GamesBeat: One thing I’m intrigued by are the various factions we saw in the demo. You have illithids, githyanki, the Zhentarim, drow, a vampire from Baldur’s Gate. There’s a lot of factions, a lot of stuff going on. Is it too much, just flavor for flavor’s sake, or do all these powers and interests intersect?
Smith: Everything intersects. One of the big changes from Divinity: Original Sin II, one of the things we wanted to improve on, is how stories intersect. For all of the origin characters, the ones you see and the ones you’ve not seen, they all have a very specific agenda. They all have a backstory that’s going to come to light. But they’re not side stories. They all cross over. They weave into the main story.
Something like the Zhentarim, they’re present in the world. They’re not necessarily going to play a huge part in the story, because it’s not their story necessarily. But they exist in the world, so therefore they exist in our game. The Harpers exist in our game. The Flaming Fist exist in our game. Other people I won’t mention right now exist in our game. But all these different factions are at play in the world. Some will play larger parts and some play smaller parts. A lot of them, the part they play is kind of up to you. If you want to dig deeper into the Black Network, you absolutely can. You might be able to get a little Zhentarim badge of your own at one point. You might be able to get a Harper insignia of your own. We want to give people the opportunity to align themselves with different people and different factions.
But the main storylines are all converging. The origin storylines all converge. All the different factions — essentially, something that is happening in the world is so big and magnetic that it’s drawing everyone in. Of course the centerpiece for it is Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate is the place where everything is going to change. Everyone’s being drawn toward Baldur’s Gate for their own reasons.
Lae’zel, she’s the one who’s disinterested. She doesn’t even know what Baldur’s Gate is. You can have really cool conversations with her if you’re a Baldurian. It’s one of the tags we can give to people. Some of the origins are from Baldur’s Gate. They all know it. And if you make a custom character, all the custom characters have at least some association with Baldur’s Gate. If you’re from Baldur’s Gate, you can tell her what you think of it, and you can just tell her, oh, it’s a utopia, the most beautiful city in Faerûn, it’s gorgeous, it’s fantastic. And she’s just like, well, I’ve not seen anything impressive yet, but maybe when I get to Baldur’s Gate it’s going to be as good as you say it is!
Or, and I know this is going to be a big retro throwback, by paying attention and experimenting.
A lot of older games—and even some newer ones—don't give you full on solutions to every task you need to accomplish to progress, sometimes they try to engage you to an extent that goes beyond giving you simple instructions to follow and actually requires some level of problem solving to figure out. I don't fault games for challenging players in this way, in fact I massively prefer that they do.
Hell, I figured them out without the internet, and I'm certainly no genius.
I'm not sure this is good enough of a response, to be honest. Even if a player experiments, and succeeds, there's no feedback helping them distinguish between immunities based on spell protections, based on damage type or based on enchantment level. Players can brute force through monsters but it actually is virtually impossible to know these things without some prior knowledge or looking things up.
On top of this is the feedback for "magic resistance". Again, it's difficult for a player to learn that magic resistance on enemies is a percentage system, as opposed to merely being a binary status. Or that it's even only temporary/conditional on some characters (mages, again).
Couple this lack of feedback with the fact that the inventory system encourages you not to hoard tons of gear (a good thing, in some ways), and players can easily put themselves into unwinnable or at the least very grinding experiences. Thru no fault of their own.
One thing I don’t like about P:K is that I only get one crack at opening or disarming something so I have to rely on save scumming to get it open or disarmed.
Or just leave that container alone and proceed with the game. If you're meant to open everything, why lock it in the first place.
You can only get one pick locking attempt per level - yes. Just come back later when you get a new level. As for disarming - you get an unlimited amount of attempts.
Or just save scum and open it now so you don’t have to backtrack every level.
Or, and I know this is going to be a big retro throwback, by paying attention and experimenting.
A lot of older games—and even some newer ones—don't give you full on solutions to every task you need to accomplish to progress, sometimes they try to engage you to an extent that goes beyond giving you simple instructions to follow and actually requires some level of problem solving to figure out. I don't fault games for challenging players in this way, in fact I massively prefer that they do.
Hell, I figured them out without the internet, and I'm certainly no genius.
I'm not sure this is good enough of a response, to be honest. Even if a player experiments, and succeeds, there's no feedback helping them distinguish between immunities based on spell protections, based on damage type or based on enchantment level. Players can brute force through monsters but it actually is virtually impossible to know these things without some prior knowledge or looking things up.
On top of this is the feedback for "magic resistance". Again, it's difficult for a player to learn that magic resistance on enemies is a percentage system, as opposed to merely being a binary status. Or that it's even only temporary/conditional on some characters (mages, again).
Couple this lack of feedback with the fact that the inventory system encourages you not to hoard tons of gear (a good thing, in some ways), and players can easily put themselves into unwinnable or at the least very grinding experiences. Thru no fault of their own.
I don't know what to tell you, I've learned all of those things just by playing the game, and others can too. You can learn how these systems work through experimentation, by reading combat feedback, by looking at items descriptions and character records, and by learning the magic system and what the spells do. It takes both initiative and effort on the player's part. It's fine if you don't like that the game never explicitly explains those systems but that doesn't mean it's objectively bad game design.
@Adul I must admit, When I first played Baldur’s Gate I had no understanding of the rules and completely winged it. It was one of the things I loved about it back in the day. I probably still don’t 100% understand every single little mechanic that goes on behind the scenes but I still loved every minute.
Or, and I know this is going to be a big retro throwback, by paying attention and experimenting.
A lot of older games—and even some newer ones—don't give you full on solutions to every task you need to accomplish to progress, sometimes they try to engage you to an extent that goes beyond giving you simple instructions to follow and actually requires some level of problem solving to figure out. I don't fault games for challenging players in this way, in fact I massively prefer that they do.
Hell, I figured them out without the internet, and I'm certainly no genius.
I'm not sure this is good enough of a response, to be honest. Even if a player experiments, and succeeds, there's no feedback helping them distinguish between immunities based on spell protections, based on damage type or based on enchantment level. Players can brute force through monsters but it actually is virtually impossible to know these things without some prior knowledge or looking things up.
On top of this is the feedback for "magic resistance". Again, it's difficult for a player to learn that magic resistance on enemies is a percentage system, as opposed to merely being a binary status. Or that it's even only temporary/conditional on some characters (mages, again).
Couple this lack of feedback with the fact that the inventory system encourages you not to hoard tons of gear (a good thing, in some ways), and players can easily put themselves into unwinnable or at the least very grinding experiences. Thru no fault of their own.
I don't know what to tell you, I've learned all of those things just by playing the game, and others can too. You can learn how these systems work through experimentation, by reading combat feedback, by looking at items descriptions and character records, and by learning the magic system and what the spells do. It takes both initiative and effort on the player's part. It's fine if you don't like that the game never explicitly explains those systems but that doesn't mean it's objectively bad game design.
Owlcat Games admitted that the lack of in-game explanation was one of the major flaws of Pathfinder: Kingmaker. While I salute you were able to learn all ins and outs of BG by playing the game, in no way it should mean tabletop games should come without good explanations / in-game encyclopedia. PoE had that encyclopedia, now Pathfinder: WotR will have a better in-game tutorial for players. It's not a question about whether one player is smart enough to understand all ins and outs and others are dumb. It's a question of whether you as a player can even understand how game mechanics work to be able to play and have fun.
Yeah, PKM is rather weak on that part. Very little is explained, for example damage calculations. It has happened many times that I really do try my best to add all the damage from abilities, feats etc and do the math and still end up way wrong compared to what's in the character screen and with no way of finding out the real answer. I'd say objectively that's a very bad game design, same as in BG where it wasn't always very easy to know ie which spell countered which, when to use breach vs secret word or whatever. The games are still good, both BG and PKM, but if I can choose, I'd rather just have the explanations in the game so I won't have to alt-tab and google very 5 minutes.
It's not a question about whether one player is smart enough to understand all ins and outs and others are dumb.
To be clear, that's not what I said and it's not what I think. I said anybody can do it if they put their mind to it and play the game enough, and I stand by that.
The pervasiveness of easily available instructional information in games has to do with the lengths of the attention spans of the players who the games are designed to appeal to.
If you take a look back at the gaming landscape 20 years ago, playing a video game was much more of a long-haul thing than it is today. People had fewer games to play, and on average they spent more money and time on each game. There were no smart phones and social media wasn't ubiquitous in society. People on average had longer attention spans, and games were designed with this in mind. They often had many features and secrets that were designed to be uncovered over numerous playthroughs. They often had learning curves that forced you to reload again and again, slowly building up your skill.
As you can probably tell by the tense I've been using up to this point, I do realize that times have changed and today we have a different status quo. It's true that in today's gaming culture, games are generally expected to provide much clearer instructions for gameplay and more instant gratification in general. The sheer number of games that we constantly have available for us to play on every device that we have at hand has been slowly training us not to stick with games that offer greater delayed gratification and longer, more involved learning experiences. As soon as we hit the first obstacle of frustration we can simply switch off and play something else, and the people who design our games understand this.
If you leave our current cultural context behind and look at the big picture, neither approach is inherently superior to the other. One gives you a more constant stream of smaller, more frequent dopamine rushes, while the other one spaces them out farther apart and increases their intensity. You may have a preference for one or the other—I certainly know I do—but that doesn't mean that either approach is objectively superior. Currently, one simply has more cultural support behind it.
I think this is one of the reasons I miss the old printed manuals that came with games. Often the manual was part of the game giving clues and information. Having everything in electronic format is not always better.
But manuals going away is much like having to play with graph paper or a notebook going away. It is something that game developers absolutely have to take into account when designing their games today. And it's one of the things that I was talking about when I said earlier that it's not wise to cling to design decisions from late 90s, simply because you feel the need to be faithful to the series.
PoE is an example of a pretty similar combat experience to the BG games, but with a lot more feedback for the player. While still rewarding experimentation, exploration within the systems.
Or, and I know this is going to be a big retro throwback, by paying attention and experimenting.
A lot of older games—and even some newer ones—don't give you full on solutions to every task you need to accomplish to progress, sometimes they try to engage you to an extent that goes beyond giving you simple instructions to follow and actually requires some level of problem solving to figure out. I don't fault games for challenging players in this way, in fact I massively prefer that they do.
Hell, I figured them out without the internet, and I'm certainly no genius.
I'm not sure this is good enough of a response, to be honest. Even if a player experiments, and succeeds, there's no feedback helping them distinguish between immunities based on spell protections, based on damage type or based on enchantment level. Players can brute force through monsters but it actually is virtually impossible to know these things without some prior knowledge or looking things up.
On top of this is the feedback for "magic resistance". Again, it's difficult for a player to learn that magic resistance on enemies is a percentage system, as opposed to merely being a binary status. Or that it's even only temporary/conditional on some characters (mages, again).
Couple this lack of feedback with the fact that the inventory system encourages you not to hoard tons of gear (a good thing, in some ways), and players can easily put themselves into unwinnable or at the least very grinding experiences. Thru no fault of their own.
I don't know what to tell you, I've learned all of those things just by playing the game, and others can too. You can learn how these systems work through experimentation, by reading combat feedback, by looking at items descriptions and character records, and by learning the magic system and what the spells do. It takes both initiative and effort on the player's part. It's fine if you don't like that the game never explicitly explains those systems but that doesn't mean it's objectively bad game design.
Again, you actually can't learn these things through combat feedback, as I stated. Or a more precise way to put it, is you could only learn by some pretty lengthy experimentation. If you overcome weapon quality immunities once, you might not guess that damage type immunities exist at all, you might not understand how caster protections work either. Hell, hitting a stoneskinned wizard says your attack was ineffective -- but it actually *is* having an effect. I think some players here are either forgetting their previous D&D experience which gave them these insights or what it was like to play this game blind. But to say that you can distinguish between protection spells, damage type immunity, and weapon level immunity based on the BG game's feedback is just not at all an accurate description of the feedback you get from the combat log.
Again, you actually can't learn these things through combat feedback, as I stated. Or a more precise way to put it, is you could only learn by some pretty lengthy experimentation.
What you've just said is that you can learn those things from playing the game. Once again, you may prefer the information to be more readily available, but not everyone does.
If you overcome weapon quality immunities once, you might not guess that damage type immunities exist at all, you might not understand how caster protections work either. [...] But to say that you can distinguish between protection spells, damage type immunity, and weapon level immunity based on the BG game's feedback is just not at all an accurate description of the feedback you get from the combat log.
Damage type immunities: "Clay Golem: Takes 0 damage from Minsc"
Protection spells: "Lich: Casts Stoneskin" -> Open your mage's spell book and read the spell description. (Or read it the next time you visit a magic shop.)
You're making this out to be a lot more obscure than it actually is.
Hell, hitting a stoneskinned wizard says your attack was ineffective -- but it actually *is* having an effect.
Hitting someone who's stoneskinned doesn't say that. It doesn't say anything—I just checked. Your hint is the feedback line for the casting of the Stoneskin spell.
Hell, hitting a stoneskinned wizard says your attack was ineffective -- but it actually *is* having an effect.
Hitting someone who's stoneskinned doesn't say that. It doesn't say anything—I just checked. Your hint is the feedback line for the casting of the Stoneskin spell.
With absolutely zero feedback, how is a player even supposed to put 2 and 2 together here? There's actually no reason for a player to for sure know that it was the stoneskin spell that was making their hits do no damage.
Especially considering the chaotic nature of combat, the fact that stoneskin is often cast with a bunch of other protections via contingencies by the monsters. Again, you're using your knowledge of the game to put 2 and 2 together. But there's so much happening in a combat log, a new player isn't going to necessarily be able to pick out the stoneskin line, without foreknowledge, as being the culprit.
I can confirm there is a portion of new players who tried BG on the console (the first time in their life) and requested to have a manual included into the console package (Switch / Xbox / PS4). While the research the player can do per @Adul's position is possible in theory, in practice when you play the games for the first time, without any experience of similar games / tabletop games the chances are you will be overwhelmed by the info and have a hard time understanding how this or that ability / spell work.
Also, one of the biggest feedback to Pathfinder: Kingmaker was that people just couldn't figure out how to use classes, eg. Kineticist.
Hell, hitting a stoneskinned wizard says your attack was ineffective -- but it actually *is* having an effect.
Hitting someone who's stoneskinned doesn't say that. It doesn't say anything—I just checked. Your hint is the feedback line for the casting of the Stoneskin spell.
With absolutely zero feedback, how is a player even supposed to put 2 and 2 together here? There's actually no reason for a player to for sure know that it was the stoneskin spell that was making their hits do no damage.
Especially considering the chaotic nature of combat, the fact that stoneskin is often cast with a bunch of other protections via contingencies by the monsters. Again, you're using your knowledge of the game to put 2 and 2 together. But there's so much happening in a combat log, a new player isn't going to necessarily be able to pick out the stoneskin line, without foreknowledge, as being the culprit.
It's not absolutely zero feedback. The Stoneskin line appears in the combat log every time the spell is cast, even in contingencies. It has a specific animation and a specific sound effect. As players play the game they can learn to associate these signs with not being able to hit stuff. If they want to know why, that information is available to them in-game.
Contingencies are an advanced feature new players will not often come up against. Well, not unless they decided to skip BG1 and jump straight into BG2. But to that I have a rather easy solution.
What made me hate DOS2 is not DOS2 itself. I mean, i wish that i could get a refund but is my fault for overplayiing it... What made me hate DOS2 is the people who claims that DOS2 is "the modern baldur's gate", when DOS2 has almost everything that i hate on modern RPG's, except dialog wheels.
Quotes like "missing obvious not work" and "spell slots are not intuitive" made me really hate BG3 and expect a SCL clone before the game was announced. So yes, i was one of the guys who heavily criticized B3 and wanna ask to BG3 critics. In what the game doesn't look good? In the visual? Are you hating a game only by it?
i feel the same. it's like the witcher 3. dos 2 sold so well it's now the gold standered of crpgs. so if your not a fan of that style of game your out of luck.
i feel the same. it's like the witcher 3. dos 2 sold so well it's now the gold standered of crpgs. so if your not a fan of that style of game your out of luck.
The problem with this is: You're not out of luck. PF:KM, PoE1 and 2, Tyranny and now PF: WotR - there are options for consumers who want that kind of game.
i feel the same. it's like the witcher 3. dos 2 sold so well it's now the gold standered of crpgs. so if your not a fan of that style of game your out of luck.
The problem with this is: You're not out of luck. PF:KM, PoE1 and 2, Tyranny and now PF: WotR - there are options for consumers who want that kind of game.
PoE 1/2 is not old school like PF:KM but is more old school than DOS2.
While the research the player can do per @Adul's position is possible in theory, in practice when you play the games for the first time, without any experience of similar games / tabletop games the chances are you will be overwhelmed by the info and have a hard time understanding how this or that ability / spell work.
On that point we can agree, because it's also not my position that players will learn all of this stuff on their first few fights or even their first few playthroughs. As I said, it's a long-haul thing.
There was a time when I used to learn new things that surprised me while playing the Baldur's Gate games even after I had been a long-term superfan and had played them again and again rigorously for many years. It's one of the things that I love about these games.
Sadly it doesn't really happen anymore 20+ years in, but I couldn't reasonably expect it to. Would be amazing if it did though.
What made me hate DOS2 is not DOS2 itself. I mean, i wish that i could get a refund but is my fault for overplayiing it... What made me hate DOS2 is the people who claims that DOS2 is "the modern baldur's gate", when DOS2 has almost everything that i hate on modern RPG's, except dialog wheels.
Quotes like "missing obvious not work" and "spell slots are not intuitive" made me really hate BG3 and expect a SCL clone before the game was announced. So yes, i was one of the guys who heavily criticized B3 and wanna ask to BG3 critics. In what the game doesn't look good? In the visual? Are you hating a game only by it?
That is really sad to hear. So, for example, me sharing my genuine, real excitement from playing a game can make you start hating it just because I'm too enthusiastic in expressing my opinion? That is quite unfortunate.
I mean, I don't start hating P:K, Gothic, Might & Magic VI just because someone is very excited and constantly mentions it. I didn't start hating any game because of that. I prefer to see myself, try myself and judge myself. The Witcher 3 and D:OS 2 are 2 RPGs I enjoyed the most in the last 10 years.
What made me hate DOS2 is not DOS2 itself. I mean, i wish that i could get a refund but is my fault for overplayiing it... What made me hate DOS2 is the people who claims that DOS2 is "the modern baldur's gate", when DOS2 has almost everything that i hate on modern RPG's, except dialog wheels.
Quotes like "missing obvious not work" and "spell slots are not intuitive" made me really hate BG3 and expect a SCL clone before the game was announced. So yes, i was one of the guys who heavily criticized B3 and wanna ask to BG3 critics. In what the game doesn't look good? In the visual? Are you hating a game only by it?
That is really sad to hear. So, for example, me sharing my genuine, real excitement from playing a game can make you start hating it just because I'm too enthusiastic in expressing my opinion? That is quite unfortunate.
I mean, I don't start hating P:K, Gothic, Might & Magic VI just because someone is very excited and constantly mentions it. I didn't start hating any game because of that. I prefer to see myself, try myself and judge myself. The Witcher 3 and D:OS 2 are 2 RPGs I enjoyed the most in the last 10 years.
Yep. You are right. I should't hate dos2 only because i don't like the crowd who compares a game who has everything that i hate on modern games with one of my most beloved games but hate isn't a rational feeling. Anyway, BG3 looks gorgeous, the changes that they made on rolling dices on attacks are so small that most modders will gonna fix it.
My fear is that it could be a small change easily fixed by mods to a complete re write of rules.
i feel the same. it's like the witcher 3. dos 2 sold so well it's now the gold standered of crpgs. so if your not a fan of that style of game your out of luck.
The problem with this is: You're not out of luck. PF:KM, PoE1 and 2, Tyranny and now PF: WotR - there are options for consumers who want that kind of game.
For now, yes. But for how much longer? Obsidian's Sawyer has openly lamented about how because D:OS2 did things a certain way everyone else will now be expected/forced to do the same. He was specifically talking about full VO in cRPGs, but it surely applies across the board.
i feel the same. it's like the witcher 3. dos 2 sold so well it's now the gold standered of crpgs. so if your not a fan of that style of game your out of luck.
The problem with this is: You're not out of luck. PF:KM, PoE1 and 2, Tyranny and now PF: WotR - there are options for consumers who want that kind of game.
For now, yes. But for how much longer? Obsidian's Sawyer has openly lamented about how because D:OS2 did things a certain way everyone else will now be expected/forced to do the same. He was specifically talking about full VO in cRPGs, but it surely applies across the board.
I get some of the concern- but there will always be an indie market for these kinds of things. I consider Obsidian indie (or rather, did before MS scooped them up) and I consider Owlcat to be indie in this regard.
Some folks in the WotR thread were just crowing about how WotR made more money from KS than D:OS2 did. That’s apples and oranges, but still shows the market is very receptive to these game types.
i feel the same. it's like the witcher 3. dos 2 sold so well it's now the gold standered of crpgs. so if your not a fan of that style of game your out of luck.
The problem with this is: You're not out of luck. PF:KM, PoE1 and 2, Tyranny and now PF: WotR - there are options for consumers who want that kind of game.
3 of those are by the same company who deemed them a failure and is very likely to never return to the format. At best they license the engine to someone.
So you have 1 other company doing it and that's it. Not exactly swimming in it.
Swen: "I replayed BG1 & 2 when we started on this and the same things that stood out back then still stand out today: The sense of being on an epic quest with a party of interesting companions which I need to keep happy, the promise that there’s something to be discovered everywhere I go, the sense that I’m someone special in this world and make a difference and a lot of “oh that’s cool”. I think I appreciated it even more now than I did back in the days." Here.
If that is not understanding of what classic BG is, I don't know what that is then.
It's much better than everything we heard before. I'd wish he said something positive about combat/gameplay as well, but it's still much better.
BTW, I got my questions answered and have to say I am certainly more hopeful than before. Still a bit skeptical about the group initiative idea, but that can be fixed and there was a lot of surprisingly good news for me. I had not expected that they would be willing to settle for a lvl 10 cap, but I think it's really great they do not try to take you to max level in a single campaign.
None of my questions got awnsered, but this lv cap = 10 will really hurt those who will try solo the game. Maybe modders will fix it like ToEE, i never soloed the game without mods who remove the lv cap
Comments
https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/10/baldurs-gate-iii-goblins-are-friends-not-fodder/
An excerpt:
GamesBeat: One thing I’m intrigued by are the various factions we saw in the demo. You have illithids, githyanki, the Zhentarim, drow, a vampire from Baldur’s Gate. There’s a lot of factions, a lot of stuff going on. Is it too much, just flavor for flavor’s sake, or do all these powers and interests intersect?
Smith: Everything intersects. One of the big changes from Divinity: Original Sin II, one of the things we wanted to improve on, is how stories intersect. For all of the origin characters, the ones you see and the ones you’ve not seen, they all have a very specific agenda. They all have a backstory that’s going to come to light. But they’re not side stories. They all cross over. They weave into the main story.
Something like the Zhentarim, they’re present in the world. They’re not necessarily going to play a huge part in the story, because it’s not their story necessarily. But they exist in the world, so therefore they exist in our game. The Harpers exist in our game. The Flaming Fist exist in our game. Other people I won’t mention right now exist in our game. But all these different factions are at play in the world. Some will play larger parts and some play smaller parts. A lot of them, the part they play is kind of up to you. If you want to dig deeper into the Black Network, you absolutely can. You might be able to get a little Zhentarim badge of your own at one point. You might be able to get a Harper insignia of your own. We want to give people the opportunity to align themselves with different people and different factions.
But the main storylines are all converging. The origin storylines all converge. All the different factions — essentially, something that is happening in the world is so big and magnetic that it’s drawing everyone in. Of course the centerpiece for it is Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate is the place where everything is going to change. Everyone’s being drawn toward Baldur’s Gate for their own reasons.
Lae’zel, she’s the one who’s disinterested. She doesn’t even know what Baldur’s Gate is. You can have really cool conversations with her if you’re a Baldurian. It’s one of the tags we can give to people. Some of the origins are from Baldur’s Gate. They all know it. And if you make a custom character, all the custom characters have at least some association with Baldur’s Gate. If you’re from Baldur’s Gate, you can tell her what you think of it, and you can just tell her, oh, it’s a utopia, the most beautiful city in Faerûn, it’s gorgeous, it’s fantastic. And she’s just like, well, I’ve not seen anything impressive yet, but maybe when I get to Baldur’s Gate it’s going to be as good as you say it is!
She’s not that impressed. [Laughs]
I'm not sure this is good enough of a response, to be honest. Even if a player experiments, and succeeds, there's no feedback helping them distinguish between immunities based on spell protections, based on damage type or based on enchantment level. Players can brute force through monsters but it actually is virtually impossible to know these things without some prior knowledge or looking things up.
On top of this is the feedback for "magic resistance". Again, it's difficult for a player to learn that magic resistance on enemies is a percentage system, as opposed to merely being a binary status. Or that it's even only temporary/conditional on some characters (mages, again).
Couple this lack of feedback with the fact that the inventory system encourages you not to hoard tons of gear (a good thing, in some ways), and players can easily put themselves into unwinnable or at the least very grinding experiences. Thru no fault of their own.
‘ Couple this lack of feedback with the fact that the inventory system encourages you not to hoard tons of gear’
That’s what a bag of holding is for isn’t it? ?
XP?
Or just save scum and open it now so you don’t have to backtrack every level.
I don't know what to tell you, I've learned all of those things just by playing the game, and others can too. You can learn how these systems work through experimentation, by reading combat feedback, by looking at items descriptions and character records, and by learning the magic system and what the spells do. It takes both initiative and effort on the player's part. It's fine if you don't like that the game never explicitly explains those systems but that doesn't mean it's objectively bad game design.
Owlcat Games admitted that the lack of in-game explanation was one of the major flaws of Pathfinder: Kingmaker. While I salute you were able to learn all ins and outs of BG by playing the game, in no way it should mean tabletop games should come without good explanations / in-game encyclopedia. PoE had that encyclopedia, now Pathfinder: WotR will have a better in-game tutorial for players. It's not a question about whether one player is smart enough to understand all ins and outs and others are dumb. It's a question of whether you as a player can even understand how game mechanics work to be able to play and have fun.
To be clear, that's not what I said and it's not what I think. I said anybody can do it if they put their mind to it and play the game enough, and I stand by that.
The pervasiveness of easily available instructional information in games has to do with the lengths of the attention spans of the players who the games are designed to appeal to.
If you take a look back at the gaming landscape 20 years ago, playing a video game was much more of a long-haul thing than it is today. People had fewer games to play, and on average they spent more money and time on each game. There were no smart phones and social media wasn't ubiquitous in society. People on average had longer attention spans, and games were designed with this in mind. They often had many features and secrets that were designed to be uncovered over numerous playthroughs. They often had learning curves that forced you to reload again and again, slowly building up your skill.
As you can probably tell by the tense I've been using up to this point, I do realize that times have changed and today we have a different status quo. It's true that in today's gaming culture, games are generally expected to provide much clearer instructions for gameplay and more instant gratification in general. The sheer number of games that we constantly have available for us to play on every device that we have at hand has been slowly training us not to stick with games that offer greater delayed gratification and longer, more involved learning experiences. As soon as we hit the first obstacle of frustration we can simply switch off and play something else, and the people who design our games understand this.
If you leave our current cultural context behind and look at the big picture, neither approach is inherently superior to the other. One gives you a more constant stream of smaller, more frequent dopamine rushes, while the other one spaces them out farther apart and increases their intensity. You may have a preference for one or the other—I certainly know I do—but that doesn't mean that either approach is objectively superior. Currently, one simply has more cultural support behind it.
PoE is an example of a pretty similar combat experience to the BG games, but with a lot more feedback for the player. While still rewarding experimentation, exploration within the systems.
Again, you actually can't learn these things through combat feedback, as I stated. Or a more precise way to put it, is you could only learn by some pretty lengthy experimentation. If you overcome weapon quality immunities once, you might not guess that damage type immunities exist at all, you might not understand how caster protections work either. Hell, hitting a stoneskinned wizard says your attack was ineffective -- but it actually *is* having an effect. I think some players here are either forgetting their previous D&D experience which gave them these insights or what it was like to play this game blind. But to say that you can distinguish between protection spells, damage type immunity, and weapon level immunity based on the BG game's feedback is just not at all an accurate description of the feedback you get from the combat log.
What you've just said is that you can learn those things from playing the game. Once again, you may prefer the information to be more readily available, but not everyone does.
Weapon enchantment immunities: "Minsc: Weapon ineffective"
Damage type immunities: "Clay Golem: Takes 0 damage from Minsc"
Protection spells: "Lich: Casts Stoneskin" -> Open your mage's spell book and read the spell description. (Or read it the next time you visit a magic shop.)
You're making this out to be a lot more obscure than it actually is.
Hitting someone who's stoneskinned doesn't say that. It doesn't say anything—I just checked. Your hint is the feedback line for the casting of the Stoneskin spell.
With absolutely zero feedback, how is a player even supposed to put 2 and 2 together here? There's actually no reason for a player to for sure know that it was the stoneskin spell that was making their hits do no damage.
Especially considering the chaotic nature of combat, the fact that stoneskin is often cast with a bunch of other protections via contingencies by the monsters. Again, you're using your knowledge of the game to put 2 and 2 together. But there's so much happening in a combat log, a new player isn't going to necessarily be able to pick out the stoneskin line, without foreknowledge, as being the culprit.
Also, one of the biggest feedback to Pathfinder: Kingmaker was that people just couldn't figure out how to use classes, eg. Kineticist.
It's not absolutely zero feedback. The Stoneskin line appears in the combat log every time the spell is cast, even in contingencies. It has a specific animation and a specific sound effect. As players play the game they can learn to associate these signs with not being able to hit stuff. If they want to know why, that information is available to them in-game.
Contingencies are an advanced feature new players will not often come up against. Well, not unless they decided to skip BG1 and jump straight into BG2. But to that I have a rather easy solution.
Quotes like "missing obvious not work" and "spell slots are not intuitive" made me really hate BG3 and expect a SCL clone before the game was announced. So yes, i was one of the guys who heavily criticized B3 and wanna ask to BG3 critics. In what the game doesn't look good? In the visual? Are you hating a game only by it?
The problem with this is: You're not out of luck. PF:KM, PoE1 and 2, Tyranny and now PF: WotR - there are options for consumers who want that kind of game.
PoE 1/2 is not old school like PF:KM but is more old school than DOS2.
On that point we can agree, because it's also not my position that players will learn all of this stuff on their first few fights or even their first few playthroughs. As I said, it's a long-haul thing.
There was a time when I used to learn new things that surprised me while playing the Baldur's Gate games even after I had been a long-term superfan and had played them again and again rigorously for many years. It's one of the things that I love about these games.
Sadly it doesn't really happen anymore 20+ years in, but I couldn't reasonably expect it to. Would be amazing if it did though.
That is really sad to hear. So, for example, me sharing my genuine, real excitement from playing a game can make you start hating it just because I'm too enthusiastic in expressing my opinion? That is quite unfortunate.
I mean, I don't start hating P:K, Gothic, Might & Magic VI just because someone is very excited and constantly mentions it. I didn't start hating any game because of that. I prefer to see myself, try myself and judge myself. The Witcher 3 and D:OS 2 are 2 RPGs I enjoyed the most in the last 10 years.
Yep. You are right. I should't hate dos2 only because i don't like the crowd who compares a game who has everything that i hate on modern games with one of my most beloved games but hate isn't a rational feeling. Anyway, BG3 looks gorgeous, the changes that they made on rolling dices on attacks are so small that most modders will gonna fix it.
My fear is that it could be a small change easily fixed by mods to a complete re write of rules.
For now, yes. But for how much longer? Obsidian's Sawyer has openly lamented about how because D:OS2 did things a certain way everyone else will now be expected/forced to do the same. He was specifically talking about full VO in cRPGs, but it surely applies across the board.
I get some of the concern- but there will always be an indie market for these kinds of things. I consider Obsidian indie (or rather, did before MS scooped them up) and I consider Owlcat to be indie in this regard.
Some folks in the WotR thread were just crowing about how WotR made more money from KS than D:OS2 did. That’s apples and oranges, but still shows the market is very receptive to these game types.
My questions
Will have good necromancy like BG1/2? OR will gonna be limited to one summon?
Will have a option to concurrent turns or speed up animations?
Will be short rests? If not, how Warlocks will gonna be competitive with Wizards? And do you plan to include sorcerers?
3 of those are by the same company who deemed them a failure and is very likely to never return to the format. At best they license the engine to someone.
So you have 1 other company doing it and that's it. Not exactly swimming in it.
If that is not understanding of what classic BG is, I don't know what that is then.
BTW, I got my questions answered and have to say I am certainly more hopeful than before. Still a bit skeptical about the group initiative idea, but that can be fixed and there was a lot of surprisingly good news for me. I had not expected that they would be willing to settle for a lvl 10 cap, but I think it's really great they do not try to take you to max level in a single campaign.