Codex Preview RPG Codex Preview: Knights of the Chalice 2 - Augury of Chaos

[thesheeep]

UH-OH.....you sure its not linear?

Hmmm, true, actually.
If you assume a simplified chance of 50% to win one initiative pass, then a second phase (with more casters spawning that you have to win initiative against) will have the combat at 25% to win both passes. Three passes means you got a 12.5% chance.
That's pretty linear.

It's still pretty horrible, though. Imagine a 25% chance to even be able to win a multi-phased battle assuming you make no mistakes at all over three phases

I love how some seem to defend this crap because old games did it like that.
Guess what? Those old games? They sucked, too. Or at least that part of them did.

 

[Tacgnol]

UH-OH.....you sure its not linear?

Hmmm, true, actually.
If you assume a simplified chance of 50% to win one initiative pass, then a second phase (with more casters spawning that you have to win initiative against) will have the combat at 25% to win both passes. Three passes means you got a 12.5% chance.
That's pretty linear.

It's still pretty horrible, though. Imagine a 25% chance to even be able to win a multi-phased battle assuming you make no mistakes at all over three phases

I love how some seem to defend this crap because old games did it like that.
Guess what? Those old games? They sucked, too. Or at least that part of them did.

The point I made in the main thread. Winning initiative should make a fight easier, not be required to win.

By the logic of a lot of the Pierre defenders in this thread, save scumming eye crits in Fallout is a legit tactic (FO1/2 even let you save at the start of a round, so even more exploitable).

If your game is built around save scumming, then you need to rethink how you balance things.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

UH-OH.....you sure its not linear?

Hmmm, true, actually.
If you assume a simplified chance of 50% to win one initiative pass, then a second phase (with more casters spawning that you have to win initiative against) will have the combat at 25% to win both passes. Three passes means you got a 12.5% chance.
That's pretty linear.

It's still pretty horrible, though. Imagine a 25% chance to even be able to win a multi-phased battle assuming you make no mistakes at all over three phases

I love how some seem to defend this crap because old games did it like that.
Guess what? Those old games? They sucked, too. Or at least that part of them did.

I agree with you-- was making a joke about what some autist said back on 3ed page with regards to Darth Roxors review and his use (or misuse) of exponential/linear.

 

[Brozef]

First thanks for the great review as usual.
I'm somewhat taken aback after waiting so long for the game, to hear that it is basically just an over long challenge mod. But after reading through all the replies and remembering Pierre's plans I'm still optimistic. He did always say that Augury Of Chaos was a stand alone after all. I guess we are only seeing Pierre's natural talent at marketing by releasing the 'completely busted hardcore challenge mod' before the actual campaign. Like the idea of steadfastly refusing releasing his game on any popular platforms during the indie game goldrush, or the amazing David lynchian travel logs to promote his Kickstarter...
But in the end it seems all the pieces are in place. Pierre once again succeeded in crafting one of the greatest crpg engines of all time, an amazing ai and to top it all off this time around we also get amazing mod tools! So I'm pretty satisfied already. I only hope Pierre won't spend too much time redesigning AOC (what am unfortunate acronym). If he keeps it as a challenge mode and focuses on the actual campaign great things might be in store for us.
As others stated some fluff and quests to provide breathing room between the fights would go a long way to turn a meat grinder into an actual Heroic Fantasy Adventure

 

[Jaedar]

By the logic of a lot of the Pierre defenders in this thread, save scumming eye crits in Fallout is a legit tactic (FO1/2 even let you save at the start of a round, so even more exploitable).

To be fair, I did find that late game fallout (when you have power armor) is a bit save scummy. If enemy crits it ignores armor and hits for 100+ damage, which means you die instantly. If they hit normally you take 0-2 damage, so you are invincible.

But no one ever claimed combat in fallout was that great.

 

[CryptRat]

The campaign is not a low level only campaign like ToEE or Pool of Radiance.

Mantises deal 27 hits per round or something like that by the end of the game (and note that a non-mantis warrior with a good two-handed vorpal weapon will deal as many damages), obviously it's a game where you're meant to do crazy things. And if the player is the only one who's doing crazy things but enemies don't then it's boring, total symmetry is not needed but at least some illusion of some sort of symmetry is good. In Pools of Darkness or Dark Queen of Krynn you'd better win initiative or you'll get killed, more than the previous games in the series because of a different ratio of fights which are trading blows (kobolds, goblins, gnolls, bandits ... while in later games it would be the occasionnal fight againt othyugs or such, ogre clerics won't be kind) but if you tell me you never lost an early fight simply from one or two clerics succeeding in casting Hold person then I'll be very skeptical.

I think that the variance was indeed taken a bit higher, like Darth Roxor said if a dark mage wins initiative then your entire party is killed (like in Wizardry, by the way) while only one Rakshasa alone would only cast a fireball and it would take more than one to kill your entire party. However if we're specifically talking about the little fights against one of those mages and several irrelevant thugs (these fights suck, because there's no real tactics, while the ones with plenty of mages and other enemies are fine, and very fun, and the last fortress would be totally anticlimatic if it would not feature such kind of battles in this such game), these battles occur during the last parts of the game, when the initiative of your mages is high enough at this point that if you have at least two mages it's very likely one of the two will play before the enemy mage, you will rarely have to reload in all those trash fights against one mage and thugs, and such a fight will take you 5 minutes at very most, it's not the meat of the game. People are talking as the game is easy but you need to reload a not (I'm exaggerating on purpose), but in my opinion it's not and the variance is not higher than in other games in the proportions that people seem to imply, in my opinion the reason why you need to reload a lot is because it's hard (and the system is what it is), the average difficulty of the game is probably the average difficulty of the only ten hardest fights of KOTC1 or Pools of Darkness, no way I would have won the boss fight against many giants in KOTC1 with bad initiative. Of course ultimately you reload a lot in KOTC2, not because overall the encounters are more dumb than in other games with similar systems, they are mostly harder than in other games with similar systems. If you intend to win the game with a barely average party and without paying much attention to combat tactics I just can't imagine how much you're actually going to reload.

I never faced a encounter in a PnP session as hard as most of the encounters in KOTC2 but I never faced an encounter as hard as the one in the big room with giants in KOTC1 so I can get the point but I would not call that a totally fair argument anyway. Save systems are a very complicated, very controversial and very interesting topic, and my opinion is that if the game has a permissive save system then you design the game acknowledging there's a permissive save system, you don't have to agree with that but of course if you don't then you're not going to like the game, but then I feel like you can't like even KOTC1 either.

I know people hate the game for many reasons combined together, I never defended skeleton warriors with +5 weapons and you get nothing after the fight, I never defended the actual look of the game (tokens are fine, the actual tokens are awful) but I have no problem defending the encounter design, I really think the encounters are harder than stupid (stupid because of reasons which would have nothing to do with difficulty). If anything the encounters in Wizardry are both much easier and much more stupid.

The small retarded encounters could be redesigned but they are not the ones where I reloaded the most, the encounters where I reloaded the most are more than often the best ones, either against cool gangs of enemies (gangs of undead especially, or these mind flayers), or the ones against big groups of enemies which are totally fine and the very best ones in the game. The Spider Queen is a bit bullshit but isolating the very hardest, optional battle, would be dishonest. Pizzara, the witches, the battles inside the fortress, I loved these ones.

I like that the game is hard and I like that the system is crazy, if I need to reload more because of that then I don't mind.

 

[JarlFrank]

and like i mentioned before with regard to the general design philosophy, the statue in itself is not the or even a problem - the problem is that its presence in this particular fight with all the other stuff you have to wade through is just patently ridiculous

That's the thing that made me go AAAAH WHAT THE FUCK in every second fight on my playthrough.

Individually, many of the encounters are fine as tough nuts to crack.

But they just keep piling on the bullshit.

There's an encounter against lizardmen who appear and surprise you when you wade into a pool to grab a sword there.
They're a good challenge, especially since you party is in water and therefore restricted in their movement. It was a challenging but fun fight.

... but then their shaman summons a giant fucking hydra with shittons of HP, enough attacks per round to kill one of your chars in a single turn if you get unlucky, and of course it's got long reach due to its size so even approaching it in melee range is dangerous.

Many encounters are designed to be very tough but they're still enjoyable and somewhat reasonably doable.
But then, when your party's resources are almost depleted and you think you've successfully made it, some absolute bullshit drops in and you have to deal with that, too.

Not to mention the sequences of bullshit encounter upon bullshit encounter that you have to wade through without getting a chance to rest in between.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The hydra is cool

 

[MRY]

Haven't played the game, and won't, but CryptRat's thoughtful post on the interplay of the save system and gameplay made me want to add something, since it's a topic I've been interested in for years. This is a small point, but it should be obvious that the chain of logic -- (1) there's a permissive save system; (2) players should save before every encounter; (3) it's no imposition to kill them; (4) therefore it's fine if initiative is completely dispositive and if you lose initiative you must just reload -- reveals that some link is very faulty. At that point, why have initiative at all? Why not just always give the player initiative, since that is actually the outcome, only interspersed with random "your party has suffered a crushing setback" cutscenes in which you watch tokens unleashing attacks on other tokens?

This seems like the same chain of logic that goes: (1) you can reroll character stats; (2) players should therefore reroll until they have all 18 stats; (3) the game should be balanced around PCs with all 18 stats; (4) therefore the best encounters are one where the enemies are all gimmicky. It's not illogical. But logical or not, it seems bad design and imprudent. I don't recall any of the classic adventures where (1) was true going farther down that road. (I do remember being a cheese player who went with (2), and I remember (1.5) where RPGs let you just change your stats if you wanted to, so as to shortcut (1->2).) And, eventually, RPGs found better solutions, like point-buy systems.

I guess I would say that chains of logic shouldn't always be followed to the bitter end, and sometimes the classics can offer prudent offramps -- though it sounds like the Wizardry series (which I also never played, being a M&M partisan) suffered from similar flaws based on CryptRat's post.

 

[Tacgnol]

and like i mentioned before with regard to the general design philosophy, the statue in itself is not the or even a problem - the problem is that its presence in this particular fight with all the other stuff you have to wade through is just patently ridiculous

That's the thing that made me go AAAAH WHAT THE FUCK in every second fight on my playthrough.

Individually, many of the encounters are fine as tough nuts to crack.

But they just keep piling on the bullshit.

There's an encounter against lizardmen who appear and surprise you when you wade into a pool to grab a sword there.
They're a good challenge, especially since you party is in water and therefore restricted in their movement. It was a challenging but fun fight.

... but then their shaman summons a giant fucking hydra with shittons of HP, enough attacks per round to kill one of your chars in a single turn if you get unlucky, and of course it's got long reach due to its size so even approaching it in melee range is dangerous.

Many encounters are designed to be very tough but they're still enjoyable and somewhat reasonably doable.
But then, when your party's resources are almost depleted and you think you've successfully made it, some absolute bullshit drops in and you have to deal with that, too.

Not to mention the sequences of bullshit encounter upon bullshit encounter that you have to wade through without getting a chance to rest in between.

It's a hard feeling to describe, but my reaction to beating most of the encounters on KOTC 2 wasn't, "that was tough, but satisfying", it was "that was fucking bullshit".

Aside from the optional encounter (which was purposefully turned up to 11), most of the encounters in KOTC felt tough but fair.

 

[JarlFrank]

Aside from the optional encounter (which was purposefully turned up to 11), most of the encounters in KOTC felt tough but fair.

Most KotC2 encounters gave me the same feeling that optional end-game bullshit avalanche of KotC1 did.

 

[Dickie]

Aside from the optional encounter (which was purposefully turned up to 11), most of the encounters in KOTC felt tough but fair.

Most KotC2 encounters gave me the same feeling that optional end-game bullshit avalanche of KotC1 did.

I managed to beat the optional encounter in KotC1 and keep the NPCs alive, but I can't even get to the supposed hard part in KotC2. Even that optional encounter isn't nearly as shitty as the average encounter in KotC2 because you can rest before that fight and don't have to conserve anything. Doing that encounter five times in a row with no campfires, no scrolls, and giving the enemies a surprise round would be more like KotC2.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[CryptRat]

At that point, why have initiative at all? Why not just always give the player initiative

You cannot be serious. Just so one of your mage play early (I'm simplifying) you would sacrifice all the benefits of rolling for initiative, that's ridiculous.

Battles are not 1 vs 1, they're 8 vs 10 or 20 or whatever. Rolling for initiative is great. A battle can play totally differently based on the initiative queue.

This seems like the same chain of logic that goes: (1) you can reroll character stats; (2) players should therefore reroll until they have all 18 stats;

What's cool with rolling stats is that you reroll to give 18 (or 17, or 16) intelligence to your mage (his class determines his verbs) so he's a good mage and then you accept everything else. It's much more fun to leave constitution, dexterity and other stats to chance rather than choosing in my opinion.
It's different for Fallout kind of games, only 1 character and classless (his verbs depend on his stats, not on his class).

 

[CryptRat]

In case it was not clear, I mean that the verbs must be the player's choice.

However other things don't have to and it can be more fun when they're left to chance especially in party-based games. Stats, efficiencies, elemental resistances, overall character goodness, etcetera.

Typically characters all having the exact same number of points to spend in a party-based game is a bit boring. Rolling only a single number of points to spend and nothing else is a bit pointless, what's cool about re-rolling is that you're accepting or rejecting a full package, but if you really like point buy then instead you can have some initial stat roll + an additionnal number of points to spend, number of points which may or may not be fixed since the characters are different anyway.

 

[Trashos]

Interesting review. I haven't tried the game yet, but I have read all posts here.

Fundamentally: A game (especially one as this) should be hard, but a player who
- knows all mechanics AND
- all content AND
- executes perfectly
should be winning 100% of the time.

So
reloading because you didn't know what was ahead: GOOD. Now you know, you are better, go get 'em.
reloading because the game is lolrandom: BAD

That said, I do not mind it when games include a masochist mode as a highest difficulty, where you can lose even if you do everything perfectly. If there are people who like that, they can go play dice have it. But the encounter design and the game's difficulty should not be judged there, but in the highest difficulty where a perfect player can ironman it.

From what I am reading here, KOTC2 falls in the 2nd category of lolrandomness, which is a shame (unless the critics here are wrong, I guess).

 

[Lilliput McHammersmith]

The main issue with KOTC2 on its release was the crashing.

Yes, the fights were bullshit a lot of the time, but with different tactics and a pinch of luck, you could probably win them (especially if you have some patience).

I never finished the module because many times after winning a particularly difficult battle, the game would crash. It was beyond frustrating. Sounds like the game is more stable now, but I don't know that I can bring myself to run through all those encounters again.

 

[CryptRat]

Fundamentally: A game (especially one as this) should be hard, but a player who
- knows all mechanics AND
- all content AND
- executes perfectly
should be winning 100% of the time.

Dungeon Rats or Blackguards, sure, but here you roll for initiative and protagonists can do crazy things, instant killing, disabling and big area of effects are legion.

I'm not reading your hyperbolic 100% literally but I don't think iroman runs should be won on a regular basis in every single game. I can totally enjoy games where you trade blows and where ironman is really mostly a matter of playing right such as Dungeon Rats and Blackguards but games like this one where crazy things can happen and are harder to ironman are legit too IMHO.

Not all games need to be same.

Lottery is boring but even 9 chances over 10 to win an encounter on average if you do everything right is enough to make a successful ironman run quite unlikely and that's totally not lottery.

 

[Trashos]

I'm not reading your hyperbolic 100% literally but I don't think iroman runs should be won on a regular basis in every single game. I can totally enjoy games where you trade blows and where ironman is really mostly a matter of playing right such as Dungeon Rats and Blackguards but games like this one where crazy things can happen and are harder to ironman are legit too IMHO.

The 100% was literal. If players play perfectly, they should win. When they lose, they should know that they made a mistake or they have options that they don't know about or haven't thought of. That's what gets healthy rewarding mechanisms in the brain engaged.

Now, playing perfectly should not be easy to figure out or execute, and that's where hardcore game difficulty should come from. But losing when you have all information, know everything, and execute perfectly is absurd. That's not hardcore gaming, it is gambling. Lowest common denominator etc.

(but like I said, I do not mind it if games also feature a trolling mode when you lose no matter what. Some people like gambling. Gambling is objectively a cheap thrill however, not hardcore gaming.)

 

[CryptRat]

The 100% was literal.

Then I think it's completely stupid, if you roll to hit with a chance for critical failure there's always very, very, very low chance to never hit, but since it's what everybody seems to think then I'm going to drop the discussion, no offense and see you in other threads.

 

[Trashos]

Then I think it's completely stupid, if you roll to hit with a chance for critical failure there's always very, very, very low chance to never hit

That's why games with rich systems and good design allow you to have a plan B if plan A can fail.

 

[MRY]

reloading because you didn't know what was ahead: GOOD. Now you know, you are better, go get 'em.
reloading because the game is lolrandom: BAD

If anything, this seems backward to me. A game that expects the player to have metaknowledge of what is ahead is worse than a game that expects the player to accept bad dice rolls, particularly because random chance adds a "personal" drama to the game that metaknowledge doesn't.

Even in action games, my view is that a top tier player should be able to win without having already played the next segment. There should be sufficient in-game clues that a very skilled player can anticipate and react fast enough. And that seems to me all the more true in RPGs where you aren't developing twitch reflexes.

 

[The_Mask]

Interesting review. I liked it. Felt like Darth Roxor had something to say. Also glad to see Dorateen doing things. Always like me some Dorateen input.

Glad to see some standard had in "what is fun and what it isn't". Was hoping a more educational section at one point, with ideas on how things could've been improved with common sense and logic, because - in essence - a reviewers job is a positive role. A reviewer wants to see better games being made. But that's okay, things were presented clear enough for me to visualize "the better game".

I liked the screenshots too. Well picked, as far as I could tell.




Hope to see more of this kind of standard in the future.

 

[Trashos]

If anything, this seems backward to me. A game that expects the player to have metaknowledge of what is ahead is worse than a game that expects the player to accept bad dice rolls, particularly because random chance adds a "personal" drama to the game that metaknowledge doesn't.

Lots of us here have played our favorite cRPGs for hundreds and even thousands of hours. 90%+ of the time we have spent with them is with metaknowledge. If a cRPG is not fun with metaknowledge, it is not a good cRPG.

It is the same with books, movies and music. If it is good only the first time you experience it, it is trash, and it is not worth owning.

 

[MRY]

If anything, this seems backward to me. A game that expects the player to have metaknowledge of what is ahead is worse than a game that expects the player to accept bad dice rolls, particularly because random chance adds a "personal" drama to the game that metaknowledge doesn't.

Lots of us here have played our favorite cRPGs for hundreds and even thousands of hours. 90%+ of the time we have spent with them is with metaknowledge. If a cRPG is not fun with metaknowledge, it is not a good cRPG.

It is the same with books, movies and music. If it is good only the first time you experience it, it is trash, and it is not worth owning.

"A game is good if it remains fun with metaknowledge" != "a game is good if it requires metaknowledge"

I agree with you that a real pleasure in games and other works of art is reexperiencing it from the perspective of foreknowledge, but I don't think having to go back and reread a chapter over and over again before you can get to the next chapter is good book design.