By late-game content, I mean: Please give us plenty of things to do, and keep the game fun, once we start to get into late-game portion.
One of the very few gripes I have with Baldur's Gate 2 is that, the game is almost over once you get out of Chapter 5, even though that is only about 70% of the base game. Chapter 2 and 3 can be huge if you do every single quest you can. Chapter 4 and 5 are ok. Then Chapter 6 is just way too short.
From your 2nd playthrough onward, you can totally save some quests for Chapter 6, including the Watcher's Keep questline, just so you will have more "things to do". But why would you have to do that? Not to mention, the majority of quests that you can do during Chapter 2 and 3 are not really designed for late game. Once you get into Chapter 6 you are way too powerful for these quests. Judging by the game's scripts, it appears there is a cut main quest that would have you travel to previous areas on the world map, but this idea was scrapped for some reason.
The PoE2 game, when I last played it, also became extremely stale all of a sudden, when my party hit level 11-12. There were several reasons for this:
- High-level abilities just suck. I played a Cipher and was totally let down when I read the level 6, 7, 8, 9 spells. There was almost no reason to get most of these spells.
- Wizard's grimoire mechanics, which allow you to have access to pretty much all spells, making the process of "selecting spells upon leveling up" almost completely pointless.
- The game was getting way too easy. This used to be one popular feedback on the game's forums back then. I understand that they have made a lot of changes since, with much tougher difficulty settings. But having to crank up the difficulty just for the sake of keeping the game from getting dull is also not something the player should have to do.
- And a couple other things which also became much less exciting simply because I didn't feel like there was much else to try to achieve, such as ship building, or weapon upgrading.
As for DOS2's last act, while personally I didn't find it too bad, I know there used to be opinion that the last act feels rushed and not very well polished, and so on.
TLDR: My hope is that, BG3 will not have to suffer from any of these issues. It's easier to make early-game interesting and exciting, since by default everything is new and fresh, and your characters are not very powerful yet. It is the late-game portion that needs more attention. IMO, there are several things that can be done to keep late-game fun and exciting:
- Give the characters plenty of room to grow and to become more powerful.
- Give the player plenty of quests to do, and things to discover. Lengthy and fun quests, only available during late-game, and designed for a late-game party. Epic boss encounters included.
- Difficulty scaling. It's not that every single encounter you run into has to be unusually tough. There just needs to be a good amount of challenging encounters, at the right time and location, especially during main quests, so that the player can genuinely feel, "I have to become stronger. This is not enough."
- And, naturally, I hope the end-game portion will be lengthy and intriguing throughout, story-wise.
Basically, as players, we want to feel that there's still plenty of things to do and plenty of goals for our characters to achieve, even as we approach end-game. We don't ever want to feel, "That's it. I can't get any stronger than this.", or, "That's it. There isn't much else to do from this point on."
Last edited by Try2Handing; 27/06/19 04:03 AM.
