I imagine it to be very frustrating for a good player to see my try and play Pillars of Eternity. I had some down time at work today and tried to get one of the first bounties for my stronghold. The results were pathetic at best. I might as well have been playing with pinky toes.
When you get your stronghold, deciding to play the bounty hunter is not the best immediate choice.
In terms of difficulty ranking, I think that most Defiance Bay areas are easier than the first section of the Od Nua dungeon which is easier than those early bounties. 3 of the 4 initial bounties are located in the western areas and one of them will drop a grimoire with lvl 5 spells. That should be a clue...
One of the great benefits to being a poor player like myself is I don't feel the need to compete (with myself). I can role play a character in a game like BG and not worry that I didn't get everything, or that I didn't do it the best possible way based on my knowledge of a game. So If I didn't get that scroll case that was in that nondescript house because I had no reason to go in it? I do without.
Of course the worst part of being a poor player is that I don't know where everything is, nor do I know how to defeat every problem in the 'best possible way'. So I reload.... A LOT. but usually only when death occurs. After all, it's a game. And I don't feel that I need to compete with others, nor justify my play style. I entertain myself. That is enough.
Isn't Firebrand Elvenhair's house marked on the map in BGEE? Which seems plausible, since he may well of explained to the PC where he lived and invited them to drop in.
I remember being slaughtered frequently when I played BG for the first time. Those ambushes where lethal, and I went to Firewine Bridge before Nashkal on my first playthrough (because I have never listened to naggy half elves).
I feel bad about meta-gaming when the game has choice. In PoE, vague spoilers ahead, I did a thing that caused me not to be able to do another thing for a companion quest. I considered re-loading so I could do the companion quest but then was like, "Wait, no. What's the point of playing a game with choice if I don't accept the outcome?"
I'll just do that particular companion quest line once I do a second run of the game. Though on my second run I plan on using all custom characters. . . /blech.
Usually I stay in character for choices and choose the outcome based on what my character would say. I wish in Mass Effect you could turn off the obvious Renegade/Paragon light-up-things so that I'm not influenced by what "path" I need to take. I like how Kotor only told you after the conversation was finished. On my first and second runs of Kotor I actually ended up being grey/neutral the entire time.
Also, about the super-special-SCS-no-reload-etc-etc. runs, I never even beat ToB, even on just normal, because fire giants kept like 2 shotting my blackguard character QQ
And in IWD I had to lower the difficulty from normal to easy during the Elven tower sequence when there was like a million skeleton-golem-things.
The infinity engine style of games are my absolute FAVORITE games of all time but I'm so absolutely horrible at them. XD
I imagine it to be very frustrating for a good player to see my try and play Pillars of Eternity. I had some down time at work today and tried to get one of the first bounties for my stronghold. The results were pathetic at best. I might as well have been playing with pinky toes.
When you get your stronghold, deciding to play the bounty hunter is not the best immediate choice.
In terms of difficulty ranking, I think that most Defiance Bay areas are easier than the first section of the Od Nua dungeon which is easier than those early bounties. 3 of the 4 initial bounties are located in the western areas and one of them will drop a grimoire with lvl 5 spells. That should be a clue...
It says in the stronghold description "offers HIGH LEVEL bounties".
I just started this same experiment with an evil party.
I'm roleplaying a chaotic neutral cat-loving, fun-loving cleric-mage of Sharess, who resented Gorion's restrictions on his fun while he was growing up, and promptly dismisses anything Gorion has to say once he comes of age and gets out of Candlekeep.
So, I headed south with Monty and Xzar immediately, since they seemed my character's kind of people, and he wanted nothing to do with Gorion's friends Jaheira and Khalid. Gorion says go north, I go south.
Upon meeting M and X, they said that their destination, Nashkel, was a "short ways south", so, that's the way we went. The first map in that direction was High Hedge, so, I hiked there. I knew good and well that this was going to result in a party wipe if we kept going south, to dart or dagger throwing skellies. So, I metagamed a roleplay that we were tired, and that M and X knew that we should head east to Beregost and rest before connecting to a road south that they knew of there.
So far, so good. But, I want to recruit and use Dorn as my main tank in this playthrough. And, as far as I understand, his recruiting encounter will not proc if you have not gone to the FAI first and spoken to him there. Even worse, if you finish the Nashkel Mines and make J and K disappear before ever going to the FAI, I've read that Dorn will also disappear and be forever unrecruitable.
This would be very, very bad game design on Beamdog's part, since they would have tied the entire Dorn character to the assumption that all players will go to the FAI first. Which is especially bad, since evil players are directed south by M and X.
Does anyone know if Beamdog ever fixed this goof? If I don't hear differently, I'm going to have to metagame a trip north to the FAI to talk to Dorn in order to make my playthrough intentions work.
I imagine it to be very frustrating for a good player to see my try and play Pillars of Eternity. I had some down time at work today and tried to get one of the first bounties for my stronghold. The results were pathetic at best. I might as well have been playing with pinky toes.
When you get your stronghold, deciding to play the bounty hunter is not the best immediate choice.
In terms of difficulty ranking, I think that most Defiance Bay areas are easier than the first section of the Od Nua dungeon which is easier than those early bounties. 3 of the 4 initial bounties are located in the western areas and one of them will drop a grimoire with lvl 5 spells. That should be a clue...
It says in the stronghold description "offers HIGH LEVEL bounties".
I was in violent agreement with you until: -I had a look at the bestiary information -I reached Od Nua level 5 and compared it with the Warchief bounty and his lvl 5 Xaurip champions and high priests.
@Fardragon, unless they've fixed it in a patch, he won't *be* on the road to Nashkel mines unless you speak with him first at the FAI. That was my question. Did they fix it in a patch so that Dorn's ambush will still occur on the road to Nashkel even if you haven't spoken to him first?
... I still don't get people's aversion to reloading or love of "Iron Man Mode". *shrug*
But yes. Baldur's Gate is mean. It wants you to die. Or so it would seem from today's perspective. Maybe it isn't actually so much that Baldur's Gate is mean or hard. I think it's more that games these days are easy.
True, but have you ever played an old game? We're talking long before 3d graphics, when hard disk drives were measured in megabytes, and surely nobody will ever need more than 100MB of disk space...ever played games from that era?
Hopefully, games evolve to be more fun
I remember playing the classic text adventures of the 1980s. These are the precursors to RPGs, all story, no stats, and any wrong move is punished with 'you died' - start again. These games typically ran on computers with tape drives, rather than disks, so reloading a saved game would mean rewinding the type yourself to find the exact point on the cassette where your saved game file started, or you could just start over (assuming the game offered a save option at all!)
LucasArts gave the whole genre a shot in the arm with the SCUMM system, where rather than punishing you with death for a wrong call, they threw in a funny line to amuse you instead. You could spend longer immersed in the game, and as long as you shared their sense of humor, this turned out to be more fun.
Early RPGs built on the era of the instant-death adventure. They were cruel, they were unforgiving, but if you learned the rules and were careful you could stomp them as hard as they were stomping you. Early play in BG is reminiscent of this era, as a lvl 1 PC is extremely vulnerable, and a 6-person party takes forever to level. I remember being super-happy first time I played when my thief finally hit level 2 somewhere in the Nashkel Mines. Finally, one character that might be able to take a hit without dying...
The game has got only easier over the years, first the internet gives out the now 'obvious' tricks to surviving at low levels, the overpowered disabling spells for low level play, where to go to find the best kit. I was immensely proud of my Wizard's magic ring, back in the day, as it paid off all my patience searching every map just in case. However, to this day I feel like a cheat every time I don the extra Ankheg plate, as that was revealed to me by the internet, rather than my own discovery. Likewise, I think I was no more than 3 "How about now?"s away from getting something from Noober, but would likely not have learned this myself.
BGEE takes that to the next level, adding weapons styles (including dual wielding) and character kits to the mix, making 1st level easier and easier to navigate. Likewise, we know to advance early with a small party, if we want to level more quickly. A surprising amount of 'useless' treasure starts to mount up, making it easier to sell and buy the big rewards earlier in the game. The mounting kit problem is partially solved by adding bags and cases to the game, so we can now carry more of our loot back to the store to sell. This makes the game easier, but it boosts the fun, as we are spending longer engaged on our quests without feeling compelled back to town just to manage inventory. Evolution.
When we play no-reload, it is surprising how much of the 'useless' equipment comes into its own - the potions you would routinely sell are suddenly meaning for that one-shot hit just when they are needed. We get back to that earlier feel where there was an element of danger around every turn, which is a more visceral kind of fun, but balances out some of the things that make the game now feel too-easy with practice. They can also bring back to life something that starts to feel a little stale after you have beaten in 20-30 times.
As Belgarath shows though, there are other ways to bring the game back to live. Knowing we are deliberately not optimizing while playing a character AS a character, discarding out metagame knowledge, and playing a real story will inject enough difficulty of their own that we might not need a strict no-reload to feel a real sense of danger.
The other thing highlighted here is how the game is written for an audience familiar with the conventions of gaming. It is expected that characters will routinely wander into and loot essentially every house that they see, regardless of their alignment, even paladins! I remember playing Dungeon Siege for the first time and feeling immensely irked that I could not loot from any of the houses near the start of the game - until I remembered I am playing a hero, and heroes do not look the places they are rescuing! The game balance was structured around that, and ultimately it became more fun for me. If I am role-playing like Belgarath now, I do find it very difficult to justify wandering into homes at random without a good reason (it helps to have a thief on the party who runs off on their own, sometimes )
And while there is no getting away from 'there is only one first play through of a game', I find that I rarely get that. You start, you play your first game, you die horribly, but learned a bit. So you start a second time, optimized around what you learned from the first attempt, and get a little further - but now you have specialized down something too narrow, that is no longer fun now you see the bigger picture, so next time you die you start over again, and by the time I hit my stride in the mid-game, I am probably on my 4th or 5th PC, and those early map-readings are highly edited. So usually don't get even a first play through, just a series of play-lets, where different parts of the game are now.
OK, way too much there, but this seems to be a fun thread for nostalgic essays...
For me personally, I acknowledge that I am a fairly poor player. I play the game on normal or easy and if I need to reload to get a desired response? i do. If people think less of me for that? That's their loss. But yes, people do make an issue of it.
Some of the most fun I have had playing games came from accepting this - I had not played 1st person shooters for a long time when Mass Effect came out, so dialed the difficulty right down to the easiest setting and decided not to worry about it, and just enjoy the game. It turned out it was indeed challenging for me, but I got into the swing of things by mid game, and so for my second play through turned the difficulty up just one setting, and so eventually made my way through all of the difficulties before I was done. It helped that it was another game worth replaying, even if nowhere near as varied as BG.
Of course, I was overconfident when ME2 then shipped, and had to learn to turn the difficulty down again, especially with the added wrinkle of managing ammo But again, it was fun to play within my limitations, and finally master the game. Generally, I seem to have most fun playing one difficulty below the one that causes me to reload all the time, although I do enjoy beating the harder levels (once!) too.
Only semi-related, but ME3 was probably most interesting as I had lost saves migrating PCs before it came out, so played from level 1 while not yet knowing the ground rules (game system changed for each game) and mismanaging (metagame) my PC badly. The game had clearly been balanced for imports from ME2 though, and actually gave steadily fewer skills/level until you hit the level 30 ME2 import level, by which time you are already through most of the game as there is no extra XP to find to cover the level gap - in fact, without playing ME2 many missions are cut, so you get less! That was an interesting '1st time' no-metagaming experience for sure, and did show that if a game is compelling enough, you will pick up the skills to beat it. It was a lot more fun on the second play through, starting with an ME2 non-Soldier import though!
@Fardragon, unless they've fixed it in a patch, he won't *be* on the road to Nashkel mines unless you speak with him first at the FAI. That was my question. Did they fix it in a patch so that Dorn's ambush will still occur on the road to Nashkel even if you haven't spoken to him first?
That's what I meant. The game COULD be changed so that you encounter him on the road irrespective of having met him previously. It would be a better solution than moving him to a Beregost inn.
That breaks their target audience into 3 distinct categories (and I recognize each, they nail them pretty well) where 'spike' is their competitive tournament player. I think the dysfunctional online communities are where any one of those archetypes dominates - most notably the 'spike' persona taken to a competitive extreme.
@Fardragon, unless they've fixed it in a patch, he won't *be* on the road to Nashkel mines unless you speak with him first at the FAI. That was my question. Did they fix it in a patch so that Dorn's ambush will still occur on the road to Nashkel even if you haven't spoken to him first?
Talk about bad game design. If they made Dorn's interaction on the road mandatory every time someone travels to Nashkel people would complain about it. Just like they did with Neera's encounter in Beregost, just like they did with Hexxat talking to you in the Copper Coronet in BG2EE. Personally I have no problem with them putting Dorn in the Friendly Arm Inn because that is where the game suggests you go. New players playing an evil character still would likely go there first. As opposed to some inn in Beregost that they aren't directed towards.
@GreenWarlock - LOL. I decided last year that I would try (again) to play Dark Souls. It was a LONG haul getting anywhere in it and I am still and naph at PvP. But I slogged through it and ultimately got to liking it so much that I finished it. Then I got into Dark Souls 2, which I have now also completed. So I get what you are saying.
I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't have as many gaming hours as I would like, so I don't care if I "Master" a game or not. If I play it and have fun? WIN. If I complete it (which is even more rare) Mega WIN. If I stop having fun? I stop playing. It's as simple as that.
What's funny is I have been playing PoE a little bit. talk about meta-gaming??? I go into a scenario, get my party slaughtered. Reload and go back again... Rince, lather, repeat. It's happened a bunch and I am not even out of Act 1??? But I appear to enjoy it, so what the heck.
It's happened a bunch and I am not even out of Act 1??? But I appear to enjoy it, so what the heck.
That pretty much nails it - if you are having fun then the game (experience) is a success. My preference is for games that you do have to work at, that reward you for persistence, and where playing on 'hard' for the first play through is probably NOT a great idea unless you are either a masochist, or a true expert of the genre. Increased difficulties are usually my reward once I master the basic game - if I enjoy a game enough for it to be worth the replays.
Comments
Of course the worst part of being a poor player is that I don't know where everything is, nor do I know how to defeat every problem in the 'best possible way'. So I reload.... A LOT. but usually only when death occurs. After all, it's a game. And I don't feel that I need to compete with others, nor justify my play style. I entertain myself. That is enough.
I remember being slaughtered frequently when I played BG for the first time. Those ambushes where lethal, and I went to Firewine Bridge before Nashkal on my first playthrough (because I have never listened to naggy half elves).
I'll just do that particular companion quest line once I do a second run of the game.
Though on my second run I plan on using all custom characters. . .
/blech.
Usually I stay in character for choices and choose the outcome based on what my character would say. I wish in Mass Effect you could turn off the obvious Renegade/Paragon light-up-things so that I'm not influenced by what "path" I need to take. I like how Kotor only told you after the conversation was finished. On my first and second runs of Kotor I actually ended up being grey/neutral the entire time.
Also, about the super-special-SCS-no-reload-etc-etc. runs, I never even beat ToB, even on just normal, because fire giants kept like 2 shotting my blackguard character QQ
And in IWD I had to lower the difficulty from normal to easy during the Elven tower sequence when there was like a million skeleton-golem-things.
The infinity engine style of games are my absolute FAVORITE games of all time but I'm so absolutely horrible at them. XD
I'm roleplaying a chaotic neutral cat-loving, fun-loving cleric-mage of Sharess, who resented Gorion's restrictions on his fun while he was growing up, and promptly dismisses anything Gorion has to say once he comes of age and gets out of Candlekeep.
So, I headed south with Monty and Xzar immediately, since they seemed my character's kind of people, and he wanted nothing to do with Gorion's friends Jaheira and Khalid. Gorion says go north, I go south.
Upon meeting M and X, they said that their destination, Nashkel, was a "short ways south", so, that's the way we went. The first map in that direction was High Hedge, so, I hiked there. I knew good and well that this was going to result in a party wipe if we kept going south, to dart or dagger throwing skellies. So, I metagamed a roleplay that we were tired, and that M and X knew that we should head east to Beregost and rest before connecting to a road south that they knew of there.
So far, so good. But, I want to recruit and use Dorn as my main tank in this playthrough. And, as far as I understand, his recruiting encounter will not proc if you have not gone to the FAI first and spoken to him there. Even worse, if you finish the Nashkel Mines and make J and K disappear before ever going to the FAI, I've read that Dorn will also disappear and be forever unrecruitable.
This would be very, very bad game design on Beamdog's part, since they would have tied the entire Dorn character to the assumption that all players will go to the FAI first. Which is especially bad, since evil players are directed south by M and X.
Does anyone know if Beamdog ever fixed this goof? If I don't hear differently, I'm going to have to metagame a trip north to the FAI to talk to Dorn in order to make my playthrough intentions work.
There are other characters in BG that are much harder to get without metagaming though.
-I had a look at the bestiary information
-I reached Od Nua level 5 and compared it with the Warchief bounty and his lvl 5 Xaurip champions and high priests.
Hopefully, games evolve to be more fun
I remember playing the classic text adventures of the 1980s. These are the precursors to RPGs, all story, no stats, and any wrong move is punished with 'you died' - start again. These games typically ran on computers with tape drives, rather than disks, so reloading a saved game would mean rewinding the type yourself to find the exact point on the cassette where your saved game file started, or you could just start over (assuming the game offered a save option at all!)
LucasArts gave the whole genre a shot in the arm with the SCUMM system, where rather than punishing you with death for a wrong call, they threw in a funny line to amuse you instead. You could spend longer immersed in the game, and as long as you shared their sense of humor, this turned out to be more fun.
Early RPGs built on the era of the instant-death adventure. They were cruel, they were unforgiving, but if you learned the rules and were careful you could stomp them as hard as they were stomping you. Early play in BG is reminiscent of this era, as a lvl 1 PC is extremely vulnerable, and a 6-person party takes forever to level. I remember being super-happy first time I played when my thief finally hit level 2 somewhere in the Nashkel Mines. Finally, one character that might be able to take a hit without dying...
The game has got only easier over the years, first the internet gives out the now 'obvious' tricks to surviving at low levels, the overpowered disabling spells for low level play, where to go to find the best kit. I was immensely proud of my Wizard's magic ring, back in the day, as it paid off all my patience searching every map just in case. However, to this day I feel like a cheat every time I don the extra Ankheg plate, as that was revealed to me by the internet, rather than my own discovery. Likewise, I think I was no more than 3 "How about now?"s away from getting something from Noober, but would likely not have learned this myself.
BGEE takes that to the next level, adding weapons styles (including dual wielding) and character kits to the mix, making 1st level easier and easier to navigate. Likewise, we know to advance early with a small party, if we want to level more quickly. A surprising amount of 'useless' treasure starts to mount up, making it easier to sell and buy the big rewards earlier in the game. The mounting kit problem is partially solved by adding bags and cases to the game, so we can now carry more of our loot back to the store to sell. This makes the game easier, but it boosts the fun, as we are spending longer engaged on our quests without feeling compelled back to town just to manage inventory. Evolution.
When we play no-reload, it is surprising how much of the 'useless' equipment comes into its own - the potions you would routinely sell are suddenly meaning for that one-shot hit just when they are needed. We get back to that earlier feel where there was an element of danger around every turn, which is a more visceral kind of fun, but balances out some of the things that make the game now feel too-easy with practice. They can also bring back to life something that starts to feel a little stale after you have beaten in 20-30 times.
As Belgarath shows though, there are other ways to bring the game back to live. Knowing we are deliberately not optimizing while playing a character AS a character, discarding out metagame knowledge, and playing a real story will inject enough difficulty of their own that we might not need a strict no-reload to feel a real sense of danger.
The other thing highlighted here is how the game is written for an audience familiar with the conventions of gaming. It is expected that characters will routinely wander into and loot essentially every house that they see, regardless of their alignment, even paladins! I remember playing Dungeon Siege for the first time and feeling immensely irked that I could not loot from any of the houses near the start of the game - until I remembered I am playing a hero, and heroes do not look the places they are rescuing! The game balance was structured around that, and ultimately it became more fun for me. If I am role-playing like Belgarath now, I do find it very difficult to justify wandering into homes at random without a good reason (it helps to have a thief on the party who runs off on their own, sometimes
And while there is no getting away from 'there is only one first play through of a game', I find that I rarely get that. You start, you play your first game, you die horribly, but learned a bit. So you start a second time, optimized around what you learned from the first attempt, and get a little further - but now you have specialized down something too narrow, that is no longer fun now you see the bigger picture, so next time you die you start over again, and by the time I hit my stride in the mid-game, I am probably on my 4th or 5th PC, and those early map-readings are highly edited. So usually don't get even a first play through, just a series of play-lets, where different parts of the game are now.
OK, way too much there, but this seems to be a fun thread for nostalgic essays...
Of course, I was overconfident when ME2 then shipped, and had to learn to turn the difficulty down again, especially with the added wrinkle of managing ammo
Only semi-related, but ME3 was probably most interesting as I had lost saves migrating PCs before it came out, so played from level 1 while not yet knowing the ground rules (game system changed for each game) and mismanaging (metagame) my PC badly. The game had clearly been balanced for imports from ME2 though, and actually gave steadily fewer skills/level until you hit the level 30 ME2 import level, by which time you are already through most of the game as there is no extra XP to find to cover the level gap - in fact, without playing ME2 many missions are cut, so you get less! That was an interesting '1st time' no-metagaming experience for sure, and did show that if a game is compelling enough, you will pick up the skills to beat it. It was a lot more fun on the second play through, starting with an ME2 non-Soldier import though!
That breaks their target audience into 3 distinct categories (and I recognize each, they nail them pretty well) where 'spike' is their competitive tournament player. I think the dysfunctional online communities are where any one of those archetypes dominates - most notably the 'spike' persona taken to a competitive extreme.
There was also an interesting follow-up article on a second way of thinking about their players, but I'm not sure it adds as much here: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr278
I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't have as many gaming hours as I would like, so I don't care if I "Master" a game or not. If I play it and have fun? WIN. If I complete it (which is even more rare) Mega WIN. If I stop having fun? I stop playing. It's as simple as that.
What's funny is I have been playing PoE a little bit. talk about meta-gaming??? I go into a scenario, get my party slaughtered. Reload and go back again... Rince, lather, repeat. It's happened a bunch and I am not even out of Act 1??? But I appear to enjoy it, so what the heck.