Baldur's Gate inventory & XP discussion

Prime Junta said:

It would be, if it actually entailed *doing* something -- e.g., running up to the character and giving the potion. But it doesn't work like this in any of the games we're considering -- you pop open the inventory, grab a potion, and drag it on the target's portrait, and ZING! the target drinks it, with nobody having to move.

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In BG/2 you have to come near the other party member to give him an item. Not as near as hand-reach near, but still..
This adds another tactical layer to combat.

I would very much like to play a game with a more realistic inventory -- carry limits determined by what real people can actually carry

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You must have in mind that we're talking mostly about superhumans here with loads of strength - but this strength also has its limits.

It's clear that DA isn't that game. In fact, I can't think of any party-based cRPG that works remotely like this. All of them are based on the fiction of an absurdly big inventory and the ability to do stuff to stuff that's not really physically possible if you think about it too hard. The party inventory just takes out some extra clicks from this fiction. IMO that's a clear improvement.

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Bad design shouldn't be a point of reference.

Any particular reason you think BioWare will fail in this respect? I'm pretty optimistic about it myself -- after all, that sort of thing is their bread and butter; they've been doing it since there WAS a BioWare.

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Because bioware mostly worked with already estabilished rulesets like d&d. But even then they managed to outrageously ruin balance by adding idiotically imbalanced items such as celestial fury in bg2. And from what I hear and read mass effect combat is... bad and easy with some weird combat mechanics. Jade Empire is more twitch based so I won't take it into consideration for DA.

Tan said:

In BG/2 you have to come near the other party member to give him an item. Not as near as hand-reach near, but still..
This adds another tactical layer to combat.

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Funny, I never noticed. Honestly. Not once. I was tossing potions back and forth during combat, and never once saw this happening.

You must have in mind that we're talking mostly about superhumans here with loads of strength - but this strength also has its limits.

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No matter how strong you are, you would not be able to carry six suits of full plate mail and a half-dozen two-handed swords, and then cheerfully wade into a fight. They're just too bulky. And in practice, the inventory limits in all these games are so big that they're really no limits at all -- their only effect is to be an inconvenience, requiring you to shunt stuff between people.

Bad design shouldn't be a point of reference.

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"Unrealistic" is not necessarily the same as "bad." These are games. They have different styles of gameplay. Packrat gameplay is one such style. You may like it or not, but that's due to preference.

My point is that this system is not substantively different from any BioWare cRPG: only the usability is more streamlined.

Because bioware mostly worked with already estabilished rulesets like d&d.

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Which are absurdly poorly balanced to start with, especially AD&D 2nd Ed, which they used for the BG's.

But even then they managed to outrageously ruin balance by adding idiotically imbalanced items such as celestial fury in bg2. And from what I hear and read mass effect combat is... bad and easy with some weird combat mechanics. Jade Empire is more twitch based so I won't take it into consideration for DA.

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Could you be more specific about what you've heard and read, and what, exactly, do you mean by "bad", "easy," and "weird combat mechanics?"

Prime Junta said:

No, Tan -- AD&D 2nd Ed has to be the WORST balanced RPG system *ever.* I challenge you to find a PnP system that's worse. Seriously. I've played a quite a lot of them, and haven't seen anything that comes close.

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Hahah, no, you're really overexaggerating it.
I found it pretty enjoying in computer versions.

At least you didn't have situations like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sd82o7rPB0

Go to 2:00 and look at the red numbers floating above the PC. That's what I was talking about. If you thought I was making things up..

for example, we don't know how crits work, whether magical attacks can bypass armor, whether the no-attacks-of-opportunity thing is a base mechanic, some feats at work (cf. Dodge-Mobility-Spring Attack, or high levels of Tumble, or any of a number of other feats and skills that you can use to avoid AoO's), or something that follows from having someone with a fast weapon fight someone with a slow weapon. We don't know if the videos are actual in-game footage, or if the encounters were set up specifically to demonstrate a point.

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I'm just more informed than you about dragon age so I know many things you don't.
Crits work on a percentage basis which is pretty low + a multiplayer of course. So there is no crit confirmation it seems, which is a thing I loved about d&d 3.x.

Magical attacks are not affected by armor. Because.. they're magical.

Pretty much all "feats" (talents and skills) are revealed and there's no aoo avoiding talent.

Those are in game footages.. you think they'd make a new engine to demonstrate combat?

What I'm sayin' is that it LOOKS like you're very determined to dislike the game, and therefore you're interpreting everything you see about it in the worst possible light. (It's pretty common behavior when it comes to high-profile games.)

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It LOOKS like I know more things about DA so I know more things I dislike about it as well.

As to me, I'm more optimistic about DA's combat simply because BioWare has years and years of experience designing cRPG combat systems, and I find it unlikely that they would make the kind of elementary design mistakes that you so eloquently described, and I do not think the videos strongly suggest that such mistakes have been made. Of course, I'll be disappointed if it turns out that you were right all along. Won't be too long until we find out.

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Watch that youtube link first.
Bioware is a strange company.. I think they're ok in some departments and very bad in some others. The one constant is: they think they know best and rarely listen to advices. Which, if you only take a superficial glance, may not seem so.

Tan said:

Hahah, no, you're really overexaggerating it.
I found it pretty enjoying in computer versions.

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In computer versions? You mean, like defeating an ancient dragon by zapping a Feeblemind at it, and then just sticking it in the side with a dagger until it keels over?

...

No, I'm not exaggerating it. Seriously. Think about dual-classing for a moment.

A fighter/mage (or kensai/wizard, of you're doing kits) of levels 9/10 will have the SAME XP as a mage of level 11.

Now, have them duel.

Hell, send them to face *ANY* challenge by themselves.

If you can think of a worse example of unbalanced game design in RPG's, I would very much like to hear it.

(After we're done with that, we can deal with the Blade bard kit and his offensive and defensive spins. Then we can deal with the God-mode cheat that is the AD&D monk. And *then* we can deal with all the kits that are so underpowered as to be near-unplayable.)

At least you didn't have situations like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sd82o7rPB0

Go to 2:00 and look at the red numbers floating above the PC. That's what I was talking about. If you thought I was making things up..

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I don't think you're making things up. However, I think that unless you know something dramatically more than I do, you don't know what the context of the clip is, which rules are in play, whether it's actual gameplay footage or something set up for a demo, and so on and so forth.

I'm just more informed than you about dragon age so I know many things you don't.

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I'm entirely willing to believe you. I don't know all that much about it, actually -- only what I've seen in these videos and read on the Net, and I clearly haven't spent as much time at that as you have.

Crits work on a percentage basis which is pretty low + a multiplayer of course. So there is no crit confirmation it seems, which is a thing I loved about d&d 3.x.

Magical attacks are not affected by armor. Because.. they're magical.

Pretty much all "feats" (talents and skills) are revealed and there's no aoo avoiding talent.

Those are in game footages.. you think they'd make a new engine to demonstrate combat?

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No, but I think it's quite likely they might set up an unbalanced encounter to show something off, or use some cheat mode, or something else.

It LOOKS like I know more things about DA so I know more things I dislike about it as well.

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If you say so. Thus far, though, I have a terribly hard time disentangling the facts from your inferences, and therefore figuring out how well grounded your inferences are in the facts.

Watch that youtube link first.
Bioware is a strange company.. I think they're ok in some departments and very bad in some others. The one constant is: they think they know best and rarely listen to advices. Which, if you only take a superficial glance, may not seem so.

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I agree. I think they're very good at producing stuff that's stable, runs well on a wide variety of platforms, and is very rich in the amount of content -- quests, character development, and so on, and that has a consistent look and feel in terms of visuals, sound, and writing.

They're not so good at cutting-edge graphics, and they're downright bad at originality -- they rarely take any kind of creative risks, their games are chock-full of cliché and stock characters, and the writing is pretty ho-hum. They're at their best when they're handed a rich, big, pre-existing palette of cliché to work with: IMO their best writing was in Jade Empire and KOTOR, and their worst when they have to make up something from scratch, and therefore only end up reusing REALLY old clichés (Mass Effect, NWN OC).

They're also pretty good at balancing very complex game systems -- Neverwinter Nights and its expansions are a particularly good example; D&D 3.0 is fiendishly rich in terms of character build options, and therefore chock-full of possible exploits, yet they've managed to computerize it without obvious dominant strategies, making the game playable and enjoyable (as enjoyable as it is, anyway, which in the case of the OC and SoU is, not very) with a very broad range of character builds. And the fact that they managed to make playable games at all out of the sick nightmarish horror that is AD&D 2nd Edition is a huge testament to their mad game-balancing skillz.

What I'm sayin', is that I find it very unlikely that DA would be dramatically WORSE than their previous stuff in terms of game balance. I don't expect much originality, and I do expect writing that occasionally slides into unintentional farce, but I also expect a solid, rich game with meaningful character development choices and tactical gameplay. Having read DA: The Stolen Throne, I also expect a good deal of plain ol' *fun* -- Gaider is clearly thrilled pink with the setting and the darkspawn are genuinely creepy, which is very promising for the overall feel of the game.

IOW, I sort of expect a similar experience as Baldur's Gate 2, clichés, clingy (elf) girlfriends and all, only without the outrageous balance problems derived from the AD&D 2nd ed. ruleset, with a slicker, more usable UI, and without the incredibly bad early game design.

And... I simply do not believe that you can draw as broad inferences are you're drawing from a few seconds of demo footage, whatever it shows.

And yeah, if they do manage to screw up the balance, I will be disappointed.

You're talking about player vs player balance regarding d&d. I was considering player vs environment.
While yes, the example that you provided shows that a class combo is better than another class it doesn't show the horror of having you fight against an opponent that can barely damage you with its normal attacks.
Now.. feeblemind.. it's a pretty powerful spell, isn't it?

Prime Junta said:

I don't think you're making things up. However, I think that unless you know something dramatically more than I do, you don't know what the context of the clip is, which rules are in play, whether it's actual gameplay footage or something set up for a demo, and so on and so forth.

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Wait for a moment and think - why would they show gameplay footage that actually has nothing to do with the actual game? Yeah, you could say "it's bioware!" But lets assume they acted genuinely.

It wasn't a hands on demo so they had no need to "adjust" the game to be more easy for casual players. It was just an excerpt of gameplay they included in the interview. I really don't get why would they want to make DA combat look bad on purpose.. But again, I don't think bioware is too clever so anything is possible.

Just a few additional notes:
From game screenshots having 30 armor is possible as well having weapons which deal 5 damage. Do the maths.

If you say so. Thus far, though, I have a terribly hard time disentangling the facts from your inferences, and therefore figuring out how well grounded your inferences are in the facts.

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You know, I'm not a CNN reporter reporting about Dragon Age thus I include my point of view here and there.


Oh, and we mostly don't agree with what bioware is good at and what bioware is bad at.

Tan said:

You're talking about player vs player balance regarding d&d. I was considering player vs environment.

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Same diff. An overpowered player is overpowered, whether it's versus the environment or other players. Having classes or class combos that are clearly way more powerful than others results in a "dominant strategy" -- i.e., they remove incentives to play anything other than them.

Compared to *that*, the occasional overpowered magic item in BG2 is chickenfeed. In fact, the single biggest balancing error that BioWare made in the BG's isn't any stupid magic item, or even the Feeblemind spell; it's the character generation system -- you can keep rolling and then reassigning the numbers until you get 18 18 18 18 3 3. And that they did fix for NWN.

While yes, the example that you provided shows that a class combo is better than another class

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Not just "better." Overwhelmingly better. So much better that it's an exploit.

it doesn't show the horror of having you fight against an opponent that can barely damage you with its normal attacks.

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Yes, that would be really stupid, which is why I would be extremely surprised to see that sort of thing -- on a regular basis anyway, on anything other than the easiest difficulty levels -- in DA. I just don't believe that BioWare is incompetent enough to fuck up something that basic.

Now.. feeblemind.. it's a pretty powerful spell, isn't it?

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Yes. Unbalancingly powerful.

Wait for a moment and think - why would they show gameplay footage that actually has nothing to do with the actual game? Yeah, you could say "it's bioware!" But lets assume they acted genuinely.

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If I was a game dev, and the marketing dude asked me for a quick video showcasing group combat, what would I do? I might just snag some snazzy-looking level, use the debugger to drop in a party, hit Record, and play for a few minutes. If my party happened to be ten levels above the area level, tough titty.

Point being, it is stupid to draw your kind of inferences from a few seconds of gameplay footage, when we know nothing about the context, background, or parameters related to that footage. We can see the UI, we can see what the combat animations look like, we can see that the AI apparently knows how to switch between different types of attacks, and that sort of thing.

But there's just not enough data to say anything at all about stuff like game balance, whether there are dominant strategies or not. For example, the "no AoO" thing might result in a situation where stab-and-run works great against certain opponents, but only if there's enough room to back away, which there might not be; a build that'll dance on the grave of one enemy might really have to struggle against another. That sort of thing happens -- is part of the point, really -- in complex games with varied challenges and lots of character development options. (The level in NWN2 OC where you had to go solo against bad-ass undead was a pretty severe example -- some builds had real trouble surviving, whereas, say, a paladin or good cleric would just breeze through.)

It wasn't a hands on demo so they had no need to "adjust" the game to be more easy for casual players. It was just an excerpt of gameplay they included in the interview. I really don't get why would they want to make DA combat look bad on purpose.. But again, I don't think bioware is too clever so anything is possible.

Just a few additional notes:
From game screenshots having 30 armor is possible as well having weapons which deal 5 damage. Do the maths.

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And in D&D, it's possible to have DR20+ (Stoneskin much?), and there are weapons that do 1d3 damage. *You* do the math. Just the fact that such things exist don't say a thing about how they're used.

You know, I'm not a CNN reporter reporting about Dragon Age thus I include my point of view here and there.

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It's still good practice to distinguish between reporting facts and stating your interpretation of the facts. The fact that some professional journos screw up something as basic as that doesn't give us permission to do the same.

Oh, and we mostly don't agree with what bioware is good at and what bioware is bad at.

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If you say so. What's your take?

I just want to add that fighter/mage multiclass and kensai -> mage dualclass are possibly the most overpowered classes/kits I have ever played. You can make an Eldritch Knight fairly powerful in 3.5, but nothing like those builds. It's basically a full level Fighter with the ability to get:
- Stoneskin (can't be cast on other targets, unlike in 3.5).
- Mirror Image.
- Various anti-spell protections like Globe and Mantle.
- Spell sequencers/triggers, making them immortal when stored with the right spells.
- Timestop (!!!).
- Access to all the level 10 spells (Summon Planetar etc) and all the epic Fighter feats.
- Full spell damage and almost max amount of spells per day if needed.
- Etc, etc, etc..

While I certainly think it's fun to play, I do consider it redicilously overpowered.

Depends what you mean by "full level Fighter". You couldn't advance very far as a fighter and still be able to play long enough to get level 10 spells as a Mage. You had to dual-class fairly early in BG 2 to be able to get that far in your second class.

In fact, iirc even a pure Mage didn't usually get level 10 spells until you reached the Throne of Bhaal areas.

JDR13 said:

Depends what you mean by "full level Fighter". You couldn't advance very far as a fighter and still be able to play long enough to get level 10 spells as a Mage. You had to dual-class fairly early in BG 2 to be able to get that far in your second class.

In fact, iirc even a pure Mage didn't usually get level 10 spells until you reached the Throne of Bhaal areas.

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Quoting from GameBanshee:

The experience cap in Baldur's Gate II is set to 2,950,000 for all characters, which means a Kensai that reaches level 9 will have 135000 experience points, leaving 2,815,000 experience points for the Mage part. Now, a mage requires 2,700,000 experience points to get to level 17 (in which he gets level 8 spells) and 3,000,000 experience points to get to level 18; since you can't get 3 million experience points in Baldur's Gate II, a Kensai/Mage will allow you to max your Mage part, as if you were a pure mage.

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I played a kensai/mage build, and precisely because of the geometric nature of XP level cost, it was ridiculous -- I traded off maximum one level of mage to get 9 (or possibly 10, I don't remember for certain) levels of kensai. That is absurdly unbalanced.

And yes, I passed the kensai level while still pretty early in the game. Again, no surprise there, because the XP rewards go up geometrically as you proceed.

You won't get 10th level spells in Shadows of Amn. They are introduced in Throne of Bhaal. 10th level spells are picked upon levelling up a character with access to 9th level spells (can be the Figher levels, doesn't have to be a Wizard level, as long as you can cast 9th level spells).

This implies that ToB is installed, in which case the maximum XP is 8.000.000, which allows a multiclassed Fighter/Mage to achieve 4 million XP of each class. The level cap for "epic levels" in BG2 is 3.000.000 xp (all classes get it at that point).

Congratulations. You now have two epic characters for the price of one, with access to all epic skills and spells for both classes. The benefit of going from 4m to 8m on a single character is almost non-existant, since it's only a few levels. However, for a fighter/mage it's not "a few levels", it's an entire epic character.

PJs example is also overpowered, but JDR is right that a 9th level melee is not a "full melee character". It's still very powerful, and practically free (135.000 xp is not a whole lot).

That still doesn't allow you to get level 10 spells. (Referring to the GameBanshee quote)

Anyways, it's no different from 99% of the other RPGs out there that allow you to powergame if you follow a certain structure. It's up to the player whether or not to do that.

JDR13 said:

That still doesn't allow you to get level 10 spells. (Referring to the GameBanshee quote)

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It was about SoA, not ToB. SoA doesn't have epic-level spells. And if you continue with that build to ToB, you will get epic spells. (I did, and I did.)

Anyways, it's no different from 99% of the other RPGs out there that allow you to powergame if you follow a certain structure. It's up to the player whether or not to do that.

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Of course all cRPG's with character building options have powergaming options -- as in, some character builds are more powerful than others, and someone who understands (and uses) the game system well will end up with a better character than someone who just picks skills/feats/spells/whatever at random.

The question is, how much more powerful, and which ones? In D&D 3, for example, any well-optimized single-class build is roughly as powerful as the most powerful well-optimized multi-class builds. Prestige classes can give some neat abilities, or boost the "natural" abilities of a class (Arcane Scholar of Candlekeep much?) but they don't fundamentally change the equation.

However, there aren't any obvious ways to make overwhelmingly powerful characters that leave others completely in the dust. What's more, making optimized builds of different classes is a rather a different experience every time -- for fighters, it's all about feats; for magic-users of all stripes, it's about spell selection and (secondarily) metamagic, and so on. There are gobs of roughly equally viable options to choose from and approaches to take.

Finally and most importantly, none of the D&D 3 power-builds are without weak points. Fighters don't have the tools to face magic. Magic-users don't have the tools to face magic-resistant critters. Rogues can't go toe-to-toe and hope to live. Multi-classers won't have the high-level abilities of single-class characters. And so on.

Conversely, the AD&D kensai/mage (or fighter/mage multiclass) is a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-ALL, which is something that just doesn't happen in decently balanced systems.

(And yes, that's just one example -- the Blade bard kit is almost as badly overpowered, and the monk is stupidly so.)

I'm sorry, but just because one particular build can be a jack-of-all trade doesn't mean the entire system is screwed. You simply choose not to be that build if you don't want to be that powerful. It really is *that* simple.

JDR13 said:

I'm sorry, but just because one particular build can be a jack-of-all trade doesn't mean the entire system is screwed. You simply choose not to be that build if you don't want to be that powerful. It really is *that* simple.

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Tell me, JDR: if a game allowed you to buy 9 Potions Of Gain Level at 1 gp a pop, at the first shop you see, would you consider it unbalanced? Nobody's forcing you to buy them, you know, if you don't want to be that powerful.

If yes, how is this different from a character system that allows you 9 free levels, with minimal trade-offs?

If not, could you give an example of a feature that you do consider unbalancing?

Prime Junta said:

Tell me, JDR: if a game allowed you to buy 9 Potions Of Gain Level at 1 gp a pop, at the first shop you see, would you consider it unbalanced? Nobody's forcing you to buy them, you know, if you don't want to be that powerful.

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Yeah, that's the exact same.... We're talking about a game that gives you a multitude of different options for a build, and it's unlikely that a first time player, without knowing about it beforehand, is going to choose that particular build. Even if he/she does, it doesn't guarantee a cakewalk in that game.

Even so, many people might *want* to be that powerful for a playthough anyways, whether *they* need to, or simply want to try it on a replay. It's not as if BG2 isn't a very difficult game to begin with.

JDR13 said:

Yeah, that's the exact same.... We're talking about a game that gives you a multitude of different options for a build, and it's unlikely that a first time player, without knowing about it beforehand, is going to choose that particular build.

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Okay, then: so how about my followup question? What, exactly, would you consider an unbalancing feature? I get a feeling that our perception of the term differs a quite a lot.

Even so, many people might *want* to be that powerful for a playthough anyways, whether *they* need to, or simply want to try it on a replay. It's not as if BG2 isn't a very difficult game to begin with.

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My experience was that BG2 had an absolutely brutal learning curve -- most of the early quests are way above the starting party's class level and until you figure out (by trial and error) which ones are feasible, you will get hammered. Repeatedly.

Prime Junta said:

Okay, then: so how about my followup question? What, exactly, would you consider an unbalancing feature? I get a feeling that our perception of the term differs a quite a lot.

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I get the feeling that our perception of a lot of things differ. Afa your question, are you refering specifically to BG 2 right now, or in any game in general?

*Edit* I'm gonna just assume you mean in general. An unbalancing feature to me would be when a game eventually becomes too easy no matter what class\build\etc you are, because the enemies in the game max out too early to present any challenge in the late game. Morrowind would be a perfect example of that. No matter what you do in MW, you eventually become too powerful to face any real challenge, and there's nothing you can do to avoid it.

JDR13 said:

I get the feeling that our perception of a lot of things differ. Afa your question, are you refering specifically to BG 2 right now, or in any game in general?

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Any game in general.

*Edit* I'm gonna just assume you mean in general. An unbalancing feature to me would be when a game eventually becomes too easy no matter what class\build\etc you are, because the enemies in the game max out too early to present any challenge in the late game. Morrowind would be a perfect example of that. No matter what you do in MW, you eventually become too powerful to face any real challenge, and there's nothing you can do to avoid it.

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Okay, I see. So, from that POV, BG2 is not unbalanced, because the game is hard enough that it's extremely difficult to solo no matter what you do -- i.e., a single extremely powerful character in the party (i.e., you, if you powergame) doesn't make a big enough difference to overall party strength that it would make the game a cakewalk.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Except, of course, that BG2 lets you powergame the entire party -- just make ALL of them kensai/mages, with perhaps one fighter/cleric to do healing duty. I haven't actually played it this way, but I'm fairly certain that that would make the game absurdly easy. That would cause you to miss out on all of the cool intra-party stuff with the NPC's, but them's the breaks, so all but the most avid powergamers would probably not do it this way.

But I think my main point stands -- AD&D 2nd Edition is a really poorly balanced game system, and BioWare is to be commended for making several entirely playable games despite the crappy base they were working with.

JDR13 said:

*Edit* I'm gonna just assume you mean in general. An unbalancing feature to me would be when a game eventually becomes too easy no matter what class\build\etc you are, because the enemies in the game max out too early to present any challenge in the late game. Morrowind would be a perfect example of that. No matter what you do in MW, you eventually become too powerful to face any real challenge, and there's nothing you can do to avoid it.

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That makes me think of Two Worlds ... I revert to my old analogy for the gameplay, how I was getting destroyed handily by kittens and butterflies early on, and later how I could single-hit-kill elder dragons without breaking my stride.

In Baldur's Gate 2, the XP you get scales with the size of your party (it is divided evenly between all party members). I usually run with 4-5 people, which will give you 10th level spells before reaching ToB. If you run solo or duo, you will even reach the 8.000.000 XP ToB cap before reaching the actual ToB maps.

I can't even remember the last time I reached the final in SoA without having epic feats and spells.