It's frustrating to me that 20 year old games are being used to argue why Larian's bad design or implementation is "ok" in BG3.
First of all, why? Is there a large part of the player base who actually enjoy exploiting or cheating in a game? Does it create a sense of accomplishment? Why should we have exploits that ignore the rules of the game?
Secondly, there's a difference between intentionally and unintentionally allowing exploits. Larian have a tendency towards intentional exploitation. They leave exploits in when they could fix them. Clearly someone over there likes to win by cheating a little.
Example. The Ogre encounter in BG3. You can place your party on the roof and just whittle them down with ranged weapons. They either stand still and do nothing or throw stuff at the ceiling without a line of sight and can never hit you. In PnP a DM would have the Ogres smash the walls to bring the whole building down and make the party roll Acrobatics checks or fall down as it shakes. Larian insisted on having a HUGE emphasis on verticality. But now that verticality is undermining the game itself by making it trivially easy. I didn't feel accomplished killing them that way. I felt like BG3 sucked. And before the inevitable "if you don't like it don't use it" argument, don't. I will use it, and the game will suck. If Larian insist on having such verticality but can't do what the PnP DM would do, they have failed and their game sucks.
Yes, and I hate to resort to any form of generational finger-pointing but my experience as a Raid Leader in Vanilla WoW in 2004-2006 and Classic WoW 2019- 2021 could not have been more different. *Generally* modern gamers do not have the focus, the discipline or the integrity of older gamers.
Luckily Classic WoW was HEAVILY nerfed, had far less bugs, and we had much better connection speeds so all encounters were made much easier. Boss abilities in Classic were tuned down or removed from Ragnaros to Kel Thuzad. It was made stupidly easy, and still people would prefer to cheat if it saved 2 minutes.
Heigan the Unclean had an exploit that allowed you to stand on the platform and attack him and avoid the Heigan Dance (which even with Modern connections and Systems we had half the people in the raid unable to do it no matter how easy I tried to make it for them) - until Blizzo fixed it a month later.
I could not even imagine having Modern gamers spending 6 hours learning a single encounter like we did in ye olden days, they would all ragequit.
* There ARE exceptions, I have met younger gamers who play games with a serious level of integrity and they know why that is so important.
