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Decline Nerd Commando Guide Channel (ex-funbuilding & stuff)

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
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Yeah, but let's not forget that our series is not about powerbuilding only - for example, there's a great whirlwind attack/combat relfexes fighter build in TTOEE which, when massed, is incredibly fun to play. My most pleasant gaming experience with this game, btw, was when trying to ironman it with 100% non-caster party (consisting of Chris Avellone the dashing paladin/rogue, half-orcish shovelmen David Gaider, Todd Howard & Jennifer Helper and, finally, Pete Hines the halfling ranger-slinger (with the preferred enemy:players, of course)). I always died got wiped during those extra Circle of Eight missions (playing without casters is hard), but that still was great.
 

Shadenuat

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Man I want to replay TOEE now.

I think saying that you can dump anything but int/wis&con and then picking +4 initiative feat is a bit weird. Why not pump DEX.

For shapeshifting druid I think there are also a focus(natural weapon)-like options avaible in TOEE.
 
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Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
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I think saying that you can dump anything but int/wis&con and then picking +4 initiative feat is a bit weird. Why not pump DEX.

Well, as you've seen, I'm a stat rolling advocate in this game and it's less about pumping anything and more about managing the good or the bad stat rolls (depending on how meticulous/cheesy you are with them). And while the initiative is great, the stat gain of it from dexterity is not that huge - +1 per two points can't really compare to the whopping +4 of the feat. Not to mention that, worst comes to worst, you can play around low initiative and it's somewhat easier than to play around 28 hit points at level 10 or easy to resist spells.
 

Krraloth

Prophet
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Nov 20, 2009
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Boringland
Wasteland 2
Wow. The playlist is tasty.
Nice to know that you can make some change playing Magic, I've had a couple of friends over the years who were really into it but I never even tried to play it cards is teh hard and all.
I did listen to a couple of videos but yeah, they made little sense.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
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1,870,765
Thanks for the videos, it's one of few games where analysing builds was fun.
Especially ranged combat videos (because they sux until you get enchanted stuff or craft some).

What else I would like to see from you? Maybe build for Icewind Dale 1&2 for Heart of Fury mode.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
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What else I would like to see from you? Maybe build for Icewind Dale 1&2 for Heart of Fury mode.

I must concede that I utterly loathe RTWP games. I can tolerate ones where combat is not important and can be easily boiled down to clicking enemies to death (kotors and nwns), but anything that actually requires a constant micro-management out of me makes me bored incredibly fast. I mean, what's the point of pretending to be real-time if I actually have to pause the game every couple of seconds to issue new orders? But that's an old holywar, I guess. Anyhow, I've started IW 2 a couple of times, got through the act I and found myself out of desire to proceed further.
 

Shadenuat

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Replayed game and have to say, compared to whirlwinding enlarged fighter/barbarian with holy pitchfork of doom, casters are kinda meh in ToEE.
They're good for heals, buffs and CC, killing brigands and bugbears and all that, but with enemies that actually matter, they're mostly throwing pokeballs around to turn mobs attention elsewhere.
Can never have too many holy weapon wielding melee badasses in this game if you ask me. Some sort of paladin/cleric/fighter character with 2-handed holy weapon is probably the best guy to have around in this game (in theory, in practice gotta see how many levels of every class might be a good idea to take).

I played pure evil party and had COE 8.0 and everything though, so no cool divine toys and spells for evil poor me. Also bonus damage effects in crafting were capped for me, no more than 1, felt like moment I slap, say, fire on top of divine, I only got fire working. Not sure how exactly all that works though...

edit

oh hey, I think I just got myself a Paladin, and I totaly want whirlwinding holy halberd with Holy Sword casted on top of it

81611891.jpg

I will see if I will be able to ruin this with a few fighter levels :M
 
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Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
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I think it's more about whirlwind-style and AoE spells not really working that well together - I mean, your whirlwind guy has to stand in midst of enemies to perform his thing, which really interferes with the casting of your fireballs and so on. I went through vanilla with a pure casting party once and I can't say I've been disappointed by them.

As for the paladin's holy weapon - it's not supposed to stack with the weapon's enhancements.


BTW, I must say that I'm not sure when the next funbuilding will come out - I've got a rather annoying case of food poisoning (should've listened to the mom, she always told me to go druid), I've slept through the majority of yesterday, today is somewhat better, but I still feel too weak to do anything cerebral and/or constructive.
 

Zdzisiu

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Dec 3, 2009
Messages
3,489
I think it's more about whirlwind-style and AoE spells not really working that well together - I mean, your whirlwind guy has to stand in midst of enemies to perform his thing, which really interferes with the casting of your fireballs and so on. I went through vanilla with a pure casting party once and I can't say I've been disappointed by them.

As for the paladin's holy weapon - it's not supposed to stack with the weapon's enhancements.


BTW, I must say that I'm not sure when the next funbuilding will come out - I've got a rather annoying case of food poisoning (should've listened to the mom, she always told me to go druid), I've slept through the majority of yesterday, today is somewhat better, but I still feel too weak to do anything cerebral and/or constructive.
Thats one of the perks of doing this as a hobby. Nobody will mind if you are a couple of days or a week late with you videos. And working while feeling like shit usually leads to lower quality end result.
 

baturinsky

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5,526
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Russia
What else I would like to see from you? Maybe build for Icewind Dale 1&2 for Heart of Fury mode.

I must concede that I utterly loathe RTWP games. I can tolerate ones where combat is not important and can be easily boiled down to clicking enemies to death (kotors and nwns), but anything that actually requires a constant micro-management out of me makes me bored incredibly fast. I mean, what's the point of pretending to be real-time if I actually have to pause the game every couple of seconds to issue new orders? But that's an old holywar, I guess. Anyhow, I've started IW 2 a couple of times, got through the act I and found myself out of desire to proceed further.

You can try playing IWD2 solo or duo. Only problem is that you stop getting combat exp at around the Ice Temple.
 

Shadenuat

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I think it's more about whirlwind-style and AoE spells not really working that well together - I mean, your whirlwind guy has to stand in midst of enemies to perform his thing, which really interferes with the casting of your fireballs and so on. I went through vanilla with a pure casting party once and I can't say I've been disappointed by them.

As for the paladin's holy weapon - it's not supposed to stack with the weapon's enhancements.
It's mostly resists and magic resistance I was annoyed with. And when monster has hundreds of HP and MR it's a lot easier to just poke the fucker with a holy stick than try and find enough Cones of Cold to turn him into icicle.
As for Divine Sword, it still should add +2 to bab and dmg, it gives pal free circle against evil and I wonder if +2d6 holy from spell would actually stack with, say, an Ice enchantment on his weapon.

My party now is: Pal (uses starting divine longsword for now), Ranger (focus - bastard sword, short sword, I want to turn him into fragarch+whatever wielder), dwarven cleric of Kord (Strength&Good domains - free strength, enlarge, all the good stuff), an all round wizard and
the destroyer of worlds, halfling barbarian 1/fighter+ sling shooter :argh: weap focus slings and all the stuff. HUEILARIOUS
I run out of bullets quickly though
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
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Messages
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Well, I don't recall having that much trouble with the resists in ToEE, but then, I was playing vanilla and who knows what they could've added in the Co8.

Yeah, that's the one things I've forgot to mention - the bullet stock of the game is really short. It gets somewhat easier once you start encountering certain kind of bugbears (iirc), but even so it's nigh impossible to support more than one slinger in this game.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
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And so, after a rather specifically productive week (including much more shitting than I would want to admit), I was inspired to turn to the man who turned shitting into the art. But don't get disturbed too much as I'm talking about shitting out a game every year and I want you all to welcome the good, old and lazy Jeff Vogel into our series!




In other news, I've been playing Divinity: Original Sin recently (I'll do funbuilding about it in a week or two, once we'll have a decent promo video of my game because I make no secret that I attempt to use my videos also as a means of promotion for my games; it's not really efficient at this point, unfortunately, but it's still better than nothing, I guess) and I'm loving that game. It's not without minor flaws and, I think, the designers gave all the shiny toys too early to the player, but still, it features one of the most interesting encounter designs that we've seen in RPGs and, considering how rare the good combat actually is, it's a great feat. It also makes me think that Fargo is incredibly screwed to release his W2 right after the D:OS, because almost everything Fargo promises to do D:OS actually does and does it much better. I guess it doesn't have as much (mostly faux) C&C choices, but I'll take decent combat&exploration over the faux C&C any day, every day.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
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No, not really.

Yes, really.

Look, what Fargo promises is pretty much the true Fallout 3. Sorry, but F1+2 are mentioned way too much in his interviews to deny that. But the thing is, the game has nothing of what truly made F1+2 great. Because all that reactivity stuff is bullshit - it always was, it will ever be. One of the most beloved C&C games, for example, is the first Deus Ex, but fittingly so, all of the C&C there don't mean shit (and I'm talking about desu ex here because the original fallouts had no C&C at all, lol, and reactivity also was minimal & cosmetic). They're just extremely memorable because they were placed in the greatest points imaginable - "Bawww, my poor brother Paul dies... Oh, wait, shit, I can save him, hallelujah!!!" It's pretty much a designer's trick, but it's a helluva neat trick. And, due to budget constraints and the difficulty of implementation, it'll remain that way in the next 50 years. At the very least. So all that "each wasteland 2 playthrough is unique" is the Mass Effect 3 tier of PR talk. But I digress.

What made F1&2 great and what makes the majority of the games shit is the way they approach problem solving. At best, shitty games tell you "there are ways A, B & C of solving this problem, press a button to choose one". At worst, they just tell you "you must solve this problem this way, do it, fucker". Whereas good games are all about "well, here are this problem and here is a toolbox - 'kay, dude, try to invent something". And while I won't tell you that F1&2 were immaculate in this department (no game really is, probably), they were great at that. At least at great as it usually gets. And that's why they're loved. And that's why the original Deus Ex was so much better than the Human Revolution - once again, build your own solutions instead of choosing the combat/stealth/social solution. It's all about flexibility vs rigidity, and the choice from 3 rigid options is nowhere near flexible.

And it's just that D:OS has the flexible core whereas W2 has the rigid core. The inflexibility of engaging/disengaging from combat, the skills working only when scripted, the impossibility of influence the battlefield in any meaningful way, the absolute lack of tactical variety... You can actually tinker and tinker with the Divinity. You can't do fuck shit about Wasteland 2. Or, rather, you can try, but the returns are pathetic. And that's where the marrow of this whole game concept is, everything else is cosmetic.

That's also why AoD had mixed reception here, btw. It was (and probably is) more rigid than people expected it to be. Well, you can metagame in it a lot, but metagaming is like breaking the fourth wall - it can be cool, but you do it too much and you crash the entire bulding.
 
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Whereas good games are all about "well, here are this problem and here is a toolbox - 'kay, dude, try to invent something".
Indeed. I've invented plenty of solutions in D:OS, I've lockpicked doors to skip puzzles only to have the game stop in it's tracks because you weren't intended to do that. I've teleported characters out of prisons to have them act as if they were still inside and break quests. Outside of combat, applying that inventiveness is likely to be either useless or blatantly break the game.

Not that I actually agree that a great game is the result of what you described anyway, nor do I care for your weird understanding of what Fargo promised. Hell, your means of interpreting Fargo's promises is a hell of a lot more inventive than anything you can get away with in D:OS.

What Wasteland 2 actually promised was reactivity, c&c, and multiple solutions to problems, wrapped in a post apocalyptic setting. It didn't claim to be your personal vision of what a Fallout 3 game would be, the name-dropping is a marketing tool, and the team has made efforts to let it be known that Wasteland 2 is not Fallout.

Wasteland 2's approach to problem solving is all about the reactivity, the game world is supposed to react to your actions, and the way you solved problems, through dialogue and consequence. This isn't possible in a game where you invented the solution, and it certainly isn't the case in D:OS. Even if D:OS was competent enough to actually take advantage of it's own flexible system by making triggers vague enough to work no matter how you accomplish your objective, still nobody would ever acknowledge what you did, and nothing would change, which may not matter to you, but it's what Fargo promised.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
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So I've finished the Divinity: Original Sin. Finally. Funbuilding coming out soon, huge wall of text of impressions inside the spoiler. You've been warned.

I must say that after getting through the whole game (which was quite a feat of endurance, btw), I perfectly understand all the critique that circulates here. Because, while the first one third or maybe a half of this game are nigh-perfect, the rest are colossal, massive, tremendous disappointment. On all the fronts. And while it's hard for me to call this game bad (I've started & restarted the game a couple of times to finally make the proper build – didn't know about the respec option – and this made me squeeze about 40 hours or so from the best part of the game, and hey, after 40 hours of fun you can't really complain about something being sucky), I must admit that I've finished this game only because of my intention of making funbuilding about it (which will come in a day or two), otherwise I would've abandoned it somewhere at the lvl 15 or so. Because it was really fun, only it stopped to be.

The reasons for it are aplenty and calling out many of them will sound quite heretical to the Codex, I think (btw, no offense, 'dex, but the whole reference to you in this game was cringeworthy, at least to my taste). First two to blame will be the length of the game and the freedom of exploration. Yeah.

The length of the game problem is quite traditional – it stems from the notion that, no matter what, RPG should be huge. Like, 50 hours of gameplay or gtfo. Or even more. But... While, of course, getting more playtime for the same money sounds exquisite, in reality, making a game which will stay both enjoyable and fresh for the duration of 50 hours (at least) is no small feat of design prowess. And it also is quite a matter of budget constraints, which, with the burden of graphics and full voice-over and the demand for complex animations, becomes heavier and heavier with each year. It's a really hard and challenging task which these games are supposed to complete.

And while many of the codexian favorites can easily provide this much content, most often it is done mostly through the discreet application of padding. Sure, you may score more than a hundred of hours in wizardy 8, but how much of those exactly will you spend while fighting the same pack of crabs? D:OS faces the same problem. While at the start of the game the encounters seem to be really unique and hand-placed and I've thought that finally someone made the game where there was nothing but interesting boss-fights, in reality, the combat system of the game, however strong it started, just failed to support the whole 80 (?) hours of gameplay. Once you crack up the system (which is not that hard), you understand that each encounter, in reality, is pretty much the same and instead of having fun you just go through the motion. Partially, that's the fault of the game's balance. Partially, it's also the flaw of the game's overall design. We'll discuss that in a second.

Another “original sin” here is the free exploration – yeah. See, D:OS is incredibly combat-centric game. It's the main and the only truly interesting feature of the game. The story is somewhere there, but the authors themselves don't give many fucks about it and its deliverance at times is really clumsy. The game's world is non-present, honestly. Because the maps are rather small, there isn't much to explore – no really curious side-content. So the only thing that the free exploration gives here is that it actually screws with your enjoyment of the game.

Let's take cyseal. Once you clean up the lighthouse ghoul and maybe the Arhu's failed experiment, you have 3 more or less level-appropriate directions to explore. First is the logical continuation of arhu's monstrosity cavern, the northern Cyseal and, eventually, necromancer's lab. Second is the beach with the orcs and the Black Cove. Third (and the least obvious – by the location of it I totally expected it to be something like lvl 9-10 area, not the lvl 7 one) is the baron's mansion (though it should be a bitch of a bossfight to take at the lvl 6). And see, no matter where you go first here, it makes the remaining two quite dull and unchallenging. You just become so leveled up that they stop being hard and, well, that's where the fun of the game originates. So when I first went necromancer's lab, black cove was an absolutely meh followup for me. It was quite interesting when I went it first, though, but the lab, on the other hand... And it only got worse through the course of the game. So at the end of the game you can take (theoretically) challenging bossfight. Optional one, though. Cool. What was not cool is that that bossfight gave my party so much experience that it destroyed the whole beginning of the second chapter for me.

And, to be honest, my completionist approach irrepairably broke the game quite short after that –at lvl 12 or so the fights just stopped to be challenging. Oh, sure, I'd get an occasional party wipe or reload solely on the base of enemies being capable to screw you in many ways – one time, my knight got charmed and hacked the rest of the party in one turn. Another, it was just a super-lucky mass stun for the foe. Third one it was just me going easy on the chapter 3 starting spiders (hey, lol, I outlevel these fuckers, how hard can they be?) and them hitting for 300-400 damage per shot (while my girls had 700 each). But that didn't create actual complications, it never made me to rethink my tactics completely, there was never a call for adjustment – it was just me being lax on the game. And what reasons were there to be tryhard? I've used only a couple of healing potions, just one tutorial scroll and about half-a-dozen of special arrows though it (despite all that stuff being supposedly necessary) – there was just no reason to use those.

Once again, hivemind won't approve that, but I think that splicing the free exploration with a challenging combat system is a nigh-impossible goal. I guess you can try to achieve it by making the combat difficulty so mind-numbingly hard, so even the large character growth won't make your guy overpowered (and also a more horizontal-based approach to leveling up will help). Otherwise, the player just can't help but to wander somewhere, thus making half of the eventual combat non-fun for him. Anyway, realistically speaking, you have to choose one of these two as the focus for your game. Otherwise, a joyous playthrough is only possible if the player has the knowledge to metagame him through the levels, sustaining the challenge artificially. Which is something that can't really be done in your first playthrough and, to be honest, is a fucking game designer's job. The player shouldn't be responsible for fixing his mistakes.

Another hindering factor here is that, while the combat loses challenge, it doesn't become instantaneous – no, you have to still go through the motions, to watch all the animations (which are rather slow and cannot be skipped/quickened, not even in the single player mode) and stuff. Which is annoying and it's something that totally took me out of the game – once fights became dull, that infected everything else and so the game's silly humor and plot quickly became annoying and the puzzles caused nothing but irritation (and an immediate googling if they took more than 30 seconds to solve). Because what's the point, anyway? And it was especially bad because the start of the game was especially good. Ugh.

Now for the more precise reasons of that breakdown. The first cause is that the game, like a slutty girl, is all to eager to throw herself all over you, when it's the resistance that really drives the man. All the game's most interesting features and options are shown to you in the first ten hours. All the game's best spells and abilities you get in your first ten levels or so, after which it's just blanks or more of the same or stuff that's actually harmful to you. I mean, it's preposterous that the majority of the tier-5 spells are either semi-random crap (like hail or electric storms) or have the stupidly long cooldowns (like invulnerability) or do more harm to you than they do to your enemy (like the freaking earthquake). And the remaining couple of good spells, due to their long cooldowns, you can easily cast with the +2 AP penalty for having the skill level (like the lava core). But even that I never actually used – I mean, what's the point to cast all those fancy spells if the basic boulder bash+fireball combo works exactly the same?

And it's the same with every school – the 1-2-3 tier spells (i.e., the ones that you get quickly and that are really cheap to afford in terms of skill points) were all that I used through my playthrough. And even not all of them. Which lead to me eventually getting tired of them and wanting to discover something new, but there just wasn't anything else to discover – everything in the higer tiers were either more of the same or clunky and useless. And it's obvious that, without new stuff and tactics, game gets old fast.

The same was with the boss fights – the designers tried to make them really diverse, but they actually failed at that. All bosses here have exactly the same build-up – they're big, tough and they have some sort of stupidly powerful ability which really fucks you up. They may call up reinforcements, they may cast 3 disables per turn, they may heal themselves up, whatever. You let them do their thing – they fuck you up, it's simple. And so is the solution – just don't let them do that, just keep them perma-disabled and focus them before they can make a single move. And, with all the disables available to your party, keeping them shut up is incredibly easy – say, King Boreas. I read he's a tough bastard, he changes resistances, he summons up help, etc. - but in my experience it was just him standing on the place doing nothing, because I've never gave him a single turn to do anything.

And you can say – well, dude, it's your own fault for being a tryhard. Yeah, kinda. But the difficulty here is, the system is built around that. It's either you who screw your enemies swiftly or they who kick the living shit out of you – the best example here are the ranger foes, who either annihilate your entire crew with their ridiculously damaging AoE arrows or you shut them down immediately with disables or line of sight denial. There is no middle ground there, it's a totally do or die situation. And, at first, doing is fun, but not for the entire 80 hours of the game.

It's just the wrong way of designing the system. And it's really hard to balance out – say, make the chance of disabling lesser and you're not achieving anything, you're just making the game more random. Something can be done, of course (like charms lasting 2 or even just 1 turns), but for the majority of it it's easier to build a system from the scratch than to use this one (which is kinda bogus news for all that “the mod community will build new stories!” aspect of the game).1

Another issue with the game is that many little things that make the early part of it enjoyable actually deteriorate somewhere after the middle. For example, guerilla-crossbow sniper tactics, capable of killing foes in one hit and without initiating a combat (which allows to cheese through some encounters rather quickly). Whether too powerful or not, at least they give you the way to skip out the boring stuff fast, not to mention that they're the only decent use for crossbows in the game. But no, after a certain point the gap between the monster's health and the single shot damage becomes that huge that not even an oath of desecration+critical hit combo will give you a one shot kill. Same thing goes for the opportunist, for example – the hp bloat gets so big that one extra attack (which didn't happened that often in my experience) just made no difference. Or the crushing weapons which seems to be something of a silver bullet in the early game (weaker than you average weapon, but strong against specific monsters), but totally lose that aspect in the late game (while retaining their utter weakness). Or, say, five star diner – considering that crafting & cooking is pretty fun in this game, battle eating is a nice addition to the table. But, as the food doesn't really progress through the game, it just gets outdated at some point and nice talent suddenly changes into a waste of talent point. And so forth. In the end, out of a rather big talent pool there's only about 9 which are really worth getting, and most out of those are class-specific (like quickdraw or backstabber).

And, well, inner balance is really screwed in this game. Which isn't apparent from the beginning, but becomes quite a nasty revelation in the middle of the game. I mean, for the first time, bows and crossbows look quite equal to each other and both tempt you with their own unique builds, but once you get to the quickdraw (which, as a ranger, you want to pretty much rush) and guerilla becomes worthless, the value of crossbows deflates. And it's really baffling how can you miss something like that – the simple calculations show you how sucky they are vs bows even in a perception heavy build (which really favors the crossbow). Or the seeming contest between the two-handed axes, greatswords & spears – no contest at all, considering that crafted axes do much more damage than the other two and, say, the extra reach of the spear is too tiny to compensate for it. Or the stupidly strong rubies and 50% resist potions, making enemy's elemental magic almost non-issue – heck, they've limited the max non-potion resistance to 80 in the last patch, but I don't see what's the point. The game is already easy when you can rack up even the 80 of them, going anywhere above that is a total overkill.

And so forth. I could bitch for much longer, but I'm kinda tired at this point and this is already too long of a post. TBH, the game really resembles it's grandfather, the Divine Divinity – it starts nice and awesome and challenging and fun and there's a whole world to discover, only then you discover that half of the game's mechanics don't work and the rest are stupidly powerful so challenge disappears and there's only the bitter grind to the end. Still, I'll remember the merry start instead of the boring mid-to-finish of it so I won't say that I have that bad opinion about D:OS. I just wish I stopped playing once the Cyseal ended (and just replayed it a couple more times).
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
The puzzles got old, too. Definitely feels like a case of a game that they just threw too much into making it long.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
A-a-and it's up. Damn thing turned out to be monstrous - heck, my poor PC processed it for, like, 4 hours, and I've barely had enough space for the fraps file - once the recording was done, I was left with naught but 4 gb. But, well, there's a lot to be said about this game's system.



In other news, we've finally implemented RPG system into our own project. It's not as monocled as you would probably expect out of me, but let's not forget that we're talking about action-roguelike space invaders-like shmup with elements of match-3 here, kinda hard to insert enough :monocle: in such thing.
 

quasimodo

Augur
Joined
Oct 11, 2006
Messages
372
Wow.....Thanks for that. It answers all the questions I have been to lazy to research myself.
 

blamzooie

Educated
Joined
Dec 18, 2013
Messages
72
Would you consider doing a funbuilding analysis for Knights of the Chalice? I bought this 5 years ago, and can't find my old saves. Since I have to roll a new party, I thought I might get some help to avoid getting wiped in the early battles.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
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Sure, I can, especially since I've recently reviewed ToEE so DnD 3.5 is quite fresh in my mind. Will do it this week.

BTW, I'll hold off extra divinity vids (like dual lone wolf builds & stuff) as they say new patch is coming shortly. Will do them after the patch.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
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So during the last couple of days I’ve been having a real clusterfuck with my primary PC (and a lesser one with my internet – some stupid provider rules about how many different computers you can link to it in a given period of time; the chain of Windows reinstallation kinda dried out my limit), so I couldn’t really make any kind of funbuilding video (and I still can’t– writing this from my, at the moment, internetless laptop so I can post this later). So I’ve thought that, at least, I can write something interesting. See, at the moment I’m finishing the work on the Caelum’s RPG system (actually, today I’ve finalized all the improvements I’ve wanted to see on the player’s cannons – they were pretty varied already but I felt that I could’ve squeezed some extra juice out of them and so I did) and I’ve made a couple of interesting conclusions in the process. As usual, they’ll sound heretical to the codex.


See, the general notion is that the good RPG needs to have a complex character (or, better even, party) building system. Lots of stats, some perks or traits, plethora of various skills and all kinds of interconnecitons between them. Sounds fun, right? And whenever an RPG offers less than that it should be met with ridicule & hate - I mean, are you what, some kind of fucking diablo clone? But the thing is, is that level of complexity really needed? Is it actually pragmatic to have it?


I mean, it's generally not thought in such terms, but let's take one of my personal favourites, M&M VII. We have a 4 person party and each of those persons is one out of nine classes. Unfortunately, I've forgotten all the math I've ever known, but the thing is, shouldn't there be, like, at least a thousand of possible combinations? Because, once you think about it, there are tons of different ways in which you can fill out those character slots. But that's theoretically. Practically, the majority of those combinations are just blank, pointless fillers like "rogue-rogue-ranger-druid", "ranger-ranger-rogue-druid" or "druid-druid-rogue-ranger". And when it comes to the actual archetypes, we have something around six or seven.


Or take the everyone's favourite, Fallout. 1&2, obviously, but even the 3 and New Vegas fill the criterion here. With full four levels of complexity (special-traits-skills-perks) and lots of options crammed into each of those levels, the number of possible character building combinations probably reaches millions, right? Each player has their unique build, special snoflakes whirling everywhere, hooray!


But, as we all know, that's only in theory - in practice, we have a dozen of builds (at best!). You may say that that's the fault of many traits & perks being too weak or harmful and many skills being underused (some to the point of being barely used), i.e., that that's the problem of the game balance (side note: I find all this talk about "fun vs banlace" that circulates the codex nowadays extremely silly; that's like seriously discussing whether it's better to cut off the right testicle or the left testicle; I'll keep a pair, thank you), but the question arises - how the fuck do you balance a system where there's even a hundred builds possible? Heck, it's not even balance - how do you just keep it all merely tested?


Another point is - who'll actually go through the game with those thousands of builds? Unless you set that as your life's goal (which is a sad life goal, tbh), you're not playing any kind of game that much. Even the best ones have five, at the absolute best, ten playthroughs. And, as my observations show, while everyone loves to commend such systems for their flexibility, in reality, people often go through their reruns with mostly the same builds (generally, that occurs when those reruns are separated in time, but few games are good enough that you’ll want to replay and replay and replay them in succession). I won't say that for everyone, but, for me it's quite disappointing to preach the strong-flavoured gameplay of M&M VI-VIII focused party builds only to hear the old tired "nah, these games are at their best with a mixed, balanced party" responce. And so on. So, while rhetorically said variance is praised, is it even requred by the players?


Sure, perhaps having just 3 character builds (like the Planescape: Torment, codexian #1 RPG) is a wee bit too little, but thing is, talking mathematically, how much stats do you actually need to create a varied system? Let's take just 3 stats, the basical minimum of strength-dexterity-intelligence. Let's say that they cap out at 10 and, during the course of the game, you can spend 18 points on them. There are also feats which are tied to the even values of those stats - you gain access to them at having 4-6-8-10 of the stats. So we have following builds available:


10-6-2, 6 variants in total.


10-4-4, 3 more, 9 total.


8-6-4, 6 more, 15 total.


8-8-2, 3 more, 18 total.


6-6-6, 1 more, 19 total.


So, ummm, 3 stat system is total shit, right? No varience at all. Of course, the success of such system will be mostly tied to how strong and well-though are those feats (especially ones which reward multi-classing, it’s incredibly important to even them out with the min-max ones), but the point is, even such bare-bones system is more than enough to provide fun and variety for your RPG. A practical amount of them. And, realistically speaking, that's the path CRPG should go - I mean, the less there are elements in the system, the easier it is to test them all and, thus, weight them properly. Why cloud the sight of your testers and other designers with tons of, pretty much, chaff? Why mislead the player with a boatload of crap? Yeah, initially, it creates an illusion of game system being immense and colossal, but that illusion quickly crashes under its weight, especially if the player is forced to go through a couple of unsuccessfull restarts. I mean, yeah, theoretically a multi-layered system sounds awesome, but practically, is it truly viable? Or is it just a pipe dream? See, I totally adore Underrail (which is probably the best implementation of such system to this date), but even it totally cheats there as it's not really a 100% flexible system. The characters are defined by feats and feat's prerequisites fall in a number of certain archetypes, so it's, like, a classless system, only there are still classes. More flexible than in a pure class-based game and with a great sense of discovery once you reveal another archetype for yourself (I guess that’s the main benefit of such systems – they add some explorational depth), but still. And Underrail, even if we account that it was a solo-man project (though, in terms of design, it doesn't say much - it's not like bigger games have tons of people making their systems, usually, there are at best 2-3 guys who do that; if anything, doing this alone is even easier as there is no interference and design arguments), but it is also a game which was rather long in development and time seems to be an extreme luxury for the today's developers. But, once again, I don't try to flak Underrail - it's a great game with one of the best systems ever. But even there it's not all flawless. So maybe instead of setting a sky-high bar and breaking your legs while trying to jump over it, it's easier to set a more pragmatic goal and reach it without much hassle?
 

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