AI, contingencies, sequencers, meta-magic -- so how is it?
Ygramul
Member Posts: 1,059
Are the contingencies and sequencers etc. ported from BG2EE to IWDEE?
I hope not. Not unless the AI is severely buffed to deal with it. And since SCS-level AI is not available for IWD that is likely not the case.
Basically, can a solo Sorcerer wipe the floors with the whole game?
(... which a well-played BG2EE Sorcerer will, if her spells are ungimped and if the AI is not buffed.)
Relatedly, is the base AI any better?
In the original, one buffed up front line tank would agro all the incoming hordes while the rest of your party (especially casters) could attack them unmolested. Does the AI now know to go after your mages and archers?
I hope not. Not unless the AI is severely buffed to deal with it. And since SCS-level AI is not available for IWD that is likely not the case.
Basically, can a solo Sorcerer wipe the floors with the whole game?
(... which a well-played BG2EE Sorcerer will, if her spells are ungimped and if the AI is not buffed.)
Relatedly, is the base AI any better?
In the original, one buffed up front line tank would agro all the incoming hordes while the rest of your party (especially casters) could attack them unmolested. Does the AI now know to go after your mages and archers?
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Comments
If you throw a glass to the ground, breaking it, and stomp on it a few times, you're not really doing anything by stomping on it a bit more.
If you take a balanced game and unbalance it, that is not "Enhanced". It is just bad design.
It wasn't hard to break that game's difficulty by fielding multi class Fighters, equipping them with bows and laying down double/triple layer webs or Emotion Debuffs.
The difference now is that casters don't need to rely on Fighters all that much and can break the game on their own.
What is the merit of breaking a game --or breaking it further?
I asked this on day one: is AI being tweaked to deal with new spells & conditions?
IF NOT, then the game was better off without these new spells...
Anyone willing to manipulate the mechanics would have broken IWD's difficulty just as easily back then, how they do it now, and how many more ways they have available to them now doesn't matter.
And if we're going to talk about the AI, the AI back then was just as inadequate. Enemies would just run straight into Web and Entangle, they would zero in on the nearest target no matter who it was or how impossible that target was to hit or if it had Free Action and was standing in the middle of a double layer of Web, instead of the most optimal. So even with the options players had back then, the AI was woefully easy to exploit.
You somehow think this was "balanced"? Hilarious.
So the difficulty isn't worse. Players back then and now have options that the AI can't handle.
If you don't use the BG2 stuff, you'll get vanilla IWD behavior.
The thought of scs cheeseball enemies in HoF mode will hunt my nightmares... They chased Dagon out, so at least I've got that going for me.
The beauty of IWD:EE is that it can be as hard or as easy as you like. You can use story mode, if you like. Invincible characters with double XP and 25 in all stats. Or you can play on insane and restrict yourself to say only allowing 10 rerolls of stats, or restricting yourself from moving stats around.
You can use cheesy tactics, or not. It's up to you. You can install BG2 Tweaks and allow multiclassed fighters to attain grand mastery. You can remove all traps and locks and make it so that mages never fail to learn spells. You can use the console to give yourself as much XP, gold and weapons as you would ever want.
So why does it matter if the player has more options now? They are just that - options.
Basically, HoF is a half baked cludge that I never use.
There are many things in IWDEE (from sorcerers independance from scarce scrolls to totemic druid summons in HoF) that can affect the difficulty of a game that was never balanced in the first instance. Spells that are too high level for anyone to cast, on scrolls too obscure for anyone to find, are not amongst them.
Because I can make that same argument about exploiting the stupidity of the AI. The player can always not exploit how dumb the AI is in the original IWD.
It was unbalanced before and it is unbalanced now. Dedicated cheesers and powergamers (like myself to a certain degree) will find ways to exploit the game. I've already noticed (and I am probably not the first person to do so) that when rolling ability scores, if you do not need a high score in an attribute, lower it to 7.
Scores like Strength, Constitution and Dexterity do not have any penalties or benefits between the levels of 7 and 15. Except in the case of carrying weight for Strength. So, if you don't need a 15 or higher, lower it to a 7 and put the points somewhere else. Makes scores like 10 or 13 completely worthless.
Anyway, think of the predicament that Beamdog is in. If they completely rebalanced the game with the new classes and abilities in mind, it would be impossible to play like you would play the original. Fans who do not like these new kits will be unable to play the game, and be upset. Even those who would relish the challenge, might be disappointed because it would have to change too much. It's not in the scope of what they wanted to do.
Put it this way - if Beamdog did what you suggest, then the target audience will have to shrink drastically. People who have never played D&D games before will have no choice but to play on story mode, because normal would crush them. They would get hit by a mage casting confusion and their entire party would die. Does that sound fun to you?
Actually they did the most sensible thing - they left the difficulty alone. That is probably the best way (IMHO) to stop people bitching. If they changed it, people would bitch one way or another. Either it is too hard or too easy.
Yes, some finer grained control over the difficulty would be nice. That is about the only change that I think they should look into. Otherwise, wait for DavidW to port some of his AI scripts to IWD:EE.
Having said that, I'm not convinced it's this EE team's responsibility to do this, and unfortunately modders would have to put a hell of a lot of effort in for not much reward. (I'd pay, but how many people realistically would?).
What I would say, though, is I am personally disappointed that a few more options haven't been included to at least have a few enemy mages who can use the new spells, to at least make that an option in the settings. Frankly, I think given the fact the whole point of this game is a challenging dungeon crawl, the effort spent creating a story mode (albeit probably didn't take much) would have been far better spent creating a decent hard mode with a half decent AI which I'm going to assert would have appealed to a good deal more of the likely purchasers of this game.
Otherwise, no. Not really.