is actually better than in most games. Nalia's Keep is one of the less complex examples and even that one has a bunch of ways to do stuff. Some further random comments: You think the inventory is bad this early in the game? I'm a hopeless packrat so I manage to fill it up eventually, but not that soon. I think Harper's Call failing to bring back Aerie is a bug. Did you click on the corpse or the portrait? I don't remember it ever failing for me, elf or not. I loved that Glaicus can be freed and Domination is not the only thing that does it. I killed him the first time through, but on a subsequent playthrough, I wanted to remove his Haste to make it easier so I hit him with Dispel Magic... and he started talking! That was pretty awesome. I believe your example of "party banter" is not so much banter as it is the character expressing an opinion regarding your current reputation. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to unintentional silliness as you saw with Nalia.

Lowering the difficulty in Lords of Xulima makes the game much better. I don't think it actually makes the individual fights easier, but you get literally twice as much XP and things are cheaper. No idea why they did that -- higher difficulty should not mean "must grind more enemies". In other respects, this game reminded of a lot of things I disliked about old-school RPGs. I played them a lot when I was a child, but frankly, after the stories and characters of the Infinity Engine (most notably Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment), there is no going back. I was looking through my Steam library and I noticed that Shadowrun: Dragonfall has been updated to the Director's Cut edition which apparently has some extra missions and more character interaction. Nice of them to do that without asking for more money. I've played the original before (I think I even went through it twice), but I think I'm going to give up on Lords of Xulima and play this Director's Cut Dragonfall instead.

Judging movement, controlling combat and effective use of AoE are all tactical decisions. If your companions have moved into range of your own AoE, you're doing something wrong. If enemies have moved out of range, you timed it terribly. I am not sure why you are attributing Re-Volt's statement to me. I agree with you that it's a tactical effort to make AoE spells work properly. My point was that except for certain specific situations (albeit not necessarily uncommon ones), this was generally not worth the hassle. That's good. I haven't seen the "green fringes" yet and the ability to cancel is useful. Does the spell count as cast for the purpose of casting limits when you do that?

Finished Wasteland 2, started Lords of Xulima. The latter looks very pretty, but the party members have no personalities, the text is rather verbose and the rule system is... not actually described either in the 15-page manual or within the game, at least nowhere near completeness. The skills of each class appear to be revealed one level before they become available so it's hard to make plans. What I assume to be the "to hit" percentage appears to be more or less the same for each class, but they don't seem to hit at the same rates so maybe it means something else. I picked the Old-School Veteran difficulty, but this appears to mean not only that the fights are harder (which would be OK since the difficulty is reasonable), but also that the characters advance slowly which means one must grind through all of the random enemies to go through the main story. To be fair, the difficulty selection screen warned about this, but I didn't think the leveling would be that slow. Also, it doesn't help that my fighter does an average of 6 damage whereas the rats in the introductory cave do around 10 (seriously? ). I think I'm just going to lower the difficulty and see if it is more fun that way.

Wow, that is a really long post. For some of them I agree with you, for others I do not. I will only reply to some since I don't have much time. But also not too simple... which is kind of difficult to do when we don't agree on what "too complicated" means. I played BG2 when I was a teenager without ever having seen D&D before and while I missed certain aspects of the ruleset on my first playthrough, it was quite playable after reading the manual and going through the tutorial. KotOR was too simple for my tastes. Well, they're not in PoE. I agree that it is probably possible to do better without them, but in the past, when people have said that they're making a ruleset specifically for the computer, it has not necessarily worked out better. Also, KotOR, which you seem to like, was based on the same D20 rules as the D&D games. I disagree. The problems with random equipment are intrinsic and cannot be solved without making the items bland whereas the Carsomyr problem from BG2 is specific to BG2: it's a combination of overly narrow weapon specializations and too great a disparity between the best weapons for each specialization. Having pre-set equipment allows for much more memorable pieces and also solves the issue with crafting being either useless or overpowered. I believe every game in the past decade has used point-buy and PoE will do the same. I think rolling the states was kind of fun, but this is a settled issue. Points 3 and 4 are specific to older games and I think newer ones are more clear about this. The rest of your points are mostly non-controversial -- I don't think anyone is against a good story or good AI, the problem is execution.

I've never seen a satisfactory solution to this in a Real Time with Pause game. On the one hand, it's true that being able to toss fireballs into the crowd is not very conducive to tactical play, but on the other, the hassle of using these spells in a rule system where the intended targets can be somewhere else entirely by the time the spells hit is such that I simply don't bother except in very specific situations (e.g. as "the opener" or by using immune characters as bait or when the game hands you a "fish in a barrel" environment). My most used AoE spells in BG2 were Horrid Wilting and Dragon's Breath precisely because they could be cast without taking half a minute to predict where everything will be 4 seconds from now and figure out whether it is worth casting. In NWN, the same was true of Firebrand and the Missile Storm spells.

Finished it last night. The ending was not bad, although a tad predictable. It's too bad you can't tell the villain I liked the epilogues, even if they did get confused about one of the characters being alive whereas within the game he is pretty clearly dead. I do have one question:

There are two distinct issues in the original post. First, most game play videos are not an accurate portrayal of the game in regard to the ratio of paused to real time play. When such videos are made, the idea is generally to show off some specific aspect of the game play and most of the time it is much easier to do this when the game is paused. Once you are actually playing the game and have learned how to do it, frequent pausing is unlikely to be required except for a few difficult battles. Second, the animations will be better in the final version, but nobody knows how much. To be honest, while it would certainly be nice to have great animations, this is not one of the most important features. To take the ToEE example: if you asked me today whether ToEE had better animations than, say, BG2, I'd have to admit that I have absolutely no idea. I remember quite a few things about ToEE and many more about BG2, but the animations aren't one of either set.

Yes, there are... but they are buried beneath a veritable mountain of garbage. SWTOR makes me very sad because if they had taken the core content and made a single player game out of it, it had the potential to be something original and great: the logical extension of the idea from Dragon Age: Origins, with the different origins all having an entire story of their own (rather than only the introductory chapter and then a few random variations as in DA:O). Instead, they made it into an MMO and a pretty bad one at that, with all of the time-wasting nuisances that design around a subscription fee entails and a great deal of cut-and-paste (and paste and paste and paste...) content. I more or less fall into this boat. It would take nearly universal acclaim for me to play another of their games. The money is not really an issue, but I just don't have the time anymore.

I've been playing Wasteland 2 for the past couple of weeks and it's given me ideas for a few minor features that would be nice to get right in PoE: 1) The ability to mark places on the map. I'm fine with the game not giving people and locations markers -- I'm not a big fan of this feature, but I guess that's part of the old-school charm. However, I see no reason at all for stopping the player from marking things on the map. These games are played over long periods of time and I don't remember what was where for dozens of locations. 2) Similarly, it would be nice to have a place in the journal/log/whatever to write things down. I can use a piece of paper, but it's annoying. BG2 had this feature as well as the map marker. 3) Make the distance from which a trap is disarmed substantially larger than the distance from which the trap is triggered. This was actually a problem even in BG2 (though it was admittedly rare) and it's a larger problem in Wasteland 2 (where it is definitely a bug because the character then proceeds to successfully disarm the triggered trap!). The disarming of traps should be based on the indicated skill of the characters. I shouldn't have to tiptoe them right up to the trap before telling them to disarm it.

I might have failed a Google search check so I'll ask here... is there a way to place a marker on the map to remind one of what is there? For example, there are some safes which are currently too high difficulty for my party. Can I mark their location on the map?

Do try Dragonfall. As I said, it was my favorite of the three and comes pretty close to what I was looking for. I tried to think about what goes wrong with such games. From most to least important: 1) Appeal to nostalgia is a coin with two sides. On the one hand, the old games were good so similar games should also be good, but on the other, I've played the old games (many, many times for some of them) so it shouldn't be too similar. A non-Kickstarter example: Dragon Age: Origins would probably have been a lot more fun if I hadn't already played half a dozen games with the "hub and spokes" model. Furthermore, the individual "spokes" were more or less well designed, but they followed such an obvious pattern (bit of talking, lost of combat, binary choice at the resolution) that it made the later ones predictable. Basically, there should be somethings which are new and surprising in the structure and mechanics of the game -- too bad that when the developers try for this, it usually makes the game worse. It's hard to find something which is both new and good. 2) I don't like the characters as much. This is weird because by objective measures (e.g. the total amount of dialog), the characters from Baldur's Gate 2 weren't all that developed -- but for whatever reason, the few interactions they did have managed to sketch interesting and/or amusing personalities whereas the new games fail at this despite devoting more words to it. It's similar to how a well-drawn pencil sketch can be better than a poorly-drawn watercolor painting. Same goes for the romances (although come to think of it, neither of the Shadowrun games had any romance at all and I don't see how Wasteland 2 can have them given the structure of the party). 3) I'm getting somewhat more jaded as I get older. With books and even movies, I'm able to compensate by being more discerning, but there are so few CRPGs that attempting the same trick would probably leave me with an empty set.

I think that specific project failed not so much because of Kickstarter's general state as it did because they launched a new Kickstarter before releasing the delayed product of an earlier one. There are companies which can get away with this (e.g. inXile did it with Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera), but there are very few of them and they tend to be relatively well recognized and large enough to field multiple development teams. If only 33% of your original backers return for the new project and you're asking for 2.5 times as much money... well, this is not likely to go well. I don't think Kickstarter is dying, but as time goes on, it will certainly lose the more naive video game backers. You know, the people who are confident that they will receive everything they paid for by the estimated delivery date and then get upset about the nearly inevitable delays. Also, the success of games which has for over $100K will depend largely on previous Kickstarters that have asked for a similar amount. Personally, I've thus far played the two Shadowrun campaigns and am currently in what I believe to be in the early-to-mid game of Wasteland 2. They deliver what they promised, but none of them has been particularly awesome so far (though the Shadowrun campaign set in Berlin is currently my favorite). It's not that I dislike them, but when I played, say, Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment, I really cared about what happens whereas with all of these new games, I do not. I'm not sure why. For example, Wasteland 2 does a great job of presenting its setting and there has clearly been a lot attention paid to details... but the magic just isn't there. It is a good game and occasionally quite amusing so I don't doubt that I will finish it, but I'm not going to stay up at night to play it. Maybe it's just that I'm not a teenager anymore, but then again I still get the same feeling from reading books as I did then so it's more likely that something is lacking in these games.

No. Their nomenclature is standard for the industry (take a look at the wiki). "Pre-alpha" builds (if there are any) generally do not compile without a lot of effort and they certainly do not run except maybe for very short tests. Alpha versions compile and run, but they are missing features (not in the sense of having placeholders for assets, but rather with the code that would handle the asset or placeholder simply being absent) and are usually unstable. What you see with the PoE beta is precisely a beta: it compiles and runs mostly (though not entirely) without crashing, but there is a general lack of polish as well as some placeholders. Also, as many people have said in different forms, the things you are talking about will not make or break the game. It would be nice if they managed to make the combat animations look good, but it would not be a big deal if they do not. Nobody ever said "You know what I remember about Baldur's Gate 2? It had great combat animations!" The interface should not degrade the gameplay (e.g. the colors should be fixed and so on), but beyond that it's all bells and whistles -- if we have them, good, if not, it's OK.

This is distasteful, but it mostly occurs because the criticism doesn't make much sense -- every point (except the one which is downright bizarre) is something you would expect to see in a beta, not something to cancel the game over. Summarizing the original post: 1) Colors need improvement -- already pointed out by people participating in the beta and will be improved. 2) Animations need improvement (repeated 4 times in various contexts) -- again, it's a beta, they are working on it. 3) Sounds need improvement -- beta, working on it. 4) No voice acting -- of course there isn't: not only is the voice acting done close to the end (it's orders of magnitude more difficult to change than just changing a line of text), but it's also reserved to important characters which means it's not likely to be seen in the beta as they don't want to spoil too much. 5) And then there is the bizarre ragdoll physics thing which basically comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with PoE (defeated enemies vanishing is obviously another thing that will be fixed). It's criticism of the beta, but not very constructive criticism.

I've never played anything but the most casual poker so I don't understand what you mean, but I have played chess at a competitive level. The chess equivalent of your starting point in RPGs is a position where you have already won. In other words, the RPG has to be winnable -- it's no fun if a player does most things right and still loses. In such a position, there is no well-defined "optimal" play in chess; as long as you don't screw up to the point where you've turned your winning position into a draw or a loss, you're OK. In fact, the most common "optimal" path for such positions is whatever wins the game fastest. Yes, but I said "good RPG". More seriously, RPGs have evolved with time starting with more or less straight dungeon crawls then adventures with a linear story then a not-so-linear story and finally highly non-linear adventures with multiple ways of doing things. The type we're after in PoE is the latter. Fine -- but then it makes absolutely no sense to pause the game every half a second. I guarantee you that with competent play, your chances of success are basically the same (~100%, barring random number generator weirdness). I don't know what EV means, but I believe that I have framed the problem properly. The combat part of the game can logically be divided into sections between rest points. When making any action, it is necessary to consider where in a given section you are -- it wouldn't do to blow the heavy munitions on some introductory goblins or rats or something of the sort. This is what I'm telling you though: there is no meaningful difference. The randomness in the IE games (and presumably also PoE) is not like what it is in poker; it is constrained by the central limit theorem so with proper play, you should win ~100% of the time.