Larian cultists reviewing BG1/2 - NOW with IWD:EE reviews

[Hoodoo]

r00fles

 

[Serus]

But Arcanum comes the closest for someone to make that comment.

Ah, yes, the great itemization of arcanum, a game where most items seem to have lolrandom stats, magic items consistently outperform tech and upgrading weapons as a tech guy oftentimes makes it strictly worse instead of better. Amazing example.

I never said "greatness". No one said "greatness". The only "greatness" here is that of the strawman. Mechanically Arcanum combat is very poorly done and since items are mostly used in combat they are often poorly done as well. Balance-wise Arcanum is an unfunny joke. From gameplay standpoint Arcanum itemization is lackluster - as are combat mechanics or character development (creation is nice though). HOWEVER items in Arcanum are often very well done thematically. Mostly the technological ones, including the blueprints. They are part of why the techno-magic setting (sort of) works. My favorite from that perspective is the Chapeau of Magnetic Inversion. They have great names, the art fits the theme well, you need to make some of them yourself which also add to the theme. They are good mostly because of fluff. You my say that fluff matters little compared to mechanics or balance or simple usefulness and you'd be correct - i'm the first one to agree that mechanics should go before everything else. Still, some of Arcanum strongest points are the setting and the atmosphere. Its items greatly help in that.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

BG is mediocre at best. IWD is slightly better because it has something approaching decent, well-crafted encounters and excellent dungeon crawling rather than the """"story"""" and """"dialogue"""" of BG, which has awful Bioware writing.

But both games are bad enough that I had to make a massive WeiDU module to fix them both. And even then my work is never done.

These games just aren't that good.

 

[Harthwain]

RTwP is best when you can program party AI and let it play itself in real time (in other words, when you bypass the pause part).

You can set scripts exactly for that. I never used it, but I will have to try it sometime and go through the game mostly that way (aside from casting target spells manually, of course).

 

[Jvegi]

Are you babies playing the game on core difficutly or something?

 

[Melcar]

Are you babies playing the game on core difficutly or something?

EE Story mode most likely.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

But Arcanum comes the closest for someone to make that comment.

Ah, yes, the great itemization of arcanum, a game where most items seem to have lolrandom stats, magic items consistently outperform tech and upgrading weapons as a tech guy oftentimes makes it strictly worse instead of better. Amazing example.

I never said "greatness". No one said "greatness". The only "greatness" here is that of the strawman. Mechanically Arcanum combat is very poorly done and since items are mostly used in combat they are often poorly done as well. Balance-wise Arcanum is an unfunny joke. From gameplay standpoint Arcanum itemization is lackluster - as are combat mechanics or character development (creation is nice though). HOWEVER items in Arcanum are often very well done thematically. Mostly the technological ones, including the blueprints. They are part of why the techno-magic setting (sort of) works. My favorite from that perspective is the Chapeau of Magnetic Inversion. They have great names, the art fits the theme well, you need to make some of them yourself which also add to the theme. They are good mostly because of fluff. You my say that fluff matters little compared to mechanics or balance or simple usefulness and you'd be correct - i'm the first one to agree that mechanics should go before everything else. Still, some of Arcanum strongest points are the setting and the atmosphere. Its items greatly help in that.

So let me get it straight. You've said that arcanum has shit combat but itemisation is great. What you've actually meant by this is that the itemisation is terrible but the lore behind it is good.
Codex gerontophiles have strange ways with words.

 

[Ryzer]

More Larian cultists after the launch of BG3 :

THAC0 was the biggest pleb and retard (tautology) filter ever made, kinda sad they removed it.

 

[Volourn]

There's nothing convoluted about ac and thaco. Holy fukk. Its such asimple concept that even a retart like me understood it as a kid. lol

 

[Harthwain]

THAC0 was the biggest pleb and retard (tautology) filter ever made, kinda sad they removed it.

Not true. Even a kid could grasp that better armours have lower value by comparing something as simple as chain mail and leather armor (with the idea being that heavier armours obviously offer a great deal more protection). Then there are ordinary weapons and magical weapons, the latter having higher plus sign clearly indicating the better ones (and XdX was simple enough to understand by comparing single-handed and two-handed weapons). So you could not fully understand the rules governing that, but in practical sense it was easy enough to follow.

 

[Butter]

THAC0 was the biggest pleb and retard (tautology) filter ever made, kinda sad they removed it.

Not true. Even a kid could grasp that better armours have lower value by comparing something as simple as chain mail and leather armor (with the idea being that heavier armours obviously offer a great deal more protection). Then there are ordinary weapons and magical weapons, the latter having higher plus sign clearly indicating the better ones (and XdX was simple enough to understand by comparing single-handed and two-handed weapons). So you could not fully understand the rules governing that, but in practical sense it was easy enough to follow.

And yet you can see a great many retards complaining that they were filtered by it in the Steam reviews.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

As someone who fully understands how THAC0 works.

THAC0 is shit and you're all high on copium.

The armor system is ass-backwards (literally).

Just because you like a game doesn't mean you have to mindlessly defend a badly-made system.

MOST of ADND is good, and I definitely feel that 5E is a hugely oversimplified version of it. Modifiers are much better than the Advantage/Disadvantage mess we have now and retards have ruined DND overall, but THAC0 was a blunder that I'm glad is gone.

You don't make the game more complicated or interesting by making making armor negative. You just make things more confusing.

Rolling for stats is the other unforgivable element of the systems in ADND (and Baldurs Gate/IWD by extension). Point buying just makes sense.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Advantage/disadvantage is simple when you do it it's just the statistical implications that are convoluted(if you need to roll 10, advantage is an equivalent of +5, if you need to roll 20, it's+ 1)

 

[Harthwain]

And yet you can see a great many retards complaining that they were filtered by it in the Steam reviews.

"A great many"? 91% out of 8 360 reviews are positive and not all of them mention THAC0. Hell, you could argue that a lot of these negative reviews are about Beamdog's changes to the original game, not about the original game itself or its system.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

there's nothing wrong with thac0, it's just a math thingy you do when you perform attacks. it really doesn't matter if it "makes sense" when the game is entirely based on abstractions.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

there's nothing wrong with thac0, it's just a math thingy you do when you perform attacks. it really doesn't matter if it "makes sense" when the game is entirely based on abstractions.

This is the dumbest take in the history of dumb takes. You should feel ashamed for having posted it.

A strength of game design is being able to keep mechanics understandable and simple, but with a large amount of depth. THAC0 goes in the opposite direction, being inherently complicated to understand, and offering little depth.

Literally all it's doing is decreasing your chance to hit. Which plenty of other systems (including 5E) do in much the same way, without the extra pointless abstraction and dealing with lower numbers being better, which adds absolutely nothing other than confusion.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

there's nothing wrong with thac0, it's just a math thingy you do when you perform attacks. it really doesn't matter if it "makes sense" when the game is entirely based on abstractions.

This is the dumbest take in the history of dumb takes. You should feel ashamed for having posted it.

A strength of game design is being able to keep mechanics understandable and simple, but with a large amount of depth. THAC0 goes in the opposite direction, being inherently complicated to understand, and offering little depth.

Literally all it's doing is decreasing your chance to hit. Which plenty of other systems (including 5E) do in much the same way, without the extra pointless abstraction.

(x)-(-y) is primary school mathematics

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

(x)-(-y) is primary school mathematics

And that addresses my point how exactly?

Explain to me how "Oh no, the lower number is actually BETTER, you need to subtract the armour numbers in relation to THAC0 rather than simply lowering the to hit value" actually adds anything of any tangible value to the game.

If all you have is "LOL but math is simple reeeeeee everyone is dumb but me" then maybe you should spend less time on forums and more time killing yourself.

 

[Cryomancer]

(x)-(-y) is primary school mathematics

But is too complicared for modern games.

Hell, Swen said that "spell slots aren't intuitive" and believed that people wouldn't understand it. Note that Dark Souls 1/2 uses it. You memorize soul spear and has a set number of soul spear charges.

"Oh no, the lower number is actually BETTER

Simple. THAC0 is how high you need to roll a D20 to hit AC=0. THACO =10 > THACO = 15 as you need to roll lower to hit. Lower THAC0 is good just like lower carry weight is good. Lower debt can be good. Lower number of game journos. Lower number of bugs.

 

[Harthwain]

there's nothing wrong with thac0, it's just a math thingy you do when you perform attacks. it really doesn't matter if it "makes sense" when the game is entirely based on abstractions.

This is the dumbest take in the history of dumb takes. You should feel ashamed for having posted it.

A strength of game design is being able to keep mechanics understandable and simple, but with a large amount of depth. THAC0 goes in the opposite direction, being inherently complicated to understand, and offering little depth.

Literally all it's doing is decreasing your chance to hit. Which plenty of other systems (including 5E) do in much the same way, without the extra pointless abstraction.

The game is largely automated on the account of being in real-time and the game doing all the calculations for you, so it's easy to play it even if THAC0 is needlessly complicated. At worst you may play somewhat suboptimally. Playing it at the table would be an entirely different matter, because someone has to actually do the calculations for everybody, which is more complex than having an automated system, even when everyone understands the rules.

 

[Butter]

Is this Retardera? Why are people complaining about THAC0 being needlessly complex? "It describes your chance to hit. Lower is better." You can explain it in under 5 seconds. You clowns could've picked dual classing rules, or non-linear attribute bonuses, or racial level caps, or fucking anything else. Complaining about THAC0 is a meme at this point.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

or the fact that you can reach level cap pretty much 1/8 into the expansion, and that even that was lost in the original translation from 1 to 2, but that's veen solved by both mods and the EEs. However it's still a thing.

 

[Melcar]

Imagine not understanding THACO.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

(x)-(-y) is primary school mathematics

And that addresses my point how exactly?

Explain to me how "Oh no, the lower number is actually BETTER, you need to subtract the armour numbers in relation to THAC0 rather than simply lowering the to hit value" actually adds anything of any tangible value to the game.

If all you have is "LOL but math is simple reeeeeee everyone is dumb but me" then maybe you should spend less time on forums and more time killing yourself.

THAC0 (To-Hit Armor Class 0) was merely a simplification of the existing tables in D&D and AD&D, which laboriously displayed the minimum d20 roll needed to hit an enemy based on character class and level range (in rows or columns) and the enemy's armor class (in columns or rows). Gary Gygax had already hit upon the THAC0 concept in a series of tables appearing in Appendix E in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979, though the exact acronym THAC0 wasn't used until 1985's 'Black Box' Master Set for Mentzer BECMI D&D, and it didn't become standard until AD&D 2nd edition in 1989, which finally enabled the same information to be delivered far more concisely.

in AD&D 2nd edition versus AD&D 1st edition's unnecessarily lengthy tables

 

[DoWhocares]

You tards can't seriously be defending THAC0 and acting like it's some arcane concept only prestigious gentlemen can grasp.

Understanding THAC0 is easy and precisely what makes you see how stupid it is. It's literally ass-backwards for no good reason. Just imagine Gary Gygax walking into a TSR design meeting and going "Hey guys, check out this cool new armor system I created - the LESS armor you have the MORE armor you have. Isn't that grand? Oh, and also, a PLUS one sword is actually a MINUS one sword."

It's also inelegant as fuck because it's an arbitrary cutoff point. You don't win the game and get a blowjob from a nymph when you hit AC 0. Armor can and does go into negatives. THAC0 would make some sense if 0 was the lowest armor could get. But since it's not, I'm convinced the whole system was concieved just to piss me off. First by how stupid it is, then through me seeing people defending it.