Should Beamdog intentionally introduce new exploits into the EEs?
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Member Posts: 859
Something that's been floating around in my head. It seems there are two main camps that crop up whenever Beamdog patches a behavior that has been around for a long time.
Camp #1: "exploits are unintended and bad and the developer is fully within its rights to correct them"
Camp #2: "exploits don't hurt anyone and correcting them reduces the number of ways one can choose to play the game, and ultimately makes the game less fun. Fun is a more important goal than strict adherence to the rules."
If one wanted to get more specific, there seem to be two more hybrid camps that fall somewhere between those.
Camp #3: "Some exploits cannot be avoided by the player, such as MMM setting your APR to five. These should be patched. Others are strictly up to the player, such as bard song stacking. These should be left."
Camp #4: "There is nothing wrong with patching exploits in theory, but *BEAMDOG* should not be patching exploits because they are not the *ORIGINAL* developer. They are the caretakers of the IE games, but not the owners, and they should respect the state the actual owners left the game in as much as possible.
Now, I tend to be in Camp #1. Game developers absolutely tell you how you should and shouldn't play their games, and that's fine. The original games shipped with exploits that the original developers corrected, and I have no reason to believe that the ones they left were because they approved of those exploits and not because, say, they didn't have the money to support continued patches.
But as a user-of-exploits, I'm also sympathetic to Camp #2 and #3. I love Feeblemind. I love Feebleminding blue-circle NPCs until it sticks for all manner of reasons, (to facilitate their murder, to allow me to pickpocket and steal with impunity, to avoid fights or conversations, or just because I feel like it). If "failed Feebleminds don't cause a neutral NPC to go hostile" ever gets patched, I'll be sad to see it go, because that's one less way for me to enjoy the game.
But this raises a question for me. If I'm in camp #2 or #3, isn't the logical endpoint of my position the belief that Beamdog should be intentionally introducing *new* exploits, provided that they're completely avoidable for those who don't want to take advantage?
Should Beamdog make it so that invisibility stacks and if you cast it twice, you become invisible to creatures who could otherwise see through invisibility? And a third casting would make it so that the invisibility is undispellable, and a fourth casting would make it so that aggressive action no longer breaks invisibility?
After all, it'd be completely optional if a player wanted to cast Invisibility four times to enter God Mode. It would just give players another way to enjoy the game if they wanted it, and they'd be free to ignore it if it felt too cheesy for them.
Should Beamdog make it so if you pause the game and trigger a Greater Whirlwind and a Wand of Lightning before unpausing you wind up with 60 attacks per round? Should Beamdog make it so if a Cleric uses rat form from the Cloak of Sewers, not only can he still use Turn Undead, but Turn Undead will actually work against all enemies, whether undead or not? Having a rat-formed Cleric run through the lair of the Unseeing Eye chunking Beholders would certainly give us another way to play, (and I'd argue it's still less cheesy than the Shield of the Balduran).
Should Beamdog not only reinstate all of the stacking behavior from vanilla BG, (Hardiness stacks with itself, Armor of Faith stacks with itself, Blur stacks with itself, etc.), but even introduce new stacking behavior? Make Fireshields stack, poison weapon stack, etc.
Should Beamdog change things back so that not only could you wear character-specific items that should be disallowed, (Monks wearing Firecam's Full Plate, Fighter/Mages casting spells in Corthala Family Armor), but actually go through and randomly / arbitrarily change the flags on other items so that they're usable by the "wrong" classes, (Clerics using Fire Tooth throwing dagger, say, or Jahiera inexplicably being able to equip the Scarlet Ninja-To)?
Or even do away with all flags entirely and just leave things up to player discretion whether they want to use "disallowed" items or not, (perhaps put this as an option in the menu so new players don't accidentally equip their kensai with armor without realizing they shouldn't be able to)?
I don't mean to suggest there's a "right" answer or a "wrong" answer to any of these questions. Like I said, I'm in Camp #1, and the fact that I answer "no" to these questions is a big reason why, (otherwise I'd be more in Camp #3 to protect my beloved Feeblecheese).
But I think answering "yes" to any or all of these is a totally reasonable position for a Camp #2 / Camp #3 player to take, and it's interesting to me that I haven't ever seen anyone else advocating for Beamdog to introduce *more* exploits. Because that seems like a perfectly logical endpoint.
If you consider yourself a camp #2 / camp #3 player, would you be in favor of Beamdog intentionally introducing new exploits? Why or why not?
Camp #1: "exploits are unintended and bad and the developer is fully within its rights to correct them"
Camp #2: "exploits don't hurt anyone and correcting them reduces the number of ways one can choose to play the game, and ultimately makes the game less fun. Fun is a more important goal than strict adherence to the rules."
If one wanted to get more specific, there seem to be two more hybrid camps that fall somewhere between those.
Camp #3: "Some exploits cannot be avoided by the player, such as MMM setting your APR to five. These should be patched. Others are strictly up to the player, such as bard song stacking. These should be left."
Camp #4: "There is nothing wrong with patching exploits in theory, but *BEAMDOG* should not be patching exploits because they are not the *ORIGINAL* developer. They are the caretakers of the IE games, but not the owners, and they should respect the state the actual owners left the game in as much as possible.
Now, I tend to be in Camp #1. Game developers absolutely tell you how you should and shouldn't play their games, and that's fine. The original games shipped with exploits that the original developers corrected, and I have no reason to believe that the ones they left were because they approved of those exploits and not because, say, they didn't have the money to support continued patches.
But as a user-of-exploits, I'm also sympathetic to Camp #2 and #3. I love Feeblemind. I love Feebleminding blue-circle NPCs until it sticks for all manner of reasons, (to facilitate their murder, to allow me to pickpocket and steal with impunity, to avoid fights or conversations, or just because I feel like it). If "failed Feebleminds don't cause a neutral NPC to go hostile" ever gets patched, I'll be sad to see it go, because that's one less way for me to enjoy the game.
But this raises a question for me. If I'm in camp #2 or #3, isn't the logical endpoint of my position the belief that Beamdog should be intentionally introducing *new* exploits, provided that they're completely avoidable for those who don't want to take advantage?
Should Beamdog make it so that invisibility stacks and if you cast it twice, you become invisible to creatures who could otherwise see through invisibility? And a third casting would make it so that the invisibility is undispellable, and a fourth casting would make it so that aggressive action no longer breaks invisibility?
After all, it'd be completely optional if a player wanted to cast Invisibility four times to enter God Mode. It would just give players another way to enjoy the game if they wanted it, and they'd be free to ignore it if it felt too cheesy for them.
Should Beamdog make it so if you pause the game and trigger a Greater Whirlwind and a Wand of Lightning before unpausing you wind up with 60 attacks per round? Should Beamdog make it so if a Cleric uses rat form from the Cloak of Sewers, not only can he still use Turn Undead, but Turn Undead will actually work against all enemies, whether undead or not? Having a rat-formed Cleric run through the lair of the Unseeing Eye chunking Beholders would certainly give us another way to play, (and I'd argue it's still less cheesy than the Shield of the Balduran).
Should Beamdog not only reinstate all of the stacking behavior from vanilla BG, (Hardiness stacks with itself, Armor of Faith stacks with itself, Blur stacks with itself, etc.), but even introduce new stacking behavior? Make Fireshields stack, poison weapon stack, etc.
Should Beamdog change things back so that not only could you wear character-specific items that should be disallowed, (Monks wearing Firecam's Full Plate, Fighter/Mages casting spells in Corthala Family Armor), but actually go through and randomly / arbitrarily change the flags on other items so that they're usable by the "wrong" classes, (Clerics using Fire Tooth throwing dagger, say, or Jahiera inexplicably being able to equip the Scarlet Ninja-To)?
Or even do away with all flags entirely and just leave things up to player discretion whether they want to use "disallowed" items or not, (perhaps put this as an option in the menu so new players don't accidentally equip their kensai with armor without realizing they shouldn't be able to)?
I don't mean to suggest there's a "right" answer or a "wrong" answer to any of these questions. Like I said, I'm in Camp #1, and the fact that I answer "no" to these questions is a big reason why, (otherwise I'd be more in Camp #3 to protect my beloved Feeblecheese).
But I think answering "yes" to any or all of these is a totally reasonable position for a Camp #2 / Camp #3 player to take, and it's interesting to me that I haven't ever seen anyone else advocating for Beamdog to introduce *more* exploits. Because that seems like a perfectly logical endpoint.
If you consider yourself a camp #2 / camp #3 player, would you be in favor of Beamdog intentionally introducing new exploits? Why or why not?
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Comments
(If the exploit is enough of an exploit for anyone to give a damn. And of course, assuming the exploit can be patched. The "talk to unfriendly creature before turning unfriendly" is probably very difficult to patch.)
I also disagree that exploiting exploits is not a playing style. I'm halfway through a game where I'm roleplaying that Imoen is the only Bhaalspawn and she's just having a psychotic break, looking at the results of her tainted blood and attributing them to an imaginary Charname that only she can see.
For this run, Charname is a Jester who does nothing but sing his bard song while invisible-- something that is possible only through the use of an exploit that was patched in version 2.0, but since I'm still on 1.3 I can still take advantage of.
Now, maybe you think this isn't a "playing style", it's just me using cheat codes. I like to think of it as a fun experiment in emergent storytelling. Agree or disagree, there's really no argument that the entire run would have been impossible had my game been updated to version 2.0.
(I'm fine with the idea to hide them behind cheat codes, though I think at that point a Camp #2 or Camp #3 person might argue that so long as the mechanism of the exploit was completely optional and impossible to trigger by chance, what does it matter if you put it behind a cheat code or not? If someone wants to do it, they'll do it. If someone doesn't, they won't.)
But coming into unrelated threads like this just to complain about the state of the iOS titles or IWDEE isn't really sticking it to Beamdog so much as it's sticking it to the other people in that thread who were hoping to discuss what the thread was actually about.
If an exploit is difficult to find, difficult to pull off, has a limited effect, has drawbacks, and only applies in certain circumstances, then it won't break the game. It's just a cool thing you can do.
Case in point: the spider gnome trick. I didn't discover the trick until years after I first started playing the game. Performing the trick requires multiple steps, only certain classes can do it, and it's not useful for every fight in the game.
(Unless you're Jan, in which case it can do almost anything, but the trick is no longer possible in BG2:EE)
But if an exploit is easy to find, easy to pull off, scales infinitely, has no drawbacks, and applies everywhere, then it breaks the game, because you can do everything with that one exploit alone. It reduces effective gameplay to one strategy.
A good example would be if you could indefinitely talk-block everyone in the game, even hostile critters. If you could, then it would render all other strategies obsolete, because that one exploit would always be the strongest option. The only way to keep the game challenging would be to avoid using it.
From a "flavor" standpoint, Feeblemind's utility against blue-circle NPCs is one of the key differentiators of the spell. If you do away with that, you might as well rename it to "Finger of Braindeath", since it's basically just Finger of Death with no damage on failed save.
From a mechanical justification standpoint, I think it makes sense depending on how you're abstracting a "save vs. spells". Is this an active thing that people are doing, or is it a passive trait of theirs? If it's the former, then after a successful save they would be all "oh hey, someone's trying to cast a spell on me, let's go aggro." If it's the latter, though, then they'd kind of just stand around and say "Oh, is that wizard casting a spell? I wonder what he's casting. I don't see anything happening. Is he looking in my dir... *feebleminded*."
(And given the nature of Feeblemind, I don't know that bystanders would necessarily notice when it's successful.)
- Feeblemind
Most non-damaging spells flagged as "hostile" are only so on a successful save because they have extra display/feedback/mechanical effects that don't offer a saving throw.For example, using Color Spray against a neutral creature above level 4, which Color Spray should not affect, will still turn them hostile. The only reason they turn hostile is this effect:
Display String: "Too high level for Color Spray"Without it, creatures above level 4 would not turn hostile.Another Example: Spiritual Lock (the Shaman's version of Feeblemind) does cause hostility on a successful savingthrow. The reason it does, is these effects: preventing the rest of the spell from affecting creatures with those spellstates.
and these effects: imposing a greater saving throw penalty against these creature types.
It doesn't matter what the targets race or Spellstates, they will turn hostile on a successful saving throw simply because these effects are present.
The Feeblemind spell lacks any such effects. You could add any effect to the spell without a saving throw, even something such as this:
Immunity to Spell: Alliesand it would cause allies to turn hostile on a successful saving throw.
I want the old exploits that you do not end up using unintentionally to stay there because they give the game character in some cases make it more fun. However, if the devs find out that they introduced an exploit by mistake, and it turns out players will not use it unintentionally and it also fun - leave it in.
At the end of the day, it's cheesy and exploity and I don't really blame Beamdog if they decide to change behavior, (though I think this is less a "bug" and more an instance of "there were two possible design directions, both of which have drawbacks, and the original devs chose one when with the benefit of hindsight they probably should have chosen the other").
And as I said, current behavior at least goes a long way towards distinguishing it from Finger of Death and Polymorph Other.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/228280/discussions/2/368542585862403732/
"- Non-friendly NPCs that are Blinded will no longer stand still; they will wander aimlessly until they are close enough to see someone worth attacking"
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/723016/#Comment_723016