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Gilrael Offline OP
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Hi guys,

I try to love the game (80 hours in EA) and yet, they failed utterly in many aspects, as many games...

1) Tactician mode: R I D I C U L U S

An intelligent way would have been to increase the number of mobs, limit the legendary items for sale. NOT stupidly increase armor and shield values to insane values.

2) They fell in the same trap as most RPG games. I am sick of that. When you're level 1 you kill level 1 guards. You hit level 5. Then you change zone. Oh, surprise, the very same guards in new area are level 5, you kill them. You hit level 10. Then you change zone. Oh, surprise the very same guards are now level 10 ... No a single DEV that will ever realise that the most basic guards in 3rd area would solo all the bosses in first area ... Come on ...

Why is it so difficult to make a game that is L O G I C ...

STOP scaling all NPC. Have real different ones. There is no sense of progression, and you create a universe wich feels so artificial ... All guards are between level 5 and 10. You can't wipe them in Fort Joy? Normal. It is a prison you need to escape smartly. You arrive in driftwood, guards are same level. Normal, they are the same army. End game, you become a god. Go back to Fort Joy, liberate your friends and get revenge on the guards. Or do an action game then, No level, no stats.

3) items: you're level one you can by level 1 sword. You're level 2, you can buy level 2 swords, you're level 10 you can buy level 10 swords ... Every seller has legendary items in his inventory ... again ... Stupid, every game does that. How is it that for god sake, no one can make a game that differs from Diablo ... Where an item has some value ... Where you character is not 90% gear dependant. Where your items increase your strenght by 50% max, not 500% ...

The Braccus Rex set in Fort Joy for example ... Lore of the game says it is on of the the biggest bad guys. Every seller in drifwoods sells items that are 5 times more powerfull ... How L O G I C ... Brilliant ... dissapointing

DOS 2 is just doing the same BS than every other RPG on the market. It is sad.

I really hope one day, some guy will make a perfect game ...

PS: if the only reply you can make to this post is :"if you don't like the game, don't play it", then I suggest you don't loose your time.

Last edited by Gilrael; 19/09/17 08:05 AM.
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Its called gamification and sense of progress. Also - fun

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Gilrael Offline OP
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Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.

I see no sense in progress in killing the same npc every level, because he increases in level at par with me.

I have a sense of progress when I am at par with kobolts at level 1, goblins at level 3, orcs at level 5, ogres at level 8... and dragons at level 20.

Or did I misunderstood your post?

Last edited by Gilrael; 19/09/17 08:14 AM.
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Originally Posted by TsunAmik
sense of progress [...] fun


Both are completely absent from tactician mode.

Compared to classic, all it does is demand you do 100% of the content 100% correctly with a 100% optimized build.
It doesn't throw new challenges at you, it just narrows your ways to approach them and makes them take longer to complete.

It highlights the flaws of the game, rather than offering a fresh experience.

Also, a kickstarter stretchgoal should have been more than +50% stats on everything. It's not as hard of a ball drop as something like Mighty no. 9, but it's still a pretty garbage way to deliver on a promise.

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Originally Posted by Gilrael
2) They fell in the same trap as most RPG games. I am sick of that. When you're level 1 you kill level 1 guards. You hit level 5. Then you change zone. Oh, surprise, the very same guards in new area are level 5, you kill them. You hit level 10. Then you change zone. Oh, surprise the very same guards are now level 10 ... No a single DEV that will ever realise that the most basic guards in 3rd area would solo all the bosses in first area ... Come on ...

Why is it so difficult to make a game that is L O G I C ...

STOP scaling all NPC. Have real different ones. There is no sense of progression, and you create a universe wich feels so artificial ... All guards are between level 5 and 10. You can't wipe them in Fort Joy? Normal. It is a prison you need to escape smartly. You arrive in driftwood, guards are same level. Normal, they are the same army. End game, you become a god. Go back to Fort Joy, liberate your friends and get revenge on the guards. Or do an action game then, No level, no stats.

3) items: you're level one you can by level 1 sword. You're level 2, you can buy level 2 swords, you're level 10 you can buy level 10 swords ... Every seller has legendary items in his inventory ... again ... Stupid, every game does that. How is it that for god sake, no one can make a game that differs from Diablo ... Where an item has some value ... Where you character is not 90% gear dependant. Where your items increase your strenght by 50% max, not 500% ...

The Braccus Rex set in Fort Joy for example ... Lore of the game says it is on of the the biggest bad guys. Every seller in drifwoods sells items that are 5 times more powerfull ... How L O G I C ... Brilliant ... dissapointing

I really, really, really couldn't agree more.
I'm sick to death of scaling for purely mechanical reasons, throwing away all logic and inner consistency of the game. I want a game world making sense, with the strength of characters and creatures linked to what they are, not the time in the game I meet them.

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Originally Posted by Gilrael
Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.

I see no sense in progress in killing the same npc every level, because he increases in level at par with me.

I have a sense of progress when I am at par with kobolts at level 1, goblins at level 3, orcs at level 5, ogres at level 8... and dragons at level 20.

Or did I misunderstood your post?


well doing kobolts at lvl1 and dragons at lvl20 is easy, but solving this issue with humans would be probably just fighting 5year olds at lvl1 and fighting demigods at lvl20, which sounds rather unoptimal. Or have lvl15 human guards all over the world, which would then break the main premise of this game - total freedom. Because half of the encounters with NPCs in fort joy ends up with battle, and guards are often near, it would be very hard to impossible to get out of fort joy the way I did - kill everything smile
So human levels and power are gamified - they are not like real humans with their constant strength, but their strength is scaling according to to game needs to always pose appropriate challenge. If they stayed the same, you would be at one point too weak, for few minutes would be the same power and rest of the game they will be just nuissance, which is not fun, nor realistic. So in order to have sense of progression (you gain levels, equipment etc.) AND some challenge, you need scaling guards.
Which is fully rational, because you in real life also don´t start as skinny twat with stick and end up as dragon killing demigod swimming in money and bitches just 3 months later, do you...

If that bothers you, RPG is not the right genre for you maybe?

Last edited by TsunAmik; 19/09/17 08:32 AM.
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Originally Posted by TsunAmik
If that bothers you, RPG is not the right genre for you maybe?

Completely stupid answer - if anything, RPG SHOULD be THE kind of game which put forward immersion and consistent world to begin with, due to its very nature.
As for variance in strength in humans, it wouldn't be a problem if not for the bad habit of making increase of power far too big - if you didn't double your health and damage every five levels, you wouldn't need to have all foes always around your own level.

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@Tsunamik

The difference between an action game and a Role playing game is exactly that. You progress, and kill stronger mobs, level related. And indeed, it is easy to create that with the progression from kobolt to dragon and less with humains. However this is just it. To do a great game, you must address this difficulty. There are many ways to do this. DOS2 just failed utterly in that respect.

Or you do an action game. Which are fun, like the Call of Duty series. German soldiers in the last level are the same than in the first. They don't have more HP, more shield, guns that does 200 times the damage. And you don't increase in level. You don't even have a character sheet. It is another style of game.

@Akka

Completely agree with you.

Last edited by Gilrael; 19/09/17 09:00 AM.
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If they level scale, then 100% agree. I am not far enough yet to see if this is true but I trust that youre telling the truth. Level scaling does not belong in an RPG. I have seen a lot of lazy anti-rpg/tactical decisions in this game. Dumbind down of crafting is one which I absolutely hate. It was already too easy in DOS1, but now its trivial. The idea of jobs and skills is central to RPG's and having someone be able to craft anything without some trade off is silly. How about the lack of expansion to skills and talents? I thought this game was going to be a few steps ahead given the funding it received... but they really cheaped out on some parts. I also dont see a great improvement to graphics honestly and im using a 980...

Its a fun game so far (though i have not gotten far), but its not knocking my socks off. I expected better and I am not convinced that the fundraiser money was spent wisely at all.

Last edited by Marc54; 19/09/17 09:14 AM.
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Wait enemies level scale in D:OS2 ? That's really disappointing if it's true..

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No they dont scale to your level - they scale to their location. Scaling to level was done in oblivion, and we all know what trainwreck that was.
That means that guards in fort joy might be level 5-8, and guards in driftwood might be 8-12 and such.
So if you wanna beat them, you have to get on their level first, which is standard gamified challenge. Unless you want to fight weird monsters only all the time, humans must be done this way. You are just looking at it way too strictly from realistic point of view, but as I said, this has no place in classic RPG, where you have complete character progression during one adventure.

@Gilrael How do you adreess this difficulty tho? There are only bad options, some just worse then others. I like having steep power curve, because it is much harder to be excited for new sword when its going from 55 dmg to 57 dmg, than to from 55 to 75. Also I dont want to spend 3 weeks practicing swordskills, so I can beat one guy slightly easier.. thats just boring as fuck. If I was to do that, I would do it in RL, not in game laugh

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Originally Posted by Marc54
If they level scale, then 100% agree.

Originally Posted by Jimmious
Wait enemies level scale in D:OS2 ? That's really disappointing if it's true..

There is no dynamic level scaling in OS2 (as in : the level of your character has no influence on the level of gear or foe).
But there is a static level scaling (that is : foes and items increase in level as you go farther in the game). Which means a regular Joe at the beginning is lvl 1, but a regular Joe later is lvl 7. Or, an uberpowerful artifact of the world-destroying villain that you can find at the beginning has 20 armour, a regular run-of-the-mill nameless items later has 80 armour.

It's less aggravating than dynamic level scaling, but it's just as much idiotic.
Originally Posted by TsunAmik
@Gilrael How do you adreess this difficulty tho? There are only bad options, some just worse then others. I like having steep power curve, because it is much harder to be excited for new sword when its going from 55 dmg to 57 dmg, than to from 55 to 75.

That's just the opposite actually. When you're showered in items with a steep power increase, then they lose all relevance and it's just a treadmill of number inflation.
When there is little power increase, then each item becomes much more relevant and memorable.

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Well, yeah, thats another point of view, which I cant really dispute. But I guess I am more ok with constant progress at steady rate, instead of few super power spikes in whole game when I first find enchanted sword, and then find legendary magic sword laugh

Guys, for the sake of argument, can you name me some non-freeroam cRPG which utilizes this non-human scaling system you are talking about? Because I can of course imagine that in freeroam levelscaled game like skyrim (or gothics, but even G3 was location scaled a bit), but I just cant imagine such system in cRPG without complete open world, where you use levels as guidance of your progression through map.

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Originally Posted by TsunAmik
Well, yeah, thats another point of view, which I cant really dispute. But I guess I am more ok with constant progress at steady rate, instead of few super power spikes in whole game when I first find enchanted sword, and then find legendary magic sword laugh

Not necessarily "super power spike". The very point of doing smaller power increase is that they don't need to be big at all to be significant.

I mean, even AD&D 2e, which was on the high end of "power gaming", had magic weapons typically going from +1 to +3, with +4 being exceptional and +5 usually restricted to artifact or other similarly legendary items. So just a single point of bonus was already a big deal, despite being in the end just about 1/20th chance to hit more.

Hack'n'slash-like gearing treadmill though ? It's just a long string of numbers without meaning. Do you remember the weapon you used one level ago ? Will you remember it in one month ? I doubt it, it's just some number that is replaced 30 mn later by a larger number. Do you actually prefer that to having to chase a renowned artifact and actually have said artifact hold its promises by being REALLY relevant and lasting a long time, and being something you remember about long after the game is finished ?
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Guys, for the sake of argument, can you name me some non-freeroam cRPG which utilizes this non-human scaling system you are talking about? Because I can of course imagine that in freeroam levelscaled game like skyrim (or gothics, but even G3 was location scaled a bit), but I just cant imagine such system in cRPG without complete open world, where you use levels as guidance of your progression through map.

The problem is more to find a cRPG without idiotic power increase, because somehow it seems that designer believe only a bunch of 0 added to damage will please gamers (this is a pretty insulting reasoning if you think about it).
But all the games based on existing P'n'P RPG ruleset (typically ADD) did use such non-human "scaling" (i.e. : they used defined monsters, which have defined stat, instead of just putting scalable stat on a skin, which make every monsters basically the same and have no intrinsinc power). So all the old-school D&D games up to NWN2 were using this.

This obsession with mindlessly scaling with level is a typical cRPG disease (which is, sadly, spilling into P'n'P today) because it's the lazy way out : just use a formula. Building a world making sense is more fulfilling, but requires more work, while tweaking a few numbers dissociated from what they represent, is much easier.

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It's the core flaw of the story, I already pointed out in the EA. You are in a prison with all those elite super bad boys and still are able to kill them all with your lousy gear, while traders somehow are able to restock out of nowhere with most epic gear. Immersion is totally broken frown


Regarding natural natural progress regarding humanoid: Thugs, Recruits, Soldier, Veterans, Elites... There are enough classifications to make it natural to expect a different level of challenge from units.


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