ZornWO

What I was looking for in this update was a way to add in some intricacy and strategy on top of the raw tactics - in order to make up for having no prebuffing (which is understandable), no sequencers and no contingencies (which is really disappointing). Having lots of spells and filling a grimoire w/ them adds a touch of that back in but doesn't really fix the problem. I guess SCS has spoiled me utterly. The players that Josh Sawyer calls the "Rommels" (not the greatest name there lol) get maybe one or two rpgs a decade, if even that much. Players like that playtester Josh has cited a couple times who never thought to prebuff have essentially the entire market catering to them already; you hear stuff abt ppl buying more games than they can even get around to playing. Losing PoE to the second group is a bitter pill to swallow. I'll have to wait & keep an eye out for mods... thankfully I don't preorder as a rule. That said, I sincerely wish you guys @ Obsidian the best of luck. I'll go so far as to say, if I thought your success depended on my purchase I'd go ahead & "buy" (back) it now. It does look like you're producing a quality game & you completely deserve the love you're getting.

I totally support ppl expressing their subjective dislike of SCS. It's totally valid to say one didn't enjoy SCS. But it kills me to see this unfair criticism that it isn't strategic or it's somehow cheesy when DavidW put years of thought and hard work into making it strategic and into heavily reducing the cheese in the game. He put a lot of effort into keeping a consistent ruleset for players and opponents, closing off some of the broken nonsense like Cloudkilling enemies offscreen, and by avoiding Weimer Tactics-style "gotchas." He created a bunch of code so the AI can detect what you're doing and react sanely. Having fighters know to switch to ranged weapons when they're stuck in a Teleport Field makes TF tactical rather than stupidstrong. The first time seeing enemies move outside cloud AoEs was almost as impressive as the first time seeing an enemy priest cast Zone of Sweet Air to help his party. Not to mention the outlandishness of enemies that know how to open doors to chase after you as one of your characters tries to retreat! Those enemies were showing even more gall than that fighter who had the audacity to take an antidote when poisoned. I only found BG1 and BG2 when it came to Gamefly, which I happened to have at the right time. So I wound up exploring their mods, including SCS, before trying IWD. Yeah... it doesn't compare. IWD is a great game, and it had some fun to offer, but it felt like a much older game. Its AI just wasn't very responsive. Edit (on top of some re-wordings): I'll add abt Weimer's Tactics mod - one difference b/w it and SCS for me is metagaming. I try hard not to metagame BG2 except for quest order and maybe some inventory decisions. Not only is it possible not to metagame in SCS, the mod facilitates that goal. On a fresh install, it randomizes spellcasters' spellbooks out of a handcrafted set appropriate for their level so you can't metagame the spells you'll face. I found Tactics was too puzzle-like to do avoid some metagaming.

Thanks for the reply.

Just to piggyback on the AI question, but will there be any randomization to enemy types or their abilities? There's a mod to BG2 (SCS) that randomizes wizards' spell books from a set of handcrafted spell books each time you install, and so I only ever play on fresh installs. Also, will there be any classes that have sequencer/contingency type spells? That's a huge thing for me. I was looking at the art for scripted interactions; are they in an in-world style, i.e., are they how Dyrwoodians (sp?) or whoever illustrate manuscripts?

Alright, the comment's two weeks old, and sorry for dumping yet again on DA, but this point's a huge pet peeve of mine. Having several ways to build classes up is a great thing, but DA:O did it badly. I beat the game on the hardest difficulty setting, w/ a house rule against any potion use (health and lyrium), paying virtually no thought to my ability and spell picks apart from some healing spells. It's not that the game was too easy, it's that it was too simple (though parts were too easy too). Somehow "tactics" has come to mean "never having to think much ahead," and that's terrible. If the devs are going to ensure each class has several valid ways to build up, they should pay careful attention to making sure that abilities aren't all valid in just any arbitrary combination - each ability should be useful, but at least past the lower/lower difficulty setting(s), ability pick combos should matter & require some planning. That's a big part of the fun! This is why heresy is eeevil!!1!1

Stasis_Sword's requests seem pretty elementary to me, expect perhaps the "nerfed forms" request if the druid forms don't mimic actual creatures in the world. "Unlocking abilities over time" seems like an improvement over IE shapeshifting. If it's of interest, the BG1/2 spider form is useful against spellcasters since the several rounds of poison damage disrupt their casting. It's also better against enemies that are prone to going invisible etc.

Apologies if it's a duplicate request, but -- It'd be really great if you could talk to shopkeeps over the sales counter, or bartenders over the bar, rather than having to walk around to their side like in the IE games. It's probably not worth too many "zots" if that's what it'd take, but it feels a little silly talking to Barkis in the Smoldering Corpse on his side of the bar

It seemed as if TC there was saying that fire could create a status effect, being set aflame or the like, no? The wiki pg on defense mentions, "Fortitude (FOR): Represents a character's endurance to "body system attacks" such as poison or disease. It is based on Might and Constitution." It's fairly surprising there's no poison dmg, but it's probably not terrible that way.

It's really disappointing there won't be new stretch goals. (What a way to get a sense of what the promancers are feeling.) Druid & chanter companions that have dialog would've been very welcome; the wiki on companions doesn't even mention a fighter. Plus, BG2 had a dearth of wilderness. Valorian says it has 5 wilderness areas, but it's not clear what that's counting. There are the 3 that unlock when you exit the Underdark, plus a 4th if you count the UD exit area itself (which shouldn't count, really). Maybe if you count the druid grove and the Umar temple ruins? Overall, good update tho. The godlike are looking good & Ondra's Gift has so much open space it's crying out for a battle.

Ofc it's perfectly fine to disagree only in part. The issue was that I posted abt my interest in all these different kinds of tradeoffs, and your response was to enlighten me that tradeoffs don't all have to be one kind of thing. On top of a more general sense your replies tend to be... unresponsive to the topics discussed, and it creates an impression you don't give attention or thought to the posts you reply to. My schedule's far too hectic to view ignoring other ppl as "productive discussion." Even here, in response to a passage suggesting you didn't consider an earlier post's points, your reply isn't to clarify how you did consider them, or to acknowledge the problem and address it, or even to avoid replying to the point (which, as before, would've been fine), but it's instead to react as if the passage disdained partial disagreement - a leap that's just baffling. Lephys, it's clear (and appreciated!) you're well-intentioned, but it is frustrating having a conversation that lacks conversing. Perhaps it's best just to agree to disagree & move on. Some of what you've said to Mr. M has been rather ironic.

Well, given my hard-earned pessimism regarding game series that name-drop BG and promise "tactical" combat, hopefully Obsidian can make that 2-0 ftw.

To be fair, I suspect that passage was referring to my post, which explicitly stated I wasn't that into summoning. Meaning that, as I said, in BG2 especially except for Mordy Swords or Planetars (which were very OP), the summoning spells are heavily overrated imo for most of the game - and I'd love a game where the summoning system was more interesting/complex, and again, there was a lot of great discussion in the thread which generated some thought. Though, if someone's aim is to have a pure summoner, especially a solo one, then I can see why having a risk to some summoning spells that they'd rebel would be unappealing as it'd create a need for contingency plans that wouldn't rely on those summons.

Yes, but I was curious about what the specifics were. I'm asking b/c our sense of how IE combat plays is extremely different, especially when you say things like "I don't want to win combat because I had more positive effects on my party than the enemy did, and/or countered their dispels before they could counter my buffs, etc." Sorry we still disagree, but my overwhelming impression from many, many of your posts is that you dislike managing risks ex ante; you only ever seem to want determinism or pure ex post reaction. But that eliminates wholesale a source of complications and contingency-planning; it just flattens the dimensions of the tradeoffs the player faces. That's far more, as you put it, "primitive" than including those added complications. So for instance: "For example, having the ability to strike your ally to awaken them from a Sleep effect is, in my book, a far superior means of handling such a thing than 'I'll cast this spell that's the opposite of sleep, and/or is designed to remove effects.'" Look at what you're proposing: the player can only react, rather than having the option of judging in advance the risk of a sleep effect to be high enough that it's worth devoting resources to addressing. That's obviously an elimination of a potential source of tradeoffs and difficulty - you're homogenizing gameplay. Some of the rest of your post is a bit hard to untangle, partly b/c it intermingles three different things: buffing before combat, buff stacking itself, and hard counters. On buffing before combat, you know my suggestions. It's not hard to understand why ppl dislike rote pre-combat buffing. On buff stacking - again, I said why I like them and why they add strategic challenge; the response seems to be primarily, oh, it's "silly", "primitive," "ridiculous." When you say, "Well, the tradeoffs just don't need to be purely a choice between a direct action and a passive boost," it's fairly clear you simply didn't read what I wrote, which you know, is fine, but then why respond? On hard counters, I haven't really discussed them. I like hard counters simply b/c of my experience w/ them vs. other combat systems, which don't deliver the same complexity. (Yeah, that's ironic, given how they work vs. other buffs, which on paper seem more intricate.) Let's take a simplified example: Let's say your spellcaster-only party loads up on fire spells. That's a very simple tactical plan, and (past maybe a first handful of low-lvl encounters or such) you should lose for it. If the enemy has hard-counter PfFire, you will - so if a hard counter's in a game, you'll have to weigh the risks of facing it, and assess the opportunity costs of taking other damage types versus debuffs, etc. Sometimes this risk management will pay off big, sometimes it'll go terribly, and it lets combat be dicey in ways I haven't seen other combat systems deliver. All of that delivers combat diversity and strategic depth. Otoh, If the enemy has a soft counter to fire, well, either you're in the same boat b/c PfFire's effectively close enough to a hard counter (in which case, the change had no point), or there's no particular reason to change your tactical plan and you can still win with mindless tactics. The response here might just be Pipyui's point that if you know you're facing e.g. Fire Elementals, you can memorize PfFire and have a win on simple tactics. But that's a problem of enemy design given the spells and abilities, not the other way around - e.g., aTweaks' pnp Salamander Nobles had an ability that lowered enemies' fire resistance. And along those lines, have you played mage duels in BG2? Particularly with the SCS mod? They really bring out the potential of these systems. It's not at all a function of simply having more buffing, or countering them before they counter you, as you suggested above. You can win w/ fewer or no buffs, and you can win w/ no or minimal debuffing - or lots of both. You can also lose any of those ways, and I've done that too. It's partly a function of smart spell selection ex ante - you have to think abt the system and the spectrum of contingencies possible, especially in no-reload - but also how well you can implement that understanding on the fly. It's more an intellectual challenge. So I strongly disagree when you say it'd be better to have "something like Mage Armor to be more than just 'you're harder to hit for a duration,' instead being breakable or something, like the Wizard's Arcane Veil seems to be in PoE. Now it's strategic." That's not strategic; on the contrary, being breakable (what you seem to have in mind here, per the discussion w/ Gfted1) rewards the mindless tactic of just bashing away to break the spell.* Again, your preferences here tend towards simplifying and homogenizing gameplay. *(The particular mechanism Arcane Veil seems(?) to have where a single weapon type can pierce it is fine by me - it's analogous to the Mantle line of spells. It's a hard counter to most wpn types.) edit: rather than posting another dull book, I'll just mention here abt the Summoning thread discussion: regarding chance in combat, the reason it's strategically challenging is b/c the risk of an adverse event induces the need to create contingency plans, particularly in no-reload. If you take a risk-based spell, other parts of your spell/ability selections will change to keep it from being a disaster if e.g. the summon rebels. So the chance spells have an implicit resource cost that you're overlooking. As well, sorry to say, I disagree w/ the rest of your views there, but it's probably not worth pursuing.

I'm not bothered by it. I thought the dev's were trying to keep away from this sort of stuff? The reloading to get a better outcome? The reload to get your death spell off, a successful pick pocket, to do 'anything else better' type outcome? Wow, I thought that was just for a particular spell or two? Are they really examining every little mechanic for how it affects that issue? I don't get it. It's a single-player game. If some ppl save-scum I don't see why the game should nanny them. It starts to impact no-reload play.

Lephys, I'm curious, were there any specifics in IE combat that you liked? In terms of buff stacks, the main thing (hardly the only thing) I like about it is that it creates "stacks" of different, often challenging tradeoffs both in spell selection and w/in combat (both offensively and defensively), far more extensively than any other combat system I've tried. If you change some of your spell picks, it creates cascades of implications for what else you'd want to pick (even if you just restrict attention to "viable" spells (e.g. no infravision)). Combat against enemy mages is extremely diverse and unpredictable (particularly with good AI, per SCS), w/o being arbitrary, and can often close off the obvious ways to attack and force you to get creative more than I've seen in other systems, esp. in no-reload. I could go on about it but no-one's really reading. Anyway, in the IE games, prebuffing was just a small price to pay - though again, I think there are ways around prebuffing. I'd be more open to other systems if I had some expectation they could deliver tradeoffs like that. I've just never seen it. Your idea about a skill wouldn't address that really. As well, the game already has an interruption mechanic.