Brahs, I want to Arcanum and Planescape

[861129]

Also how does BG2 stack up? It's Bioware which makes me a bit uneasy...

Solid as a rock in terms of gameplay/UI.

 

[DraQ]

Also how does BG2 stack up? It's Bioware which makes me a bit uneasy...

Well, I'd say it's a bit of a bread and butter RPG, but a good one.

I never got far into it, mostly because of my ambition to port character from much worse BG1 which I'd have to finish first, but it's probably the pinnacle of what Bioware could ever achieve.

Combat is definitely better than PS:T, though it's obvious that the IE took its toll, locations look pretty cool, there is a lot of content and there seems to be a lot of intraparty interactions to liven the game up.

Codex rarely considers BG2 an excellent game, but almost never considers it a bad one.

 

[SCO]

BG1 is a better game in some ways since it actually has some sidequests that have alternative solutions (shock!) with mechanics beyond "kill guy, deliver mcguffin" (horror!).

Also, BG2 has linear parts where you're locked into a dungeon crawl.

 

[DraQ]

BG1 is a better game in some ways since it actually has some sidequests that have alternative solutions (shock!) with mechanics beyond "kill guy, deliver mcguffin" (horror!).

Technically yes, practically it still makes Morrowind look like supreme ruler of all C&C in comparison.

 

[SCO]

I'm talking about stuff like charming questgivers/bountyhunters or the thief's guild series of quests (that is normal in other games... still, you won't find anything like that kind of scripting in fucking bg 2 without mods).
The most involved quests of this kind in BG 2 were the class-stronghold quests, and even so all of them had a sizable dungeon-crawl component. Well, there was that twisted-rune thing and the serial killer stuff, that was nice.

Morrowind... i can think of raising the disposition of "weird" normally-hostile factions like necromancers, slavers or boethiah cultists to be able to talk to them.

 

[Malpercio]

Also how does BG2 stack up? It's Bioware which makes me a bit uneasy...

It's magnificent in every possible way, one of the greatest videogame experience. But skip BG1, shitsuxs and it aged pretty poorly.

Also, you should stop confusing the Bioware of the Black Isle days with the modern one.

 

[Sacculina]

Also, you should stop confusing the Bioware of the Black Isle days with the modern one.

I dunno, I seem to recall my male PC having three simultaneous and equally unwanted romances foisted on him just for the sin of allowing the following to join the party: the widow-in-mourning (Jaheira, cf Sky and Thane), the broken bird (Aerie, cf Tali and Merrill), and the evil one (Viconia, cf Morrigan, Jack and Morinth). The decline may not have started with Baldur's Gate 2, but it did set the stage for it.

 

[Skittles]

I disagree--I could never get into BG2, but BG1's low level, high fatality play during the first couple of acts is great. By the time the hordes of spawning gnolls are easy to beat, then it feels like there are trash mobs. By the time you have six party members with magic gear and you have more spell slots than you know what to do with, then it loses its charm.

 

[Papa Môlé]

Yeah same here. Low level DnD is pretty fun when you feel like your heroic acts haven't become a commonplace occurrence for your characters yet and what few powers or spells you have are rather important. High level DnD however is full of bloat, repetitiveness, and irreparable imbalance.

 

[ChristofferC]

BG1's low level, high fatality play during the first couple of acts is great.

One unlucky crit and you have to reload. Awesome combat.

Alternatively you kite with op ranged weapons. Awesome.

 

[SCO]

It's a game for patient people yes... I even prolong that stage by using a mod to change npcs into F/M/C

Eventually, though, once you get to the 5th level, the cheese begins.
But hey, you can do Durlag's Tower before

 

[Malpercio]

Also, you should stop confusing the Bioware of the Black Isle days with the modern one.

I dunno, I seem to recall my male PC having three simultaneous and equally unwanted romances foisted on him just for the sin of allowing the following to join the party: the widow-in-mourning (Jaheira, cf Sky and Thane), the broken bird (Aerie, cf Tali and Merrill), and the evil one (Viconia, cf Morrigan, Jack and Morinth). The decline may not have started with Baldur's Gate 2, but it did set the stage for it.

The romances weren't foisted on you in the slightest. You could kill Aerie the first time you met her or tell her to gtfo the first time she started talking about her fucking wings.

 

[Sacculina]

The romances weren't foisted on you in the slightest. You could kill Aerie the first time you met her or tell her to gtfo the first time she started talking about her fucking wings.

'Foisted' might be too strong a word (to that extent this is true of all BioWare romances), but is there a way I could avoid a romance with her in the party without being a complete jerkass? While playing a male PC, of course.

 

[Skittles]

BG1's low level, high fatality play during the first couple of acts is great.

One unlucky crit and you have to reload. Awesome combat.

Alternatively you kite with op ranged weapons. Awesome.

There's a reason you have more than five party members available to you--I can think of eleven off the top of my head available as soon as you leave Candlekeep. Reloads are only necessary if your main character goes down. I don't see a huge problem there. Losing characters forces you to make do with suboptimal parties.

No denying that ranged weapons seem to break the IE games a bit. I guess I consider it only fair as there're no AoO or grid to block enemies' forward progress in a meaningful manner. Bio's only solution to kiting seems to be enemies that respawn behind you when you're not looking, which is not much of a solution in my mind.

 

[SerratedBiz]

but is there a way I could avoid a romance with her in the party without being a complete jerkass?

Is this a joke? No, really. 0/10 trolling?

 

[Sacculina]

but is there a way I could avoid a romance with her in the party without being a complete jerkass?

Is this a joke? No, really. 0/10 trolling?

Genuine curiosity. I soon got fed up and restarted with a female PC, but from what I gathered the only way to avoid a romance with Aeire as a male is through the 'jerkass' conversation options. Yea, for sooth, he that hath naught but good in his heart and courtesy on his lips shall never escape that whining harpy's talons.

 

[DraQ]

I disagree--I could never get into BG2, but BG1's low level, high fatality play during the first couple of acts is great. By the time the hordes of spawning gnolls are easy to beat, then it feels like there are trash mobs. By the time you have six party members with magic gear and you have more spell slots than you know what to do with, then it loses its charm.

Low level and high fatality is fun, but less so if you effectively have no diverse means at your disposal.
Also, you're flooded by trash mobs since day 1 and it is very boring and repetitive.
For example I don't think there was even a single moment when gnolls weren't trash mobs after you advanced far enough to actually meet them, I may not be a D&D buff but it was deeply disappointing to me that about that a towering, muscled hyena biped with a fucking halberd was only a nominal threat to my band of n00bs.

Then there is the problem that everything is generic as fuck, combat is 90% trash encounters, party AI is infuriatingly retarded, enemy AI is exploitably retarded, plot is molasses through the first 75% of the game and exploration is a chore, because it consists entirely of screen wiping minigame.

No denying that ranged weapons seem to break the IE games a bit. I guess I consider it only fair as there're no AoO or grid to block enemies' forward progress in a meaningful manner. Bio's only solution to kiting seems to be enemies that respawn behind you when you're not looking, which is not much of a solution in my mind.

Powerful ranged weapons are quite realistic, but the solution is shit, because even more trash mobs is hardly a good thing.

 

[Skittles]

See, the problem with ranged attacks in my mind is the poor implementation of movement and zones of control in the game. Monsters amble towards your archers most of the time rather than charging, because there's no charge option and movement speed is strangely handled in BG's RtwP system (to say nothing of the spotty pathfinding, at least in early versions). Of course, if they could move realistically, due to the awful limitations on line of sight and the inability to effectively create defensive positions in the game, archers would be worthless because they could get at most a single shot off. Rather than adding the complexity to make archery balanced, Bio left it powerful and just added trash mobs that were difficult to all shoot down before they reached your archers/spawned behind you when you try to use skirmish tactics (which are practically cheating in BG).

If they did movement, positioning and range correctly, those gnolls could easily be the baddest sons of bitches in the early game--decent speed, polearms and numbers...

tl;dr They should've made it turnbased and I'm still butthurt. Is there a mod, yet?

Oh, and I feel like even low level parties have some nice tools available to them in the form of spells. At level one, you've already got access to Charm, Colour Spray, Grease, Sleep, and Entangle for your tactical options and a decent array of different damage dealers from Magic Missile, to Burning Hands, to Chill Touch and Shocking Grasp (you know, weak but ranged and guaranteed hit, good damage but medium range with risk of FF, and good damage w/o FF but touch only, one target only), not to mention buffs for trickier fights. The magic is best in DnD cRPGs before you get Fireball, in my opinion.

 

[SCO]

I've tried to plant the idea in the gemrb guys.

That's the only way you're ever going to get real turn based combat ever in this fucking game.

Well, there are some autopause options that you can use to streamline your actions without wasting time, but that doesn't really matter for most of the clusterfuck around movement (though the best one - pause after spell cast - is also highly annoying if not in combat; fixed in gemrb)

 

[DraQ]

Morrowind... i can think of raising the disposition of "weird" normally-hostile factions like necromancers, slavers or boethiah cultists to be able to talk to them.

Well, typically when you have to take something from someone reluctant diplomacy, stealing and combat are default options, then there may be scripted alternative solutions as well, especially with stuff like FG (subfaction branch), hlaalu and so on.

Morrowind is definitely not a C&C heavy game, but it still looks better than BG in this regard.

tl;dr They should've made it turnbased and I'm still butthurt.

Yes, definitely better for party based and better for D&D.

Oh, and I feel like even low level parties have some nice tools available to them in the form of spells. At level one, you've already got access to Charm, Colour Spray, Grease, Sleep, and Entangle for your tactical options and a decent array of different damage dealers from Magic Missile, to Burning Hands, to Chill Touch and Shocking Grasp (you know, weak but ranged and guaranteed hit, good damage but medium range with risk of FF, and good damage w/o FF but touch only, one target only), not to mention buffs for trickier fights. The magic is best in DnD cRPGs before you get Fireball, in my opinion.

There is pretty much no excuse to not implement spell ingredients in D&D cRPG. Computer takes the burden of keeping track of all the shit while it would be an extremely nice cheese limiter and add depth to the gameplay.

Also, damage dealing magic definitely sees too much attention in cRPGs (there should be some, but apart from the really high level stuff it should be limited and of limited use) - want moar utility spells, spells introducing interesting alternatives in and to combat and situational stuff.

Finally:
Fireball + IE = strategic bombardment from beyond visual range + derpy AI = ultimate cheese.

 

[Revenant]

I really don't get it why people on the Codex are so obsessed with turn-based combat. AD&D 2nd Edition, in fact, was not turn-based in the strictest sense, as you could get equal initiative rolls for combat sides and shit would happen simultaneously. Turn-based is an excuse for tabletop games, where it's difficult to simulate real-time action, but computer games don't have this issue. Besides, turn-based spellcasting is way too easy - you can always avoid a fireball to friendly fire, for example. Even if you must have turn-based, IE has the "pause after end of turn" option, which brings the game as close to AD&D 2nd Edition combat as possible, with clusterfuck being an analogy of loose placement rules found in the system.

Bio's only solution to kiting seems to be enemies that respawn behind you when you're not looking, which is not much of a solution in my mind.

Enemies only respawn if you load the game while being in a "respawn-enabled" area. This is a sort of anti-reloading measure the game uses, although a crappy one. It's a good thing they got rid of it in BG2.

 

[DraQ]

I really don't get it why people on the Codex are so obsessed with turn-based combat.

I am not. I actually prefer directly controlled single character (possibly with followers) RT with first person view and would like stats strongly influencing stuff, but on lower than usual level.

It's just that party based + RT = fucking mess.

Add to it the fact that D&D mechanics is TB, so any game using it should also be TB and the fact that AI in BG sucked balls, and you have no reason to go RT in any of the IE games.

AD&D 2nd Edition, in fact, was not turn-based in the strictest sense, as you could get equal initiative rolls for combat sides and shit would happen simultaneously.

Which is something I don't think any TB advocate would actually object to.

My favourite TB system would actually be simultaneous phase based.

Turn-based is an excuse for tabletop games, where it's difficult to simulate real-time action, but computer games don't have this issue.

That's only half-truth and as such a full lie.

Mechanics and NPC decisions are bottlenecks of a traditional PnP RPG that can be eliminated using technology when going cRPGs, but they are hardly the only bottlenecks present. In particular a single player party based cRPG has one huge additional bottleneck PnP one does not - it has the only player controlling the whole party. This bottleneck mirrors the one on the GM's side - controlling NPCs - except it won't go away thanks to technology, because we can't replace the player with the technology.

Unlike an RTS, an RPG requires much finer, deeper and error-free control over your units because an RPG party member isn't nearly as expendable as RTS infantry man #176 and unlike RTS infantry man may have several weapons, different types of ammo, scrolls, potions, special abilities and possibly a spellbook or even two.
In effect even an "RT" party based RPG has to become quasi-TB as player constantly cycles between party members rather than controlling them all simultaneously, except instead of mechanically enforced turns we have player mashing spacebar as if it was some kind of awesome button.
So it's still sort of TB except it sucks.

Besides, turn-based spellcasting is way too easy - you can always avoid a fireball to friendly fire, for example.

What.

No, seriously - what.

How does one even follow from the other?

Even if you must have turn-based, IE has the "pause after end of turn" option, which brings the game as close to AD&D 2nd Edition combat as possible

Except IE has dynamic RT pathfinding that sucks horribly and often requires much more frequent pauses, so this option is irrelevant except for showing that IE games fail at implementing the ruleset they seek to.

 

[Skittles]

I got ninja'd by DraQ with the TB explanation, but I mostly support it. I don't feel that RtwP can ably handle basics like positioning and movement speeds well. I'm all ears if you have a real time based game that approaches TOEE or JA, but Baldur's Gate (the IE games in general, I'd wager, though I've never done IWD) has a pretty frustrating combat system that could've used TB combat and a real grid to address the issues I've already mentioned. It might not be the only way, but it's the way the games with the best tactical combat have done it.

Enemies only respawn if you load the game while being in a "respawn-enabled" area. This is a sort of anti-reloading measure the game uses, although a crappy one. It's a good thing they got rid of it in BG2.

Not true. It occurs, at the very least, in the gnoll fortress, the xvart village and with the kobolds in the Nashkel mines. It will also happen with other trash enemies out in the wilderness.

 

[DraQ]

I got ninja'd by DraQ with the TB explanation, but I mostly support it. I don't feel that RtwP can ably handle basics like positioning and movement speeds well.

I think it might, but it requires very specific (and difficult) approach. First, the underlying mechanics must be completely smooth RT. Second, the game needs very sophisticated autopause and notification system that can detect any event you might want to pause upon, and no, not the crude clusterfuck IE games had.
Something truly sophisticated that can discern both task completions and any situation changes that may make you change your orders, for example: previously stationary target starts to flee - game pauses and notifies you, so that you can immediately decide if you wish to pursue it or abort attack, enemy mage started casting a spell - does it affect your tactics in any way? currently traced route to target has been obstructed and closest new route differs from the old one more than threshold value - continue or change orders? etc.
Preferably such system should also filter out trivial cases - for example if enemy starts to flee, but your warrior attacking it is already close and can move faster (criterion being predicted time or distance travelled before intercept, based on current distance and speeds of both participants.

Still, while I think it'd be perfectly possible, especially since any good AI should also detect and evaluate such events, it's not going to be easy.

Not true. It occurs, at the very least, in the gnoll fortress, the xvart village and with the kobolds in the Nashkel mines. It will also happen with other trash enemies out in the wilderness.

Also high hedge.
And fucking Firewine dungeon .

Still, swamping party with nuisance enemies is incredibly shit discouragement as it doesn't really pose much threat, it's just tiresome.

 

[Revenant]

Add to it the fact that D&D mechanics is TB, so any game using it should also be TB and the fact that AI in BG sucked balls, and you have no reason to go RT in any of the IE games.

Let's see AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook on page 122:

The Combat Sequence

<...> These steps are:

1. The DM decides what actions the monsters or NPCs will take, including casting spells (if any).
2. The players indicate what their characters will do, including casting spells (if any).
3. Initiative is determined.
4. Attacks are made in order of initiative.

Now let's see how two game engines - the GoldBoxes and the infinity engine - handle this. In GoldBoxes, initiative is rolled and THEN characters move, cast spells, or attack. This clearly swaps 2 and 3 phases of a combat round. On the other hand, in the Infinity Engine, you direct your characters, and THEN actions happen according to their initiative. The conclusion: Infinity Engine games do a better job implementing AD&D 2nd Edition rules than GoldBoxes. Real-time combat clearly is more in accord with the combat sequence quoted above than turn-based combat.

Besides, turn-based spellcasting is way too easy - you can always avoid a fireball to friendly fire, for example.​

What.

No, seriously - what.

How does one even follow from the other?

As in Knights of the Chalice, when your mage gets a turn, you pinpoint the fireball precisely to hurt only enemies and do your devastating click. In the Infinity Engine, you must evaluate enemy movement while your mage is casting and aim optimally as not to hurt your characters. The later is an obviously more challenging and realistic combat mechanic.

Not true. It occurs, at the very least, in the gnoll fortress, the xvart village and with the kobolds in the Nashkel mines. It will also happen with other trash enemies out in the wilderness.

Then I must have been mistaken. Ok, now I'll have this in mind in my next playthrough.