Can I even handle a game like PE any longer? Well, I sure hope so!

[IndiraLightfoot]

OP complains that can't handle an RPG because real life, kids and effort

Spends hours upon hours of time on writing and reading walls of texts about the same RPG

 

"No spark" indeed. 

Heh, the spark is burning pretty bright, still, and the endurance is a bear's, but the patience for the more tedious part of gaming is wearing thin.

[Sarex]

 No, what this boils down to is that you don't respond to what I actually say. You assume I must really secretly mean something stupid and you respond to that instead. I explicitly said that I don't want the game to tell me anything. I also said that there's a difference between reloading and learning tactics to play better.

 

 You stated in no uncertain terms that think you reloading is the same as using in-game tactics to win.

 

 It isn't.

 

 It would be dead easy to write a computer program to win, say BG2, or any of the IE games - a few hundred lines of code (because reloads mean you can try again until you succeed - mindless search for the 'win'). It would be nearly impossible to write a program to do a no reload win of BG2 because it actually needs to learn strategy and tactics and not memorize partial solutions.

 

 Fair enough. The first three that come to mind are:

 

 Kangaxx - very silly encounter. You need a plus four weapon and some kind immunity to imprisonment - so reload buy the staff of Rynn and recruit Korgan. The rest of the party hides while Korgan goes berserk and beats Kangaxx to death the staff (Phase three is profit!).

 

The mindflayer area in the sewers. This is extremely silly and it does exactly what you said you don't like - it hits your party with a psionic blast before they go into the area (the game directly tells you what you need to defend yourself). It probably does this because during play testing, testers wandered in there without enough chaotic commands spells (the one specific thing you need to make it easy) and  hilarity ensued.

 

Finally, The Twisted Rune - This one is less silly because a high level party probably has everything they need. But if you go there at the wrong time, you can't leave and need to reload. When you do reload, you probably know everything you need to make the fight fairly easy  - a winning strategy is practically handed to you by the level layout once you know what the enemies look like.

 

So much for learning tactics.

 

Kangaxx- Used spell immunity and spell shield and resist fear on my melees, put my paladin(with holy avenger) closest to the lich and cast death ward on him and let the lich cast all his spells on him. Took me a few reloads to find out hot to position my characters so they all survive.(I think I beat him on my second try but lost half of my party) So you see the encounter isn't impossible without finding out a "simple piece of information that is obvious in hindsight". Not to mention that what you said is a go to guide that you find online on how to beat the lich.

 

Mindflayers in the sewers I beat by summoning creatures and letting them take on the mindflayers psionic attacks. Took me maybe one reload to get through it.

 

I don't remember this last one, but this is simply learning patterns. For the encounter to be what you want, the devs need to make an AI for the game that will change the behavior of the enemy every time you enter a fight.

 

As you can see, what is impossible to you isn't to others. That is why I am so confused with your comments about "impossible" fights. There wasn't a single fight that you couldn't beat in multiple ways in IE games. It's your choice to look at online guides and spoil your encounters, but that is not the devs fault. Even if it somehow was their fault I seriously doubt it that they will manage to make PoE a perfectly balanced game where no fight can be cheesed.

[Wombat]

I must of course add that when I took companions on in IE games and NWN games, they were integral to my enjoyment of the story and the party interactions and all that, but later on, I made parties with just my own characters, and I only really cared about my main pc in them as well. In combat, I never role-played my characters in our party. I know, it's a bit harsh and heartless in a way, but it certainly makes combat easier and more effective, and to me, actually more fun. 

That would be rather costly tactics for Expert mode, where 0 health means death, but, if you just crank up the difficulty level, even in Path of the Damned, it would be a valid enough tactics.  As I wrote, nobody would stop you from doing so.  There are already such tools which adapt the gameplay to the preference of the players.

 

 

I don't see how your system is much different. If you dump WIS in 3d, you suffer, if you get more, you benefit. And benefits from stats like INT/CHA for non standard classes were a privilege of prestiges in 3d.

You got rid of CHA (or rather, added a general combat bonus to it), well, it always was a dump stat in IE, so that's something. But I doubt pumping stat which "adds more time to effects" in your game would make a better fighter than a STR/DEX/CON based one, no?

Even Sawyer admitted Fighter is easier class for the players to choose attritute scores compared with Monk/Paladin.  Fighter seems not to be a resource-consumptive class and more modal than some other classes with flashy soul abililies but, still, I think they can be more varied compared with the equivalant class in IE games.  And, personally, I wonder if I'd like all the six party members to require micromanagement (even with the newly added "slow" funciton), which is rather based on my preference, though.  In any case, If you like more resouce-heavy classes, you are free to ignore Fighter.

 

 

[Monte Carlo]

With regards to the stuff about Kangaxx / Twisted Rune (etc).

 

The point has been missed. Those fights were, literally, Easter Eggs. They were meant to be cheesed. There are other critical path examples where design might be askew, but these are the wrong targets.

[SqueakyCat]

As long as there is a difficulty slider that sorts the men and women from the sheep then I'm cool.

 

Fixed that for you Monte.  Your chainmail bikini roots are showing. 

 

Eternity is not like that.  If I go through a dungeon, get an hour in, find some hot loot, etc etc, then die and didn't save at some point (we don't know save rules yet, maybe I couldn't save?) I lose EVERYYHING.  I lose the exp, the levels, the items, the progress, the money, all of it.  So I have to repeat the entire last hour.  That is frustrating.  In Dark Souls I didn't really lose much at all and I was going to have to repeat the area again sooner or later anyway because there is not a single place in that game you probably don't end up visiting more than once.

 

Challenge =/= dieing a lot and tons of reloads.

Challege = fights that require some planning, effective use of your parties skills, and knowing when to tell you are just out of your league.

 

I beat Dragon Age Origins on it's hardest setting and never had to reload a single time, my party literally never wiped.  I would still say many of the fights were tough and I had plenty of close calls.  Had my team not been well built, had I not given them the gear and items to be prepared, and had I not deployed them well I can promise you I would have wiped plenty of times.

 

Obsidian has stated it will be save anywhere (with certain obvious restrictions like combat) so you won't lose anything if you save regularly.  It would take me hours to try and find the post talking about saving in the game but I'll try and look for it later.

[Wizaerd]

 

@Reever, there's dumbing down, and then there's getting rid of unnecessary complexity and lazy design masquerading as challenge. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which, and the classics had a lot of both, and downright bad design to boot.

 

As to the games you listed, I didn't care much for ME nor DA:O, but IMO their weaknesses were primarily with the aspects you liked, not so much that ME was actiony and DA:O was MMORPG-y. I didn't like the writing in either, and ME's universe was empty and repetitive; it also had the worst loot system in any game I've played, with mountains of endlessly repetitive, generic shinies.

 

I've more or less given up on BioWare actually. They were on an upward slope until BG2, and a downward slope since then with occasional dead-cat bounces on the way. The last BioWare game I genuinely enjoyed was Jade Empire, and it was a pretty light snack compared to the banquet that is BG2.

 

(Yes, despite having criticized BG2 a quite a lot here, it was a banquet. I didn't enjoy everything on the table, but the best courses were really good and there was such a lot of everything that I could just, like, not have any of the turd pudding.)

 

I almost liked your post

I totally agree with the first part! Sadly, there are still people that put the classics on a pedestal and flame anyone who dares to suggest any kind of change...

As for the second part, I know that ME's plot isn't a masterpiece, but being the Sci-Fi fan I am and being under the illusion that my choices mattered (haha, I'm looking at you ME3 ), it was a great experience for me. As for the looting, may I remind you of the rags in P:T? One of my main gripes with RPGs in general is that I never know what the hell I should take along and what I should just throw away. My perfect RPG would have a merchant at every corner :D

And I can't really judge how BW are now in comparison to earlier and it'll still be some time till I can I can only hope they can win some of their former fans back with the new games they're going to bring out the next few years =)

 

 

 

Would you (everyone) say that the issues are a) overall game scope b) game difficulty or c) something else?

 

In my opinion, an RPG should be a big game (if that's what you meant with scope). Although I wonder how a bigger series with episodic content would do. That would be more or less perfect for people who don't have that much time to invest in a game, but of course, even that depends on the mechanics and execution.

 

For me personally, the only difficulties I ever have are either fights or puzzles. I'm not really that big of a tactician - nor do I want to really "waste" time to figure out how to kill a specific monster, because I just want to get it on with the story. At the same time, I do know that many people get a sense of accomplishment by doing just that, so it's cool. That's why it's important to me that a game lets you change the challenge fights pose to the player.

Puzzles...sometimes they're fun and interesting, sometimes they're just frustrating and in the way. But many people like them, so I don't expect them to be taken out completely

Another problem people (might) have with games with such a scope is of course remembering the plot points etc. That's why a journal is good to have, I guess. Started The Witcher a year ago I guess (finished the 1st chapter) and I forgot a lot about the plot. That's one of the more extreme cases of taking a hiatus, of course, but that's how it is.

 

What I hate most in games are time limits though, especially in RPGs. That's why I'm anxious to see how a certain element in this game will turn out (is this a spoiler?) and I can't wait to see what I'll think of Fallout or NVWN2:MofTB.

 

 

It's almost as if I had written this posting, since we're on the same wavelength here...

[Monte Carlo]

I apologize, your Squeakiness.

[PIP-Clownboy]

Dark Souls isn't easier when you're in undead form, you can't summon help for one thing.

 

Definitely easier for me. Going human opened you up to invaders... most likely an invader min-maxed perfectly to crush things at that level range. My anxiety levels are always a bit higher while in human form especially when you're making a corpse boss/run as you'll lose everything on that body if an invader kills you. 

Edited January 16, 2014 by PIP-Clownboy

[Metabot]

 

Dark Souls isn't easier when you're in undead form, you can't summon help for one thing.

 

Definitely easier for me. Going human opened you up to invaders... most likely an invader min-maxed perfectly to crush things at that level range. My anxiety levels are always a bit higher while in human form especially when you're making a corpse boss/run as you'll lose everything on that body if an invader kills you. 

 

 

Well yes of course you get invaders in human form, but that doesn't make the game itself harder, especially boss fights obviously. You don't get any stat bonuses in undead form or anything like that.

[Stun]

I've gotten an impression that some people here forgot about the various game modes they are offering with more detailed options for single items.  Nobody would stop you from choosing Expert, Path of the Damned and Trial of Iron game modes, besides the normal difficulty settings.  Also, quite many of us are entitled to take part in beta testing if we wish to do so.*   Furthermore, as I wrote before, you don't need to rest in every single rest place.  So, I guess its too early to discuss things further especially when we are yet to put our hands on the current gameplay although the devs sound quite confident in how things turned out so far, to my ears.  As a long term forum lurker, I may have been just accustomed to the way of Sawyer thinking but, some of us asked how things around difficulty were designed and Sawyer gave quite good answers in both general terms and more concrete details in this thread.

A player can certainly tweak gameplay difficulty to taste. That's a given. But much of the stuff we're discussing here falls outside of that... Like an encounter design's inherent difficulty. For example, a low level party in BG1 can wander off a little too far to the east and stumble upon packs of Basilisks. Basilisks are nasty when you're low level. They can petrify you instantly, taking you out of the game (ie. time to reload). Well? Moving the difficulty slider to "easy", will not help, here. Unless it actually replaces that pack of Basilisks with a different encounter entirely... like Hobgoblins or something. But as far as I know, POE's difficulty settings will not be going so far as replacing whole encounters.

 

As for Sawyer's explanations. Sure, there's just the right amount of "Ideal" in them to make them sound good, but the final verdict, which is still almost a year away, will be ours. Design plans, and design implementations are two very different things. We'll be playing the latter.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Stun

[Yonjuro]

 

 Fair enough. The first three that come to mind are:

 

 Kangaxx - very silly encounter. You need a plus four weapon and some kind immunity to imprisonment - so reload buy the staff of Rynn and recruit Korgan. The rest of the party hides while Korgan goes berserk and beats Kangaxx to death the staff (Phase three is profit!).

 

The mindflayer area in the sewers. This is extremely silly and it does exactly what you said you don't like - it hits your party with a psionic blast before they go into the area (the game directly tells you what you need to defend yourself). It probably does this because during play testing, testers wandered in there without enough chaotic commands spells (the one specific thing you need to make it easy) and  hilarity ensued.

 

Finally, The Twisted Rune - This one is less silly because a high level party probably has everything they need. But if you go there at the wrong time, you can't leave and need to reload. When you do reload, you probably know everything you need to make the fight fairly easy  - a winning strategy is practically handed to you by the level layout once you know what the enemies look like.

 

So much for learning tactics.

 

Kangaxx- Used spell immunity and spell shield and resist fear on my melees, put my paladin(with holy avenger) closest to the lich and cast death ward on him and let the lich cast all his spells on him. Took me a few reloads to find out hot to position my characters so they all survive.(I think I beat him on my second try but lost half of my party) So you see the encounter isn't impossible without finding out a "simple piece of information that is obvious in hindsight". Not to mention that what you said is a go to guide that you find online on how to beat the lich.

 

Mindflayers in the sewers I beat by summoning creatures and letting them take on the mindflayers psionic attacks. Took me maybe one reload to get through it.

 

I don't remember this last one, but this is simply learning patterns. For the encounter to be what you want, the devs need to make an AI for the game that will change the behavior of the enemy every time you enter a fight.

 

 

 

We could have a better discussion if you would stop thinking you were going beat me in this battle of wits you seem to think is taking place here (btw, how so you think that's been going so far?) and think about what point I'm trying to make. Yes, I know, as does anybody with a BG2 manual in their possession, that there is more than one way to make your party immune to imprisonment (and I've beat these three levels in different ways, too).

 

My point is that in hindsight these fights have trivial solutions (the first two, I'll say  more about the the twisted rune). If you reload even once, you can figure out the solution from the info in the manual.

 

Kangaxx is not a hard fight if you know two things about him.There is no puzzle to solve. You need to figure out a counter to the one thing he does and you need a plus four weapon. This is not a tactical challenge. 

 

Do you agree with that point or not?

 

And now I'll give you an idea of what's it's like to be me talking to you:

 

You said,

 

 

 

... I am so confused...

 

 Finally, something we can agree on. 

[Reever]

 

It's almost as if I had written this posting, since we're on the same wavelength here...

 

Good to know there are other people who're feeling the same about stuff =D

[Yonjuro]

With regards to the stuff about Kangaxx / Twisted Rune (etc).

 

The point has been missed. Those fights were, literally, Easter Eggs. They were meant to be cheesed. There are other critical path examples where design might be askew, but these are the wrong targets.

 

 

  Sure, that's a fair point (and not unrelated to the point I'm trying to make here). These aren't tactical challenges - or at least not good tactical challenges (maybe the twisted rune is to some extent).

 

 A better example is the final 2 fights with Irenicus. Compared to the end of BG1, these were very disappointing. Especially the first one on the tree. On my first play through, I worked out what I thought was a good strategy and then  I literally killed him by accident. He was built up as some kind of uber mage in the cut scenes and then the guy you fight is just a regular mage. I retreated everyone along the same branch of the tree and summoned some skeletons to slow down his inevitable (I thought) pursuit. The plan was to use the branch points for ambushes. While I was getting my party ready for him he died - from the skeletons. 

[Yonjuro]

... For example, a low level party in BG1 can wander off a little too far to the east and stumble upon packs of Basilisks. Basilisks are nasty when you're low level. They can petrify you instantly, taking you out of the game (ie. time to reload). Well? Moving the difficulty slider to "easy", will not help, here. Unless it actually replaces that pack of Basilisks with a different encounter entirely... like Hobgoblins or something. But as far as I know, POE's difficulty settings will not be going so far as replacing whole encounters....

 

 

 The basilisk map is an interesting example. You could do a lot of things with the difficulty slider, but many of them would not make the level better.

 

 Just to remind everyone, conveniently, the game developers provided you with a dire charmed ghoul at the beginning of the map who wants to be your friend and help you (ok, yeah, those guys had a sense of humor). So, one solution to the puzzle with a fairly low level party is to keep the ghoul in front and engaging the basilisks (since the ghoul, being undead, is immune to them) and only bring your party up later with ranged weapons and spells. You also need to keep the other guys on the map (some monster, a mage etc.) from killing your ghoulfriend before you finish off the basilisks and you need to finish them before the dire charm wears off. (Implicit in this is that you stealth scouted the level in advance to solve the puzzle because wandering around is not a great idea on this level.)

 

 So, ways to make this harder: 

 

 1. The basilisks could gaze at unprotected party members in the back

 2. They could run away when they realize their gaze is failing or when they start getting hit

 3. Add additional enemies to the map

 4. etc.

 

 But those might make the 'ghoul solution' just not work because you won't have time to finish off the basilisks and, since, the ghoul needs backup to kill the basilisks, item 1 would just mean you need protection from petrification for more people. Likewise, if you were using a party member protected from petrification in place of the ghoul, making things take longer only means you need more scrolls, potions or memorized spells.

 

 So far, none of this makes the level more fun, just more difficult in an uninteresting way (and probably requiring a higher level party to beat). Then again, if things were laid out carefully there could be added difficulties that required you, say, to bring up melee fighters to protect the ghoul between basilisk encounters or something, so there could be interesting ways to do the difficulty slider too (, unless that just makes the party tank (or some other) solution strictly better).

 

 So, that's a roundabout way of getting to the point:

 

 I suppose what most of us would like (maybe?) is for the difficulty slider to add interesting tactical requirements to the puzzle. In the above example, requiring melee fighters and the ghoul to switch off 'taking point' might be interesting. Requiring more Mirror Eyes potions or the equivalent would not.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Yonjuro

[Stun]

Alternatively, They could:

 

1) Make the Basilisk gaze be a cone attack that effects an area, instead of just one subject at a time. This will, of course, eliminate the common tactic that players always use of totally Buffing up just one of their characters and then having him draw all the attention of the Basilisks while the rest of the party safely takes cheap pot shots from a distance.

 

2) Eliminate Korax, forcing players to summon their own undead if they wish to use the "undead decoy" tactic.

 

3) They could Trap the area where the Basilisks are.

 

4) Finally, (and this one is really evil) They could adjust that Mage's AI, and have him spam Dispell Magic at anyone attacking his Basilisks. This will outright halt the use of the standard protection from petrification hard counter. ( Edit: It will also dispel the Ghoul's dire charm, making him turn on the party LOL)

Edited January 17, 2014 by Stun

[Marceror]

While eagerly anticipating PE, I've been thinking on my gaming, and where it's at today as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago. And this makes me question if I even can handle a game like Pillars of Eternity any longer? Let me elaborate. I am a true gamer. I really play all kinds of PC games: FPS, CRPGs, ARPGs, platformers, rogue games, 4 X, horror, MMOs, etc. I've even been playing PS3 a lot with my kids, Little Big Planet, the Lego games, and Move-based shooters and exercise games. However, as I've gotten older, I realize that my gaming habits have changed quite a bit, partly because of the responsibilities of being a parent and a slightly mature parent, which certainly eats away at the precious gaming time available.

 

I mean, PE offers no less than a party-based CRPG with an extensive main story, braided with dozens of intertwined juicy stories, as well as interesting side quests and a number of really fleshed out companions. And it just feels so long ago (nearly half a decade). My last whiff of all of this was Dragon Age: origins, which despite some severe shortcomings, at least delivered a good enough CRPG experience for me. Before that, I had been in CRPG heaven with MotB and NWN2 (with NWN1 and some of its persistent worlds on its back, and in turn, there had been the golden oldies of the IE-games). While I had to settle with only two real playthroughs of DAO (perhaps in part because of all the middle-age responsibilities), I had always gone all-in on those other meaty CRPGs (doing hundreds and hundreds of hours, with plenty of new playthroughs, modding, etc). I must underline that this devotion is not all because of D&D, which I really adore, since I certainly spent oodles of time in the Ultima games, as well as the more shallow clickfests in the Might & Magic-series.

 

Before I saw the Obsidian PE KS, I had almost given up on seeing a decent party-based western CRPG of the tolkienesque, Medieval genre. There hade been plenty of single character CRPGs out there, but they have been so severely lacking in story, companions, and character creation/building/skills and spells diversity, that I simply thought that kind of game would never see the light of day ever again, and especially not with an entire party.

 

My point? Well, this lack made me play more and more ARPGs when I have some time over. I actually almost never played them before (D1 and D2, of course, but that's about all). I've taken a look of what sort of games I keep returning to when I have finished shorter games or games with a campaign that you only do once, and it seems my game log is clogged up with TitanQuest, Torchlight, D3, and now recently Van Helsing and Path of Exile. They are simple hack-n-slash games, where items run the show, and everything is all about rushing and collecting, it seems. They are pleasantly mind-numbing, nothing more to them, really.

 

Still, one game type is still as frequent in my "games I keep coming back to"-drawer as it was 10 or 20 years ago, and that is turnbased 4X games. I just love those. They feel very creative and varied, at least when they are good. I mean, Civilization is at the top of the list. But it can be Legendary Heroes or some space empire game, as well as Warlords or some EU-game.

 

Both ARPGs and turn-based 4X games have one thing in common. They adapt to what I invest in them. If I go casual, they will be casual. If I go more serious on them, they get a bit more serious (to a point, of course). But can this compare to how I played NWN2 or BG2? No, since they truly swept me away to another realm, a lovely fantasy setting that I truly appreciated to be in and to shape all of its stories and outcomes with various parties and companion bantering. and sometimes I just min-maxed my way through them, even solo. In both those sides to them, I really invested a lot of time and effort, but will I do the same with Pillars of Eternity? Or have my CRPG heart been corrupted by ARPGs? Is the spark still there? And will I have time enough. I mean, playing MMOs is out of the question where I'm in life right now. Well, at least it won't be this always online non sense here (thank god!).

 

Anybody else out there, anxious about not being up to snuff when it comes to PE? Perhaps you fear ruining it all with some rushed playthrough, instead of steeping yourself into the lore and the RPG system that be? Moreover, it hasn't that familiarity that D&D lend games of yore, so will you have the time and take the time, to get involved in it?

 

I'm curious about your take on this.

Sounds like you're way too much of an old codger to play this game. You should surrender your copy of the game over to me at once.

 

Oh, wait, I've already got a couple of copies coming to me... and I'm an old codger too!!

 

Ah well, mayhap we can chat when the game comes out, about how they just don't make em like they used to (because the problem couldn't be with us, right?).

[Failion]

Its all about time management really. Not everyone the same when it comes to gaming. Some people with jobs and kids at home can play multiple mmos with stressful guild politics,story driven rpgs like its nothing to them, maybe too simple. 

[Marceror]

Its all about time management really. Not everyone the same when it comes to gaming. Some people with jobs and kids at home can play multiple mmos with stressful guild politics,story driven rpgs like its nothing to them, maybe too simple. 

Such folk are most likely neglecting some important things, even if on the surface it may not seem that way. It's hard to be responsive to your kids needs when you're tied up in an MMO, deep in a dungeon and if you go AFK your party is going to die because the healer is suddenly gone.

Edited January 17, 2014 by Marceror

[Marceror]

Seriously, this board should give at least 30 seconds of "grace period" before marking a post as "edited". All I did was fix your to you're immediately after posting.

[Yonjuro]

Alternatively, They could:

 

1) Make the Basilisk gaze be a cone attack that effects an area, instead of just one subject at a time. This will, of course, eliminate the common tactic that players always use of totally Buffing up just one of their characters and then having him draw all the attention of the Basilisks while the rest of the party safely takes cheap pot shots from a distance.

 

2) Eliminate Korax, forcing players to summon their own undead if they wish to use the "undead decoy" tactic.

 

3) They could Trap the area where the Basilisks are.

 

4) Finally, (and this one is really evil) They could adjust that Mage's AI, and have him spam Dispell Magic at anyone attacking his Basilisks. This will outright halt the use of the standard protection from petrification hard counter. ( Edit: It will also dispel the Ghoul's dire charm, making him turn on the party LOL)

 

 I don't think I would notice the first three of those the way I've usually played that map. I typically have some kind of protection from petrification on anyone who gets near a basilisk. I didn't usually use Korax (because he's slow) and usually scout outdoor areas with an invisibility spell since the thief doesn't need to open anything.

 

 Would those three make the map more interesting to play? I think they just add restrictions, no?

 

Number four, on the other hand, I would notice. I suspect a lot of players would reload and fireball with extreme prejudice, but there are some good straight ways to play that too. It's a little bit like the elder orb in the twisted rune that dispels your negative plane protection (if I'm remembering that correctly).

[Wombat]

But as far as I know, POE's difficulty settings will not be going so far as replacing whole encounters.

How much of info about PoE did you actually read?

 

Path of the Damned is a spiritual successor to Icewind Dale's Heart of Fury mode. In our encounters, we like to turn individual combatants on and off based on the level of difficulty. If you come into an area on Easy, maybe casters are replaced with weak melee enemies. If you come in on Hard, maybe the casters are augmented by a tough melee enemy or two. With Path of the Damned, that goes out the window. All enemies from all levels of difficulty are enabled and the combat mechanics are amplified to make battles much more brutal for everyone involved.

If things are not changed after the old update above, enemies are scaled based on the difficulty level, not character level as in Bethesda games.  So, even at easier difficulty levels, if a low-level party wander too far, they will eventually come across what they cannot deal with, which is, however, by design or due to the scope of the game.

 

[Edit]  BTW, I couldn't find where it was mentioned but, IIRC, encounters tied to the plot seems to be scaled to some extent.  Oh and np Indira

Edited January 17, 2014 by Wombat

[Stun]

 

But as far as I know, POE's difficulty settings will not be going so far as replacing whole encounters.

How much of info about PoE did you actually read?

 

Path of the Damned is a spiritual successor to Icewind Dale's Heart of Fury mode. In our encounters, we like to turn individual combatants on and off based on the level of difficulty. If you come into an area on Easy, maybe casters are replaced with weak melee enemies. If you come in on Hard, maybe the casters are augmented by a tough melee enemy or two. With Path of the Damned, that goes out the window. All enemies from all levels of difficulty are enabled and the combat mechanics are amplified to make battles much more brutal for everyone involved.

 

Hm... I stand corrected.

 

I thought Path of the Damned would just beef up existing enemies and increase their number (because that's what IWD's Heart of Fury does). But they're actually going to replace enemy types? Interesting.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Interesting, indeed. Wombat, thank you for sharing that info on Path of the Damned. I've missed it somehow, and it's really exciting news to me. However, a system like that will need a lot of tweaks before they get the balance just right. Hence, us beta testers!

Edited January 17, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Karkarov]

Dark Souls isn't easier when you're in undead form, you can't summon help for one thing.

Just as an aside, yes it is.  There are certain things mechanically that happen behind the scenes.  No you can't summon help... but you also can't be invaded.  Additionally mobs actually do less damage to you when you are in undead form.  It isn't "huge" but it is there.  I find solo 9 out of 10 times is easier.  Save for maybe Ornstein and Smough.

[Monte Carlo]

Path of the Damned is easy mode for sexual tyrannosaurs like me.