Yonjuro

My take. The last couple of hours were an endless horrible grind and I hated every moment, I'm never going to replay BG1 (because of the ending). Starting at what point? The final fight in the temple? Before that?

Reloading because the fight was difficult is good. Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad. I think that's the argument that (most) people are making here. Silly example: You walk into a room (that you had no way of scouting in advance and onto an immediate dispell invisibility trap) and a guy hurls the 'Kill Your Party Instantly With No Save' spell and kills your party instantly with no save. You reload and go the store to buy six 'Protection From Kill Your Party Instantly With No Save' scrolls and then read them before going back in the room. Victory! vs. Less silly example: You walk into a room and there's a beholder elder orb in the room who starts casting true sight. You know what a beholder is. You run back out before the true sight finishes, go to the store and buy things to protect you from petrification, imprisonment, magical damage etc. or maybe you even have them with you already. Better than the first example; some would argue that it's not a lot better. vs. Much less silly example: You walk into a room and there's a party just like yours, maybe a few levels higher and maybe there's eight of them. You might lose and need to reload, but that's ok.

So, let's look at some examples regarding these quotes: My example is the final fight in BG1. That was very challenging for me the first time I did it and it was mostly for interesting reasons. First, Sarevok has a lot of magic resistance and is a meat grinder. Tazok also hits hard, so you don't have 'just contain Sarevok' as a viable strategy. Then you have Angelo doing lots of AoE damage, mostly with flame arrows, so that tight formation you wanted to use to deal with the melee guys is looking less viable. Finally, you have Semaj hurling crowd control spells that make party member run around in panic or confusion (and inadvertently summoning battle horrors by triggering the undisarmable traps). That was pretty challenging the first time I played it partly because I knew nothing about D&D and hadn't played a game like BG before. The last time I played BG, the final fight was easy and not entirely due to metagame knowledge. In hindsight, the game gave you some huge hints about that fight - e.g. a gnome that you may have bumped into in the Gibberling Mountains was having dreams about you and gives you some of the best advice you'll ever get (in a game or out of one). Also, in the thieves guild they recommend you buy some things from 'Black Lily' and she has arrows of dispelling for sale. Yeah, should have taken that advice too. Anyway, what do people think about that fight? It seems to have a good tactical challenge as I mentioned above. Strategic planning helps a lot (and the layout of the room, especially the trap placement points to some useful strategic ideas). Prebuffs help a lot and are probably necessary due to the crowd control spells and to the AoE damage spells to a lesser degree (those could be protected against after the fact if your party wasn't running around in a panic). I didn't beat it the first time without reloading, but in hindsight, it was probably possible to win it without metagame knowledge. Thoughts on that fight? Other examples?

Of course, but puns are the only currency I can accept. I hope that's not going to be a problem.

You guys aren't communicating. The distinction Lephys is making is not: Fail the first time vs. Succeed the first time it is: Always fail the first time - impossible to succeed vs. Always succeed on the first time - too easy to fail. There's a lot of room between those extremes. If that's what he's saying then he's putting up a ridiculous straw man. I gave exactly zero examples of an "always fail the first time" encounter. Why? because there are no such encounters in the IE games. One can very easily (and logically) ONE-SHOT-KILL Kangaxx by accident in a blind first playthrough. Sure, 'impossible' is strong word - it's really more like exponentially improbable. But, fair enough, let's ignore the strawman and put it this way instead: There could be fights that almost nobody wins the first time because the fights are really hard and there could be other fights that almost nobody wins the first time because the fight is (next to) impossible without metagame knowledge (hence reloading for a not so good reason). I don't want to speak for Lephys but I think what he's getting at is that he is pretty ok with the former and opposed to the latter. EDIT: Nevermind - talk amongst yourselves.

Can you show some of those examples between them? Considering you've said there's a lot of room between them. Of course I can - it seems that you don't see the distinction or you wouldn't have worded it like that. Pretend that Kangaxx needed a plus 5 weapon to hit him instead of plus 4. Also pretend that the only plus 5 weapon is Carsomyr. Finally pretend you don't have a paladin in your party so you sold Carsomyr. You get into that fight, put up the protections you need, and eventually they wear off and everyone gets imprisoned because nobody can hit Kangaxx. That's pretty extreme, but it's still in between the two extremes of always fail and always succeed because if you got really lucky with your party composition and equipment (and did everything right) you could still win. It isn't actually impossible to win without metagame knowledge it's just improbable. On the other end, suppose Kangaxx is hittable by anything and dies of fright if you hit him. Well, that's also very extreme, but if you got really unlucky he would still imprison your whole party before anyone in your party hit him so it isn't an example of always winning. In the middle of the above two silly examples you have the actual Kangaxx fight. Do you see now what I mean by there's a lot of room between the two extremes?

You guys aren't communicating. The distinction Lephys is making is not: Fail the first time vs. Succeed the first time it is: Always fail the first time - impossible to succeed vs. Always succeed on the first time - too easy to fail. There's a lot of room between those extremes.

Could you elaborate? How is it good, specifically in relation to instead simply having to deal with an encounter that is designed to be feasibly tackled without increasing a bunch of values before going in? (It isn't necessarily good, it is a matter of degree.) Some things are more on the strategic end of the scale and some are more on the tactical end. Working out useful buffs, trap placements etc. especially non-obvious uses of them can be a lot of fun. But... does it actually make combat more interesting? I like being invulnerable, because it's simply nice to not take any damage. But then, does it really enhance combat, which is basically about a challenge in the first place? In other words, if, instead of being a spell, all enemies just didn't react to you for 10 seconds after you started the battle, or if you could just always launch infinite abilities at once, instantly, would combat be better, or worse, overall? I think Timestop made combat more interesting. It gave you (and many of your opponents) a stack of about 3 or 4 spells at a time. Late game, at the point when you could do it, that didn't usually end the more difficult fights (and some of the really difficult enemies were immune to it anyway) and you probably only had one or maybe two Timestops memorized, so it wasn't something you could do that often. So again, its a matter of degree. Certainly, infinite uncontested spells, by you or your opponents, would not be interesting.

No no. That's good. And, if you also set spike traps and summon skeleton warriors it's extra good. But, I agree with the other things you said. Oh, except: That's Timestop. I love Timestop. (When I do it. I hate it when someone does it to me (but, love it if they do it to my summoned kobold commando; is that wrong? it can't be wrong if it feels so right)). Anyway, yes - I think Mr. Sawyer's original list is fine (with some reservations about the precombat buffs item) and it looks like his goal is to make something challenging but with fewer 'rough edges' than we had in the IE games. I'll bet he succeeds, because, you know, hindsight and experience and stuff.

(I like everything about this update.) The itemized 'Active Effects' section on the character sheet is very nice.

Two things come to mind (err, I mean, A pox on both your houses! ): I didn't read that buffing was being eliminated. I read that the IE games may have required too much of it (and some of not really even encounter specific). That said, I agree with your main point. Scouting and planning ahead was the way I usually played the IE games (and I like being able to do that). I especially didn't like when I scouted and planned ahead and then the game went into a cutscene and undid my planning. Or, in BG2, changing the time of day to add a vampire encounter in the graveyard district - that's a bug not a feature. Let's add that to the list of annoying things the IE games did that shouldn't be in PoE. I'm not disagreeing with that but, as we all know, the IE games have a strategic element to them too. Once you know what you're doing, encounters get (a lot) easier. Some of knowing what you're doing is: scouting ahead/using stealth, using appropriate buffs, setting traps (thief traps, skull traps, cleric wards), summoning appropriate critters, spell sequences. (Of course, knowing the encounters makes them easier on subsequent play throughs too, but knowledge of the above carried over to the other IE games where you didn't know the encounters). Anyway, to me, this is a good thing that there's a lot more going on than who hits whom with what and in what order.

Certainly, it is possible to have too many overpowered items (when you toss yet another +7 ubermunchkinsword of ubermunkinness on the pile, then there is clearly too much stuff). In BG (1 or 2), if you could have purchased an unlimited number of protection from magic scrolls (instead of 5 in BG1, some of which you have to find, and 2 in BG2), many of the challenges would have evaporated. On the other hand, sometimes the right loot can make more play styles viable (including solo runs, but really any party that doesn't include one of everything (especially someone who can cast needed buff spells)). That's true and I never played BG1 in the original engine, only BGtutu. Now that I think about it, it's surprising how well the weapon choices worked even though the weapon proficiencies were different in the two engines. It made a few weapon choices suboptimal in TuTu but didn't really break things. I suppose it's because there weren't too many critters that were immune to too many weapons - that probably makes things easier to balance.

It's an interesting question. If you eliminated walking around and various other inconvenient things in a game, it would almost surely detract from the experience. E.g., in the BG series, there were choices to make about what items to leave on the ground. Those decisions can add to the game play experience unless there is too much of it and it becomes a chore. Likewise, walking around and exploring the world, even walking back to where you were before is an important part of the experience of the game. I'm sure that level designers think a lot about how much time (or maybe how many discrete events) are spent directly advancing a quest line/exploring a new area vs. doing 'other necessary stuff' like backtracking to the point where you need to take the next action. As Jarmo pointed out earlier in the thread, putting strange stores/rest areas in a dungeon indicates that the developers recognized a design problem late in the development process. Our good friend 'Swift Thomas' in IWD2 (who would essentially teleport you to a different map) seems to be a clear sign that something went wrong with the area design and wasn't uncovered until play testing. Now I'm curious about the best practices for level design that, say, count events (and path lengths of events) of different types that indicate issues like this before spending a lot of time and effort on the level and encounters. It seems like measuring the right things could save a lot of money during development and make a much better game. If any developers are reading this and can enlighten us, I bet a lot of people would be interested.

Yup, that's the one.

I don't think there's anything wrong with finding somewhere to rest in an old disused and massive dungeon, similar to how the Fellowship rested on their travels through Moria, though I would take precautions such as casting illusions, locking doors, setting up traps and alarms etcetera. Or try and find some secret area thick with the dust of centuries of disuse, and close the doors behind you, making sure that any patrols are not aware of your presence. Sure, that makes perfect sense to me. I was thinking more of getting to level three of the dungeon and finding an enclave of clerics living there who will watch over you while you sleep (until you open the wrong door - then they try to kill you, but the people behind the door will then watch over you while you sleep).

I think you're making a strong point here. Not only it is a sign a dungeon is too long, it's a sign the devs realized the dungeon is too long. I make an exception to the dungeon length where the length is meaningful, like in the Endless.. paths.. deeps? Or whatever, where you've stumbled into something humongous, like the underdark. Lot's of fighting in a strange place, and then you stumble into a refuge, a village of some silly gnomes or something. Works for me. Yes, the BG2 Underdark was well done. You find the gnomes and there are only a few of them at home because of the demon. It was easy to suspend disbelief. On the other hand: Yes, at that point, they might as well add a Starbuck's coffee shop. Those hellspawn love a good mocha latte.

Yonyuro: You certainly put your finger on one of the major issues - backtracking! Plenty of the classic CRPGs had this, but when is it bad and when is it at least tolerable? And can it ever be good? .... I'm afraid my cultural illiteracy will show through here because I don't know any of the examples you mentioned. As Iucounu pointed out a few pages ago, the story has a lot to do with it. So, In Cloakwood, you are grinding your way through spiders and wyverns etc. but you really want to get to the guy at the end (and IT'S PERSONAL ). Contrast that to IWD where you go to the vale of shadows because you (an inbred northern adventurer ) have been ordered there by some neofascist archdruid that you met yesterday. When you do finish the vale of shadows, the only thing you learn is that you did it all for nothing. But, back to backtracking (err, yes). Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all. Adding a hoard of sword spiders that you grind through while backtracking wouldn't make it fun - it would just make it take longer. Adding a hoard of mindflayers or beholders wouldn't make it more fun than adding sword spiders. It would compound the problem if you were backtracking in order to recover from injuries. To continue with this hypothetical, if you are limping away with an empty spellbook and having used most of your healing potions, that is a case where making the level more difficult would necessarily make it more tedious. One step forward seven steps back. There were some examples in IWD where, oddly enough, you find places to purchase healing/potions and safe places to rest in the dungeons. It's a bit strange, but it makes tactical retreating take less time. Hmm, maybe putting stores and youth hostels in a dungeon may be a sign that the dungeon is too big/linear? I'll have to think about that.

Just to be clear, I was using that as as an example of a mistake that I made as a new player that required backtracking to fix, not a negative about the map. I think that was a well done group of maps - difficult but not frustrating. Also, the wyvern cave encounter was optional so if it had turned out to be too hard, I could have skipped it and/or come back when the party was higher level. Sure, that encounter got much easier once I knew what I was doing. And, there was certainly a hint (a movie of a wyvern flying off with a cow). In subsequent games, I was also more subtle about how I lured them out the cave (you know, fireballing them tends to lure all five of them out at once).

Sure, I'm fine w/that too. To clear up my earlier point, what I'm less fine with is not having any indication if you can complete a quest or not. PS:T had some examples where that was hard to tell. E.g., the 'puzzled skeleton' wasn't the only one who was puzzled during that encounter. Hmm, maybe if I talk to zombie 4173 I'll be able to solve this. Nope, how about zombie 4174? Nope .... BG2 had an encounter where if your WIS was high enough you could talk your way out of a fight (the beholder in the City of Caverns). Some of the high WIS NPCs will chime in during that encounter if your PC doesn't have a high enough WIS. During one (solo) play through, I had a low WIS character and found out that it doesn't always end that way. But, it does always end - one way or the other.

As a huge fan of MotB, I think you have identified perhaps my biggest gripe with that NWN2 expansion right there (I actually thought the spirit meter was fitting somehow, but perhaps it was with you for too long). One of few new games that have really impressed me in the last year or two is Dishonored. My avatar certainly hints at me digging it. However, Dishonored too had a similar annoyance, but this time it was what PrimeJunta called "lack of transparency". If you did a no-kills playthrough, you had no idea if you had haphazardly killed someone directly or indirectly. And some acts were like two hours of game play. It wasn't fun when you saw you had some inexplicable death on your consciousness at the end of it. I would so much appreciated if I at least could check if my hands are clean while playing the game. Things like this is so unnecessary and so easy to rectify. And it doesn't have to be in your face like in FNV, where if you somehow short circuit a quest by killing some NPC, you get a pop-up saying something like "quest failed" on the screen. It's well enough with some info screen that I can get to via some short key. ...... Great examples. The question is, when you make a mistake, when/how do you discover it and what are the costs to fix it? Two examples: In PS:T, some minor quests can only be completed if your character has the right stats. Others can be solved by persistently revisiting and talking to the right NPC's. There isn't always a way to tell which is which. So, how do you know when you've made a mistake - err, you replay the whole game with different stats and get different results sometimes but not others?? So, when you know you've made a mistake (wait, wyverns are venomous??). What is the cost to fix it? (Welp, back to the Friendly Arm to resurrect one of my party members). Often the cost involves backtracking. If there's too much backtracking coupled with respawning enemies, it's easy to get into the situation I mentioned in my previous post where turning up the difficulty slider just makes the level seem tedious instead of more challenging. (A.k.a. the 'running a meat grinder down a hallway' situation.) BTW, I enjoyed the Cloakwood maps in BG1 - I'm not using that as a bad example, but rather as something that easily could have gone bad. TL;DR -- It shouldn't be an undecidable (that is, RE-COMPLETE) problem to know if you can finish a quest at all. -- Mistakes need costs but mind numbing boredom for the player is not a good cost function.

a. For the record, I'm in favor of a larger scope. I think, for me it is mostly: b. I like difficult levels but, in some cases, adding difficulty can just make things tedious. This happens when the game play graph looks like a straight line, that is, when an objective involves a very long series of non-optional sub-objectives. If the only choice a player can make is press on or backtrack umpteen levels to recover, then difficulty level becomes positively correlated with boredom.

Lots of good thoughts in this thread. I think some of the concerns boil down to, when is something fun and challenging vs. hard and frustrating. Maybe we can come up with useful thoughts about that. So, yeah, the illithid level. Several things can make it more frustrating than fun. If you go there with a high enough level party, (mage or cleric 15 or higher) then hasted skeletons make it pretty manageable. If your party is lower level, well, you don't have enough chaotic commands spells. You may have done the beholder area first and found a greenstone amulet that defends against psionics, but not completely (what the $%^&* does that mean, does it work or not?). And, maybe you didn't do the beholder level first and don't have a greenstone amulet at all. Eventually you find 'brine potions' that make your characters immune to psionics (but you don't know how long they last). Oh, and you can't leave until you beat the level (unless you want to reload). So, when is a level challenging and when is it frustrating? Some things that come to mind: 1. Game ending attacks that have no defense at all - yuck. 2. Defense exists, but in a reasonable play through you don't happen have it with you and you can't leave and come back with a scroll/potion/higher level cleric/whatever because you're stuck in the level - yuck. 3. Too much grinding and a long walk to recover if your party is too wounded to risk resting in a dangerous place (or, if you can't rest at all without a long walk). 4. Too much backtracking to solve a puzzle. Hint, something is wrong if someone would be tempted to use a teleport cheat to beat a level. (Yeah, I'm looking at you 'Trials of the Luremaster' gem puzzle). Shortest path optimization is for computers, not computer gamers and isn't fun. At all. Ever. Really. Not ever. A dungeon that I liked in BG2 was Windspear Hills. You might have a problem with the undead critters, especially with a lower level party but there is a convenient ambush point to use on them (that is initially used on you). Firkraag is a challenge, but is optional and a lot of the loot you can find in the dungeon makes him a lot more manageable. Getting out to rest in safe place was a pain, but was usually not necessary. Level drain was a pain there and everywhere else. The cloakwood spider level in BG1 was challenging for a new player but well done. The guy at the beginning of the level tells you that his brother was taken by spiders. The astute player may have chosen to leave and come back with antidote potions if not already equipped. The game did not prevent the astute player from doing so. Good, challenging, fun (in a creepy disturbing sort of way) level for a low level party. What else? Other ideas?

Dude, how can the barbarian be named Martin? Just kidding. If I'm getting your main point, the idea is that each party member is making the contribution that they are suited for and the environment is such that they may need to do completely different things, depending on their abilities, to get into the encounter at all. As opposed to: thief opens door, everyone rushes in and either shoots arrows (or spells) or jumps into melee. The main point here is that the choices you make for your characters will affect how each character will participate in the encounter. Am I getting your main point here? This looks like a special case of having meaningful choices, but it's an interesting special case because the differences are played out per encounter so it doesn't require the developers to write an exponential number of, say, dialog nodes.

I haven't done the math, but I didn't think it worked like that. I thought that if you had two barrels of the same length the heavier projectile would fly straighter (assuming a large enough charge to get an equal muzzle velocity). (Also, if there are two sights, more distance between them helps, so longer means more accurate for that reason too.) The length also increases the burn length and, hence, the muzzle velocity but so does the size of the charge, so I was assuming that with a larger diameter ball, one uses enough of a charge to get the muzzle velocity high enough. But, I don't really know the details, am I leaving something out? It's not obvious to me why it's the ratio that's important.

Well, speaking of summoned minions, and things that need improvement: In BG2 (and Tutu) summoned minions didn't (usually) trigger traps (I think there were a few exceptions). It was probably for balance reasons - one of the main reasons for including a thief would have evaporated. Still, that's pretty broken. I don't know if that's relevant to PoE because it sounds like there won't be many summons, but if there are, I would expect them to trigger traps.