The redundancy of skills and spells...

[commie]

Having just finished Divinity II:DKS, I was yet again faced with a game which seemingly has a varied selections of skills and spells and the like to choose from but where it all comes down in the end to picking a handful of these and spamming the whole game from start to finish with them. This is made even more problematic by the fact that the original list of things and spells is extremely paltry to begin with compared to games of days of yore.

Now of course in the past you also faced the potential of a dreaded 'insta-win' spell but the sheer number of combinations and limited leveling and skill point allocation that often took a lot of grinding to achieve made it more of a reward for your effort than the very first thing you put your points in.

Furthermore, in the past you were often forced to diversify in approach as certain enemies were always immune to certain attacks, forcing the player to work out alternatives. Shit, even the hoary old 'fire elementals get raped by ice arrows but shrug off fireballs' thing; while basic as fuck; at least makes your wizard character be forced to beat a hasty retreat if all he has is fire magic spells. In Divinity II the magic missile slaughters all and sundry, just as the explosive arrow does.

Such all purpose spells or skills like exploding arrow that kill everything are an added bane; it's not enough that they are powerful, they also stop any need for investment in anything else. Why bother picking a 'kill undead' spell or a 'rust armor' spell for those specific enemy types that normally would shrug off normal attacks when with the points you save you can just make an overpowered spell even more powerful and breeze through them?

We all rage about many of the limitations of modern games but I haven't seen too much shit flinging at the limited utility of skill trees and spell choices these days, rather the whining is about the limited amount of specializations and spells to choose from, completely missing the point. I'd rather have a 10 skills and 10 spells and have all of them useful in certain situations and less so in others than 100 different spells from which only 2 or 3 are needed.

 

[SuicideBunny]

i wish people would stop calling spell-like abilities skills. it makes the pnp gamer in me sad.

 

[Raapys]

I'd rather have a 10 skills and 10 spells and have all of them useful in certain situations and less so in others than 100 different spells from which only 2 or 3 are needed.

I'd rather just have BG2.

 

[Krash]

^ p much. Even though some were useless and some were a must, there was still so many useful spells to choose from. Much of the tactical versatility of parties were thanks to spellcasters.

 

[JarlFrank]

Well, one problem of Divinity 2 is that it's a single character game, and that skills have multiple levels (and many of those). Which means that if you want to make one skill effective, you need to spend a lot of skill points on it, which inevitably means you won't use any others.

Then again, yeah, some of them are pretty useless compared to others, so there's never a situation where you really have to think about which one to take.

 

[Erzherzog]

What irks me the most are games where the magic class is clearly superior because in addition to powerful spells, he has spells that cover other character archtypes as well.

The only disadvantage tends to be lower health and that's easily worked around.

 

[commie]

I'd rather have a 10 skills and 10 spells and have all of them useful in certain situations and less so in others than 100 different spells from which only 2 or 3 are needed.

I'd rather just have BG2.

Oh indeed and that's what I was thinking of really, though I mentioned 10 and 10 because that's the 'way of the present' it seems so with such a narrow pool it should actually be easier to make a good balanced set of skills and spells to choose from that are useful in many situations and for various play styles.

i wish people would stop calling spell-like abilities skills. it makes the pnp gamer in me sad.

But they are considered as skills by the developers as well. Consider the 'skill books' you read in Divinity II whereby you can get 'skill points' that you place in a 'skill tree' to unlock a spell 'skill'.



JarlFrank, in Divinity II I just put 15 in Mind read and 15 in wisdom as soon as possible with about 10 in exploding arrow and one in Demon summon for the DKS part then with the excess of skill points in FOV I poured it all into magic missile and firewall and a bunch of other skills that I never used just to get rid of them and it was pretty much instawin all the way apart from Ygerna as I made sure I freed the fucker in the tomb for an added challenge. It probably would have been even easier if I didn't waste so many stat points into strength and dexterity as I originally tried a fighter than a ranger. Sure you can gimp yourself and waste the points to make it 'harder' but who does that deliberately? I'd rather have faced some creatures that are immune to these things, forcing me to have to decide whether a super magic missile is worth not going into an area inhabited by these immune fiends or rather tone down the magic missile and get some ice blast as well for them, or even to pick a melee skill for them etc. The ability to respend your point allocation at will is even more of a cheat mode and makes things even worse.

Single character games can fuck up things indeed in that there is a tendency to make sure you don't paint yourself into a corner with bad development of character where you cannot progress. In party based games you can usually hire a NPC or create a new character to make up any deficiency. Having said that, RPG makers could learn a lot from hybrids like Deus Ex, System Shock in how to make a variety of skills useful for various play styles in single character games. Sure they have their own faults but you can't tell me that overall it's not just as rewarding or as possible playing a rambo killer as it is playing a stealthy ghost in Deus Ex for example.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

shit like this is why I have ALWAYS thought it mandatory for a rules.ini analog for every rpg or at least some possibility of in-depth player tweaking beyond developers deigning to hamfistedly mitigate the top few flaws and kind of sidling their way around the rest while doing bugfixing

look at total annihilation, even almost 15 years past release the two sides are still being tweaked

then again I suppose the constructivity of effort here does depend a lot on which game and which playerbase you're talking about
diablo 2 balance mods for example

 

[JarlFrank]

What's also better with multi-character RPGs is that you will vary your skills more, and teamwork can make every type of character important. Whereas in single-character RPGs, one class might dominate all others because it's just so much better on its own. Yeah, a mage might be awesome if you could position him behind your warrior so he doesn't get insta-killed by charging enemies, but you only can have one char. Yeah, a warrior could be great but then you're never going to get into any of those locked rooms.

Single character games always have one "best" character class, and any kind of support class that can be vital in a party-based game is not going to stand a chance.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

well bro bethesda has solved this thread's problem by making all player characters powerful and heroic no matter what you do

yet another reason they are the most popular rpg developer now while troika's skeleton lies a hundred feet away from the watering hole of solvency

 

[Roguey]

I'd rather have a 10 skills and 10 spells and have all of them useful in certain situations and less so in others than 100 different spells from which only 2 or 3 are needed.

So in broad strokes you'd rather have DS3 than Divinity 2. I know I would (speaking solely about character systems and better versus worse).

And yeah it was a huge mistake of Larian to make skills 15 ranks deep and have upgrading them just increase damage for the most part. And that ridiculous unarmed skill was probably the biggest mistake of them all. Solution (as somewhat demonstrated by aforementioned DS3): Make skill ranks much shorter and have them do something other than more damage.

 

[Renegen]

Sometimes you just need to experience different things. I played King's Bounty with only using around 10-15 spells, and on a next playthrough I discovered a whole new range of game breaking spells that I hadn't used once in my first game. Each new game I'd try to get new monsters, new spells, new skills (hahah) and new items. It was a pleasure to see how the most useless spells could be turned into something very powerful given the right strategy.


Frankly I'm tired of people complaining about too many choices because they "didn't experience everything". Well fuck, just play it again. It will save you money too.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

This is pretty much par for the course. You are arguing against the basic game design, which is a Diablo clone from the first person perspective. Dumping all points into one or two skills is going to be better than generalizing, its how the genre works.

Personally I am of the opinion that every single ARPG should just go ahead and copy the Guild Wars skill system. Not necessarily even the skill breadth, simply the separation of skill points invested to power skillsets/skills you know/skills you choose to be usable at a time does wonders for getting away from 1-shot characters.