Review RPG Codex Review: Pillars of Eternity - By Vault Dweller and the Spirit of Grunker

[Angthoron]

They don’t need the money from a small community such as the Codex and people who buy games such as AoD, SitS and Underrail, because they will sell millions to consoletards anyway.

You know, I remember posters on various forums saying this exact fucking thing when Black Isle and Troika Games were still around. They were so right.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You didn't really think this through, did you?
From the times immemorial, the reward for playing well has always been making game easier, especially in action games, unless it was some kind of weirdo game.
Play well and don't die = retain all the power-ups and kill everything easier, or at least have more lives/health to deal with harder stages later on.
Play well and kill more enemies in a row = get bonus points (usually meant extra life at some point) or some other reward.
Play well and explore a hard-to-reach or secret area = get some bonus.
Play well and defeat an optional hard enemy = get some bonus.

EDIT: Come to think of it, that's one of the main reasons the old games are so enjoyable - they reward effort. Unlike modern games that foster mediocrity via "no player should lose" mentailty.

Nope, I meant exactly what I said, and I dislike the design of the older Castlevanias or shooters like Gradius for this very reason. For one, they effectively sabotage their own mechanics - it's pointless to have multuple extends in Gradius if you can't recover once you die in one of the final levels, for example. Secondly, this kind of difficulty scaling makes noone happy - a beginner will be frustrated because his mistakes are punished so harshly, while a veteran will find little challenge as they breeze through the game on the strength of their stacked powerups and resources.

Funny that you would mention the idea of scoring by killing enemies in a row - this is a characteristic feature of the Dodonpachi games, and those games do, generally speaking, give you more resources the more you die, and become more difficult as you score. Not to mention games with truly crazy rank like Battle Garegga, where it's often preferable to suicide, as playing with multiple lives in stock makes the game too difficult.

You're making two mistakes here:
1. You're abstracting the difficulty-vs-power aspect from the other ways of managing difficulty a game could have. It is but a fragment of the overall game balance after all.
2. You're focusing purely on action games (in an RPG thread), and not only that - you're focusing on arcade action games, where one of the staples of design had always been a high difficulty and harsh punishments for mistakes to force players to play again from scratch (which required money). Not to mention that such games were really short, if you could beat them in one attempt. One had to get really good at those to even have a chance of seeing the end of the game. Compared to your average modern games, where it is assumed that almost everyone should be able to reach the endgame, should they be willing to invest some time and a token amount of effort.

1. I'm not, unless I'm misunderstanding your point here. I was explicitly mentioning games with very prominent dynamic difficulty based on player performance. So no, I don't think the difficulty variance stemming from player power is the only factor to consider here.

2. Yes, and my initial comment explicitly mentioned action games only, and was directed at Lords of the Fallen, an action game. In case you were confused, I'm not talking about Pillars of Eternity here. If that deeply upsets you, feel free to make a thread in Site Feedback to complain about my ungentlemanly conduct. Furthermore, it was you who brought up arcade and arcade-like games, when you started talking about stages, powerups (and power-downs on death), chaining for score, and so forth. Maybe you shouldn't have done that, if you think that you needed to start again from scratch in those games after failing - one would expect the concept of continues to be familiar to even the most insular of autists at this point.

If you want to talk about other types of action games, feel free to. There might be an interesting discussion to have there about difficulty in games with resource management. Though I could point out that, for instance, the reward for beating an early "unbeatable" boss in Ninja Gaiden is unlocking the highest difficulty mode.

In a broader sense, rewards for skilled players don't have to be big, and a properly-balanced game would have a proper difficulty curve that accounts for both the probability of an average player gaining said bonuses, and for the cumulative impact of such acquired bonuses on the long-term balance. Similarly, the game doesn't have to punish players for bad skills too harshly, but neither should it be lenient towards sloppy gameplay (unless it is some sort of banal shit boring time-killer popamole crap, of course).

So the rewards shouldn't actually be meaningful, for balance reasons? Why have them at all, then? Why not reward the player with hidden, bonus content, like these unfairly difficult arcade games do? I certainly wouldn't mind some extra hidden bosses in a Souls game, as those tend to suffer from the "too punishing for beginners, too easy for veterans" syndrome as well.

I can't believe I have to explain such simple things.

I can't believe I'm being condescended to by someone talking about arcade games without understanding the concept of continues.

Don't worry bro, that's just a joke. I've seen people say so much stupid shit on the Codex over the years, that it's very easy to believe yours.

 

[felipepepe]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You're actually presenting good players with a different, harder challenge. Anyone can kill five enemies, rest, and kill another five, and a 5% XP bonus is irrelevant. But facing 100 enemies without resting is a challenge harder than even the boss battles in the game.

Would you say that ghosting in a stealth game is easy just because you avoid all combat and there's no "real" penalty for failure? Of course not, being seen in a ghost run is much more frustrating than dying in a regular run.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You're actually presenting good players with a different, harder challenge. Anyone can kill five enemies, rest, and kill another five, and a 5% XP bonus is irrelevant. But facing 100 enemies without resting is a challenge harder than even the boss battles in the game.

Would you say that ghosting in a stealth game is easy just because you avoid all combat and there's no "real" penalty for failure? Of course not, being seen in a ghost run is much more frustrating than dying in a regular run.

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

 

[DeepOcean]

Funny, from where I'm at it looks more like the exact opposite. Pillars would've been a better game had they not had to go in so many directions at once, trying to honor the stretch goal and backer reward promises they made in the KS.

You are in part right and in part wrong, yes, Od Nua and the stronghold were just filler, someone placed them there as placeholders and seems to never turned back to finish the job but there were a few things like the side quests on guilded valley. They were just fetch quests but Obsidian didn't even tried spicing them up, there were a few aspects of the lore that are somewhat interesting like the children with the souls of animals, those elemental spirits that are maelstroms of tortured soul made by animancy but instead of doing quests related to that stuff, you go kill bandits that attacked the blacksmith supply cart as if that sort of generic quest wasn't on every RPG ever and always bored the fuck out of the player. Obsidian hide the best parts of PoE's lore on info dumps and just made the "Please good sir, go kill those enemies for me and pick my mcguffin for 10 gold coins when you have 20.000." over and over, I don't think that can be attributed just to stretch goal overload.

 

[Irenaeus II]

Wow. This discussion got weird.

I shoehorned in the bit about Josh being an ultra-liberal to incentivize you to understand why PoE is banal-shit-boring.

Regardless of his worldview, I'm quite serious when I say that he seems to seize on the most obvious solution to any problem.

You're arguing with someone who named themself after a Final Fantasy character.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Sabin can perform wrestling moves on a moving train, it's okay to be weeaboo for him.

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

The idea is to reward you for doing the hard thing with more power so you can keep doing the hard thing when it's even harder. The ultra-experienced players interested in low level runs are usually creative enough to find other ways to limit experience gains.

 

[felipepepe]

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

You're forgetting how Dark Souls-like games play. When you rest or die all enemies respawn, so you'll kill them over and over again. A regular player dying like 3-5 times per area is still getting WAY more XP than a guy that clean it all in just one swoop and has a 200% XP bonus.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Sabin can perform wrestling moves on a moving train, it's okay to be weeaboo for him.

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

The idea is to reward you for doing the hard thing with more power so you can keep doing the hard thing when it's even harder. The ultra-experienced players interested in low level runs are usually creative enough to find other ways to limit experience gains.

I understand what the idea is, I just don't think it's necessary in action games, and tends to cause more problems than it solves. I can think of counterexamples where it works well, but all of them have a dynamic difficulty which causes the game to become more difficult in proportion to how much power it awards you, thus changing the gameplay style significantly.

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

You're forgetting how Dark Souls-like games play. When you rest or die all enemies respawn, so you'll kill them over and over again. A regular player dying like 3-5 times per area is still getting WAY more XP than a guy that clean it all in just one swoop and has a 200% XP bonus.

I guess. As a way of avoiding the need to grind, it makes a bit more sense. Still, I'd prefer it if also became more difficult as it did this, let you sequence break easier, unlock secret areas, and so forth. Kind of a pity Souls games in general don't do this.

Is Lord of the Fallen actually worth playing, by the way? Relative, to, say, replaying DS2 with the SotFS changes.

 

[Lurker King]

They don’t need the money from a small community such as the Codex and people who buy games such as AoD, SitS and Underrail, because they will sell millions to consoletards anyway.

You know, I remember posters on various forums saying this exact fucking thing when Black Isle and Troika Games were still around. They were so right.

Exactly! Their games were also MMOs hybrids sold digitaly on PS4 and Xbox for causal retards all over the world who can barely read. They also had a potent hype machine powered by game dorito-dew journos who will tell everyone how their games are great with a 10 in metascore. The industry was exactly like that. Your comparison makes perfect sense. Watch out, people! Bethesda, BioWare and Projekt RED are fragile and can be bankrupt tomorrow if grognards and other members of the Codex don’t buy their shit. Don’t pirate their products and support them! It can make all the difference in the world.

 

[Delterius]

The game I like is just like Beethoven and the games you like are just like Justin Bieber. Behold my insurmountable wit in my striking analogies.

Sounds legit.

 

[Irenaeus II]

I agree with him.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

But you're a FANBOY! Getting rid of the tag won't wash away the shame.

 

[Angthoron]

Exactly! Their games were also MMOs hybrids sold digitaly on PS4 and Xbox for causal retards all over the world who can barely read. They also had a potent hype machine powered by game dorito-dew journos who will tell everyone how their games are great with a 10 in metascore. The industry was exactly like that. Your comparison makes perfect sense. Watch out, people! Bethesda, BioWare and Projekt RED are fragile and can be bankrupt tomorrow if grognards and other members of the Codex don’t buy their shit. Don’t pirate their products and support them! It can make all the difference in the world.

Yes, my comparison makes sense. CDPR released a good single-player game with shoddy gameplay, and with strong story and atmosphere. Now, some retard goes advocating that hey, let's not pay them because it's apparently communism outside. What happens? Well, other retards listen and don't buy it. Sure, it might be a drop in the ocean. But it might also not be - retards make a very significant chunk of world's population. Next, the investors hold a meeting and say, hey, you know what, we gave you money, we didn't get a 500% return, what gives? You said you could make an RPG that sells. You know what, fuck you guys, remove this stupid "story" shit, cut out the wasteful "choice and consequence", look, we know what sells, explosions and modern guns. Go make that.

It's very cute, that thing you're advocating. Except, just for you to know - I dumped more money on each of the indies you've mentioned that amounts to several copies of W3. Not just a "couple of bux". Because I liked the things promised. But that doesn't mean that I'll be a dick and stop giving money to other people as well because lol AAA, that's just fucked-up logic. If I work in higher-tier companies, that means what, you don't need to fucking pay me for services my company provides? Yeah, right.

 

[felipepepe]

Is Lord of the Fallen actually worth playing, by the way? Relative, to, say, replaying DS2 with the SotFS changes.

Depends. It's a simplified Dark Souls clone, with few weapons, armors, enemies and bosses. Spells are almost non-existant and there's way less playstyle variations. And forget about the plot and NPCs, they are dumb as hell.

But it still has that Dark Souls-like combat, and that was enough for me to have a lot of fun.

 

[Lurker King]

Exactly! Their games were also MMOs hybrids sold digitaly on PS4 and Xbox for causal retards all over the world who can barely read. They also had a potent hype machine powered by game dorito-dew journos who will tell everyone how their games are great with a 10 in metascore. The industry was exactly like that. Your comparison makes perfect sense. Watch out, people! Bethesda, BioWare and Projekt RED are fragile and can be bankrupt tomorrow if grognards and other members of the Codex don’t buy their shit. Don’t pirate their products and support them! It can make all the difference in the world.

Yes, my comparison makes sense. CDPR released a good single-player game with shoddy gameplay, and with strong story and atmosphere. Now, some retard goes advocating that hey, let's not pay them because it's apparently communism outside. What happens? Well, other retards listen and don't buy it. Sure, it might be a drop in the ocean. But it might also not be - retards make a very significant chunk of world's population. Next, the investors hold a meeting and say, hey, you know what, we gave you money, we didn't get a 500% return, what gives? You said you could make an RPG that sells. You know what, fuck you guys, remove this stupid "story" shit, cut out the wasteful "choice and consequence", look, we know what sells, explosions and modern guns. Go make that.

Nigga, please! Since when became reasonable to put the holy names of Black Isle and Troika with the likes of CDPR? I’m not gonna waste my time explaining the differences. The numbers speak for themselves:

The Witcher 3 sells 4 million copies in two weeks

"Prior to release, over 1.5 million people pre-ordered the game. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt debuted at No. 1 in the UK software sales chart in its first launch week and the income grossed by the game is 600% higher than predecessor The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. It was also the best-selling video game in the UK in 2015 as of 26 May 2015, breaking the record previously held by Battlefield Hardline. It debuted at #1 on the Japan video game sales charts, selling 67,385 copies during its first week. Four million copies of the game were sold two weeks after its launch.[58] As of 11 June 2015, over 690,000 players activated copies of the game through GOG Galaxy".

 

[Excidium II]

I do agree with the sentiment but it's mainly because I'm a poor, so every monies spent on vidya gaemz is money that could have gone to other necessities such as eating food that isn't rice and beans. Because of that I'm much more inclined to pay for an independent game where I know every bux make a difference compared to just adding a drop to the ocean of an AAA's profit

 

[Copper]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You're actually presenting good players with a different, harder challenge. Anyone can kill five enemies, rest, and kill another five, and a 5% XP bonus is irrelevant. But facing 100 enemies without resting is a challenge harder than even the boss battles in the game.

Would you say that ghosting in a stealth game is easy just because you avoid all combat and there's no "real" penalty for failure? Of course not, being seen in a ghost run is much more frustrating than dying in a regular run.

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

Well, assuming the stealth game is an RPG, that's exactly how it would work, right, a raised character level leads to a better stealth skill? Even in a 'twitch' stealth game like Thief, the player's skill should be improving, both in terms of controlling Garret, and in knowing the AI's routines and quirks, so the gap between them and the AI widens. You are also literally rewarded for playing well in Thief by having more loot to buy more arrows, etc, to steal more loot, and so on.

 

[Telengard]

Sounds like a bad idea to reward someone for playing well by making the game easier for them, in action games at least.

You're actually presenting good players with a different, harder challenge. Anyone can kill five enemies, rest, and kill another five, and a 5% XP bonus is irrelevant. But facing 100 enemies without resting is a challenge harder than even the boss battles in the game.

Would you say that ghosting in a stealth game is easy just because you avoid all combat and there's no "real" penalty for failure? Of course not, being seen in a ghost run is much more frustrating than dying in a regular run.

I don't think it's easy or a bad way to challenge the player, I just think the reward isn't appropriate. To use your stealth analogy, it's as if ghosting a level in Thief made enemies in the next level less alert.

Well, assuming the stealth game is an RPG, that's exactly how it would work, right, a raised character level leads to a better stealth skill? Even in a 'twitch' stealth game like Thief, the player's skill should be improving, both in terms of controlling Garret, and in knowing the AI's routines and quirks, so the gap between them and the AI widens. You are also literally rewarded for playing well in Thief by having more loot to buy more arrows, etc, to steal more loot, and so on.

But conversely, that would also mean: in an rpg with variable amounts of rewards, you have to skip combats in order to maintain a solid, fun difficulty, while in RPG Thief you would have to stop sneaking, bump into things and get into fights in order to maintain difficulty.

 

[Telengard]

Yeah a game you can go through from start to finish without firing a single bullet is a "FPS".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97UpUFTAkcw&list=PL15560AAA35A9D857

Cute.

Can't beat Bubbles, but there's also Titanfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsnzPC6hcWo

 

[Mastermind]

Yeah a game you can go through from start to finish without firing a single bullet is a "FPS".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97UpUFTAkcw&list=PL15560AAA35A9D857

Cute.

Can't beat Bubbles, but there's also Titanfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsnzPC6hcWo

They're not FPSs either, they're action games with significant FPS components.

 

[Archibald]

My takeaway from this thread is that some people genuinely believe that players should not be awarded for playing well.

But conversely, that would also mean: in an rpg with variable amounts of rewards, you have to skip combats in order to maintain a solid, fun difficulty, while in RPG Thief you would have to stop sneaking, bump into things and get into fights in order to maintain difficulty.

Like, if you make a sold party in RPG game then its significantly easier than if you made a party of shit characters. If you know mechanics well of the game then its significantly easier than if you didn't know anything. If you are able to dodge 90% of boss's attacks then its much easier to kill him than if you were able to dodge only 30% of his attacks. If you don't award people for exploring content and searching for secrets then very few players will bother, because being good at the game won't give them anything worthwhile.

 

[T. Reich]

In a broader sense, rewards for skilled players don't have to be big, and a properly-balanced game would have a proper difficulty curve that accounts for both the probability of an average player gaining said bonuses, and for the cumulative impact of such acquired bonuses on the long-term balance. Similarly, the game doesn't have to punish players for bad skills too harshly, but neither should it be lenient towards sloppy gameplay (unless it is some sort of banal shit boring time-killer popamole crap, of course).

So the rewards shouldn't actually be meaningful, for balance reasons? Why have them at all, then? Why not reward the player with hidden, bonus content, like these unfairly difficult arcade games do? I certainly wouldn't mind some extra hidden bosses in a Souls game, as those tend to suffer from the "too punishing for beginners, too easy for veterans" syndrome as well.

I'll ignore your feeble personal attacks and focus on the only actual interesting counter-argument you made.

First of all, don't put words in my mouth - I didn't say that rewards should be meaningless, because it's nonsense.
"Hidden", or rather non-material rewards are a good way to preserve difficulty while rewarding skill. After all, from the game-as-Skinner-Box point of view, such rewards are only means to keep the player hooked, and the nature of the reward is of relatively minor concern. All the reward has to be is to be meaningful to the player at the time it is given out.
Speaking of "material" rewards that actually make the game easier if acquired - they don't have to be something exceptional (only satisfactory, or sometimes even token). They can be temporary as well. Reward can be immediately useful with high temporary impact (a temporary bonus, some sort of consumable item), it can be reasonably useful in the short-mid term (maybe a better weapon or armor that will eventually become obsolete, but is pretty good now), or potentially useful in the long term (a piece of super-weapon or rare set item that will give bonuses with other set pieces acquired later).

Action games usually balanced the relative ease of acquiring power-ups with the equal ease of losing them.

 

[Sensuki]

My takeaway from this thread is that some people genuinely believe that players should not be awarded for playing well.

Yeah this is hilarious. This is the reason why in games like Call of Duty MW2 and stuff you get rewarded for death streaks and things like that.

If you have skill, you should find it easy.

My personal belief is that games should be made for the best players, not the average joe, or babbling idiots. But then again I've played a lot of competitive games, so that is probably unsurprising.

 

[Zetor]

My takeaway from this thread is that some people genuinely believe that players should not be awarded for playing well.

Yeah this is hilarious. This is the reason why in games like Call of Duty MW2 and stuff you get rewarded for death streaks and things like that.

If you have skill, you should find it easy.

My personal belief is that games should be made for the best players, not the average joe, or babbling idiots. But then again I've played a lot of competitive games, so that is probably unsurprising.

I'll c/p one of my earlier posts on this subject... though I'm pretty sure this was discussed on the codex a few billion times previously.

The party becoming too powerful when going off the beaten path is a problem in pretty much every game (not just RPG) because of lazy design: optional content that rewards players for doing it by increasing their power. Devs need to balance for the crit path, so if you're doing every single sidequest, it'll pretty much destroy all challenge you can encounter on the main quest. PoE actually does somewhat OK on this front by shifting most of the difficult content into side quests and side areas (e.g. endless paths) to begin with... though honestly, a lot of the side content is easier than the crit path, so doing it isn't any evidence of "playing well".

In case of shooters and stuff, the answer is easy: high scores (or ~cheevos~). It has no actual gameplay effect, and lets the best players compete on the leaderboards. IMO the 'good' (non-lazy) solution in an RPG would be to design the game from the ground up to grant XP only after achieving certain objectives on the crit path, and optional content only rewarding the player in ways that don't directly affect player/party power: opening up certain options in later quests, getting a better ending for a particular faction, etc.