Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

the difficulty conversation returneth, never to be resolved, yae, never to take a single step in any direction

 

Like Rake said, it basically is. They wiggle out of it with "difficulty levels". It'll be like the new XCOM, which people love to hate on here for shuttling any difficulty into optional elements.

 

"I'm going to make a game I find fun to play" as opposed to the current en vogue designer philosophy which is, "If the player doesn't like the game, it's my fault, not theirs."

"I'm going to make a game I find fun to play" can create products with zero challenge or interest to me, but at least it opens up the possibility of genuinely good games. I like the way Tim Cain talks a lot more than I do Sawyer, but whatever. It's all personal preference.

 

The only "principle" in play here is that he'll get shit on for not catering to one camp or the other, but due to the fact that most people are retards, it's easier to cater to the retards.

That's not going to stop me from criticizing him for catering to retards in the name of more sales, better press, and to avoid being shat on, which is exactly what he's doing—since we know for a fact that he himself, and true fans of these games prefer proper hard difficulty. That more-or-less echoes Zeriel's "I'm going to make a game I find fun to play" philosophy.

Fake edit: Actually, I suppose that does describe a principle of sorts. And really, your quote there explicitly implies that dumbing games down for fucktards is a perfectly reasonable design philosophy.

 

All this talk about PE difficulty doesn't really say anything about Sawyer, but about its backers at large. Because I'm pretty sure if he was designing the game just for the Codex, he's perfectly capable of designing difficulty that the Codex members claim to desire.

 

The incoherence of the concept of difficulty in a single player save and reload game (justaposed with the completely confident use of the word "difficulty" itself) on the Codex is becoming my new "What is an RPG?" toothgrind

 

Keep in mind that he wasn't Tweeting his thoughts on a near-daily basis while working on FNV—or at least, if he was, I wasn't reading them. Confronted with his frank admissions that most people are frustrated by a challenge and that he's designing PE accordingly, I have more cause for annoyance.

Slapping someone is less aggravating than punching their teeth in, but it's still bad. Adjusting PE's baseline difficulty and balancing to cater to Obsidrones is less annoying and drastic than catering to console peasants, but it's the same essential process of compromise.

I wrote hundreds of pages ago that the game's default difficulty and the one the game's designed around should be proper hard, with easier settings for progressively mentally handicapped people, and one or two higher settings for the experienced/truly insane. Anything less will annoy me, yes, because it's catering and it's disingenuous (e.g. calling Very Easy "Normal" so that casuals don't get butthurt and lose all their self-esteem).

 

Yes, I recall reading that at some point. I absolutely agree with him that it's better to design and balance the game around proper hard difficulty first, then subsequently tweak damage/HP/items/encounters and such for lower/higher levels of difficulty.

The thing is, he cites BG2 and IWD2 as examples, and their default difficulty settings tended more toward Easy than Hard, even more than a decade ago. All in all, that statement of his is a wash for me.

 

I still want it to be cleared up sometime whether "We're using Icewind Dale 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 for reference." means "We are using their normal mode for references" and not anything else. I do seem to remember 'core' being above normal in BG2 for example, but it might be my memories playing trick.

Edit: also, it might just means that easy= easy, hard = hard, and so on.

 

I never thought the day would come I'd see RPGCodex staff being apologists for "well, the game has to be easy because otherwise people get discouraged" design arguments.

It's a brave new world!

 

We are mad about Call of Duty and Skyrim though. So are lots of other people.

I was a Call of Duty player btw (until it went full popamole). So imagine how I feel.

 

Where all this aspergery for combat difficulties came from?
The "principle" i was talking about has nothing to do with difficulty. I simply meant the desision to not allow bad builds, to allow respec etc. The difficulty will be just fine. What i talked about is the refusal to punish careless or bad desisions down the line.
And that will apply to PE as far as we know. I couldn't care less about what he did in F:NV. That game was for Bethesda fans. He could have inserted godmode and i wouldn't mind.

 

I dunno, I do think there's more than a few things wrong with a universal DT system like this.

Assuming it's well-balanced, then it becomes a boring non-decision as far as weapon choice goes. Use the high DPH weapons on hardened enemies, use the high DPS weapons on softer ones. Thrilling.

And if it isn't well balanced, as in New Vegas, one type of weapons (high DPH) breeze through every encounter without much thought or micromanagement whereas the other struggles on one type of enemy while gaining little advantages against the other type versus what they lose in tactical capability. Basically it looks something like such:

High DPH Weaponry Outlook

Enemies without DT: Eliminated easily, but not necessarily as efficiently as high DPS weapons when using default ammo. But there is always a ton of, otherwise useless, JHP ammo...
Enemies with DT: 360 xXN0SC0P3Xx MLG headshots abound. But seriously, you kill them quite easily.

High DPS Weaponry Outlook

Enemies without DT: Killed marginally more quickly than DPH weapons. Woohoo!
Enemies with DT: Got armor piercing ammo or max charged cells? No? Well enjoy shooting at all of the hardened HP bloats for about a minute straight.

And the other issue with universal DT is that it sucks at dealing with gameworlds where varied weaponry exists. Why should a super mutant in Mad Max armor be as resilient against Pre-War laser weaponry as it is against small arms fire? You get strange inconsistencies like this with a universal DT system that isn't present in a multiple DT system a la Fallout 1.

When you say it like that, yeah, it does sound dumb. But if the gameworld so dictates, then you should be able to become immune to certain types of attacks. Power Armored Kwanzanians were able to devastate Chinese tank & infantry divisions in the great war; you should be immune to raiders with nothing but pistols and sub-machine guns when you're suited up in some minty T-51b. And it's "balanced" in that there are going to be, or at least should be, enemies with access to similar technology that can combat your player.

Like I said before, it's not about one weapon type being strictly better, just mostly better and a lot more user-friendly. Going the DPH route is basically cruise control. You don't need to every worry because your weapon will be adequate, at worst, for any situation. Sure, picking off cazadores might not be as efficient as machine-gunning them down, but it's nowhere near the brick wall that a DPS player encounters against the majority of the elites which happen to be hardened HP-sponges (Super Mutant Masters, Robots, Deathclaws, Radscorpions, Power-Armored foes, etc).

Given how much Sawyer and the cru enjoyed making boss fights in IWD2 have completely arbitrary resistances/weaknesses that were unknowable outside of trial & error, I'd say it was a feature, not a bug.

Nah, it's pretty easy to approach the hallowed rank of ninja cartographer in vanilla New Vegas without doing too much in the way of cheesy exploits. Just maxing INT as quickly as possible while picking up Educated ASAP will give you enough skill points to easily max out 6 or 7 skills, perhaps more. And given that out of the 13 skills, four are mostly combat focused, you're pretty well rounded as is. But if you exploit the buff-outfits and the magazines to scrimp on skill points, you can "effectively" be maxed in probably every single skill worth investing in and pass all relevant skill checks in such a way as to make the Nerevarine blush.

To be honest, brother, things like "match ammo" and the "BAR" are coming up blanks in my memory? Are those things added in the DLC, because I didn't buy any of that shit. The awful endgame sequence killed any enthusiasm I had for the vanilla game (tho the ending slides were very nicely done) and I was in no mood to spend money on a game I was out of patience with.

As for the AP ammo, like I said before, high DPS weapons need specialized ammunition to be effective against hardened foes wheras high DPH weapons just slide and let do all the way through any encounter. And if you really want, you can just use the ammo that multiplies enemies DT in exchange for large damage increases with many of the DPH weapons.

Logical with bullets against power armor, not so much logical when you look at lasers on chitin or super mutant trash cans. But that's universal DT for ya.

Ah. Interesting. Depending on how it's done, it might have made for a more pleasurable experience. But I really don't see myself picking up a "Bethesda-Like" for quite some time...probably until they start aping the Souls Series or Dragon's Dogma and cease being "Besthesda-Likes".

 

The Light Machine Gun is in the base game, and with hand crafted ammo (easily stockpiled due to the volumes of surplus .223 I use on general enemies generating casings and breaking down other ammo types for the other parts) can tear up anything in the game. Granted it is a pretty short range weapon, but if you want something longer range that cane tear up pretty much anything, if you don't mind burning 100 rounds a second, is the minigun. AP ammo is kind of sparse for the minigun, but its fire rate is so insanely high that all it means is you spend an extra second hosing down enemies. With all of the +carry weight perks, 10 STR, and pack rat perk my gunner could carry 20k rounds of 5mm for the minigun or several thousand for the LMG - which is more than enough to get through most areas before restocking (except OWB...).

The DPH weapons are better for a couple enemies at a time, but auto weapons are glorious for mowing down the hordes of dirty savages.

 

You don't need any gun other than the Ratslayer for any area on any difficulty... with the possible exception of Deathclaws, since proper Deathclaws with keen senses, social aggro (I think?), high speed and mobility, tough skin, and buzzsaw business ends are something New Vegas absolutely got right.

 

Actually yeah. with pulse slug, robos and power armor are cakewalk. Slug for high DT targets. Coinshot/normal works best to knock em down or low dt targets.

And all you really need is riot shotgun (or hunting/dinner bell) fast shot trait, and the perks rapid reload, shotgun surgeon and stay back with high luck.

TBH, it gets reallyy boring so I mix in some sniping with the hunting rifle, cause with just one weapon and relevant ammo everything point blank to mid range is cakewalk. Cadazors and Deathclaw raping begins at ~lvl12.

 

Let's not buy into this tripe. The vast majority of 'difficult' games don't test mental ability, they test bloody-mindedness and the quantity of free time the player has.

If you beat a really difficult game, it isn't because you're a wunderkind, it's because you have nothing more worthwhile to do with your hours.

 

Call of Duty 1 didn't have regen. It was a mid-to-slow paced WW2 FPS that required good aim and game smarts. There was a large skill gap between a good player and a shit player. One good player could mop the floor with an entire team in 5v5 SD. The map design was also pretty great. CoD1 Dawnville, Carentan, Railyard, Depot, Brecourt (among others) are all fantastic CoD MP SD maps.

Call of Duty 2 introduced regen (popamole) BUT the game still had bolt action rifles, a (newly introduced) shotgun and one bullet headshots - so despite the health regen, you were still rewarded for good aim because if you hit a shot you were rewarded for it (most of the time, the hit registration wasn't perfect). It also introduced jump ironsight and reduced the fall damage, which made the game very fun to play and the skill gap was still high between a good and average player. CoD2 needed a lot more modding to make it competitive though (such as disabling terrible graphical features such as distance fog and disgusting brown ambient smoke among others.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the last PC competitive title in the series, and only because of it's continued popularity. The reason for this is that this is the last title that includes buyer-controlled Dedicated servers and Mod Tools in the stock game. The stock game itself is pretty terrible and pub is filthy to play with the inlusion of kill streak rewards such as UAV, Airstrikes and Attack Helicopters that target the scoreboard leaders in the server to try and bring them back down to everyone else's level. Modders however (Xfire mod, PAM and now Promod) have done an excellent job at taking the stock piece of shit and turning it into a competitively viable game. The skill gap in the game is much lower than previous titles and it includes a lot of faggot game mechanics such as exploding cars (which can be taken out, but the SD map design kind of needs them in), sprint and a bunch of other shit. There are still active communities in Europe and Australia, and in fact I am going down to Melbourne to commentate the CGPL finals at the end of the month, $8K prize pool or something.

MW2 was where it all changed. No dedicated servers, no mod tools, no developer console and the developers openly attacked the competitive scene for making the game 'not fun' for the average player, despite the fact that they exist in almost completely separate communities. Activision and it's developers have fully embraced the console gamers, retards and mass market and left us out to dry. So bloody oath I am mad. Call of Duty 1 and 2 are better games that CoD4 but no one will play them because the learning curve is too high and they get absolutely smashed by the teams of yesteryear. We have held tournaments over the past few years and only the players in my team that had never played before were able to do any good, but the best we could do was 2nd place 3 years in a row vs the one of the oldest teams .

I would actually be very interested in seeing what Josh Sawyer would do for his 'dream RPG'. I think he treats the IE crowd with a bit of ... disdain? maybe? Or at least, to the point where he mainly recognizes the casual gaming crowd within that audience. We get our Optional challenge modes at least. Doesn't seem to hold 'Codexers' with very high regard. But I think a Josh Sawyer Historical RPG or something would be great.

Me too. Chris Avellone, Adam Brennecke and Tim Cain while not inherently console fans do seem pretty popamole in their tastes at least these days.