Enemies

[lissom]

What defines half the game in this genre, the other guys.

One of the trends I've noticed with enemies in many of these games is that have dymnamic leveling. AKA, we'll make sure you can kill this. It makes combat boring and trivial as it basically removes the possability of ever running into any hard enemies(bar some cheese factors). And seeing how you can already load a saved game if you die, there are't an consequences for dieing anyway. So combat is meaningless and bland blandness. That was one of the greatest things about BG II, you could actually get a sense of accomplishment from succeeding in hard fights. So the relative meaninglessness of death was fine because you had to reload frequently when you screwed up.

In BGII you could cheese fights by making all your own party and going fighter/other, etc, but I'm talking about playing with the default party choices and turning the hardness up a notch. aka well within the designers' parameters you could find things that were reasonably hard, and seemed reasonable. And by seemed reasonable I mean that the only thing hard about the fights wasn't that the game went and added 2x the health to mobs. You have to figure out how you were going to kill that dragon etc.

IWDII, the "dragon" guardian in the snake temple, that is what I would define as unreaonably hard. It was only hard becuase it was basically immune to everything so unless you had the "right" party configuration (or so I assume as I only had one I could try), you had to reload until you got lucky with some spells (Perhaps all barbarians or w/e could take him easy). That was just cheesy and seemed foolish, anything that is immune to stuff is hard..... and also kinda boring. One of World of Warcraft's, etc big steps over AD&D was that basically no one is immune to damage except under brief and exceptional circumstances.

[Osvir]

I want enemies to be immune, I want bosses to be immune, I personally don't think it's boring, it's frustrating. As long as I can leave the area and access some shop or something (even if I have to go through the entire dungeon back and forth).

 

In IWD I had a whooping party that could defeat anything, well anything except the last boss. My party was strong, I had great gear and equipment, the only thing that was missing was 1 Hammer that I had just sold (learned later reading a guide that you're supposed to keep it, ah how should I have known?). I tried fighting the last boss 3 or 4 times before giving up, each time took about 30-40 minutes before my party died and the god damn boss was always at "Near Death" from Spells (which was the only thing capable of hurting him), the rest was "Immunity to damage". The real issue was that I couldn't leave the end-game tower and there were no shops to exchange my gear at in any way so I was practically stuck in an area and I couldn't change my "load out".

 

I think that most people that got to the final boss in IWD probably beat him/her so I'm probably in the minority of the minority here, still don't want to get stuck in an end-game area that I can't leave. And if I can't leave it I want to have a secret shop or items in the end-game dungeon that I can use to change my "load out" in case I'd come across a similar situation.

[Hassat Hunter]

I also object. Immunities should be one.

 

I actually think WoW and similar games did bad there. There's no need for example to split specilisations. If in a game someone is immune to fire, your fire wizard is useless. Hence you update fire and ice to counter that. In systems where there's just resistances however you probably don't. Why split between fire and ice if the solution to fire-resistant enemies is just... more fire?

 

And thus it harms having to use strategy and resorts to using the same tactic over and over and over, because you can. Not a good thing IMO.