I had a different feel for BG especially. DA Origins I felt wasn't as good in terms of story, but it was decent.
In terms of the combat the 2nd edition rules were actually really good for this type of system. Your tanks really didn't need much guidance as they were almost all auto attacks. That meant you just had to point them to the right mobs. There was actually a limited amount of abilities for everything except mages. This allowed for easy point and click style positioning. In a game like DA I you have to click certain abilities at certain times constantly in combat. That makes for difficult micromanagement of multiple characters.
I think the more complex the combat system is the harder it is to manage multiple teammates at one time unless it is turn based combat.
FF4 is probably my favorite final fantasy and it really had limited choices available in terms of customizing classes. I enjoyed the story a great deal. FF6 had a lot of options in terms of giving each character different items that gave them different abilities. I like the variety, but not the idea of giving your character abilities from an item.
The Final Fantasy games are a bit different beasts because the combat takes place completely separately from the world map you are traveling around. There is little in the way of positioning. It's all just picking the right abilities to win.
I do like puzzles in games. I started with games like Legend of Zelda which had many little puzzles to solve.
Good point on Eye of the Beholder. I didn't play the game much, but having some time pressure definitely makes things more intense.
"Tanks" in 2E were the root of its problems. Fighters were some of your most durable characters and your highest sustained damage characters and equipped with the least tactical decisions. That's a pretty awful combination.
I agree a real-time combat system has to optimize for not having too many decisions to make, but "right click to send your fighters to attack" wasn't exactly an interesting decision to include in the mix (nor was positioning because this was 2E after all and very few positional considerations existed.)
And yeah, complexity is bad, but you still want to achieve depth. "Simple yet deep" is the design ideal.
Combat taking place separate from the world immediately eliminates the "positioning" decision. While a simple decision itself, it's also needless complexity in most RPGs (except tactical RPGs which take significant strides to ensure positioning matters a lot.)
I wasn't talking about puzzle-puzzles. I was talking about combat-puzzles. The best combat in games is like a puzzle where the correct decisions are tricky to figure out (and typically dynamic and changing so that the correct solution isn't as predictable.)
That's why I thought it worked out well.
You most of BG was positioning and finding the right spells to use. You usually had enough to worry about with positioning your rogue (if you were going to use backstab), keeping the enemies away from your lightly armored characters by creating a bit of a barrier, and utilizing the proper spells from your spell casters. When it came down to it worrying about having to use special abilities for your fighter would have made the controlling a whole party of six a bit more than I would have enjoyed.
I see what you are saying now about combat puzzles. BG had a number of situations where you had to get your characters in the right position and pick the right spells to counter the enemy without really being told what to use. Some of the spell descriptions were fairly cryptic and that was part of the difficulty of the game. I think Divinity Original Sin does a good job of this. There are usually different strategies that work well in certain encounters.
You most of BG was positioning and finding the right spells to use. You usually had enough to worry about with positioning your rogue (if you were going to use backstab), keeping the enemies away from your lightly armored characters by creating a bit of a barrier, and utilizing the proper spells from your spell casters. When it came down to it worrying about having to use special abilities for your fighter would have made the controlling a whole party of six a bit more than I would have enjoyed.
I see what you are saying now about combat puzzles. BG had a number of situations where you had to get your characters in the right position and pick the right spells to counter the enemy without really being told what to use. Some of the spell descriptions were fairly cryptic and that was part of the difficulty of the game. I think Divinity Original Sin does a good job of this. There are usually different strategies that work well in certain encounters.
You're right that in a 6-person party it's fine for some characters to have limited decision sets.
But the problem was the overpowered nature of fighters, not their limited decision set.
The idea is rogues would expend more tactical effort getting behind someone and be rewarded with better damage.
The mathematicalreality is early rogues didn't do better damage (and later rogues only beat fighters by a slim margin), and in all cases the rogue has significantly worse survivability.
(This forum provides a decent run-down of the math.)
I had a lot of memorable experiences in 2nd edition in both tabletop and videogaming, but looking back on it it was really very flawed and inferior to what we have today. A modern game with party combat should balance the capabilities of its classes while keeping in mind the need to not overload players with party decisions.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You most of BG was positioning and finding the right spells to use. You usually had enough to worry about with positioning your rogue (if you were going to use backstab), keeping the enemies away from your lightly armored characters by creating a bit of a barrier, and utilizing the proper spells from your spell casters. When it came down to it worrying about having to use special abilities for your fighter would have made the controlling a whole party of six a bit more than I would have enjoyed.
I see what you are saying now about combat puzzles. BG had a number of situations where you had to get your characters in the right position and pick the right spells to counter the enemy without really being told what to use. Some of the spell descriptions were fairly cryptic and that was part of the difficulty of the game. I think Divinity Original Sin does a good job of this. There are usually different strategies that work well in certain encounters.
You're right that in a 6-person party it's fine for some characters to have limited decision sets.
But the problem was the overpowered nature of fighters, not their limited decision set.
The idea is rogues would expend more tactical effort getting behind someone and be rewarded with better damage.
The mathematicalreality is early rogues didn't do better damage (and later rogues only beat fighters by a slim margin), and in all cases the rogue has significantly worse survivability.
(This forum provides a decent run-down of the math.)
I had a lot of memorable experiences in 2nd edition in both tabletop and videogaming, but looking back on it it was really very flawed and inferior to what we have today. A modern game with party combat should balance the capabilities of its classes while keeping in mind the need to not overload players with party decisions.
I actually preferred it that way. Yes the Rogue (which was actually a Thief) was inferior in combat to a warrior. That makes sense because a Thief is not about dealing damage in combat. They are about fulling the role of finding traps, stealing, and picking locks. This adds diversity to the PvE roles instead of just having everyone focused on combat. A fighter could not perform the important things that a Rogue could do and they couldn't cast the amazing, but limited by cast per day spells of a Mage either. Each class had a role to play in the game. It was simple not balanced around combat effectiveness and it didn't need to be. The problem is that if you balance things around combat the roles in game become very bland. Everyone is just a different flavor of DPS. No role is really unique and it doesn't really make sense from a role playing standpoint IMO. A Thief should never be as good at melee combat as a seasoned warrior. They are more focused on stealing and making money. A Mage shouldn't either as they spend most of their day reading spell books. A Cleric is fairly proficient in melee combat, but they spend a fair amount of their time doing it in most cases.
A little GW2 and possible some age of wonders 3 (no, not a MMO) if my friends go online tonight. But my main gaming thing this week is the pnp Shadowrun session I am running tomorrow. Not really a week I am playing that much computer games.
I actually preferred it that way. Yes the Rogue (which was actually a Thief) was inferior in combat to a warrior. That makes sense because a Thief is not about dealing damage in combat. They are about fulling the role of finding traps, stealing, and picking locks. This adds diversity to the PvE roles instead of just having everyone focused on combat. A fighter could not perform the important things that a Rogue could do and they couldn't cast the amazing, but limited by cast per day spells of a Mage either. Each class had a role to play in the game. It was simple not balanced around combat effectiveness and it didn't need to be. The problem is that if you balance things around combat the roles in game become very bland. Everyone is just a different flavor of DPS. No role is really unique and it doesn't really make sense from a role playing standpoint IMO. A Thief should never be as good at melee combat as a seasoned warrior. They are more focused on stealing and making money. A Mage shouldn't either as they spend most of their day reading spell books. A Cleric is fairly proficient in melee combat, but they spend a fair amount of their time doing it in most cases.
Well if your argument is D&D based games don't provide enough thief challenges to warrant the thief class, then I'd agree with that. I cruised through BG with a fighter-heavy party until I got too bored to continue, since the vast majority of challenges were combat challenges and failing a combat challenge was a hard stop (reload a save) while failing thief challenges was just a little damage on my giant HP pool of beefy fighters.
Personally I thought per-day spells for mages was a bad system too, though I'd concede it's potentially not as bad a break with a party-based game.
Essentially in a good combat system like 4E you have several tiers of abilities: common, short-cooldown and long-cooldown. This is balanced aorund a single player having interesting choices at any given moment: is the current fight important or risky enough to demand my more powerful cooldown abilities, knowing they may not be available next fight, or even several fights afterwards?
With that in mind in a party-based game if you have a mage in your party who has spells that only refresh once a day then that becomes your set of long cooldowns. The problem is 2E didn't really offer the common abilities or short-cooldown abilities. You just had your fighters/thieves who attack-moved, and your cleric/mages who had long-cooldown abilities.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I actually preferred it that way. Yes the Rogue (which was actually a Thief) was inferior in combat to a warrior. That makes sense because a Thief is not about dealing damage in combat. They are about fulling the role of finding traps, stealing, and picking locks. This adds diversity to the PvE roles instead of just having everyone focused on combat. A fighter could not perform the important things that a Rogue could do and they couldn't cast the amazing, but limited by cast per day spells of a Mage either. Each class had a role to play in the game. It was simple not balanced around combat effectiveness and it didn't need to be. The problem is that if you balance things around combat the roles in game become very bland. Everyone is just a different flavor of DPS. No role is really unique and it doesn't really make sense from a role playing standpoint IMO. A Thief should never be as good at melee combat as a seasoned warrior. They are more focused on stealing and making money. A Mage shouldn't either as they spend most of their day reading spell books. A Cleric is fairly proficient in melee combat, but they spend a fair amount of their time doing it in most cases.
Well if your argument is D&D based games don't provide enough thief challenges to warrant the thief class, then I'd agree with that. I cruised through BG with a fighter-heavy party until I got too bored to continue, since the vast majority of challenges were combat challenges and failing a combat challenge was a hard stop (reload a save) while failing thief challenges was just a little damage on my giant HP pool of beefy fighters.
Personally I thought per-day spells for mages was a bad system too, though I'd concede it's potentially not as bad a break with a party-based game.
Essentially in a good combat system like 4E you have several tiers of abilities: common, short-cooldown and long-cooldown. This is balanced aorund a single player having interesting choices at any given moment: is the current fight important or risky enough to demand my more powerful cooldown abilities, knowing they may not be available next fight, or even several fights afterwards?
With that in mind in a party-based game if you have a mage in your party who has spells that only refresh once a day then that becomes your set of long cooldowns. The problem is 2E didn't really offer the common abilities or short-cooldown abilities. You just had your fighters/thieves who attack-moved, and your cleric/mages who had long-cooldown abilities.
This is true, but the Cleric/Mage had a lot of spells to use once you got past a certain level. Clerics were fairly good at melee combat and could tank. Thieves are another issue. I agree that there weren't enough traps in game to make them as useful as they should be. That is more a game design flaw which is prevalent in most games that included the thief class. It's true that much of the combat is auto attack. That makes sense since most classes would be swinging their sword, hurling rocks with a sling, shooting a bow, or sneaking into position. This also worked well in BG because having to constantly micromanage abilities throughout the entire game would have been a bit boring. Instead it was only needed during the most difficult encounters.
Pretty much keeping it to Rocket League, Diablo 3 and Duelyst. I might download Blade and Soul over the weekend. But other than that...The Division is coming out March 8th so I have that to look forward to.
I have been playing Halo, Forza and the Witcher recently. Forza I play a lot, but I will soon beat all the Halo campaigns (I am playing Halo 3 atm) and halfway through Witcher 2. THen need to play Witcher 3, Fallout 4, replay DEus Ex HR to refresh my memory in time for Mankind Divided. I have too many games I want to play but sadly not enough time.I have enough games on my backlog (and no I don't mean stupid steam games I will never play) to last me the whole of 2016 without taking into account all the awesome games coming out in 2016 - Deus Ex, Mass Effect, Tekken 7, SF5, Gears 4, Uncharted 4 etc.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I'm not hooked on any games atm, so probably only spend 4-6 hours a week gaming atm, currently distributed between:
1) Splatoon - probs 3 or 4 hours on this 2) Mario Kart 8 - maybe an hour or two 3) Yoshi's Woollen World - 30mins or so
(if you can't tell, I bought myself a Wii U over Christmas and got these 3 games)
I will probably jump onto Dawn of War 2: Retribution for a few last stand games at some point, its a good fall back if I want something quick and easy.
Before the end of january, I plan to give Fallout 3 "a good attempt", by which i mean have one or two sessions of at least 3 hours gametime, to see if I like it. If I do, i'll probs get hooked and sink 30-50 hours into it over the next month. If I don't like it, the next on my list of big-games-i-skipped is Mass Effect
Mass effect is amazing. I loved it to bits. One tip is don't do the secondary missions if you don't find them fun. If you like them great, but don't burn yourself on all the filler secondary quests. The main storyline is freaking amazing.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Comments
You most of BG was positioning and finding the right spells to use. You usually had enough to worry about with positioning your rogue (if you were going to use backstab), keeping the enemies away from your lightly armored characters by creating a bit of a barrier, and utilizing the proper spells from your spell casters. When it came down to it worrying about having to use special abilities for your fighter would have made the controlling a whole party of six a bit more than I would have enjoyed.
I see what you are saying now about combat puzzles. BG had a number of situations where you had to get your characters in the right position and pick the right spells to counter the enemy without really being told what to use. Some of the spell descriptions were fairly cryptic and that was part of the difficulty of the game. I think Divinity Original Sin does a good job of this. There are usually different strategies that work well in certain encounters.
But the problem was the overpowered nature of fighters, not their limited decision set.
The idea is rogues would expend more tactical effort getting behind someone and be rewarded with better damage.
The mathematical reality is early rogues didn't do better damage (and later rogues only beat fighters by a slim margin), and in all cases the rogue has significantly worse survivability.
(This forum provides a decent run-down of the math.)
I had a lot of memorable experiences in 2nd edition in both tabletop and videogaming, but looking back on it it was really very flawed and inferior to what we have today. A modern game with party combat should balance the capabilities of its classes while keeping in mind the need to not overload players with party decisions.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
But my main gaming thing this week is the pnp Shadowrun session I am running tomorrow. Not really a week I am playing that much computer games.
Personally I thought per-day spells for mages was a bad system too, though I'd concede it's potentially not as bad a break with a party-based game.
Essentially in a good combat system like 4E you have several tiers of abilities: common, short-cooldown and long-cooldown. This is balanced aorund a single player having interesting choices at any given moment: is the current fight important or risky enough to demand my more powerful cooldown abilities, knowing they may not be available next fight, or even several fights afterwards?
With that in mind in a party-based game if you have a mage in your party who has spells that only refresh once a day then that becomes your set of long cooldowns. The problem is 2E didn't really offer the common abilities or short-cooldown abilities. You just had your fighters/thieves who attack-moved, and your cleric/mages who had long-cooldown abilities.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I played a couple hours of Witcher 3 a couple weeks ago, will probably start playing it again once I'm out of this gaming slump.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.