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Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Anthony Davis
- Start date
Zboj Lamignat
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2012
- Messages
- 5,848
Yes, it's also possible to complete fps games without killing anything, you can find the videos all over the net and paste them here for good measure.
FPS games are about killing stuff. RPGs are a bit more than that, combat is just part of the mechanics. An important one, but not so much you should drop the game completely if it's shit (unless it's Inquisitor).
Top Codex RPGs have shit combat. Torment's bashed for it, because people can't get into their heads that it's dialogue which is Torment's real gameplay. KOTOR2 has shit combat. Some people even think Fallout has shit combat (I think I've seen Excidium saying that? Although he rarely uses more than one sentence in his posts so it's hard to distinguish them from the others). It's does't mean people "suffer" through these games.
(I am a bit on a Volourn level now, I know, just for Troika instead of Bioware, but goddamn it, how I'm tired of "blackmountainclanharmmagmagolem" people, so forgive me for venting all that out).
Torment's combat isn't great, but it's ten times better than Arcanum's combat.
Most of what you've saying is true to a certain extent, but I'm not sure what your point is, exactly. Even you surely don't think Arcanum's combat is "excellent". Do you think it's "good"? "Adequate"? "Poor"? "Terrible"?
Most Codexians who love Arcanum are more than willing to admit that its combat is total garbage. Moreover, they usually allow that if the combat were actually good, the overall game would be improved, even if combat isn't the reason why Arcanum is good.
Most of what you've saying is true to a certain extent, but I'm not sure what your point is, exactly. Even you surely don't think Arcanum's combat is "excellent". Do you think it's "good"? "Adequate"? "Poor"? "Terrible"?
Most Codexians who love Arcanum are more than willing to admit that its combat is total garbage. Moreover, they usually allow that if the combat were actually good, the overall game would be improved, even if combat isn't the reason why Arcanum is good.
And why is that exactly? Because it has beautiful Final Fantasy inspired spells?
I would never call it "garbage". "Adequate" is a nice word for both games, althought most people won't agree with me, probably. But the fact that Arcanum combat is poorly balanced never bothered me that much to loathe that part of the game. Unlike Torment, it has lots of details. It has armor with resistances to diffirent types of damage (wearing full plate in Arcanum actually feels like you're wearing something real which deflect blows and can break, not just gaining +2 to AC). It has interesting health/stamina segregation. You can disarm enemy with a spell. Your gun can stuck if you are too far into magical aptitude.
Compared to that? Torment is just about clicking stuff and "degenerative" rest (not that it bothered me any way too). Torment's combat is probably more adequate because it is simple but polished enough, while Arcanum's is detailed but "broken". But I don't think that's the reason to call Arcanum's combat "garbage" unlike Torment's.
Now encounters like "50 zombies" or "30 monkeys with different colors"? These are garbage.
I think if they replaced most encounters with something like Lukan in the beginning without touching combat system Arcanum won't get it's "BLACKMOUNTAINCLAN" infamity, at least not that much.
Sums it up nicely.
No idea. Meaningless violence and people, characters and nameless mooks both, rushing and not caring at all about their lives is one of those undefeated gaming cliches.
Generally, living beings in games do not want to live.
As for Arcanum's combat potentinal, for me it's (dare I say it?) fun was in how it generally supported one of the main motives of the game which can be summed up as "What does that do?". Game has a lot about experimenting, lot's of crazy scientist type of plot, and for me the fun part was to first learn something, and then kill somebody with it.
tuluse
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2008
- Messages
- 11,400
Arcanum's combat was boring, insipid, and monotonous. It is one of the worst combat systems I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. At no point did I ever have fun with it. I rarely ever experienced a tactical challenge (the only real question I ever faced was, I can I kill this thing without eating another health item). It was just watching a few characters on screen bashing each other until it was over. The RT/TB hybrid was awful. It meant certain builds were broken in real time, while others were broken in turn based, and seemed to expect the player to know you should switch based on what enemies you're fighting. I used turn based 90% of the time because I dislike RT, so that made the fucking golems hard as fuck, like 2 hits and you can die, and you can take 2 hits in a single round hard. It was just a exercise in save scumming. Then once you get out of the Black Mountain Mines, combat is never that hard again ever.
Honestly the pass in the mountains to go meet the Elves is even worse than the Black Mountain. Move forward 15 feet, fight one polar bear thing. Wait a few minutes to regen stamina, repeat, and do this 100 fucking times until you're through.
Honestly the pass in the mountains to go meet the Elves is even worse than the Black Mountain. Move forward 15 feet, fight one polar bear thing. Wait a few minutes to regen stamina, repeat, and do this 100 fucking times until you're through.
Arcanum - when you need to segregate people who play human warriors with melee skills and kill everything from other players
Zetor
Arcane
Arcanum combat system was shit even if you weren't playing a melee build. I know I was annoyed a lot with my gunslinger techie (throwing an infinite number of molotovs takes 0 AP, but shooting a gun that does less damage and only to a single target takes half of my turn? k). That's without going into issues with weapon speed in general, cost/benefit of the harm spell, blah blah blah.
Arcanum - when you need to segregate people who play human warriors with melee skills and kill everything from other players
That is far from the only non-viable play style—and severe imbalance is far from the only reason Arcanum's combat is bad. The utterly horrible RT/TB hybrid model, the sheer idiocy of NPC party members during combat, and the preponderance of uninspired trash mob encounters are all high up on the list.
"Human" and "melee" and "kill everything" really ought to be a viable path (one of many), whether you find it
or not. In essence, you're asserting that players should build their characters in the "correct" way, and play the game in the "correct" manner. So much for choice, huh?My first playthrough was cookie-cutter Fallout-like "gunslinger diplomat". I never had much trouble. Molotovs can't kill a lot, they are only good in the beginning against rats and low level scum. Grenades are better, sure, but fast revolver can carry you till midgame, sniper rifle and elephant gun are powerful enough too.
Players need to make that choice for it to work. There is a ton of ways to pass through magma golem in BMC exept straightforward battle, and game system supports it. Codexers argue that skills should matter, strategy, decisions, smart character building must exist, but when they are given ten ways to pass through a certain enemy in the game, and picking the most straightforward and boring one comes up as the most difficult, what could that mean?
The real point is that your entire argument is one big strawman. Not everyone (in fact I'd say very few) who dislike the game's combat played human melee warriors and attempted to stupidly hack 'n' slash their way through the entire game. You can keep on insisting that that's the case, but it's a piss-poor approach, because you're flat-out incorrect and everyone who's played the game knows it.
It was't an argument, it was a jokingly observation, so cookie cutter ready-to-apply terms for rhetorics are't necessary. But I replied to your post because I thought that you made a wrong assumption on the availability of choice in Arcanum, which it does't have any problems with. Is bashing everything with a balanced sword very fun? Probably not. Is it the only option to play the game? Should it be a viable choice to beat anything in a game? Why would you continue bashing polar bears if you have ton of other choices? And so on.
Gondolin
Arcane
Frankly, as I get older, I'm more and more disappointed by the combat-to-other-things ratio in RPGs. It trivializes combat and makes games boring. I'm kind of fed up with enemies who fight to the death no matter what and who are too stupid to avoid a party of obviously successful mass murderers. I'm kind of fed up with "clear the map of all enemies" being the common approach.
Brotherman Bill
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2009
- Messages
- 6,933
Drog has found as new mode of trollan?
Zboj Lamignat
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2012
- Messages
- 5,848
Arcanum's combat is not "adequate", it's absolutely awful.
1. It's probably the single most broken system in history of crpgs. If you try naming all the things that are completely imbalanced without making a break you can probably die out of dehydration. Also, builds that you can come up with share at least one of the following traits: are too strong/weak; are boring to play; require meta knowledge of the game to work.
2. RT/TB system is a complete mess and introducing it into the game broke it even further.
3. The AI of both the mob and your followers is nonexistent and tends to do the most idiotic things, don't put lots of stuff in your game if your AI can't use even the most basic things properly ffs.
4. The game is filled with tons and tons of samey combat.
5. There is a distinct lack of interesting encounters which creates a deadly combo with point 4.
6. Games that have tons and tons of samey combat usually make it rewarding through leveling and looting. Leveling in Arcanum is meh because of point 1 and because you gain level at hilariously high rate. Looting is shit as well, you find tons of trash (literally) and the artifacts are unexciting (why be happy about a magic sword if you murder everything with a rusty fork if you have haste/dodge/whatever).
7. Even the silly stuff like (death) animations looks worse than in Fallout that came out in 1997 and run like a charm on P166 and 1mb graphic card (note to all the people that did not play Arcanum when it came out, only a couple of years later because someone told them that it's a holy grail of true crpgs - please don't get me started on Arcanum's engine...).
1. It's probably the single most broken system in history of crpgs. If you try naming all the things that are completely imbalanced without making a break you can probably die out of dehydration. Also, builds that you can come up with share at least one of the following traits: are too strong/weak; are boring to play; require meta knowledge of the game to work.
2. RT/TB system is a complete mess and introducing it into the game broke it even further.
3. The AI of both the mob and your followers is nonexistent and tends to do the most idiotic things, don't put lots of stuff in your game if your AI can't use even the most basic things properly ffs.
4. The game is filled with tons and tons of samey combat.
5. There is a distinct lack of interesting encounters which creates a deadly combo with point 4.
6. Games that have tons and tons of samey combat usually make it rewarding through leveling and looting. Leveling in Arcanum is meh because of point 1 and because you gain level at hilariously high rate. Looting is shit as well, you find tons of trash (literally) and the artifacts are unexciting (why be happy about a magic sword if you murder everything with a rusty fork if you have haste/dodge/whatever).
7. Even the silly stuff like (death) animations looks worse than in Fallout that came out in 1997 and run like a charm on P166 and 1mb graphic card (note to all the people that did not play Arcanum when it came out, only a couple of years later because someone told them that it's a holy grail of true crpgs - please don't get me started on Arcanum's engine...).
Has anyone actually claimed that balance can be thrown to the wind? Because I haven't seen that, and since that would be an insane thing to ever claim, I wouldn't think anyone would state something completely idiotic like that. But maybe you saw a post that claimed it. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt before again pointing out that you're using a gigantic strawman.
There's a big difference between criticizing the sort of perfectionist approach to balance Sawyer has for being blind to the history of system design and outright saying "Fuck it! Let's have a level 1 feat that gives +20 strength and one that gives a single hit point!"
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
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- 37,130
I've seen many people say "I don't care about balance in a RPG."
Also "Fuck it! Let's have a level 1 feat that gives +20 strength and one that gives a single hit point!" was not the approach Tim Cain took to Arcanum.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8416
Tim Cain said:
Shrek likes to play advocatus diaboli when he's bored, no matter how awe-inspiringly, magnificently stupid his position might be given the context.
If you defend Arcanum's combat for any reason, you're a retard. It's as simple as that. The combat may have redeeming qualities, but so do some mass murderers. No one cares that a mass murderer helped old ladies cross the street, donated to the March of Dimes, and was quiet while reading in the library—their transgressions are so great, the redeeming qualities are totally overshadowed and you'd be a jackass to even mention them. So it is with Arcanum's combat.
If you defend Arcanum's combat for any reason, you're a retard. It's as simple as that. The combat may have redeeming qualities, but so do some mass murderers. No one cares that a mass murderer helped old ladies cross the street, donated to the March of Dimes, and was quiet while reading in the library—their transgressions are so great, the redeeming qualities are totally overshadowed and you'd be a jackass to even mention them. So it is with Arcanum's combat.
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