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

[Jarmo]

 

 

 

 My example is the final fight in BG1. That was very challenging for me the first time I did it and it was mostly for interesting reasons.

.....

 

 Thoughts on that fight? Other examples?

 

My take.

The last couple of hours were an endless horrible grind and I hated every moment,

I'm never going to replay BG1 (because of the ending).

 

 

Starting at what point? The final fight in the temple? Before that?

 

 

What was that place you entered into the.. what was that now.

From thieves guild into the maze system thing?

[Ink Blot]

What was that place you entered into the.. what was that now.

From thieves guild into the maze system thing?

 

The Undercity.

[Yonjuro]

BG1's final fight is unintelligently designed. Not because of the Cheese (Serevok is a 16th level fighter with 80% magic resistance. RIGHT!), Or because of the illogical terrain (cloudkill, web and stinking cloud traps that everyone is immune to except your party. RIGHT!) No. BG1's final fight is poorly designed because it instantly ends when Serevok is killed. This means that it's an utter waste of time to bother with his interesting cohorts.

 

 

 I agree that it would be better if you had to kill all four of them.

 

 I don't agree that having a high level enemy with special capabilities is Cheese. (and, Kangaxx can imprison from a distance, you can't do that).

 

 Also, you can detect the traps and know in advance which ones can't be disarmed. That's part of the problem to solve. A good strategy will keep your party from triggering the traps.  I'm surprised you have the opinions that you have about this.

 

 

 

 

 All you need to do is focus everything you've got on Serevok, and ignore everything else. Lame.

 

 Well, no. For that to work, you also need to have buffed to make yourself immune to the magic attacks or Semaj and Angelo will kill your whole party before you finish off Sarevok. So, sure, given the right buffs, that's one of many strategies that will work.

[Yonjuro]

 

 

I don't really get it, what is so bad with reloading? ...

 

 Reloading because the fight was difficult is good. Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad. 

 

 I think that's the argument that (most) people are making here.

 

 Silly example: You walk into a room (that you had no way of scouting in advance and onto an immediate dispell invisibility trap) and a guy hurls the 'Kill Your Party Instantly With No Save' spell and kills your party instantly with no save. You reload and go the store to buy six 'Protection From Kill Your Party Instantly With No Save' scrolls and then read them before going back in the room. Victory! 

 

 vs.

 

Less silly example: You walk into a room and there's a beholder elder orb in the room who starts casting true sight. You know what a beholder is. You run back out before the true sight finishes, go to the store and buy things to protect you from petrification, imprisonment, magical damage etc. or maybe you even have them with you already. Better than the first example; some would argue that it's not a lot better.

 

vs. 

 

Much less silly example: You walk into a room and there's a party just like yours, maybe a few levels higher and maybe there's eight of them. You might lose and need to reload, but that's ok.

 

 

So we don't want traps, we don't want fights to surprise us because we might be low health (stamina?!?), we want to be told everything about the fight before hand or to be able to retreat and make preparations (how this is different from reloading I don't know), and we want the enemy to have equal resistances to everything (so there isn't any weakens we can exploit on our next play-through).

 

 

 

If you want to argue against my point you actually need to read the words I write and understand what they mean. 

 

So, in order:

 

 1.  Of course there can be traps. The point of my first silly example is that the situation is unwinnable without reloading and trivial when you have the information you need; The only way to get the information is to fail and reload. It's meant as an extreme example of what people are objecting to. I hope that is now clear to you. Ask more questions if it isn't.

 

2. Of course there can be surprise fights. If you reload,  it's not a surprise anymore, is it? If you need to reload to get information to win the (no longer surprise) fight, that is when it becomes a problem.

 

 

 

we want to be told everything about the fight before hand or to be able to retreat and make preparations (how this is different from reloading I don't know)

 

3.  Ok, then I'll explain it to you and then you will know how it is different. Scouting ahead and/or tactically retreating is part of role playing a character who is acting cautiously which a character might reasonably do in very dangerous environment. It isn't the game telling you anything, it is your adventuring party figuring it out. It's also part of the skill of playing the game. Reloading until you accidentally win or gather enough information to intelligently win is metagaming not playing the game. Do you now know how the two are different?

 

 

 

 and we want the enemy to have equal resistances to everything (so there isn't any weakens we can exploit on our next play-through).

 

  In my final example, the enemy had you outclassed and outnumbered  and probably has capabilities that your party doesn't have, so there's no equality there, but this one does require some explanation. The reason for using that example is that if you come across an adventuring party similar to your own, you are likely to be able to figure out a reasonable set of tactics on the fly. That is, you don't need more information than you have. You still may lose because your tactics didn't work but you won't lose because there's some strange requirement that you have no way of knowing about. 

 

 

Let me repeat the beginning of my previous post.

 

Reloading because the fight was difficult is good.

 

Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad. 

 

 The key thing here is: if a little scrap of knowledge makes a fight easy and the only way to get that little scrap of knowledge is to fail and reload, then the game is broken.

[Lephys]

EDIT:

 

Basically, Yonjuro already said it.

Edited January 15, 2014 by Lephys

[ZornWO]

 

As for buffing, we're not eliminating buffing, but we are eliminating pre-combat spell buffing.  Buffs in PoE have an opportunity cost because they're combat only spells.  They're good and they're powerful, but when you cast them, you're choosing between buffing or engaging in offense or taking some other action against hostile enemies that are engaging the party.  As others have already posted, aside from hard counters (which often require metagaming or prescience), most pre-buffs are rote actions.  There's nothing strategic about it other than asking the question, "How many resources would I like to expend now to increase the power of my party members?"  That is a choice, but it's not much of one.

 

 

If a player scouts ahead using stealth or divination spells, and finds an enemy ahead, does that start the combat condition even if the enemy isn't aware of the party's presence?  (Like IE wouldn't let you save if there were monsters nearby.) 

 

 

 

I wanted to reiterate this just in case in got lost in the, uh, brouhaha.  My concern is that there won't be much benefit to scouting ahead, apart from maybe positioning your party.

[Yonjuro]

 

Reloading because the fight was difficult is good. Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad.

Right, but how can one make such a judgment call (that this encounter had a special attack that was impossible to predict)?

 

Player Party X walks into a room of Clay Golems. They did not expect to encounter clay golems, and no one in his party has a blunt weapon. So...Clay Golems win. Reload.

 

 

 That's a good example.

 

 As far as I'm concerned, that encounter is fine and player X is out of luck because most parties will have a blunt weapon somewhere and if one doesn't well, those are the breaks.  In the IE games, the healers can only use blunt weapons.

 

 If your encounter was scoutable and/or had some space for tactical retreat, then I like it better. You can also kill the golems with thief traps which you either need to set in advance or keep the golems busy while your thief backs off and sets them. Then you lure the golems onto the traps.

 

 

 

Should we all be deprived of such encounters just because it MIGHT be impossible for someone to predict the first time around? 

 

I only want to deprive you of encounters that simultaneously:

 

1. have very specific preconditions to win, so specific that most players will not meet the preconditions in normal play

and

2. no way to find out in advance what the preconditions are

 

(The second and third joinable NPCs that BG2 hands you in the tutorial level are Misc who has proficiency in mace and Jaheira who has proficiency in quarterstaff and clubs. If you can't beat a clay golem, that's your problem. ) 

 

Others on this thread may wish to deprive you of additional encounters.

[Yonjuro]

 

 

 

 

 My example is the final fight in BG1. That was very challenging for me the first time I did it and it was mostly for interesting reasons.

.....

 

 Thoughts on that fight? Other examples?

 

My take.

The last couple of hours were an endless horrible grind and I hated every moment,

I'm never going to replay BG1 (because of the ending).

 

 

Starting at what point? The final fight in the temple? Before that?

 

 

What was that place you entered into the.. what was that now.

From thieves guild into the maze system thing?

 

 

 

 The thieves maze. Yeah, that was a grind, especially the first time. One part that I would change is that there is some kind of jelly that can insta-kill a character that fails a save. That just seems cheesy.

 

 Did you revisit the thieves maze after playing through some other IE titles? I think it's mostly pretty manageable and I'll bet it wouldn't be nearly as bad as you remember.

 

 Other than the nasty jellies, I think there were two battle horrors (that are good to fight one at a time luring them into ranged weapon fire) and some annoying skeletons that shoot magic arrows at you (in front of some nasty lightening traps (that the skeletons are resistant to)).

 

The skeletons are doing to you what you just did to the battle horrors. Those boney bastards! Anyway, using stealth and disarming the traps in advance makes that one manageable. I think you can lure them up to the edge of the maze to neutralize the ranged attacks too.

 

Anyway, that was a tangent - how about an example of a tactical fight that you liked?

Edited January 16, 2014 by Yonjuro

[Sarex]

If you want to argue against my point you actually need to read the words I write and understand what they mean. 

 

So, in order:

 

 1.  Of course there can be traps. The point of my first silly example is that the situation is unwinnable without reloading and trivial when you have the information you need; The only way to get the information is to fail and reload. It's meant as an extreme example of what people are objecting to. I hope that is now clear to you. Ask more questions if it isn't.

 

2. Of course there can be surprise fights. If you reload,  it's not a surprise anymore, is it? If you need to reload to get information to win the (no longer surprise) fight, that is when it becomes a problem.

 

3.  Ok, then I'll explain it to you and then you will know how it is different. Scouting ahead and/or tactically retreating is part of role playing a character who is acting cautiously which a character might reasonably do in very dangerous environment. It isn't the game telling you anything, it is your adventuring party figuring it out. It's also part of the skill of playing the game. Reloading until you accidentally win or gather enough information to intelligently win is metagaming not playing the game. Do you now know how the two are different?

 

 In my final example, the enemy had you outclassed and outnumbered  and probably has capabilities that your party doesn't have, so there's no equality there, but this one does require some explanation. The reason for using that example is that if you come across an adventuring party similar to your own, you are likely to be able to figure out a reasonable set of tactics on the fly. That is, you don't need more information than you have. You still may lose because your tactics didn't work but you won't lose because there's some strange requirement that you have no way of knowing about. 

 

 

Let me repeat the beginning of my previous post.

 

Reloading because the fight was difficult is good.

 

Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad. 

 

 The key thing here is: if a little scrap of knowledge makes a fight easy and the only way to get that little scrap of knowledge is to fail and reload, then the game is broken.

 

What this all boils down to is that you always want the game to tell you what the next fight is going to be, or you want the ability to escape from any fight. To be perfectly honest I wouldn't want to play a game like that. It would feel too much like holding my hand. They will probably do what they did in IWD - wilderness lore and in BG - tracking, to let you scout levels for advance warning. To me that is more then enough. Half the fun in playing a game like this is figuring out those hard encounters and finding those obscure ways to beat them. As for the key thing you mentioned, for me there wasn't such an encounter in the IE games, yes there where fights which could be won by an easy combination of spells but those things where usually learned from online guides, I on my first play trough didn't use guides and thus had no issues with small pieces of information making a fight easy. Those things where probably possible because the devs couldn't predict them and they just got figured out. If you think that PoE is going to be so perfectly balanced, that those things won't happen well I think you are going to be disappointed.

 

I am also curious for an example of "Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad.

" in a IE game. Maybe that would help me see what you are aiming at.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Sarex

[Karkarov]

I love how everyone in this thread so in love with hard counters and tons of reloading thinks that "challenge" and "dies tons" are the same thing.  We will take Dark Souls as an example, dying in that game is not bad.  At all.  Why?  What do you actually lose?  Theoretically speaking absolutely nothing as long as you are able to get back to the spot where you died.  You keep all loot/items you found, your level doesn't go down, the game is actually EASIER when you are in undead form, you lost at worst some souls (exp) and humanity.  Both of which can be farmed easily once you learn how.  You are supposed to die in Dark Souls but death in the long term actually has very little impact in that game beyond the resources you might have used and thus lost like buff items.

 

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.

[Yonjuro]

 

If you want to argue against my point you actually need to read the words I write and understand what they mean. 

 

So, in order:

 

 1.  Of course there can be traps. The point of my first silly example is that the situation is unwinnable without reloading and trivial when you have the information you need; The only way to get the information is to fail and reload. It's meant as an extreme example of what people are objecting to. I hope that is now clear to you. Ask more questions if it isn't.

 

2. Of course there can be surprise fights. If you reload,  it's not a surprise anymore, is it? If you need to reload to get information to win the (no longer surprise) fight, that is when it becomes a problem.

 

3.  Ok, then I'll explain it to you and then you will know how it is different. Scouting ahead and/or tactically retreating is part of role playing a character who is acting cautiously which a character might reasonably do in very dangerous environment. It isn't the game telling you anything, it is your adventuring party figuring it out. It's also part of the skill of playing the game. Reloading until you accidentally win or gather enough information to intelligently win is metagaming not playing the game. Do you now know how the two are different?

 

 In my final example, the enemy had you outclassed and outnumbered  and probably has capabilities that your party doesn't have, so there's no equality there, but this one does require some explanation. The reason for using that example is that if you come across an adventuring party similar to your own, you are likely to be able to figure out a reasonable set of tactics on the fly. That is, you don't need more information than you have. You still may lose because your tactics didn't work but you won't lose because there's some strange requirement that you have no way of knowing about. 

 

 

Let me repeat the beginning of my previous post.

 

Reloading because the fight was difficult is good.

 

Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad. 

 

 The key thing here is: if a little scrap of knowledge makes a fight easy and the only way to get that little scrap of knowledge is to fail and reload, then the game is broken.

 

What this all boils down to is that you always want the game to tell you what the next fight is going to be, or you want the ability to escape from any fight. 

 

 

 

 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.

[Metabot]

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

[Stun]

(1)Challenge =/= dieing a lot and tons of reloads.

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

When defining "Challenge", you cannot separate these two. Often times (in fact, most of the time) Tough fights that require planning, require effective use of your party's skills, and require that you know when you're out of your league, will CAUSE #1. Especially in a first play-through. Gamers are a stubborn, prideful lot. They will incessantly do #1 until they successfully achieve #2. This is why I said a few pages ago that a tough, unique encounter should be like a puzzle.

 

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.

Well of course that's a gamer's worst nightmare. No one wants that. I've yet to hear anyone say: "Awesome! I get to redo this entire level because I was smart enough to forget to save!" lol

 

But I'm pretty sure I heard one of the devs here say that they're not gonna stray too far from how the IE games handled saving. Which was perfect.

 

1) can't save during combat or dialogue.

2) can't save while duration-based AOEs are active (web, grease etc.)

 

You can save any other time. So basically to avoid the gamer's nightmare of having to re-do an hour's worth of a successful gaming session, simply develop decent save habits. I usually quicksave after every encounter. Additionally, I'll quicksave after a particularly long inventory management session, or after a successful rest. I'll do Special saves (stuff I put in a new save slot) before a boss fight. And that's about it. If POE adopts the IE game save system then the game will also auto-save at area transitions, and occasionally before major story-based events.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Stun

[Yonjuro]

 

I am also curious for an example of "Reloading because the fight has some strange very specific thing that will be obvious in hindsight but impossible to tell in advance is bad.

" in a IE game. Maybe that would help me see what you are aiming at.

 

 

 

 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.

[Robsidious]

 

 As far as I'm concerned, that encounter is fine and player X is out of luck because most parties will have a blunt weapon somewhere and if one doesn't well, those are the breaks.  

 

 

Exactly, this is the crux of the issue. How reasonable it is to assume the player will know how to combat certain creatures and their abilities, at a given point in the game?

 

'Hard Counters' is not an all good or all bad issue. There is a spectrum of hard counters in the IE games, according to the predictability of encounters and the potential to be prepared for them.

I don’t particularly like coming across an encounter that I literally cannot defeat even with infinite reloading because I need to go back to town to acquire specific item(s), memorise certain spells or whatever. This is neither challenging nor fun, even if it doesn't bother me as much as it apparently bothers others.

 

What I do enjoy is the danger and excitement of powerful enemy abilities that require hard counter(s), so long as I can reasonably learn how to prepare myself to deal with them. I DO NOT THINK THIS NECESSARILY REQUIRES METAGAMING. I want to learn through playing the game how to combat unique monsters and abilities, not be able to just always make **** up as I go (tactically speaking).

 

Perhaps the player can be warned through dialogue to beware the banshee’s gaze or whatever before undertaking a quest that would encounter such creatures. Perhaps the gameworld can include bestiaries that once found or purchased and read, update your journal’s bestiary and provide information about creatures notable abilities and how to counter them. After all, it seems logical that an adventuring party would start out with limited knowledge of how to fight certain monsters (and other humans, wizards etc), and that some adversaries would have unique abilities that must be countered in specific ways. Since learning how to fight different adversaries is a natural part of these games anyway, I believe that gameplay is enriched when players are more actively involved in this learning process, rather than such key information being spoonfed or resulting from trial and error, aka metagaming.

 

I also think the issue (note again I said issue, not problem) of hard counters in the IE games was greatly exacerbated by the vancian casting system. This should be (at least partially) addressed by grimoire swapping, which should enable more immediate access to counters. Although this still necessitates certain class requirements for party composition, this in turn can be offset be having multiple solutions to hard counters through scrolls, potions, salves, magic arrows etc. The problem then becomes how to balance the availability of countering solutions while still making preparation strategically engaging.

 

Stun’s example of fighting clay golems is a good one to illustrate this point. The player needs to learn (ideally through exploring the gameworld rather than metagaming) that such creatures require magical blunt weapons to damage them, and so prepare or adapt during combat accordingly. I think it reasonable to require an adventuring party to be equipped with a variety of skills and weapon types to deal with the diverse array of adversaries they can expect to encounter throughout such a fantasy setting.

 

Yonjuro’s example of encountering an adventuring party similar to yours provides another good illustration. Perhaps this party has a grimoire or two at the ready with some dire spells you must counter or you’re screwed. Combat begins and you don’t have immediate access to the counter - a party member or two is taken out of action, yet you are able to switch grimoires and bring them back into the fight, losing precious time because you weren't immediately prepared. Alternatively, your priest may have an ability that affects the same counter, or you may have a magical salve in your backpack that does the trick. However, if you have not learnt what the correct countering spell is or your priest does not have that skill and you have no such salves, scrolls or any of the few ways to counter that spell... you are dead because you are not prepared to deal with the threat.

 

To me the issue is not ‘hard counters are bad and need to be removed’, but rather ‘hard counters are an exciting tactical element that require multiple available solutions which the player can reasonably learn through exploring the gameworld, so as to facilitate and reward intelligent preparation and play’. The issue then becomes how to reasonably inform players of how and when to prepare, while still making preparation a balanced, thoughtfully engaging strategic aspect of gameplay.

[Lord Gorchnik]

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

But just like any game, if you know the strategies, tricks, and guidelines to any area or boss you don't need assistance.

[Lephys]

Hard counters are fine, when they're just aspects of the combat.

 

Example:

 

These Spiders poison the crap out of you. If you ignore the poison, you're pretty much effed. That, I don't mind. Especially since that's something that SHOULD be some kind of common knowledge in the game. There's no way no one in the world has any idea those spiders are venomous, even if they don't know exactly how venomous, etc. They just *shrug* and say "Those things are effing poisonous. I wouldn't mess with them. That's all I know."

 

Noob player guffaws and says "I've got OODLES of HP! I don't care about a little venom!", or just doesn't even bother to collect intel on the creatures of the swamp he's about to traverse, and therefore he dies. That's A-OK with me.

 

Intelligent player either stocks up on some anti-venom stuff, or some kind of protection/mitigation spells, or prepares a strategy to keep the spiders away, requiring rigorous pausing and moving, etc. Whatever the exact decision, the intelligent player proceeds with caution. Okay, he doesn't die nearly instantly to venom. But the spiders are still difficult and powerful foes, even if you don't succumb to their venom like a noob. It's not "Oh, that was the threat... the venom... hard-countered... VICTORY!"

 

So, the hard counter wasn't "you can't win this, and now you can easily win this." You didn't hard-counter the battle. You hard-countered a factor.

 

I'm not going to say hard-counters are bad, but they're bad when they're the main component of a combat challenge. But, it's all about extents/degrees. Too many of them, and the combat's back to stupid-ville. "Oh, their venom can kill you... also, they can teleport right behind you. Also, you can't hurt them unless you cast Soften on every single one of them. Also, they change color throughout the battle, and if you hit them with a spell or effect of that color's element, you instantly die."

 

That kind of thing. Even some of those, alone, are fine. But, you start stacking 'em into these uber-boss battles, and it's just silly. You've basically got a house-sitting instruction list for combat victory.

 

That's not challenging combat anymore. That's memorizing a speech, or learning some dance moves.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Thanks for all the insightful posts! Keep them coming!

Well, except for posts that seem to be more e-peen and I'm better and more hardcore than you. They can be tedious and a tad childish in the wrong way.

 

This thread is certainly beginning to cover a lot of bases for what can make a huge CRPG demanding and even unbearable, and that for a lot of objective and subjective reasons. If anything, it shows we have all different ideas about what constitutes fun in a CRPG.

 

Important issues have come up, among them: lengthy backtracking, reloading, pre-buffing, one-solution encounters, the possibilities of planning ahead, including of course making a viable party, as well as game difficulty and gameplay design in general.

 

I'd like to point out a few things that matter to me, as I don't want to lose sight out of them:

-I love D&D. I have played it PnP from the late 70s and all the way up to the 4th ed of the 2000s. Also, I've played almost every D&D PC-game, there is. However, T-H-I-S...I-S...N-O-T...D-&-D. Perhaps the major advantage of this: The system that Josh & Co devise will be more hand to glove for a CRPG, regardless whether it will turn into a PnP-RPG later. I reckon, this means we can be a bit more creative in our discussion under this topic, instead of getting too stuck in the computerized D&D of the IE games.

-And here's a thing that only recently hit me: I fear that PE will be more pause-heavy than I am used to. What do I mean? Well, first of all, it's a RTwP, so pause is in by definition. But then there's the issue of different playstyles. Karkarov described how he played Dragon Age Origins. How he carefully planned ahead and prepped, and how he made a great party machine. I shared that philosophy in that game, and I rarely needed to pause. And then before that, I played NWN2 with expansions to bits (my most played CRPG ever; I literally made a score of full playthroughs. I really liked how the 3.5 ed of D&D was implemented there, and of course I loved much of the setting and the stories and the campaign as a whole. Well, here's the thing. I rarely used pause there as well, but I was an ardent pre-buffer. My party outshone the Strip in Las Vegas. Even further back, I played the 3rd ed IWD2, and the 2nd ed D&D IWD + of course BG1 and 2, with pause on the back burner. In all these games, and especially, the first ones I mentioned, it was possible to not pause very much, making a real time playthrough, almost, because of careful planning, meta-knowledge, pre-buffing, CRPG-savviness, and last but not least, because of me treating all other party members as extendible pawns compared to my main character. In NWN 2, it was particularly easy, as resting only took a quick kneel anywhere, and everybody in the party was happy again. Also, dead party members awoke again within seconds. Now, in PE, on the other hand, we have plenty of cues telling us that the combat will be more tactics heavy during combat. Also, in-between encounters we have some stamina/health system that gimps suffering party members, not to mentioning maiming, etc. I suspect that PE will be much more of a turn-based CRPG if I crank up the difficulty slider, which I will!   Since I can no longer treat other party members as ever-rezzable pawns and cannon fodder.

[Metabot]

I hope it is more pause heavy than not pausing at all.

[Yonjuro]

... and last but not least, because of me treating all other party members as extendible pawns compared to my main character......if I crank up the difficulty slider, which I will!   Since I can no longer treat other party members as ever-rezzable pawns and cannon fodder.....

 

 That's a very different play style than I had with the IE games. I rarely got my party members killed because it seemed like something my PC just wouldn't do.  I suppose that probably causes me to play a lot more conservatively than you do.

[Wombat]

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.

*  It would be time-saving for both designers and testers if they have a better system to balance things out, which is probably one of the reasons why they came up with the current system rather than the old RNS-heavy and fixated puzzle system.  BTW, if you wonder what I mean by 'fixated puzzle', Sawyer once wrote something like:  an ideal system would allow the players to solve a situation in various ways rather than forcing them to solve a puzzle which strictly demands a single answer and thus ends up requiring the players routine tasks.  If you think this may decrease the difficulty, why not try higher difficulty settings and figure it by yourself once the game is available?  Also, why not read his recent comments and ask why he designed the system in the way it is now to yourselves?

[Silent Winter]

I'm against "kill all the party" death spells that you couldn't have prepared for beforehand.

But a "Kill single party member" death spell could result in "woah f**k! He's got a death spell.  Haven't seen one of them before:

a) Oh, look, I've got a 'death-proof' potion - use it

b) Runaway!

c) dog-pile the mage

d) ignore it...die."

 

Otherwise, I pretty much agree with what Lephys said on the last page.

I don't mind reloading, but I'd like to be in with a chance of not having to just because I didn't read a game-external strategy guide.  In world warnings and lore (even vague) are good.  Being able to scout is good. Being able to adapt tactics on the fly to deal with new situations is good.  Dying because I couldn't figure it out first time is ok.  Dying because I had no chance to figure it out first time is not.  (Having said that - I don't really mind the very occasional situation like that if it's a clever puzzle.)

[Wombat]

Did I need to emphasize 'fixated' part?  How about a 'puzzle' which requires your response time to time but your responses can be different depending on how your character and parties are built, what kind of abilities/equipment/members (some may have been maimed) remained in your options?

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

... and last but not least, because of me treating all other party members as extendible pawns compared to my main character......if I crank up the difficulty slider, which I will!   Since I can no longer treat other party members as ever-rezzable pawns and cannon fodder.....

 

 That's a very different play style than I had with the IE games. I rarely got my party members killed because it seemed like something my PC just wouldn't do.  I suppose that probably causes me to play a lot more conservatively than you do.

 

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. 

[Shadenuat]

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.

 

 

No bad builds" is not the same as "all builds are equal" and "all builds are functionally the same".  It means that if you distribute your points in different ways across our attributes for a character of any class, the strengths and weaknesses of the character will shift in interesting ways and still be viable.  If you dump Resolve for your fighter, you will suffer.  If you boost Resolve for your fighter, you will benefit.

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?

Edited January 16, 2014 by Shadenuat