Feel like I fall somewhere in the middle here. I definitely believe there should be a sense of progression and accomplishment, and thus just "down-leveling" every monster to be able to be killed by the party at any time feels a bit like a cop-out. Nothing has made me bored with RPGs (e.g. TES4/5, ME, Dragon Age, so on) quicker than feeling like every battle is the same but with palette-swapped enemies. Occasionally the story can override that feeling, but I don't think a party-based RPG will ever be so immersive that combat can be mostly ignored in that way.
Beyond that, I feel it kind of sucks because it takes away some of the potential variety in a playthrough. If you're immediately fighting all the "cool" and showy late-adventure monsters, what really do you have to work up to? It seems like the MM is large enough to circumvent this, but it is a thought that crossed my mind given how horrendously this has been applied to other examples in the genre. I also don't love the barrelmancy/hoardermancy stuff. There's way too much dependency on surface and environmental effects and it really does make BG3 too "game-y" by a half. For comparison, I was playing Solasta today and even though it's a lot rougher in terms of the shiny stuff, I found combat to be a lot more enjoyable.
That said, I also don't think things should be made difficult for the sake of it. The reason QoL adjustments have been so prevalent across the video game world is because gaming is now a mainstream hobby/interest. Most people don't want to go diving through manuals or the internet to figure out the minutia of a system like I did 15-20 years ago. And, honestly, sometimes I don't really want that either. The problem becomes how to balance QoL and a sense of challenge and "discovery," so to speak. Naturally some things will be sacrificed. If you balance/design the game around the fact that players will know creature levels beforehand, then it doesn't make a bunch of sense to plow resources into making sure every encounter has enough visual/cinematic cues to make it apparent (to people who are just casual gamers/don't have the background D&D knowledge) what is and isn't a challenging encounter. If you design it the other way, you're naturally going to be losing something somewhere else.
I'm also not sure that there is a perfect marriage of the two. If you make level indicators toggleable, it's quite likely you'll be sacrificing some of the work on visual cues and so really it'll just be a tacked-on feature for the hardcore set. I find myself gravitating toward this option but I also hate features that are just plopped on top of a finished product instead of carefully designed to fit with the rest of the game.
This feels rambly, but yeah. I think it'll be interesting to see if Larian can find a happy medium or if this is going to end up being a case where by trying to satisfy too many preferences you end up with something that's not great for anyone.
Last edited by Dan Quail; 31/10/20 12:19 AM.
