PrimeJunta

I don't think the IE games did that, except maybe for morale. The D&D rules certainly don't. What the D&D rules do have are rules on flanking bonuses, flatfooted, and that kind of thing, and at least some of the games we're talking about did implement those. ToEE certainly did. I kinda like the idea though. I just wouldn't like the bonuses/penalties to be invisible. It is a game after all and I prefer games where I don't have to guess what the rules are. Tangent: The Numenera PnP system has an interesting way of dealing with this, by the way -- the GM can have mobs (between 4 and 10 critters, depending on size and coordination) attack as single creatures that are two levels higher and do double damage. Totally unsuitable for a computer game of course, but it's a really elegant solution for a tabletop game, especially if you're talking through the combat and not using figurines. It makes mobs of low-level critters potent threats -- if you have 3 Armor a level 3 critter will only be able to harm you on a crit, but with that rule a mob of them would do 6 damage, which gets nasty fast.

@Lephys, I kind of disagree about that. Valve does exactly that extremely well. They introduce new tools little by little, and every time after you get one you get a situation where it's useful, and then it builds on those to create more complex situations. Half-Life 2 did it. Portal did it. And I found both kind of monotonous and grindy. I much prefer varied difficulty. Perhaps my ideal curve is a relatively easy start that introduces the mechanics and pulls me in, followed by troughs and spikes, with the possibility of going into really tough areas by choice -- but with the game clearly communicating that those areas you're about to go in are dangerous and you might maybe want to level up a bit first.

I didn't actually do any of the fetch crap. I just heard about that meadow and the moathouse and went exploring. I leveled up by splatting those ugly frogs outside the moathouse, skeletons on the meadow, plus a bit – but not all that much really – camping for wandering monsters. I think there would be a quite a few ways to make an exciting first-level D&D game without having to do boring first-level crap. I have in fact run a few myself. They can even have some combat. It just doesn't have to be mortal combat. And naturally there are any number of fun non-combat challenges that you can throw at your players. The first serious adventure in my campaign involved holding back a nighttime attack until the town guards showed up, followed by a two- or three-session ghost story/murder mystery. It would have been theoretically possible for someone to get critted and die in the combat due to no fault of their own, but it would've had to be really unlucky, and it didn't happen.

As an afterthought, Arcanum is a pretty good example of a game that manages to fail in both directions. As Chris Avellone has demonstrated, it's impossibly difficulty if you roll up a squib – which is very easy to do unless you already know what to expect and how the game works – but once you find out about Harm it becomes ridiculously and tediously easy. It's kinda amazing that they managed to fail so spectacularly. Real shame too as the game does most other things really well. @Jarmo, if you were referring to my choice of not having arcane casters, I hope my cleric+druid will get the job done. They do have area-effect spells, just not so many that deal direct damage. But area buffs/debuffs/status effects are really effective. I've already made use of Bless, Bane, and Entangle actually. Entangle is pretty neat with the reach weapons that let my characters stand outside the radius and poke at stuck things with impunity.

Gotta go with Messier-31 re Dreadnought. The Royal Navy trademarked that one. It invokes a massive armored battleship, not a raging barbarian. "There are only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and the naming of things." On the one hand, bland names let you, the player, flesh out your character concept because they don't say all that much about what it's like. But they're bland and boring. On the other hand, descriptive and rich names spark the imagination and are interesting, but restrict you to the concepts they describe. So really I dunno. Guess we'll have to see how it plays out. Personally I don't care all that much either way.

I've been getting my teeth into a D&D classic I've neglected, namely, Temple of Elemental Evil (yes, with the Co8 fixpack). It's got me thinking about the difficulty curve in games of this type. But first, brief impressions. I'm not very far in, just cleared the Moathouse and arrived at Nulb. The combat, when it starts, is seriously good. Far and away the best in any D&D game I've played. Tactics matter. Also, I've rediscovered the phalanx. Man is it pretty. No other party-based D&D game I've played comes close, including the latest iterations of NWN2. This makes me really salivate over PE; if they can make it as pretty but at full-rez on my 27" iMac, woo-hoo. Everything is pretty. The monsters, the lovingly-crafted avatars, the cloaks, the animations, the environments. Everything except the UI which looks like it's a development placeholder, which it probably is. Nice sound effects and music too. Plot? What plot? Never mind. I do like meself a bit of plot though, and this would've been way better if Troika had put some thought into it. Plot-wise ToEE is like porn: it's only there to provide an excuse for the action. And difficulty. This is actually really problematic. As in I don't know what my opinion is about it anymore. The game starts out incredibly punishing, just like BG and BG2. It took me a quite a few tries to get my party of first-level delicate flowers to level up. I started playing on Ironman because I'm an inveterate save-game abuser, but that was clearly a bad idea. Ironman clearly requires either godlike D&D skills or metagame knowledge, remembering what's about to be sprung on you around the next corner. So after about a dozen tries I gave up and started one in normal mode. Much better. Then it gets easier. Like, a lot easier. The difference between level 1 and level 2 is huge. By level 3 I was barely dying/reloading at all. I hope the difficulty will ramp up again as I move into the next area as this is getting kinda boring. I still think that kind of punishing initial difficulty is a bad idea. It'll just get lots of people to give up in frustration. If I hadn't had so many similar games under my belt, there's no way I'd have the patience to learn to get the stupid party up to level 2. A game that has enemies that one-hit kill you, and doesn't in some way let you know that you're about to go somewhere really dangerous, is poorly designed IMO. Fortunately we haven't seen much of this lately so it's unlikely PE will be done like this. On the other hand, that kind of difficulty curve gives a really tangible feeling of progression. Splatting that giant + bear that obliterated my party in, like two or three rounds when I first came across it felt like a real achievement. I think treading that line has to be one of the hardest things in game design. Go too far on one side, and it's dull as dishwater, a mechanical, repetitive grind of easily splatting forgettable enemies. Too far on the other, and it gets way too frustrating to be fun. What's more, since you're designing it and know it inside and out, you'll have to rely on playtesters to find out exactly how hard a game you're really making. It's also an area where IMO most games of this type fare rather badly. Mask of the Betrayer was pretty good I thought. Fallout was pretty good (Fallout 2 not so much.) Most others fall fairly far from the sweet spot in one direction or the other. I wish there was a patent answer to this question. I don't think there is though. I do hope Obsidian gets it right. (For those curious, I'm playing with a party of two fighters with a couple of levels of barb for rage and fast movement, one ranger with a level of rogue to get Open Locks and Disable Device, one cleric, and one druid. No arcane casters on purpose; they're especially useless at low levels and this is low-level D&D. Once I got those sad sacks to level 2 it's been working out pretty well.)

I haven't seen anyone arguing against antagonists showing you a little respect. Some of us just aren't huge fans of epic-level fireworks. Not the same thing.

A million times this. Thirded. This would be wack.

The Wikipedia article on stalemate was pretty fascinating. According to it, stalemate was standardized as a draw in the early 19th century; before that, the rulings were all over the place.

Uh, you actually want to watch a scene where little figures march across the screen when viewed from a 45-degrees top-down perspective? To each their own, I guess. If they do do that, I hope they'll put in subtitles and make it possible to just click through them, 'cuz I would find it excruciating. You're right though that it wouldn't cost much, so there is that at least. (I'll still take the painted intertitles though TYVM.)

I almost wrote "I don't like epic levels, I think they're silly" but that's not actually strictly true. It is true, however, that I've never played a game that did that kind of power in a way that I liked. ToB was just dull. I would have enjoyed MotB much better if it had been levels 1-18 rather than 18-30. HotU was an enjoyable-enough dungeon crawl but even that got a bit dull. The only setting that really accommodates epic-level gameplay that I've come across is Planescape; there you're mixing it up with demigods and archdevils due to the nature of it. PS:T however was not epic-level, and I haven't played any other Planescape cRPG's. George Ziets had a pretty wack idea for an epic-level Baldur's Gate sequel, though: you'd start out as a just-ascended minor god, but then the old death gods would gang up and evict you from the Throne of Bhaal, and things would get weird from there. You'd produce avatara which would do stuff in various planes at various power levels, and so on and so forth. That, I think, could work. But if we're talking straight-up prime material plane fantasy, no epic levels, thanks. They're just silly.

IMO this is yet another question that's really hard to answer without knowing how the mechanics hang together. If there's enough variety within classes so you can make a fighty magic-user or magic-using fighter, for example, then I don't see any compelling need to multi-class. If there isn't, then multi-classing can add a lot of welcome variety. For example, if we're looking at D&D, AD&D multi-classing was a disaster, a dreary chore and an exploit at the same time. D&D3 was built with multi-classing in mind to start with, and there IMO it fits very well -- the classes themselves are extremely narrow, but multi-classing lets you build a huge variety of character concepts. (OTOH it's also really easy to produce a multi-class squib, which is perhaps not so desirable.)

Or the SoundCloud guy who sounds just like Christopher Lee.

Mm. I've been puttering around in Storm of Zehir a bit again. I gotta say that that game makes the "utility character" really sumthin-sumthin'. My party leader is, shall we say, not optimized for combat. Instead he's got all the skills that are useful on the map. He's a human rogue with INTO 18 and one level of wizard and ranger to unlock Survival, Spellcraft, Craft Armor and a few others, plus Able Learner. He is without a doubt the single most fun and useful character in the party, because of that world map. The rest of the party are min-maxed wrecking balls so it doesn't really matter that he can only get the odd arrow in in combat; in fact that's kind of part of the fun -- and I think that making him excel at combat as well would have detracted from the experience. So it's not like you can't have a D&D-style party-based cRPG where a "utility character" is fun. But. Storm of Zehir is a bit of an unusual game. It's really crying out for a character like that. The world map makes it so. Without that world map, that skill-machine would be just dead weight. I could've distributed the most important skills across the party while making only minimal compromises to their combat effectiveness, and gotten one more min-maxed wrecking ball, which would've been a signficant bump up in power. I guess that kind of puts me in two minds about this "all classes fight equally well, but differently" thing. If the game really is combat heavy, and if there is no pay-off for making one guy the skill machine, then I guess that's the way to go. But if they take a lot of inspiration from SoZ, I think I'll miss my cerebrally-oriented explorer who just sits on a rock while his companions deal with the opposition.

Except, Karkarov, that PE has a 2D background, remember? The only 3D models on the screen are the characters and monsters. You can only zoom in and out. I.e, you'll see something like Gorion getting whacked by Sarevok, which is IMO a pretty lousy cutscene. Again, I'd much prefer they did this with intertitles and/or narration.

That's a matter of point of view, you know. If you're used to having a wizard, then not having one will be perceived as a lack, of course. However, if you just look at the tactical challenges themselves, on their own merits, I'm pretty sure you'll find that having two divine spellcasters instead of one wizard and one divine spellcaster will have the advantage most of the time. Clerics and druids have lots of options for your mage suppression scenario, for example. Stuff like Silence and Hold Person (CLR 2) to take them out of the game straight out, single-target or small-area damage spells like Searing Light, Creeping Cold, Dehydrate, Flame Strike, and Swamp Lung, and area suppression spells that'll, among other things, bork spellcasting, like Spike Growth. Bottom line is I usually don't bother with arcane casters when I play D&D 3 based cRPG's these days. Divine ones are just so much more versatile.

If you're working in an engine that's suited for cinematics, then of course it's easy and cheap to make them. If you're not, you have to use some other engine for them, which immediately adds overhead. In any case, it's not a question of absolute cost; it's a matter of bang for the buck. If you already have groovy concept art, why not just make an IWD-style slideshow with voiceover? That serves the same purpose, is just as atmospheric, and a lot easier and cheaper to make than creating an animated cinematic from scratch. So yeah, I'm all for IWD-style slideshows with narration plus Darklands-style intertitles. No mini-movies TYVM.

@forgottenlor, yeah, you do lose out on area of effect damage spells, but you gain on area of effect buffs and de-buffs. The challenge is "how to deal with a mob." Either way will do it. In other words, I stand by my position that clerics and druids are just about as effective as wizards/sorcerers when dealing with mobs; it's just that the way they deal with them is different. (There are specific situations in which a wiz's fireball-lobbing capability really shines, of course, such as when there's a mob at the other edge of the map with no friendlies in danger of getting caught in the blast, but then that kind of situation doesn't present much of a tactical challenge to start with IMO. The converse is true too, of course, e.g. if the mob consists of undead.)

I disagree. D&D clerics have really good area buffs and de-buffs at just about every level. In low-level D&D for example a combination of Bless + Bane and, if necessary which it isn't, Cause Fear will make enemies go down like ninepins, and it just gets better from there. Blasting fireballs at them isn't the only way to deal with mobs. Druids OTOH have a crazy powerful mix of debuffs, area attacks, and buffs. Clerics/druids do need a bit more tactical thinking than wizards or sorcs, but IMO ultimately they're a good deal more powerful even when ignoring the melee aspects. Being able to wear armor is extremely useful even if you never pick up a weapon. I made a build like that in MotB who just waltzed through the tough optional fights; I was surprised myself actually. (Hint: Implosion. If you've boosted your spell penetration abiltiies to the max, it amounts to a Win button, generally speaking.) Druid is my favorite solo class actually, as they're quite decent in toe-to-toe combat, have a highly useful spell set, are provided with a handy meat shield, and have the most versatile mix of spells of any class. They self-buff like clerics, they heal, they deal area damage, they deal point damage, and of course nobody summons like a druid.

Because there are better, more atmospheric, cheaper, and less annoying ways of accomplishing the same thing? Personally, I go to the movies if I want to watch a movie. If I play a game, I like to be in control. I dislike it when the game suddenly locks my controls and forces me to watch something. I didn't like it in the IE games, and I won't like it in PE if they do it. At least most IE games newer than Baldur's Gate had skippable cutscenes and cinematics, thank goodness.

Personally, I think the Herp: Derp, Herp: Derp of Herp, and just plain Herp of Derp name structures have been overused. It'd be cool if they came up with something more creative. Thinking of good games with good names from days gone by... Fallout, Half-Life, Quake, Civilization, Icewind Dale, and of course Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden. So something along those lines.

Jesus, Amentep. Is that stuff for real? Maybe we gamers deserve our reputation as juvenile sociopaths.

Good catch. Someone ping Kaz to ask if he did actually see that, or if it's just coincidence. There are similarities for sure but also pretty major differences so it could be either. How many ways are there to make a full-body portrait of a cat-eared midget looking severe and investigative anyway?

There are boring ol' technical considerations too. Making all NPC's killable drastically complicates scripting. You have to deal with the "player killed plot-essential NPC" situation somehow. In a sandbox game like Morrowind where most of the stuff for you to do isn't connected to the main plot, it kiiiinda makes sense to just pop up a notice saying "by the way, you can't complete the plot now that you whacked Vivec so early on." Because there is still plenty left for the player to do, like I dunno trying to become the head of the Telvanni or something. (Been a while since I played it, you probably can tell.) In a plot-driven one like PE OTOH, that doesn't work, so the remaining options are all kinda crummy. You can just show a "Game over" screen, making killing them defeat conditions. You can bring in Biff the Understudy to stand in for them. If you're feeling really feisty, you can script in some alternative NPC's for the same chokepoints so the game will only end if the player whacks all of them, but that introduces some pretty major QA complications as you'll have to test all the combinations. None of these strike me as significant improvements over just flagging some of the sorry sods unkillable and getting on with it. It hasn't bothered me overmuch in any similar game until now anyway.

Vailians should definitely gesticulate wildly whenever in conversation.