I mainly prefer the fixing of things which are bugs, regardless of whether this causes a nerf or buff. When it comes to rebalancing I have trouble deciding what is good and what is bad. It often depends on the situation. In general though, I tend to hate nerfing while I am ok with buffing. In almost every case I think there should be the caveat that any balance changes should be reversible via mods.
I mainly prefer the fixing of things which are bugs, regardless of whether this causes a nerf or buff. When it comes to rebalancing I have trouble deciding what is good and what is bad. It often depends on the situation. In general though, I tend to hate nerfing while I am ok with buffing. In almost every case I think there should be the caveat that any balance changes should be reversible via mods.
here's a rule of thumb game made easier than it used to be = bad
Beamdog's problem - what I've come to realize has always been Beamdog's problem, right from the start - is that they insist on spending time, effort and resources making changes nobody asked for. There was no great outcry to nerf the assassin and blackguard, or to change the fonts, or to add sprite outlines and colored selection rings. Rather than ask players if such changes would be at all welcome, the devs commit to them and then are dumbfounded when reception is lukewarm (and that's being generous). So now they get to waste even more time, effort and resources backtracking and trying to find a comfortable middle between the changes they want to make and the threshold players are unwilling to cross, while cutting the corners that actually matter.
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.
here's a rule of thumb game made easier than it used to be = bad
Yep, that over a period of time is often called a "power crawl", and it has the tendency to destroy games.
exactly it's easy to fix-this in a conservative and legacy-friendly way: whatever makes the player stronger should somehow apply to enemies
player gets a kit making him stronger? some enemies should get it. player gets to play with a goblin shaman? he should fight some goblin shamans too player gets new spells? some enemies should too players gets better items? some enemies should either get better items (masterwork weapons / armor for example?) or be more proficient with weapons they already have players get to get more XP? some enemies should get a level-up etc...
and: players get to get more gold? they should #1 get an opportunity to spend that gold (which they currently don't) and #2 their purchasing power should not increase when it was already too high
here's a rule of thumb game made easier than it used to be = bad
Yep, that over a period of time is often called a "power crawl", and it has the tendency to destroy games.
Those are just my tendencies as a powergamer. I would like to point out that I am not always ok with rebalances that buff things. I should also point out that I didn't say "I love buffs", just "I am ok with buffs".
being a powergamer doesn't have anything to do with how difficult the game is. i'm a powergamer too, but that has nothing to do with the game being made easier.
here's a rule of thumb game made easier than it used to be = bad
Yep, that over a period of time is often called a "power crawl", and it has the tendency to destroy games.
Those are just my tendencies as a powergamer. I would like to point out that I am not always ok with rebalances that buff things. I should also point out that I didn't say "I love buffs", just "I am ok with buffs".
No I get it, I'm the same way, as I think most players are. That's why when MMO developers rebalance stuff (as they very often do) they tend to get a lot more flak from players for nerfing than for buffing. So, over time (sometimes unconsciously), the direction of the entire development of the game tends to shift towards a very buff-heavy course, which over months and months trivializes previous content and makes the game worse and worse.
But all of this is besides the point in the case of Baldur's Gate, because here I think buffing and nerfing character abilities are both wrong-headed actions. This a classic that should be respected and preserved, not an MMO where the meta-game should shift every month to the flavor of the most recent balance update.
... But all of this is besides the point in the case of Baldur's Gate, because here I think buffing and nerfing character abilities are both wrong-headed actions. This a classic that should be respected and preserved, not an MMO where the meta-game should shift every month to the flavor of the most recent balance update.
i agree. they should just stick to the original effective difficulty level
for example in soa pre-tob there were no HLAs
now in BG2:EE which invariably includes ToB everyone reaches HLAs during SoA, and the game is much much easier.
this needs to be counteracted to restore the original challenge which is the soul of every game. that's what a team of enhancers and legacy-preservers should do in my opinion.
I don't have time at the moment to craft an essay on why I think change is good, but I'll just say this for now: I don't believe in cutting a game slack when there's an opportunity to change things, whether it's old or new. I don't believe in the term 'classic' when it comes to gaming either. Sorry to disappoint those out there who disagree.
I don't have time at the moment to craft an essay on why I think change is good, but I'll just say this for now: I don't believe in cutting a game slack when there's an opportunity to change things, whether it's old or new. I don't believe in the term 'classic' when it comes to gaming either. Sorry to disappoint those out there who disagree.
If we're talking about modding, expansions, and optional content, I agree. If we're talking about changes to an old game that are forced on all players whether they're looking for new challenges or just want to replay an old classic, I disagree.
If you want to make Baldur's Gate harder, easier, more balanced, less balanced, or whatever, go right ahead, I support you fully to express your own preferences. As long as you don't force your preferences on me.
If we're talking about modding, expansions, and optional content, I agree. If we're talking about changes to an old game that are forced on all players whether they're looking for new challenges or just want to replay an old classic, I disagree.
An old game is Might and Magic 3. People play that for nostalgic reasons. New players don't play BG for nostalgic reasons and that's the key. IE games aren't nearly so old. If it's perfectly playable in 2016 the same philosophy applies to it's design as to any other modern game. There are now new players that experience the game pretty much the same way i did many years ago - there is immersion, there is real enjoyment.
Only a game that has a breath of timelessness can still work like new after almost 20 years. So the legacy is really not so much about old players, it's about *the game as such*.
New players don't play BG for nostalgic reasons and that's the key.
Is it, though? New players might not play BG for nostalgic reasons, but I do. Why is it suddenly decided that they're the preferred players who should be catered to, instead of them being the scholars who are exploring what a classic game from '98 plays like?
IE games aren't nearly so old. If it's perfectly playable in 2016 the same philosophy applies to it's design as to any other modern game.
Which modern games are we talking about here? I haven't played too many that are quite so harsh and rough right out of the gate as Baldur's Gate is. Sure, there's the rare exception like Bloodborn, but that hardly represents the modern standard of RPGs. RPGs have been getting more and more trivial and handholdy for the past couple of decades, and BG doesn't fit in with the general pattern anymore. Baldur's Gate is a game from the 90s and it definitely plays as such.
There are now new players that experience the game pretty much the same way i did many years ago - there is immersion, there is real enjoyment.
Only a game that has a breath of timelessness can still work like new after almost 20 years. So the legacy is really not so much about old players, it's about *the game as such*.
Isn't that all the more reason for these new players to actually experience the game as you and I did, instead of how Beamdog (or really anyone) has reimagined it? All arbitrary balance changes do is get the game further and further away from the original experience, the one that made it as popular as it is today.
I don't think they should rebalance things. This is a single player game and I think that it's ok to have some under and some over powered characters or builds. Every game has it's optimal specs or classes that do theoretically the most damage. I used to play WoW and I read the theorycrafters' work to try to up my game, so this isn't exactly new. But this isn't an MMO where we generally have one group being "kept down" by the success of the others. I had seen people reject melee DPS in WoW just because "ranged do better on these fights generally". No one's going to be unable to get through the game on their fighter because "inquisitors are better, reroll GG".
I feel that the different classes have different learning and skill curves and that's ok. Plus, reworking the game so that mages aren't so dramatically overpowered by the end is going to be difficult. Also, because of all the party combinations we have access to, it's not like you're ever locked out of something unless you choose to be.
If they correct bugs or something like that, that's ok. I would hate to see a patch note saying "We're reducing the damage of Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting because it was making mages too powerful at higher levels and we felt that Illusionists were too weak because of its damage."
On a personal note, I'm still a living salt mine over the nerf to Algernon's Cloak. It's not like it was even THAT powerful or game breaking but it sure was fun for me. Plus, if I ever stopped finding it fun I could just stop using it. I had choice. Now I don't.
I believe there's a key point that lots of people are missing: Baldur's Gate is an AD&D adaptation. And AD&D as a rules system is based on a very different design philosophy than every iteration of D&D that came later.
AD&D is very liberal when it comes to balance. And by that I mean that no one expects to have perfect balance when you crunch the numbers behind the dice rolls. And it also counts on the longevity of campaigns to even things out.
Example: non-human races have advantages over humans and as a drawback, they have level caps. Another example: linear warriors, quadratic wizards. At low levels, warriors rule. At high levels, wizards overpower them (or everything, really).
In other words, in AD&D things are not supposed to be strictly balanced all the time. The pendulum swings one way and then back, and then the other way again and so on.
The subsequent editions changed that and 4E is particularly egregious in that regard. Since it's been almost two decades, it seems to me that the current generation of players has been more influenced by the post-3E approach (and it's obsession with perennial balance) than by AD&D.
Another fundamental characteristic between AD&D and later editions is that the former is a collection of several subsystems (think about how the difference in how thief skills, ability score checks, saving throws and attack rolls work) while the latter ones have progressively unified mechanics. 5E is much more modular in that regard, but the simplification (or dumbing down, depending on your opinion) is still present.
As a game series that encompasses a whole campaign (from puny Level 1 all the way to epic levels), it's more than okay for Baldur's Gate to keep in line with AD&D's design philosophy.
The thing that concerns me with Beamdog rebalancing/revising of Bioware content is that every time I look at the new content introduced by the EEs, I identify one of two kinds of stuff:
1) Things that are not integrated seamlessly (main example: the way the BG:EE new NPCs are completely out of line with the originals in terms of scope)
and 2) Things that are either ambitious or complex to the point where they easily break (main example: Hexxat, all the micromanagement imposed by her presence and all the bugs and exploits that come with the package).
There are exceptions, of course: most new items are very good.
I'm starting to go on a tangent, though, so I'll drop my point for now and elaborate further some other time.
I believe there's a key point that lots of people are missing: Baldur's Gate is an AD&D adaptation. And AD&D as a rules system is based on a very different design philosophy than every iteration of D&D that came later.
AD&D is very liberal when it comes to balance. And by that I mean that no one expects to have perfect balance when you crunch the numbers behind the dice rolls. And it also counts on the longevity of campaigns to even things out.
Example: non-human races have advantages over humans and as a drawback, they have level caps. Another example: linear warriors, quadratic wizards. At low levels, warriors rule. At high levels, wizards overpower them (or everything, really).
In other words, in AD&D things are not supposed to be strictly balanced all the time. The pendulum swings one way and then back, and then the other way again and so on.
The subsequent editions changed that and 4E is particularly egregious in that regard. Since it's been almost two decades, it seems to me that the current generation of players has been more influenced by the post-3E approach (and it's obsession with perennial balance) than by AD&D.
Another fundamental characteristic between AD&D and later editions is that the former is a collection of several subsystems (think about how the difference in how thief skills, ability score checks, saving throws and attack rolls work) while the latter ones have progressively unified mechanics. 5E is much more modular in that regard, but the simplification (or dumbing down, depending on your opinion) is still present.
As a game series that encompasses a whole campaign (from puny Level 1 all the way to epic levels), it's more than okay for Baldur's Gate to keep in line with AD&D's design philosophy.
The thing that concerns me with Beamdog rebalancing/revising of Bioware content is that every time I look at the new content introduced by the EEs, I identify one of two kinds of stuff:
1) Things that are not integrated seamlessly (main example: the way the BG:EE new NPCs are completely out of line with the originals in terms of scope)
and 2) Things that are either ambitious or complex to the point where they easily break (main example: Hexxat, all the micromanagement imposed by her presence and all the bugs and exploits that come with the package).
There are exceptions, of course: most new items are very good.
I'm starting to go on a tangent, though, so I'll drop my point for now and elaborate further some other time.
I agree that AD&D was less focused on balance, but I believe that's because it was expected for the DM to manage it. Good balance is always an admirable goal, whether it's handled on the rules side or by the DM.
Fixing bugs, loopholes, differing texts and actual effects, sure. But I'd vote against changing any of the vanilla content on an excuse of "balance": what's balanced is really subjective, with some people claiming stuff like the Kensage is ridiculously overpowered while others (me included, actually) don't think it's too overwhelming.
For stuff like balance, I think mods are the best way to go. Some people like Rogue Rebalancing, thinking it balances the Thief and Bard classes better; others think it makes the balance worse. There've been multiple balancing attempts to the Shapeshifter, and quite a number of kitpacks adding or modifying existing kits in the name of balance, and their work is to be thanked. But the baseline should remain the same; it's far too late to change stuff over balance in a single-player game.
I don't think Beamdog should waste its time on balance issues for vanilla content. We already have lots of modders like @Demivrgvs and @subtledoctor re-balancing basically everything in the game. There's nothing wrong with Beamdog doing the same, since any change they make can be modded away if people don't like it--it's just that Beamdog has better things to do.
I don't think Beamdog should waste its time on balance issues for vanilla content. We already have lots of modders like @Demivrgvs and @subtledoctor re-balancing basically everything in the game. There's nothing wrong with Beamdog doing the same, since any change they make can be modded away if people don't like it--it's just that Beamdog has better things to do.
I'd rather BG:EE be Baldur's Gate with modern presentation, than Baldur's Gate with modern presentation plus a bunch of added stuff that should be removed with mods. Beamdog's job is to provide the base game, and the mods' job is to change it. Not the other way around.
Clearly I don't see the point, while classes such as mage are way too powerful. It would be better to"rebalance" them by creating something new instead of reshaping an old game that already proved itself to be successful.
What's overlooked is how much "rebalancing" the player does, mainly by being an arse. After a while, you can't be bothered to prebuff, wander into a fight unprepared and then run around like a bunch of loons wondering why NPC's are nearly dying.
That's rebalancing, unintentional though it maybe.
Far too much attention is given to the "no reload" style of player. The rest of us don't need the game "rebalanced" because we don't play the game as a final exam and, for example, don't find mages particularly OP because a lot of the time, we can't remember half the spells that we can use. And we panic. And we forget to put armour back on which we took off to open a chest. Or we wander off in a beholder lair safe in the knowledge that their magic can't touch us, except for "hold", and then find that the rest of the party is miles and miles away and you're "held" and powerless so there's a mad scramble across the map to help out..........
Leave the game alone, it works better than all the rest 20 years down the line.
I don't see the need to "balance" anything in a single player game. For me imbalance and "unfair" are an integral fact of any realistic and immersive setting. Arbitrary balance is actually immersion-breaking for me and I don't want my mundane warriors to be just as powerful as archmages because Beamdog felt the need to balance warriors and mages in BG2.
Your choice of classes and companions and their strengths and weakness, synergies or conflicts should be a part of the difficulty setting you choose for your specific adventure. Arbitrary balance is unnecessary and in my opinion, unwelcome.
This. The whole "AD&D was never balanced!" argument is BS. AD&D relied on a good DM to keep players in line and on track. Thieves, by far the weakest class according to the numbers, had the potential to be the most disruptive, the most creative, the most powerful. If a player tries to do something obviously contrary to the stated rules of the world - like, say, cast a Chain Contingency spell in the midst of combat in order to have the spells in it cast quicker - the DM has the ability to shut them down.
"Oh! The ogre berserker managed to score a crit on you a split second before you finished! Now you're hurt and bleeding and the Chain Contingency *plus* those three spells are all lost from your memory... What? No, you can't see the roll. Trust me, he scored a crit."
Here, there is no DM, only the code. So if Beamdog wants to change to code such that it acts like a better DM, I 100% support it.
There is no such thing as "arbitrary balance" in games. Balance is part of the soul of every game.
wikipedia: "A game is structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment. Key components of games are: - goals - rules - challenge - and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both."
When you have a goal and face a challenge to meet it, you have a problem. So games are about problem solving. Within a man-made set of rules designed to produce enjoyment. Rules influence the challenge. When rules are deficient and don't produce a desired degree of challenge, the problem is either too hard or trivial. That means that the game is not properly balanced in order to produce the desired level of enjoyment. Sometimes the problem-solving breaks down completely and you either hit a brick wall (unsolvable problem in a bugged game for example) or you just go from point A to point B without having to put in any effort (nonexistent problem). There, however, you have the interaction which is also an integral element of games, but it's not specific to games and is not sufficient on it's own to form a game.
Without a problem to solve there's no game. You may derive all of your enjoyment from the aspects of game that don't have anything to do with balance (interaction, artistic elements such as storytelling or visuals) but that certainly is not the case for a majority of people who bought a *game* knowing that it was a game. And it probably isn't true (that balace is unimportant) even for you, even if you don't know it. Do you play on story mode? You don't? So it isn't true and balance is important to you as well some degree.
If you don't play the game for problem solving, then you're not playing a game. You might be playing an interactive novel. Or an interactive work of visual arts.
Baldur's Gate is not that. Might be for you. But it in itself, in it's essence is a game. It was made by people who make games. It was marketed and sold as a game. It was played as a game and reviewed by press as a game. It had all the elements of a game. These elements were formulated in a certain proportion. There were *goals* (quests) There were *rules* (AD&D adapted for a CRPG) There was *interaction* (roleplaying)
and...
There was *challenge*. Not the hardest game ever made, but there was a certain, specific amount of it and something about it had to be right because people loved the game as a whole...and they wrote walkthroughs...wrote strategies and debated on forums...
Now when Beamdog comes and they make this element slightly defective compared to it's original form (despite making improvements in other regards) and call that "Enhanced Edition" you must understand that some people won't be pefectly satisfied.
The balance in Baldur's Gate only ever existed in chunks, and only in certain areas of the game - it never was omnipresent, nor very prominent, really. As a player you could always make character and party setup choices that would make the game a lot easier or a lot harder. If you're familiar with the game, you can choose to forgo most of the challenge or mix-and-match your own balance, as you please, without ever even touching the difficulty slider. If you want to use the terminology from earlier, you are your own DM.
The game is not a fair and even playground, and it never was. It's not balanced in the same way an MMO is where it's essential that various characters are on a sameish power level. When Beamdog decides that the wizard slayer is too weak and should be buffed, I can't help but feel they're misunderstanding the nature of the game and how player choice works with it.
Comments
game made easier than it used to be = bad
it's easy to fix-this in a conservative and legacy-friendly way: whatever makes the player stronger should somehow apply to enemies
player gets a kit making him stronger? some enemies should get it.
player gets to play with a goblin shaman? he should fight some goblin shamans too
player gets new spells? some enemies should too
players gets better items? some enemies should either get better items (masterwork weapons / armor for example?) or be more proficient with weapons they already have
players get to get more XP? some enemies should get a level-up
etc...
and:
players get to get more gold? they should #1 get an opportunity to spend that gold (which they currently don't) and #2 their purchasing power should not increase when it was already too high
But all of this is besides the point in the case of Baldur's Gate, because here I think buffing and nerfing character abilities are both wrong-headed actions. This a classic that should be respected and preserved, not an MMO where the meta-game should shift every month to the flavor of the most recent balance update.
for example in soa pre-tob there were no HLAs
now in BG2:EE which invariably includes ToB everyone reaches HLAs during SoA, and the game is much much easier.
this needs to be counteracted to restore the original challenge which is the soul of every game. that's what a team of enhancers and legacy-preservers should do in my opinion.
Maybe I'll come back to this topic later.
If you want to make Baldur's Gate harder, easier, more balanced, less balanced, or whatever, go right ahead, I support you fully to express your own preferences. As long as you don't force your preferences on me.
New players don't play BG for nostalgic reasons and that's the key.
IE games aren't nearly so old. If it's perfectly playable in 2016 the same philosophy applies to it's design as to any other modern game. There are now new players that experience the game pretty much the same way i did many years ago - there is immersion, there is real enjoyment.
Only a game that has a breath of timelessness can still work like new after almost 20 years. So the legacy is really not so much about old players, it's about *the game as such*.
They should balance future projects though (including future ees)
I feel that the different classes have different learning and skill curves and that's ok. Plus, reworking the game so that mages aren't so dramatically overpowered by the end is going to be difficult. Also, because of all the party combinations we have access to, it's not like you're ever locked out of something unless you choose to be.
If they correct bugs or something like that, that's ok. I would hate to see a patch note saying "We're reducing the damage of Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting because it was making mages too powerful at higher levels and we felt that Illusionists were too weak because of its damage."
On a personal note, I'm still a living salt mine over the nerf to Algernon's Cloak. It's not like it was even THAT powerful or game breaking but it sure was fun for me. Plus, if I ever stopped finding it fun I could just stop using it. I had choice. Now I don't.
AD&D is very liberal when it comes to balance. And by that I mean that no one expects to have perfect balance when you crunch the numbers behind the dice rolls. And it also counts on the longevity of campaigns to even things out.
Example: non-human races have advantages over humans and as a drawback, they have level caps. Another example: linear warriors, quadratic wizards. At low levels, warriors rule. At high levels, wizards overpower them (or everything, really).
In other words, in AD&D things are not supposed to be strictly balanced all the time. The pendulum swings one way and then back, and then the other way again and so on.
The subsequent editions changed that and 4E is particularly egregious in that regard. Since it's been almost two decades, it seems to me that the current generation of players has been more influenced by the post-3E approach (and it's obsession with perennial balance) than by AD&D.
Another fundamental characteristic between AD&D and later editions is that the former is a collection of several subsystems (think about how the difference in how thief skills, ability score checks, saving throws and attack rolls work) while the latter ones have progressively unified mechanics. 5E is much more modular in that regard, but the simplification (or dumbing down, depending on your opinion) is still present.
As a game series that encompasses a whole campaign (from puny Level 1 all the way to epic levels), it's more than okay for Baldur's Gate to keep in line with AD&D's design philosophy.
The thing that concerns me with Beamdog rebalancing/revising of Bioware content is that every time I look at the new content introduced by the EEs, I identify one of two kinds of stuff:
1) Things that are not integrated seamlessly (main example: the way the BG:EE new NPCs are completely out of line with the originals in terms of scope)
and 2) Things that are either ambitious or complex to the point where they easily break (main example: Hexxat, all the micromanagement imposed by her presence and all the bugs and exploits that come with the package).
There are exceptions, of course: most new items are very good.
I'm starting to go on a tangent, though, so I'll drop my point for now and elaborate further some other time.
For stuff like balance, I think mods are the best way to go. Some people like Rogue Rebalancing, thinking it balances the Thief and Bard classes better; others think it makes the balance worse. There've been multiple balancing attempts to the Shapeshifter, and quite a number of kitpacks adding or modifying existing kits in the name of balance, and their work is to be thanked. But the baseline should remain the same; it's far too late to change stuff over balance in a single-player game.
What's overlooked is how much "rebalancing" the player does, mainly by being an arse.
After a while, you can't be bothered to prebuff, wander into a fight unprepared and then run around like
a bunch of loons wondering why NPC's are nearly dying.
That's rebalancing, unintentional though it maybe.
Far too much attention is given to the "no reload" style of player.
The rest of us don't need the game "rebalanced" because we don't play the game as a final exam and, for example, don't find mages particularly OP because a lot of the time, we can't remember half the spells that we can use.
And we panic.
And we forget to put armour back on which we took off to open a chest.
Or we wander off in a beholder lair safe in the knowledge that their magic can't touch us, except for "hold", and then find that the rest of the party is miles and miles away and you're "held" and powerless so there's a mad scramble across the map to help out..........
Leave the game alone, it works better than all the rest 20 years down the line.
Your choice of classes and companions and their strengths and weakness, synergies or conflicts should be a part of the difficulty setting you choose for your specific adventure. Arbitrary balance is unnecessary and in my opinion, unwelcome.
A well balanced game has lots of meaningful choices, not choices masquerading as calculations (to use terms from the video).
There is no such thing as "arbitrary balance" in games. Balance is part of the soul of every game.
wikipedia: "A game is structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment. Key components of games are:
- goals
- rules
- challenge
- and interaction.
Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both."
When you have a goal and face a challenge to meet it, you have a problem. So games are about problem solving. Within a man-made set of rules designed to produce enjoyment.
Rules influence the challenge.
When rules are deficient and don't produce a desired degree of challenge, the problem is either too hard or trivial. That means that the game is not properly balanced in order to produce the desired level of enjoyment. Sometimes the problem-solving breaks down completely and you either hit a brick wall (unsolvable problem in a bugged game for example) or you just go from point A to point B without having to put in any effort (nonexistent problem). There, however, you have the interaction which is also an integral element of games, but it's not specific to games and is not sufficient on it's own to form a game.
Without a problem to solve there's no game. You may derive all of your enjoyment from the aspects of game that don't have anything to do with balance (interaction, artistic elements such as storytelling or visuals) but that certainly is not the case for a majority of people who bought a *game* knowing that it was a game. And it probably isn't true (that balace is unimportant) even for you, even if you don't know it. Do you play on story mode? You don't? So it isn't true and balance is important to you as well some degree.
If you don't play the game for problem solving, then you're not playing a game. You might be playing an interactive novel. Or an interactive work of visual arts.
Baldur's Gate is not that. Might be for you. But it in itself, in it's essence is a game. It was made by people who make games. It was marketed and sold as a game. It was played as a game and reviewed by press as a game.
It had all the elements of a game.
These elements were formulated in a certain proportion.
There were *goals* (quests)
There were *rules* (AD&D adapted for a CRPG)
There was *interaction* (roleplaying)
and...
There was *challenge*.
Not the hardest game ever made, but there was a certain, specific amount of it and something about it had to be right because people loved the game as a whole...and they wrote walkthroughs...wrote strategies and debated on forums...
Now when Beamdog comes and they make this element slightly defective compared to it's original form (despite making improvements in other regards) and call that "Enhanced Edition" you must understand that some people won't be pefectly satisfied.
The game is not a fair and even playground, and it never was. It's not balanced in the same way an MMO is where it's essential that various characters are on a sameish power level. When Beamdog decides that the wizard slayer is too weak and should be buffed, I can't help but feel they're misunderstanding the nature of the game and how player choice works with it.