Ohioastro

There is a reason why a lot of us really, really, really don't like the Codex. And it's encapsulated in that review. Arrogance, lack of perspective, and a rigid adherence to decade-old formulas. This is a hatchet job, which is exactly what I'd expect from the Codex. It's a shallow piece of work, with numerous errors - the sort that you'd make if you were prosecuting a case, rather than evaluating a game (as the post above me notes.) For example, this is his class summary: "The druid is good at everything and overshadows all other casters, the priest would be good if buff spells didn’t suck and the endurance/health system wasn’t broken, and the wizard got terribly shafted." What game is he playing? In the one that I'm playing, high level wizard are very powerful, low level wizards have very strong debuffs, priest buffs are very strong, and druids are fun too - but hardly "overshadowing" the others. I could go on, but what's the point? The people who are angry that they didn't get to design the game will love this. Other people won't see much of value. Par for the course over there.

I find the lack of attacks of opportunity to be poor for game balance and my enjoyment. I don't want to have encounters designed around click-a-thons to move characters around, which is the practical consequence of no engagement. Basically, it's just replacing the PoE status quo with a more kinetic, butin my mind far more gamey, alternative. It's also certainly true that D&D has gone back and forth on this - none in 2nd and 3rd ed, but it's definitely in 3.5. Don't know about 4.0 and 5.0. Others feel differently, of course, and I don't think that there is a right and a wrong here (ditto for, say, turn based vs. real time with pause.) But if you remove penalties for running away out of melee range, you are designing your game around the idea that people will spend a lot of time leading the AI on chases.

...which can be fixed in the AI, and has nothing to do with the existence of an engagement system.

This is actually pretty common - I read a fascinating article by the Galactic Civilizations lead, Brad Wardell, about that. His point was that computer AIs in virtually all games aren't playing by anything like the same rules that the players are. GalCiv was actually an exception - the rules for players and AIs are identical in that game, and it's arguably the most challenging AI on the market. (It helps that it's a space game, which means no real "terrain", and that it has deliberately simple rules. To make the AI tractable they give unlimited spells, but a restricted number of them. Otherwise the AI would have to choose between dozens of options. It's the same reason why the IE games gave you "orc archer" and "orc warrior", in a system where all of the players can use either bows or swords.

Thanks. I had the +2 DR from the Knights and got the +0.1 Crit from the Mercenaries, but either didn't realize or forgot about them. The rest are either evil or endgame stuff which I haven't gotten to yet. I suspect you have to fool somebody into feeding the undead scholar near the machine for him to tell you how to do it. Well, he needs living human flesh. How many choices do you have in Heritage Hill? Once you think that through, you get the Deceptive and Cruel bits. I actually couldn't make myself do it because of that.

Yes, I think that we should resist feeding a single post person who is pushing hot buttons. 3 or 4 out of 8 is not all guys.

I see a lot of threads where people try to redesign the rules of the game to alter some perceived imbalance - anything from a dislike of some of the basic systems to a perception that the game is "too easy" or deviates in some other way from earlier games. I'd like to see if we can have a thread that focuses instead on ways to improve the game experience within the current rules by suggesting improvements in how encounters are designed and how the AI behaves. To start the ball rolling, here are some suggestions: 1) Focus on the linchpin (or boss) encounters. In a system with per day abilities it's going to be difficult to balance normal encounters (e.g. a couple of trolls or a handful of humanoids) for two reasons: players can control the terrain, doing things like using doors for chokepoints, and they can burn as many spells as they need to win. For the key encounters - usually ones that end quests or block further progress - you can design them around players using all spells (avoiding fruitless "rest spam abuser" arguments) and, as noted below, you can control the terrain to make for a more challenging and interesting experience. 2) At higher difficulties, control the tactical terrain for bosses. There are many ways to do that : a cutscene where players are marched up to talk to an NPC (we have this now); events (e.g. use a grappling hook to cross a bridge) could be used to have a passage crumble or a gate slam behind; secret doors slide open behind the party, causing enemies to approach from different angles. Any of these can be used to start encounters with the players not hiding behind a door or positioned relative to the enemies in some desired way. You can also have off-screen reinforcements appear during the battle. I suspect that this change, by itself, will significantly reduce the number of people who claim that the game is too easy. It will also reduce the "kill the wizard with guns before the battle" syndrome. 3) Have the AI prioritize targets like players do. Players don't focus on tough melee targets: they attack vulnerable and dangerous targets. Have the AI prioritize "dangerous" targets more and gang up on them more. This is especially true for ranged targets. 4) Use tools to break engagement and chokepoints. Use knockbacks to push players out of doors; use knockdowns to break engagement and charge the backfield. 5) Don't stand in the fire. The AI will frequently leave combatants standing in zones that freeze, blind, or interrupt their actions. Prioritize moving out of them quickly (this can go with the "breaking engagement" items above.) As a complement, use abilities that restore status. 6) Have more loops. Have more setups where the AI can send attackers around from multiple directions, reducing the value of chokepoints. ---------------------------------------------------- Any other ideas / concepts? If possible, I'd really like to see what is possible in the current rule set, changing simply encounter design and AI, to see how much better the game could be within that framework.

Well, that's just, like, your opinion man.

An action game is a completely different beast from an RPG. Full stop. I think that we need to turn down the flamethrowers here, frankly. I have a ton of choices when it comes to action games - especially on consoles. RPGs are rare. DA2 got a lot of *deserved* scorn for two sets of reasons: first, it replaced an RPG with an action game; and second, it was objectively (I'll get there in a minute) shoddy in construction. By the latter, I mean that they recycled assets to an astonishing degree. They parachuted enemies in instead of trying to make them remotely believable. These are not subjective things: they are explicit mistakes, and Bioware admitted that they were. I can't believe that we can be arguing these points. On the rest, if you prefer action games to RPGs you'd prefer DA2 to DA:O. It really annoys me when people make sweeping claims - for example, that a reflex action game is "more tactical" than an action RPG. Is Call of Duty really "more tactical" than chess, for example? Apples and oranges. But the thing fort the action fans to realize is twofold: this game represented a real breach of faith between audience and producer. They marketed a game as a successor to another when they switched genres. They'd have been a ton better off calling it something completely different, and they wouldn't have gotten the reaction that they did. I no longer am *interested* in Bioware games. They're entitled to chase a younger audience and I'm not obligated to support them. Second - as you get older your reflexes slow down. I'm no longer particularly good at twitch gaming, and I don't enjoy it. There is a space for games that aren't frantic and games that aren't flashy, and they've been rare. If Bioware wants to make fantasy Call of Duty, bully for them. But call it that - don't pretend that a console action game is a RPG, and don't claim (as in DA:I) that you're making a game for PCs first with console controls.

Again, I point to the metacritic reviews: People rated PoE and DA:O very highly, they rated DA2 very poorly, and they rated DA:I as mediocre. And that's for a reason. DA2 is an action button-pushing game, not a RPG. The fact that veterans can trivialize every single game in the genre once they crack the system is not an argument that a game is bad. If I have to spend 100 hours and multiple replays to figure out how to beat a game system it's a good one, even if I am no longer challenged once I do.

Sorry, having recently finished both DA:O and DA2 on nightmare in preparation for DAI(which I dropped out of disgust in the first hour from console control scheme), I disagree. I liked both. I liked the story and characters in DAO, and the combat and tactics in DA2. Let's not kid ourselves here, DAO's combat was a complete cheese fest once you knew what you were doing. There was nothing tactical about it. My PC rogue literally auto-attacked his way through the whole game coz none of his other abilities WORKED in terms of having better dps than plain auto-attacking. DA2 actually has consistently challenging combat. Just because they implemented non-sucky looking, faster-paced animations does not mean it's less tactical than DAO(the opposite is true). Sure DA2 sucked from rehashed areas and average meh story/companions, but its combat was one of its high points and one where it improved over DAO. What? "Consistently challenging combat?" Are we talking about the same game? The one where, by design, you could win all normal difficulty encounters without ever using a single ability of any companion (unlike your characterization of DA:O)? The one where hard difficulty involved the same AI but with inflated HP? Teleporting enemies from the sky? It sounds to me like you're an action gamer, but attacking a clever tactical game as one where you can autoattack and playing up the "awesome button" DA2 is tough to swallow. DA2 was *hated* by users, with a wretched metacritic score. DA:O was loved by users. It's not just my opinion - and Bioware has basically apologized for what they did with DA2. Here are the average user reviews from metacritic: PoE: 8.6 DA:O 8.6 DA2: 4.4 DA:I 5.8 I actually find a strong correlation between my views and averages like these, even though I know that people game the system with 1s and 10s. This also shows that it's entirely possible for users to rate games highly (they don't attack everything).

Does playing in slow mode help? the basic issue that I could see is that action proceeds too quickly to hit pause if it takes awhile to mechanically hit the keys. Running at S speed will slow everything down and make it more forgiving.

This is so subjective that I don't even know how to formulate a response. Walking into the first village and seeing a bunch of people hanging from a giant tree is "bland"? Finding out that babies are being born without souls? This game is text heavy and not visual heavy; so if you favor cinematic cut-scenes and the like you'll be disappointed. This game is for book people, not movie people; it's reading the Lord of the Rings, not watching it.

There are surprisingly few CRPGs where this isn't the case. I mean, name a major CRPG, pretty much definitely this is the case. People, the very same people who complain about it, just complain about how they don't feel like they're actually gaining power, how the game is "unrewarding", if it's not the case. Absolutely. I found the BG2 expansion - the one with the crazy high level spells - to be the easiest, by a wide margin, of the entire series. You just had such crazy tools available. There is a recent example of exactly what you're talking about: the Elder Scrolls Online. They had three factions and you leveled 1-50 in one of them. They then had "veteran levels", designed to be more challenging, where you'd go through the other two factions with drastically boosted opponents (think HoF mode in Icewind Dale.) My God, but people hated that. They complained endlessly about how their heroes were so weak. (It's especially funny there, since in a MMO you could always do things with, you know, other players, and it wasn't that hard even if you had two people working together. But modern MMOs are really single player games with other people there for background chatter.) It's now been completely nerfed, so that Veteran mode is pretty much the same as the 1-50 experience.

I'd go closer to the route of boosting spell resistances on bosses. I'm in Act I on PoTD and having a lot of fun. The summoning figures, etc. are completely optional - I think that solo players rely on them heavily, so I'd be wary of crimping them. The usual problem that I have with games in hard difficulty settings is that they take forever - I know that I can always beat that pack of goblins, but I need hours of my time to walk across a room. Much better to just have to think in normal encounters and have a fun puzzle to crack for the bosses.

Y'know, if I find certain tactics to be trivializing games, I don't run to the message boards complaining about them. I don't use them. The problem with PoTD is that it's slower because I have to cast more spells and rest more; I enjoy it otherwise. I really hope that they don't change it into a slog. (And, again, I think that higher difficulty battles should be balanced around really tough boss encounters, not turned into dreary slogs where you have to plow through thousands of overpowered goblins to get from A to B.)

Logic fail. No, it's just an insult used to call someone an incompetent player, nothing more. I like to stretch myself by conserving resources - basically, to learn how to play efficiently. If you use too few spells then you get banged up and need to rest to heal, so it's a balance. But, for example, I consider rapid-fire clicking to beat the game AI to be flat-out exploiting- and I would never do that. If someone is coming for my character I intercept them, disable them, or so forth - I may have that character run away, but I'll have someone else engage. Because, to me, there is no difference between using mouse clicks to trivialize a game and using the console. My way doesn't involve using all of the spells all of the time, but it probably does involve using more spells than Street-Fighter style rapid clicking to prevent the computer from doing anything. So, when I see that you can beat PoE by click-a-thoning it, so what ? You can also beat it by using console commands.

The game does have strong choices in what gets damaged by what. However, if you go overboard you end up forcing wholesale redesigns. Do you need to up the number of spells that wizards get if any damage dealing spell only works on half of the opponents? Do I need xerox fire / cold / lightening / poison spells to play rock paper scissors with enemies? Do you invalidate entire class core abilities against certain enemies, forcing redesign of levels that would otherwise be too, say, undead heavy? Do you end up making scouting mandatory so that people fiddle around to get the "right" spells and abilities lined up? If things are immune to some things, why aren't they vulnerable to others, and doesn't this actually make the game a lot easier? Wouldn't you make classes like ciphers even stronger if their spells, unlike wizards, worked against everything? And why do we need to interpret abilities literally anyhow? The machinery is in place to make certain tools less effective than others; why not just extend that?

I cared more than I usually do with games, so I think it's a you thing honestly. Yea, there are people who develop an intense dislike for something and who then need to have their opinion validated by attacking every aspect of the game. I'll take the PoE story over the paper-thin Baldur's Gate one any day of the week, thank you very much.

Successful games can be played by different people with different styles and motivations. The basic issue with many "balance" arguments is that one persons "exploit" is another persons "cool strategy", frequently one employed in a completely different context. So a strong ability or spell may make it possible, for example, to run though with an unorthodox party design that is otherwise unviable. There is a big element in the balance arguments about people being judgmental about the playstyle of others. I see references - unironic ones - to "rest spam abuse", and they crack me up. You have a game with limited resources. You restore them with resting. Those are the rules. You can choose other designs altogether: limiting abilities with cooldowns and omitting rest altogether; having all resources regenerate out of battle, and so on. Is there some "proper" frequency for resting, and people who do it more often are inferior players? Nope. In my view the real challenge is always in the linchpin encounters. How often you rest when going through routine matters is just a function of how picky you want to be in playing and your tolerance for downtime.

These are very reasonable comments and I concur. In particular, it would help substantially if casters got a single per encounter spell a bit earlier. then they'd be less like autoattack bots in trash battles. I'd like them to look at the balance of the crafting ingredients some. There are a few bottlenecks that seem off - for example, you can run all the way to the endgame without being able to craft the second, let alone the third, quality tier. Those aren't such an enormous edge that this seems warranted. I'd also like the ability to overwrite enchantments. A tooltip that would be very,very useful for crafting: say what a given ingredient is actually used for. Since it is deeply counter-intuitive in some cases that item X can be used to upgrade weapons or make, say, potions.

I dunno... I don't think this is really a valid argument to make. Anything that the game mechanics allow or tacitly encourage you to do is fair game for criticism. It doesn't make sense to criticise PoE for having abusable mechanics (like engagement in some cases) but give the IE games a pass. You're never "supposed" to do abusable things, that's why we label them abusable. Now you're just creating a narrative and selectively ignoring post content, Matt. /s Yea, I am just bowing out. In the end, some people can't accept that other people have a point, and Sensuki is one of them. There is a reason why I, and a lot of other vets, don't hang out at the Codex - because you have people trying to win arguments rather than having discussions. I like IWD; I like BG; I like PoE. Other people have different tastes. Vive la differance and all that!

In both games I rest when I run out of spells or when the characters are banged up; they're identical. Usually a few well-chosen spells, in both games, are sufficient to turn trash mob battles. In both games, you rest before main encounters and throw everything at the wall. In both games some spells are a lot more powerful than others. Are we supposed to play these games by charging into battles with no resources or hit points? If you want an example of a game where there is no "rest abuse" you play a game where there isn't any resting, like the Thief or Dishonored games. Of course, this usually coincides with cooldown abilities rather than ones that require resting to recharge. I don't even know what "rest abusing" is. You have resources, you use them until you run out, you rest. If you mess up on a battle you get banged up and rest more. If you mess up less, you go further. I just don't see a difference between these games.

That's hilarious - you have two parallel systems that permit resting at will with no consequences, at worst just backtracking to somewhere safe...and they're different because.

That's funny because I find the combat pathfinding in all of the Infinity Engine games WAY better than Pillars of Eternity. Make sure to set your path search nodes to 40,000 in the IE games. Yeah and this is dumb AI that is easy to get around too. Some target low DR so you can just wear heavier armor to switch targeting. Some target low Deflection, so what you do is run the character they are targeting around while everyone else attacks them ... lul so ez. The engagement system is so broken that if the AI did try to break it, this would happen. You really are fond of the old systems, and that's your right. This thread spurred me to do a side-by-side, as opposed to a nostalgia run. After doing so I just can't agree with your assessments. Every criticism laid at PoE applies to the IE games. In the IE games I can manipulate the AI and I can metagame the encounters to make them simple to deal with. Single spells like Entangle or Web are massively overpowered (far more so than things like Slicken that upset people here so much). Archery is crazy strong in IWD. The main difference is that IWD is a linear ride and as a result the encounters are tuned to your character level; the net result is a tight series of tactical fights that are fun. BG, by contrast, was much easier to trivialize - as is any other open world game. That's just the nature of the beast. To be clear, I enjoy all of them. I suspect that the difference between us is that I'm not trying to play PoE as if it is something else, but rather taking it on its own terms. When I play IWD I don't focus on the quality of the story because that's not the focus - it's a dungeon crawl. Playing PoE and always comparing it to another game, rating it according to how close it is, will only cause problems. And there are a *ton* of quality of life improvements in PoE. I don't miss the inventory nonsense, the poor pathing, fiddling with stacks of arrows and other consumables, stuffing and sorting things in barrels, the various "save, try, reload" annoyances with things like memorizing spells. Or the baroque complexities of the class systems, the way that you can drive yourself down dead ends without realizing it (oops! I had to have a 10 spellcraft to get the fire damage boost, even though it's useless to me), the min/maxing of the stats (set char=3 and int = 3 for almost all characters without consequences, everything else is maxxed, go me...) The dialog trees are far, far more subtle and interlocking than IWD. The games are simply different ones. But the game that answers all of the criticisms leveled at PoE doesn't exist.