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

[Sensuki]

I've yet to play a game like this

"You need to know how to best use all of your many spells and abilities to overcome this challenge"

Some games attempt it but always ends up with cheese.

 

[Logic_error]

Especially when you can spam them non stop with the at will spells.

 

[Infinitron]

I've yet to play a game like this

"You need to know how to best use all of your many spells and abilities to overcome this challenge"

Some games attempt it but always ends up with cheese.

So every single difficult game you've played has been "cheesy difficult"?

 

[Space Satan]

I miss all the fun stuff in older computer games, who would even put such encounters in a game nowadays?

that was fun once, then you reloaded and took precaution.

 

[Sensuki]

So every single difficult RPG you've played has been "cheesy difficult"?

Sure unless you count BG2 or whatever but that's more LOL UR DEAD.

Mind you I haven't played a lot of the older RPGs and stuff.

An example of cheese difficult is The Witcher 2. The only reason the game is hard is because one of the default strong style sword attack animations is absolutely retarded. Geralt does a triple pirouette before striking and exposes his back to any melee foes within about a 270 degree range. On hard or Dark, enemies just hit you mid animation and either outright kill you in one hit or take away about 90% health. The attack isn't procced from a combination of movements (like a good action melee game - Jedi Knight 2 etc) it's random and it happens ~33% of the time.
If you get that attack amidst multiple foes it's pretty much 50% guaranteed reload.

If the game didn't have such a dumb animation, the game would not be that hard at all. You'd still die but only when you made a blundering error.

I actually think the Combat Rebalance mod makes it worse, because it takes away parry mode and makes it passive but limits the amount of attacks you block - which kinda forces you to be a bit more aggressive. The recovery animations etc are WAY better than default, but pretty much every time I die is because I get that stupid pirouette attack animation and get oneshot. Woohoo.

 

[Shadenuat]

Plus just things like 2nd Edition D&D at low levels being utterly unforgiving

AD&D games should start with characters already at level 3. No death by a single arrow, and spellcasters have some spells already.

 

[Roguey]

BG1 was harder than BG2. Not sure what they're smoking to make that comparison.

Josh doesn't consider RNG-difficulty meaningful.

If the game is shit on normal then it's shit

They're balancing the game on hard first then scaling down for the other two modes. Cause it's easier to lower difficulty from a high bar than it is meaningfully raise it from a shallow baseline.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Is the list of companions on the wiki finalized? I tend to play classes that are not represented by companions, for added variety, and i couldn't help but notice that there weren't any ciphers on that list.

 

[Rostere]

I miss all the fun stuff in older computer games, who would even put such encounters in a game nowadays?

that was fun once, then you reloaded and took precaution.

Fun once is still better than no fun at all, I think.

Still, it's not really about the difficulty. In classic adventure games you could die suddenly and arbitrarily because you used a certain item on something, often finding out ways to die was as fun as playing the game itself. Dying in a CRPG is not always that fun but there's really no excitement if you know you can't die on a whim. Today, I guess most encounters are always "balanced" for the PC's strength, resulting in the lack of any challenge or excitement. When you see new enemies, you know you will be able to beat them if you're not stupid. Players are supposed to be able to "win" every challenge they see, either because of level scaling or because of linearity you rarely encounter something you can't fight. To me, coming back to a tough monster which tore you to pieces two levels before or beating said monster as a low-level character with the odds stacked against you, reaping the rewards, is an essential game component. The developers should always give the player challenges they won't expect most to tackle.

Fallout but especially BG1 were great in the sense that they were very inhomogeneous, one moment you would be waltzing around in the wilderness chasing gibberlings, the other moment your entire party would be fleeing from a really tough encounter. There's nothing like that in modern games.

 

[Surf Solar]

I really never had the fear of "oh lordy I bet I get a complete party wipe around the next corner of this dungeon" in Fallout, infact it was even pretty easy. Whereas in Baldurs Gate I/II or Icewind Dale I often had this feeling.

 

[sea]

There's "LOL UR DEAD" difficulty and then there's "You need to know how to best use all of your many spells and abilities to overcome this challenge" difficulty.

Basilisks and clever puzzles like that (which train the player to not do stupid shit) aren't really LOL UR DEAD kinda difficulty. They force you to take a different approach than what you normally would. In that respect such challenges are admirable because you have to start thinking about how to overcome an obstacle unconventionally instead of roflstomping it with hasted fighters yet again.

I really never had the fear of "oh lordy I bet I get a complete party wipe around the next corner of this dungeon" in Fallout, infact it was even pretty easy. Whereas in Baldurs Gate I/II or Icewind Dale I often had this feeling.

Try stealthing through the Cathedral or Mariposa with a weak non-combat character.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Enemies that petrify your party for example, they don't add difficulty, they just force you to reload and prebuff before the fight. No one in BG1 or 2 ran around always buffed, they just mowed every trash mob encounter and when they inevitably died because some developer decided to drop a couple of basilisks or a demi lich around the corner, they just reloaded.

A way around this is to have dynamic mob composition on encounters, and add real feat/skill/item usage to humanoid monsters, instead of a single instakill/petrify skill that serves as a difficulty buff.

 

[Sensuki]

Is the list of companions on the wiki finalized? I tend to play classes that are not represented by companions, for added variety, and i couldn't help but notice that there weren't any ciphers on that list.

Nah they are not doing companions until after the main story is complete so all of the companions can have an opinion on the main plot / lots of reactivity etc.

 

[Infinitron]

There's "LOL UR DEAD" difficulty and then there's "You need to know how to best use all of your many spells and abilities to overcome this challenge" difficulty.

Basilisks and clever puzzles like that (which train the player to not do stupid shit) aren't really LOL UR DEAD kinda difficulty. They force you to take a different approach than what you normally would. In that respect such challenges are admirable because you have to start thinking about how to overcome an obstacle unconventionally instead of roflstomping it with hasted fighters yet again.

I agree that they aren't the worst example of LOL UR DEAD kinda difficulty. Here's how I imagine Josh Sawyer would do it, though:

Instead of petrifying and insta-killing your characters, a basilisk would paralyze your characters and then attack them. With no way to defend themselves, the affected characters would take lots of damage, but in the first encounter with a basilisk, the non-paralyzed members of the party would probably succeed in defeating it before anybody was killed.

After that first encounter, a smart player would know to look for a way to resist this paralysis and would go searching for Korax the ghoul. If the player isn't smart, then he'd probably lose some already-wounded party members in the next basilisk battle.

 

[sea]

Enemies that petrify your party for example, they don't add difficulty, they just force you to reload and prebuff before the fight. No one in BG1 or 2 ran around always buffed, they just mowed every trash mob encounter and when they inevitably died because some developer decided to drop a couple of basilisks or a demi lich around the corner, they just reloaded.

A way around this is to have dynamic mob composition on encounters, and add real feat/skill/item usage to humanoid monsters, instead of a single instakill/petrify skill that serves as a difficulty buff.

The challenge comes in preparation and resource management. Sure, it's a "prepare or die" situation unless you get really good at kiting, but considering you see Basilisks in literally two areas in the entire game (one expansion area) it's not like this is "cheap". You get plenty of warning including the frozen stone corpses of dozens of adventurers at the entrance of the area, and several NPCs even say "be sure to pack some protection scrolls if you head south." If you wander into that like an idiot, you deserve to get petrified.

I agree that they aren't the worst example of LOL UR DEAD kinda difficulty. Here's how I imagine Josh Sawyer would do it, though:

Instead of petrifying and insta-killing your characters, a basilisk would paralyze your characters and then attack them. With no way to defend themselves, the affected characters would take lots of damage, but in the first encounter with a basilisk, the non-paralyzed members of the party would probably succeed in defeating it before anybody was killed.

After that first encounter, a smart player would know to look for a way to resist this paralysis and would go searching for Korax the ghoul. If the player isn't smart, then he'll probably lose some already-wounded party members in the next basilisk battle.

See above. The Basilisks actually have one of the best enemy introductions in the whole game. It's nothing compared to the random mages who have preset spell triggers and contingencies and special scripts that let them break the game, and the only way to win is to learn their patterns through trial and error.

 

[Infinitron]

See above. The Basilisks actually have one of the best enemy introductions in the whole game. It's nothing compared to the random mages who have preset spell triggers and contingencies and special scripts that let them break the game, and the only way to win is to learn their patterns through trial and error.

Sure, and that's why I agree the basilisks aren't the worst example of insta-death - but they're still insta-death. I'm not saying that's bad, necessarily, but it's a trick you can only pull once.

 

[Sensuki]

Now ... if the Basilisk Ray was not a targeted spell and you had to micro your characters to avoid ... that would be a lot better (but some people here would probably hate that).

 

[Kem0sabe]

Enemies that petrify your party for example, they don't add difficulty, they just force you to reload and prebuff before the fight. No one in BG1 or 2 ran around always buffed, they just mowed every trash mob encounter and when they inevitably died because some developer decided to drop a couple of basilisks or a demi lich around the corner, they just reloaded.

A way around this is to have dynamic mob composition on encounters, and add real feat/skill/item usage to humanoid monsters, instead of a single instakill/petrify skill that serves as a difficulty buff.

The challenge comes in preparation and resource management. Sure, it's a "prepare or die" situation unless you get really good at kiting, but considering you see Basilisks in literally two areas in the entire game (one expansion area) it's not like this is "cheap". You get plenty of warning including the frozen stone corpses of dozens of adventurers at the entrance of the area, and several NPCs even say "be sure to pack some protection scrolls if you head south." If you wander into that like an idiot, you deserve to get petrified.

I agree that they aren't the worst example of LOL UR DEAD kinda difficulty. Here's how I imagine Josh Sawyer would do it, though:

Instead of petrifying and insta-killing your characters, a basilisk would paralyze your characters and then attack them. With no way to defend themselves, the affected characters would take lots of damage, but in the first encounter with a basilisk, the non-paralyzed members of the party would probably succeed in defeating it before anybody was killed.

After that first encounter, a smart player would know to look for a way to resist this paralysis and would go searching for Korax the ghoul. If the player isn't smart, then he'll probably lose some already-wounded party members in the next basilisk battle.

See above. The Basilisks actually have one of the best enemy introductions in the whole game. It's nothing compared to the random mages who have preset spell triggers and contingencies and special scripts that let them break the game, and the only way to win is to learn their patterns through trial and error.

I used them as an example of how difficulty shouldn't be reduced to adding a single "oh shit i'm dead ability" to enemies or as you correctly pointed out, crazy mages with "time-stop- word kill - gate - whatever" triggers and contingencies.

For me higher difficulty would be as you well put it, to add stress to player resource management, make it impossible to rest during a dungeon due to some factor like nightmare killing gnome apparitions, or adding a time factor to a chain of encounters, the volcano will explode if the player doesn't activate the fusion device thingamajig in 5 minutes. Adding pressure, tension and making players sweat are good things in my opinion.

 

[Delterius]

Now ... if the Basilisk Ray was not a targeted spell and you had to micro your characters to avoid ... that would be a lot better (but some people here would probably hate that).

That would be silly, it really doesn't fit the game at all.

 

[Shadenuat]

You get plenty of warning including the frozen stone corpses of dozens of adventurers at the entrance of the area

And it's not like petrification is irreversible. Heck, not even death in IE games is irreversible, with very rare exceptions.

 

[Delterius]

Also, odds are you'll go to the Nashkel Carnival before getting close to the basilisk map, so you are introduced to petrification in a controlled environment. Sure, there are some holes in this plan, after all BG1 is a open world, but at least the foreshadowing isn't obvious.

 

[Sensuki]

Now ... if the Basilisk Ray was not a targeted spell and you had to micro your characters to avoid ... that would be a lot better (but some people here would probably hate that).

That would be silly, it really doesn't fit the game at all.

Correct, it doesn't. Too RTS/ARPG ish.

 

[imweasel]

Thats what playing a fighter mage was always supposed to be.

A fighter-mage/battle-mage or equivalent is also not a mage, it's a different class or a multi-class.

Its much more then just being a mage that wields swords in a shitty way.
And disregarding some dumbasses whose brains are only capable to think in bethesda - DnD binaries, due to life long exposure to decline deposits that degenerated their brains... a fighter mage is a whole other mess to deal with.

It's called multi-classing a mage/fighter.

Its not supposed to be about a "dual class" of some sort, but a different kind of specialization, where combinations and mixes of skills create your own personal gestalt tactics and abilities.

Hiver: My party is too squishy, i'm gonna specialize my mages to use great swords and plate armor with only 6 Strength. Derp.

Someone who isn't a moron: My party is too squishy, i'm gonna replace one of mages with a fighter/paladin/barbarian/monk/whatever the fuck

 

[Roguey]

See above. The Basilisks actually have one of the best enemy introductions in the whole game. It's nothing compared to the random mages who have preset spell triggers and contingencies and special scripts that let them break the game, and the only way to win is to learn their patterns through trial and error.

Sure, and that's why I agree the basilisks aren't the worst example of insta-death - but they're still insta-death. I'm not saying that's bad, necessarily, but it's a trick you can only pull once.

A big prob Josh would have with basilisks is that you beat them with a hard counter. Protect your peoples from petrification, boom, roll over 'em. Boring.

 

[Irenaeus]

A big prob Josh would have with basilisks is that you beat them with a hard counter. Protect your peoples from petrification, boom, roll over 'em. Boring. Fun.

Fixed