Jaesun
Fabulous Ex-Moderator
The Final Battle in Pools of Darkness.
Saark said:In a given encounter, changing the difficulty level shouldn't mean that his "press a for awesome skill of doom of darkness" suddenly deals double damage. Instead he should be able to cast something else that's even worse, better yet, that counters whatever you might use to survive it in the first place.
thesisko said:So it sounds like Sawyer "gets it", but still people find the encounter design in MotB to be mediocre. So, what was lacking? And shouldn't be enough to play with the numbers to tune an encounter up/down if it's interesting and engaging at its core?
BG1 didn't have any goblins.Demnogonis Saastuttaja said:Huh, 9 posts and I don't have anything to add. What's happened to the codex? Oh hey it's Jasede, how are you bro?
Anyway, none of OP's examples are entirely correct. BG2 has a bunch of chaff encounters, inappropriately leveled thugs and such, and not much of it is challenging. It has it's moments, but a big problem is cutscene-invulnerability and other cheesy shit like that. Personally I liked BG1 more - maybe a group of goblins isn't that interesting but encountering some roving goblins in the woods makes sense and when you're low level, your characters might die to bad luck if nothing else.
thesisko said:I'm talking the other way around though. As in, he already does all that fancy stuff, but on easier difficulties you'll take less damage, immunities become % resistances, enemy buffs aren't as strong so you get away with not dispelling them etc.
Why wouldn't it work to initially tune for a good challenge and then tone it down by changing numbers?
Saark said:Of course you can imagine some super heavy fight that throws all these nifty mechanics at the player. You still want "everybody" to beat it though, don't you? So to make a game challenging, you will most likely have to start at the "everybody will be able to beat this" foundation, then increasing several parameters of that fight. Be it additional enemies, increasing spell power, gaining resistances/immunities or something else.
Wouldn't it generate good publicity and better reviews if the game became known for having a challenging-but-fair "Hard/Insane" mode, while still being easy enough at default difficulty?Saark said:And if you actually wanted to create challenging fights in a new game, you would either have to sacrifice the thought that it will become at least somewhat popular, or scratch every single idea you had about challenging and engaging combat.
thesisko said:Wouldn't practically everyone be able to beat Baldur's Gate 2 if the default difficulty restricted all enemies to trivial buffs and spells, reduced NCP damage 75%, removed random encounters when resting, added auto-rest when out-of-combat and knocked companions unconscious instead of killing them? And it probably would still be more interesting at this difficulty level than Dragon Age, even if it was no more difficult.
thesisko said:Wouldn't it generate good publicity and better reviews if the game became known for having a challenging-but-fair "Hard/Insane" mode, while still being easy enough at default difficulty?
Crispy said:I actually hated the final fight in New Vegas. Legate Lanius was certainly an interesting character, and the Speech method of dealing with him was mildly rewarding, but it was over so quickly that one never really felt they even barely accomplished much after dealing with him.
Overweight Manatee said:For D&D games and related systems it should be really easy to scale encounters for different difficulty levels.
Crispy said:Fighting him was equally lame unless possibly for an uber-melee build, because the terrain on which you have to maneuver is much too highly restricted, with his tent on top and your stupid companions blocking any retreat.
Time and resource management on an expansion-sized schedule and budget. Plus NWN2's hardest setting makes enemies do double damage and that's just wrong.thesisko said:Why did the other devs, according to Sawyer, stop him from requesting "IWD2 levels of difficulty", instead of saying "OK, but only for the hardest setting"?
If we're strictly talking about combat encounters, you can compensate for the relative lack of variety in enemy types by a sufficiently complex combat system, a great variety of party customization (equipment, skills, etc.), decent NPC AI, and the playing field designed to interact with the NPCs and PCs in such a way that tactical combat is encouraged (if not outright required).Surf Solar said:Interesting discussion. While mostly we're talking BG2 or D&D games with a wide variation of critters, how would you design interesting encounters in a fallout game, which lacks bigger variation of critters and so on? Don't want you to do my homework for me, I am just interested in your opinion, as I'm doing some optional "dungeons" at the moment and want to make it as interesting as possible. :great:
Surf Solar said:Interesting discussion. While mostly we're talking BG2 or D&D games with a wide variation of critters, how would you design interesting encounters in a fallout game, which lacks bigger variation of critters and so on? Don't want you to do my homework for me, I am just interested in your opinion, as I'm doing some optional "dungeons" at the moment and want to make it as interesting as possible. :great:
thesisko said:Overweight Manatee said:For D&D games and related systems it should be really easy to scale encounters for different difficulty levels.
So why has this been done so poorly? At least that's the impression I get, since people regard certain games as "too hard" and others as "too easy". For instance, ToEE, IWD2 and SoZ are regarded as being pretty hard.
Would it, for instance, have been impossible to tune MotB to be as hard as IWD2 on the hardest setting but still have the same difficulty on normal?
Why did the other devs, according to Sawyer, stop him from requesting "IWD2 levels of difficulty", instead of saying "OK, but only for the hardest setting"?
Mastermind said:Surf Solar said:Interesting discussion. While mostly we're talking BG2 or D&D games with a wide variation of critters, how would you design interesting encounters in a fallout game, which lacks bigger variation of critters and so on? Don't want you to do my homework for me, I am just interested in your opinion, as I'm doing some optional "dungeons" at the moment and want to make it as interesting as possible. :great:
You don't need critters at all to have a large variety of enemies. Different weapons and abilities can provide a great deal of interesting situations. The most interesting BG2 fights were usually against other NPCs, not monsters.
Overweight Manatee said:IMO, the best you can do is to have enemies that are using the environment well. Place short ranged high-initiative enemies around blind corners, snipers that hold a position at the end of a long corridor, etc.
Fallout actually had a lot of situations like this. Using choke points is essential to managing the late-game enemies (it's cheesy, I admit), melee characters are there to knock your ass around while sharpshooters do the real damage, and sometimes traps exist to mess you up in the middle of encounters, usually appearing where you least want them. Playing with locked doors can also be extremely entertaining, again cheesy, but still important as far as environment design for fights goes. It's not exactly Panzer General, but I've found most of the problems with Fallout's combat don't come from the problems in positioning and environment design, but rather they come from poor weapon balance and the fact that aiming for the eyes usually trumps everything else.Saark said:Unfortunately more tactical games with a top down view don't seem to use the environment very much. Coming back to FO1 or BG2 I can't think of any fight that actually was severely limited by the space you could fight in.
sea said:Dragon Age: Origins, if not for its shitty character system and lack of variety, also would have had better encounters in places than Baldur's Gate 2 - it's one of the few RPGs in its style I've seen where positioning in the environment actually did matter and where the AI would often exploit your weaknesses (archers pinning your party down from above while mages hit them with fireballs, then tanks running in to mop up). Baldur's Gate 2 unfortunately puts most of its fights in tight quarters and unless you exploit the fog of war mechanics or use meta knowledge, the only real tactics come down to prebuffs since things like positioning, flanking etc. are basically handled automatically (or even made irrelevant with certain skills), and most fight arenas are too confined for elevation to matter.