Gloomy outlook on AI. (What is the SCS status for Dragonspear at release?)
Ygramul
Member Posts: 1,059
Does anyone know how/if SCS for BGEE could carry over at least basic AI functionality to SoD?
I imagine that specific AI improvements, e.g., for mage/cleric scripts would require a full update on SCS, which may be as involved and distant as SCS for IWD; i.e., it may never happen.
I make a point of purchasing and supporting all Beamdog releases (they had been nice developers to us), but quite honestly I never bothered finishing IWD: it is uselessly easy without an SCS level AI, no matter what challenge settings/mods you use (reasonable, core rule, no-reload settings; heart-of-whatever is irrelevant here).
I wish Beamdog spent resources on upgrading AI on all EE line. I would pay $60 (price for an AAA title) happily on nothing but an AI upgrade for the games.
I imagine that specific AI improvements, e.g., for mage/cleric scripts would require a full update on SCS, which may be as involved and distant as SCS for IWD; i.e., it may never happen.
I make a point of purchasing and supporting all Beamdog releases (they had been nice developers to us), but quite honestly I never bothered finishing IWD: it is uselessly easy without an SCS level AI, no matter what challenge settings/mods you use (reasonable, core rule, no-reload settings; heart-of-whatever is irrelevant here).
I wish Beamdog spent resources on upgrading AI on all EE line. I would pay $60 (price for an AAA title) happily on nothing but an AI upgrade for the games.
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http://gibberlings3.net/forums/index.php?s=18d5d09611ed3dd692effae8a2bdcace&showtopic=27034
Realistically though it's clearly a very time consuming thing to do and there aren't THAT many people who play this kind of game for really tough combat. Pillars of Eternity was pretty disappointing too to a SCS veteran. There's already a small market for Isometric RPGs and a small percetnage of those who want advanced AI.
What I do hope is that the Devs have at least improved on the Vanilla AI for the new encounters, so that the enemies make slightly better use of their abilities etc., I think there's reason to be optimistic there.
There was also talk of a "legacy of bhaal" mode, which I can't find much information on, which might help.
I'm sure there will be other aspects of the game to enjoy too, but do agree that poor difficulty can ruin a game. You often get this extensive list of cool abilities which you barely need to use!
According to the devs, "they re-designed AI from the scratch. Partly because it was rather blunt in vanilla games, partly because it simply could not handle the tasks we had set for it.
So, albeit it doesn't necessarily top SCS - which wasn't a goal, for various reasons, - it still offers a comparable amount of challenge on high difficulty settings, as well as introducing a couple brand new features. You might have glimpsed one during the large battle in a courtyard."
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/655356/#Comment_655356
In SoD, your difficulty will greatly influence the encounters, not only adding some troops to enemy groups but improving their AI.
Enemies won't use their most powerful spells, items and abilities on Normal and Story Mode. They will also not use some of their more advanced tactics on those settings. However, if you increase the difficulty to "Core Rules" (or higher) you can be sure that opponents will fight to the best of their ability.
The number of enemies that you fight also varies depending on the difficulty settings as does the actual composition of the battle encounters. Sometimes, a single creature that gets added on a higher difficulty setting can make a battle significantly harder due to its ability to heal or buff its allies.
[spoiler=an encounter on the Easy difficulty]
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=an encounter on the Insane difficulty]
[/spoiler]
The Legacy of Bhaal mode has the following additional traits:
player summons get *2+20 hp
max rest encounters increases by 1
+75 gold per pickup
creature levels are treated as level + 12 for some checks
non controlled sprites cannot fail morale checks
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/717207/#Comment_717207
This is good to hear and I hope it trickles back to the original BG content.
Also, I hope that they will adopt IWDEE's "Insane Difficulty; without extra HP or XP" options into BG and BG2. (That may involve updating a lot of encounter tables, so perhaps not trivial.)
The best investment for Beamdog's time, in my opinion, is a DLC with an AI upgrade (throw in some kits, for marketing, if you want). I will gladly pay full price of an AAA title for that if done well.
So if you play on harder difficulty settings, you fight more monsters and get the XP that those monsters are worth. As an example, lest's say that on Normal you would fight two ogres, each worth 270 XP so you'd get a total of 540 XP from that encounter. On Core Rules, you would fight 3 ogres for a total of 810 XP from the same encounter.
But there will be (and currently you can see it in the open beta of the EE patches) an option to switch off difficulty-based increased damage.
(If an AI-only DLC may not sound marketable feel free to bundle some class/kits in it, of course.)
That also means that the changes don't backport automatically to other areas; different encounters have different creatures, which means they don't use the same AI.
@Ygramul I'd love to see that personally, but it would mean a significant change in the overall design of the game, so it's not something that we'd do lightly. But it is something that I, personally, would support as an optional add-on.
In SoD we've been fully in control of encounters' design, both on local and global scope, and knew them by heart. With vanilla content we'd first need to rebuild the picture in our minds, before making changes. It's nothing impossible, as visibly proven by SCS, but ensuring that no new bugs are introduced requires quite more effort than may seem at first glance and than we could afford at the moment. We don't want new bugs.
I appreciate the earnest response.
I hope you folks will consider the continued interest in the EE series as a vote of confidence to continue improvements (and, yes!, please charge us for it -- we want you to profit well while doing this).
Baldur's Game series has become the connoisseur's gaming experience at this point, proving that a refined game is worth something even decades after, rather than the usual develop/abandon cycle for titles.
There is a reason why Pillars of Eternity (which objectively is beyond BG in many regards) is still not getting as much playtime as BG from me, as did neither NWN, Dragon Age etc.
Redo AI for combat vs named enemy groups on Core or higher difficulty and you can add general AI that was added for players for non named enemies. There are not that many named enemy groups, a couple of bounty hunter groups and some of the story named enemies. Or at least do that for some side quests battles, kind of like how Pillars of Eternity had side quest combat harder than main quest combat.
@DavidW has been great in providing support for the newer iterations of BG/EE over the years, but it will likely take a while in the best of circumstances.