Uneven challenge levels get me down

[carbon_dragon]

It's not really a criticism of the game because we all grew up playing these sorts of games. Still it kind of kills part of the fun of playing for me. I'm playing and I'm feeling like I actually know something and I'm beating all the troops easily and then suddenly I hit a brick wall -- an unbeatable enemy who kills everyone in a round and is totally and completely invulnerable to all my attacks (can you say darkside loyalists). It's all the more surprising when my guys are actually pretty powerful.

 

I was watching a lets play with someone who finally kind of gave up and boosted his folks to the maximum the game would allow and he still had some trouble with some of the parts of the game. I'm not giving up, but I think there is a reason why modern games have gone to a scaled system.

[Randomizer]

Jeff deliberately set up several areas that are harder than the ones nearby when you first reach them. Second trilogy is more linear than the open world of first trilogy where it was even easier to reach places well above your power level.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

In all fairness, the captain of fort Saffron warns you about them being really powerful.

[carbon_dragon]

Yes, but people are different. I like to work hard at a RPG, bulding up my forces, getting ahead of the power curve, trying to stay ahead of the monsters and trying to be a badass. But in this game(s) you can't do that because no matter how powerful you get, there always seems to be an unstoppable roadblock ready to rip you to pieces.

 

Also it interrupts the adventure. When I get killed because surprise that's one of the super-roadblock encounters, getting killed and having to reload damages the suspension of disbelief and the immersion of the game. Granted the inertion is not the equal of Skyrim, but still you get involved and suddenly you get a bucket of cold water poured on you.

 

No big deal, but it kills some of the fun -- for me. I used to play games just like this all the time, and I've romanticized them while outside the bubble, game design has moved on to different gaming paradigms. Not too many RPGs left, but those that are (Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas) generally try (for good or ill, depending on your opinion) to avoid crushing reverses that sour the players on the fun of playing the game. That's all these games are for, fun right? You don't get extra credit in Heaven for beating these games before you die.

 

I stopped playing Fallout New Vegas Dead Money and never went back because that scenario (and only that one in Bethesda) was ultimately impossible for me to win because the bad guys (the holograms) were totally invulnerable to any weapon. I just couldn't get past them and every time I died trying, it killed a little of my fun in playing. Finally it was all gone. There's probably a lesson there, or maybe it's just me.

[Sudanna]

This sort of design is really a consequence of the open-world nature of Avernum. Jeff uses challenging areas or enemies to tell you that maybe you should go and handle some other things before dealing with this. If you're having a hard time, go do something else and come back later. Now, it's fine to not like that, but if you're just trying to out-level all the enemies and not deal with the challenge, you could try using the character editors.

 

Also, you're not supposed to try and fight the holograms in Dead Money. You sneak past them, find their emitters, or hack nearby terminals to turn them off, make them non-hostile, or make them go somewhere else. They're made of light, after all - what are you gonna do, shoot them? And you should totally go back and suffer through that part. I can only think of one area where they really get aggravating, and Dead Money is an absolutely fantastic bit of DLC. All of New Vegas' DLC are masterpieces. Except maybe Honest Hearts, but it's still at least good.

[Ohsky]

Getting killed is a natural thing of every game. Or it should be, more even on an open exploratory one. There is a difference between a challenge and an unplayable set of videogames due to excessive difficultity, some balance should be set there, in case needed.

[carbon_dragon]

No, other games are open world (Avernum 6 isn't THAT open world anyway). The issue is scaling vs. non scaling. Are the monsters what they are, or do they scale with the player? Neither is necessarily the "right" way to do it. I think I prefer scaling, but that doesn't make it right.

 

About Dead Money. I dealt with a lot of the holograms before I got into the vault. But there in the vault, no matter what I did or tried, I couldn't get past them. I read all the online information I could find, I actually tried the scenario twice, the second time with the slow time implant, but I just couldn't get past that spot in the fault. VERY frustrating. The thing is that a good game gives you options. Maybe you're a twitch gamer who can run and strafe and dodge and weave. Or maybe you're a thinker who can go around trouble. A good game should give you more than one choice. When it doesn't you get frustration in at least some of the players.

 

I've found very few bugs in Avernum 6 so far. The only one has been that I couldn't find a character to give me the secret passageway to rescue the hostages so I had to just go down there and hit the kidnappers really hard, making sure none of them got away and they were all DEAD. Not a big issue. But perhaps after playing scaling games for years, I've lost some measure of patience for the write something down and come back later approach that used to not bother me.

[Ohsky]

I hate scaling, to be honest. In fact, i stopped playing some games that did. It isn´t rewarding at all.

[carbon_dragon]

Scaling doesn't really keep the battles even because the player has choices while leveling. If you level with average skill, you end up finding the whole game a challenge with the boss monsters very fear inducing. If you level the wrong things you can find the whole game practically unplayable, but Skyrim for instance you have to be REALLY a bad leveller. Or if you level in a min/max fashion, very very carefully, you can get ahead of the power curve and outclass most monsters (or all of them). I'm a planner so I like to work at the levelling so my encounter are less stressful. Different strokes I guess. I absolutely hate going through a dungeon where everything is under control and then you go from 5 on the 1-10 difficulty scale to 26 between one encounter and the next.

 

Really I'm not a very hand-eye dextrous gamer so I really need the planning/tactical game to not require that. Any old RPG fits that category and Bethesda's RPGs mostly do too (except for Dead Money). But modern games amaze you with their immersion. Realmz or Wizardry or Avernum will never do that, they just don't have the horsepower or the millions behind them, but I still like the way they scale these days. It's always a controversy and I understand some people don't like it. Skyrim is kind of sneaky because they don't just make weak monsters more powerful (or vice versa) they change the monster to be a weaker or stronger monster on a continuum depending on where you are at present. After all, when's the last time you were watching an action hero movie where the hero kept dying and reloading his saves? Scaling helps to prevent that (though not entirely)

[Triumph]

I'd just chime in that "immersion" is not dependent on having boocoos-hyper-mega-uber-crystal-clear graphics. I find many Spiderweb games (see Nethergate or Geneforge 1 for some prime examples) tremendously immersive, thanks to very solid writing and atmospheric descriptions that engage my imagination. Sort of like...*gasp*...a book. I think the relatively "primitive" graphics actually aid that use of one's imagination; rather than show me exactly what X looks like, they provide a sort of skeleton, which my imagination combines with the text descriptions to flesh out. When high-powered modern graphics show me something in hyper-realistic detail, it leaves no room for imagination, no room for me to participation in envisioning the story. I realize maybe some players only find immersive in high-quality graphics, and just don't find the other path satisfying, but I think it's a big mistake to presume cutting-edge graphics = immersion, primitive graphics = non-immersion.

[Alorael at Large]

I don't even know what immersive is supposed to mean in a game. If I'm playing a shooter, I don't want to be immersed! I want to be comfortably somewhere other than shooting and being shot!

 

I will say, though, that I think the counter-graphics crowd doth protest too much. Not that they're wrong, but the pro-graphics camp has a point. There are things that really are best shown, not told. There are also things that are hard to express visually but not in words, and things for which the imagination will be more vivid than anything computers can show. But that's not a fault of either text or graphics; there's a reason why movies and novels can happily coexist, each playing to its own strengths.

 

—Alorael, who has said many times before that games, movies, and books are good at telling different stories. He should probably expand that a bit: graphics-intensive games and graphics-light games are also good at different stories. It's hard to get the same visceral dread out of text as you can from dark rooms, leaping monsters, and scary sounds. But you also literally can't have poetry unless you write it, and you certainly can't have internal monologue, or historical commentary, or Jeff's signature deadpan narration, unless you've got text. (Well, you can actually have narration. I suspect it would get very old very fast.)

[Lilith]

(Well, you can actually have narration. I suspect it would get very old very fast.)

 

Bastion had voiced narration throughout the whole game and a lot of people thought it was one of its best features so i guess it can sometimes work?

[Sudanna]

Bastion is a veeery special case. If you can do it as well as Bastion, great, but you probably can't do it as well as Bastion.

[Randomizer]

There is an Art of Video Games exhibit passing through Phoenix, Arizona and one thing it mentions is the beautiful cover art and manual illustrations that came with early video games to give players an idea of what the game designer wanted, but couldn't show with early 8 and 16 bit graphics. The player's imagination was supposed to deal with the early graphic limitations.

[Ohsky]

Imagination could be a factor, but if it´s the most important one is that the game sucks and you rely on imagination to excuse that sucking. In a book it´s understandable, in a videogame, it isn´t. Spiderweb games´s use of imagination on your side is far from being even a tertiary factor to enjoy them, from my own experience.

 

As far as i have seen, even old Avernum games are entertaining, besides it´s crappy graphics, they have something that is not left to imagination that attracts me and that is gameplay and overall story. To follow the story there is not much of an imagination effort to be done. I don´t imagine Demons to be "the way i think", dragons, to be "the way i think", people to be "the way i think". I enjoy those little old graphics as they are. One ends up liking them, i see how cute they are. If it were not fun to do all that you can do in game beyond reading the long dialogues and making sense of those long descriptions in your mind with imaginated pictures of them... i do once on a while but i couldn´t care less about fantasy books in reality, as i don´t like reading books at all.

 

With this kind of videogames what i do is to learn more english the best way there is to it. It has been that way since childhood.

[carbon_dragon]

Avernum 6 is the most complex RPG I've seen on the iPad, even though the port isn't entirely satisfactory (touching the screen doesn't really work as a replacement for a mouse in all cases like mousing over the map because your fat finger blocks what is being displayed).

 

Anyway, the graphics are not bad for an old fashioned game -- in effect it's a highly refined but old-fashioned game. Like I said that's not necessarily a bad thing, I have a hard time with a lot of modern real-time semi RPGs because I just don't have the reflexes. I like turn based games that use strategy. For me the more information there is on the game (there is usually a LOT on Bethesda games including very good book guides) the better I like it. Thats because with these non scaled opponents, you really need a sequence of events -- an idea of what order to hit things so that you will be good enough to fight the opposition when you get there. With a really good game guide (Fallout 3's thick book length guide is the best I've seen) you can plot all of that out, and that is what I like.

 

I don't want to arrive in the late game finding out that the best weapon in the game requires you have 12 points of polearm skill when I took swords. I want to know what is coming. With that foreknowledge (even if the book was 10 times the cost of the game) the lack of scaling would be no problem. And good maps that give you annotations on where everything is, especially in places like the Labyrinth would be especially welcome. The Avernum maps don't show you anything really. You can't see where the stairs up and down are, you seldom have annotations of important things, you can't record where there is an encounter of a magic wall or a locked door you want to come back to later, nyet. See that's not an issue with Skyrim because you seldom have to come back. If you're going to make them come back, don't make them record on paper trying to remember where to come back to. Let them drop markers with notes on the map or something.

 

This isn't the old days. Some of the modern innovations are worthwhile -- better maps, quest arrows, map markers, and so on. Sorry I tend to rant.

[Death Knight]

To be completely fair, I'm sure this is a thing that is very much why the 2nd trilogy is that way. Its extremely linear, there are many mini-bosses that can shred through your characters no matter how godly your stats are (Well unless you went divine touched). I mean that's how the whole 2nd trilogy is, its very much like Icewind Dale series-that is brutal.

 

Not that the original trilogy isn't, but you at least get a chance to lvl up much moreso than usually can. The best thing to do is get parry to 10 for fighters and from there boost your offense through quick action or weapon skill. Parry is an offense too as by missing getting hit makes them on the defense as you get more attacks off.

[Alorael at Large]

I don't want to arrive in the late game finding out that the best weapon in the game requires you have 12 points of polearm skill when I took swords.

That's not generally a problem in Spiderweb games. Jeff tries pretty hard to make all builds that aren't obviously stupid effective. It's been largely that way since Exile (sadly maces were never really decent). There are good weapons of all kinds and gameplay doesn't suddenly switch up on you later, although sometimes there are sudden leaps in difficulty of enemies.

 

—Alorael, who wishes Jeff had stuck by his convictions. Yes, it's harder to screw up beginning builds now before playing at all, but Avadon had the elegant "respec whenever you want eventually" that was unrealistic and wonderful. Being able to fix your mistakes is a good thing. Disabling it in super-hardcore mode is fine, but for normal players it's great, and not labeling it cheating is even greater.

[Lilith]

That's not generally a problem in Spiderweb games. Jeff tries pretty hard to make all builds that aren't obviously stupid effective. It's been largely that way since Exile (sadly maces were never really decent).

 

They were fine in the early-to-midgame: flails were as strong as waveblades, while being significantly cheaper and easier to get. It's only once you start finding unique magical edged and pole weapons that bashing weapons start to fall behind -- and even then, there were enough unique maces and hammers that one bashing weapon user out of a party of six wouldn't hold you back.