Should Beamdog rebalance original content?
Adul
Member Posts: 2,002
This appears to be a hot topic issue. What do you think? Do you think AD&D 2nd Ed. or Baldur's Gate is unbalanced? Do you think Beamdog should do something about it? Would you rather they rebalanced/redesigned the old abilities, classes, spells, and monsters that are too weak or too powerful, or should they leave them alone? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss.
- Should Beamdog rebalance original content?82 votes
- Yes, Beamdog should rebalance old classes, monsters and abilities that are too strong or too weak.34.15%
- No, Beamdog should not rebalance original content.46.34%
- Other19.51%
3
Comments
That's a change I would gladly approve.
I've liked they have made the Wizard Slayers' abilities possible to apply to missile and not only melee attacks. And now the fact that Wizard Slayer apply 25% , not 10%, casting failure on hit, has gone official. These are the welcome changes, to help an underpowered kit a bit.
Or a new feature (coming from IWDEE) that bard songs now break invisibility. Or making spirit animals of a totemic druid to progress with levels in BG1.
But some cases are harder than others. For example, changing the Poison weapon ability for BG2 levels. While making the ability to progress with levels is an excellent idea and actually makes BGEE better, so that at the lvl 1 it's not a game-breaker, changing the behavior that was the case all these years in BG2 is different. If it worked on appropriate levels for many years, could the change be made?
One additional note: towards the EE content they're absolutely free to do as they wish. For example, the Stupifier mace has been brought to BG1 by the EE, and I find it absolutely fine that they have nerfed it a bit in the beta. Or the Shadowdancer famous "nerf". Or Sun Soulray now affecting one target.
The 25% spell failure thing, well, I think that's on the verge of what I consider to be intrusive change. On one hand, 10% wasn't all that useful and the wizard slayer was barely used anyway, on the other, that made playing a wizard slayer a more challenging and unique experience. I do like that some character creation options make the game harder, and I sometimes like to take part in these as an alternative to the old difficulty slider.
My problem with the poison weapon change is that it not only made assassins less viable at lower levels (which is fine by me, the original games did not have low level assassins), but also nerfed high level assassins who used poison weapon with darts or a different high-APR weapon, making these tactics ineffective and useless. Before, the assassin was the backstab guy with the poison darts, now the assassin is just the backstab guy. It feels like they removed something substantial and interesting there.
And I agree, Beamdog balancing any EE-exclusive or SoD content to their heart's content is a-ok by me, as long as the original content does not become a casualty in the process.
All I can find are the Changed ones (on Beamdog and Steam) and the Original ones (on GOG)
As for asserting that balancing old content automatically makes the game better, I think that's a short-sighted way of looking at it. In the case of an old, very popular, and well-respected IP like Baldur's Gate, you need to consider more than simple game mechanics. Some players return to play this game after decades, some players will be new to it, and some will have played it on a regular basis for 15+ years. Old game design decisions, the original author's artistic intent, nostalgia, and existing player preferences are all factors here that should be taken into account.
Hence I think this is worth discussing beyond just saying that if a feature makes the game better, it should be in the game.
At the end of the day, I think balance is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, Beamdog should be cautious in dealing with things that affect a large portion of the game. I mean, Stoneskin is almost certainly overpowered, but a huge portion of BG2 is designed around it being overpowered. Rebalancing Stoneskin would change the game in fundamental ways, and that's probably not a wise can of worms to open. But smaller things, details at the periphery, which the game wasn't designed around? They should change how those work, if it makes the game more balanced.
But, to those who don't like the quest for balance in general, and to those who want balance in their games, let me say one thing: if balance leads to sameness, you're doing balance wrong. The entire point of balance is to allow the player different options without a clear correct or incorrect choice. If balance makes everything the same, the choice is gone anyway, even if it's nominally still there. Balance exists to promote diversity of playstyles, and if you lose that in the process of balancing things, you haven't actually balanced anything.
I'm asking because I consider BG1 to be horribly unbalanced, but being absolutely fine that way. We might be talking about the same things in different terms.
Truly good balance is, unfortunately, a rare thing, and it's not like I've played every game out there, so I'll have to jump genres and possibly mediums a bit to find examples.
Starcraft, rather famously, is balanced between the races. Not between every tactic, or every unit, but the between-race balance is strikingly good. Whether this applies to Starcraft 2 is a matter of somewhat more debate. It definitely does *not* apply to Warcraft 2, which managed the worst of both worlds by having things be almost totally identical and still unbalanced because one of the small differences was way too powerful for one race.
Bastion is very balanced between weapon setups. Seriously I cannot say enough good things about the balance in Bastion. I have literally never talked to two people who agree on the best setup, and I think that's amazing. There are still some issues (no one seems to like the pistols), but on the whole it's superb. Every setup feels different, and no one seems to agree on what's the best.
Seventh Sea has a weird sort of balance between its five main stats. Each one is so utterly, dominatingly powerful where it applies that you can't really afford to be bad at any of them. There are no dump stats in Seventh Sea (well, maybe Wits if you're playing pure hack-and-slash), because EVERYTHING is powerful. I note this, not because I think Seventh Sea is a great system, but because this sort of high-impact balance is the type of balance that tends to bit Baldur's Gate the best. Baldur's Gate is, after all, a high impact game, with an abundance of save-or-lose effects and complete immunities to things.
5th edition D&D isn't perfectly balanced by any stretch of the imagination, but it does a way better job than any other edition. 4th is more even, but it achieves that by making everything kind of the same, so that's just diminishing differences, not balancing them. 5th edition retains most of the structural class differences of 3rd edition (not quite the extreme differences of 2nd edition and earlier, but close enough), while massively improving on the balance between classes. Unless you happen to be a ranger, in which case you're up the creek without a paddle.
I hope that helps give an idea of what I mean (and what I don't mean) when I, personally, talk about balance.
(probably simple:)
1. add the same breadth of difficulty-dependent encounter variation in all games as they did in SoD - basically they should add casters and archers and some monsters to enemy groups, that appear on higher difficulty settings
2. make many humanoid warrior enemies kitted wariors and barbarians (so that they use enrage, rage, poison weapon, etc)
3. add shaman enemies to BG1 and BG2
4. make the drow inside Ust Natha tougher (it's too easy to massacre everyone there which is *so not the point*, but it's also fairly rp-consistent for most good-aligned games so many people do it)
(probably not simple:)
5. add the same AI improvements to BG1 and BG2 that you did to SoD....and much less importantly to IWD
6. rebalance experience because the additions have added to the total pool of experience and unbalanced the game a bit - mainly by reducing XP for those quests that yield a lot of (too much) it, so it would be a conservative change
7. rebalance gold somehow because the additions have added significantly to the total pool of gold (i have some ideas but this is probably not the place to go into detail)
To invoke a rather extreme example, should Beamdog make sure that fighters, bards, and mages are all on a relatively same power level and usefulness on levels 1-5?
If not, why not? What makes one tweak to a class's power level acceptable, but not this change?
And if so, is there no point where artistic intent should be respected? Should the Enhanced Editions just be completely redone with a modern design perspective in mind?
It's not a mmorpg where a split second or a couple of damage can make the difference, so it doesn't really need that kind of balance.
One of the selling point of the game is to give the player as much freedom as possible, even the freedom to roleplay whatever he wants from a weak character to a powerful one.
And, in my opinion, Beamdog's role should only be that of making the game smoother and take care of the transition between 1998 and nowadays.
I'm pretty happy with the job they are doing. @Erg, they implemented a lot of fixes that they took from others (and that you can even apply to BGT, for that matter), but they also developed many improvements on their own.
You can find them in the logs and you know it, so I'm not gonna spam them here. Last but not least the possibility to swap between dual-wielding and two-handed weapons.
Ti suggerisco di provarlo per come è adesso e in modo estensivo prima di giudicarlo, nel peggiore dei casi hai buttato venti euro.
Edit: typos.
You can't make CC an exact copy of the PnP version because Baldur's Gate 2 is made 80% of combats and possibly even more at higher levels.
And that's where BG's version of CC only triggers: in combat.
Well, you don't have to think: any.
And btw, read here:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contingency.htm
To draw a comparison with the movie world, I regard the difference between BG1 (the adaptation) and BG1:EE (the rerelease) the same way as the difference between the 1978 Superman movie adaptation and a modern digital cleaned up Blu-ray rerelease. When the former one takes artistic liberties with its source material, maybe changes events around, or shortens a character arc, it's understandable. The original is a comic book, the adaptation is a movie - some things will need to be different. However, when the latter goes in, takes scenes out, and replaces them with digitally altered or re-shot takes (Star Wars, anyone?), people will be upset. They bought the rerelease of the Superman movie they remember from their childhoods and got something different.
What I'm trying to say is there should be more to Beamdog's changes than what makes sense from a gameplay perspective. They should be considering that a lot of people playing the EEs have a strong emotional attachment to the source materials. They also need to have a strong sense of their own roles as caretakers and what is and what isn't in the realm of acceptable change in that role.
Granted, they seem to be aware of a lot of this, and I don't think they've erred too egregiously against it, but when things like the BG2 assassin poison stacking nerf or the wizard slayer spell failure buff come up, they don't exactly put ease into my mind. They've got dangerously close to the line, with their toes crossing on through to the other side.
I mean, when the default reaction to so-called "rebalancing" is the immediate creation of a mod to negate those changes, the wiser course of action would have been to leave well enough alone.