Baldurs Gate 3 & Game Dev recently

Off-topic
101

The balance is terrible for what it’s worth, but like you say it’s not the rulesets casuing that, it’s the actual envioromental design and the core of the design philosophy being on choice. The game can be broken extremely easily, by exploiting mechanics that have been implemented in a way that effectively just went ‘balance doesnt matter, its upt ot he player if they want to do the thing that breaks the game’.

This only really causes a problem with stealth and combat breaking ai, which is less a balance issues, and more an ai issue. (From what I can gather the ai just simply doesn’t have anything telling it what to do if the only thing that attacked it, is now hidden, out of range of where sight would be, and on elevation. It’s an oversight that creates a lack of balance, as it renders stealth archer op, in yet another rpg)

102

I fucking love Slormancer… that, and Chronicon. Such enjoyable games that don’t suffer from the same balance micromanagement like big name titles do. They allow players to get obscenely powerful because, that’s the what players enjoy. I still don’t know why more games haven’t adopted the crafting systems they have. Just up the crafting costs, and throw in rarer material drop rates, and they could fit into any *RPG on the market. But no, the purists would cry about it just being an item editor, so it’s never even considered :\

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103

I wouldn’t call my self a ARPG purist, actually quite the opposite, I really like if devs try to incorporate new and interesting things or try a different take on well established systems.
But I still highly dislike the idea of too deterministic crafting.
It takes so much excitment away from actually finding items out in the fields.

LE really already is on the edge of being too much like that.

104

Then the Chronicon/Slormancer system is a better system. Randomly crafting affixes from the pool is FAR more random than the rune system in LE, and can get extremely cost prohibitive, in a hurry. Imagine if getting your affix(es) was done via Chaos Runes only. Granted, in Slormancer/Chronicon you have infinite attempts, but you need crafting mats to do so. Chronicon is far more generous with them, I’ll admit. But in Slormancer, getting 3 perfect rare affixes is a pretty hefty challenge for a single item, much less your entire gear load. Well after they altered the costs and rare material drop rates.

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105

It has to do with them being offline games imo.

There is no reason to restrict the player, there is no leaderboards, no players comparing each other in town etc. It has that classic rng feel where you can outgear/outgrind any threat and just become crazy.

This only matters if there is an online space where items are shown to each other, chris has talked about this in regards to PoE, items have such insane variance because it drives player interaction with each other on social media when someone posts a crazy broken cool item.

For single player games that basically does not matter. Because you can just hack items in if you really want. having a +1200 shoulder piece in slormancer and posting it on social media just shows me you edited your gear most likely. I dont really care because its single player and whatever is fun for you is what is important.

But for online service games thats just not the situation.

So I can see both sides, but I personally am a bit tired of the extreme lotto that many games in the space have just so that people can circle jerk on reddit.

2 Likes
106

This is very subjective. While this might apply to some people, I don’t care if a game is online, single player or LAN coop or whatever.

I still feel the same about this, where finding items naturally feels way better than “crafting” items.

It is never good to talk in absolutes with stuff like this, there is always something in between.

2 Likes
107

But they almost, with a very high %, hovering in the high 90s, never are better. Crafting always wins, because of the insane nature of randomness, combined with the sheer amount of options available. Unless you want only 4 or 5 suffixes and prefixes available, on a single base per slot, relying on drops is a near-impossibility.

Maybe that would make for an interesting server/playmode option – No Crafting. And then we could see just how reliable drops actually are.

108

Always love a good analogy… :wink:

109

@Heavy are you talking about PURE finding? Meaning the object you find, untouched by any manipulation at all?

If that’s the case, then I have to agree with @DirePenguin on this. While it certainly would ‘feel’ better once I find that “good” item, the time between when that occurred would be, um, tedious, to put it mildly.

I think I sort of like the middle ground. I do like finding good items, certainly, but I also like finding those good items, knowing I have the ability to make a few tweaks here and there to be prime real estate. So I enjoy both finding and crafting. I get super hyped when I find an item with 45+ FP on it and three key affixes. I know I’ve got the potential to get something really good. And at higher levels this doesn’t occur that often. I’d hate to have to find something with four affixes that I have zero ability to tweak. I’d be dead before I found some stuff. :joy: :rofl:

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110

Yes exactly.
Doesn’t matter if its Unique items, or good rare/exalted items.
Just items, where when they drop and you shortly look at them and you are like:“YES NICE”

Crafting has its own “excitment” moment for sure, but for me LE crafting is (yet) to simple.

Hopefully we will get some more crafting mats in teh future, that will have different ways to manipulate items.

111

That happens with, or without crafting. Even with the deterministic “item editor” crafting of Slormancer, there are items I just won’t deal with, simply because the time/cost investment to craft them would be monumental. On the same token, when a well-rolled item drops, with many of the stats I’m looking for, I get excited.

I just can’t understand this (to me at least) irrational hatred/fear of crafting systems where you can actually get the stats you want, that many people seem to have. It’s like there’s some subconscious love for frustrating RNG grinds, just for grinding-sake.

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112

If I understood it right, yeah LE could use of more awesome rare drops. Everything is around finding uniques with LP and the pre selected exalteds. Or finding good exalted to put the wanted affixes. Everything “follows a pattern”.

To me this has relation with another problem, that LE is on the edge of being too much restrictive, players are forever chasing god-tier items or S-tier itens but never are able to achieve the item.

113

This is a multi-layered topic, but the TLDR for me is:

  • Rare/Exalted items are rarely exciting, because they will only become exciting after crafting is successful, but because crafting is very RNG-heavy, even a very good weapon can turn out to be bad/not useable

  • When crafting does “work out”, it is exciting, which is cool, but its not he same as actually finding good items for me.

  • This also leads to mediocre items sometimes getting insanely good, because of very lucky crafting outcomes. This can be good, but also is bad at the same time, because essentially this puts stress/fomo on your loot filter strictness and makes you wanna pick up medocre items as well.

  • LE is lacking universally good drops (something akin to a Divine Orb/Exalted Orb in PoE for your generic few minutes/hours session drops that can happen very frequently). This takes away a lot of “feeling of progression” during later parts of the endgame, when you play for several hours of play sessio nwithout any noteable progress.

I just don’t like “delaying” the excitment away from the part, that should be the most exciting about a loot-driven game

114

Your point 4 sorta is exactly why you run into these problems with loot based games though.

After a point all that matters is luck, if you have no crafting, you can go hours/days without any progress

In games with 100% deterministic crafting I never leave a play session going “I made no progress” because I always obtained materials that allows me to build towards my finished goal.

I think you can actually have both, its about balancing the mat requirements vs luck.

For your example, PoE is perfect. There is high variance strats like Div card farming or currency farming MF where your profit hinges on hitting a big drop or getting that div card to drop.

Breach and legion offer you much lower profit over time, but reward you for every single encounter. You will never leave a breach or legion without at least one splinter.

When you create a game with nothing other then loot drops, and no way to modify them, you are just creating a loot box simulation. You can end up with an extremely bad streak that ends up making you never progress for days at a time.

Its why people so desperately ask for ways to add lp to items, or reverse bad crafting or what have you. Because people want to feel progression and not simply pull the one armed bandit 10k times to come up empty.

I think the experience of being excited by what pops out much better fits in genres like Rogue/roguelites. Where your experience with items happens over a short to medium play time, and sometimes you hit your first item room and its some crazy item and you roll over the game, and then the next you struggle all game until you lose the battle of attrition and run out of health because you just got really bad items. But its okay, you go next.

I think in longterm progression style games you really do need to have a good mix of excitement for loot as well as a way to always be working towards a long term goal in a meaningful way.

Thats really what LE lacks currently, is there is no long term goals you obtain by putting in hours. whether you put in 50, or 500 hours, if your goal is X item, hours put in just puts you closer to infinity chances which means you hit closer to true statistics. That isnt really that great.

I really would love it if loot alone could be exciting like it is in a roguelite, but that would require dumbing down items to a degree that would lose the charm of having so many different item affixes.

edit; this is also a bit offtopic, someone make a 500th item thread so we can bitch about opinions on pretend items hehe

115

LE is not a longterm progression style game. The game is over when you beat T4 dungeons. You can think that it is, but its not. Monolits are mindless grind, T4 is just to get some gear.

Longterm means you are working towards something. What are you working towards with crafting slowly your gear? Which endgame exactly. When you already beated both.

116

Maybe I’ve been playing aRPGs wrong all these years but isn’t this kinda the definition? D3, Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, D2…they all had certain end bosses that were the pinnacle of the game. You worked to beat those. When you did, you worked for better gear to beat them faster. Or try a different build that might be better?

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117

Did you just quote me to tell me you played all those ARPGs and you didn’t notice LE doesn’t have anything pinnacle in it. Well, think you have been playing wrong all these years. We do gear from caves that we restart by save and exit in all of those. But we don’t build our characters to beat more caves, yes we go do hard bosses with them. So don’t know where your pinnacle is, but it is certainly not present here. Or we have different understandings what pinnacle bosses in a game are. If you refer to T4 Dungeons as pinnacle, man. Big oof.

118

No, he quoted you because most RPGs have some form of pinnacle boss that you beat & then there’s “nothing left” after that. It also feels like you’re conflating an unfinished game with games that have been out (/“finished” if you can even use that term in modern aRPGs) for years if not decades.

The T4 dungeons are the current pinnacle, but there’s a lot left to be added. Remember when Brutus was the “final” boss in PoE’s beta?

2 Likes
119

Yeah, I remember very well. That was not 5 years after release. A game made by a very small team. A game that progressed faster with a small team. A game that was free.

I general you’re digging yourself a grave in a conversation if you compare this wasteland to PoE, if you wish I can give you even more examples.

But as you see I’m not here to compare it to 1 game. In the ARPG scene there are many, and this one is just sadly said, 5 years with an unfinished shell.

120

Neither is the current version of LE.