Encounter design - best and worst CRPGs?

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Playing the old Gold Box game Gateway to the Savage Frontier made me realize that having one of the best combat engines in the history of CRPGs doesn't help when the encounter design is boring, unimaginative and downright lazy.
I'm currently at Tuern and probably 1/3 though the game and so far there has been few unique and even fewer memorable battles. On every map you fight the same fucking battles again and again. Thankfully most maps have a limit of about 5 random encounters (but they are all the same random enconters) but on some maps I have succumbed to something I very rarely do - using the Flee option or saving and reloading in order to escape the utter tediousness of fighting the same fucking group of Northmen for the hundreth time. Even the set encounters get repeated in this game, like in Luskan where you fight the same group of Pirates and Margoyles in the five different mansions.
Even the "boss" battles are boring, with the boss being just a regular Kraken Captain or Hosttower Mage, of which you have killed dozens already.

Congratulations to Don Daglow on this "achievement" of lazy and unimaginative encounter design. And ditching the Parley option was just icing on the cake. Even going into Taverns in you had just the option of Fight or Leave. No drinking, relaxing and talking.


My other "favourite" when it comes to poor encounter design is Knights of Legend. You never ever meet a mixed group of monsters. It's always 6-10 of the same type. In this game the first thing I did was purchasing horses for my party so that they could run from random encounters.

Honorary mention must go to th Bard's Tale games that threw random encounters at your every few seconds (1 and 2) or steps (3). But at least the random encounters were totally random and varied.


Now to the games that did it right.

Of all the games I've played I think Baldur's Gate 2 is in a class of it's own when it comes to good and varied encounter design. In how many other games than the Baldur's Gate game do you get to fight against several other parties of adventurers?
And then there's all the "boss fight" against Dragons and Liches (both of which are far better implemented than their weak Gold Box counterparts) and the other Bhaalspawn.
Even though the combat system could have been better (I disliked it at first, but have grown to like it) the enocunter design and wide range of options more than makes up for it, IMO.

The Icewind Dale games also had quite a good encounter design, but hade more filler combat and less special encounters than the BG games. But it was a nice change to go from very powerful single enemies to fighting large groups of enemies. Especially the Severed Hand had some very good battles against armies of shadowed elves.

Of the old school games I think Pool of Radiance, Death Knights of Krynn, Dark Queen of Krynn and Pools of Darkness had good and varied encounter design.
I liked the huge battles in PoR. Much more fun with one mother of all battles than dozens of smaller copy pasted battles that only serve to annoy the player (unless you are a compulsive grinder) and whittle down the HP of the party.
These games also had limited and varied random encounters.

I played Death Knights of Krynn before Gateway to the Savage Frontier and it's remarkable how one game could do it right and the next one do it all wrong. In DKoK nearly every battle was unique and there was usually a reason for the encounters, while in GttSF it's just "Monsters Attack! Fight or Flee?"

Of the other old school CRPGs most of the classics had adequate encounter design, but most of them were rather random and thus quite varied.

Of the more recent crop, ToEE is a game with some decent encounters. It does suffer a lot from repetitive filler combat, though. I hear KotC has good encounter design too.

There's still a lot of room for improvement on this aspect of cRPGs.

If you cut out a lot of the filler, Dragon Age has some really good encounters. Archers attacking from behind destructible cover or elevated positions, mages that cat area-of-effect attacks in small areas to split your party up while ranged attackers pepper you from behind and meat walls keep you in the killzone, single enemies scripted to lure you into traps and ambushes, spiders that will ensnare your party, dragons that require unique tactics and have special attacks that can nearly instakill you if you're not careful, etc . This is way, way better than even the Baldur's Gate games in most cases, although all the Infinity Engine titles come very close from time to time. The only thing really holding the game back are the simplified character system and, as mentioned, the filler trash mobs everywhere.

As for weak encounter design... Arcanum and Fallout 2 both compete for the crown. Of all the most fondly-remembered RPGs, they have some of the most consistently lame and shitty encounter design ever. Now, Fallout 2 does have some good ones, but they are few and far between. The only thing that saves both is that you occasionally have to vary tactics to take a certain enemy type down (like the lava golems in Arcanum) but overall it's just lazy "here's 3 identical enemies in a room, kill them and move to the next." It's kind of shocking how much better the first Fallout game's encounters are.

Oh, come to think of it, Avadon's encounter design sucks too. Some good boss fights that require special tactics to bring enemies down, but god damn is there a fuckton of filler. I don't think I've seen an RPG with more trash enemies to fight. The worst part is it makes up like 90% of the game.

And of course, Neverwinter Nights goes without saying. It's like they literally just copy-pasted the same five enemies through the entire fucking game, with only one or at most two different ones per level. I honestly have trouble believing how the developer who made Baldur's Gate 2 could churn out such utter garbage.

I thought I had seen it all until I played Final Fantasy Tactics (modded). There are no filler battles (technically there are random encounters if you travel back and forth a lot, but I just skipped those), all story battles are unique. You always come up against new enemies, with new abilities, different terrain that plays a huge role in how you approach them. And since you constantly change and respec your squad, no two encounters play alike. In terms of tactical combat, this is as good as it gets.

Too bad it has both anime art style and is made for consoles/hand helds.

How?

Indeed. Nor does it explore homoerotic relationships in a fantasy setting. But given the things it does exceptionally well, I'm willing to forgive these shortcomings.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...g-like-tactics-ogre-fuckin-rocks.56310/page-4
spekkio's post halfway through

You say that like an art style can be inherently bad.

Not objectively maybe.
But I just can't stand anime anymore than I can stand listening to rap and "R&B".

Interesting, didn't know about that, thanks!

Understandable. Unfortunate, but understandable. FFT is a great game.

Worst encounters: got to agree, its Fallout and Arcanum. In both encounters dont even feel like they were designed but randomly put together.Especially bad when we consider that you have a turn based combat in there and could do awesome stuff if designed properly.

Best: BG2 had some good ones but ultimately they got repetitive fast, fortunately different kinds of enemies changes that a bit. I also liked encounters in ToEE but maybe thats because it has an awesome engine for this kind of stuff...

I disagree when it comes to ToEE and Dragon Age. The former does have some good encounters and boss battles especially towards the end but for the most part you're fighting groups of bugbears or something equally boring. It's not bad but it's not especially good either and it's fun mostly because the combat system is just so good.

I can't remember a single encounter from DA:O because you're fighting the same enemies over and over and over and over again with very little variety. There's little difference between filler content and "important" content because it all feels exactly the same. The difference between fight A and fight B is usually just that the same enemies are positioned somewhat differently and there may occasionally be some tougher HP-bloated enemy to spice it up a little. Some effort was clearly put in designing these encounters but you can get through all of them with pretty much the same tactics because there's no difference between fighting a Darkspawn or a human. Dragons are just big HP sponges and fighting them is unbelieveably boring. I think it's a good example of encounter desing gone wrong, although the combat system and terrible pacing are also to blame. I get that you might DA:O's encounter design better than the first BG's but seriously, it's nowhere near being even in the same league with BG2.

Agreed on Arcanum having terrible encounters.

Remember what JA2 did with only 3 groups of enemies (+tanks and weapons)?

Yeah.

It's true there were many a bugbear, but you could avoid those fights if you wore the temple robes. The fight against Hedrack and his minions on level 4 was very cool. With Barkinar roaming the hallways before the main fight scoffing at the party when you parlay, and Hedrack summoning Iuz (his GOD) to beat the party's ass. That whole setup was really well designed.

ToEE had a pretty good mix of different encounters, if you don't count the temple bugbears and other guards (who you don't have to fight necessarily).

DAO encounter design was complete and utter shit, every fight to the beginning to the end of the game was basically the same thing.

Mysteries of Westgate had what i'd call a good encounter design, there were no filler mobs, as a result every fight was a bit memorable or at least felt unique.

BG2 provided so much variety that i can play it for 10+ time and not get bored.

Yeah, I am not sure if DA suggestion wasnt just a joke or something. How can you have varied and interesting encounters with two-three constantly reused enemies...

For worst.. Fallout, probably. I always thought the combat aspect of Fallout was the only crippling weakness the game had.

Best? Shit, I dunno, maybe X-COM?

Although that is before the crazy v113 with its hordes. Remember pre113 RE battle fondly. post113 it's a bit like work, especially after we got full outfits for everybody and his brothers.

I think MotB was quite exceptional as far as encounter design goes, but maybe I'm just glorifying my memory of it. I didn't like the combat system in BG 2 at all but it had decent encounter design. The expansion however was great as far as encounters go. Witcher 2 was pretty good. Deus Ex, if it counts as an RPG, was great. I'm not sure where to cut the line as to what counts as an encounter in VtMB, but that game was exceptional as far as 'events' go.

I think Pools of Darkness was more memorable for it's locations than the encounters, although the two did have good synergy at least. Bards Tale 1 might well have chucked a lot of random battles at you, but it also had one of the most memorable CRPG encounters I can ever remember - 4 groups of 99 berzerkers. I'm struggling to think of any other CRPG's since then where you have to fight an entire army of opponents (even if it did come down to just breathing a lot of fire in their general direction).

This is one area where MMO's have significantly overtaken single player games in many respects. Compare the design of some of the better raidbosses in WoW vs. key encounters in single player RPG's and the lack of memorable encounter design is staggering. I only remember one battle in DA:O (High Dragon) that genuinely made me feel that I had taken part in something epic.

Son, you've been missing out. If you never played fft maybe you could play the easy type hack but I recommend the full 1.3 hack that is found on insanedifficulty.com. I'll warn you, it'll take you for a spin if you don't know the mechanics (I didn't know them and I had to learn them quickly or restart, a tip: don't grind, try not to level too much and think about long term character development. I hate reading manuals and faqs so I had to restart like 3 times after playing half of the game because I fucked up but that's just me)

As for great encounter design, once again I think mods fix shit up. Undead Targos in IW2, some of the fights on Improved Anvil and Tactics for BG2 are great, other than that, Geneforge 5 had well thought filler combat that I really liked and Knights of the Chalice had some great fights too.

What about AoD?