Level Scaling in Baldur's Gate
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This discussion was created from comments split from: Unpopular opinions.
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Could be worse, though. The EEs could use vanilla BG walking speed.
Went with a half-orc kensai this time. I finished a dwarf kensai run through bg1 awhile back...but I scrapped it. A dwarf out of armor just doesn't work for me^^
Who could have known?
I happen to agree. I can gain three or four levels in the first 20% of the game and three or four more in the last 80% of the game. That's an awful long time between level ups.
Paper Mario's level progression is basically a perfectly straight line. There are no jumps or slowdowns at all.
BG1 has by far the most lopsided level progression I've ever seen. Shoal alone gets you 2-3 level ups. The ankheg farm gives even more XP, and the basilisk area gives you even more than that. All are accessible, and doable, at level 1. But those are the best sources of XP in the game; you never get anything faster.
Seriously? That's your problem? That using meta-game knowledge you deliberately went out of order and did a high-level area way ahead of time? And that "loopsided" your level progression. And that's the game's fault... because it's not linear like IWD2 or Paper Mario, apparently.
Okay then. I guess open-world RPGs are just not for you.
Perfect, that plateau you reach where the game is still challenging but with care/thought/tactics you can proceed.
Do you know how desperately hard that is to achieve in a game?
BG2 doesn't do it, it punishes you too much when you judge it wrong. And then before you know it, nothing much comes close to being a challenge at all.
Seriously, how much of BG2 is a walk in the park?
The whole of Spellhold, the underdark, the return to BG, Suldenesselar, all of it is routine unless you nerf yourself. And that's with not going out of your way to do it but by simply doing all the quests in chapter 2.
SCS makes a huge difference to BG2, BG not so much, the game achieves that balance by itself.
Edited to Add
BG2 allows you to turn one of it's major enemies into being not even fightable because you don't need to anymore, vampires.
I can't remember the last time I bothered to fight a vampire after the random encounters on the streets. So to get any challenge at all from vampires, you have to play a certain way, don't take a cleric early.
That's not balanced.
But no need to make it harder for yourself by allowing NPC to develop skills pretty quickly that wipe out a main enemy of the game.
Why isn't "turn undead" capped? Or a "save" allowed?
I kind of don't want it to be but when you can blow up a lich?
And you have to get to these really huge XP exploits across maps which contain spawns that can easily kill you at level one.
The basilisk map, might just be me, but right next to where you meet whathisname, Gnolls always appear. And they can do enough damage to whatshisname to mess up the rest of your xp farming.
The ankheg farm is indeed doable at level 1, but it's not exactly safe. A good set of armor will help, but because ankhegs also do acid damage on a failed save vs. breath, it's entirely possible for a bad hit to be instantly fatal, even for level 1 characters with less than 14 HP (which normally cannot be killed in a single blow, as they stop at 1 HP before dying).
However, Command and Sleep can both disable ankhegs. Sleep offers a save vs. spell at -3, which amounts to a 75% chance of success. That's 5 rounds of automatic hits. Command offers no save at all for targets below level 5, so a cleric can chain-cast Command spells and keep an ankheg down for 3 whole rounds (or 2 rounds for a cleric with below 18 Wisdom, like a gnome). Ankhegs have 52 HP, but unless you're playing solo, it should be possible to finish off an unconscious ankheg by dual-wielding weapons, as the THAC0 penalties from dual-wielding don't matter when you're getting automatic hits.
If you're playing with SCS, you can recruit Tiax from Beregost and use his Ghast to absorb the ankhegs' attacks. I often use Xzar and Montaron as tanks, simply because I don't care if they get killed.
And, of course, it's always possible to sneak into the ankheg cave and nab the Wand of Fire. A cleric can use Sanctuary to get the wand with no risk of getting hurt (opening containers cancels invisibility, but not Sanctuary), while a thief's stealth will merely give him or her a chance of grabbing the wand and making it out alive.
As for the gnolls in the basilisk area, they can definitely kill you at level 1. But you can run away from them (they're pretty slow, like all enemies whose sprites never got updated since the original BG1), and if you're familiar with the map, you can avoid running into them and go straight to the basilisks with Korax leading the way.
I guess let's put it another way. It's not that the level-ups slow down. It's that throughout the entire game the XP is super-concentrated instead of spread relatively evenly. I want to talk specifically about vanilla BG1, because it's unfair to lump TotSC content in here; basically the entire patch was designed to only add 1 level for most classes.
In non-expansion BG1, the XP cap was 89,000. This means that with a party of six you needed 534,000 XP to max everything out. Clearing out the Mutamin's Garden map got you around 30,000 of that. Clearing out the Lighthouse map got you around 20,000 more. Between the two of them, they're providing nearly 10% of all of the experience you'll need for the entire game.
In non-expansion BG2, the XP cap was 2.95m, so a party of six would need 17.7m XP to max out. If BG2 had something the equivalent of Mutamin's Garden and the Lighthouse map, it'd be a map that awarded over 1.7m XP. But BG2 doesn't have anything *CLOSE* to that. The closest I can think of is returning the Ryhnn Lanthorn, which gives your entire party 74.5k XP, then teleports them, then gives the entire party 74.5k experience again. That's 149k XP times six party members, or 894k total.
This is basically the last big XP reward in the entire game, coming at the culmination of a chapter-long quest and very shortly before your final confrontation. And it rewards a smaller percentage of total XP than clearing Mutamin's Garden did in BG1.
And this is just looking at Mutamin's Garden and Lighthouse. The Ankheg Farm is nearly as ridiculous. Just a basic clearing of the Ankheg farm map, (including resolving the Tenya quest, but not including any Ankheg farming), adds another ~15,000 or so. And again, this involves no Ankheg Farming, but given that it's so obviously rewarding and so obviously easy, stopping to farm Ankhegs seems to be one of the most obvious things in the entire game.
This isn't even about the fact that those massive XP pools are doable at level 1. It can rightly be pointed out that with enough metaknowledge, *everything* is doable at level 1. It doesn't matter if you do them first thing or last thing, the problem is that in BG1 XP is highly concentrated, with most areas giving you basically nothing and a few areas giving you basically everything.
Because BG1 is giving such insane XP totals (relative to total XP in the entire game) in such a condensed space, it must offset this by giving less XP everywhere else. Which means outside of the random and arbitrary points where XP comes in a deluge, (arbitrary = completely unrelated to the main quest line), XP comes in a trickle. And when you're in the (overwhelming majority of) moments where XP comes in a trickle, leveling can feel like a slog.
This is not a problem in BG2. By and large, quests are all giving a comparable amount of XP, and that amount is roughly proportional to the amount of work that was required to complete the quest and the relevance of the quest to the main plot line.
You are talking about advanced tactics and exploits that other than places like this forum are not well known.
The level progression is lopsided mainly for those who play BG a lot, an awful lot.
That surely can't be applied across the whole spectrum of players?
It took me years, and not until I registered here, for me to even consider trying a solo run.
I honestly don't think that the views of very experienced players should be the views that reflect how BG does anything.
I don't consider myself an "expert" or even an experienced player compared to yourself and others posting here. But I can recognise, even about myself, that toa large extent it is my playing, my actions that have made BG unbalanced.
When I first tried out BG1 in the Tutu days, I hunted hobgoblins and ogres for XP. The ankhegs just slaughtered me when I stumbled onto the farm, and I never even saw the basilisks. I remember dying numerous times in the Nashkel Mines and Firewine Ruins because of those Kobold Commandos and their arrows. Those Lightning Bolt traps weren't much fun, either. I didn't understand how people were supposed to beat the game when reaching level 3, or even level 2, was so far out of reach.
Baldur's Gate is hard. It gives you very few options and the game is riddled with instant death scenarios. It's my understanding that, in the original game, you could get ambushed by multiple basilisks on your first area transition out of Candlekeep.
So is your problem not that BG plays better, you know actually gives an enjoyable playing experience, because of the way it is set up.
Or is it that the numbers are uneven and therefore if you are number/level crunching, BG reaches a plateau?
It seems pointless to have this discussion unless it is acknowledged that the leveling up in BG was done for a purpose. It was used in order to make the game a better game. Of course leveling should be restricted after you have reached the plateau, the game is designed for you to reach that plateau yet still be challenged.
BG does that a lot better than BG2.
BG2 throws "challenge" out of the window for a large part of the game when you know your way around it.
Yeah but, but, but, the numbers are unbalanced.
Getting hung up on numbers, why?
Your model:
1. I'm digging through the data and see that XP gains are unbalanced.
2. I wonder how that should make me feel.
3. I decide I will now perceive leveling up in BG1 as a slog, (getting "hung up on the numbers").
Reality:
1. I perceive leveling up in BG1 as a slog.
2. I wonder why.
3. I realize XP gains are insanely unbalanced, which perfectly explains my original perceptions.
I'm not hung up on the numbers. I'm hung up on the feeling that BG1 is a slog, and the numbers are my way of quantifying and explaining that feeling. They are not used to form my opinion, but rather to inform my opinion.
Again, my problem isn't that leveling up is restricted. Tales of the Sword Coast added a bunch of extra content that was designed to get most characters just one more level... and that's fine! TotSC was a great expansion, and the XP gains were spread relatively evenly throughout it so that everything in it provided rewards roughly proportional to the difficulty, duration, and importance of the task in question. I never play through any TotSC content and think "this is an unrewarding slog".
My problem is that that is simply not the case in BG1, where (using completely arbitrary numbers to illustrate the point), say, 25% of the game's experience comes in 5% of the game's content, leaving only 75% for the remaining 95% of the game's content. (A problem only exacerbated by the really steep ratio of experience required for early level-ups vs. late level-ups.)
Again, I just made those numbers up to illustrate the point, but if we accept them as fact, then in the "XP-rich" areas you're getting six times as much XP per unit of effort as in the "XP-poor" areas. Once you exhaust those XP pools, all that's left is to grind out XP at the much slower rate.
And there's not a lot of justification for the denseness of that XP from a game-design standpoint. Most of the time, developers will make the main quest more XP dense and sidequests less XP dense to create more of a sense of progression when advancing the plot, (while leaving dithering around as its own reward). But BG does the exact opposite.
We could use a reductio ad absurdum to show why unbalanced XP gain can be an issue. Imagine a 100-hour long game where 99% of the experience in the entire game from killing some dude named Steve and 1% of the experience in the game came from literally everything else combined. I don't care if Steve is really, really hard to kill and the battle against him is the most epic battle I have every experienced in a video game, that's prima facie terrible design.
Now imagine the opposite game, where everything is perfectly calibrated so that upon completion of any segment that represents exactly 10% of the game you will be rewarded with exactly 10% of the XP in the entire game. This could be boring, sure. Or it could also not be boring. @semiticgod already mentioned that this is basically Paper Mario in a nutshell, and that's an awesome game. Hyper-balanced XP gains are not prima facie a bad design choice.
So when a developer moves their game away from perfectly proportional XP rewards, they need to have some justification for doing so. I think some minor variation is obviously good. You want everything the player does to be rewarding enough to justify them doing it, but everything doesn't need to be *equally* rewarding, and indeed various quirks and inconsistencies in rewards can add a lot of character to a game when done well.
My main contention is that the variance in rewards in BG1 *is not done well*. It's too extreme. There's, what, about 36 maps that are reachable immediately after leaving Candlekeep, give or take? When I'm playing BG1, I'll do a full clear on a dozen of them (generously), a focused foray into maybe another dozen with a specific objective in mind... and then just leave the remaining dozen untouched, either never setting foot in them or else using them only to travel to another area that's actually worth my time. Once I've experienced that content once or twice, it may as well not exist.
When you're exploring randomly, some maps are going to give you 2,000 XP and some maps are going to give you 20,000 XP. In the first couple of playthroughs that's kind of a fun feature, since you never know what you're going to get. But once you have that metaknowledge, this is a major, major, major drag.
Maybe you want to defend it as great game design because of how magical the experience is when you don't have metaknowledge. That's fine insofar as it goes. But I can't unremember things once I know them. I can't recapture that magic anymore, it's long gone. And so the unbalanced XP distribution dramatically impacts replayability of BG1 for me. Because I no longer have hope and wonder to incentivize exploration, exploration is a slog.
If things are different for you, I'd just like to go on record as saying (A) I'm really glad that BG1 preserves its replayability so well for you, but for me it has always felt like a huge slog (since around playthrough #3), and it's hard to argue someone out of their feelings, and (B) ... this *is* the unpopular opinions thread, right?
"Maybe you want to defend it as great game design because of how magical the experience is when you don't have metaknowledge. "
No, I've given you the reasons for my defense of the system which you have chosen to ignore.
BG leveling works because it allows the player to quickly achieve a level where playing is rewarding. And then keeps you at that level so the game doesn't become trivial.
BG2 allows you to surpass that level quite early so there are no challenges left.
Now admitedly, BG2 does this not only by leveling, but by rewarding players with epic level, gamebreaking items and OP skills (turn undead).
The two combined make the areas I have previously mentioned, spellhold and onwards, pretty uninspiring from a gameplay perspective.
That's where there is "slogging".
Yay, look at all those XP rewards, just lets not talk about how you have been going through the motions for a long time.
Perfect, that plateau you reach where the game is still challenging but with care/thought/tactics you can proceed.
I did not direct my response directly to you because it was a conversation with multiple participants, but I responded in this post:
and followed up in my last post:
The truth is your main defense, (low-level is a nightmare but you get through it quickly and the rest of the game is balanced), isn't necessarily true. Either you exploit metaknowledge to hit those big XP pools and skip it entirely, or else you pass by the XP pools and grind for ages to get through it in less-rewarding XP streams. To get a party of six from level 1 to level 3, I can either clear 15 entire "low-XP" maps... or I can just clear Mutamin's Garden.
Also, your criticism of my stance that XP pools are bad is that I'm only exploiting them because of my metaknowledge. I'd respond by saying that your criticism of the underdark as "easy" is likewise because of your metaknowledge. Because I'd wager a bunch of people first hit the underdark with its magic-resistant drow, its liches, its beholders, and its hordes of mind flayers and thought it was anything *BUT* "easy". In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the Mind Flayer dungeon is the most difficult part of Shadows of Amn, bar none.
But it's no coincidence that the toughest parts of the underdark, (fighting Vithal, Mind Flayer Dungeon, Beholder Dungeon, Dierex, fighting the demon lord, fighting the drow city, fighting Adalon), are all optional content, while the minimum-required mandatory content, (Brynnlaw, talking to some Svirfnebli, killing the Kuo-Tao, etc), is a cakewalk.
This is a result of a completely different design decision: the decision to let the player leave for Spellhold at his or her discretion. This means that mandatory quest sections must be doable with a party that has ~300,000 XP, and anything that is doable by a party with 300,000 XP is going to be a cakewalk for a party with 1.5m XP.
Really, the devs should have done *a lot* more with scaling monster spawns during this section. Or, alternately, they could have gotten around this the same way they did in BG1: by making all that extra exploration you did before advancing the plot so unrewarding that the power differential between a completionist party and a non-completionist party was much smaller.
Anyways, in BG1, there's not really a whole lot of challenge either. Kill a lone cleric, kill a lone mage, obtain some scrolls from the bandit camp to get to Cloakwood. I'm not intimate enough about BG to know what sort of level you'd be by the time you got to Cloakwood mines just killing plot critical stuff and stuff otherwise directly in the way, but I wouldn't be surprised if one was level 3-4 at the least.
I made my widget comment earlier because it's harder to balance a game when the level range could be 3-7 as opposed to 10-15. In the first case, say your wizard's got 1 5d6 fireball and your Cleric has a few cure spells in the first case, but in the second case area-effect save-or-die enemy-only spells can be deployed, and your Cleric can do complete heals.
And so game developers have to design for the least common denominator, or at least the worst average sort of party expected. They have to design around someone skipping all that optional stuff. So late gameplay has to be less challenging unless they're designed so that all the earlier "optional" content actually isn't optional, but necessary grind in order to win.
One, and the most "personal", is that you feel that unless you're regularly gaining levels you're gaining nothing. But you're still gaining XP, and therefore still getting closer to your goal(of gaining levels). That is completely ignoring other means of gaining power which is gold and items. Mutamin's Garden might be a great place to gain XP but there isn't anything interesting there as far as items go, for example.
Two, you ignore that higher levels require drastically more XP to gain. Going to kill Sil & family might be fantastic for a level 1-2 party, but a party at levels 6-7 will be lucky if anyone gains a single level at all. Just because you personally rush the Mutamin and/or Sil doesn't mean that everyone does it. And it certainly doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. In fact, these maps are entirely optional in the game world, even more optional than something like Firewine(which you at least are told about in Beregost as a good place to "adventure" in) or Dryad Falls(which you will likely have to pass through on your way to Gnoll Stronghold to free Dynaheir) But nothing in the game points you towards these super high-level(because that's what these are; it's not like you get all this XP for free) locations.
Three, you ignore that level progression and power progression are two different things. Going from a level 1 Fighter the a level 13 Fighter is a huge increase in power. From 13 to 17, not so much. From 17 to 21, all you get is ThAC0 points. Sorry, but I'd much rather "slog" through low levels that matter, where I can eagerly look forward to another one knowing it will make a noticeable difference on the way the character performs, than "steadily gain levels" where all I get on a level up is "Hit Points Gained: 4". There is a perfect justification for that denseness from a game-design standpoint. Baldur's Gate is a role-playing game. The ultimate function of a role-playing game is to simulate reality - usually a different reality, but a reality nonetheless. And reality is never fair or balanced. Neither are encounters in Baldur's Gate, and therefore XP spread. Because of this, Baldur's Gate is ten times the roleplaying game Baldur's Gate 2 is(and let's just forget about ToB). In Baldur's Gate, there is a world that you get thrown in as one of many inhabitants, and the world does not bend itself to you. In Baldur's Gate 2, you are the center of the game, and the entire game is all about you. And yet I fully explore every map, even the Xvart Village, kill all monsters, loot all the houses in cities, and - just for good measure - try to pickpocket every NPC with a name.
Maybe blame the player, not the game? Maybe, if getting a bunch of levels from Mutamin and Sil early bothers you don't do it first, and do it last instead, like the high-level content it's supposed to be?
Then again you play it on an iPad, so what can I expect lol.
" Baldur's Gate is ten times the roleplaying game Baldur's Gate 2 is"
In BG there's that inconsequential encounter where a random woman asks you go a bit south and kill the ogres. When you come back 5 minutes later, she says something like "oh, have you done it already, I'm no good at this quest giving business".
I love that as it is very tongue in cheek and applies so well to BG2. The idea that if you are not told to do something, you don't do it. And years before BG2 appeared on the scene.
Would have loved BG2 to have trusted the player to find out what to do on their own a bit instead of so many "go here do that" pointers. Would any player have really not ventured out of Athkatla had they not met somebody saying "I'll mark that on your map"?