Baldur's Gate 2 and P:E, round 3

[gogocactus]

Hello PrimeJunta, I'm very happy to see you back on the forums since I was afraid the negative feedback on your previous BG2 threads had scared you away. That said, I really loved those threads because you mentioned a lot of things about BGII which I could at first not agree with such as your claim that BGII required a lot of metagame knowledge to be enjoyable. Yet upon a new play through I had to concede your point and got to realize that BGII is only fun if you are the type of person that enjoys learning meta game and to then replay parts of the game... That said, welcome back and thanks for your new contribution to the forums.

[Nonek]

One minor quibble, is not Poe's spell system more appropriately compared to BG1's? They are both after all low level games with a quite low level cap, whereas in BG2 we are beginning to attain a measure of power that dwarfs the prequel. Just a thought.

Edited March 13, 2015 by Nonek

[PrimeJunta]

@Nonek That's true, but the underlying spell mechanics in both games are the same.

 

At low levels the P:E system is clearly richer and more interesting than AD&D (compare what the level 4 BB wizard can do to what a level 4 AD&D wizard can do, for example), but I am a little worried that once we hit higher levels -- some of which will be in P:E already -- the magic system will feel "flatter" and less involving.

 

There is probably room for improvement there for the expansion and the sequel (always hoping there will be one).

[SKull]

The thing I think newer gamers miss sometimes is that games like BGII came at the end of a ca 30 year process of developing a nuanced game world called AD&D, which was supposed to be hard. BGII was not the beginning of anything but rather the ending of something pretty amazing. Nothing like it exists now and no game like it could even get the funding for production these days. My first experience with AD&D was playing tabletop RPGs with my buddies back in the 80s. And we died all the time at first because everything was new. Learning how to play it was half the fun and socializing was the other half. Nobody usually expected to finish anything. It was just a game world and you could use it as you liked, either playing pre-written modules or writing your own. Most of the actual stuff you ended up doing while playing was not scripted at all, but more or less improv RP/horseplay mixed with dice rolls, sometimes while actually being drunk. And it was fun. What CRPGs have almost completely lost is the largely unscripted nature of these earlier generations of RPG games. The original Baldur`s Gate is probably the best of them simply because it had a relatively open world and tons of places to explore which you didn`t need to even visit if you didn`t want to. It gave you a decent amount of freedom to do things when you wanted to, and not simply because there was nothing left to do or (Horror!) because the game scripted you to go there. From this perspective BGII was a huge step in the wrong direction, although in other ways it was much better.

 

When people started translating AD&D to CRPGs in the 1990s it was not up for discussion that all the rules and all the difficulty of AD&D had to be translated first. Not as some novel addition to annoy people but as a crucial part of the AD&D experience. If BGII hadn`t been hard to the point of frustration it wouldn`t have been an AD&D game, and it would never have dared say "based on AD&D" on the box to begin with. It`s just that simple. And like you said yourself it gets easier as you practise and learn the rules of the game. And that is what gaming is about. Or at least what it used to be about. I`m not so sure anymore what people imagine gaming is about, considering that all I seem to hear is moaning that games are too hard. Even when games are ridiculously easy you`ll find someone who thinks it is too hard and is complaining about it. For an ancient gamer like myself this is very confusing. Games are supposed to be hard. Not because I`m so awesome but because without a challenge there`s no point. Finishing BGII feels like something of an achievement precisely because it is hard. Make it easier and there`s no achievement. And if there`s no ahievement, what`s the point? And that is the problem with single player games over the last decade+. They`re all much too easy, almost without exception. And I don`t expect PoE to be any exception sadly.

[Infinitron]

The thing I think newer gamers miss sometimes is that games like BGII came at the end of a ca 30 year process of developing a nuanced game world called AD&D, which was supposed to be hard. BGII was not the beginning of anything but rather the ending of something pretty amazing. Nothing like it exists now and no game like it could even get the funding for production these days. My first experience with AD&D was playing tabletop RPGs with my buddies back in the 80s. And we died all the time at first because everything was new. Learning how to play it was half the fun and socializing was the other half. Nobody usually expected to finish anything. It was just a game world and you could use it as you liked, either playing pre-written modules or writing your own. Most of the actual stuff you ended up doing while playing was not scripted at all, but more or less improv RP/horseplay mixed with dice rolls, sometimes while actually being drunk. And it was fun. What CRPGs have almost completely lost is the largely unscripted nature of these earlier generations of RPG games. The original Baldur`s Gate is probably the best of them simply because it had a relatively open world and tons of places to explore which you didn`t need to even visit if you didn`t want to. It gave you a decent amount of freedom to do things when you wanted to, and not simply because there was nothing left to do or (Horror!) because the game scripted you to go there. From this perspective BGII was a huge step in the wrong direction, although in other ways it was much better.

 

When people started translating AD&D to CRPGs in the 1990s it was not up for discussion that all the rules and all the difficulty of AD&D had to be translated first. Not as some novel addition to annoy people but as a crucial part of the AD&D experience. If BGII hadn`t been hard to the point of frustration it wouldn`t have been an AD&D game, and it would never have dared say "based on AD&D" on the box to begin with. It`s just that simple. And like you said yourself it gets easier as you practise and learn the rules of the game. And that is what gaming is about. Or at least what it used to be about. I`m not so sure anymore what people imagine gaming is about, considering that all I seem to hear is moaning that games are too hard. Even when games are ridiculously easy you`ll find someone who thinks it is too hard and is complaining about it. For an ancient gamer like myself this is very confusing. Games are supposed to be hard. Not because I`m so awesome but because without a challenge there`s no point. Finishing BGII feels like something of an achievement precisely because it is hard. Make it easier and there`s no achievement. And if there`s no ahievement, what`s the point? And that is the problem with single player games over the last decade+. They`re all much too easy, almost without exception. And I don`t expect PoE to be any exception sadly.

 

Except this thread is full of a bunch of people saying BG2 isn't actually that hard.

Edited March 14, 2015 by Infinitron

[PrimeJunta]

@Skull "Easy to learn, hard to master" mean anything to you?

 

AD&D is kind of the opposite. The rules are a mess and a lot of work to learn, but once you figure out the holes in them, it becomes easy. 

[anameforobsidian]

 

Keep in mind that some of these changes would make the hard counters not hard anymore. Resistances instead of immunities means soft counters, because you can overwhelm them with enough effort (50% resistance, so just cast twice as many spells).

That's kind of the point, though. Left-and-right, you see people talking about how great it is to have emergent gameplay, so I don't see why we sweep it under the rug for something as fundamental as countering. One could say that the very nature of a "tactical" combat system is the whole idea of countering.

 

That being said, I definitely don't think that anything even remotely "hard" should be removed as a counter. But, generally, the fewer options you have to handle a given thing, the less interesting "countering" that thing is. And, in the interest of, well... interestingness, it doesn't have to be as simple as just 50% effectiveness instead of 100%. Even if it were, you say "just cast twice as many spells," but it isn't that simple. You can only cast so many spells in a given amount of time. D&D rules already handle the changing of a spell's level ("cast at level X instead of level X"), so if something kept reducing level 5 spells down to level 1 spells, you'd have to cast 5 of them just to get it even close to ONE spell of the same magnitude as the original. Now, that might lead you to think "well, then what's the point? It might as well be a full immunity, since it's pointless to cast such piddly spells." But, that's not necessarily true, precisely because the system isn't that simple. You could have a spell that was going to stun a target for 15 seconds, for example. Maybe it only stuns them for 3 seconds, but the fact that it stuns them still interrupts the target's casting for long enough for you to do something else about it.

 

That's the heart of what countering should be all about, really. Not "do I have an ability that's designed specifically to 'counter' another one?", but instead "what can I effectively do about what the enemy's doing?"

I think there's definitely room for "hard counters," but they have to be intelligently designed. Just as a quick example, a shield that absorbs the next two spells cast on that target would be a "hard counter" to incoming spells. But it's more of a tactical/timing thing, than a "Haha, you have no way of getting through this unless you undo this effect! MUAHAHAHA!". You could just hit them with two wimpy spells, or maybe you have a character with a weapon that procs a spell effect when they attack, and you decide it's prudent to take the time to get that character to land two attacks on them because you don't want to waste your spells, etc. Or maybe you just have your casters resort to physical weapons for the time being?

 

And maybe that shield only lasts 20 seconds, instead of just being "check mate... waiting on your move" in terms of harming that target with spells. Stuff like that.

 

Not that everything has to be super generic in terms of immunity, but there are very clever factors to use for immunities to make things quite powerful, without making them a permanent lock blanketing a bunch of combat factors with only one (or just a couple) key(s) to open it. As with the example above, I feel like any immunity or powerful spell like that should require/provide for just as much cleverness in its use as the cleverness allowed towards countering it. Ideally.

 

 

Unless I'm mistaking my definitions, the more options you have to deal with something, the softer a counter it is.  

 

I do like your point on lowering the duration of spells.  If it were up to me, I'd give wizards a bunch of near instant defenses, but they would only last a round or three.  That way they're reactive, but there's no chain contingency spell immunity: abjuration stoneskin nonsense going on.

 

Although I think BG2 (especially ToB) faces a bigger issue, and that's duration and spell level bloat.  This has a nasty intersection with hard counters, which can make high level enemy encounters last too long and just be generally tedious.  Higher level casters can easily create a set of conditions with an uninteresting arcane set of counter conditions while some classes sit around and flail helplessly.  

 

The game does a good job of hiding these problems from the user by making the enemies not use many of the best spells in the game, and then overleveling them.  It also gives the player characters insanely powerful tools that are only used by them and not against them (Carsomyr).  Then there are the truly fun exploits (rabbit swarm to deny positioning, black blade simulacrums)

 

Bioware did a good job of hiding the system's flaws, but I don't think that's the same thing as a good system.

Edited March 14, 2015 by anameforobsidian

[PrimeJunta]

Definitely agree about the duration bloat. It adds a lot of tedium, for example when you win a fight but one of your toons is left with a long-duration stun, confusion, paralysis or whatever and you don't feel like wasting a precious counter on it, but instead have to just twiddle your thumbs for, like, minutes before it expires.

[SKull]

 

The thing I think newer gamers miss sometimes is that games like BGII came at the end of a ca 30 year process of developing a nuanced game world called AD&D, which was supposed to be hard. BGII was not the beginning of anything but rather the ending of something pretty amazing. Nothing like it exists now and no game like it could even get the funding for production these days. My first experience with AD&D was playing tabletop RPGs with my buddies back in the 80s. And we died all the time at first because everything was new. Learning how to play it was half the fun and socializing was the other half. Nobody usually expected to finish anything. It was just a game world and you could use it as you liked, either playing pre-written modules or writing your own. Most of the actual stuff you ended up doing while playing was not scripted at all, but more or less improv RP/horseplay mixed with dice rolls, sometimes while actually being drunk. And it was fun. What CRPGs have almost completely lost is the largely unscripted nature of these earlier generations of RPG games. The original Baldur`s Gate is probably the best of them simply because it had a relatively open world and tons of places to explore which you didn`t need to even visit if you didn`t want to. It gave you a decent amount of freedom to do things when you wanted to, and not simply because there was nothing left to do or (Horror!) because the game scripted you to go there. From this perspective BGII was a huge step in the wrong direction, although in other ways it was much better.

 

When people started translating AD&D to CRPGs in the 1990s it was not up for discussion that all the rules and all the difficulty of AD&D had to be translated first. Not as some novel addition to annoy people but as a crucial part of the AD&D experience. If BGII hadn`t been hard to the point of frustration it wouldn`t have been an AD&D game, and it would never have dared say "based on AD&D" on the box to begin with. It`s just that simple. And like you said yourself it gets easier as you practise and learn the rules of the game. And that is what gaming is about. Or at least what it used to be about. I`m not so sure anymore what people imagine gaming is about, considering that all I seem to hear is moaning that games are too hard. Even when games are ridiculously easy you`ll find someone who thinks it is too hard and is complaining about it. For an ancient gamer like myself this is very confusing. Games are supposed to be hard. Not because I`m so awesome but because without a challenge there`s no point. Finishing BGII feels like something of an achievement precisely because it is hard. Make it easier and there`s no achievement. And if there`s no ahievement, what`s the point? And that is the problem with single player games over the last decade+. They`re all much too easy, almost without exception. And I don`t expect PoE to be any exception sadly.

 

Except this thread is full of a bunch of people saying BG2 isn't actually that hard.

 

 

Yes once you learn the rules it`s not. I was replying to the OP though, and not everyone else, as I`m sure you noticed.

[Lephys]

Unless I'm mistaking my definitions, the more options you have to deal with something, the softer a counter it is.

You aren't mistaken. That's absolutely correct. I apologize if I seemed to be disputing that fact. To clarify what I'm trying to get at regarding counters being hard or soft:

 

You can have an immunity to Lightning Damage, and that's a "hard counter" in the sense that there's no way to deal lightning damage to the person wielding that immunity without stripping that immunity. There's one way to deal with that immunity, if you want it gone. BUT, there are still other ways in which to deal with that person. Namely, deal other types of damage to them, or bind/incapacitate them until that immunity wears off, etc.

 

When you get something like Immunity to Physical Damage, or Immunity to Negative Effects, you're stripping an awful lot of options away from the player in dealing with that. Even though there are still things you could do, the remaining options tend to undermine the design of the system, which was rife with all those options for you to robustly affect combat factors. The only effective choice, at a certain point, becomes stripping that immunity away, which is usually the work of one or two abilities that do expressly that. So then, this hugely tactical system is reduced to, essentially, rock paper scissors. They cast Rock? You cast Paper, or you lose. Etc.

 

So, yeah, in a sense, the hardness of a counter (in terms of not necessarily how you can directly undo it, but in what options remain for dealing with it as a factor between you and combat victory) is kind of a smooth slider. You can have immunity to all damage for 5 seconds, and that won't be as "hard" of a thing to counter, because the need to remove that immunity will not be high. But, if it were for a minute, then that spell is giving the immune person free reign to do whatever they please, unless you undo that immunity. Thus, it is the Rock, and you must use Paper, or just play "flee that guy" for the next minute. Etc.

 

I simply believe that this hardness/softness needs to be taken into account when designing these abilities, as it pertains to maintaining tactical play with clever counters. The list of counter options should ideally remain tactically complex, rather than super simple.

 

You would almost never want a truly "hard" counter, with only one solution. That's a Legend of Zelda boss fight. "Dodge it until it gets its giant hand stuck on the wall, then hit its hand until its head falls down and opens up, then hit its brain with bombs." Etc. That would be preposterous in such a design. But, there also really aren't any of those, I don't think, in BG2. But there are some that are still beyond the oversimplification of countering threshold.

 

I do like your point on lowering the duration of spells.  If it were up to me, I'd give wizards a bunch of near instant defenses, but they would only last a round or three.  That way they're reactive, but there's no chain contingency spell immunity: abjuration stoneskin nonsense going on.

Indeed. Methinks duration is the main issue behind this whole "Oh noes! pre-buffing!" issue, too. It's not that applying beneficial effects before combat is bad. But, the more bonuses you can infuse yourself with for the next 5 combats while you don't worry about them anymore, the less reactive those factors become in combat. Fire attacks? Oh, we've had fire immunity for the last 3 hours. No worries. I'll just cast it again if it wears off before the next fight, ^_^