Difficulty and Challenge

chickenhed

Hello everyone,

I wanted to get some feedback on this. I see a lot of people say that they only play on core rules because it is the same as its pnp dnd counterpart. This always bothered me because a video game cannot mirror pnp simply because your opponents are AI versus a human DM. With a DM, the core rules make sense. The challenge would likely be greater as you have to pit your character's actions against the mind of the DM.

So my questions is this, is core rules enough of a challenge for those that are very comfortable with Baldur's Gate game mechanics? If not, in what ways do you increase your challenge of the game? (or do you bother?)

For me, I like to use as few mods as possible, so I do not use scs. I instead increase the difficulty to hard and sometimes insane. While it does not "fix" the AI like scs does, it makes it so that if you screw up something, you WILL pay the price. That is exactly how I like to play most games in general.

I was always surprised that it seemed like most people seem to have quite the aversion to upping the difficulty from core in this game.

Thoughts?

Edit: Nightmare - Insane.

Blackraven

I would recommend you to use mods, particularly SCS, in spite of your tendency to use as few mods as possible. Intelligent enemies present much more of a challenge IMO than suffering higher damage per hit you take...

Twani

Insane just makes mobs hit harder, basically. That's very easy to deal with; it hardly increases the difficulty for me at all. If I want an actual challenge, I play with SCS. Enemies that are actually intelligent are fun. Enemies that are stupid are not. And in vanilla, the enemies are pretty stupid. I want to have to think about encounters, maybe try an encounter a few different ways, rather then just blowing through the game with no challenge.

Gotural

Also increasing the game difficulty only increase the damage you take, and when you're a mage, you take zero damage anyway with Mirror image, Stoneskin, etc. So it only increase the difficulty for non-mage classes, which are already worse.

Ygramul

Core Rules. SCS [AI improvements mostly]. No-reloads.

Best gaming experience there ever was.

lunar

I agree with others, SCS is the way to go, especially in bg2 with high level casters, scs enemies do feel like they are living, real, thinking enemies. Like they are controlled by a living, breathing DM. They can detect and foil your strategies and with the certain amount of randomness in their scripts and behaviours, they can improvise on the go, like a real person. This makes battles extremely challenging and fun.

Simply upping difficulty is a very lazy method for a challenge, I think. If it also spawned more monsters and/or let them use better tactics, it would have been cool, but as it is, it just increases the damage you take=an experienced player will know how not to take damage at all!

jackjack

I play on Core Rules, but the day I feel ready for a tougher challenge, I'll be installing SCS. Doubling the damage isn't nearly as devastating as a properly played enemy mage.

ChildofBhaal599

My latest challenges have been insane+SCS+Ascension and a multiplayer game. Just playing multiplayer has made core rules seem harder. The modded insane single player game was obviously no easier, but I got to the end with everything and felt great afterward.

Lemernis

Core rules is fine for me, though I can pretty much own the game as a veteran player. If I want to increase difficulty, I'll install SCS which is a brilliantly realized mod to make enemies behave quite a bit smarter. I'd rather fight a smarter enemy than have the game double enemies' hit points or whatnot.

Ballad

Personally, I really dislike mods or settings that increase the game's difficulty via handicapping my characters or through giving my enemies an unfair advantage (double hitpoints, bonus to rolls etc.) To me, getting chunked by a kobold due to double damage has nothing to do with challenge and everything to do with cheese, frustration and self-torture. Bad luck is just that, bad luck, and tells very little about how well I can handle the more elaborate tactical encounters. For this reason, I don't feel bad for keeping my difficulty on core or pulling it down a notch every time I scribe spells or level up my characters. Rather than stacking the odds against myself and excercising stupid and unrealistic self-restraint when it comes to using my more powerful spells and abilities, I'd rather have my enemies become smarter and more able to utilize their full potential.

...which is the reason I always play with SCS installed

chickenhed

Great input, thanks everyone. One of the issues I have is that I have a hard time playing tutu or even EE for BG1. There is something about the old feel of Vanilla BG1 that I simply love. Since scs is not available for vanilla BG1, that is not an option for me. However, Maybe I will indeed give scs a shot for BG2.

Lemernis

If you decided to pop for BG:EE you could use SCS for it. Just sayin'. One thing you would like, I think, about EE is that although it uses the BG2 engine it uses the BG1 sprites--which for me is the best of both worlds.

BGEE looks great, btw. Here's an example of a screenshot:



View full size

CrevsDaak

@Lemernis those in BG:EE are BG2's game screen animations, because BG1's game screen animations don't support dual-wielding. But the Inventory screen animations used in BG:EE are from BG1 (and new ones were added/created).

Lemernis

@Crevs Doh! that's right of course. But why is it that I'm remembering BG2's sprites looking more spindly than that?

Lol, oh well. Whatever. I probably haven't played original BG1 or BG2 in about ten years. Starting about ten years ago I played BGT and then took a hiatus from the game, and then came back to it in BGEE.

Blackraven

I think BGEE uses Erephine's amazing mod 'One Pixel Productions' (http://www.spellholdstudios.net/ie/1pp).
This would explain your best of both worlds experience, which I share btw.

EDIT:
yep, just checked, see http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/comment/19275#Comment_19275

element

I don't find either insane difficulty or scs overly satisfying tbh

insane is just lazy difficulty scaling

but modding a game to be harder just defeats the point for me.

chickenhed

Not that it matters to the overall discussion but I feel that I need to point out that I DO own BGEE and BG2EE. Anytime I can support these games, I will. I just have a hard time NOT playing BG1 vanilla. It's a true classic experience for me. I'm far more open to playing heavily modded BG2.

Speaking of which and to derail my own topic further, the biggest issue I had with modded BG1 is spells. BG2 has many divine and arcane spells that would be available to my characters in BG1 that my opponents do NOT have access to. Does BG1EE solve this? Either by limiting the spells to what BG1 had OR by giving the AI opponents access to BG2 spells?