Blaine
Cis-Het Oppressor
One quibble I've yet to see mentioned (or at least explored in-depth) is how dry, regimented, uniform, and just overall utterly predictable the itemization can be in this game.
There's an orderly selection of food for every stat. They're all interchangeable with their counterparts, except for which stat is affected: Hot Sauce Hotdogs bestow +10 Endurance and +1 Might for 600 seconds, Teaberry Toasties bestow +10 Endurance and +1 Dexterity for 600 seconds, Ratburg Roasties bestow +10 Endurance and +1 Intelligence for 600 seconds, et cetera. Player-controlled enchants are the same, requiring one each of three categories of ingredients and some skrilla to make: 1 Bibblydoo, 1 Smitherwidden, 1 Zambone and 200 copper for +4 Accuracy on anything; 1 Ziprock, 1 Dungerang, 1 Smitheepop, and 200 copper for 1.15x damage on anything; 1 Erdyskronk, 1 Shinnyzoom, 1 Cropadonk, and 1200 copper for +4 and 1.15x together; 1 Flammensmurfer, 1 Adracadabra, 1 Koolkrepuscle, and 300 copper to add a fire effect; 1 Snakesnack, 1 Opa-opal, 1 Flimmyflam, and 300 copper to add a poison effect....
Almost every single crafting ingredient is pretty much interchangeable. Oh, another plant! +1 to a slot of one or more recipes. Of course the ingredients are really only a gateway to unlocking the enchant so you can pay a X00(0) copper for it.
Weapons and armor, well, it's a flat-out case of six of one, half a dozen of the other. Trade DR incrementally for slower action recovery, and that's the whole armor system. Weapon deals more damage, it's slower; has more damage types, less overall damage; ranged, slower overall; short-range ranged, get a DR penetration bonus or fire/reload slightly faster; and on and on. Not to mention, the enchanted items you find have sometimes one unique enchantment (maybe more in exceptional cases), but are otherwise just about the same as their non-special counterparts. +5 Deflection rings, +5 all resistances rings/capes, +10 or +15 to one stat rings/medallions/gloves, and so on are much more common in the first half.
Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus fucking Christmas cocks, it's like a severely autistic child had at the game, except instead of arranging the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms into perfectly straight and sorted columns surrounded by concentric rings of grain nuggets, instead he meticulously arranged and straightened everything about the game mechanics.
Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment were MUCH more organic with their itemization. They were nothing like this. This system feels planned, artificial, cadenced, paced, deliberate, predictable, mundane, controlled. I think part of it is that character levels are pretty low, so you won't be finding wildly differentiated enchanted items... but that's not all of it. Most of it was this harebrained quest for perfect balance with absolutely no cheesing and nothing shitty, nothing too powerful, everything's got to be as good as (interchangeable with) everything else.
There's an orderly selection of food for every stat. They're all interchangeable with their counterparts, except for which stat is affected: Hot Sauce Hotdogs bestow +10 Endurance and +1 Might for 600 seconds, Teaberry Toasties bestow +10 Endurance and +1 Dexterity for 600 seconds, Ratburg Roasties bestow +10 Endurance and +1 Intelligence for 600 seconds, et cetera. Player-controlled enchants are the same, requiring one each of three categories of ingredients and some skrilla to make: 1 Bibblydoo, 1 Smitherwidden, 1 Zambone and 200 copper for +4 Accuracy on anything; 1 Ziprock, 1 Dungerang, 1 Smitheepop, and 200 copper for 1.15x damage on anything; 1 Erdyskronk, 1 Shinnyzoom, 1 Cropadonk, and 1200 copper for +4 and 1.15x together; 1 Flammensmurfer, 1 Adracadabra, 1 Koolkrepuscle, and 300 copper to add a fire effect; 1 Snakesnack, 1 Opa-opal, 1 Flimmyflam, and 300 copper to add a poison effect....
Almost every single crafting ingredient is pretty much interchangeable. Oh, another plant! +1 to a slot of one or more recipes. Of course the ingredients are really only a gateway to unlocking the enchant so you can pay a X00(0) copper for it.
Weapons and armor, well, it's a flat-out case of six of one, half a dozen of the other. Trade DR incrementally for slower action recovery, and that's the whole armor system. Weapon deals more damage, it's slower; has more damage types, less overall damage; ranged, slower overall; short-range ranged, get a DR penetration bonus or fire/reload slightly faster; and on and on. Not to mention, the enchanted items you find have sometimes one unique enchantment (maybe more in exceptional cases), but are otherwise just about the same as their non-special counterparts. +5 Deflection rings, +5 all resistances rings/capes, +10 or +15 to one stat rings/medallions/gloves, and so on are much more common in the first half.
Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus fucking Christmas cocks, it's like a severely autistic child had at the game, except instead of arranging the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms into perfectly straight and sorted columns surrounded by concentric rings of grain nuggets, instead he meticulously arranged and straightened everything about the game mechanics.
Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment were MUCH more organic with their itemization. They were nothing like this. This system feels planned, artificial, cadenced, paced, deliberate, predictable, mundane, controlled. I think part of it is that character levels are pretty low, so you won't be finding wildly differentiated enchanted items... but that's not all of it. Most of it was this harebrained quest for perfect balance with absolutely no cheesing and nothing shitty, nothing too powerful, everything's got to be as good as (interchangeable with) everything else.
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