Bloat sucks

[the mole]

I'm right min maxing tards are wrong

 

[the mole]

Dude, your posts are not good enough to justify taking over the thread. Shut the fuck up for a while, and return when in your senses.

Do something about it

Moron

 

[EldarEldrad]

added Jarl to a list of steam review people who are too proud to lower the difficulty.

Add me too, it is better drop a game than lower the difficulty from the hardest possible.

Btw, bloat really sucks - the example is this thread bloated by shitposter retard.

 

[JarlFrank]

Dude, your posts are not good enough to justify taking over the thread. Shut the fuck up for a while, and return when in your senses.

Do something about it

Moron

Looks like someone did something about it

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Ash yam + bloat.

Someone with high Alchemy skill please mix a potion for our friend the mole.

Ain't no potion what can cure autism.

 

[EldarEldrad]

RIP the mole (2019-2020)
Anyway, he wasn't funny retarded, he was annoyingly retarded, so no one will miss him

 

[hilfazer]

So the mole has been popped.

 

[Thac0]

He made 26 posts a day before being banned. That was some next level adhs.

 

[Sykar]

 

[Strange Fellow]

god bless you benevolent overlords, for you have delivered us from spam

 

[luj1]

Bloat is terrible in every type of RPG and leads to minmaxing (which reduces build variety since there's inevitably gonna be builds that are orders of magnitude better than all the others) and tedious endgame fights that rely either on luck or on exploits.

Bloat can infest everything that has to do with numbers. HP bloat is the most common, but stat bloat can also be an issue. Bloat can affect both the player characters and the enemies.

Examples of bad bloat:
- All post-Morrowind Bethesda games. High level enemies get such a huge boost to HP, and the player has high AP at that point too, that each hit only takes away a small amount of HP and fights become tedious grinds.
- Assassin's Creed Odyssey. HP gets bloaty at higher levels, and the combat is much more tedious than it was in the purely action-based non-RPG predecessors.
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Especially on higher difficulties, enemy stats are so ridiculously inflated towards the end that you have to autistically optimize your character builds or get fucked.

There are plenty more games that do this, but those few prominent examples should illustrate the issue.

Bloat, especially when it's taken to extreme levels, makes late-game gameplay tedious and reduces the amount of options a player has to handle any given situation. In vanilla Fallout 4, you're pretty much forced to invest points into the damage-enhancing perks because if you don't, the bloated enemies will be a chore to kill once you reach higher levels. In Kingmaker, you need to autistically optimize your AC and to-hit bonuses and squeeze out every single point you can get, otherwise endgame enemies will be impossible to even hit while hitting you with every swing. When numbers grow exponentially like that, you are forced into certain builds that give you a chance to deal with the ridiculously inflated numbers. Some character builds that the game theoretically offers - and whose abilities can be useful, even - become unviable simply because they can't keep up with the bloat.

With excessive number bloat, gameplay tactics are reduced to leveling up your character and picking the right skills to increase. It is detrimental to the gameplay of both action RPGs, where player twitch skill should play a role, and tactical RPGs, where player tactical thinking should play a role.

In an action RPG, excessive number bloat leads to you and an enemy whacking each other for five minutes, with each hit only reducing a small amount of HP. There are zero tactics involved, just keep whacking until the HP bar is down. Special abilities like knockdowns, staggers, etc are reduced in effectiveness because even if you manage to successfully inflict them, there's still going to be a lot of HP left to whittle down. Your own character also tends to have bloaty HP at that point, so any negative effects you suffer can usually be countered by gulping down a potion. Combat devolves to a situation where the character with more health potions wins. Boring and tedious.

In a tactical RPG, the same problems arise. Ideally, you want to get better positions, out-flank the enemy, use area effect spells/tools like a grease spell or throwing gas grenades to deny ground to an enemy, etc. But when HP is overly bloated, the effectiveness of such tactics is reduced, as it's still going to take 5 turns of whacking until the enemy's HP bar is depleted so dealing damage is more important than anything else.

Scaling character and monster power level purely by making all the numbers bigger is bad design. It tends to make high level combat less fun than low level combat, because it no longer feels lethal. Where on low and mid levels, one or two critical hits could get you close to death or take out an enemy, at high level a critical hit means you take off 8% instead of merely 4% of the enemy's HP bar. It turns into a boring grind. This is why people tend to prefer mid-level D&D to epic level D&D. Throne of Bhaal isn't as well-liked as Shadows of Amn because it's filled with tons of bloaty enemies that are tedious to fight (especially those giants).

In bloaty systems, level becomes the most important factor in determining success, so once you attain a high enough level, low level enemies will be a complete pushover who can't even harm you, while enemies just two levels above you can be impossible to defeat. Tactics take a backseat to simply grinding out more levels.

So what's the alternative? Why, less bloat of course! Fallout 1 does it well enough. HP gains per level aren't so high that you can shrug off a hundred hits at higher levels, and critical hits are potentially so powerful that they can one-shot even high level chars. Combat stays dangerous at high levels and there are many viable tactics and character builds. If you keep the scaling of stats and HP more reasonable, high level characters will still have an edge over low level characters but they don't get an insta-win button.

Also, you can make character development more horizontal instead of vertical. Rather than simply raising up numbers, levelups could give your chars new abilities instead or improve your character in other ways. Gothic is a good example for action RPGs: rather than just increasing damage, leveling up your weapon skills makes combos easier to chain and the controls more responsive. It actually feels like your character is getting better at fighting! Spellcasters in D&D get new spells on levelup, which often contain stuff that goes beyond merely doing more damage than earlier spells. There are many ways to make high level characters feel significantly more powerful than low level characters without having to inflate all the numbers to ridiculous levels.

Inflated number bloat needs to stop. It's not fun. It's just tedious.

I might hate feature bloat more than HP bloat.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Bloat is terrible in every type of RPG and leads to minmaxing (which reduces build variety since there's inevitably gonna be builds that are orders of magnitude better than all the others) and tedious endgame fights that rely either on luck or on exploits.



Inflated number bloat needs to stop. It's not fun. It's just tedious.

I agree. I could not even finish playing Kingmaker, a game I mostly liked, in a system I like for this reason. Every character ends up with a belt of +4 DEX, STR, CON or more, All 18's stats? That won't get you anywhere in Kangmaker, everyone has 24 everything by the end, and the ridiculous +67 to hit on each to hit roll vs Armor class 88, its just tedious as hell after awhile.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

The problem with bloat in RPGs is that the genre is known for two things: continuus character development and games being very long. If you want the game to be 60 hours long, player to constantly advance and numbers to go higher as he advances there will be some bloat at the end.
It reminds me of idea I had once after comparing HoMM 3 to RPGs. In both games you build your heroes and fight against stronger foes, but HoMM is not a one long continuous campaign, but rather a set of smaller campaigns and missions. You could make an RPG in the same way. Instead of having one 60-120 hours long campaign you can have a bunch of separate smaller campaigns and stand-alone adventures. That way the stats won't be so bloated since you want have to go to higher numbers to make the game longer.

 

[JarlFrank]

Or have a campaign that has enough branching paths that you can replay it 5 times and always have a different experience.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Or have a campaign that has enough branching paths that you can replay it 5 times and always have a different experience.

That's what Age of Decadence did, which worked well for that game. The problem with that approach is that players will still repeat early game a lot, and that all branches will have to be similar difficulty-wise since every path might be someone's first, which might discourage people from finishing all the paths. If you do it like HoMM 3 did you can have interesting things like a late-game campaign that is very difficult and involves very low level characters.

 

[Desiderius]

Bloat is terrible in every type of RPG and leads to minmaxing (which reduces build variety since there's inevitably gonna be builds that are orders of magnitude better than all the others) and tedious endgame fights that rely either on luck or on exploits.



Inflated number bloat needs to stop. It's not fun. It's just tedious.

I agree. I could not even finish playing Kingmaker, a game I mostly liked, in a system I like for this reason. Every character ends up with a belt of +4 DEX, STR, CON or more, All 18's stats? That won't get you anywhere in Kangmaker, everyone has 24 everything by the end, and the ridiculous +67 to hit on each to hit roll vs Armor class 88, its just tedious as hell after awhile.

Nothing has AC 88. Highest I’ve seen is 60 on an optional boss tuned to be difficult and that was easily dispelled down to 45 the next round. Meanwhile main attackers had ABs in the mid-50s.

If you stack your buffs properly there’s no min-maxxing involved. If you min-max you can get AB/AC to 100 but the last 40 or so of that is a total waste.

 

[Desiderius]

So weird that people lump P:K in with bloat. First cRPG that I’ve ever played on hardest difficulty and even that got too easy. Are people just paralyzed by all the options?

 

[Anonona]

Nothing has AC 88. Highest I’ve seen is 60 on an optional boss tuned to be difficult and that was easily dispelled down to 45 the next round. Meanwhile main attackers had ABs in the mid-50s.

If you stack your buffs properly there’s no min-maxxing involved. If you min-max you can get AB/AC to 100 but the last 40 or so of that is a total waste.

So weird that people lump P:K in with bloat. First cRPG that I’ve ever played on hardest difficulty and even that got too easy. Are people just paralyzed by all the options?

But you just posted attackers being on the mid 50s, enemies with 45 to 60 AC , being able to reach 100 AB/AC and 60 ACs being an optimal number (or at least I'm assume so if 40 points are unnecessary). I mean, that itself looks like quite a bloat to me. And if despite that bloat the game isn't hard, it actually makes its case worse. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the game is bad, but I find it strange to say it doesn't suffer from bloat when the difficulty options all consist on increasing enemies stats, as well as doubling the damage you receive on Unfair. Though, I don't know much about Pathfinder in general. Does monster and player stats usually get that high?

 

[Desiderius]

Nothing has AC 88. Highest I’ve seen is 60 on an optional boss tuned to be difficult and that was easily dispelled down to 45 the next round. Meanwhile main attackers had ABs in the mid-50s.

If you stack your buffs properly there’s no min-maxxing involved. If you min-max you can get AB/AC to 100 but the last 40 or so of that is a total waste.

So weird that people lump P:K in with bloat. First cRPG that I’ve ever played on hardest difficulty and even that got too easy. Are people just paralyzed by all the options?

But you just posted attackers being on the mid 50s, enemies with 45 to 60 AC , being able to reach 100 AB/AC and 60 ACs being an optimal number (or at least I'm assume so if 40 points are unnecessary). I mean, that itself looks like quite a bloat to me. And if despite that bloat the game isn't hard, it actually makes its case worse. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the game is bad, but I find it strange to say it doesn't suffer from bloat when the difficulty options all consist on increasing enemies stats, as well as doubling the damage you receive on Unfair. Though, I don't know much about Pathfinder in general. Does monster and player stats usually get that high?

No, it’s unusual, and it would be a better game with 2/3 the stats and using better AI/mob tactics for difficulty. That said the purpose of the numbers is to keep difficulty more or less constant with player progression and with competent play (I.e. no min-maxxing necessary) that will be one’s experience with the game.

If anything endgame battles are faster (less rounds required) than early game before your class really kicks into gear.

 

[Tigranes]

So weird that people lump P:K in with bloat. First cRPG that I’ve ever played on hardest difficulty and even that got too easy. Are people just paralyzed by all the options?

What does bloat have to do with actual difficulty?

 

[Desiderius]

That’s the context of the complaints. Read them.

There are also complaints about fights taking longer and the like which isn’t the case with competent play.

 

[Ol' Willy]

RIP the mole (2019-2020)
Anyway, he wasn't funny retarded, he was annoyingly retarded, so no one will miss him

A cautionary tale, this will happen to all enemies of minmaxing

 

[Tigranes]

That’s the context of the complaints. Read them.

There are also complaints about fights taking longer and the like which isn’t the case with competent play.

Sorry if I'm missing something. You mean this?

I agree. I could not even finish playing Kingmaker, a game I mostly liked, in a system I like for this reason. Every character ends up with a belt of +4 DEX, STR, CON or more, All 18's stats? That won't get you anywhere in Kangmaker, everyone has 24 everything by the end, and the ridiculous +67 to hit on each to hit roll vs Armor class 88, its just tedious as hell after awhile.

I enjoyed Kingmaker, and I disliked the bloat. Not because killing someone took an hour (it didn't) or that it made the game too hard (it didn't), but simply because the treadmill of ever increasing numbers became such a dominant aspect of the gameplay that it was more tiresome than usual. I think it would be an even better game with better design in that aspect.

Saying that the bloat ruined P:K would be wrong & hyperbolic. But I don't think anyone said that. hollaback boy up there says he mostly liked the game, too.

Just about every CRPG system involves some kind of linear, thoughtless upgrading that 'gates' player power, whether it's the number of your magic missiles or stat increases. Bloat for me is when that aspect becomes too exaggerated and dominant, increasing the makework required to keep up, and in turn reducing the significance of tactical elements.

 

[Desiderius]

Sorry if I'm missing something. You mean this?

I agree. I could not even finish playing Kingmaker, a game I mostly liked, in a system I like for this reason. Every character ends up with a belt of +4 DEX, STR, CON or more, All 18's stats? That won't get you anywhere in Kangmaker, everyone has 24 everything by the end, and the ridiculous +67 to hit on each to hit roll vs Armor class 88, its just tedious as hell after awhile.

I enjoyed Kingmaker, and I disliked the bloat. Not because killing someone took an hour (it didn't) or that it made the game too hard (it didn't), but simply because the treadmill of ever increasing numbers became such a dominant aspect of the gameplay that it was more tiresome than usual. I think it would be an even better game with better design in that aspect.

Saying that the bloat ruined P:K would be wrong & hyperbolic. But I don't think anyone said that. hollaback boy up there says he mostly liked the game, too.

Just about every CRPG system involves some kind of linear, thoughtless upgrading that 'gates' player power, whether it's the number of your magic missiles or stat increases. Bloat for me is when that aspect becomes too exaggerated and dominant, increasing the makework required to keep up, and in turn reducing the significance of tactical elements.

Yes, and that’s not the case with P:K. In the process of discouraging multi-classing many of the abilities scale automatically with class level (Inquisitor most notoriously). I wonder if the people struggling to keep up were inadvertently weakening their builds through splashes they thought they were forced into (as the OP here described his plight).

Yes, I mean it. I find games/difficulty levels that require that kind of constant, thoughtless, linear upgrading tiresome so don't play them. P:K isn't that kind of game, even on the highest difficulty. You master the new challenges by matching the resources/strengths/abilities you have at hand with the weaknesses of the mobs you're fighting, not with ceaseless upgrades. The numbers get high (but notice not exponential) because substantial upgrades happen under the hood via artisans, non-random loot drops, and abilities which scale by level, none of which require the sort of grinding, min-maxxing, or vendor stalking you have in the later Diablos or D:OS II for instance.