Injury System is way too brutal

[Nail]

Injury system would be brutal if those were permanent injuries, like in real life

Right now it's just a mere food consuming along with some buffs.

[Sedrefilos]

Am I the only one that feels resting in video games is good only in games with perma-death (like Darkest Dungeon for instance)?

[Wormerine]

Am I the only one that feels resting in video games is good only in games with perma-death (like Darkest Dungeon for instance)?

D&D style resource management feels most natural if choices you make are irreversible. Decision “do I push in, in spite of danger or unoptimally rest now” is also an interesting choice only in a situation in which that decision made can’t be altered.

[Mikeymoonshine]

rest mechanic doesn’t feel all that good to me in this iteration. I do like individual changes (food used for camping, food replacing supplies, resting flexible but with diminishing returns, spells per encounter not encouraging not using them) but as the result resting mechanic (and therefore injury system) seems to be in the game only because is has been there before rather than fulfilling intergral part of the gameplay. In PoE1 rest would interact with many aspects of the gameplay - replenish health, refill spells, remove injuries, set right bonuses before tough fight. In PoE2 it’s just remove injuries and replenish “empower points” - which so far I am not using all that much - it might be me being new to the system, not fault of the system itself. Bonuses from resting seem nonspecific so far making them general choices (more healing for tank, more health for squishes etc.) rather than tailored for next encounters.

 

While I wasn’t a fan of how KOTOR didn’t punish getting knocked out in any way, PoE2 injury/resting system seems to be there only to punish getting knocked out. It’s not terrible but feels more artificial than before. I got annoyed with traps giving injuries but at the same time I do like that activating trap does something tangible now.

 

Yeah exactly, resting meant something in the last game even if the system was not that great. There were good times to rest and there were good times not to rest. In this version game it really is best to just rest after every injury, there's no incentive not to other than the loss of resting bonuses but then food also gives bonuses. Maybe if they made removing injuries harder as in it requires specific recipes to heal specific injuries? Also make it so only specific recipes give decent bonuses or just no food bonuses. 

[morhilane]

Am I the only one that feels resting in video games is good only in games with perma-death (like Darkest Dungeon for instance)?

POE2 has perma-death, once you get 4 injuries the character dies and is removed from the party. You get a corpse on the ground with all his/her gear.

[Sedrefilos]

 

Am I the only one that feels resting in video games is good only in games with perma-death (like Darkest Dungeon for instance)?

POE2 has perma-death, once you get 4 injuries the character dies and is removed from the party. You get a corpse on the ground with all his/her gear.

 

Well, yeah, but you can always rest almost without limitation correct? So you WILL rest frequently because why not?

In Darkest Dungeon you get some limited supplies and you never find any more in the dungeons. So choosing when and where to rest is crucial because if you lose your heroes that's it they're gone and if you abandon the delve they get afflictions, and you lose the quest etc.

They are very different games Deadfire and Darkest Dungeon but that's my point: resting mechanic is good in no story-heavy games that rely mostly on mechanics and they are built around the "push-your-luck" idea. I'm not so sure resting fits in stroy-driven rpgs, (although it adds to the atmosphere) because, at the end, it brings nothing to the table mechanics-wise. It's just something that you do. "Oh, I'm hurt. Ok I'll just rest I suppose - here wounds gone. Those guyz look pretty nasty. Ok, I'll fight them and then rest again thanks to my endless food supplies".

I don't know. I never gave much thought on rest 'cause whenever it was present ti was just something I did when I got hurt much - a click of a button. I'm not sure there is a way to implement it in a way that is meaningful in these types of games, unfortunately.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Sedrefilos

[Wormerine]

 

rest mechanic doesn’t feel all that good to me in this iteration. I do like individual changes (food used for camping, food replacing supplies, resting flexible but with diminishing returns, spells per encounter not encouraging not using them) but as the result resting mechanic (and therefore injury system) seems to be in the game only because is has been there before rather than fulfilling intergral part of the gameplay. In PoE1 rest would interact with many aspects of the gameplay - replenish health, refill spells, remove injuries, set right bonuses before tough fight. In PoE2 it’s just remove injuries and replenish “empower points” - which so far I am not using all that much - it might be me being new to the system, not fault of the system itself. Bonuses from resting seem nonspecific so far making them general choices (more healing for tank, more health for squishes etc.) rather than tailored for next encounters.

While I wasn’t a fan of how KOTOR didn’t punish getting knocked out in any way, PoE2 injury/resting system seems to be there only to punish getting knocked out. It’s not terrible but feels more artificial than before. I got annoyed with traps giving injuries but at the same time I do like that activating trap does something tangible now.

 

 

Yeah exactly, resting meant something in the last game even if the system was not that great. There were good times to rest and there were good times not to rest. In this version game it really is best to just rest after every injury, there's no incentive not to other than the loss of resting bonuses but then food also gives bonuses. Maybe if they made removing injuries harder as in it requires specific recipes to heal specific injuries? Also make it so only specific recipes give decent bonuses or just no food bonuses.

The problem is you are adding mechanics and expending part of the game which doesn’t interact with the rest of the experience. You have to rest, because if you don’t in the next fight kicked out partymember wont get up. So you rest. I would advocate going as far as removing resting entirely and create entirely different “punishment” system for getting knocked out. Maybe not for Deadfire, but at this point we are moving so far away from IE games that it might be worthwhile for PoE3 to go back to drawing board and do things from scratch. New protagonist, new rules, new systems. At this point, old ones don’t really seem to glue all that well anymore.

[Sedrefilos]

Apparently "consoles" was not the only reason rpgs moved away from IE mechanics, if that was a reason at all.

[Breckmoney]

I think people might think differently of rest spamming if food was fully implemented. Like if you had 10 high dollar rare meals that added something like 2 Pen, 10 accuracy and 1 regen/second, I dunno. Good stuff. Certainly I would feel pressured to put off resting as long as possible.

[Enduin]

I think the new system is a step in the right direction, but certainly in need of tuning and changes. The old Health/Endurance system worked, but it wasn't ever something I thought was a very good system. It was rather inelegant. Simplifying health to fixed conditions rather than a very large numerical scale makes more sense and is far easier to understand for your average player. I think it's also a potentially more accurate approximation of what it's trying to represent, ie the overall physical condition of your character.

 

That said the Injury system needs more nuance and granularity to it as it is currently too simple and thus severe in its implementation. I didn't find it all that hard to avoid knockouts in my time with the Beta but it certainly is quite punitive when they do happen. Especially when you take into consideration things like Traps which automatically add an injury. I think more injury conditions and degrees of severity would be the best way of improving the current system. The old Health/Endurance system was to abstract, while the new Injury system is more straightforward and representative, but it is too rigid and simple at the moment. 

 

I think it would be beneficial to introduce two tiers of Injuries: Serious and Minor. Serious Injuries would work just how they currently do in the Beta and then Minor Injuries would incur less serious penalties. The severity of the injury you receive would be dependent on the severity of the attack that knocked you out. Powerful attacks would result in Serious Injuries while less powerful attacks would only result in Minor Injuries. Minor Injuries could also occur when struck by critical hits and when you trigger a trap. On their own Minor Injuries won't impart a Health Penalty, but they will in pairs maybe for a reduced amount say only 15% instead of 25%. As well you would need twice as many Minor Injuries to trigger death. 

 

I think by making Minor Injuries the more common outcome will reduce the pressure to rest. They would still be detrimental, but not so punitive that having two or three would make the average player feeling compelled to rest. I think it would also possibly be worthwhile for them to test out making it so that Serious Injuries can only be recovered by staying at an Inn or similar fixed resting location, not through camping/food. That too could again help to curb the inclination and pressure some players feel after receiving an Injury to immediately rest up. But then again that might just do the opposite and have players feel compelled to leave a dungeon before a major encounter and return to an Inn to rest up, which is pretty much the exact opposite behavior you want to encourage. 

[Sedrefilos]

@Enduin
Having minor and serious wounds sounds like a good idea, imo, although I don't think inn-resting curing serious wounds will solve much, more like it'll have the the latter of the outcomes you describe and it'll annoy players.

 

If two kinds of wounds are to be implemented, I suggest serious wounds be treated in a more unique and hard-to-get way (like special treatment using a rare rsource or something, I don't know), so when you have one or two wounds you're like "ok, I won't be able to cure enough serious wounds untill I don't even know when, so screw this side dungeon I'm currently in - I guess I've failed it at this playthrough - better save for the critical path because if I fail that too is either game over for good or reload a very old save". That, me at least, will make think twice before consuming my wound-curing supplies.

 

Of course, as I said before, I'm not sure resting can be done that good in these types of games so maybe this conversation is meaningless and Obsidian will just inplement their current idea, which noone will complain when the game is out 'cause, ok another not very successful resting mechanic and they'll just abandon it altogether in the future

Edited November 20, 2017 by Sedrefilos

[Christliar]

Resting was done well in both Knights of the Chalice and the Swordflight fan module for NWN (one of the best RPGs in years btw), and even the first battle at Stalwart, so it's not a problem. It makes the game immeasurably more difficult on a completely different level, however. They just have to be willing to do it, but they aren't because they are catering to a completely different audience/silent majority than whatever forum can muster. It's weird to say the least, but the business side of things speaks louder than any "hardcore" fan. That's why they changed the semi-Vancian system in the first place, instead of making it meaningful by restricting resting, they are removing it altogether because people rest after every fight anyway and hand-holding that audience is way more important. It's obvious there are some ulterior motives at play here, so it's no wonder the resting stopped making sense and it's a vestigial element trying and failing to appease grognards. Fun fact - only 0.4% of players completed P1 or PotD (at least in GOG's statistics). C'est la vie, I guess.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Christliar

[Sedrefilos]

 It's obvious there are some ulterior motives at play here

Some zionist conspiracy maybe?

[morhilane]

Fun fact - only 0.4% of players completed P1 or PotD (at least in GOG's statistics). C'est la vie, I guess.

What does that have to do with anything? I like the current injury system/resting and I never played POE1 on PotD (or even Hard).

[Christliar]

No zionist conspiracy, unfortunately, those are fun, the business side of things is the ulterior motive.
 

 

 

What does that have to do with anything? I like the current injury system/resting and I never played POE1 on PotD (or even Hard).

 

It's unrelated to whatever you like or don't like. I'm just saying that difficulty is not what most people are looking for, hence the statistic, while fixing resting requires the game to be more difficult.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Christliar

[Sedrefilos]

"Fixing" resting is a bit subjective.

[Christliar]

Ok, if you prefer, read it as (using your own words) "make resting that good".

[Sedrefilos]

Ok, if you prefer, read it as (using your own words) "make resting that good".

That's what I mean. How a good resting mechanic works is not something objective. I'd like it that way you'd like it that way.

Personally I don't believe it can work in this game in a way it makes good sense gameplay-wise.

Removing it altogether, as you suggest, sounds good, imo, but it'll require too much rules changing so that you can heal more frequently/sustain more damage during combat since you wouldn't want to have any companion drop to 0 life anytime.

I still believe "survive the encounter or die" + wounds for fallen (DA:O style) is the best way to go for these games.

 

EDIT: Also, I don't believe resting has to do with wanting the game to be easy so that they can sell more. Pillars 1 had resting yet not even 1% finished it, as you said.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Sedrefilos

[hilfazer]

I'm glad people started to say "semi-Vancian" instead of "Vancian". Still incorrect but it seems we're getting there.

 

While priest and druids require no explanation, wizards may not be as obvious. A grimoire in PoE can hold a subset of all spells. But that's still not preparing spells, it's choosing a spell on the fly. And thanks to grimoire switching wizards have access to their full repertoire in practice.

 

Vancian does not mean per rest. Mana can be paired with per rest just fine and it's totally not vancian. PoE1 casters were using "leveled mana". Vancian just happens to be per rest and i'm not even sure if it is a requirement.

BTW: some classes in PoE2 who are not casters are using mana

[Christliar]

If we cannot find anything objective in a resting system, how are we supposed to talk about and improve it? It seems self-defeating to me.

[Gairnulf]

I still say that the injuries system is fine, and if someone is getting knocked out in every fight, he can

1. continue on, regardless of the injuries, if he would watch what he is doing and adapt his tactics

2. lower the game difficulty

3. load up a savegame from before getting knocked out, and continue trying until he finds the right tactics for the combat encounter, same as he has been doing in PoE too!

 

So what is the big deal?

[ghostwriter]

I still say that the injuries system is fine, and if someone is getting knocked out in every fight, he can

1. continue on, regardless of the injuries, if he would watch what he is doing and adapt his tactics

2. lower the game difficulty

3. load up a savegame from before getting knocked out, and continue trying until he finds the right tactics for the combat encounter, same as he has been doing in PoE too!

 

So what is the big deal?

 

Exactly this... especially since the resting system is much more liberal in this game.

[anfoglia]

I'm ambivalent about injuries. Yes, a single injury may be reason enough to rest. Depending on food supplies, maybe that eliminates some of the incentive for strategic planning. But most of that went out the window with per-rest abilities, and the player's ability to return to town always acted as an escape hatch. I think there is some sense in just conceding the player will rest spam and assessing some light fee on top of the primary punishment (being unconscious for the fight at hand). Some of the obvious alternatives (recovery based on in-game time; making injuries less devastating but food somewhat rare) don't jive well with other game systems or goals. I'm sure there's a better system out there, but I'm not convinced this is currently a big problem with Deadfire.

[Answermancer]

No zionist conspiracy, unfortunately, those are fun, the business side of things is the ulterior motive.

​I don't think wanting more people to play the game (and enjoy it) is an ulterior motive though, it's a front-and-center motive of every game developer.

 

I mean, you want a lot of people to play it because otherwise you can't afford to keep making games. Full stop, a game company is a company and needs to make profits to continue existing. And even if profit didn't matter, game developers tend to be passionate that their games appeal and are enjoyed by many people, and few of them want only the most hardcore audience to have a good time.

 

In that sense, the massive number of casual players subsidizes the more hardcore crowd, so there needs to be a balance, and apparently a lot of people thought PoE was scary and hard even on Normal (it was a recurring theme in reviews and comments online at launch). Not that I agree mind you, Normal was easy if you paid attention, but there were several decisions they made in the first game that I think scared casual players away:

• The start of the game was the hardest part, pretty much.
• Largely this was because you didn't get a full party for a while.
• A lot of people seemed to miss companions even when they could have recruited them.

I saw so many threads of people going "I am in the temple in ​the first town and I'm getting ripped up by these ghosts and this game is impossible!" And inevitably they were trying to do it with 1-2 characters because they didn't realize they could talk to Eder, or they missed Aloth, or they didn't explore the outside areas and find Durance or Kana.

 

I think Obsidian shot themselves in the foot a bit by trying not to scare and overwhelm players with powers (by giving them a full party earlier), and instead scared and overwhelmed them with encounters because those people didn't know how to get a full party together, or how important that was.

 

Anyway, I think the only way to properly cater to both sides is to have more drastic handholding on normal and remove most of it on hard and above, because even casual players seem to be averse to lowering their difficulty. PoE tried to do this by limiting camping supplies at higher difficulties but it didn't work so well for all the reasons people have discussed.

[Daled]

I'm ambivalent about injuries. Yes, a single injury may be reason enough to rest. Depending on food supplies, maybe that eliminates some of the incentive for strategic planning. But most of that went out the window with per-rest abilities, and the player's ability to return to town always acted as an escape hatch. I think there is some sense in just conceding the player will rest spam and assessing some light fee on top of the primary punishment (being unconscious for the fight at hand). Some of the obvious alternatives (recovery based on in-game time; making injuries less devastating but food somewhat rare) don't jive well with other game systems or goals. I'm sure there's a better system out there, but I'm not convinced this is currently a big problem with Deadfire.

 

I feel the same. Unlike the penetration system I don't think the resting/injuries are broken, surely not perfect but far from being a problem. I'd say that the system is "okay" even without other changes.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Daled