Thoughts about encounter design, structure and pacing in Path of the Damned difficulty

[tdphys]

Actually, I'm wrong, it doesn't need to be exponential.

What if we wanted to have a progression where the XP difference gaining a level that is 10 more then gaining xp from a level 4 levels behind.
Mathematically, this would be
xp(n) - xp(n-1) = 10* ( xp(n-4) - xp(n-5) )

If we start off with the 1000, 3000,6000,10000 levels in Pillars, we can get a recurrence that generates the rest up to level 12:
(done in python)

1000,
3000,
6000,
10000,
15000,
35000,
65000,
105000,
155000,
355000,
655000,
1055000,
1555000

This doesn't look so bad does it?

(coincidently, exponential multiplied by 1000):

1000,
2000,
7000,
20000,
54000,
148000,
403000,
1096000,
2980000,
8103000,
22026000,
59874000

Okay, that's a little more fearsome.

4 times, give probably what pillars needed to maintain approx level 1-4 pacing:


1000,
3000,
6000,
10000,
15000,
23000,
35000,
51000,
71000,
103000,
151000,
215000.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Let's look at Pillars of Eternity's wilderness encounters under Path of the Damned difficulty (The One True Difficulty Level™). Many of them are quite challenging. I would never call them "trash combat" and individually, they're pretty fun to overcome.

the group of four trolls in the middle of a forest that i fought during my first playthrough has suddenly grown to six trolls, i feel this change to be very challenging and fun

 

[Gord]

 

[Lhynn]

nothing of value

 

[Hatred]

Two months in and you haven't finished it yet. " PoE 10/10 GOTY : Can't actually be fucked playing it " as the new thread title please.

 

[Atchodas]

OP told himself that he played 6 man party at easy first then considered to go normal but stayed easy because difficulty was fine in some early posts about PoE in one of the threads ... now this pathetic scrub tried PoTD and he comes here saying : I THINK WE SOULD NERF ENCOUNTER ARROUND THE BOARD TO MAKE THEM LESS DIFFICULT , Fuck yourself dude seriously .. nerf encounters REALLY? Make POE easier ? are we playing the same game ?

 

[Ellef]

it's shit

 

[laclongquan]

I blame his new tag~

 

[hell bovine]

But even without fancy NPC enemies, I think some relatively minor tweaking of existing encounters could make PoE/PotD a better-paced experience. Of course, I imagine that as I progress in the game and my characters become more powerful, I might reach a point where this pacing issue sorts itself out naturally, though at the expense of difficulty across the board.

Yeah, the pacing becomes "fuck, combat, not again" somewhere during middle game and continues towards the very end.

The problem with Pillars is that somewhere along the way the game turns into that giant xvarts village from BG1, because the developers seem to believe that you can increase game difficulty by increasing spawn numbers of critters that ceased to be a challenge several levels ago.

 

[Infinitron]

Let's look at Pillars of Eternity's wilderness encounters under Path of the Damned difficulty (The One True Difficulty Level™). Many of them are quite challenging. I would never call them "trash combat" and individually, they're pretty fun to overcome.

the group of four trolls in the middle of a forest that i fought during my first playthrough has suddenly grown to six trolls, i feel this change to be very challenging and fun

I'm not sure if you are aware that PotD does more than increase enemy numbers. Take a look at Gord here, who seems to have gone from thinking that PoE is lame to thinking it's actually kinda cool just from checking out PotD.

Yeah, the pacing becomes "fuck, combat, not again" somewhere during middle game and continues towards the very end.

The problem with Pillars is that somewhere along the way the game turns into that giant xvarts village from BG1, because the developers seem to believe that you can increase game difficulty by increasing spawn numbers of critters that ceased to be a challenge several levels ago.

I'm not an anti-trash-mobbist, and fights like that don't, as a rule, make me go "fuck, not again". That Xvart village is a fond memory from BG1. As long as there are other things as well, that is.

Again, it's all about the pacing. Quick trash mob fights where they make sense, slower tough nuts to crack where they make sense.

OP told himself that he played 6 man party at easy first then considered to go normal but stayed easy because difficulty was fine in some early posts about PoE in one of the threads ... now this pathetic scrub tried PoTD and he comes here saying : I THINK WE SOULD NERF ENCOUNTER ARROUND THE BOARD TO MAKE THEM LESS DIFFICULT , Fuck yourself dude seriously .. nerf encounters REALLY? Make POE easier ? are we playing the same game ?

Joined:
Apr 23, 2015

FYI, I have never even loaded up PoE on any difficulty other than PotD.

 

[Delterius]

I'm not an anti-trash-mobbist

Well, in this very same post you are defending the idea that some of the game's detractors should check PotD. That difficulty and challenge are vital to the enjoyment of the game. So shouldn't you be against trash mobs of all kinds?

Let me speak about my own experiences. Strangely enough, when comparing my time with the IE games and that with PoE I remember that I never cared much about the former games' higher difficulty settings. For one since I had it in my head that those would distort the 'actual' monsters from D&D. For another since, those D&D games had endearing qualities beyond challenge.

Why do people re-play Baldur's Gate seventeen times over a decade? Isn't the game a big cakewalk by then? Well, that probably has something to do with how 'broken' the game is. At least when compared to PoE. Thinking about my favorite part of those games, the spell repertoire, I can entertain myself with broken and truly interesting spells from every level. In PoE, everything is a check and balance against each other, including the spells. There's nothing 'broken'. Everything depends on the encounters themselves to have any value.

Considering the fundamentals that Sawyer introduced, PoE should have been a sleek, linear experience a la Blackguards that fits the squad based tactical gameplay that it focused on. Trash mobs, difficulty spikes and cliffs, all that sort of thing, are better left for more adventury games, like BG.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, in this very same post you are defending the idea that some of the game's detractors should check PotD. That difficulty and challenge are vital to the enjoyment of the game. So shouldn't you be against trash mobs of all kinds?

Uh, nope? Like I said, difficulty and challenge where it fits. When I spend a bunch of time clearing out numerous groups of lions or boars or whatever and end up having to splooge a whole bunch of spells to defeat them, in my book, that's not "bad encounter design", but it is an unusual roadblock in the game's expected sense of pacing. It's not "this is bad combat", it's more "cool fight, but why am I doing this so much and spending so much time on it?"

If you've played The Banner Saga and fought the Dredge, you'll know exactly what I mean here.

Let me speak about my own experiences. Strangely enough, when comparing my time with the IE games and that with PoE I remember that I never cared much about the former games' higher difficulty settings. For one since I had it in my head that those would distort the 'actual' monsters from D&D. For another since, those D&D games had endearing qualities beyond challenge.

Well, the IE games didn't have to be set to a higher difficulty level to have sufficient amounts of challenging combat.

Why do people re-play Baldur's Gate seventeen times over a decade? Isn't the game a big cakewalk by then? Well, that probably has something to do with how 'broken' the game is. At least when compared to PoE. Thinking about my favorite part of those games, the spell repertoire, I can entertain myself with broken and truly interesting spells from every level. In PoE, everything is a check and balance against each other, including the spells. There's nothing 'broken'. Everything depends on the encounters themselves to have any value.

Considering the fundamentals that Sawyer introduced, PoE should have been a sleek, linear experience a la Blackguards that fits the squad based tactical gameplay that it focused on. Trash mobs, difficulty spikes and cliffs, all that sort of thing, are better left for more adventury games, like BG.

I'm not sure PoE is really that unbroken. I can suggest a few spells that I've found if you like.

But in any case, I think it's a pretty extreme thing to say that you can't have an "adventurey RPG" if there's balance. Balance, therefore Blackguards? I mean c'mon.

Also Blackguards wasn't really all that balanced.

 

[Delterius]

When I spend a bunch of time clearing out numerous groups of lions or boars or whatever and end up having to splooge a whole bunch of spells to defeat them, in my book, that's not "bad encounter design", but it is an unusual roadblock in the game's expected sense of pacing. It's not "this is bad combat", it's more "cool fight, but why am I doing this so much?"

Yes, but that actually confirms what I said. The reason why you found those boars interesting is because they took a whole bunch of spells to defeat. That makes them more than trash. Uninteresting filler, perhaps, but not trash.

But in any case, I think it's a pretty extreme thing to say that you can't have an "adventurey RPG" if there's balance. Balance, therefore Blackguards? I mean c'mon.

When I said 'Adventury' RPG, I meant to make use of Sawyer's own words. In the IE games, challenges are framed not entirely unlike puzzles. It is all a matter of finding a key which fits. The means to damage Vampiric Wolves. To resist the Basilisk's gaze. To breach the Mage's Stoneskin. So it goes. Running into one of these without the means to right away figure some out through the mess isn't necessarily a bad thing. Be it in terms of player experience or game design. It is a matter of failling, learning a bit more about the world and then coming back to solve the 'puzzle'. Therefore BG most of all is a 'simulationist' game. Its world first, combat second.

Pillars is completely different. Its foundational principle is to maximize player choice through near competitive balance. There's a reason why people/Sawyer drew comparisons with League of Legends and I'd go further, the process by which the game's rule system was built -- by fan coordination and developer reiteration -- reminds me an awful lot of the progressive build up of Mobas and general WC3 maps back in the day. Provided you aren't grossly underleveled, you likely always have the tools to overcome obstacles. The focus is combat first, world second. All things find their purpose in a balanced, fair and challenging combat situation.

As such, equipment, spells, classes, monsters, consummables and, most importantly, the order in which the player might potentially meet each of them, must be carefully crafted in order to keep everything in place. That's why there are combat only spells, why the benefits of attributes are so small, why the itemization is leagues behind BG2. Its just the kind of game Pillars is. There's nothing extreme about that and I think it is self evident that this kind of game benefits a lot from a Blackguards style linearity.

 

[Infinitron]

You're ignoring the fact that I found the boars interesting but still thought I probably could have gotten a better overall experience if they were quicker and easier to kill.

Re: balance = Blackguards
*shrug* I think it's fascinating the way it is. And also that you're looking at a very specific aspect of the IE games.

You say people replayed them because they wanted to "play with broken spells". Is that really true? I'd say there were probably more who replayed because they wanted to try different classes. And since you say PoE aims to maximize player choice there, well...

(In truth, however, the real reason people replayed them is that they were just good, different choices or experimentation be damned.)

 

[bminorkey]

Level balancing is always a delicate issue isn't it? On the one hand, letting your players outlevel things means a lot of the quests and the content becomes meaningless. On the other hand, level scaling.

A little idea not necessarily related to PoE. I feel like it would be nice if some low level quests had a "heroic" version. Devs spend a lot of time creating branching options for questlines, but often the branching is just there for the sake of roleplaying. I can either report the farmer to the authorities, kill him, or let him go; it's nice to have this kind of choice but not very interesting from a gameplay perspective. So what if instead of classical "branching" quests had some easy paths and some difficult paths? Instead of being just a farmer, the farmer was a retired but skilled knight. Reporting him to the authorities or letting him go is the easy path. But you can also choose to challenge him to combat, and that's more difficult, because he is a very strong opponent and wears an excellent set of armor.

A level 3 character could maybe try to challenge the knight to combat, but he'd die quickly. However someone doing the quest at level 6 could attempt the challenge, and if they win, they'll get an extra bonus from the quest in the form of the knight's armor.

You can't challenge the Lich directly, you need to infiltrate his castle and disable the power sources that he taps into in order to weaken him first. Or can you? Maybe a level 12 party can. And if it wins, it will receive some of the Lich's magically-powered equipment, which is otherwise rendered powerless because of the disabled power sources.

It can also go the other way around, of course.

 

[Lhynn]

You're ignoring the fact that I found the boars interesting.

Thats it, thats all. im done here. These are the standards, theres nothing left to discuss.

 

[Tigranes]

Thats it, thats all. im done here.

Woohoo!

Edit: Okay, okay. So if the point is trash mobs should be less difficult so the player gets by them faster, well, I don't know. I'd like every fight to be difficult and interesitng (and so they are no longer trash mobs), but (1) that's pretty much impossible in an IE style RPG given how much combat it has, and (2) making it difficult enough for my / many Codexers' standards in that fashion would mean a lot of players who get stuck on every god damn battle.

I suppose it all comes down to the fact that the gap between each dififculty level should be a lot higher, which is something that applies to almost every RPG out there. I wonder if it really is because devs don't tend to be very good at games in many cases, and so they think it's hard enough already.

 

[tdphys]

I can see the necessity of trash mobs adding danger to an area for a certain level, and maybe add suspense to wandering territory. The mobs are only hard if you're under-leveled, and easy otherwise. Too many to blanket an area makes higher level a chore to clear out. To that effect, I'd suggest wandering bands of trash mobs would have been nicer in pillars; let's you have the danger*control without the overpopulation ( I'm thinking bottom part of the gorge and most of elmchore, er elmshores ), same with the skaen temple.

One of the better levels I thougt was the patrolling ogres in Od-Nua, added life to the level. It would have even been nicer if they'd scripted all the ogres coming for you at the call of the sentry though.

 

[Lhynn]

Thats it, thats all. im done here.

Woohoo!

Edit: Okay, okay. So if the point is trash mobs should be less difficult so the player gets by them faster, well, I don't know. I'd like every fight to be difficult and interesitng (and so they are no longer trash mobs), but (1) that's pretty much impossible in an IE style RPG given how much combat it has, and (2) making it difficult enough for my / many Codexers' standards in that fashion would mean a lot of players who get stuck on every god damn battle.

I suppose it all comes down to the fact that the gap between each dififculty level should be a lot higher, which is something that applies to almost every RPG out there. I wonder if it really is because devs don't tend to be very good at games in many cases, and so they think it's hard enough already.

Dude, he found interesting a goddamn trash fight. against boars in the middle of the wilderness.
I dont know what kind of standards infi must have, where something that is closer to a random encounter of an extremely bored and boring DM is enough to be memorable. Even the difficulty is exaggerated, only reason i remember it is because of the embarrassing display of shit pathfinding it showcased.
The only reason the lion encounter he brought up before is remembered is just because of the utter retardation of said encounter, it makes no logical sense whatsoever.
Other than that, character system is borked as i explained earlier, it literally forces everything to be the same by enforcing averages and using % boosts that keep it static no matter how high the numbers go. This creates a dynamic that doesnt evolve in mid or high level gameplay. It makes for repetition in a genre where the main draw is the interaction between the character and the world and how the dynamic of it evolves as the player character grows.

 

[hell bovine]

Yeah, the pacing becomes "fuck, combat, not again" somewhere during middle game and continues towards the very end.

The problem with Pillars is that somewhere along the way the game turns into that giant xvarts village from BG1, because the developers seem to believe that you can increase game difficulty by increasing spawn numbers of critters that ceased to be a challenge several levels ago.

I'm not an anti-trash-mobbist, and fights like that don't, as a rule, make me go "fuck, not again". That Xvart village is a fond memory from BG1. As long as there are other things as well, that is.

Again, it's all about the pacing. Quick trash mob fights where they make sense, slower tough nuts to crack where they make sense.

And those few tough encounters loose any challenge when the party has leveled up enough. I have finished PoE on PotD, and the problem with those mindless encounters is that you get nothing from winning them: no challenge and therefore no fun in defeating the monsters, the loot that you get are some ingredients that you can buy anyway, and no experience, because of the way bestiary works.

By the time I got to the xvart village in BG1, there wasn't any point in fighting them either, so I just skipped it. But you can't avoid much of the filler combat in PoE, because the majority of the game is like this.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I'm not sure if you are aware that PotD does more than increase enemy numbers.

yes it also bloats the enemy hp and stuff

i did a short test ride of potd up until getting to chapter 2 and it already managed to bore me to tears

but i guess i just dont appreciate the depth presented by such rich and inspired encounters as lions and boars

is watching paint dry perchance your favourite pastime activity?

 

[Infinitron]

I find challenge rewarding. After a decade of popamole games where you can't really lose, it doesn't seem like it should be that surprising when I go "Hellz yeah, now you're talking" when I see Eder getting torn to bits after I fail to support him properly.

I suppose I can understand that it may not be as impressive for those who have spent all that time playing the "BG2 highlight reels" again and again.

By the time I got to the xvart village in BG1, there wasn't any point in fighting them either, so I just skipped it. But you can't avoid much of the filler combat in PoE, because the majority of the game is like this.

Actually, per my OP, you can avoid lots of it, because it's off in those optional Deathclaw Promontory-like areas. Assuming you're talking about those tough encounters that become easy when the party has levelled up enough.

 

[Darth Roxor]

or maybe you are just a scrub with no standards

 

[Hatred]

Lets be real. Infinitron is the King of Copypaste. Of course he supports Copypaste encounter design.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I find challenge rewarding. After a decade of popamole games where you can't really lose, it doesn't seem like it should be that surprising when I go "Hellz yeah, now you're talking" when I see Eder getting torn to bits after I fail to support him properly.

What do you mean by this, exactly? Could you give a kind of a blow-by-blow of what you did wrong? I'm wondering because my problem with difficulty in RtwP is that it often involves failure by omission rather than by decision, i.e. that you simply couldn't be bothered to pause enough or manually manipulate each of your party members consistently.