/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5427934]

Tips for managing a whole party smoothly? I'm a phonelet playing the enhanced edition and never played this on pc so maybe it's easier with a mouse but I find the real time combat overwhelming in this game. Bow focused characters that I only intend to use their short sword in desperate situations seem to always default to the sword, magic users charge headlong into melee combat and get themselves killed immediately, and coordinating actual combat tactics is just a micromanaging mess. I wish it was turn based like actual dnd, maybe with a visual presentation similar to fallout 1 and 2. Are my complaints valid or do I just need to git gud /vr/?

[Anonymous No.5427942]

are you even using the pause button
anyway, nowadays I wish it was turn based but at the time I wished fallout combat was like bg. I guess it's because I played it first.

[Anonymous No.5427943]

>>5427934
Pause is your friend or the command that pauses after every round of combat which is enabled in the menus. Also, use a thief to scout with

[Anonymous No.5427947]

>>5427934
you need to hit the space bar, that pauses the game and allows you to micromanage the fights. forget about the scripts, I use them only for the tanks/fighters when I'm sure the only thing left to do is wipe out hitting shit on the screen, if not it's pausing/command/and action all the way.

[Anonymous No.5427956]

>>5427943
>command that pauses after every round of combat
Didn't know this existed, I'll need to check it out

[Anonymous No.5428112]

>>5427956
Nigga, do you even rtfm before playing a game or at the very least explore every available option before making a shit thread?

[Anonymous No.5428190]

>>5427934
OP you are casual and retarded for trying to play this on a phone.

Get a PC or dont play this at all youre just ruining your experience of an otherwise great game.

[Anonymous No.5428690]

>I play BG on a fucking phone
>don't you guys have phones?
The absolute state of humanity I swear to me mom

[Anonymous No.5428696]

Just fucking play it on pc, even a toaster bought for 30$ can run it perfectlt, why you would even think to play this on a phone it just boggles my fucking mind why the fuck would anyone do such a thing for fuck's sake

[Anonymous No.5428701]

Dude, I would play this on a PC. It seems v painful on a phone.

[Anonymous No.5428713]

>>5428690
"smart"phones were a mistake tbqh

[Anonymous No.5428719]

>>5428713
Seriously every part of smartphone design is casual shit. Theres not one actually smart thing about smartphones.

Big useless media screens for impressing normies, low batteries, TOUCHSCREENS I hate smartphones so fucking much. Same thing as women no wonder smartphones are thot devices.

[Anonymous No.5428727]

>guide guise I play a 1998 PC game on a phone and I somehow suck at micro, how do I git gud?
Let BG go and get Starcraft on your phone

[Anonymous No.5428749]

>>5428719
desu I completely understand your complaints but you need to realize that a phone/tablet can't be a watch or whatever because they would get hot af and the touchscreen saves space between display and inputs which is really important. Also even if you and me would both wear pic related nobody else would forgive us for it.

[Anonymous No.5428778]

>>5427934
>playing on a phone
anon pls no
your complaints are valid in that RTwP is cancer beyond belief but you're a filthy phonefag

[Anonymous No.5428802]

>>5428778
>RTwP is cancer beyond belief
kys
BG is more interesting and fun than any turn based game in the entire history of the medium.

[Anonymous No.5428849]

Beamdog is a guilty of a number of different crimes. Here are the major ones.

1. The Enhanced Editions are essentially a collection of free mods that had existed for nearly twenty years. Beamdog gathered them all up, slapped "Enhanced Edition" on it and resold it as a new product. There's very very little in the Enhanced Editions that wasn't already out there, and most of it is stuff you don't want (like obnoxious character outlines).

2. The games didn't sell so well and the originals were still far outselling them, even twenty years after their release, so Beamdog had EVERY digital distributor stop selling the originals and ONLY sell the Enhanced Edition. If you want to buy a digital copy of the originals now, they're "bundled" into the Enhanced Edition. Now these scumbags can claim sales from people just wanting to buy the originals as their own.

3. The infamous 600+ bugs on launch. The game is still riddled with bugs (as even a perfunctory glance over their forums show) but the fact that it took nearly two years for them to get a game that had been working fine for 20 years to reach playability after launch is telling of their wild incompetence.

4. This is where we get to the ones that really piss people off. Beamdog couldn't just remaster the game, they had to fuck with the content too. New dialogue for existing NPCs like Jaheira, Viconia, Safana, Kivan, et cetera was written in to make the characters more progressive and leftist friendly. Beamdog shills will argue that "adding content isn't changing content XDDD" but it is when the new content changes the core personalities of the existing characters. This is in addition to adding a slew of their own LGBT (hitherto there were none in Baldur's Gate) NPCs, all flooded with OP attributes and magic items to encourage people to play them despite their cancer.

5. Siege of motherfucking Dragonspear.

6. >>/vr/thread/5402232#p5408278

[Anonymous No.5429030]

>>5428749
I would have 0 use for anyone's forgiveness if I had one of those.

[Anonymous No.5429292]

[Anonymous No.5429416]

>>5429292
Utterly irrelevant to Baldur's Gate.

[Anonymous No.5429472]

Hi guys playing starcraft broodwar atm on phone, how can I beat the last zerg mission?

[Anonymous No.5429697]

>>5427934
Look at scripts (AI control) and autopause. It makes things a lot easier. Also play it on PC, this game doesn't suit mobile interfaces at all.

[Anonymous No.5430250]

>>5428802
You know how anons here know you haven't played many games at all?

[Anonymous No.5430256]

>>5428802
>BG is more interesting and fun than any turn based game in the entire history of the medium.
even if we restrict it to D&D BG gets blown away by the Gold Box games and Dark Sun SL

[Anonymous No.5430862]

>>5430250
You know how anons here know you can't string two sentences together to build an argument and make an actual point?
You know how anons here know you've barely played BG?
>>5430256
Who are you even trying to kid? Gold box rpgs have somewhat interesting gameplay, but they're boring as fuck compared to baldur's gate. You'd know it if you had indeed played them.

[Anonymous No.5430926]

>>5430862
not that anon. I think RTwP is fine in particular the Baldur's Gate implementation of it. But to pretend like BG is better than "any turn based game in the entire history of the medium" is just absurd.

[Anonymous No.5430929]

>>5430926
Why is it absurd?

[Anonymous No.5430941]

>>5427943
auto pause:
enemy sighted
character injured (reduced to fewer than 30% health)
character death
weapon unusable

[Anonymous No.5430947]

>>5430929
Because RPGCodex considers turn-based gameplay to be the epitome of roleplaying games and thus any turn-based game is instantly better than RTwP, as RTwP is a crude, base and adulterated, and this is always the objective truth. They will sing peans towards Realms of Arkania HD before they admit Baldur's Gate or the truly real-time (action) RPGs are any decent.

[Anonymous No.5430983]

>>5430947
You know what's funny? There are almost no turn based rpgs in the top 20 poll rpgcodex, and Torment and Fallout 1 and 2 are the only games that rank higher than BG2 in their top 70 list, and I'm pretty sure it has not much to do with the gameplay.
Unconditionally defending turn based shit and acting like BG is somehow not complex or interesting is baby's or rpgcodex wannabe first opinion about crpgs. Because he hasn't played any yet and just wants to look based like the other cool kids on the boards.

[Anonymous No.5431003]

>>5430929
Because Baldur's Gate falls way short of the potential for a turn-based game with a 2D battlefield. Yes, the RTwP system does a great job of addressing the Gold Box issue of every single AD&D turn being given equal weight even if all you're doing is taking the next swing (miss) at a goblin. BG does a good job of rewarding planning and tactics.

But it's hardly perfect. Despite having a 2D battlefield, most battles resolve into toe2toe melee and ranged attackers within a single turn, rendering that extra dimension largely meaningless. It's also hard to design compelling environments. There's a lot of flat and bland or cramped and awkward spaces to fight in.

Contrast it with a game like Final Fantasy Tactics. Not only do you have 3 dimensions on the battlefield rather than just 2, you have a variety of mechanics that keep the units moving around through the environment. In BG you just stick a couple of tanks in front and focus fire on one enemy at a time. In FFT there are plenty of opportunities to use AoE damage, various types of ranged attacks, buffs, debuffs. Every turn has decisions to make with consequences you can see play out. In Baldur's Gate, a spell like Fireball ranges from overpowered to completely useless. You might use it to end a battle on the first turn or you might not be able to use it at all. Buffs tend to be just tedious things you have to do before each battle or maybe on the first turn. In FFT, casting a buff is usually a tactical decision with tradeoffs.

Don't get me wrong, the infinity engine is great for what it is. But it's still just a less-awkward conversion of tabletop AD&D rules than what came before, and still doesn't quite work in a videogame the way it was meant to work in the tabletop setting.

[Anonymous No.5431032]

>>5430947
I must admit I'm sort of curious what other games those codexers have played that use RTwP. Because if your standard is say, Skyrim, then you might have a point. The way you can pause in that game and just use every potion in your inventory before unpausing is kind of silly. It's pretty easy to see how an RTwP system can be designed badly.

The Infinity Engine on the other hand, is genius because it manages to successfully blend a real-time exploration/interactive RPG engine with the AD&D ruleset. I just played Champions of Krynn (Gold Box) recently and spent literally 15 minutes of a battle doing nothing but trading whiffs with level 1 enemies. Every fucking turn I had to menu through selecting attack, selecting a target, etc. In Baldur's Gate, that same battle would have had all the same tactical decision points, except it would have been over in a minute or two as all that whiffing would have played out quickly and non-interactively.

Again, it's not perfect (see >>5431003) but the RTwP is effectively used.

[Anonymous No.5431054]

>>5431003
Yeah so it's somehow absurd because FFT exists and plays differently
Half this post is pretty good though, but your basic logic is 'FFT is better, here, a couple situational examples'. And I don't play AD&D so I don't care about its rules.
You know what you'll never do in a turn based game? Miss something. Timings matter in BG, buffs matter (these are what allows you to use aoe damage throughout the entire fight from BG1 to ToB btw).
Movement and placement matter a lot more than in turn based and are more complex to try and anticipate. Of course, it's a lot more visible with SCS than the base game, but SCS just updates the AI, it doesn't change the groundwork, you already have all those possibilities in the base game.
As for buffs, I can't agree. Wizard chess and buff/debuff is the basis of the gameplay in BG2 and it's probably the most interesting part of this game because it involves every tactical aspect of the game, understanding rules and placement. A dispelled character is as good as dead, so using a round or several to rebuff or recast what protects you against dispel is a constant pressure when you also have to dispel your enemies and inflict damage on them. I really fail to understand how casting a buff would be a tactical decision with tradeoffs in FFT and somehow not in BG.
What you describe as 'cramped environment' is also debatable. There are few rights that indeed take place in such an environment, and when it does, it's completely part of the system and the challenge, because micro matters a lot in rtwp, so restricting it forces players to find other solutions and think outside of the previous box.
As for the last part, who cares about origunal AD&D rules, the read almost the same, but they're made for pen and paper in a turn based environment, not a rtwp videogame. Of course they're not fully implemented, it's a different medium and adapting them in rtwp was the way to go to have them shine the most in the videogame medium.

[Anonymous No.5431061]

>>5431032
>games that use RTwP.
>Because if your standard is say, Skyrim,

[Anonymous No.5431131]

>>5431054
>Yeah so it's somehow absurd because FFT exists and plays differently
When you claim something is the best turn-based game in the entire medium, you had better be prepared to defend against a game like Final Fantasy Tactics. Or Wizardry. Or Master of Magic. Or Civ II. Or Heroes of Might and Magic. Those are all turn-based videogames. Since you are clearly not, you should probably moderate your hyperbole.
>You know what you'll never do in a turn based game? Miss something.
Sure but it's debatable how valuable of a mechanic this actually is. Missing stuff becomes a habit in BG because the rewards for micromanagement are unbalanced and often not worth the tedium.
>Wizard chess and buff/debuff is the basis of the gameplay in BG2
Wizard Chess is worst part of the game. It's either a game of tedious rock-paper-scissors or it's just use Keldorn. All you do is scroll back through the buffer to see what buffs got cast and then use the appropriate counterspell. There's no decision to make other than "wait or try to dispel."
>it involves every tactical aspect of the game, understanding rules and placement.
Not at all. Placement doesn't mean jack shit for Wizard chess. It matters a bit when you're talking about buffing a tank against vampires or dragons but even then it's still a fairly basic "melee range vs long range" positioning.
>I really fail to understand how casting a buff would be a tactical decision with tradeoffs in FFT and somehow not in BG
So, my criticisms above aside, wizards using their various immunity buffs in combat is a very small part of the game. The vast majority of buffing in Baldur's Gate involves a routine of spending 1-2 rounds before the battle starts loading up on protections and haste or whatever. This rarely gets more complex than "cast the shortest duration buffs last."

[Anonymous No.5431136]

>>5431061
So are you going to answer the question or just drool all over yourself?

[Anonymous No.5431168]

>>5431131
I like your little list of games at the start but you've missed my point. You didn't show that FFT was somehow deeper or more interesting than BG, you just said it existed and listed a few mechanics. Same thing you did with that new list.
>Wizard Chess is worst part of the game. It's either a game of tedious rock-paper-scissors or it's just use Keldorn. All you do is scroll back through the buffer to see what buffs got cast and then use the appropriate counterspell. There's no decision to make other than "wait or try to dispel."
That's bullshit since the same argument to absurdity can be brought up against any game mechanic and any balance ever.
lich fights and many fights in ToB include immunities to anything that dispel combat protection, you can't breach a lich or a dragon and if it casts protection spells (which it will in SCS) you have to find other ways to get around them.
Placement and movement is important for wizard chess and it's pretty obvious. It allows you to retreat one or several party members when needed and tank with the right person for the job, changing aggro, etc.
It indeed gets more complex than "cast the shortest duration buffs last" when every single fight sets you up against spell casters who can easily dispel you if you aren't extremely careful with which buffs you have upand where your characters are. Again I don't understand how you can pretend otherwise it boggles my mind, I lost Edwin permanently just yesterday because I couldn't get a pfmw up or move him fast enough after getting a fallen planetar summoned on him.
Sure my original statement is a bit hyperbolic and it definitely includes playing with SCS over the unmodded game, but at the same time I haven't had such a blast playing any great turn based rpgs. Shit like civilization shouldn't have anything to do with this debate though , we're not really in the same category.

[Anonymous No.5431292]

>>5431136
Skyrim isn't an RTwP game is the point.

[Anonymous No.5431324]

>>5431292
So list some other fucking RTwP games that aren't infinity engine games you fuckwit, or shut the fuck up and stop missing the point.

[Anonymous No.5431389]

>>5431168
>You didn't show that FFT was somehow deeper or more interesting than BG
Yes I did, you just weren't paying attention.

Baldur's Gate is effectively a "2-dimensional with obstacles" battlefield. You have a flat 2D space, and the environment can have walls or objects that can block projectiles, spells, and vision. Final Fantasy Tactics effectively a 3-dimensional battlefield. Having the high ground makes a difference, both in melee and with archery, different units have different movement abilities, and spell effect areas may be limited on the vertical axis.

The 3D space in FFT results in fundamentally deeper gameplay than Baldur's Gate, with more tactical decisions to make and more factors to consider by default on every turn, without the need for a difficulty mod (although a popular one exists anyway). It also enables a greater variety of encounters by virtue of the environment being a meaningful part of each battle.

Another thing that FFT does differently that directly results in greater depth is the blocking mechanism, which is specifically arranged to reward rear attacks. This means that the direction a unit is facing often matters a lot, and most turns involve a decision about whether to risk a head-on attack or spend your movement turn to maneuver for a better strike (to say nothing of using tactical decisions to limit the exposure of your own backs). In Baldur's Gate, it rarely makes a difference outside backstab, and even when it does, minor positioning like that doesn't have the same simple risk/reward proposition.

>if it casts protection spells (which it will in SCS) you have to find other ways to get around them
That's still basically just finding the right paper to beat rock. Unless there isn't one in which case figuring out how to survive against an invulnerable enemy until the protection wears off is a reasonable challenge, but one that can get meta very quickly.

All that being said, it's true I haven't played SCS.

[Anonymous No.5431447]

>>5431389
>That's still basically just finding the right paper to beat rock. Unless there isn't one in which case figuring out how to survive against an invulnerable enemy until the protection wears off is a reasonable challenge, but one that can get meta very quickly.
Well that's probably what you miss with BG if you haven't tried SCS, but finding a paper to beat the rock doesn't always involve a particular spell. Liches technically can't get dispelled, with scs or in the base game if you don't use an inquisitor. Remove/dispel magic will have a 5% chance of working and they are immune to breach and lower resistance (actually immune to level 5 spells and lower)
For example, a 'good' way to take down a lich is to survive and wait out its protection from magic weapons (naturally immune to normal weapons) and have a fighter beat down its stoneskin while protected from fire, cold and magic energy to avoid taking damage from the fire shields and the chain contingency x3 abi-dhalzim that will surely come soon. Move him immediately if he gets dispelled, otherwise he dies, etc.
Wizard chess 101 seems basic if you only consider the different dispelling options you have, but the real depth comes into play when you find out that you have basically hundreds of way to play it differently, finding ways to deal damage through protections and a load of other stuff. Hell, you can even hit a lich with the unblockable damage of the ring of the ram, and if you got it below 90hp you can get a power word stun on its ass after dispelling spell protections. You can use a well-timed time stop to make sure the pfmw will go down when you want, and kill it with auto attacks while it can't rebuff, etc.
You have a thousand possible moves to solve the puzzle each time, that's why it somewhat deserves its 'chess' name.

[Anonymous No.5431450]

Also same but opposite as you, I haven't played FF tactics as in depth as I've played BG, but I really don't think the gameplay is as rich, even though it has some cool features. The rules used in BG allow for such a variety of possible moves that it's hard to top. Also coupled with an amazing character progression system ensuring a lot of variety in playstyles even among a single class.
SCS is really worth trying out if you're interested though, it's unironically the best mod for any game I've ever played, really amazing work. Amazing difficulty mod, fair, interesting and fun.
But beyond that, other stuff like Tactics, Improved Anvil, Asylum are also mods that make the most of the ruleset to create fascinating puzzles to solve that are arguably among the most challenging stuff the entire rpg genre has to offer. So yeah again, I was a bit hyperbolic in saying that BG is more complex and interesting than any turn-based rpgs, but it has a pretty solid claim to that title.

[Anonymous No.5431475]

will immunity to +1 weapons be of any use in ToB?

[Anonymous No.5431489]

>>5431475
Not really no, aside from a few very minor enemies everything strikes as a +3 or more.
Though the other bonus for this hell trial is about as useless anyway.

[Anonymous No.5431497]

>>5431489
>useless
for fighters?

[Anonymous No.5431508]

>>5431389
>fundamentally deeper
No, having more fundamental mechanics and moving parts to your gameplay doesn't lead to deeper gameplay by itself. Added complexity =/= depth. Many games are touted as having a higher degree of complexity, but fall flat when you actually take a look at how said complexity is applied to gameplay. Ultima 7's complex way of learning and applying spells doesn't make the game a deep mechanical experience, for example. Fallout has been proven time and time again to be a game about either burstfire or shooting people in the eyes, and all of the other supposedly rich tactical options allowed by its system are either inefficient or limited, and pretty much every build ends up the same, from hammer-wielders, kung-fu champions to snipers.

"Finding the right paper to beat rock" is just not a fair assessment of a game where the amount of papers can be very, very large, evident by the amount of people who play without casters or thieves. There's even a documented playthrough of a Transmuter Mage through SCS, which specifically is *forbidden* to use most of the conventional bottle openers and has to find others.

[Anonymous No.5431513]

>>5431497
It's alright for any non arcane class I guess, but it won't increase your hp pool if you're already at 18 or 19, and the regen is cool to have in BG1 when potions are scarce, but not that useful in ToB when you have so many options to get health back
I mean chances are, you potion cases are full of health potions by this point, so you will heal yourself even if you don't pack a cleric rather than rest or move for it anyway, and it's obviously way too slow to be of any use in combat

[Anonymous No.5431831]

>>5431508
idk anon you basically have the bottle opener or you make the bottle run around until the cap comes loose and after that it's just throwing numbers at each other. If there's variety it's mostly aesthetic variety if anything.

[Anonymous No.5431836]

>>5431508
>Added complexity =/= depth.
So what does depth mean to you? All this semantic wanking doesn't really say much.
Yes, it's technically possible that a more complex system has less depth than a less complex one. Wizardry is deep despite not having a real 2D map.
This is especially true when you are talking about the most fundamental components of the system, like the dimensions of the gameplay field, rules for physics, and that sort of thing.

>Fallout
This doesn't apply Final Fantasy Tactics, apart from some specific and well-known flaws in the design such as Math Skill. If the 3D battlefields in FFT weren't actually meaningful to the gameplay I wouldn't have brought it up.

>"Finding the right paper to beat rock" is just not a fair assessment of a game
It's a summary of a dynamic where you have a lot of all-or-nothing immunities and arbitrarily complex rules for counter spells used to strip those immunities. It tends toward determinism rather than risk/reward decision-making. If you Bert has a +2 weapon and Ernie has a +3 weapon, and one enemy, soandso, puts up a shield against +2 weapons, well then obviously you just have Ernie attack the guy with the weapon immunity. There's no real thought involved, most of the difficulty is the accidental difficulty that comes from shit like not noticing that soandso was +2 immune until Bert wastes a turn attacking.

Also remember I don't need to prove conclusively that FFT is deeper than Baldur's Gate, all I need prove is that the debate is open. I'm not claiming that FFT is the greatest turn-based videogame that exists.

[Anonymous No.5431845]

>>5431831
>idk anon you basically have the bottle opener or you make the bottle run around until the cap comes loose and after that it's just throwing numbers at each other
that's bullshit, I can make such a shitty reduction of any game ever made.

[Anonymous No.5431851]

>>5431836
>It's a summary of a dynamic where you have a lot of all-or-nothing immunities and arbitrarily complex rules for counter spells used to strip those immunities. It tends toward determinism rather than risk/reward decision-making. If you Bert has a +2 weapon and Ernie has a +3 weapon, and one enemy, soandso, puts up a shield against +2 weapons, well then obviously you just have Ernie attack the guy with the weapon immunity. There's no real thought involved, most of the difficulty is the accidental difficulty that comes from shit like not noticing that soandso was +2 immune until Bert wastes a turn attacking.
what a load of shit

[Anonymous No.5431873]

>>5431851
Infinity Engine games are lock and key, you know it's true. They might as well be Donkey Kong 64.

[Anonymous No.5431882]

>>5431873
Yeah and final fantasy tactics migth as well be tic-tac-toe
feels good to be an intellectual able to see the true nature of videogames
in this moment, I am euphoric

[Anonymous No.5431883]

>>5431873
What do you mean?

[Anonymous No.5431907]

>>5431882
>>5431883
stop ruining my jokes by being autistic

[Anonymous No.5431909]

>>5431907
but my euphoric post was a joke too, stop ruining mine!

[Anonymous No.5432517]

>>5431851
>what a load of shit
So what does depth mean to you?
You can't even answer the question. It appears you are the one full of shit.

[Anonymous No.5432552]

>>5431836
>Also remember I don't need to prove conclusively that FFT is deeper than Baldur's Gate
If the debate is open, this goes backwards as well - turn-based systems aren't necessarily better or more complex than RTwP ones (as presented in IE), nor are they inherently deeper. I do not have to prove anything conclusively either - merely all I have to point out is that even a very complex system will still lean towards having some most optimal or obvious choices that narrow the available scope of the gameplay to some "best" solution. I believe BG is generous enough to offer you a playing field where you can play multiple characters that bring something new to the table, in terms of tactics, resources (both what resources they bring and what sorts of resources they consume) and playstyle.

You present BG as a game that's inherently all about dynamics like "all-or-nothing immunities", but having a +2 weapon or +3 weapon and the right spell to breach defenses still isn't enough to simply win in combat, and there's also considerations like individual party composition. It would be more valid if the progression for weapons was linear and a party member wielding a +3 weapon was some sort of evenement, rarity, a cherished resource unto itself, or that we assumed that Bert, realizing his actions do not amount to anything, may now dig in the party's pool of consumables to break out a potion of firebreath, a wand of cold or an arrow of dispelling. If there's one thing I'd say about Baldur's Gate is that most of its depth comes from the caster gameplay, as even martial solos end up playing like bona fide casters with the sheer amount of consumables that replicate magical effects you're expected to use.

[Anonymous No.5432575]

>>5432517
I'm not the guy you were answering to in that post, I'm the one you were arguing with before, so I don't give a fuck about his or your definition of depth.
This post is a load of shit because it's a retarded caricature of BG and AD&D games by someone who never played one seriously. That's it.
I could make a retarded reduction to stupidity like this for any game ever released (see BG as donkey kong 64 and FFT as tic tac toe) and nothing of value would come out of it either. You couldn't even try to seriously justify any of this shit.
Feel free to strut around with this trash and your rhetorical questions, but that was fucking garbage.

[Anonymous No.5432576]

>>5427934
There should be an option to autopause when an enemy is sighted. It would be literally impossible otherwise

[Anonymous No.5432579]

>>5428112
To be fair the manual for this was about 200 pages

[Anonymous No.5432587]

>>5432579
To be fair taking a look at the options takes 20 goddamn seconds even if you haven't read the fucking manual

[Anonymous No.5432591]

>>5431836
(cont >>5432552)
In that, I posit that while BG might be all about figuring out the right ways to react to certain immunities, the game is far from "fixed". Your party composition might arrive at the same goals with completely different tactics even while using the same set of NPCs between tries, and rarely is there a situation where you're roadblocked entirely by not having access to one specific ability.

For me, "depth" mostly means... I guess it mostly has something to do with the amount of complex systems that actually do have meaningful interaction with the world and aren't there just for show, or aren't rendered completely useless because of easier, more efficient tactics.
To illustrate what I consider deep: Starcraft is a smaller game compared to many RTSes, but the level of depth it has (insofar as being a 20 year old game that is barely updated yet still bringing new ideas, and the understanding of it is positively arcane to 90% of the playerbase), is, in my opinion, unparalleled.
In a way, "depth" to me is "what you can squeeze out of the game, realistically". "Applied complexity", if you will.

What I'd like to highlight is where you say that it's "technically possible" for a complex game to not be so deep, I consider it a more common sight.

I find it more relaxed to admit in this discussion that I haven't played FFT, but I'm more willing to go do it right now (I'm downloading the ROM right now, positively energized), because this discussion is nicer to have when 1) you also freely admit you're not familiar with SCS, so we're not all posturing as some know-it-all grognards, 2) you have sound arguments that it's a fun game and 3) you are not steering the discussion into camp division, which is really refreshing and admirable.

[Anonymous No.5432612]

>>5431882
>Yeah and final fantasy tactics migth as well be tic-tac-toe
Again here is a very simple decision to make in FFT:
(1) Attack from the front then retreat OR (2) Circle around and strike from the back OR (3) Attack from the front and stand your ground.

With option (1) You have a 65% chance to hit and gain a terrain advantage as the enemy must come to you on the next turn. With a good movement ability you might even be able to move out of range.
With option (2) You have a 100% chance to hit, but must remain in place after the strike which may leave you vulnerable.
With option (3) You have a 65% chance to hit but your next turn will come up faster (33% faster I think? I can't remember)

This is a risk/reward proposition, one of the simplest in the game, a routine tradeoff that shows up multiple times in most battles, with the details varying slightly each time (some enemies have better protection than others, etc.) This is not tic-tac-toe. It's not rock/paper/scissors. There is no right answer, only different risks and costs.

Note there are a lot of risk/reward decisions in Baldur's Gate. I'm not trashing the game as a whole. The point with this example is to show how tactical decision-making can factor into even a simple action such as taking a melee strike. Of course there's far more complexity possible, especially when you get into AI and teamwork.

And most importantly, until you get to Calculators and a few other exploitable mechanics, everything is coherent and intuitive, with no need for an abstract meta-game layer like "Wizard Chess." The challenge in using magic in FFT comes from positioning, timing and choosing targets, not knowledge about which spell school you need 100% immunity from to survive.

[Anonymous No.5432619]

The auto pause option is boring as fuck, fite me irl
Real men take decisions in milliseconds once the fight is on, they read the log in real time, use visual cues and only press the spacebar to cast non hotkeyed spells in order to keep the adrenaline going and to preserve maximum immersion
then they let a single manly tear drop when their favorite companion gets permakilled before moving on and ordering someone else to step into their still warm boots

[Anonymous No.5432625]

>>5432612
>abstract meta-game layer like "Wizard Chess."
But it's anything but abstract, it makes perfect sense lore and universe-wise
If your charname isn't a minmaxing bitch who spent his youth chasing rats with a knife and reading anything he could about the rules of 2nd edition AD&D, he is dead.
More seriously, that's a shitty false equivalency, of course if you live in a universe where spell immunity is a thing, you'd better know which one is the most useful of the bunch and why.
I mean, the most used spell immunity is abjuratuon, which doesn't make you immune to any magical effect, on the contrary, it prevents you from getting dispelled because schools of magic aren't a gimmick, they make perfect sense. Both from a metagame and an in-universe perspective.
Play the game more, you're full of false pre-conceived notions about it, and that's too bad, you're missing out.

[Anonymous No.5432626]

>>5432575
You're the one not taking any of this seriously. You claimed BG was the pinnacle of turn-based gaming then at the first sign of challenge you're failing to defend your case.

>You present BG as a game that's inherently all about dynamics like "all-or-nothing immunities"
No, that's not what I did. I am specifically talking about the "wizard chess" dynamic which is not a major factor in most fights throughout the bulk of the game. That was just the example brought up that supposedly shows how BG is literally the best turn-based game ever.

I described several elements of the BG game engine that I believe detract from its potential. For me, far more important than the wizard chess shit is that the use of space just isn't quite there. It's hard to argue the point because it isn't BAD, but there's a clear tendancy for battles to quickly sort into two or three attack ranges (melee/ranged, melee/spell/ranged), with the space in between usually not mattering that much and most battles not requiring repositioning more than a couple of times.

I already admitted that SCS might address some of this stuff and I wouldn't know as I haven't played it.

[Anonymous No.5432628]

Sorry, second half of this: >>5432626 is meant for >>5432552

[Anonymous No.5432648]

>>5432626
>>5432626
>You claimed BG was the pinnacle of turn-based gaming then at the first sign of challenge you're failing to defend your case.
May i remind you that you left two of my posts unanswered earlier?
As for the rest, it's not my post but you're again failing to understand many aspects of the game, now you're on about something about placement, but you still haven't addressed anything related to the complexity of 'wizard chess' which imho, you completely missed on your playthrough (which is ok, it took me three including one with SCS to realise how it actually worked in depth). As well as many mechanics which you haven't even bothered addressing, be it the incredible depth and richness of classes and kits each with a particular gameplay or the 'macro' side of things which is character and party building.
I mean this post isn't dishonest unlike your earlier outburst, which is great, but fuck me, even this thing about placement is only vaguely true for a part of BG1, use of space changes drastically between the beginning of BG1, BG2 (first and second half can even be argued here) and ToB, and even for many fights in between. Even depending on your party composition it changes drastically. The vanilla game is easy though and you can finish it without mastering micro at all, but when you start playing somewhat seriously, there are no serious fights with which you can get away with shitty and immobile placement.

[Anonymous No.5432654]

>>5427934
>playing on phone
>enhanced edition
Is this a parody post?

[Anonymous No.5432658]

>>5432654
Most likely to be fair

[Anonymous No.5432661]

>>5430983
>I'm pretty sure it has not much to do with the gameplay.
Fallout gameplay is tremendous, fuck off

[Anonymous No.5432664]

>>5430941
it can be a bit jarring, but it's the best way to play the game. I remember those, but it's a good place to start out with the round pausing and enemy on sight.

[Anonymous No.5432668]

incidentally, the much-maligned Vancian system is a part of AD&D I really like, especially compared to FFT which uses a simple MP system. Although it's a bit heavily biased toward preparation, AD&D's spell system does force you to figure out ways to use different spells creatively rather than just using your best spell every turn until your MP runs out.

[Anonymous No.5432671]

>>5432661
Yes it is, but Baldur's Gate is just richer on that area.
The first game on the list is PST and I've yet to meet anyone trying to argue that it has better gameplay than both classic Fallout games and Baldur's Gate, hence why I think it doesn't have much to do with gameplay anyway.

[Anonymous No.5432674]

>>5432648
>May i remind you that you left two of my posts unanswered earlier?
I'll reread the thread when I get a chance and will try to answer whatever I have time for.
Fact is though that if Wizard Chess is your main selling point for BG I'm not likely to be sold no matter what.

[Anonymous No.5432679]

>>5432664
No >>5432619

[Anonymous No.5432703]

>>5432674
These ones if you're indeed curious, but I probably won't answer to the next wall of text with a wall of text of my own because I'm getting sleepy, so only bother with that in mind
>>5431447
>>5431450

My point anyway is that the gameplay is richer than you give it credit for, because it takes several playthrough to fully realise the extent of what you can do in this game.
I pretty much unironically think that you haven't fully played BG if you didn't crash the base game trying to make an infinite timestop/project image/wish loop at least once. I've finished it a lot with scs, I might be somewhat biased towards it but I've unironically never encountered a non pure strategy game with such enjoyable and rich replayability.

[Anonymous No.5432713]

>>5432668
Pretty much this too
Although there are quite a few useless/roleplay only spells, there is such an important number of useful and even amazing spells, both arcane and divine (and drudic? Or something?) that even in an absolute tryhard run using only the very best ones in the game, you will never find yourself spamming only a couple of them. And that's not even mentioning consumables, items, innate abilities, passive abilities, HLA, etc.

[Anonymous No.5433012]

>>5427956
Whatvafucking tool

[Anonymous No.5433243]

>>5432713
heh well that one was me actually.

[Anonymous No.5434248]

>>5427934
>playing this masterpiece on a fucking phone
Get real

[Anonymous No.5434281]

>>5432625
Answer me this then:
Is there any party stronger than six independently proficient solo class mages?
and
Why do you think this is good design?

[Anonymous No.5434428]

>>5434281
>Is there any party stronger than six independently proficient solo class mages?
Of course there are. Single class Mage isn't even that good, and even if we assumed your question asked about X-to-Mage duals, there are plenty of better party compositions. Mages and mage duals lack THAC0, single target DPR, no Chaotic Commands/Death Ward/and other useful utility spells that have a Druid/Cleric niche, no powerful traps, no ability to use plenty of powerful and useful gear, and are horribly slow in the early game, plus there's only so many scrolls you can use.

[Anonymous No.5434430]

>>5434281
yeah, any combination of dual/multi class to mage with at least two fighters/mage, a mage/thief and a cleric/mage, a sorcerer or Edwin as main backline caster and a full class druid.
Although if I do a full trilogy run, I wouldn't ever go with 6 arcane casters in BG1, because, well, it sucks in BG1, not enough XP nor good scrolls for everyone.
I tried a 6 arcane casters run in insane/scs and it was pretty fun, but somewhat tedious. If you perma buff, you're technically invulnerable as long as you don't get dispelled (and you will if you don't play solo, let's face it) but you will miss physical damage and cleric spells who both come in handy at all points of the game. It's really not the most optimal setting for most of the game, having physical damage and divine casting as well as lots of arcane casters is more optimal, a balanced party is easier to manage and play at the end of the day.
The "good design" (whatever you pseud want to imply with that) is that every class is perfectly viable to finish the game solo/no reload (except fucking monks but who cares) and any combinations of any class can make any party whatsoever not only viable but also fun to play.
Because any class shines the most at very different points of the game, and mages aren't better than most classes at certain points, like for most of BG1 (unless they empty their entire spellbook at every fight)
Even playing monk and trying to make it viable is fun. You can't really make it viable, but it's fun to try.

There's honestly nothing worse than solo games with the "perfect" balance of a fucking moba, where every class is designed to be exactly as useful and powerful as the others next to it.
You just end up with a bunch of boring classes that all play exactly the same, where the only difference is the color of the icon you have to press every few seconds.

[Anonymous No.5434438]

>>5434430
>The "good design" (whatever you pseud want to imply with that) is that every class is perfectly viable to finish the game solo/no reload (except fucking monks but who cares) and any combinations of any class can make any party whatsoever not only viable but also fun to play.
if you know what you're doing of course*

[Anonymous No.5434478]

>>5434430
There's actually a trilogy no-reload run on the Beamdog forums on Core difficulty without mods. It should be very possible to pull off on higher difficulties.

[Anonymous No.5434494]

>>5434478
yeah of course you can, I've pulled it off once on core with SCS, I'm trying on insane now, there are a lot of reports of people managing it with even some tactics component with the most improbable classes, there's Davaeorn who streams his attempts and lost an amazing run to Amelyssan today, etc.
It's actually probably easier solo or with a well optimized party of 4 than with a full party because XP, but it's a lot of fun to play like this in all cases, not even for the challenge itself but for the tension and choices it adds. I mean if you lose important party members, they're gone, you have to replace them and sometimes you lose their stuff as well.
There's a run in which Davaeorn lost his entire party to one very unexpected and unlucky fireball and still managed to finish BG1 by picking up a complete new team, etc.
It's really a lot of fun in addition to being an interesting challenge.

[Anonymous No.5434512]

>>5434478
>>5434494
and it's also really immersive, it encourages you to play "realistically", as in, really trying to stay alive and keep your party alive rather than focusing on killing stuff and reloading if things go wrong.

[Anonymous No.5434514]

>>5434494
Oh, I meant to say "trilogy no-reload run" with Monk specifically, I somehow ate that part of the message. I somehow failed to disclose that. Yeah, there's a fuckton of trilogy no-reloads with all sorts of classes and combos.

[Anonymous No.5434528]

>>5434514
Yeah for Monks specifically, I'm not sure if it's really doable with SCS on Insane honestly, the class really sucks, they have no HP, can't wear helmets so they basically explode immediately at the first crit they take on insane no matter what hits them, they do almost no ranged damage (barely better than a mage), they have no good buffs, no spells, they have a lot of item restrictions, etc
I've thought about it quite a bit when I was playing monk and I really don't see any way at all to ensure their survavibility in a solo SCS insane run. You'd have to have really good RNG all the way out of candlekeep right up until the end of ToB, that's tough.

[Anonymous No.5436806]

>>5432703
Alright, so I'll admit I may have been careless with my characterization of the wizard dynamic. But I still think that there's too much reliance on obscure rules, 100% immunities, and all-or-nothing effects. I also think the feedback given by the game is less than stellar.

[Anonymous No.5436883]

>>5436806
The rules aren't really obscure, it's just that there are quite a few, and a lot of them can interact in somewhat unexpected ways that aren't described in the manual (it's even the true "meat" of the strategic part of the game, finding out what fun or broken shit you can actually do with them, and there is a lot of that).
So of course it takes a bit of time and most likely several playthroughs to assimilate and understand them, nobody ever became an expert in AD&D in a single afternoon.
As for the feedback, same thing, the visual clues are actually pretty clear but it takes a few dozen hours to really understand it because there are hundreds of abilities with different animations. You can get to a point where you can tell almost everything an enemy has up and what he's doing just by glancing at him ; deduce what spell is currently going off based on the cast duration, animation and the sound effects, etc.
But it takes time because there are hundreds of spells with different casting times from 9 different schools, each school having a specific casting animation and sound. Add to that the speical innate abilities that most classes or monsters have, etc.
That's a lot of stuff to keep in mind to understand what the non-textual feedback is actually telling you.
The log is what you should keep your eyes on for a while, there is no better feedback than a text box explaining in real time what is going on.

[Anonymous No.5437421]

>>5436806
>>5431447
(to continue)
>For example, a 'good' way to take down a lich is to survive and wait out its protection from magic weapons (naturally immune to normal weapons) and have a fighter beat down its stoneskin while protected from fire, cold and magic energy to avoid taking damage from the fire shields and the chain contingency x3 abi-dhalzim that will surely come soon. Move him immediately if he gets dispelled, otherwise he dies, etc.
To first re-summarize my complaint, hopefully in less hyperbolic terms:

I find the "Wizard Chess" dynamic in Baldur's Gate (of which this is a fine example) to be less than satisfying. This is due to a combination of factors involving both the underlying ruleset as well as the specific game mechanics and interface. Specifically, this dynamic relies on various types of 100% immunity, with complex, subtle rules that often require memorizing tedious and at least somewhat arbitrary details about what spells grant what types of immunity, the durations of each one, what methods work for bringing down or bypassing each one, how precedence works, how innate immunities come into play, and so on. This in addition to an abundance of all-or-nothing attacks. Couple this with a limited feedback system that doesn't really mean shit unless you've memorized the ruleset, and you have a recipe for frustration.

In your example, your Lich probably also cast Spell Trap. But the Lich is also immune to spells of 5th level or lower. If a player casts a level 5 spell on the Lich, which immunity takes precedence? Does Spell Trap absorb the spell? Does it simply have no effect? The game gives you no help, here. "The game should have mystery" this is just a cop-out because that's not how anyone actually plays it. Either you go read/discuss the mechanical details and rules of BG2 or you just fucking randomly try shit until something works and then memorize that for next time.

(continues...)

[Anonymous No.5437428]

>>5437421
A key issue is that up-front memorization of mundane details required in order to even get to the fun part. Your scenario is basically a "survive 4 rounds." There are a variety of techniques you might employ, and deciding which one works best given your individual party makeup is good gameplay. The problem is that even getting to this point relies on knowing that PFMW lasts 4 rounds, that even if you take down Spell Trap you still can't take down PFMW because you need Breach, which is a level 5 spell and the Lich is immune. To say nothing of requiring foreknowledge of what the Lich is likely to do wrt contingencies and shit.

Imagine a player that has one mage cast something like Ruby Ray (NOT pierce magic, which is useless against Spell Trap), followed by another mage casting Breach. Breach doesn't land. Oops, what happened? Did Ruby Ray not actually work like it said it did? You scroll back to see if maybe you missed a magic resistance message, you review to be sure that Ruby Ray doesn't have a saving throw, maybe you find the "protections dispelled" message. Did I cast too fast and the game thinks the spells landed in a different order?

My problem with BG is the need to sort out all this bullshit to even reach the point of making meaningful tactical decisions in battle. This is just one example, most mage combat is at least somewhat like this. The concept of using immunities to introduce variety and change the conditions of a battle is not inherently bad, but I think higher level mage combat in Baldur's Gate relies on it too much, with too many different immunity spells. And the rewards for putting up with the bullshit are good, but not necessarily great scenarios.

So that's why I can't rate the "Wizard Chess" dynamic more highly than you probably think it deserves, and don't think it is a particularly great aspect of the game.
(End)

[Anonymous No.5437436]

>>5436883
>The log is what you should keep your eyes on for a while, there is no better feedback than a text box explaining in real time what is going on.
It doesn't though. The feedback is bad. The log messages are often ambiguous when they even show up. I played Everquest for several years and even wrote log parsers and shit. Those logs were actually good, with all the relevant details you need to figure out how the game worked. In fact we'd even do varieties of scientific tests to figure out whether mechanics actually matched up with descriptions (they didn't always).

[Anonymous No.5437485]

>>5436806
there's a table laying around that tells you what spells work and don't work on each spell immunity/barrier just a google away

[Anonymous No.5437814]

>>5437428
It's a question of habit and trial and errors, in the specific case of spell trap it will take precedence over any special immunities because a) it's logical b) it absorbs spells to give spells back to the caster (check the spell description)
There's absolutely nothing ambiguous about how spells work in this game, nor about anything written in the log.
If you don't understand something, read the spell description, it will be clear.
If a mage cast a breach and it doesn't work, he has to figure out why. The game doesn't spoonfeed you the answer, you have to figure it out.
Maybe your ruby ray landed on a spell shield (read the log) and didn't dispel the spell immunity abjuration or the spell trap, maybe there is a spell deflection that you missed, etc.
Read the spell descriptions carefully and everything eventually becomes clear. Breach description explicitly tells you that the spell isn't affected by magic resistance, secret word, spell thrust, ruby ray, pierce magic, pierce shield all have a complete list of what they will dispel, etc.
In short everything makes sense and everything is clearly explained but nothing is spoonfed to you. If you don't understand something it's literally because you didn't pay attention.
I mean, you complain about 'but you have to know this and that' when you have all the tools at your disposal to know it. Don't know what protection from magical weapon does or how long it lasts? Well, just read the goddamn spell description.
Don't have it in your spell book or anything? Check the manual.
Wizard chess is fun because again, you have a lot of ways to solve it even if you don't have a wizard in your team. It's not simple buff/debuff.
So yeah, your problem with BG is that it's a complex game with a lot of shit to understand, which is exactly what you originally denied. You will only call it bullshit as long as you refuse to try and do just that, which starts by reading spell descriptions.

[Anonymous No.5437815]

>>5437436
The log is good but if you can't figure out what it says, maybe it's time to read the fucking manual.
>>5437485
It's even literally written in the goddamn spell description.

[Anonymous No.5438076]

do all BG threads on /vr/ start with subtle bait OPs?

[Anonymous No.5438641]

just started playing
chaotic evil human who is handy with a flail ;)

[Anonymous No.5438813]

>>5437485
>>5437815
None of this blustering and posturing changes the fact that the game could have been better without these issues. And again, the whole point is that having to refer to a manual to see which of the byzantine rock/paper/scissors rules are in play at the moment is tedious. The fact that you get used to it after at least 10+ hours invested in end-game combat and modded gameplay, you get comfortable with it, does not make it good design. Most other aspects of the game are far more intuitive.

>The log is good
And no. The log is not good, it's fucking bad. You want to make me play a complex text-oriented game, then give me a text interface that doesn't suck. Let me write it to a file so I can open it in a window big enough to read, with search functions and scrollbars that aren't retarded. Or at least give me a good range of useful filters and/or regular expressions.

>>5437814
>If you don't understand something, read the spell description, it will be clear.
No, it's not. There's nothing in a spell description that explains, for example, whether Breach will be absorbed by Spell Trap or just fail entirely due to Lich immunity.

>Wizard chess is fun because again, you have a lot of ways to solve it even if you don't have a wizard in your team. It's not simple buff/debuff.
It's still a pointlessly complex maze of rules just to get to the point where you can make interesting tactical decisions. A game that enabled those same kinds of tactical decisions without forcing you to memorize tables full of arbitrary immunity rules would be a much better game.

[Anonymous No.5438901]

>>5438813
yah we came from a claim saying that BG was stupidly easy to a claim that you shouldn't have to spend time to understand it, whatever really.
Don't want to spend time understanding a rich system of rules? Too bad.
Don't accuse the game because you can't be half assed to try stuff out and read shit though.
Again, the original point, which you contested, was that BG has more replayability and is more complex than most turn-based RPGs (in its not-hyperbolic version). And your entire post does nothing but support that. I mean, it's clearly not your thing, if you need a fucking search function and whatever else to read text but basically, your only grasp with it is that it's a game that is easy to play but long to master.
That's fine. Not every game has to be perfectly intuitive to be able to grasp everything in 4 hours. That's actually probably why BG and to a certain degree IWD are interesting and fun to replay multiple times, because you always have new stuff to understand and try out even after 2000 hours into it.
>A game that enabled those same kinds of tactical decisions without forcing you to memorize tables full of arbitrary immunity rules would be a much better game.
Like which ones?

[Anonymous No.5439134]

>>5432576
>

[Anonymous No.5439569]

I just started playing Baldur's Gate on my PowerMac G4. Does it live up to the hype?

[Anonymous No.5439629]

>>5427934
>Tips for managing a whole party smoothly?

Don't. Full party is a noob trap.

[Anonymous No.5439685]

>>5432576
>>5430941
zoomers don't read manuals

[Anonymous No.5439787]

>>5439629
>implying
solo is the real noob trap
it's boring, you miss on all the bants and companion quests, and you roll over everything after a short point because you're capped on XP so quickly.
Even with a 3-4 party you'll be capped on XP twice as fast as with a full one.
It's much more fun to play 6 different classes at once, find synergies between them and not automatically discard two thirds of the items you find because you can't even use them.

[Anonymous No.5440740]

>>5439787
Where the hell did I say to run solo? 4 people is good, and is the standard in most D&D games. 5 is nice for the final battle.

Recruiting 6 people is a great way to not level up fast enough to get through archer hell without having to save scum.

I never hit the TotSC cap even with 4 people, much less 5, though I do reach max level.

[Anonymous No.5441529]

>>5440740
I fucked my mod setup by making enemies give no XP and I'm using both Sword Coast Stratagems and Dark Horizons, first of which is Lawful Evil and the second of which is Chaotic Evil according to my DM alignment chart.

Despite that, I'm doing fine with a party of six by being thorough with quests (20K XP or therabouts). Yes, two of them are mod characters, but Finch and Tenya are no stronger than the other characters.

[Anonymous No.5442635]

>>5440740
>I never hit the TotSC cap even with 4 people, much less 5, though I do reach max level
Do you just ignore quests and stealth past combat?

[Anonymous No.5442695]

>>5427934
Wizards aren't meant to get into melee range. If you skilled in dagger, buy throwing daggers. The best weapon to start off with are darts due to their quick speed and higher stacking quantity. Legacy of the Masters gauntlets + darts would make your wizard much more effective. Dynaheir comes equipped with a sling so she's good to go off the bat.

[Anonymous No.5442732]

>>5442695
>released Xan from his captive
>found Xan's Moonblade
>it's fucking +3 sword usable ONLY by him
>noice
>Xan is enchanter, no evocation spells
>run out of spells, tried to get in melee
i realized he's worthless and dropped him

[Anonymous No.5443849]

>>5442635
I don't generally actually run the ToSC content other than the Mage's Isle. Takes too long and some of it like the Werewolf Island, just sucks.

[Anonymous No.5443986]

>>5442732
Yeah he's pretty meh. Enchantment is a good school (charm person has practical applications in BG in some rare circumstances) but he's a trash character overall compared to other mages, especially Edwin. That and his dripping snark gets really old after a while.

[Anonymous No.5444142]

How do I get good at Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games? I'm fucking horrible and got killed by a pack of goblins on easy.

[Anonymous No.5445292]

>>5443849
I can understand, I never completed Durlag because trap finding is tedious

[Anonymous No.5445420]

>>5442695
>giving the legacy of the masters to a fucking mage
Who in hell would do such a thing
Just don't bother attacking your mages, that's not their job, no point trying to increase their thac0, especially in BG1, when it will still be fucking 12 in throne of bhaal
Giving mages a sling or darts and watch them do 3 points of damage every 15 minutes with it even with legacy of the masters and everything else... Why bother?
Give that stuff to your archers in BG1 and to clerics, druids, blades or multi classes like mage/thief and cleric/mage in BG2, pure class mages have no business using a weapon
>>5442732
He has a few stronger enchantment spells than other mages and crowd control is really where mages are useful in BG1, who gives a shit about attacking with his sword, it gives him 50 fire resistance.
If he hadn't 7 fucking CON he'd be pretty good. And he's probably still the best mage after Edwin, Dynaheir can't crowd control and Xzar can't mirror image.

[Anonymous No.5445426]

>>5444142
rtfm

[Anonymous No.5445594]

>>5444142
Don't worry about dying and savescumming at the start, low level D&D is russian roulette. Once you get a level or two it smooths out. Just make sure you have a proficiency in ranged weapons for everyone, it helps a lot.

[Anonymous No.5446043]

>>5438901
>yah we came from a claim saying that BG was stupidly easy
I never said that. Besides, keeping a manual with you to look up arbitrary details about the rules of wizard chess isn't my idea of hard. It's just tedious.
>you shouldn't have to spend time to understand it
That's not I'm saying, although I suppose I expected this frustratingly trite response. The point is about the lack of payoff for memorizing arbitrary rules.

>Not every game has to be perfectly intuitive to be able to grasp everything in 4 hours.
Of course not. But aspects that aren't intuitive should either have a good reason or you need to simply admit that it's a weakness in the game and move on.

Most of the mechanics in Baldur's Gate are intuitive and clear. There's some awkwardness under the hood due to the tabletop roots, but it's not bad. Thac0 and Armor Class are entirely cosmetic issues. Saving throws have some issues wrt mapping specific threats to save type, but as a general mechanic they're still based on the intuitive principle of having a base+modified evasion value for special effects. The rules about combat rounds are theoretically awkward but the Infinity Engine does a fantastic job streamlining this into real-time. In all of these cases, you can make decent decisions intuitively or you can study the details in order to min/max and optimize.

It's really the immunities, dispels, and counter-spells that stick out like a sore thumb as being both an unavoidable and arbitrary with minimal payoff. And by arbitrary, I'm talking about things like the level cap on Minor Spell Turning. Why is the limit 4th level? (or is it 7th? sources conflict on this). Why is there no spell with a limit of say, 6th level? These are just arbitrary details you need to memorize, or else you need to keep the manual open next to you while you're playing so you can look up this shit every time you need to know something.

[Anonymous No.5446210]

>>5444142
many spells and wands are overpowered in BG1 because everyone has low saving throws. Sleep, paralyze, blind, spook, web etc. low level debuff spells can make most battles trivial.

[Anonymous No.5447619]

>>5427934
Play in Story Mode. It was implemented for your kind.

[Anonymous No.5447624]

>>5428690
Aggravated in the EE shit that was restrained by phones since the beginning. They have to remove movies, change the image scaling and make changes here and there to not surpass the 2 GB App limit. And years later, just to defecate in players a little more, a UI redesigned for tablet users and imposed in PC players.

[Anonymous No.5447962]

>>5446043
>But aspects that aren't intuitive should either have a good reason or you need to simply admit that it's a weakness
No, you dumbass, and I don't ever see why it would be.
>the rest of this shit
Do you really need such a fantasy world to justify not reading descriptions carefully enough? Because that's pretty much all you have to do. If you understand saving throws, you should understand immunities, that's why you don't fucking roll saving throws on those.

But anyway, this is going nowhere. The spells are clear, just read the description ffs, try them out on your party members if you have a doubt, reload and try and shit
Minor spell deflection will work on any targeted spell of level 7 and lower unless it specifically says otherwise in that spell's description, it will then expire after absorbing a total of 4 spell levels or more (a level 3 spell followed by a level 7 spell will both get absorbed and the second one will dispel the deflection, a level 4 spell will get absorbed and dispel the spell), I don't understand what you don't get about it or why you ask yourself existential question about level 4 or 6 (btw did you check spell deflection, spell turning and spell trap?). it's not the game's fault if you don't read the fucking description and then cry about it not being intuitive or whatever the fuck else you're gonna pull out of ass next to keep on arguing nothing. No one who played this game remotely seriously (i.e with eyes in the screen, not wherever the fuck yours are) needs to refer to the manual every 5 seconds, but they should if they don't understand something. You know, instead of crying about how non intuitive it is.

[Anonymous No.5447993]

>>5429292
I bet that guy in the fourth panel has never had sex lol

[Anonymous No.5448005]

>>5428802
Baldur's Gate is literally a turn based game that gives you the option of letting the turns play out in real time

[Anonymous No.5448148]

>>5447624
The new journal ui is great actually

[Anonymous No.5448157]

>>5448148
The EE journal looks like shit and those fucking pop-ups at the top of the screen that made me feel like I was playing Bioshock Infinite again

[Anonymous No.5448858]

>>5448157
Bull, that's one of the biggest improvements in the game. Being able to mod the UI by hand is also great (though that could've been implemented a lot better), and fixing custom portraits was also excellent

[Anonymous No.5449130]

>>5427934
>I'm a phonelet
Is it too hard for you to fathom that the game was not designed to be played on a tiny screen with next to no way to control the game properly?

Fucking sage, dude.

[Anonymous No.5450119]

>>5448858
No, the journal UI didn't need any improvement, it's useless. I don't need anything else than a log to read a fucking log.
The UI in general looks like shit in the EE, the fact that you can hide parts of this trash easily isn't really a selling point when you can already do all that shit in the original.

[Anonymous No.5450120]

>>5448858
Custom portraits also work well in the original, I don't know what needed fixing.
A fuckton of actual issues needed and still need fixing though, but they will never be done.

[Anonymous No.5450237]

>>5447962
>Minor spell deflection
I said Minor Spell Turning, not Minor Spell Deflection. See, even you got confused trying to follow a simple discussion because there's so many fucking spells with arbitrary differences that are easy to mix up if you aren't careful.

>The spells are clear, just read the description ffs, try them out on your party members if you have a doubt, reload and try and shit
Still your case for why all these spells actually make the game better is limited. You've said "there are so many ways to deal with them" and you gave one example of a Lich fight. That's basically all I've been able to find as far as you justifying so many different immunity and counter-immunity spells makes the game better.

Basically you just love the game and seem completely unable to comprehend why anyone else might not particularly enjoy being forced to memorize details of spells that are based almost entirely around the artifacts of the spell system specifically rather than the logic of the game world in general. Minor Globe always blocks flame arrow, but never confusion, simply because confusion is one spell level higher. Why is spell rank so important? Why is it an all-or-nothing proposition? 100% immunity to level 3 spells, 0% immunity to level 4 spells.

Again this heavily biases the game toward viable and unviable tactics, rather than better tactics vs worse tactics. I honestly can't think of a game where savescumming (using the built-in save mechanism) is more effective. In most games, savescumming means attempting some difficult encounter multiple times until you can pull off a victory. In Baldur's Gate, savescumming means getting completely fucking wrecked by some shit you weren't prepared for, then reloading to prepare the appropriate abilities and and steamrolling the encounter with no one getting a scratch on the second try.

[Anonymous No.5450317]

>>5450120
EE: One high-res pic needed, just needs to be the correct aspect ratio, can be selected from the default portraits menu
Original: Two pics of an exact resolution needed, needs to be selected from a menu that has a fucked scrollbar for the smaller portrait.

[Anonymous No.5450357]

>>5450317
>waaah I need to select two pics, this made me drop the game and take up the EE
said no one of importance ever.

[Anonymous No.5450359]

>>5450237
tl;dr I don't understand the game and made no effort to, therefore it' s bad,

[Anonymous No.5450383]

>>5450237
>In Baldur's Gate, savescumming means getting completely fucking wrecked by some shit you weren't prepared for, then reloading to prepare the appropriate abilities and and steamrolling the encounter with no one getting a scratch on the second try.
No. A few trivial encounters in BG1, maybe, basically nothing like this in BG2 except maybe Firkraag, and nothing whatsoever in ToB. At some point what you call absolute immunities are actually pretty fragile or limited, you'd know it if you weren't busy trying to build a caricature
But I mean you're at the point where being immune to something while not being immune to another is now somehow bad, so whatever really.

[Anonymous No.5450412]

Are solo parties viable in BG? I want to try a paladin or fighter/cleric like Joan of Arc.

[Anonymous No.5450416]

>>5450412
People play it all the time. It's hard starting out, but once you complete a few tasks, you'll be overleveled enough for it to become bearable again (you recieve about 4x-6x the XP after all).

[Anonymous No.5450424]

>>5450357
Where did I say that? Show me where I said that.

[Anonymous No.5450429]

>>5450412
you'll deprive yourself of a lot of fun though, not being able to use a lot of items, a lot of spells and not seeing a lot of party interaction particularly if you plan to import into BG2.
it possible to go solo but i'd recommend it for an experienced player who already played through the game normally

[Anonymous No.5450439]

>>5450416
Is it easy from that point onwards or does it get tough again later?

[Anonymous No.5451354]

>>5450237
>Spell Trigger x3 Greater Malison
>Finger of Death
what a complex system, how could anyone beat anything without looking up a table?

[Anonymous No.5453643]

>>5450439
The main problem is how much of a chore it is to have such restricted inventory space, nobody else to mule items for money, constantly having to rest and heal and reorganize potions and scrolls and stuff for little encounters. Having just a Fighter or a Paladin and a single class Cleric, Thief, and Mage around basically makes everything easy, you just rest and you always have all the tools you need as spells. The real trap is how they give you Jaheira and Khalid as a pair and then throw Minsc at you when having extra fighters absolutely does nothing to help you when they split the experience more.


That being said my next game I'll probably try a team that's just a F/M, F/C, and F/T 3 man squad.

[Anonymous No.5453657]

>>5450383
be honest though BG and BG2 have more than a couple parts where you go through a story cutscene or scripted action and then you're just railroaded into an encounter without any of the strategizing or scouting or positioning or prebuffing that you would have done if you were in control. you basically have to have some sort of prescient level of genre and game design savvy to not get led to the slaughter at some point in the trilogy.

literally you have parts where enemies do not exist in any sense of the word and then are magically created in range of you after the immediate exit of a paused dialogue scene

[Anonymous No.5453678]

>>5453657
not this fucking argument again please
the last time it happened it was constant circular logic bullshit for 400 posts by 20 people
the only thing that stops you from progressing at all is the death of the main character, for which you have a ton of instant ways to safeguard against
if you're savescumming and bruteforcing every single encounter because you can't wise up to dungeons and lairs having potential ambushes and the assassins after your head being a constant theme then it's honestly on you
none of the (examples of) encounters you list disallow you to just buy at least a round or two of safety with some potion, wand or contingency
ESPECIALLY if our baseline is regular, vanilla game on Core Rules, because there's plenty of mods that rely on meta-gaming and prescience (SCS depending on depth of installation, Tactics & Improved Anvil much more prominently) but the base game on Core Rules is comparatively harmless and even the most unfair encounters are usually sidesteppable in some way
Insane is a veteran challenge for a reason, that's why it's called that

[Anonymous No.5454490]

>>5450383
>basically nothing like this in BG2
1. Wraith Ambush in the Lower Tombs/South. Wraiths use the exact same sprite as the (easy) shadow enemy. It's easy to get utterly wrecked, but also easy to steamroll the fight if you know to single out the Wraiths and have some negative plane protection. It takes just 1 failure to learn everything you need to know.
2. Halflings in the Planar Sphere. Kayardi uses Symbol:Stun, Maze, Disintegrate, Chain Lightning etc and puts up a full stack of wizard protections (Globe, Spell Turning, PFMW, PFNM, and Stoneskin). This can easily be your first encounter with a high-level mage in SoA, and very easy to fuck up, get some bad rolls, or even not notice the caster until too late as he starts out of sight, way in back of the front line enemies. There's also an 18th level Cleric. Of course if you know it's coming, you can buff up chaotic commands, death ward, and then either strip protections or beat on Kayardi with non-magic weapons and the fight becomes, if not trivial, at least a fairly straightforward fight. Again, 1 reload and you can prepare perfectly.
3. Guarded compound (Celestial Fury fight)
Traps one step into the room. 19th level thief that starts hidden, a mage, a cleric, and a couple of warriors including a kensai wielding Celestial Fury. Easy to get wrecked with backstabs, horrid wilting, and the stun-katana. But once you know all that shit is going to happen, it's easy to prepare for. With enough fireballs you can win the battle in a single round.
4. Elder Orb + Beholder Ambush in the Underdark.
5. The statue fight on the initial floor of Watcher's Keep.
This one isn't due to wizard chess as I recall, just a lot of really strong enemies showing up semi-unpredictably (but quite predictably on the second attempt).

These are just fights from memory. I haven't played BG2 in 3-4 years and my virgin experience with the game was a long time ago.

[Anonymous No.5454524]

>>5453678
>if you're savescumming and bruteforcing every single encounter
no, listen.

When you play BG and BG2 for the first time most of the encounters aren't hard. You settle into a pattern of dealing with them in various ways. Maybe some are a little harder than others but it all seems pretty balanced (though at times unmodded BG2 is just flat-out trivial). Then you run up against something completely unexpected and powerful, whether it's level-draining Wraiths or a that crazy mage in BG1 that likes to cast lightning bolt in narrow hallways. So you reload, reconfigure your pause settings, then win without too much trouble now that you know what's coming.

>the only thing that stops you from progressing at all is the death of the main character
Yeah whatever. The fact is that most people playing Baldur's Gate for the first time are going to reset if a character dies, because 99% of the time the battle is easily winnable and it's going to be way fucking faster to just get out of the way of the mage's crazy lightning bolt this time than to go get a rez for the character that got fried the first time.
>b-but hardcore blah blah
Obviously when you've played billions of hours of BG2 and ToB with SCS mods and shit, you have really lost perspective of what it's like to play the game for the first time, what those players care about, and how they should play the game.

>bruteforcing every single encounter
Trying an encounter again to address some fucking obvious gotchas in a boss fight that bit you because you'd a bit gotten lazy after killing hundreds of kobolds and bandits with ease is not "bruteforcing every encounter"

[Anonymous No.5455896]

>>5441529
>CG in real life
>LE behind the screen
go figure

[Anonymous No.5455903]

>>5454524
>I play like a braindead moron so everyone must do the same
No.
>>5454490
>here's one way among three thousand to redo these encounters too bad they didn't make me think about what I was doing for the entire game so I just redid my build this one tile then continued to play like a braindead moron, thus game is bad
Ok.

Fuck this retarded thread, fuck these retarded arguments, fucking mouthbreathing morons seriously.

[Anonymous No.5455908]

>>5455903
Great arguments.

[Anonymous No.5455916]

>>5455908
Go fuck yourself with them.

[Anonymous No.5455917]

>>5455916
Stay mad, lol.

[Anonymous No.5455921]

>>5455917
xD, upvoted lol

[Anonymous No.5455948]

>>5447624
>They have to remove movies
ohhhhhhh

I thought they just didnt like how old the movies looked, and thought their shitty art was better

[Anonymous No.5455950]

>>5450383
>basically nothing like this in BG2 except maybe Firkraag
yknow, firkraag is the easy one

the shadow dragon is typically harder because you go after it earlier before maxing out, and the black dragon in suldanessalar is hard even then

never fought adalon

[Anonymous No.5455954]

>>5454524
>some fucking obvious gotchas in a boss fight that bit you because you'd a bit gotten lazy after killing hundreds of kobolds and bandits with ease
I HATE this about D&D games; they always do this shit
why not make regular encounters more challenging? why not make boss fights challenging but without cheap bullshit?

[Anonymous No.5455963]

>>5455954
Why bother when countless retards defend this shit?

[Anonymous No.5456108]

>>5455950
That's the fucking point, because both of those and most other enemies that make encounters interesting have several ways to permakill anyone in your party, some of which you can't do much about except good micro or anticipation, which the braindead morons itt can't grasp

[Anonymous No.5456110]

>>5455963
You're a fucking moron

[Anonymous No.5456209]

>>5454490
1. get gud
2. planar sphere is for mages only, get gud, also you are able to line of sight and avoid this engagement in the core game
3. you're warned immediately when you walk in to leave, and given ample time to do so
4. shield of balduran trivializes any beholder encounter and it's something just about everyone got on their first playthrough
5. watcher's keep is a complete joke unless you're bullrushing it straight out of amn

[Anonymous No.5458168]

playing a solo fmt in bg1 with less than ideal stats and im having the most fun with these games that Ive had in a long ass time

but reading through this thread im wondering if I should finally try out mods and do SCS and ascension instead

[Anonymous No.5458198]

>>5456209
>1. get gud
Imagine missing the point of a post that fucking hard holy shit.

[Anonymous No.5458235]

>>5458198
What point?
'I found one way to make these encounters easy while ignoring the literal hundreds of thousands of other viable ways to clean them, therefore the entire game answers to my simplistic view'?
Yeah that guy is right, git fucking gud.

[Anonymous No.5458236]

>>5456209
>shield of balduran
Literally a DLC cheat item.

[Anonymous No.5458254]

>>5458168
SCS is amazing, makes the ai a lot less retarded and the game a lot more interesting, both BG1 and 2 (and ToB), unironically the best mod for any game I've played, and I can't ever imagine going back to vanilla. I realised I knew basically nothing of this game before I started playing with SCS. It sells itself as playing fair, and it absolutely does, no bullshit, the AI is just smarter and you can't really cheese it with cheap tactics anymore, don't count on pulling mobs one at a time or have your fragile mages running around butt naked for example. Aside from that, a lot of components will add a few things to some specific types of mobs or change some things for certain kits, check every one of them, nobody is forcing you to install everything, nobody is forcing you to nerf kits you might enjoy.
Fully pre buffed mages is the big component beyond the improved AI, it can be scary at first but it's really the best way to play it, for both BG1 and 2.
Ascension doesn't change much, it only affects ToB and adds a bit more challenge to a few fights, but won't affect AI, both mods work great with one another.
It also adds some dialogues that didn't make the final cut, would definitely recommend even to first time players, by the time they reach ToB they can manage Ascension.

[Anonymous No.5458263]

>>5458236
Then raise skeleton warriors

[Anonymous No.5458303]

>>5458236
It was in the vanilla game, many things in BG exist purely to completely to fuck over certain enemies that would otherwise obliterate you. In fact, this is a common trope in D&D games in general.

[Anonymous No.5458343]

>>5458303
no, it wasnt
that planescape bitch sells it to you; she was not in the vanilla

[Anonymous No.5458356]

>>5455903
this:>>5455908
Plus I never said the game is fucking bad. It's a great game. You're just incredibly insecure, losing your shit over every criticism and completely failing to provide good responses.

The fact that a game encourages and rewards savescumming more than most games doesn't automatically make it a bad game. Holy shit. A game can have weak points or flaws and still be good. Games without flaws usually just aren't ambitious enough.

There are several aspects of the game mechanics and encounter design in Baldur's Gate that encourage scumming. The game heavily rewards pre-combat preparation (buffs, equipment selection, memorized spells) and knowledge of the enemies and what they are going to do. Hitpoints tend to be low relative to damage values and the RNG makes a big difference. Randomness is not inherently bad. A good turn-based game involves taking or mitigating risks with various resources. But the simple fact is that the more the system relies on high-risk, high-reward abilities like instant-kill shots or incapacitating AoE effects, the more value you'll get for scumming.

And for me, a particularly notable issue from a game design perspective is comparing the consequence of a savescum with rezzing. Rezzing a character is a gameplay hassle as you need to spend time moving shit around inventories, re-memorizing spells, and/or trekking to specific NPCs. These are mostly tedious, not-fun aspects of the game that do little but waste your time. Meanwhile reloading and trying the battle again is quicker and far more fun.

[Anonymous No.5458362]

>>5458343
She was not in vanilla BG2 but she was added with ToB, which is what most sane people call 'vanilla BG2'
What next, losing your shit about the XP limit or something

[Anonymous No.5458367]

>>5458343
If bioware didn't delete their patch notes page for no fucking reason:

http://www.bioware.com/games/shadows_amn/support/patches/

then you'd be aware that in the last patched version of shadows amn, she is added to the base game.

joluv on the other hand, no fucking idea about whether or not he's in the base game.

[Anonymous No.5458371]

>>5458356
>removing all the lows and keeping all the highs of gameplay will surely improve game design and flow
>said every modern RPG game developer as they strip out all the RPG elements
you think you do, but you don't.
just because players want what you want, doesn't make it a good idea to ever implement, because you don't know what you want out of the game.

[Anonymous No.5458373]

>>5458367
http://web.archive.org/web/20101204224020/http://www.bioware.com/games/shadows_amn/support/patches/ ?

[Anonymous No.5458375]

>>5458356
>muh insecure
Fuck off tard, I'm against the idea of BG being a simplistic game where you just have to cast one thing to make a situation magically piss easy, there's nothing to answer constructively to that because it's a caricature of the game designed for a hipster youtube review and nothing else.

RNG is only a real factor when you don't know the game, sure a lucky or unlucky crit can make the difference, but it's your job as a player to understand when and how, to anticipate and adapt accordingly. When you don't do it, you cry about RNG and make retarded posts about savescumming because you fucking failed to understand that you could just try to play smarter.
Will I try going in the middle of this sphere of chaos to finish off this lich? Will I send my wizard on his last stoneskin to aoe this group if enemies at the risk of taking a crit arrow in the head?
Will I rely on luck to pick more damage and crowd control spells rather than immunities and protection?
Will I pick protection from fire or one more fireball?
Etc.
Your last paragraph is as profoundly retarded and shortsighted as the rest of your shit, if you enjoy savescumming and never facing the consequences of losing party members gameplay wise (loss of money, time, etc.), fine, just don't act like everyone is as stupid and uncaring about immersion as you are.
I enjoy going back to temples with half a team to spend the remainder of my money on rezzing the other half and getting buttfucked by a bandit ambush on the way, because it adds tension. Something you'll never experience when savescumming is apparently the entire extent of your gameplay
To each his own I suppose.

[Anonymous No.5458384]

>>5458303
>many things in BG exist purely to completely to fuck over certain enemies that would otherwise obliterate you
Literally 2 items like this, Shield of Balduran and scrolls of protection from undead (for liches)
And even then, a lich can (and will likely) cast a gate and summon a tanari that will dispel the scroll from anyone not under SI:A

[Anonymous No.5458402]

>>5458356
>reloading and trying the battle again is quicker and far more fun.
In BG2 especially there are quite a few instances in which you are in a 'no-return' situation until you've completed the quest at hand (unseeing eye, planar sphere, planar prison, spellhold, most of the Underdark, Hell, etc.)
Even BG1, which doesn't have those except maybe candlekeep, has ways to fuck you over and make these situations a lot less trivial than they appear with ambushes.
Persevering and trying to win and complete these situations after losing half your party to a fight that went like hell is more fun than reloading as soon as one portrait turns gray or disappears, it should also influence things like your build and party composition.
But yeah, you can also just reload and then go on about how BG is totally about savescumming and shit and say it's the game's fault when (you) take the decision to play it like this...

[Anonymous No.5458413]

>>5458235
No, the point is: here's a list of battles where it's easy to win after one failed attempt. It's a response to anon who specifically tried to claim there weren't any at all until ToB.

Also if you weren't a complete retard and could actually follow logic in an argument, you'd realize that simply listing battles that have this trait doesn't mean that any one player is going to scum every single one of them. Because you are stupid, you can't imagine any other experience than your own (or the one you pretend to have at).
>>5456209
>>5458236
>>5458263
Apparently you all need to fucking play Shadows of Amn again because the specific encounter I'm talking about is the one in the very first room in the Southern Tunnels of the Underdark. There's an Elder Orb and a Beholder waiting for you immediately on zone-in. It's a "you must gather your party zone boundary, so you can't send in a stealth character to scout or a solo Shield of Balduran wielder. But they don't see invisible, so you can invis '10 your whole party, then sneak in and get the initiative.

I'm getting the strong impression that all of you 'git gud' tards followed a guide your first time, if you don't remember this fight.

[Anonymous No.5458426]

>>5458375
>Fuck off tard
You fuck off. Your responses are based entirely around mischaracterizing my points. I'm not crying about RNG and I'm not crying about save scumming.

> just don't act like everyone is as stupid and uncaring about immersion as you are.
No, you are the one who is unable to consider multiple viable ways to play the game. I understand immersion, and do not consider the choice to avoid scumming to be particularly unusual. It's not in the same category of artificial challenge like a speedrun or hardcore mod. Thus, on the list of things one might criticize about a game "encourages savescumming" is not a very serious one. But because you're an insecure faggot you can't handle my even pointing this out without losing your mind.

[Anonymous No.5458430]

>>5458413
>>5458413
>oh wow you don't have what I define as the absolute technique to get over the first beholder fight in the literal beholder dungeon, that means you played with a guide, not that I'm a fucking moron unable to explain anything properly
Yeah that's probably it senpai
>oh wow you can't imagine any experience other than your own, too bad, here's a fucking full page about my savescummung experience and how every player has had the exact same
Go fuck yourself?

[Anonymous No.5458432]

>>5458426
>I act like a faggot, it's because the game made me do it
Yeah sure, again, go fuck yourself

[Anonymous No.5458442]

>>5458430
I never said I scummed all of those fights, dumbass. The beholder one, yes. The Watcher's Keep one, yes. There rest I just remember how much easier they were on subsequent playthroughs when I knew exactly what was coming. And because I'm not a complete failure at abstract thinking like you are, I can reason about those encounters based on their traits and not merely my personal experience with them.
>what I define as the absolute technique to get over the first beholder fight in the literal beholder dungeon
Whatever faggot I know there are multiple techniques. But the undeniable fucking fact is that there's a non-zero chance of your protagonist being disintegrated if you zone into the Southern Tunnels without preparing for a Beholder fight.

I'm also not saying that's bad. The only part that's kind of cheap is the fact that "gathering your party" is an accidental feature of the game's implementation, and basing an ambush around that is a little cheap. But I think that in this case "a little cheap" pays off with a fun surprise encounter. But that doesn't change the undeniable fucking fact that save scumming winds up being very useful.

[Anonymous No.5458448]

>>5458432
I say a game encourages particular behavior.
I don't try to over-emphasize this point.
I don't claim it makes the game bad in fact I specifically say it doesn't.
You get offended by abstract discussion about game/player interaction.
Maybe you'd be more comfortable on /v/.

[Anonymous No.5458523]

>>5458448
>You get offended by abstract discussion about game/player interaction
I get offended by morons claiming BG is all about save scumming then back pedaling, then drowning the debate in endless non-discssussion to the point that they don't even know what fucking side of what fucking argument they're on
Saving and loading allows you to understand how the game works. It is not the default state of the game, nor is it intended to be used every single time anything doesn't go according to plan, if you want to do it that's awesome but the game doesn't tell you to and lets you play however you want it, be it in savescumming or not or playing whatever party composition you might want. I just don't fucking get what more there is to it or why this retarded conversation is still fucking going on.

[Anonymous No.5458764]

>>5458375
I don't have a horse in this argument but I still want to say there aren't enough people in here who actually understand RPGs like you do