Now that some enemies can move at the same time, I expect to see larger battles in the future. The goblin camp was a good exemple why it really wasn't a good idea before it. Having to wait for every goblins to do their sometimes elaborated fight was way too tedious to go through.
Yes. True. The new system reminds me of XCom DLC with the Lost. They moved all as one in a mob manner. It definitely makes it quicker.
But group movement of enemies doesn't do anything to address whether it is reasonable to expect that a low-level party of four can defeat that many enemies, even if those enemies are mere goblins. So for me, regardless of anything else, the goblic battle situation is poorly designed no matter how you slice it. A person playing on "normal" difficulty, who does not min-max or handle their party turns in a perfectly optimal way and simply does whatever they feel to be appropriate, should not have to keep reloading a fight. If that is what is happening with players, then the encounter design is flawed. Encounters ought to be designed such that an average player playing the game in a very casual way can still end up with a solid win.
Btw, I like your idea three posts up.
I'm sorry but I cannot pretend as if this isn't just wholesale wrong on so many levels. For starters and possibly the most obvious, taking on the goblin camp in a straight up fight is overtly a bad idea and from the beginning the you get context clues that doing things this way would likely be incredibly difficult. When you fight just a couple goblins with just your party you can get pretty badly hurt or have a party member or two get downed which in terms of how games hint things to players give you the impression that these little guys are tougher then they look so when progressing it doesn't take much to think that "fighting just a hand full of these guys is kinda can already be difficult so fighting an entire camp full of them probably isn't a good idea unless i have a plan" Not only this but the game using multiple methods gives all kinds of other options that are far more feasible like characters saying you can try sneaking your way in or talking your way past guards or using the funky little tadpole in your brain to do it for free. Unless the player is being completely and utterly oblivious to any of these signs just being at the camp just shows you that visually that there are not only a crap ton of goblins but also an Ogre and multiple bugbears(both enemies who on their own already have shown can be very dangerous at this point in the game) so its not like anyone logically would ever just start a fight there without expecting it to be incredibly difficult because its signposted very thoroughly.
Okay so we've established that this fight is pretty tough at least concerning a low level party who is just "playing casually". Why would they ever expect to be able to get a solid win in this scenario? Does the concept of difficulty not exist? I know its pretty low hanging fruit when talking about this subject but in a Fromsoftware game you also get clear signpostings about optional enemies being very strong like the Tree Sentinel who is a giant fuck off huge knight with golden armor casually strutting around like he owns the place so the casual player shouldn't expect to get a win against him without dying ALOT unless they do the thing that he is there to teach you things like how you should level up and upgrade your gear first and then maybe fight this dude and similarly the goblin camp being so difficult teaches you (if somehow you were so dense not to pay attention) that fighting an entire camp of monsters is not exactly a smart idea and there are multiple ways this issue can be solve issues both in terms of not fighting(sneaking or conversation)them at all or shifting the advantage to give you a much more fighting chance if you simply do want to fight them, here are some examples.
unleashing the Spectator to attack the goblins allying with the ogres to fight with you poisoning their drinks using bombs or traps to either immobilize or just outright kill goblins easily. using range attacks in vantage points where its harder to hit you and you can block off entrances to get to you use pretty much any combination of these to fit your desired outcome.
You're not only wrong about the balancing of the Goblin Camp but you're simply wrong on a pure gameplay design level. Normal difficulty doesn't mean no difficulty it just means difficulty that is considered normal to what the developers have intended for the baseline experience that the game typically was designed for most to play at. I find it incredibly difficult to imagine how someone with even basic experience CRPGs could not understand the age old concept of don't attack the strongest encounter on the map without actually being ready to do it or being ready to die alot.
