104 réponses à ce sujet

[Slink Saberknocker]

That's the problem with these arguments that are "hard to put a finger on." If you don't actually agree with the sentiment, nobody can give a reason why you should.

True...alot of this is personal preference and varies from person to person.  For me, having a real consequence to having a player die...either the hassle of having to replay a tough fight through reload, pay to get them rezzed or losing a character added urgency to every battle that started going south.

As for the challenge, I'll take it. Kangaxx needs someone with 6th level mage spells and easily affordable equipment to be completely doomed. That's all. This might make him slightly harder than his DA equivalent, but I'm not certain.

Oh sure...in hindsight it's easy.  I'd hazard to guess that it wasn't so simple on the first playthrough however many years ago.  If you went cold rolling into that one the first go around and took it to him - then that's pretty strong.



All that said, I've tried to play BGII again and can't get past the graphics and all the text dialogue. 

[Slink Saberknocker]

On a side note...I don't think you could have a CRPG with NPC permadeath. I'd probably end up having to fight the end boss by myself and I'm not big into solo play.

[flixerflax]

Catcher wrote...

      Here's a question for those who want a Character death mechanic: Why not enforce one yourself?

I did, unwittingly, on my first playthrough.  I simply assumed that when a character was killed and their portrait replaced with a SKULL that they were dead.  And I thought that as in Arcanum, Divine Divinity, Witcher, etc. dead=dead.  So any party member going down meant a failed battle and an instant reload.  Only later did I learn that the game had more of a Dungeon Siege approach to party member death (but with no distinction between falling unconscious and falling down dead like that game did).  In fact, I've never seen an RPG without the 'action' prefix that was so lenient on the player for dying as DA is.

[soteria]

True based is more fun in pen and paper with real life dm then in any video game -- in video games it is a cross between Red Alert style of thinking and action based. One can argue it is based on skill, but not reflexes. It is how well one can make a char build and how to understand the AI instead how quick one's fingers are.

An apt analogy. I've always maintained that RPGs have a lot more in common with the strategy genre than anything else. The ability to pause, though, takes a lot of the skill out of it, while most RTS games require you to process a lot of information very rapidly and issue decisive and correct commands.

Oh sure...in hindsight it's easy. I'd hazard to guess that it wasn't so simple on the first playthrough however many years ago. If you went cold rolling into that one the first go around and took it to him - then that's pretty strong.

Also, any dragon could get shredded with traps pretty easily, and that didn't take any special knowledge or experience. I'm told there was also an exploit that worked by talking to someone, then canceling and attacking for five seconds. Right before the round ends, pause and talk to them again. Repeat. Oh, and Kangaxx didn't actually require one to be that high of a level--the mace of disruption +4 wasn't that hard to get, and scrolls of protection from magic, though rare, did the trick. The dumb thing about that fight was that the *only* part that was "hard" was his imprisonment spell. When I was trying to learn that fight I could get to that stage of the fight with extreme consistency and ease, but then Imprisonment killed me, every time, until I got frustrated and used the Slayer. Imagine my surprise...

[HoonDing]

Baldur's Gate caused you to reload anyway, if a party member got 'chunked' or level drained to 0. So in the end its death system was meaningless, save to add some D&D lore to the game.



As for Kangaxx, Protection from Undead scrolls were plenty in the game and work against all undead. It was just a case of being able to hurt him, since he required +4 weapons to hit & as a demi-lich was immune to level 8 spells and below.

[AlanC9]

aaniadyen wrote...
lol, I don't take much, if anything on these boards seriously anymore, so most of my posts are at least half joking. To answer your question, though, yeah. Monsters will attack your petrified character in BG 1. It's kind of a moot point though because the only places you encounter it are really bassilisks (an entire three areas in the game). All you need is to have protection from petrification ready when you know you're about to fight some and it's not even a problem any longer.

Thanks. I guess I never noticed it because I always engaged basilisks with ranged weapons and summoned creatures up front, just in case the protection spells went down.

[AlanC9]

Slink Saberknocker wrote...
Oh sure...in hindsight it's easy.  I'd hazard to guess that it wasn't so simple on the first playthrough however many years ago.  If you went cold rolling into that one the first go around and took it to him - then that's pretty strong. 

Probably impossible without metagaming. I'm not 100% certain they implemented demiliches per the MM, for example, and even if they did how would you know that was a demilich before you were in the room with him. Still, with a Protection From Undead scroll and any +4 weapon you'll beat him.

Anyway, BG2 doesn't offer difficulty. What it offers is new monster types that maybe hose you once. Then you've learned the trick and you beat them easily after the reload.

[AlanC9]

flixerflax wrote...
I did, unwittingly, on my first playthrough.  I simply assumed that when a character was killed and their portrait replaced with a SKULL that they were dead.  And I thought that as in Arcanum, Divine Divinity, Witcher, etc. dead=dead.  So any party member going down meant a failed battle and an instant reload.  Only later did I learn that the game had more of a Dungeon Siege approach to party member death (but with no distinction between falling unconscious and falling down dead like that game did).

I snarked about this upthread, but now I'm actually curious why people didn't see the "Injuries" section of the manual.

In fact, I've never seen an RPG without the 'action' prefix that was so lenient on the player for dying as DA is.

NWN1 and 2. The KotOR games. PS:T, though that's a special case. Several older games, like Betrayal at Krondor. And games without a party can't count since any death is, by definition, a TPW. Anyone who thinks DA is all that unusual hasn't played many RPGs.

Edit: actually, the BG games are the outlier here, since games with pregenerated companions typically don't also include permadeath.

Modifié par AlanC9, 02 juin 2010 - 03:59 .

[soteria]

Personally, I purchased DA via digital download and never read the manual. Not a fan of the pdf manuals that are increasingly common--I like to hold my reading material in my hands. Having frequented these boards pre-release, though, a manual probably wasn't necessary in my case.

NWN1 and 2. The KotOR games. PS:T, though that's a special case. Several older games, like Betrayal at Krondor. And games without a party can't count since any death is, by definition, a TPW. Anyone who thinks DA is all that unusual hasn't played many RPGs.

Also, I believe every single Final Fantasy game treats "death" this way: no one dies until everyone is dead, and party members are revived at the close of combat (usually with 1 hp). And yeah, both Betrayal games, I guess. Maybe I need to play more games, but I'm having a hard time thinking of another RPG that *did* have permadeath for unique companions. Ironically, the "action rpg" Diablo II was *less* lenient on companion death than DA.

[AlanC9]

As usual, soteria, I agree. I think they only send around PDF manuals because the print manufacturing process requires them anyway, so they're free. I'd prefer an rtf file or some such, myself. You could always print the PDF, of course -- that's what the format's for.



I think we can add Fallout 2 as a game with permadeath for unique companions. Maybe FO1 too, though in that case the design intent was that the companions would only be temporary anyway. Permadeath for unique companions seems to have been just a late-90s fad, like FMV.

[The Hardest Thing In The World]

I miss Biff the Understudy.

[TMZuk]

elearon1 wrote...

You know what I miss from some of the older CRPGs?  NPC death.  I miss having to actually go to a temple carrying your friend's body to get it resurrected if he got killed during an adventure - unless you were fortunate enough to have a rare and expensive magic item with limited charges you could carry along with you.

........................

Am I the only one who misses this?

No. I always had a priest in the party who could raise, or even played a fighter-cleric multiclass. Nothing beats the paranoia of the Underdark in BG2, ever.

But really, what i miss the most is the sheer epic size of games like BG, BG2 and Torment. When you finished DA, you were just getting in to BG2. It seems that technical progress means smaller and smaller games.

[flixerflax]

AlanC9 wrote...

I snarked about this upthread, but now I'm actually curious why people didn't see the "Injuries" section of the manual.

NWN1 and 2. The KotOR games. PS:T, though that's a special case. Several older games, like Betrayal at Krondor. And games without a party can't count since any death is, by definition, a TPW. Anyone who thinks DA is all that unusual hasn't played many RPGs.

Edit: actually, the BG games are the outlier here, since games with pregenerated companions typically don't also include permadeath.

I saw it.  I suppose I thought a comrade "falling" (the word used in
the manual) in battle was different from outright death.  There is of
course elsewhere in the manual a picture with the skull and a label
"fallen comrade."  ::Shrugs:: I don't regret the way I played my first
character.  It made me a better player and didn't add much frustration
since it seemed like death was being handled the way it 'should' have
been.

You're right. Haven't played KotOR or NWN games.  So I maybe I shouldn't talk like I know the genre inside and out.  I was
mainly thinking of single player games, which can vary death mechanics
pretty widely, from no penalty whatsoever in the action side (Sacred) to complete
game over (Divinity, Witcher).  As for death in party-based games, I
was mostly thinking PS:T, BG, Jade Empire, Arcanum (party member death
is permanent in that one, probably the harshest I've encountered), as
well as some of the action ones like Dungeon Siege and Silverfall, all of which impose more penalties/impediments to getting your party back to life.

[AlanC9]

I wouldn't put PS:T on that list. TNO can't die at all, and he can bring party members back for free.



And using skulls in the DA interface was poor design, obviously.

[Eudaemonium]

soteria wrote...

Also, I believe every single Final Fantasy game treats "death" this way: no one dies until everyone is dead, and party members are revived at the close of combat (usually with 1 hp).

That's pretty-much a staple of all JRPGs, to be honest, which tend to focus on a small motley group of companiosn, rarely over 10 and more-commonly less. Though one I know does have perma-death is the turn-based strategy RPG series Fire Emblem. That has unique character units (not simply the nameless goons you churn out in most strategy RPGs), and if they die in combat, they're gone. Forever. I heard that the recent strategy RPG on PS3 Valkyria Chronicles used a similar system, where if a character fell in combat and you didn't reach their body within a certain number of turns they perma-deathed on you.

It is, by and large, pretty rare though, in any RPG that has named, unique companions.

[maxernst]

Fallout, Fallout 2 and possibly Arcanum (can't remember for sure) are the only ones I can remember where companion death was a real threat. Well, maybe BG1, but in BG2, I always had a cleric with raise dead, and I kept around a few scrolls for the major threats (like stone to flesh)...in practice, death was only a marginally greater inconvenience than in Dragon Age.



And as I said before, most of the time when people are defeated in battle in real life, they don't die instantly, so the Dragon Age injury approach makes a lot of sense...though the impact of injuries could probably be greater.



And yes, I'm amused that I wasn't the only who didn't RTFM and got overstressed by the skull icon that appears when your character gets knocked out.



A pen 'n paper game, Rolemaster, had a death mechanic I particularly liked. When a character "died" (usually due to massive criticals than hit point damage), there was a grace period during which the character's soul had not left his body. During the grace period, if the character's damage was healed he would return to life, and the grace period can be extended by fairly low level characters. A level 5 cleric could cast "lifekeeping" to keep the soul around and "preservation" to prevent the body from degrading further for hours and that period would be extended to days for higher level characters. Actual resurrection was something like 20th level, but most of the time wasn't necessary.

[Sylixe]

The difference in comparing "difficulty between BG and DAO is that in BG you definetly learned new strategies and approached fights differently after the first or second time through. In DAO i loaded the game played for 25 mins after ostegar and ramped it up to Nightmare for a challenge and never got one. The fights were WAY to easy and the enemy AI was just astoundingly BAD.



You can ramp up their dmg and HP's all you want but as long as the enemy AI plays that stupidly you can always win regardless. In BG the enemy was equally matched against you in it's selection of feats, attacks an spells. Not to mention the huge variety in classes you could come upon in combination.



It still boggles my mind just how easy it is to kill the High Dragon, Flemyth and the Arch Demon. One would assume these should be pinnacle or at least epic level contests of combat. What you get is just the stupid AI behavior ever and a severly limited selection of options that the games AI can make in combat. Gax is about on the same level but even he isn't all that tough after you see exactly what types of effects he cycles through in the first few rounds of combat.

[AlanC9]

Does this count as thread necromancy yet?



There's something to that argument. Since D&D has lots of different tiers of creatures and spells, when you break through into a new tier you can be surprised... once. Mage battles get hard for a second when you start running into enemies with Spell Trap or some such and find that Secret Word no longer takes out their spell defense.



Doesn't help much with DA. Unless you're willing to go back to attack/ protecting buff/ debuff gameplay, that is.



And having just wrapped SoA this afternoon, I don't think those boss battles are any harder than boss fights in DA. I had a tough time with the black dragon, but that's only because I was lazy with my prebuffing.

[beggargirl]

The Hardest Thing In The World wrote...

I miss Biff the Understudy.

I used to get Biff in the greatest places!

[Sattva]

I agree with elearon1, the game loses something, if companion's death becomes so trivial.

I remember my first time playing DA:O, when one of my companions fell, I thought my heart would stop for a moment, but then he rose at the end of battle and it didn't seem to me quite right (maybe if the portraits didn't display skulls, I would not feel so much cheated)

[Relshar]

I remeber one play through in BG1 where one of the main party members character got hit with a critical, there was no body to carry back.

[AlanC9]

Hell, in ToB I've had someone die a couple of times in the same fight. And I mean really dead, not just injured like in DA. So this problem has been with us for a while



Sure, having the body destroyed meant you'd have to reload in the BG games unless you wanted to dump the character.. Would forcing a reload be acceptable in DA?

[jonnyblueballs]

Yeah, you're probably alone in this.

beggargirl wrote...

The Hardest Thing In The World
wrote...

I miss Biff the Understudy.

I used to get
Biff in the greatest places!

I don't remember ever getting that. Could be wrong though.

Modifié par jonnyblueballs, 17 juin 2010 - 07:43 .

[maxernst]

I think Biff only appeared if you had killed some character who was essential to the plot...I only got him once (I think I caught a friendly character with a fireball).

[NKKKK]

Being knocked out isn't the same as death