Balanced choice of options: a feature often lacking

[Infiltrator_SF]

First off I'd like to congratulate Obsidian for the great animated scene that was just released, I really like the art direction this game is heading.

 

I wanted to talk about an aspect that is often tweaked very late in the development so I imagine I'm not late to this sort of thing - balance of weapons, spells and abilities.

 

Oftentimes, even veteran developers are introducing blatantly overpowered or incredibly useless abilities/weapons in their games. This goes mostly for singleplayer games, like PE, where they try to fit in something for everyone, but end up making a totally one-sided scale of power when it comes to these elements.

 

Case in point - Bioshock infinite that some of you may have played. When you die, you revive at 50% health points. There's an equipment slot that basically lets you revive at 100%. Every revival heals enemies and takes your money. This is an example of an incredibly stupid skill done by a developer that has had plenty of experience in the industry. Someone might say this will let you take on enemies more easily after a difficult encounter, but why would you want to encourage people to use a skill that benefits from a situation you should always be trying to avoid in the first place? Why not take one of the blatantly stronger skills that grants more damage, but instead rely on corpse-flopping your way across a difficult choke?

 

I know what you're going to say - PE is not aimed toward people that are mindlessly going through the game, we're all experienced min-maxers and such a game will be most certainly have no glaring balance holes. Well, look at the D&D games that PE is taking a lesson from - most of them have a myriad of useless abilities and spells, not to mention weapons and armor scale awkwardly where you have a lot of great longswords to chose from but a few lousy axes, for example. Daggers in D&D were largely useless, the best assassins use staffs because the backstab multiplier takes in account base weapon damage. TeS: Oblivion, for example, punished you for levelling as soon as you saw the levelup notification because you could miss out on skill points while mosters scaled based on your level.

 

I hope the PE devs think hard on how some of us enjoy a wide variety of viable abilities and how important it is for every one of them has either a strong synergy or otherwise can be used to good effect in a min-max scenario. This will most likely come down to number crunching but I guess the important thing is that the item/skill itself does not promote some counter-intuitive mechanic first.

[Sacred_Path]

If you browse the older threads a little you will find that balancing is quite prominent on the devs' minds (check J.E. Sawyer's posts in particular).

[Lephys]

Case in point - Bioshock infinite that some of you may have played. When you die, you revive at 50% health points. There's an equipment slot that basically lets you revive at 100%. Every revival heals enemies and takes your money. This is an example of an incredibly stupid skill done by a developer that has had plenty of experience in the industry. Someone might say this will let you take on enemies more easily after a difficult encounter, but why would you want to encourage people to use a skill that benefits from a situation you should always be trying to avoid in the first place? Why not take one of the blatantly stronger skills that grants more damage, but instead rely on corpse-flopping your way across a difficult choke?

 

...

 

I hope the PE devs think hard on how some of us enjoy a wide variety of viable abilities and how important it is for every one of them has either a strong synergy or otherwise can be used to good effect in a min-max scenario.

Unless you're suggesting that death, in a game like Bioshock, despite the player's best efforts, should never occur and should be easily avoidable, I'm not comprehending what you're saying. Also, why bash the choice to bolster effects when something like death (again, in the context of Bioshock) occurs, then turn around and emphasize the importance of ability variety?

 

If you think you can just try harder and never die, then awesome. Some people will find that they can't, and will have a nice option (if they find that particular article of clothing) to mitigate the negative effects of their death. It's not encouraging anyone to die more instead of less, as death it still a negative. It's just LESS of a negative when you revive with 100% health instead of 50.

 

Hell, oodles of RPGs have had multi-tiered versions of resurrection magic. The first revive spell/item you get might just get your party member back on their feet, with 20% health or something, and later you might get one that fully revives them. Does THAT encourage you to kill your party members as often as possible? You could just as easily argue "Why give me an ability that benefits me when I do something I should be avoiding anyway (die)?"

 

As for the rest of your point, I think it's a valiant point/hope, and I don't think you have anything to fear from Obsidian.