Stop larping as a human male. You are not fooling anyone.
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Baldur's Gate Are BG1 and BG2 too dated today?
- Thread starter Feargus Jewhart
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Generic-Giant-Spider
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rusty_shackleford
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Is this an elaborate joke that I'm not getting where we pretend BG doesn't look like someone puked on the screen?
I mean this is a bait thread but I want to say smth on the topic of "dated games" in general:
I really hate it when ppl talk about how games have aged badly. They haven't! ppl just got used to quality of life stuff. The game that was great in 1989 is still great today if you let yourself immerse into it. I mean seriously I played so many games that are older than I am and loved the fuck out of them, anyone saying a game is dated is a decline enabler. Just adapt to the older game and learn to enjoy it.
Books aren't dated just because the language and narrative style changed, movies aren't dated just because they are in black and white and without sound and games aren't dated just because they have only a few colors or a dungeon wall tapestry for a forest texture.
And now everyone should go and play wizardry VI you faggots lol
I don't agree with this. Are there old RPGs worth playing today? Absolutely. But a lot of them HAVE aged badly as well. The UIs, the graphics, the lack of basic features (such as mapping or quick-saves or a journal), etc. This is more present with RPGs before mid-late 90s, as by 1997 or so, most major QoL features and reasonable graphics have been established.
I see what your point but that is actually what I mean by adapting to the older game. If you accept that the old dungeon crawlers don't have mapping and start to map yourself you can have fun with that. I had an absolute blast mapping old games once I understood and accepted this was part of the game experience back then. The same goes for journals - sure it might seem tedious to keep a bunch of notes flying around but when you really go for it and make a nice little notebook full of notes for one specific game it makes the whole thing kinda magical.
Generic-Giant-Spider
Guest
Is this an elaborate joke that I'm not getting where we pretend BG doesn't look like someone puked on the screen?
Rusty, don't take offense to this but sometimes I really wish Michael Myers was real and you were related to him.
onemananadhisdroid
Augur
Both happened to be released during a period of the industry when tech limitations weren't such a huge hurdle anymore and suits didn't compromise everything they could touch. I mean just take a look at 1998 and its line-up of evergreens: Grim Fandango, Thief, Baldur's Gate.
In a word, no.
In a word, no.
Falksi
Arcane
How so? I always thought it was fairly good. Nothing spectacular, but far from shit.
What would you be comparing it to as an example of good writing?
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Ol' Willy
Arcane
RTwP will never offer the same level of tactical encounters TB does. Let's make a comparison: for an example of TB I will pick Underrail and some glass cannon build. 90% of the enemies are capable of finishing me off in one turn: the guy with the sledgehammer, guy with the knife, psyker, assault rifle guy, guy with the grenade, sniper... not even talking about some wildlife. The combat is very tight and single misstep can fuck me up greatly or end the fight at all.
This is simply not possible in RTwP: the nature of the combat can't allow the same level of danger, when enemies attack you in real-time and you respond in a real-time. This is why if you simply pick up a RTwP game and convert in into TB it will become a boring slog. 2001 Pool of Radiance can be seen as the fine example of this: this game is like RTwP game being converted into TB game.
RTwP has a big issue with some things that are a staple of RPG combat.
I find that RTwP works much better in large-scale tactical games than TB, like Total War battles, because you're managing large amounts of units and it's all about large-scale maneuvering and holding ground rather than micromanagement of a small amount of entities.
But when you work at the scale of an RPG, turn-based is a lot better.
The best example are AoE attacks. At the scale of something like Wargame or Steel Division, calling an artillery strike on an area to deny it to the enemy or to batter entrenched infantry is totally viable due to the scale of the game. But in an RPG you don't want to use your fireball for area denial, you want it to hit a group of enemies to do damage to them, so them being able to walk out of the AoE while your wizard is still mumbling his incantation is a very real issue. AoE spells kinda suck in the Infinity Engine games because of how hard it is to properly aim them.
In a turn-based game, you can use your AoE spells and grenades and all that shit very precisely. And so can the enemy. But in RTwP it just turns into a massive clusterfuck.
Darkzone
Arcane
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Your example is ok. But it is about how the RTwP handles exact the behavior scripts of the Agents. There could be a stickiness of Enemies to PC that would prevent enemies running through through your lines towards the glass cannon Character (wizard or sniper or etc). It is how you program the behavior and not the event and time system. I suggest you look into Simulations theory especially into Discrete-event simulation and (event driven vs time driven simulation).
Ol' Willy
Arcane
So, "if the game has NPCs capable of finishing your characters very quickly, let's add some scripting limitations to prevent this from happening". Aren't you a Josh Sawyer in disguise, perchance?
That's like telling military tacticians "If you find the enemies always going for your vulnerable artillerists in the back rather than focusing on your well-armed and armored frontliners, you have to convince your enemies to behave less efficiently lmao".
Like wtf.
Why should an AI act suboptimally? You should instead introduce systems to make these actions less efficient.
rusty_shackleford
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rtwp combat AI will always be shit compared to turn-based AI
decision space is much larger, has to be done in real-time(duh), has to be done simultaneously, ...
decision space is much larger, has to be done in real-time(duh), has to be done simultaneously, ...
almondblight
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The problems with combat in the Infinity Engine games go beyond general RTWP issues. You have the weird situation where some things are divided into rounds (like spells), while others happen instantaneously (like movement). Combat looks like it's happening instantaneously, but it's not, since (IIRC) the combat animations are there simply to look cool and don't actually convey information. Likewise it can be hard to tell what's going on with multiple spells (more of an issue with later games, though). Encounter design is weak, with most of the games having hordes of trash mobs (particularly bad in BG1). Likewise enemy AI is very lackluster - melee enemies mindlessly rush you, while spellcasters sit back and blast. I read an article a while back that they kept some ranged enemies from attacking your casters because they thought it made things too difficult. There's almost no use of the environment asides from a few encounters with traps and a few with ledges (probably less than 1% of the total encounters).
And there are a lot of other issues as well (such as poor exploration). We shouldn't immediately dismiss older games, but we also shouldn't ignore their problems.
And there are a lot of other issues as well (such as poor exploration). We shouldn't immediately dismiss older games, but we also shouldn't ignore their problems.
rusty_shackleford
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most people's perspectives are incredibly blinded by mods at this point
e.g., people regularly bringing up 'mage duels' should probably go replay the game without SCS installed
DraQ
Arcane
Explained with rating.
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
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The example is pertinent but not your interpretation of the problem.
The issue with RTwP is that you can't control every variable which reduces the amount of tactical or strategic actions you can take, but this can make the game easier or harder depending on the situation. If you make a glass cannon kind of character, it is actually going to be VERY hard to keep him alive because the AI is free to target him right off the bat and you have few options to make them stop. In a turn based game, the AI would have to go through a whole bunch of hurdles, the specific actions you can assign the other characters, stuff like attack of opportunity and so forth. But in Baldur's Gate and pretty much every other IE game, the AI can just waltz up to your mage and one shot him and there's not much you can do about it. You can cast spells to slow them or freeze them, but it's hard to time them right (timing buffs is also a pain in the ass meaning you'll often end up preferring buffs with long duration) or calculate their area effect correctly, even with pause. You can send your entire party to stop them but if the AI is tough enough to survive more than a few hits they'll just slip through unhindered. This is such a common problem that all the cloth wearers in my parties tend to put a LOT of focus on defense, and because of the way the game likes to spawn monsters right next to them i often even rely on stuff like invisibility just so they don't get instant murdered when stepping into a new area.
Conversely, this also means you can cheese the AI by exploiting its stupidity. Case in point is Drizzt in BG1, which i'd imagine wouldn't be as easy to kill if the game was turn based. In fact, kiting is a very useful tactic in every real time game i've played, and often all you have to do is focus target your entire party on a single mob at a time like in a real RTS game and have the AI follow a decoy and throw all strategy out the window.
In essence, real time can make combat not easy per-se but easier to cheese in the sense it can foster laziness and thus lead to an unsatisfying gameplay experience, or one where you feel your victory had more to do with change than any choice you actually made.
This doesn't mean that real time combat can't be entertaining (and there's no guarantee that turn based combat is going to be better by default either), but you can be lazy in real combat in a way that isn't possible in turn based combat and that can lead to a less than satisfying experience, as i said.
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Ol' Willy
Arcane
Of course. Turn based + bad encounter design = boring slog. But RTwP games get away with that because [recurring argument by RTwP apologists] "RTwP combat makes trash mobs more tolerable due to being faster and less involving from the player". E.G., PST combat can't be fixed just by changing the game to TB because encounter design is a joke. But maybe, just maybe, instead of using crunches to tolerate bad design developers should just address the underlying issue, i.e., make encounters more interesting?
Murk
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IWD looks and sounds way better than BG, no question.
I always thought the IWD games had a higher quality of writing too -- and they were far more direct and concise. Never mind some of the voice acting.
edit: lol @ youtuber's background audio after initial meeting with Kresselack. Oh well, point still carries.
I always thought the IWD games had a higher quality of writing too -- and they were far more direct and concise. Never mind some of the voice acting.
edit: lol @ youtuber's background audio after initial meeting with Kresselack. Oh well, point still carries.
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
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Yes, the writing in the IWD games was better, and the voice acting too was great.
In fact, i think Black Isle made a huge mistake with IWD. They shouldn't have gone with a pure action game they should have made their own Baldur's Gate, replete with tons of writing (but not on a level with Torment obviously) and higher quality combat.
In fact, i think Black Isle made a huge mistake with IWD. They shouldn't have gone with a pure action game they should have made their own Baldur's Gate, replete with tons of writing (but not on a level with Torment obviously) and higher quality combat.
Murk
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Even just some branching options to reduce the linearity would have been tremendous.
The few times you have quests in towns, they're quite nice, and even show some reactivity to your characters (a paladin stealing a ring to confront the inn owner; being able to bless the troops in targos or give them fighting advice as a fighter; actual benefits of using tracking in the lost forest; etc.); just too few.
The few times you have quests in towns, they're quite nice, and even show some reactivity to your characters (a paladin stealing a ring to confront the inn owner; being able to bless the troops in targos or give them fighting advice as a fighter; actual benefits of using tracking in the lost forest; etc.); just too few.
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