Let's Play Baldur's Gate 2, and reflect on Pillars of Eternity (2)

[Sensuki]

Shame PoE doesn't appear to support modding.

This is not true: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69964-the-pe-ie-mod-thread-draggable-ui-now-available/

 

However there are more things they could do to support modding.

[PrimeJunta]

I played some NWN back in the day, but somehow never really really warmed to it. Dragon Crown of Cormyr and Darkness over Daggerford were cool (=better than the OC by far). Hordes of the Underdark was kiiinda OK. There's just something about the whole thing that turns me off. Maybe it's the visuals; normally graphics aren't very high on my list of priorities for a good game, but NWN hits a particularly bad spot. There's enough there to stop me from filling the blanks with my imagination, but not enough to really create an atmosphere. Dat game be fugly.

[PrimeJunta]

Tangent: this thing is doing something to the way I see things. I was just reading through the latest Q&A on Josh's blog, and where previously I would've just nodded in agreement (specifically regarding casterfights and hard counters), now I was going "but but but."

[Jarmo]

Tangent: this thing is doing something to the way I see things. I was just reading through the latest Q&A on Josh's blog, and where previously I would've just nodded in agreement (specifically regarding casterfights and hard counters), now I was going "but but but."

 

From there:

In Icewind Dale II, we did not have hard counter spell battle puzzles.  We also generally didn’t rely on that many save-or-die effects (there is a “Tactics” mod that changes this).  This approach (and a quasi-3E rulest) allowed people to build a relatively wide range of parties and character types within those parties.  Because the scenarios typically did not require prior knowledge of what was going to unfold, players could usually react and adapt in the middle of a battle with the tools they had brought.

 

I can't remember what it was in IWD2 I liked (I just remember I liked it a lot), but I think this could have been a big part of it.

I do have to try it again. Guess Rome 2 TW and Blackguards have to wait a bit longer.

[PrimeJunta]

I think a lot of Josh's concerns would be resolved simply by having the game communicate how it wants to be played better. What he says about hard counters and parties isn't strictly true (if it was, Stun wouldn't have been able to solo BG2 with a berserker), but it is true that many party compositions are much harder to play than others -- and that's perfectly fine.

 

If the game just said "Yo, you're going into this without a healer and that's gonna be pretty rough, so be warned" in some way, the people who want the challenge could proceed, whereas those who need the warning can heed the warning.

 

Again: I'm 100% certain that it is possible to make a game that's enjoyable for those who just want to play it once, without making it any less enjoyable for those who want to play it continuously for the rest of their lives. With BG2, most things screwing it up for the first group could easily have been addressed in ways that the second group won't even notice.

[Luckmann]

 

Tangent: this thing is doing something to the way I see things. I was just reading through the latest Q&A on Josh's blog, and where previously I would've just nodded in agreement (specifically regarding casterfights and hard counters), now I was going "but but but."

 

From there:

In Icewind Dale II, we did not have hard counter spell battle puzzles.  We also generally didn’t rely on that many save-or-die effects (there is a “Tactics” mod that changes this).  This approach (and a quasi-3E rulest) allowed people to build a relatively wide range of parties and character types within those parties.  Because the scenarios typically did not require prior knowledge of what was going to unfold, players could usually react and adapt in the middle of a battle with the tools they had brought.

 

I can't remember what it was in IWD2 I liked (I just remember I liked it a lot), but I think this could have been a big part of it.

I do have to try it again. Guess Rome 2 TW and Blackguards have to wait a bit longer.

 

I remember really liking IWD2 a lot.

 

I don't remember ever really replaying it.

[PrimeJunta]

FWIW I get the biggest kicks from reacting and adapting in the middle of a fight/the game/with the tools I brought.

 

The most fun I've had so far from my BG2 attempts this time were nuking those umber hulks with my single-charge wand of cloudkill and beating the necromancer with the scrolls I happened to be carrying. Both times I was out of suitable memorized magic. Reloading and metagame-prepping for a casterfight with the Tolgerias encounter was much less rewarding. 

 

I think it should be possible to have both though. Make playing with a "standard party" relatively straightforward, but with "gimmick parties," smaller parties, or solo require planning and creativity as well as on-the-fly adaptation.

[Stun]

@Stun: How can you tell that a weapon's gonna cut through any or all of those protections? Trial and error, or is there a rule to it? Elemental damage?

Elemental damage. Stone skin protects against standard physical damage, but not against fire, ice, acid, electricity & poison. I could be wrong, but I believe the spell description says so. And even if it doesn't, what can be a better teacher than experimentation on this one? You see a stone skinned mage. You whack him with your weapon then observe what happens. Or, A mage casts Improved Mantle, you attack him with Pixie Prick....nothing happens, so you try the Staff of Wynne...it does damage! Conclusion: +3 weapons don't work against Improved Mantle, but +4 weapons do!

 

@Malekith: Do they have more than one Death Spell? If not, it should be easy to just summon another one.

Usually they do have more than one. Still, a lich who wastes his time casting Death spells at your summons is not doing other things...like trying to kill your cleric. And that's kinda the point of summons.... to serve as a distraction.

 

Of course later you'll have access to better 'distractions' like Demons and Celestials.... which aren't summoned, they're gated, and thus aren't subject to the Death spell-kills-summoned-creatures rule.

Edited January 13, 2015 by Stun

[Malekith]

PrimeJunta, on 13 Jan 2015 - 2:50 PM, said:

FWIW I get the biggest kicks from reacting and adapting in the middle of a fight/the game/with the tools I brought.

 

The most fun I've had so far from my BG2 attempts this time were nuking those umber hulks with my single-charge wand of cloudkill and beating the necromancer with the scrolls I happened to be carrying. Both times I was out of suitable memorized magic. Reloading and metagame-prepping for a casterfight with the Tolgerias encounter was much less rewarding. 

 

I think it should be possible to have both though. Make playing with a "standard party" relatively straightforward, but with "gimmick parties," smaller parties, or solo require planning and creativity as well as on-the-fly adaptation.

If you try to get by with the spells you have memorised already, you will succed most often than not. Reloading to rearrange the spellbook and rest should be the last solution, not the First thing you do.

As Stun said, when you try to solo BG2 on insane, you will be forced to master the system and the spell combinations. **** cloudkill. Web+ Spider Spawn(a lower level spell than cloudkill) is equaly effective. Since spiders are immune to Web, they can devastate the opposition.I have brought down liches and opposing adventuring parties with this tactic.

 

And as usual, Josh is talking out of his ass. I don't dispute the fact that he knows his systems, but what he says makes me wonder if he played BG2 more than 1 time 10 years ago.

Wizards weren't nessesary to beat the game, BG2 has been soloed on Insane with all classes without exception. In fact the easiest way  to play the game is with a Fighter, not a wizard as the main character.

Nothing in the game forces you to "rearange the party", and if someone hit a wall and cannot progress is because he is an idiot and he didn't even try, i bet i (and half the people in the forum) can take the game from when he left it and progress just fine with the tools he already has in his disposal and he is just too braindead to use.

 

I have read Josh quotes about how some people in New Vegas did truly moronic things(that's Bethesda's audience for you) and could not progress so became frustrated. Does he actualy believe this is somehow the game's/designer's fault?

[PrimeJunta]

@Stun One thing I've been having trouble with is figuring out exactly what the mage is protected with, especially (as usual) the combo is fired with Contingency or Spell Trigger. The spell FX flash by quite fast, and obscure each other. I can usually catch Stoneskin because of the boulder effect, but that's about it. Similarly, I can't tell which protections my attempts dispelled.

 

More practice needed I suppose.

[Stun]

What he says about hard counters and parties isn't strictly true (if it was, Stun wouldn't have been able to solo BG2 with a berserker),

Confront Josh on this and his response will be 3-fold.

 

1) He'll say all bets are off once the player is armed with meta knowledge. He'll say he's more concerned about Players who are playing the game for the first time who might be turned off by the perceived Solution-less, All or Nothing, rock-paper-scissors gameplay that Hard counters bring to the equation.

2) Then he'll say that there's nothing "tactical" about a situation where an enemy Mage casts Finger of Death and gets his attack nullified by a party who put up a Death Ward ahead of time because they didn't want to be hit with death magic, and, you know, took the necessary precautions like any decent field general would.

3) And finally he'll argue that the problem with hard counters is that it goes against character build freedom. (ie. I want to build a party of Barbarians, but I can't because this game has wizards that cast finger of death and the barbarian class does not have a counter to that)

 

But again, None of this is "fact" (and certainly not observable fact, no matter what Josh says) First off, BG2 is physical, tangeable, observable proof that #3 is complete nonsense, so that one is not even worth debating. As for #2, I beg to differ. I define Tactics as coming up with solutions/game plans to problems that arise in combat. Ok, Hard counters fit that definition. Period. Josh is a game designer and it's his job to supply the player with solutions to problems, NOT to decide which solutions are "boring" and which one's are "tactical".

 

#1 is the only valid argument he makes. But Removing hard counters is NOT the solution. Giving the player information and tools and Alternatives to hard counters is. That is to say, if you put Medusas and Basilisks in the game, and their Petrification attacks are Save or Die, then give the player advanced knowledge of the threat. Then Give him Non Hard counter options... like access to Undead summons. Mirror Shields, Stone to flesh scrolls; Potions that massively improve saving throws; the ability to avoid the encounter outright via stealth and invisibility etc. etc. etc.

 

And then... trust the player to figure things out on his own. We're not ALL Idiots, Josh. We are the ones who always end up discovering Exploits that your own dev team wasn't intelligent enough to anticipate. So what makes you think we can't solve an insta-kill problem and have fun doing it?

Edited January 13, 2015 by Stun

[PrimeJunta]

Mm. I agree with you on your thinking about objection #1. BG2 does do this a lot of the time; e.g. with the Planar Sphere thing I knew I was up against a necromancer so I should expect death magic. OTOH a lot of the time it doesn't: the Cowled Wizard ambush was a suckerpunch. 

 

As to objection #2, I would agree with Josh if the fight is one of the ones you can't investigate by scouting ahead. If you sneak ahead and see a bunch of vampires, it is entirely reasonable to pre-buff with Death Ward before charging in. If OTOH it's one of the ones where the foes materialize out of thin air and there's no way you can anticipate this, then pre-buffing because you knew that they were going to do that is kinda cheesy. (Example: the first real fight in the tomb with Korgan's quest. Go past a certain point and pop! you're swarmed by all kinds of nasty things. I didn't pre-buff for that one BTW, I managed to slap a Death Ward on Korgan when it started and then have him tackle the level-drainers.)

 

My thinking? Set-pieces like the one in the tomb don't really mesh with pre-buffing. I like the set-pieces, and I think they would be improved by removing that mechanic. OTOH pre-buffing would work great if the content was more dynamic, i.e. you really couldn't metagame-anticipate what's going to hit you next. 

 

How do you think it would play if, for example, there were two or three different locations where a setpiece could trigger, and two or three different enemy compositions? That means that even if you had fought them all, you would have no "meta" way of knowing exactly which one it would be.  

[Sensuki]

The question actually should be, are those setpieces designed for pre-buffing ? A lot of them aren't, tbh.

[PrimeJunta]

I don't really care what the designer was thinking when designing them. It's the end result that counts.

 

If the system allows prebuffing, and prebuffing turns an otherwise hard fight into cheese, then that is kind of a problem IMO. Again: in a game where the player teaches himself to play, if the most obvious and easiest strategies are dull and/or cheesy, then there is something wrong with the design. Either change the mechanics to make the interesting and fun strategies more obvious, or change the game so that it nudges you towards those strategies from the start.

[Sensuki]

I would prefer a game to be designed for pre-buffing than not, but I have a feeling I'm in the minority there.

[PrimeJunta]

I would feel that setpieces which are sprung on you by surprise would become unfair in that setup. If it was based on scouting ahead so you'd know what to prebuff for, by all means.

[Luckmann]

 

What he says about hard counters and parties isn't strictly true (if it was, Stun wouldn't have been able to solo BG2 with a berserker),

Confront Josh on this and his response will be 3-fold.

 

1) He'll say all bets are off once the player is armed with meta knowledge. He'll say he's more concerned about Players who are playing the game for the first time who might be turned off by the perceived Solution-less, All or Nothing, rock-paper-scissors gameplay that Hard counters bring to the equation.

2) Then he'll say that there's nothing "tactical" about a situation where an enemy Mage casts Finger of Death and gets his attack nullified by a party who put up a Death Ward ahead of time because they didn't want to be hit with death magic, and, you know, took the necessary precautions like any decent field general would.

3) And finally he'll argue that the problem with hard counters is that it goes against character build freedom. (ie. I want to build a party of Barbarians, but I can't because this game has wizards that cast finger of death and the barbarian class does not have a counter to that)

 

But again, None of this is "fact" (and certainly not observable fact, no matter what Josh says) First off, BG2 is physical, tangeable, observable proof that #3 is complete nonsense, so that one is not even worth debating. As for #2, I beg to differ. I define Tactics as coming up with solutions/game plans to problems that arise in combat. Ok, Hard counters fit that definition. Period. Josh is a game designer and it's his job to supply the player with solutions to problems, NOT to decide which solutions are "boring" and which one's are "tactical".

 

#1 is the only valid argument he makes. But Removing hard counters is NOT the solution. Giving the player information and tools and Alternatives to hard counters is. That is to say, if you put Medusas and Basilisks in the game, and their Petrification attacks are Save or Die, then give the player advanced knowledge of the threat. Then Give him Non Hard counter options... like access to Undead summons. Mirror Shields, Stone to flesh scrolls; Potions that massively improve saving throws; the ability to avoid the encounter outright via stealth and invisibility etc. etc. etc.

 

And then... trust the player to figure things out on his own. We're not ALL Idiots, Josh. We are the ones who always end up discovering Exploits that your own dev team wasn't intelligent enough to anticipate. So what makes you think we can't solve an insta-kill problem and have fun doing it?

 

This right here is likely why he doesn't actually frequent this forum, preferring the company of yes-sayers. He'd actually have to argue his points and I think he'd have a really hard time doing that.

[PrimeJunta]

Most of you grogs are really unpleasant about the way you present your points though. I don't think most people in Josh's shoes would put up with that kind of thing for long. If he doesn't listen to you, it is largely your fault.

[archangel979]

@Stun One thing I've been having trouble with is figuring out exactly what the mage is protected with, especially (as usual) the combo is fired with Contingency or Spell Trigger. The spell FX flash by quite fast, and obscure each other. I can usually catch Stoneskin because of the boulder effect, but that's about it. Similarly, I can't tell which protections my attempts dispelled.

 

More practice needed I suppose.

I think combat log tells you which spells were activated. You might need to turn on extra log info.

[Stun]

My thinking? Set-pieces like the one in the tomb don't really mesh with pre-buffing.

Should such randomized, "poof-there-it-is!" encounters that materialize out of thin air and thus nullify pre-planning/scouting be the norm in PoE? Should they even be common?

 

I'm not knocking them, and I definitely see their appeal. It's just that Prebuffing and hard counters are something that *a lot* of people have grown to love via association with the IE games. It's pretty darn radical for Josh to remove them outright, when he could have just mixed things up a little and both sides would have been satisfied. For example, Give us a couple of those scoutable, plannable BG1-esque Basilisk encounters, AND give us those set pieces you're describing.

Edited January 13, 2015 by Stun

[PrimeJunta]

You asking me?

 

I dislike that trope. Just like I dislike being plopped right into melee in a random encounter. I'm being robbed of my agency. I may enjoy the fights, but not the way they're set up. BG2's are not especially bad (so far); the worst example of that type I can think of is in NWN2 OC where you're suddenly and without warning whisked off to solo against a LOT of vamps and other assorted undead. I wouldn't miss it if they stopped doing that sort of thing altogether.

 

You know what else I dislike? Undetectable traps. IWD had lots of those, even if the Find Traps skill description warns that you won't detect all of them. If I invest points in Find Traps, by golly gosh I want to find traps. Same thing.

 

I like scouting. It's a significant investment both in terms of party composition/character development and playing time. There should be a commensurately big payoff. If you want to limit it so it doesn't become a must-do thing, I'm sure there are ways to do that.

[Stun]

You asking me?

 

I dislike that trope. Just like I dislike being plopped right into melee in a random encounter. I'm being robbed of my agency.

Bingo. THAT is how I feel about the elimination of pre-buffs. (and to a lesser extent, the removal of the hard counter design)

 

Player agency is being taken away from us, as well as an element of tactical gameplay (planning/preparation). But what can we do? The fragile sensitivities of those casual first-time-player majorities must be protected so that PoE can sell.

[BruceVC]

I notice no one has pointed out another  very obvious difference between BG2 and PoE

 

BG2 had optional Romance which made party interaction more immersive and PoE doesn't have any. I hope there are other ways in PoE I can interact with my party  on that same personal level   

[PrimeJunta]

That's because it's my Let's Play and I go out of my way to avoid them.

[Stun]

I notice no one has pointed out another very obvious difference between BG2 and PoE.

 

BG2 had optional Romance which made party interaction more immersive and PoE doesn't have any. I hope there are other ways in PoE I can interact with my party  on that same personal level   

I called it.. On the last thread.

 

I must have ESPn!