In the original version of BG1 many of the encounters that occur while wandering around wilderness maps are not scripted with regard to spawns. The monsters are actually placed in the area file by the original developers, some areas don't even have scripts in original BG1.
What this means is that someone on the BGEE team actually manually went through areas and removed enemies, replacing them with scripted spawns.
Whoever did that should be given a hefty slap. You should not have to increase your difficulty to insane to experience the type of game Blackisle themselves designed.
What should have happened is that Normal mode and Core Rules should have been the standard with regard to spawns and difficulty. Easy mode gets nerfed to the ground and Insane is actually Insane, like a BG1 Tactics on top of SCS on top of a world of hurt.
This "feature" should have been the first thing announced to the fanbase on these forums so you could realise very fast just how terrible an idea it was. Nevermind all the technical issues people are having with actually getting the game to run, if gameplay is nothing like the original and nowhere near "enchanced" once you start playing.
In the original version of BG1 many of the encounters that occur while wandering around wilderness maps are not scripted with regard to spawns. The monsters are actually placed in the area file by the original developers, some areas don't even have scripts in original BG1.
What this means is that someone on the BGEE team actually manually went through areas and removed enemies, replacing them with scripted spawns.
Whoever did that should be given a hefty slap. You should not have to increase your difficulty to insane to experience the type of game Blackisle themselves designed.
What should have happened is that Normal mode and Core Rules should have been the standard with regard to spawns and difficulty. Easy mode gets nerfed to the ground and Insane is actually Insane, like a BG1 Tactics on top of SCS on top of a world of hurt.
This "feature" should have been the first thing announced to the fanbase on these forums so you could realise very fast just how terrible an idea it was. Nevermind all the technical issues people are having with actually getting the game to run, if gameplay is nothing like the original and nowhere near "enchanced" once you start playing.
If this is true, it's pretty sneaky. We definitely deserve an explanation. I don't even think ill buy the ipad version if this issue isn't fixed, what would be the point?
I don't know about the rest of you but I am not waiting on the developers--I am editing the spawn points in the area files myself and will test them for difficulty balance. It shouldn't take more than two or three edits per area to find the right balance. Even if this takes me three months to finish I don't care because the end result will be an updated game with the feel and difficulty of the original.
It was rather too easy for me to play. And i suck like a lot in BG, so thanks for explaining me why i wasn't dying so often ;-).
but anyway - i was playing around a bit with BGSpawn (http://www.shsforums.net/topic/39639-release-bgspawn-version-111/) mod, which was designed for BGT and after few changes i think i came up with something that seems to work with BG:EE (but i didn't tested it to widely)
I hope creator melkor_morgoth75 won't be mad at me for altering his work. Please use it at your own risk, but in case of problems, I will try to help.
EDIT: It doesn't work right yet, but i will give it a try tomorrow (for now only random encounters seems to behave properly).
For curious modders - I've changed the scripts/areas to point to areas names from original BG instead of BGT using this site http://baldur.cob-bg.pl/node/1822 . I've also included new GTIMES.IDS since EIGHT_HOURS const was missing and additional .cre file (wolfva01.cre from BG2) and removed constraint check for BGT.
After playing 3/4 of the game I have never been poisoned. It never have happens in the original game. Some areas, as Firewine or the Cloackwood are now so easy they have lost all their flavour Also vyvern seems more easy to fight...:S
That's just you; your just that lucky. Personally I've never got poison that much in one of my games before. I've run out of cure poison(i memorized 2+1 special abilitie) many times and still get poisoned, all in the same fight(the countless reload on that account since I've entered cloakwoods). I'm beginning to think it is bad karma for rolling the most awesome stats I've ever rolled before!
I'm used to playing with SCS and I was absolutely convinced that the seemingly absence of monsters was because it was the mod adding more / harder random encounters to the game. If it's not, hope it gets fixed asap. I'd be pretty sad to learn that I managed to beat the game on insane just because half the enemies were missing
Like some people already said, creature spawns were lowered in BGEE. It looks really bad compared to vanilla BG, especially when you SUPPOSE to meet many foes, like in Gnoll Fortress. Is there some kind of level scaling in game? Is it possible to adjust spawns to make them be like tey were in original BG? Is there any official statement from developers about this? It really breaks immersion when you fight "couple" instead of "army".
It really doesn't make sense, to be perfectly honest.
In some areas you have encounters that will always be there with the same enemies. For example, there is the Ogre Hunting quest in an area southeast of Beregost, where you have 2 ogres, 1 ogre berserker, 1 ogrillion and 2 hobgoblins. (There is a halfling offering the quest just north of where they stand.)
You complete this quest - kill every ogre in sight, move 50 meters westwards, only to be attacked by 2 gibberlings, "scaled to your level".
Another example is the area directly north of Nashkel. When you first get here, it is usually from the north, as you follow the road from Beregost towards Nashkel in the start of the game. On this road, there are about 6 hobgoblins camped by a fire, and the only way to avoid them would be to head away from the road completely, as you WILL run into them if you stay on the road. The party you have at this point will usually be level 2 at most at this stage, yet they are still by the side of the road, as they always have.
If you manage to kill 6 hobgoblins, even if you have to reload a few times, you should definately be able to handle at least 6 gibberlings or Xvarts.
The way this has been scaled, the encounters "set in stone" will be unexpectedly hard, as the newer and unexperienced players will be used to the way too easy random encounters.
First underlevel of Durlag's Tower done. Prepare to cry... No one random encounter, no one ghast wandering around...and only one fase-spider...I have had no need to rest, and I'm very disappointed of what alla has been so easy. In BG1 I was really terrified by the underlevels of the Tower...for now in BG EE it has been a joke...
After playing 3/4 of the game I have never been poisoned. It never have happens in the original game. Some areas, as Firewine or the Cloackwood are now so easy they have lost all their flavour Also vyvern seems more easy to fight...:S
That's just you; your just that lucky. Personally I've never got poison that much in one of my games before. I've run out of cure poison(i memorized 2+1 special abilitie) many times and still get poisoned, all in the same fight(the countless reload on that account since I've entered cloakwoods). I'm beginning to think it is bad karma for rolling the most awesome stats I've ever rolled before!
Perhaps...but it never had happened before. Few monsters means few possibilities of all kind of being subjected to special attacks/ critical hits/etc...
This is a terrible decision, haven't gotten far into the game yet but the belt collecting ogre was a cakewalk. He was alone, I'm certain he used to have a couple bears helping him out. I used to have to pass him by and go to the Friendly Arm for reinforcements *at a minimum* before tackling him, now he's just another easy fight on the road.
Very little interest in continuing on at this point, who cares about an abandoned Xvart villiage or Gnoll fortress. Why even bother bring a mage along? Hoping the devs will come the their senses and offer a remedy for this issue.
This problem was what finally drove me off BG:EE for now. It was just ridiculous to play more than half the game and not being poisoned once. In the whole nashkel mines I found 2 kobold commandos, I reached chapter 4 without having encountered a single winter wolf. The game was simply too easy. Most areas I didn't even bother going in group, I could just backstab lone enemies with my thief and only bring the rest of the group the few times where said enemy survived with too much health for me to handle alone...
And yes, I can raise the difficulty to insane, but then other encounters become almost impossible for me(low lvl), and I don't like when a game requires me to constantly change the difficulty setting to fix bad design decisions.
For whoever decided to change this, challenging(withing a limit) is what keeps people playing(even new/casual ones), being able to complete the first 2-3 chapters without even dying once gets boring really fast and if people leave the game from boredom they will hardly buy the next one or paid DLCs.
I had the same problem. Came here to post. I just played the GoG version last month, and felt there might be something wrong encountering 1 wolf at a time and 1 kobold. Now I know it isn't just me or just a feeling. I would also like the option of the game going back to the way it was supposed to be. I generally like all the rest of the changes or at least I'm not raging about them but this change doesn't make sense, gives you less XP as you progress through the game, causes weird encounters with the full scripted compared to the anemic randoms, and generally is less heroic. This is either a bug or a feature request. I plan to post for both.
I've been enjoying BGEE, which is good.. however, I did think it was extremely odd to encounter a single roaming hobgoblin in the wilderness.. or a single wolf. Unlike a few others though, my encounters were always TWO xvarts and TWO gibberlings! Hey, it's still pretty much a steamroll encounter, but at least it's not 1.. right?
The scripted battles are quite interesting though, like Bassilus and his army of undead.. and I think I fought more gnolls (at once, no less) helping Drizzt than I did in the entirety of the gnoll stronghold.
It looks like they are squishing bugs left right and centre, considering how fast the patches are rolling out. Perhaps they'll make it to this issue next!
Random spawns are temporary. This is a design feature of ALL infinity engine games. They actually make efforts and keep track of random spawns to deliver this feature.
i think ist not realy a bug. After each reload the positions for RANDOM monsters get rerolled. That means sometimes there is no monster and somethimes there is an other monster.
I like this behavier, because you cant try killing this monster so often. And make it more realistic
Comments
My encounters have been fun and numerous.. i've been ambushed by 18 bandits in one rest
What this means is that someone on the BGEE team actually manually went through areas and removed enemies, replacing them with scripted spawns.
Whoever did that should be given a hefty slap. You should not have to increase your difficulty to insane to experience the type of game Blackisle themselves designed.
What should have happened is that Normal mode and Core Rules should have been the standard with regard to spawns and difficulty. Easy mode gets nerfed to the ground and Insane is actually Insane, like a BG1 Tactics on top of SCS on top of a world of hurt.
This "feature" should have been the first thing announced to the fanbase on these forums so you could realise very fast just how terrible an idea it was. Nevermind all the technical issues people are having with actually getting the game to run, if gameplay is nothing like the original and nowhere near "enchanced" once you start playing.
but anyway - i was playing around a bit with BGSpawn (http://www.shsforums.net/topic/39639-release-bgspawn-version-111/) mod, which was designed for BGT and after few changes i think i came up with something that seems to work with BG:EE (but i didn't tested it to widely)
http://sdrv.ms/TN4jJm
I hope creator melkor_morgoth75 won't be mad at me for altering his work. Please use it at your own risk, but in case of problems, I will try to help.
EDIT: It doesn't work right yet, but i will give it a try tomorrow (for now only random encounters seems to behave properly).
For curious modders - I've changed the scripts/areas to point to areas names from original BG instead of BGT using this site http://baldur.cob-bg.pl/node/1822 . I've also included new GTIMES.IDS since EIGHT_HOURS const was missing and additional .cre file (wolfva01.cre from BG2) and removed constraint check for BGT.
I've run out of cure poison(i memorized 2+1 special abilitie) many times and still get poisoned, all in the same fight(the countless reload on that account since I've entered cloakwoods). I'm beginning to think it is bad karma for rolling the most awesome stats I've ever rolled before!
If it's not, hope it gets fixed asap. I'd be pretty sad to learn that I managed to beat the game on insane just because half the enemies were missing
In some areas you have encounters that will always be there with the same enemies. For example, there is the Ogre Hunting quest in an area southeast of Beregost, where you have 2 ogres, 1 ogre berserker, 1 ogrillion and 2 hobgoblins. (There is a halfling offering the quest just north of where they stand.)
You complete this quest - kill every ogre in sight, move 50 meters westwards, only to be attacked by 2 gibberlings, "scaled to your level".
Another example is the area directly north of Nashkel. When you first get here, it is usually from the north, as you follow the road from Beregost towards Nashkel in the start of the game. On this road, there are about 6 hobgoblins camped by a fire, and the only way to avoid them would be to head away from the road completely, as you WILL run into them if you stay on the road. The party you have at this point will usually be level 2 at most at this stage, yet they are still by the side of the road, as they always have.
If you manage to kill 6 hobgoblins, even if you have to reload a few times, you should definately be able to handle at least 6 gibberlings or Xvarts.
The way this has been scaled, the encounters "set in stone" will be unexpectedly hard, as the newer and unexperienced players will be used to the way too easy random encounters.
Hopefully this will work on the ipad one day.
Prepare to cry...
No one random encounter, no one ghast wandering around...and only one fase-spider...I have had no need to rest, and I'm very disappointed of what alla has been so easy.
In BG1 I was really terrified by the underlevels of the Tower...for now in BG EE it has been a joke...
Very little interest in continuing on at this point, who cares about an abandoned Xvart villiage or Gnoll fortress. Why even bother bring a mage along? Hoping the devs will come the their senses and offer a remedy for this issue.
And yes, I can raise the difficulty to insane, but then other encounters become almost impossible for me(low lvl), and I don't like when a game requires me to constantly change the difficulty setting to fix bad design decisions.
For whoever decided to change this, challenging(withing a limit) is what keeps people playing(even new/casual ones), being able to complete the first 2-3 chapters without even dying once gets boring really fast and if people leave the game from boredom they will hardly buy the next one or paid DLCs.
Came here to post. I just played the GoG version last month, and felt there might be something wrong encountering 1 wolf at a time and 1 kobold.
Now I know it isn't just me or just a feeling.
I would also like the option of the game going back to the way it was supposed to be.
I generally like all the rest of the changes or at least I'm not raging about them but this change doesn't make sense, gives you less XP as you progress through the game, causes weird encounters with the full scripted compared to the anemic randoms, and generally is less heroic.
This is either a bug or a feature request. I plan to post for both.
The scripted battles are quite interesting though, like Bassilus and his army of undead.. and I think I fought more gnolls (at once, no less) helping Drizzt than I did in the entirety of the gnoll stronghold.
They actually make efforts and keep track of random spawns to deliver this feature.
After each reload the positions for RANDOM monsters get rerolled. That means sometimes there is no monster and somethimes there is an other monster.
I like this behavier, because you cant try killing this monster so often. And make it more realistic