In defense of the BG games, at the very least they had some timers for some things. I don't necessarily think a game has to have a time constraint. But I do think games have to think about how their systems interact with each other and if they're achieving their overall design goal.
Obsidian has said, many times, that they were focused on "choice and consequences". And while you're given a very liberal range of choices at many points in Deadfire, there is a paucity of consequences that sting the player. This lack of challenge -- contrasted with the very real challenges in the Original Sins and Kingmaker -- help explain the game's lackluster sales.
I guess you and I played different games because I found plenty of consequences in the Pillars games especially with your choice of faction, whereas found zero meaningful consequences in D:OS1 where you could practically kill any and all NPCs without anybody caring about it and no real consequences.
I think some clarification is needed. Again, what I said was "consequences that sting". I'm not talking about consequences that mean you choose the Blue faction instead of the Red faction. Or you chose the neutral good outcome to the side quest as opposed to the lawful good outcome. Those are interesting, but they aren't in-game consequences that provide a challenge for the player. They are choices on a menu.
That's fine for roleplaying options. But it's not good *game* design to have them replace real challenge. Because games should have challenges that the player needs to overcome. The interactive puzzles that needed to be solved were a major selling point in the OS games. Because if you didn't solve them, you couldn't complete the quest. There really isn't anything like them in Deadfire, where, again, most quests are solved more in the fashion of selecting your preferred solution from a menu, than having to solve a challenging game element.
Added from edit: Additionally another example is the combat. It's not the best part of OS1 imo, but, at the very least the sort of limited resurrection scrolls and the fact that dead characters won't gain XP at least motivated you to perform above and beyond merely winning each fight. As I said previously, in Deadfire, combat has virtually no consequences that harm or inconvenience the player with the exception of total party kills.
@Jaheiras_Witness "So BG2 would have been much improved if there were a timer in play. "
No it wouldn't have. A hard time limit is always bad, no exceptions. Let me play my game at whatever pace I want. The only "sensible" timer is one that lets you influence it.
Good examples would be Tyranny's initial time limit, the game tells you to activate a spell that will kill everyone in a certain location by "X" day. Limiting exploration time. In a clever twist, the year is never specified, so you can wait until the day, cast the spell, and have a whole year if you so wish.
Or FFXIII-3, ignoring everything else about it, has a time limit on the whole game, but questing increases it. So as long as you complete quests, you will never run out of time.
I'm sympathetic to both @ThacoBell and @Jaheiras_Witness points here, so I'm not sure what to click as far as "I hear you." I guess "Like" on both posts?
In the end, I have to go with @ThacoBell , for this reason: I play games for fun, entertainment, escape, and release from stress. Timers stress me. That defeats the entire purpose of my playing a game. Therefore, the timers are a huge reason why I was unable to enjoy P:KM.
Too much realism turns a game into a chore, or a thought experiment, or a story-writing task, or a puzzle to be solved, or a math problem, or any number of things that work against my main reasons to play - fun and escape.
Too little realism breaks my suspension of disbelief and my ability to become immersed in identification with my fantasy character.
In BG2, Imoen's story-based "timer" that doesn't exist mechanically is probably one reason I almost never play BG2 any more. I like to RP and identify totally with my fantasy gaming characters, and any character I would ever play is going to make a beeline towards Spellhold in an attempt to rescue Imoen. Afterwards, I have lost my soul. That means I have to make a beeline towards Suldanessalar and Irenicus. And that means I need to miss half (or more) of the game content, most of which is irrelevant to the main story.
I would absolutely call the construction of BG2 storywise "bad game design", which I'm sure is part of the reason I almost never play it any more, while I play and replay BG1 (and Icewind Dale, for that matter) several times a year, and have for the past 20 years.
I'm only one consumer, but I need a game story that gives me just enough incentive to explore and level my character - stock standard "you're an adventurer, you need gold, you love your home town, and you have wanderlust" is just about enough for me. I don't need to be "the Chosen One", I don't need to become a king or a god, or anything like that, to have fun in a fantasy game. Heck, a simple attack on my home village is enough to set me out adventuring, and having a wonderful time doing it.
That's why Might and Magic 6, 7, and 8, and Neverwinter Nights (both 1 and 2) are such huge wins for me in their stories.
BG 2 is only fun for me if I head-canon out most of the main story and pretend I just want to explore Amn and the surrounding countryside for no other reason than just doing it, "because it's there." That's how I had fun with it the first few times way back when.
I guess Pillars of Eternity also isn't something I replay very often because of the "you're a special snowflake" core of the narrative. Honestly, I think you two just gave me a huge insight into why I don't enjoy a lot of games I would think that I should.
Imoen manages to return to you in chapter 2, so you can adventure with her. I'm trying ti out now and it seems pretty decent. She also has some interesting responses to your dreams. Unfortunately, the mod doesn't seem to add anything in the way banters for her. So she's pretty quiet.
I think some clarification is needed. Again, what I said was "consequences that sting". I'm not talking about consequences that mean you choose the Blue faction instead of the Red faction. Or you chose the neutral good outcome to the side quest as opposed to the lawful good outcome. Those are interesting, but they aren't in-game consequences that provide a challenge for the player. They are choices on a menu.
That's fine for roleplaying options. But it's not good *game* design to have them replace real challenge. Because games should have challenges that the player needs to overcome. The interactive puzzles that needed to be solved were a major selling point in the OS games. Because if you didn't solve them, you couldn't complete the quest. There really isn't anything like them in Deadfire, where, again, most quests are solved more in the fashion of selecting your preferred solution from a menu, than having to solve a challenging game element.
Added from edit: Additionally another example is the combat. It's not the best part of OS1 imo, but, at the very least the sort of limited resurrection scrolls and the fact that dead characters won't gain XP at least motivated you to perform above and beyond merely winning each fight. As I said previously, in Deadfire, combat has virtually no consequences that harm or inconvenience the player with the exception of total party kills.
In Deadfire your choice of faction can result in companions who were my core party members walking out on me. Some quests are completely closed off to you based on your choices in other quests. Some of my bounties could not be turned in because a choice I made resulted in a critical NPC disappearing. There were quests where trying to remain true to my "good" alignment produced other bad outcomes and/or cost me in other tangible ways. And of course serious differences in the ending slides. These were stinging consequences to me.
As for D:OS, and speaking only of the first game since I have not and will never play the second one, those "interactive puzzles" you speak of so highly were for me painful, annoying, make-work chores that I really hated.
"And of course serious differences in the ending slides."
I take your point about companions and the factions, which is an okay example of what I'm talking about. But I think the above line gets at what I'm talking about, and where I guess I'm not being clear. Different ending slides isn't a *game* consequence. It's a plot consequence. It's a consequence that creates some different flavor in the setting and characters, but there's not a gameplay consequence. Having a total party kill and having to load a save is a gameplay consequence. Having wounds on a member of the party and thus having them be less effective is a gameplay consequence. But that latter one is erased quite easily, as I and others have stated previously here.
I'd add, along the same line, even companions ditching you is less impactful than it could be, because you can easily recruit an enormous roster and they all level up alongside you whether or not they're used in the party. It's not at all the stinging consequence of, for example, unexpectedly having Keldorn and Viconia come to blows midway through a BG2 run. In Deadfire you'll lose out on a sidequest and some flavor you were seeking, but you can build a nearly identical mercenary or swap in one of a number of adequate alternatives.
Ending slides or quest outcomes that don't turn out the way you wanted from an emotional perspective isn't a gameplay consequence in my definition. Because, for one, Obsidian doesn't write quests that if you somehow thread this difficult needle of choices you will end up with the objectively best quest reward or happiest ending slide. In combat, you learn how to get better because you die and reload. But you don't learn how to get "better" at clicking dialogue and textbox choices because you got some unexpected bad outcomes earlier.
With regards to OS puzzles, I don't find them hard to defend at all, and they've clearly charmed greater share of the market than Deadfire. Someone like Sawyer publicly conceding that players did not generally find the game a ton of fun is a pretty rare employee concession in my experience. The OS puzzles within quests at least force you to sit and think about the game for a minute. You can't just click through a set of text menus to victory. You may find that a chore, but I think plenty of people enjoyed quests that encouraged you to do things like minutely studying that gameworld you were inhabiting -- something, you know, a character in that world might do! Deadfire, in contrast, never really challenges you with the quest work. You might agonize over the emotional/roleplay aspects of a choice, but I find you're never doing anything that feels like detective work. With some exceptions, in Deadifre you're never at a loss for knowing exactly what the next move to progress the questline is -- even for sidequests.
The end result is a game where you don't experiment much, and thus there's little emergent gameplay. You never have to stop and think about things, except perhaps on an emotional/roleplay level. And where the one system with challenge, combat, fails to deliver that frequently enough. No matter how good you make the roleplaying experience (and they did), players want games. And these kinds of games have long been defined by having challenges.
@DinoDin "And these kinds of games have long been defined by having challenges."
Disagree. RPGs are all about the story and characters. Give me an interesting place to explore, and characters that I want to explore with, with plenty of rp opportunities.
Not really. Plenty of RPG's exist that have threadbare plots or stories that aren't intended to be coherent or even the focus, but still qualify as RPG's. An RPG without game-y elements is just an interactive story/movie.
Dragon Warrior, Dark Souls, the Diablo series are all influential games that qualify as RPG's where plot, characters, etc all take a pretty strong backseat to gameplay, just to name a few.
@DinoDin and @ThacoBell , You're talking about two qualitatively different sub-genres of RPG. The ones @DinoDin mentions as examples and seems to prefer are often called "Action RPG's", or aRPG's. People argue a lot about what separates the sub-genres, and we've had several threads in this forum doing so.
We need the distinctions among the qualitatively distinctive RPG sub-genres. There are party-based, sandbox exploration, and solo loot collection based, just to name a few. Comparing games that are from different sub-genres is an apples to oranges, useless endeavor, in my opinion.
Here are the examples I can find of where we've been around and around about this issue before:
Dragon Warrior isn't an action RPG. And there are many many more examples I could include. I'm not even sure you could really argue the old Gold Box games had significant plots. The plot in Icewind Dale takes a backseat to the gameplay. Even the main game people here praise, has a compelling story, but its story isn't really the draw for its replay value, I'd argue.
If games fail to deliver fun *game* elements, I don't think it matters how well you craft the plot, story, or characters. And I think Deadfire is a solid example of this fact.
Comments
Obsidian has said, many times, that they were focused on "choice and consequences". And while you're given a very liberal range of choices at many points in Deadfire, there is a paucity of consequences that sting the player. This lack of challenge -- contrasted with the very real challenges in the Original Sins and Kingmaker -- help explain the game's lackluster sales.
That's fine for roleplaying options. But it's not good *game* design to have them replace real challenge. Because games should have challenges that the player needs to overcome. The interactive puzzles that needed to be solved were a major selling point in the OS games. Because if you didn't solve them, you couldn't complete the quest. There really isn't anything like them in Deadfire, where, again, most quests are solved more in the fashion of selecting your preferred solution from a menu, than having to solve a challenging game element.
Added from edit: Additionally another example is the combat. It's not the best part of OS1 imo, but, at the very least the sort of limited resurrection scrolls and the fact that dead characters won't gain XP at least motivated you to perform above and beyond merely winning each fight. As I said previously, in Deadfire, combat has virtually no consequences that harm or inconvenience the player with the exception of total party kills.
No it wouldn't have. A hard time limit is always bad, no exceptions. Let me play my game at whatever pace I want. The only "sensible" timer is one that lets you influence it.
Good examples would be Tyranny's initial time limit, the game tells you to activate a spell that will kill everyone in a certain location by "X" day. Limiting exploration time. In a clever twist, the year is never specified, so you can wait until the day, cast the spell, and have a whole year if you so wish.
Or FFXIII-3, ignoring everything else about it, has a time limit on the whole game, but questing increases it. So as long as you complete quests, you will never run out of time.
In the end, I have to go with @ThacoBell , for this reason: I play games for fun, entertainment, escape, and release from stress. Timers stress me. That defeats the entire purpose of my playing a game. Therefore, the timers are a huge reason why I was unable to enjoy P:KM.
Too much realism turns a game into a chore, or a thought experiment, or a story-writing task, or a puzzle to be solved, or a math problem, or any number of things that work against my main reasons to play - fun and escape.
Too little realism breaks my suspension of disbelief and my ability to become immersed in identification with my fantasy character.
In BG2, Imoen's story-based "timer" that doesn't exist mechanically is probably one reason I almost never play BG2 any more. I like to RP and identify totally with my fantasy gaming characters, and any character I would ever play is going to make a beeline towards Spellhold in an attempt to rescue Imoen. Afterwards, I have lost my soul. That means I have to make a beeline towards Suldanessalar and Irenicus. And that means I need to miss half (or more) of the game content, most of which is irrelevant to the main story.
I would absolutely call the construction of BG2 storywise "bad game design", which I'm sure is part of the reason I almost never play it any more, while I play and replay BG1 (and Icewind Dale, for that matter) several times a year, and have for the past 20 years.
I'm only one consumer, but I need a game story that gives me just enough incentive to explore and level my character - stock standard "you're an adventurer, you need gold, you love your home town, and you have wanderlust" is just about enough for me. I don't need to be "the Chosen One", I don't need to become a king or a god, or anything like that, to have fun in a fantasy game. Heck, a simple attack on my home village is enough to set me out adventuring, and having a wonderful time doing it.
That's why Might and Magic 6, 7, and 8, and Neverwinter Nights (both 1 and 2) are such huge wins for me in their stories.
BG 2 is only fun for me if I head-canon out most of the main story and pretend I just want to explore Amn and the surrounding countryside for no other reason than just doing it, "because it's there." That's how I had fun with it the first few times way back when.
I guess Pillars of Eternity also isn't something I replay very often because of the "you're a special snowflake" core of the narrative. Honestly, I think you two just gave me a huge insight into why I don't enjoy a lot of games I would think that I should.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/76098/mod-imoen-4-ever-experience-the-bg-saga-with-imoen-and-the-beginning-of-soa-without-pressure/p1
Imoen manages to return to you in chapter 2, so you can adventure with her. I'm trying ti out now and it seems pretty decent. She also has some interesting responses to your dreams. Unfortunately, the mod doesn't seem to add anything in the way banters for her. So she's pretty quiet.
In Deadfire your choice of faction can result in companions who were my core party members walking out on me. Some quests are completely closed off to you based on your choices in other quests. Some of my bounties could not be turned in because a choice I made resulted in a critical NPC disappearing. There were quests where trying to remain true to my "good" alignment produced other bad outcomes and/or cost me in other tangible ways. And of course serious differences in the ending slides. These were stinging consequences to me.
As for D:OS, and speaking only of the first game since I have not and will never play the second one, those "interactive puzzles" you speak of so highly were for me painful, annoying, make-work chores that I really hated.
I take your point about companions and the factions, which is an okay example of what I'm talking about. But I think the above line gets at what I'm talking about, and where I guess I'm not being clear. Different ending slides isn't a *game* consequence. It's a plot consequence. It's a consequence that creates some different flavor in the setting and characters, but there's not a gameplay consequence. Having a total party kill and having to load a save is a gameplay consequence. Having wounds on a member of the party and thus having them be less effective is a gameplay consequence. But that latter one is erased quite easily, as I and others have stated previously here.
I'd add, along the same line, even companions ditching you is less impactful than it could be, because you can easily recruit an enormous roster and they all level up alongside you whether or not they're used in the party. It's not at all the stinging consequence of, for example, unexpectedly having Keldorn and Viconia come to blows midway through a BG2 run. In Deadfire you'll lose out on a sidequest and some flavor you were seeking, but you can build a nearly identical mercenary or swap in one of a number of adequate alternatives.
Ending slides or quest outcomes that don't turn out the way you wanted from an emotional perspective isn't a gameplay consequence in my definition. Because, for one, Obsidian doesn't write quests that if you somehow thread this difficult needle of choices you will end up with the objectively best quest reward or happiest ending slide. In combat, you learn how to get better because you die and reload. But you don't learn how to get "better" at clicking dialogue and textbox choices because you got some unexpected bad outcomes earlier.
With regards to OS puzzles, I don't find them hard to defend at all, and they've clearly charmed greater share of the market than Deadfire. Someone like Sawyer publicly conceding that players did not generally find the game a ton of fun is a pretty rare employee concession in my experience. The OS puzzles within quests at least force you to sit and think about the game for a minute. You can't just click through a set of text menus to victory. You may find that a chore, but I think plenty of people enjoyed quests that encouraged you to do things like minutely studying that gameworld you were inhabiting -- something, you know, a character in that world might do! Deadfire, in contrast, never really challenges you with the quest work. You might agonize over the emotional/roleplay aspects of a choice, but I find you're never doing anything that feels like detective work. With some exceptions, in Deadifre you're never at a loss for knowing exactly what the next move to progress the questline is -- even for sidequests.
The end result is a game where you don't experiment much, and thus there's little emergent gameplay. You never have to stop and think about things, except perhaps on an emotional/roleplay level. And where the one system with challenge, combat, fails to deliver that frequently enough. No matter how good you make the roleplaying experience (and they did), players want games. And these kinds of games have long been defined by having challenges.
Disagree. RPGs are all about the story and characters. Give me an interesting place to explore, and characters that I want to explore with, with plenty of rp opportunities.
Dragon Warrior, Dark Souls, the Diablo series are all influential games that qualify as RPG's where plot, characters, etc all take a pretty strong backseat to gameplay, just to name a few.
We need the distinctions among the qualitatively distinctive RPG sub-genres. There are party-based, sandbox exploration, and solo loot collection based, just to name a few. Comparing games that are from different sub-genres is an apples to oranges, useless endeavor, in my opinion.
Here are the examples I can find of where we've been around and around about this issue before:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/74309/what-is-a-role-playing-game
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/10287/what-is-an-rpg
My most detailed post about my own definitions is in this one:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/34709/is-iwd-an-rpg/p1
Somebody once tried to start a poll-based discussion:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/68978/which-type-of-rpg-do-you-prefer/p1
If games fail to deliver fun *game* elements, I don't think it matters how well you craft the plot, story, or characters. And I think Deadfire is a solid example of this fact.
There's also the great characters!