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veteran
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veteran
Joined: May 2019
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.... Except you are not being objective at all, no offence intended. The biggest problem (or strength, depends who you ask) of WotR is that it is a niche game, and the developers develop the game specifically for their niche audience that seem to like the things we hate (powergaming, minmaxing, etc). I feel like more work should have been done with the difficulty settings, that while are better than most game, still lacks more customisation that might have made the game more accessible. For the most part, I still find the difficulty to make the game either hard and sometimes too hard or too easy. More work with the difficulty settings? O.O ![[Linked Image from i.ibb.co]](https://i.ibb.co/Xs56qfM/Sin-t-tulo.png) As you can see you have 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc. And, like kingmaker, you can turn off or put the crusade management in automatic mode if you do not like that kind of strategy minigame with minimal story impact. I mean, if you have that kind of customization and you want even more because it does not reach the sweet spot you will like for your game... well... I do not think the problem is in the game. You simply cannot ask the devs to adjust the difficulty to every player in the game, but you could ask that they provide the more options they could with the budget and human power they have. And they did. Evidently, it´s not the type of game do you like, or even the tabletop it´s based on. that´s fair; but it seems you are just finding fault in everything in the game, even things that are objectively not there. ... And just for the record, the fact that kingmaker and WoTR are hard games nobody argues, but I also have to say I finished the game with a party of 5 bards, so the need of what you called "powergaming" and min-maxing are only needed for the harder difficulties. Pretty sure in story mode with the lowest "damage to the party" setting the IA wins almost all the fights for you with autoattacks (I know that for a fact because my sister do not like combat and management, so she played the game like a visual novel, just to read and roleplay) You still need to beat some enemies that have particular resistances with the right spells or weapons, but you have all the time in the world to do so in the lowest difficulty settings. As I said it´s a hard game. it´s like playing dark souls and complain that you are dying. Yeah, it´s a hard game from starters. Nobody said otherwise. But unlike the dark souls series you can lower the difficulty to a manageable point, letting players that like challenges play the game too. I find it a good decision to allow people that like challenging combat and people that are there for the story and are not interested in to play the same game. I think BG3 would be like that too. Excellent post Vic! This was so awesome in Kingmaker and will be even more robust in WotR. This kind of range of a great many option toggles and sliders is what BG3 desperately needs to bring in people like me who want to like BG3 but are currently a solid 'no'.
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Mar 2020
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.... Except you are not being objective at all, no offence intended. The biggest problem (or strength, depends who you ask) of WotR is that it is a niche game, and the developers develop the game specifically for their niche audience that seem to like the things we hate (powergaming, minmaxing, etc). I feel like more work should have been done with the difficulty settings, that while are better than most game, still lacks more customisation that might have made the game more accessible. For the most part, I still find the difficulty to make the game either hard and sometimes too hard or too easy. More work with the difficulty settings? O.O As you can see you have 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc. And, like kingmaker, you can turn off or put the crusade management in automatic mode if you do not like that kind of strategy minigame with minimal story impact. I mean, if you have that kind of customization and you want even more because it does not reach the sweet spot you will like for your game... well... I do not think the problem is in the game. You simply cannot ask the devs to adjust the difficulty to every player in the game, but you could ask that they provide the more options they could with the budget and human power they have. And they did. Evidently, it´s not the type of game do you like, or even the tabletop it´s based on. that´s fair; but it seems you are just finding fault in everything in the game, even things that are objectively not there. ... And just for the record, the fact that kingmaker and WoTR are hard games nobody argues, but I also have to say I finished the game with a party of 5 bards, so the need of what you called "powergaming" and min-maxing are only needed for the harder difficulties. Pretty sure in story mode with the lowest "damage to the party" setting the IA wins almost all the fights for you with autoattacks (I know that for a fact because my sister do not like combat and management, so she played the game like a visual novel, just to read and roleplay) You still need to beat some enemies that have particular resistances with the right spells or weapons, but you have all the time in the world to do so in the lowest difficulty settings. As I said it´s a hard game. it´s like playing dark souls and complain that you are dying. Yeah, it´s a hard game from starters. Nobody said otherwise. But unlike the dark souls series you can lower the difficulty to a manageable point, letting players that like challenges play the game too. I find it a good decision to allow people that like challenging combat and people that are there for the story and are not interested in to play the same game. I think BG3 would be like that too. I'll say it again because you kinda nitpick a part of a sentence out of what I said. while the game difficulty settings are better than most games there is still work to be done in my opinion. It doesn't mean what they already did is bad or unappreciated. quite the opposite. When it comes to what I specifically like about RPGs, I like it to be challenging, but not too challenging as to force me to have perfect builds and only use specific weapons and such. right now I can kind of work it out in normal mode but some battles are still too tough in my opinion. the interesting thing about it is that for the most part, I use the builds that were provided by the game itself, so it's not like I'm necessarily build my characters really bad or something of the sort. perhaps it's just a matter of git good, but I can say for certain that lowering the difficulty doesn't help, because then enemies die in two or three hits. The only thing that kinda helps is the party damage slider, but than I can have a very long battle of miss miss miss miss miss miss until I hit something. and to be honest, I'm not sure it's a problem with the difficulty settings.
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Dec 2020
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Like I said earlier and I'm trying to be very objective here, I think some elements of the story are improved a lot. The pacing is much much better, you don't feel like nothing happens and all the things you do feel important enough and not like filler. The companions roster is the best in recent years at the very least, and of course not all of them perfectly written but the good ones are really good. Moreover, some of them are actually unique.
The story is still not too great at least until chapter 3, which is a significant chunk of the game, but the companions are good enough to carry it imo. And since I don't care for the gameplay almost at all, and outright despise buffinder system for the most part, if the story was bad I would have ditched this game a long time ago That's pretty much my stance on this too. There's a reason I haven't mentioned much about the actual gameplay. The combat being balanced around RTwP already lowers my standards by quite a bit in that department, so any thoughts about balance I would have for such a system would be a foregone conclusion. Thankfully Kingmaker's characters and aytpical plot premise was interesting enough for me to tolerate it, and the superior overall pacing of WotR and the amazing interactions between its party members are stellar enough that I don't even care (along with turn-based being available from launch). Though I will say that some party members are very unique on a mechanical level if you leave them single classed, which deepens my appreciation of them. Like Seelah potentially transitioning into a mounted tank/bruiser, Lann being a tank archer that later gets a personal dimension door and ability to attack of opportunity with a bow so that he can potentially warp up to and shotgun enemy mages and archers, and Camellia essentially being a front line tank druid-type character that trades shapeshifting for hexes and elemental weapon enchants. (I really hope the next game goes even further with mechanically unique companions. We've had a ranger in both games so far, even if Arueshalae trades an animal companion for the ability to share her favored enemy bonuses with the party instead. If it's based on Iron Gods, we'll probably get the gunslinger Lirianne as the featured iconic, but I hope there's also an Eldritch Archer or a similar spellcasting archer somewhere in the cast too. WotR actually has one big gaping hole among its known cast, and it's that none of the known companions use two-handed melee weapons. Or well, Regill does, but I think on a mechanical level, his hooked hammer is treated as dual wielding for feat purposes despite being a two-handed weapon. Haven't used him in my main party much, even though I really appreciate his writing and the perspective he brings to the cast. Also, let's just say there's a reason I specify known companions up there. There's strong hinting in-game at one more that does wield two-handed weapons, which would bring the non-path specific companion total up to 12. One could say this might be too many companions and that they all can't be written that well for that reason alone. A younger me would have believed such a thing, but WotR unexpectedly blew me away in that regard, especially in a way that it appears that all of the companions are framed as pieces of a larger whole through their party interactions. While most other cRPG companions seem to be written as if they exist in their own bubble, I somehow never got that impression from the WotR companions at all.) I'm a lot more harsh on BG3 in comparison because it's a turn-based cRPG adaptation of a turn-based tabletop game, so there's not much excuse to make gigantic balancing missteps like high ground advantage/disadvantage. The limited pool of companions have yet to grip me in a similar way as WotR's have too. Considering Larian has long made their reputation based on the combat systems of their prior games, of course people are going to be especially harsh on the combat design while not having much expectations in regards to the writing. We most definitely should have another companion or two available during the EA phase of BG3, though. I remember during WotR alpha testing last year, there was one early game companion that wasn't available during phase 1, and she just showed up out of nowhere in our party after the prologue during phase 2 (the wizard Nenio). The biggest criticism of phase 1 was that we were hard locked into using Woljif or an arcane caster MC if we wanted one in our party, and Woljif was actually unavailable during the last dungeon featured in alpha phase 1 for plot reasons. Beta 1 began implementing her quests, party banter, and a proper introduction into our party, and it was a lot different from what people expected.
Last edited by Saito Hikari; 22/08/21 06:45 PM.
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veteran
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Joined: Sep 2017
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.... Except you are not being objective at all, no offence intended. The biggest problem (or strength, depends who you ask) of WotR is that it is a niche game, and the developers develop the game specifically for their niche audience that seem to like the things we hate (powergaming, minmaxing, etc). I feel like more work should have been done with the difficulty settings, that while are better than most game, still lacks more customisation that might have made the game more accessible. For the most part, I still find the difficulty to make the game either hard and sometimes too hard or too easy. More work with the difficulty settings? O.O As you can see you have 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc. And, like kingmaker, you can turn off or put the crusade management in automatic mode if you do not like that kind of strategy minigame with minimal story impact. I mean, if you have that kind of customization and you want even more because it does not reach the sweet spot you will like for your game... well... I do not think the problem is in the game. You simply cannot ask the devs to adjust the difficulty to every player in the game, but you could ask that they provide the more options they could with the budget and human power they have. And they did. Evidently, it´s not the type of game do you like, or even the tabletop it´s based on. that´s fair; but it seems you are just finding fault in everything in the game, even things that are objectively not there. ... And just for the record, the fact that kingmaker and WoTR are hard games nobody argues, but I also have to say I finished the game with a party of 5 bards, so the need of what you called "powergaming" and min-maxing are only needed for the harder difficulties. Pretty sure in story mode with the lowest "damage to the party" setting the IA wins almost all the fights for you with autoattacks (I know that for a fact because my sister do not like combat and management, so she played the game like a visual novel, just to read and roleplay) You still need to beat some enemies that have particular resistances with the right spells or weapons, but you have all the time in the world to do so in the lowest difficulty settings. As I said it´s a hard game. it´s like playing dark souls and complain that you are dying. Yeah, it´s a hard game from starters. Nobody said otherwise. But unlike the dark souls series you can lower the difficulty to a manageable point, letting players that like challenges play the game too. I find it a good decision to allow people that like challenging combat and people that are there for the story and are not interested in to play the same game. I think BG3 would be like that too. I'll say it again because you kinda nitpick a part of a sentence out of what I said. while the game difficulty settings are better than most games there is still work to be done in my opinion. It doesn't mean what they already did is bad or unappreciated. quite the opposite. When it comes to what I specifically like about RPGs, I like it to be challenging, but not too challenging as to force me to have perfect builds and only use specific weapons and such. right now I can kind of work it out in normal mode but some battles are still too tough in my opinion. the interesting thing about it is that for the most part, I use the builds that were provided by the game itself, so it's not like I'm necessarily build my characters really bad or something of the sort. perhaps it's just a matter of git good, but I can say for certain that lowering the difficulty doesn't help, because then enemies die in two or three hits. The only thing that kinda helps is the party damage slider, but than I can have a very long battle of miss miss miss miss miss miss until I hit something. and to be honest, I'm not sure it's a problem with the difficulty settings. As I said above, there are e 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc. If with that kind of customization you still have problems with the overall difficulty of the game, I do not think the problem is in the videogame. Let´s be realistic, not many games will offer you more than this, you will hardly find games with more options than the ones offered. If you still have issues, maybe it´s simply not the game for you. But It does not mean it´s a bad game or could be enjoyable for a lot of people. If you want even more control to make your experience with the game exactly what you want, you can make your own mods and do the perfect game for your tastes. Check here https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9m6sos/modding_pathfinder_kingmaker/
Last edited by _Vic_; 22/08/21 06:13 PM.
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Mar 2020
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As I said above, there are e 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc. If with that kind of customization you still have problems with the overall difficulty of the game, I do not think the problem is in the videogame. Maybe it´s not for you because, let´s be realistic, not many games will offer you more than this, you will hardly find games with more options than the ones offered. If you want even more control to make your experience with the game exactly what you want, you can make your own mods and do the perfect game for your tastes. Check here https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9m6sos/modding_pathfinder_kingmaker/That's not an answer ("go mod it yourself"). Not many games provide such an extensive difficulty options, that's true. The fact that we got this means owlcat are interested in providing us options to customize the game to our liking. I think it's not perfect in execution, and I don't understand why do you get so defensive about it, since my point here is not shit on the game. I love this game
Last edited by Abits; 22/08/21 06:13 PM.
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veteran
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Joined: Sep 2017
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Because you insist on being objective when you are not.... like at all.
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Mar 2020
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Because you insist on being objective when you are not.... like at all. The "objective" part was in regards to the story. I thought that was clear. Edit - you conflated and mixed two completely separate massages I wrote
Last edited by Abits; 22/08/21 06:17 PM.
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veteran
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Joined: Sep 2017
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As I said above, there are e 7 difficulty modes and you can customize from the difficulty and strength of the enemies to the number of the enemies you face in every encounter, weak critical hits against the party, party speed, encumbrance, dead party members rise after combat, etc. If with that kind of customization you still have problems with the overall difficulty of the game, I do not think the problem is in the videogame. Maybe it´s not for you because, let´s be realistic, not many games will offer you more than this, you will hardly find games with more options than the ones offered. If you want even more control to make your experience with the game exactly what you want, you can make your own mods and do the perfect game for your tastes. Check here https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9m6sos/modding_pathfinder_kingmaker/That's not an answer ("go mod it yourself"). Not many games provide such an extensive difficulty options, that's true. The fact that we got this means owlcat are interested in providing us options to customize the game to our liking. I think it's not perfect in execution, and I don't understand why do you get so defensive about it, since my point here is not shit on the game. I love this game So "get good, practice" is not an answer, because the game is hard and if you do not have some skills you may suffer from high difficulties (even if you have tons of options to lower them to your tastes) So "mod it yourself" its not an answer because you want a game with the difficulty tailored perfectly to your personal and particular tastes but you do not want to work for it. What´s the answer you seek, I wonder? ED: That said, I do not particularly care if you like it or not, if you play it or not, but I do not think you are trying to be particularly objective. I do not think you are not aware of the nightmare that is the option to add more enemies or with different tactics to an entire campaign. there is a reason many many games do not do it or simply add more HP and damage to the enemies in higher difficulties. Saying the in the game "more work should have done with the difficulty" is pissing in the honest efforts of the encoders there. They do not have to, as many other games do, but they did. The game has (a lot) of flaws, possibly more until patched repeatedly, but pissing in the honest efforts of the encoders there offends me personally and profesionally, TBH, since it seems you do not really bother to do your own work to improve the game to your particular tastes.
Last edited by _Vic_; 22/08/21 07:00 PM.
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Definitely not an answer you can provide unless you are an owlcat developer but thank you for your concern
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Oct 2017
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I like how you have to be more than "daring" simply to play the core rules...
"We make our choices and take what comes and the rest is void."
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Dec 2020
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Pathfinder core rules? Damn straight that's more than daring lol. Without a GM making sure every encounter isn't a TPK, core rules are brutal lol
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addict
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addict
Joined: Jul 2019
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I like how you have to be more than "daring" simply to play the core rules... What they consider "core" is way harder than the PnP. I really hope they tone down the stat bloat for WotR.
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Sep 2017
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The "center options" are ok, but "hard" and "unfair" are still insane. The strengthened enemies have some mad AC, saves & CMD. You can still choose to pick "hard" but lower the enemy stats in the options if stat bloat is what bothers you the most. I am playing a hunter trickster, acrobatics variant, and the CMD of most of the enemies even with a Mythic trickster is impassable in Hard mode. PD: I still love tricksters, btw. The trickster path is hillarious.
Last edited by _Vic_; 22/08/21 10:58 PM.
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veteran
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I like how you have to be more than "daring" simply to play the core rules... What they consider "core" is way harder than the PnP. I really hope they tone down the stat bloat for WotR. Well, so far they didn't. It was by far my disliked aspect of the beta. I'm not even against the existence of a "masochist mode", but if you name a mode as "Core rules" and describe it as the closest to the P&P experience, you should put the bare minimum of effort to make so that it matches the description. Regardless of how that annoys me in principle if things don't change I already sort-of decided that I will play at "daring" at most or tweak individual settings, because beta 3 went out of its way to NOT be fun and feel constantly frustrating with its encounter design (even if in the end I still won every encounter), especially played in turn-based mode (which is the only mode I have interest to play). It's also worth noting that the gap in difficulty with what they call "Normal" is enormous. You go from being constantly one step from being destroyed to barely even needing to pay attention in a fight.
Last edited by Tuco; 22/08/21 11:18 PM.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jun 2012
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It's also worth noting that the gap in difficulty with what they call "Normal" is enormous. You go from being constantly one step from being destroyed to barely even needing to pay attention in a fight. Probably on account of the fact that the "normal" difficulty has weaker criticals. So you don't get hit for, um 60+ damage by level 6-8 enemies who for some reason have their Str in Dex in their twenties? When one hit from a random troll sends your barbarian into negative HP, something is clearly not right, and it would also seem that Challenging and higher add to their critical confirmation rolls/critical threat, because boy do they land them often. I've played tabletop Pathfinder, and apart from the usual early-level D&D displays of myopia on characters and an occasional unlucky roll, it flows well enough and is about as close a thing to 3.5 apart from 3.5 itself that you get these days (except I've heard that the second edition apparently changed a lot of things?). Kingmaker is like having a DM who has the local steroid-fiending heavyweight champions be your level 1 party's opponents in an inn brawl.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jun 2020
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That was my first reaction to Kingmaker, too. I didn't understand why they buffed up the enemies so much. I really dummied down the difficulty setting before I discovered the turn-based mod that players made (then a developers made their turn-based addition to the game). With turn-based, I could weather higher difficulties and even enjoy myself playing with them. But, yeah I am not a huge fan of a common bandit having an epic ability score array...
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veteran
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Joined: Mar 2020
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I think it all depends on the condition of the game by release.
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veteran
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Joined: Mar 2020
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but if you name a mode as "Core rules" and describe it as the closest to the P&P experience, you should put the bare minimum of effort to make so that it matches the description. I must say, I felt somewhat betrayed, when I discovered midway through my P:KM playthrough that "core rules" included extra stat buff for enemies (on top what I assume are baked in manipulation). I think Faceless Sister during priest dude quests was my breaking point - it was the worst example of bating players into unescapable difficult encounter without foreshadowing the difficulty I have seen in the game, plus an enemy we have faced before and killed with ease, this time buffed for no explainable reason. I will most likely dive into custom settings this time around, and cut as much bullcrap as I can.
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journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Oct 2020
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Owlcat are based in Poland and arent necessarily all about diversity and gender neutral crap like Larian is. I think Larain have gone waaaayyyyy to far with this stuff and Owlcat have completely tuned it down eg Larian has gone woke and Owlcat are not woke. They are located in Russia, and you are very wrong about Owlcat political focus. They really want to please the Western audience, the game has a very great emphasis on lgbt culture, many people who criticize them for it was banned in their Russian community group, they even unleashed a "cancel" program in relation to one of the youtuber who made videos about ingame mechanics and dare to joke about their emphasis on woke. I apologize to the moders for mention of this uncomfortable theme, but the truth must be said. They are wolves in sheep's skin.
Last edited by arion; 24/08/21 02:10 PM.
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![[Linked Image from i.ibb.co]](https://i.ibb.co/fdqCFJ0/5jdaz4.jpg)
