- Joined
- Jan 5, 2009
- Messages
- 2,355
I think encounter design is actually pretty good, it's a rare situation where the hated stat/hp bloat from other games, could imho fix a lot of issues.What leet skills? The game is very easy after level 5 and encounter design might well not exist beyond just adding more enemies.Talk about yourself, I'm not the one needing to extoll my leet skillz at a mainstream AAA Larian game here
This is only partially about combat difficulty anyway, the primary issue is that the combat becomes samey and boring, which is related to difficulty but not the same thing. You need both some kind of difficulty, variety in enemy behaviour and possibly something that forces you to adapt in some way (like immunities, death effects, dispels, silence, petrification, whatever).
Ofc if enemies actually had more tools and used them more intelligently, it would be the best, but even now there are many interesting encounters which, while they won't live up to the greatest tacticool games, could still be enjoyable if enemies were just a little more stronger, or if players weren't getting so much fucking xp unless they straight up skip half of the content.
Spectator fight for example, might be actually decent if he had a little higher stats, and could unpetrify more enemies, and get more chances to CC your dudes before he gets bursted. Just a touch of better stats and HP, and he could go from unpetrifying one guy then getting oneshot by my 2 hasted and blessed rightclickers, to having 1-2 of your guys CCd and multiple enemies unpetrified on turn 2-3, and suddenly you're in a really hard situation. Just not being able to instaburst the nigger, potentially completely changes the fight. Even if you find out different easy ways to win the fight, just the fact that you couldn't just use the same approach you always do and oneshot him, you had to think about other strategies, already pushed us from piss poor easy, to kinda fun and satisfying.
Or even some forgettable dogshit encounter like the weird cat things in the monastery, they have the gimmick of "magic allergy", eg. when you use magic close to them, on their turn it causes different random effects, they can get buffs, or explode, or do an aoe push, etc.. It COULD be an interesting little fight if that gimmick had a chance to actually activate and make any difference, it could force you into thinking about not using magic for the fight, etc.. But all these little niggers have fucking 20 hp and die in one fireball, so the gimmick ends up being COMPLETELY irrelevant and they could be replaced with any different 20hp creature and it would go exactly the same.
There is a shitload of encounters like that, that's why I want Swen to fix the balance. If I thought the game is fundamentally broken and encounter design is unredeemably bad, I would just say its shit and move on, but I think it could be a decent tacticool game, and it wouldn't even require that much work from Larian, just tweaking the numbers here and there should be enough to push it from piss poor easy to pretty fun. It wouldn't be a masterpiece of the tacticool genre, but it doesn't need to be, just have enough challenge to make lvlups and hunting for gear exciting, and engage your brain a little in combat.
But that is kind of what I mean, the components are there, they are just not used. There are interesting abilities and combinations of enemies that could be fun but they are not used in ways that make players adapt in any meaningful sense.
The Spectator fight is another matter though, that was actually pretty well designed but he is just too weak, but that is fairly unique, adding more hp to other enemies wouldn't make it more interesting it would make it more tedious.
