I guess you can boil it all down to that, but can't you do that with just about anything? I mean, simple strategies tend to work, especially against a simple enemy. Plus, there are plenty of other things you can do. [...] Most mages are accompanied by others. You may have had to divert fire from an oncoming threat, like a big guy with an axe, to deal with said mage.
Okay, fair points. Maybe I'm looking at it too narrowly, but these have been my experiences for better or worse. But a couple of things still stand. First of all, the real-time nature of the game encourages you to simply pick an initial tactic and watch it play out. Secondly, I still assert that the random variance is too broad in a game that encourages you to "save often", and that comes from a fairly thoughtless adaptation of AD&D.
Well, ranged combat and melee combat both have their times and places. As does stealth. But you can't expect to get through with just one type of combat skill, unlike Fallout.
Okay, so we'll chalk this one up to personal preference, I'd prefer interesting ways to employ the skills my character has, rather than skill use being dictated by situations. And that's pretty simple. If I want to fight a bear in melee combat, then sure, punish me and tax my healing resources, while ranged combat and such remain as an alternative where I can avoid damage, but use missile resources or combat spells.
But make the results consistent in some way. The fact that I can wade into melee combat and smash the bear without taking damage in one instance, and do exactly the same and be one-shotted is weak, and doesn't really encourage a tactical approach, whereas a more consistent result where the bear smacks me around every time, sometimes killing me would lead me to reconsider a less harmful approach.
I know I can kill the mutants with my sledgehammer without resorting to cowardly tactics like using guns, I just need enough chances so I can get some criticals.
At least the game is fairly consistent in terms of how many chances you'll get in each instance.
The moment you employ save/reload tactics, you throw just about everything out the window. Let's face it, RPG combat is save/reload's bitch. Seeing as most combat sysyems rely on randomized numbers augmented by stats to simulate combat, "luck" does play a role. Save/reload let's you put luck in your favor....eventually.
Certainly, but as soon as you set the precedent of unlikely success, then you're encouraging the player to use the game's systems to their fullest to attain that success, and incentivising player behaviour that just isn't enjoyable. If you illustrate that something is impossible (it doesn't have to be), the player moves on. It's like the common model for lockpicking, where "improbable" just isn't a deterent, and player patience becomes of more value than character skill.
You've got a knight. [...] He can either...
1. Bum rush the bear and likely deal more damage faster, but also place himself in much greater risk.
2. Use the bow and arrow to shoot the bear, and keep out of it's range indefinitely. Very low risk, but slower.
When it comes to anything I can repeat ad nauseum, I hate risk. Well kind of. I think I've pretty much flogged the too broad range of outcomes horse already. If that "greater risk" had a better measure - "Jesus, it's smacking the shit out of me, I can't stand up to this for long" vs "in the unlikely event that it hits me, I'm fucked" - then the tactical difference would become more significant.
Well....sometimes things go bad. If it kills your main character, that's even worse. I can agree at low levels there are a lot of things that can quickly and easily dispatch you, but you have to go and seek those things out in most cases. And anything else can be stopped with some tactics.
More stemming from the same thing. Yes I have to seek them out, but if I know I
can beat something, I'll either repeat until I beat it, or eventually lose patience and move on. Especially when there are bucketloads of experience at stake.
For some reason I'd assume designing a game around save/reload would be incredibly difficult and would produce a pretty bad product. Maybe consider it a little more during design, yes, but I don't think there is much of a way to fight save/reload without negatively impacting the game in doing so.
I'm not saying the whole game ought to be designed
around save/reload, but it should be considered at length (not just a little more). High risk, high reward endeavours practically beg the player to quicksave and quickload until they succeed. I'd rather see that "risk" translated into an inevitably more difficult challenge, where luck still plays a part, but isn't quite such a determining factor.
Thoughtlessly bringing a P&P system where failures cannot be backtracked into a CRPG where backtracking is an accepted standard is terrible design.
Let's be totally honest, it is pretty "hardcore" in relation to the absolutely wussified RPGs of today. About being a "hardcore RPG", well....when over 60% of the people who consider themselves hardcore RPG players have games like Final Fantasy in a top ten RPG list, then yeah, it is by comparison. And we haven't even hit the Diablo clone action RPGs or RPG lites that everyone defines the genre with. Maybe if you only frequented places with a lot of RPG players, you might see a lot of Shadows of Amn loonies....but just go to someplace like Gamefaqs or such. Baldur's Gate hasn't done shit as far as convincing people what an RPG is.
I wont be happy until everyone recognises that BG is pretty much as mainstream as they come, and it's only "hardcore" in the sense that it possesses many various products of frustratingly bad design that are likely to turn off the casual gamer.
The same people who gave Fallout a score of 7 or 8 and then jerked off to Final Fantasy 7 in the same year giving it 9s and 10s? The same people who hailed Neverwinter Nights as a brilliant RPG masterpiece? The same people who consistently give great reviews and scores to Jap-shit that gameplay-wise doesn't even surpass Wasteland? The same people who gave PoS decent scores and said shit like "it stays pretty true to the Fallout setting"?
Point taken, but there are too many people who actually believe what they read in the gaming media, though that's another fight altogether.
I bolded the ones that I thought did worse. But still, eight RPG lites versus the endless Diablo clones or grindfest MMOs is nothing.
Here's where I take issue. Most people are more than willing to make the distinction between Diablo-likes and "real" RPGs. Likewise, people recognise MMOGs as a very different beast for a different audience. And although there is undeniably an influence into the "core" of the RPG genre, most people are willing to let MMOGs be MMOGs, Diablo be Diablo, and the Japanese be Japanese. However, Baldur's Gate-likes have become the
expectation for "traditional" RPGs, even though the bar was set so much higher by Fallout.
And so in the place of solid "traditional" RPGs, we get Baldur's Gate-likes. I think it would be a difficult point to argue that Diablo and MMOGs are significantly responsible for the decline in solid CRPGs. The developers following those trends are following the trail of money, and as such, I'd question their ability to create a worthwhile RPG, and also, they've always been here. Fifteen years ago, they were trying to make the next Wolf3D. Ten years ago, they were all making RTS games in the wake of St/Warcraft, five years ago they were making RTS/RPG hybrids in the wake of Warcraft III.
If anything, logic ought to dictate that their saturation of the mass-market would create biggere opportunities for niche markets, which should result in more "hardcore" RPGs. It's a shame development doesn't seem dictated by logic or opportunity, but rather by "conventional wisdom" and trends.
Oh we would have. Except it would have been successful without another Diablo clone to fight for sales.
Doubtful. Nothing about BOS even gave so much as a glimmer of hope for success. It had failure all over it from the start, and it's a much bigger step from "hardcore turn-based PC RPG" to console action game than it is from "PC action adventure with stats" to console action adventure with stats. BGDA was a modest success because it didn't stray very much from what the core Baldur's Gate audience was already enamoured with.
To be honest, I think without the Infinity Engine it would have been worse. They would have had to spend more time on an engine/ruleset and less time on dialogue and choices/consequences. Not to mention Planescape is a Dungeons and Dragons setting. I doubt it would get divorced from the rules.
Certainly it can't be divorced from the rules, well technically it could, but it wouldn't be a good idea, and working with an existing engine is a great boon for a developer. But that's no reason why the development timeline couldn't have been lengthened to accomodate the extra work rather than cutting down the meat of the game. Wishful thinking on my part, but Interplay was flying high at the time.
Even if Baldur's Gate failed, Diablo still sold a shit-ton. That influenced publishers.
I'm not so sure that it did. Diablo predated Fallout by some time, and I'm willing to assert that the vast majority of people consider Diablo to be more or less an independent sub genre from "actual" RPGs, in much the same way GTA's second generation exists outside of the pure racing genre, or for that matter, Mariokart is another obscenely popular racing game that failed to leave a mark on serious racing sims, because people are willing to accept it as an alternative rather than a replacement.
Baldur's Gate is considered a contemporary of Fallout. Diablo is not. So when developing a game that is intended to be a contemporary of Fallout, Baldur's Gate is relevant. Diablo isn't.
Diablo spawned Dungeon Siege. Heck, they're almost exactly alike. And it real-timed Freedom Force.
Actually, once you take the significant differences into account - the addition of squad based tactics, "N"PC recruits, non-procedural world, emphasis on story, Dungeon Siege starts to look a lot more like Baldur's Gate than Diablo. Same goes for Freedom Force.
Console kiddies. Not Baldur's Gate.
Certainly, there are more developers aiming at multi-platform releases now with all the trappings that come with that, but that's just part of the problem. People are too quick to blame "console kiddies" for everything. If you're developing a PC exclusive hardcore RPG, "console kiddies" are completely irrelevant. Baldur's Gate and it's half dozen unholy spawn became the norm for what people accepted as PC exclusive hardcore RPGs. Bad thing.
That would be Neverwinter Nights and KOTOR's fault. Neverwinter Nights should have bombed...it had all the problems of Baldur's Gate and none of the "good" (although you most certainly won't agree with what I consider good). Heck, it pretty much made the player make the game. Yet people loved it and it fast outsold Baldur's Gate.
Nothing Bioware have ever done has looked like bombing, despite gross incompetence. The first "real" AD&D RPG in over five years? Instant success. CRPG 3rd Ed D&D DIY toolkit? Instant success. The first Star Wars CRPG? Instant success. Funnily enough, all of them are the "evolution" of the core gameplay of Baldur's Gate.
Again...Diablo did far more and had a far greater impact.
Agree to disagree. Nobody considers Diablo to actually be an RPG, and just about anyone willing to consider themselves an "RPG afficionado" would not consider Diablo a substitute for an RPG, even if they think KOTOR or BG are the pinnacle of the RPG genre.
If Baldur's Gate had tanked hard it's likely we would be swamped with Diablo clones, The Elder Scrolls (Bethesda is it's own publisher after all), and Jap-shit. I doubt Sierra would have given Arcanum the green light. I doubt Atari would have given Temple of Elemental Evil a go eiither. We wouldn't even have Bioware's RPG-lites. We'd have Jeff Vogel though....
Since it's purely hypothetical, it's hard to say. In any case, I'd rather a yawning gap waiting to be filled with RPGs, rather than having that gap filled with RPG-lites marketed as "hardcore". People might just be saying - isn't it time we had another classic in the vein of Fallout? Instead, we're all eagerly awaiting Jack Bauer's first adventure into space.
If you say so. Still...Ian made it into Fallout 2 both in person, and in the Vault Dweller's memoirs...so he was doing something right....or wrong.
Dogmeat has his own
wikipedia entry. I don't recall Ian in Fallout 2 at all - not saying he wasn't there - but I still insist he's not really memorable.
But they don't always prove to work. Like the "Dogmeat clone" in Arcanum, or the animal companion in Neverwinter Nights.
If you analyse both cases, you'd certainly find shortcomings in how they were implemented. I won't go into detail, but for one - "clone of iconic character" is a pretty good mould for a less than iconic character. Those who find Minsc charming and memorable would likely be less enthused by a character featured in a later game who was a barbarian with a pet space-gerbil.
No. Final Fantasy and Diablo were however.
Just like how Mariokart (or even Blizzard's fantastic Rock n Roll racing) spelled doom for serious racing sims, Goldeneye killed PC FPS games, or Wii Sports killed EA Sports. We're talking about polar extremes within a broad genre boundaries. Diablo clones exist to be Diablo clones, and if it wasn't Diablo, they'd be aping something else with mainstream appeal. Nobody setting out to make a deep RPG would use Diablo as a template.