BioWare's love for trash mobs

[Daidre]

There is another nice one with a single basilisk that spawns bit to a side of random map and petrifies MC before you can oops.

Should it also be removed?

 

[hexer]

There is another nice one with a single basilisk that spawns bit to a side of random map and petrifies MC before you can oops.

Should it also be removed?

No, it should remain.
It's simple - there are much higher chances of survival there than in 10 bandits encounter.
1 saving throw vs 10 attack rolls.

I don't know if you ever DM-ed an ADnD PnP campaign but if you pulled up such an encounter of 10 archers against a level 1 party of two, I guarantee you, they would never return to your game again.

 

[Daidre]

I never DMed anything in my life since PnP was never a thing in my region, but as practice shows, in CRPG, even if you put the same non-random 10 archers in low-lvl D&D encounter and shower players with perception checks and hints to sneak around or find another way, some will still try to face-tank them and leave "this is bad design" review.

In BG it means reload in the case of bad luck. Lots of reloads if you made 1HP wizard. But 14HP fighter with heavy shield is also an option and would shrug off most of the attack rolls.

PS This critique is not aimed at you personally, I just have seen it too often regarding P:K and it rubs me the wrong way.

 

[laclongquan]

Tabletop gamers~ Feh!

 

[hexer]

I never DMed anything in my life since PnP was never a thing in my region, but as practice shows, in CRPG, even if you put the same non-random 10 archers in low-lvl D&D encounter and shower players with perception checks and hints to sneak around or find another way, some will still try to face-tank them and leave "this is bad design" review.

In BG it means reload in the case of bad luck. Lots of reloads if you made 1HP wizard. But 14HP fighter with heavy shield is also an option and would shrug off most of the attack rolls.

PS This critique is not aimed at you personally, I just have seen it too often regarding P:K and it rubs me the wrong way.

Sure thing, I know what you're talking about.

This BG encounter unfortunately starts with your party in the middle, surrounded.
So yes, if you are unlucky enough to get it at level 1 and play a damage-oriented fighter build, reloading is the only way out of it

 

[JarlFrank]

I didn't know Beamdog added random encounters to BG1.
This supposedly happened at level 1. They sure "fixed" the game

I just finished BG:EE and that sure didn't happen to me. And had it happened, I could have probably just reloaded to avoid it.

My two cents re the discussion: BG2 is the only Bioware game with good encounter design and a refreshing lack of trash mobs. It's actually quite amazing how consistently good everything is in this area. BG1, on the other hand, is one of the most painfully tedious experiences I've had gaming wise in the last few years. 95% of the fights are against the same bandits, goblins, gibberlings, gooblydoinks and gibbelydicks. It fucking sucks.
Everything about it is so easy that I actually wish something like the above had happened.

Exactly. Baldur's Gate 1 has shit encounter design, the majority of it is just copypasted trash mobs, it's not even a quarter as good as BG2.

 

[Lilura]

Retardex logic:

Trash mobs in Bioware games: "bad ! this game is a chore to play"

Trash mobs in M&M 6,Wizardry 8 and Icewind Dale: "Good ! don't you like combat ? then go read a book !"

You forgot the Goldbox games. But yeah, in order to be consistent, criticisms must be applied equally, and to all games.

Overall, Baldur's Gate is BioWare's greatest achievement. Moreover, it is the fourth best RPG of all-time and stands as the greatest D&D-based RPG of all-time (if we don't include mods like Swordflight).

Incidentally, I have begun posting my revised retrospective on the original Baldur's Gate.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Retardex logic:

Trash mobs in Bioware games: "bad ! this game is a chore to play"

Trash mobs in M&M 6,Wizardry 8 and Icewind Dale: "Good ! don't you like combat ? then go read a book !"

First Icewind Dale = linear BG.

As for the other ones, the difference is M&M6 (and 7 and 8) have fast resolution combat, moreover the combat is actually fun, it's a fantasy party based TB doom where you shoot things with arrows and spells and eventually hack them into pieces with your sword, by the time you clean a map (exterior) in M&M 6 you did two tedious trash mobs fights in Boringness Gate.

As for Wizardry 8, there's probably too much fights involved but it's masterfully designed and you can avoid a lot of fights anyway with chameleon, teleport gates and portal.

 

[Lilura]

BG combat is faster because it's round-based realtime at 60 AI updates per second. ApR maxes out at 4. Moreover, many trashmobs can be bypassed by means of Invisibility, conventional stealth and dimension door.

BG invented the mage duel. It's got many good examples of combat encounter design over the course of its campaign, exemplified by Davaeorn and the rival parties. Subsequent RPGs copied this and that, expanded here and there, and dumbed down elsewhere.

I've covered it all in-depth on my blog. Read and learn.

 

[Darth Canoli]

BG invented the mage duel

Any prestigious codexer care to comment on that ?
Off the top of my head, i can already give half a dozen of examples of mages duels made way before boringness gate was even conceived.

 

[Lilura]

I find the people that complain about trashmobs in RPGs are usually the ones that don't understand how to utilize game mechanics.

They must be really slow players if the xvarts are getting them down. Immobilize, AoE or ignore/stealth. It's your choice. The world is populated by monsters, who would've thunk it.

Stealth and scouting is big in BG. We don't have to kill much along the plot-critical path, and the loss of kill XP doesn't matter because itemization, quest XP and kill XP of plot-criticals carries us through. It's a 161,000 XP cap. Do I need to cite the breakpoints as well?

BG's wilderness combat encounter design could have been better, but it was good enough for the seminal IE game. IWD has the best combat encounter design of the IE games, by far. Sustained horde-based encounter design is the best.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

the difference is M&M6 (and 7 and 8) have fast resolution combat, moreover the combat is actually fun, it's a fantasy party based TB doom where you shoot things with arrows and spells and eventually hack them into pieces with your sword, by the time you clean a map (exterior) in M&M 6 you did two tedious trash mobs fights in Boringness Gate.

So basically you telling me to cheese the game with 4 bows + strafing + Spam A button because Might and Magic 6 has too much trash mobs and a broken real time combat ?

i played might and magic 6 95% of the time in turn-based mode,it was a drag,i could just cheese with the real time mode of course,but then the characters progression would be pointless if i can just cheese the game.

 

[biggestboss]

Lilura - was just perusing your blog post on comparing the best dual and multiclasses in BG and was curious of something similar existed for comparing the encounter design among the games your blog focuses on - BG/BG2, IW, TOEE, etc.

 

[octavius]

As for the other ones, the difference is M&M6 (and 7 and 8) have fast resolution combat, moreover the combat is actually fun, it's a fantasy party based TB doom where you shoot things with arrows and spells and eventually hack them into pieces with your sword, by the time you clean a map (exterior) in M&M 6 you did two tedious trash mobs fights in Boringness Gate.

As for Wizardry 8, there's probably too much fights involved but it's masterfully designed and you can avoid a lot of fights anyway with chameleon, teleport gates and portal.

BG1 has ultra fast combat vs trash mobs with party AI turned on.

And you can avoid most of the trash combat by using stealth or invisibility to scout the map, and then rather concentrate on the good encounters, like the adventurer parties that virtually no other CRPGs use.

 

[Lilura]

Some more thoughts: low level collective party ApR is about 10. Speed factors can be as low as 2. So you've got 10 ApR per 6 seconds (or 3 secs at 60 AI updates) and you're slaying the mook in the second segment of the round. For a normal balanced party, you're at 16 collective ApR pretty quickly. +spells with casting times that range from 1 to 5 tenths of a round (Magic Missile to Cloudkill).

It's fucking fast even if you want to square up to every mook-mob you come across.

Go and play a current gen game or crappy old golden age one if you think BG is slow and tedious, because you have no idea what slow and tedious is.

 

[biggestboss]

BG1 has ultra fast combat vs trash mobs with party AI turned on.

And you can avoid most of the trash combat by using stealth or invisibility to scout the map, and then rather concentrate on the good encounters, like the adventurer parties that virtually no other CRPGs use.

I think every playthrough of every IE game after my very first BG1 run has been with no companion AI except for thief auto trap detection. I still feel that trash mobs in those games are quick but I also build my parties with an overwhelming martial focus with Flail of Ages +4, Crom Freyr, Belm, etc. and never really mess around with spellcasting unless it's a boss-like encounter. I even consider all the Beholder fights in BG2 to be trash mobs because I just have my main character and Jaheira with Chaotic Commands + Shield of Balduran tear through them with auto attacks while everyone else hides in a different room.

 

[Lilura]

Lilura - was just perusing your blog post on comparing the best dual and multiclasses in BG and was curious of something similar existed for comparing the encounter design among the games your blog focuses on - BG/BG2, IW, TOEE, etc.

No dedicated write-ups yet. That sort of thing is sprinkled around here and there, and can be inferred from reading the retrospectives, though. Thanks for asking.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's not even about combat speed, it's just that BG1's encounters are largely boring, the wilderness areas you get to explore are largely empty and the few encounters you find there are pretty generic or have little of interest to them. You can meet NPCs who say two or three sentences to you and then leave, and all you think is... that's it? The few side dungeons there are are usually terribly narrow so pathfinding becomes a pain. The setting is probably the blandest depiction of Forgotten Realms we ever got, BG1 just feels incredibly mundane throughout.

BG1 is one of Bioware's weaker games. BG2 is their best and the only one that can be called great.

 

[octavius]

BG1 has ultra fast combat vs trash mobs with party AI turned on.

And you can avoid most of the trash combat by using stealth or invisibility to scout the map, and then rather concentrate on the good encounters, like the adventurer parties that virtually no other CRPGs use.

I think every playthrough of every IE game after my very first BG1 run has been with no companion AI except for thief auto trap detection. I still feel that trash mobs in those games are quick but I also build my parties with an overwhelming martial focus with Flail of Ages +4, Crom Freyr, Belm, etc. and never really mess around with spellcasting unless it's a boss-like encounter.

Sure, but who said you need spell casting for mopping up trash mobs with Party AI on?

I even consider all the Beholder fights in BG2 to be trash mobs because I just have my main character and Jaheira with Chaotic Commands + Shield of Balduran tear through them with auto attacks while everyone else hides in a different room.

Shield of Balduran is something you use only for baby's first playthrough; it's so lame and cheesy. Try with SCS installed.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

IWD has the best combat encounter design of the IE games, by far. Sustained horde-based encounter design is the best.

seriously ?

fight a group of skeletons,walks three steps fight the same group of skeletons,walks four steps fight again the same group of skeletons...

Okay ! next chapter...

fight a group of Lizards,walks two steps fight the same group of Lizards,walks three steps fight a group of Red Lizards...

That was my experience with Icewind Dale,no difficulty spikes(except for the final boss),just copy-pasted mobs after copy-pasted mobs.

 

[biggestboss]

It's not even about combat speed, it's just that BG1's encounters are largely boring, the wilderness areas you get to explore are largely empty and the few encounters you find there are pretty generic or have little of interest to them. You can meet NPCs who say two or three sentences to you and then leave, and all you think is... that's it? The few side dungeons there are are usually terribly narrow so pathfinding becomes a pain. The setting is probably the blandest depiction of Forgotten Realms we ever got, BG1 just feels incredibly mundane throughout.

BG1 is one of Bioware's weaker games. BG2 is their best and the only one that can be called great.

I keep flip flopping in between whether I prefer BG1 or BG2, but I do have to admit that overall BG2 has a much higher density of interesting content. That being said, I do enjoy having those wilderness areas in BG1 to serve as a contrast for when you get to the city proper and get to experience what feels like almost completely different games within a single playthrough. In BG2, it feels like a consistent barrage of NPCs and quests from beginning to end which isn't bad but it does kind of overload my senses while playing. It would have been nice to have some emptier spaces to explore and stumble through to balance it out.

 

[biggestboss]

Sure, but who said you need spell casting for mopping up trash mobs with Party AI on?



Shield of Balduran is something you use only for baby's first playthrough; it's so lame and cheesy. Try with SCS installed.

True to the first point, but I guess I was commenting more on my distate of the party AI taking away from my autonomy moreso than the speed at which the trash mobs can be mowed down.

I've actually never played with SCS or any of those game-changing mods. I think that if I were younger I'd be more inclined to do so but in admittance of self-decline I have a lot less patience now for both modding and challenging myself.

 

[Lilura]

Wilderness exploration is one of my favorite parts of BG. I love the feeling of adventuring with a party, going off the beaten track and finding something like the lighthouse, Black Alaric's cave or an archaeological digsite.

seriously ?

Yes, I like hordes. Big tough hordes of yuan-ti, trolls and giants.

I like liches that actually have phylacteries (BG2 ones don't). And I like proper tactical scenarios that you can stealth into and check out first, before the enemy knows you're there.

While writing my retrospective, I started modding the original BG to be more like IWD. It's based on the HoF mod for the original BG, which is very old. But I've mixed the mobs up, positioned some of them in formations, and made some items to employ against the tougher combat encounter design, such as this:

Looks and sounds way better than the Bow of Gesen in BG2. Fires 5 ApR lightning bolts with the strength bonus applied to damage.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Yes, I like hordes. Big tough hordes of yuan-ti, trolls and giants.

my problem with icewind dale is more about difficulty curve than anything else,in BG2 you fight some straight up trash mobs,then you have some worthy opponents and then you fight some monsters that are hard to beat like the Shadow Dragon and Firkraag early on and some mages encounters,meanwhile in Icewind Dale fighting Frost Giants at the end-game feels as hard as fighting skeletons early on in Shadow Vale(the linearity of IWD also doesn't help).

So this is the difficulty curve of Icewind Dale:

Stable,a huge difficulty spyke at the final boss though(atleast for me).

And this is BG1 and 2 difficulty curve:

A fucking mess and it's way more fun ! sometimes you feel overpowered and sometimes you'll get your ass raped by some mages and bosses.

 

[Darth Canoli]

It's not even about combat speed, it's just that BG1's encounters are largely boring, the wilderness areas you get to explore are largely empty and the few encounters you find there are pretty generic or have little of interest to them. You can meet NPCs who say two or three sentences to you and then leave, and all you think is... that's it? The few side dungeons there are are usually terribly narrow so pathfinding becomes a pain. The setting is probably the blandest depiction of Forgotten Realms we ever got, BG1 just feels incredibly mundane throughout.

BG1 is one of Bioware's weaker games. BG2 is their best and the only one that can be called great.

You got me until the very last sentence.
I liked the exploration in BG, except there wasn't much to explore and the boring random encounters.
The story was ok, way better than the second.

As for BG2, remove inane-icus, imoen and all the shit written for them, add ToEE combat and it'd have been a great game.