Achilles and The Grognard: BG3 Gameplay Preview Materials

By Bob Case Posted Saturday Mar 14, 2020

Filed under: Video Games 88 comments

The Grognard: All right. I’m set.

Achilles: Set? What do you mean?

The Grognard: I have supplies laid by for two weeks, with room to spare. By my calculations, with proper rationing I can survive up to eight days on a single roll of toilet paper, even if it’s one of those store-brand ones. I also hit up the grocery outlet store. I bought nine pounds of dried black beans, eight pounds of frozen tilapia, seven sticks of butter, ample salt, red and black pepper, chili powder, oregano, and two entire crisper drawers full of premade southwestern salads, with dressing, which can keep for two weeks refrigerated according to the expiration dates. I’m ready.

Achilles: Are you quarantining? Have you caught the Coronavirus? I noticed you touching your face that one time.

The Grognard: Coronawhat? Oh, that. No, I mean I’m ready to talk about gameplay.


Link (YouTube)

(From Rock Paper Shotgun’s Youtube)

Achilles: Let’s just tear the band aid off here: it’s turn based, not real time with pause. Now me, I don’t really have a dog in this race. But I’m guessing you do.

The Grognard: I have dogs in races you’ve never even heard of. In this one I actually have two. I’m infuriated that they’ve betrayed the legacy of the series, but I also would have been infuriated if they hadn’t. Both of my positions are articulated fairly well in these two PC Gamer articles: pcgamer.com/it-rules-that-baldurs-gate-3-is-turn-based and pcgamer.com/it-sucks-that-baldurs-gate-3-is-turn-based.

Achilles: It’s crazy how you can just talk in hypertext like that. Personally, I’m fine with it. The way I see it, XCOM was fun, and that was turn-based, and this looks like that. It should be fun if they can avoid the September problem.

The Grognard: The September problem?

Achilles: In XCOM, the game starts to drag around September. Right around the time you start getting guerilla ops full of sectopods. I call it “eternal September.” Keep in mind that I’m referring to the original XCOM here, not its sequel, War of the Chosen. Are you all right? That vein on your forehead is bulging again.

The Grognard: Don’t worry, I have breathing exercises for that. You’re on to something here, though. What about the game drags in September?

Achilles: It just gets repetitive. Like in a real time with pause game, you can do trash fights mostly on autopilot. But in turn-based, you keep doing the same things over and over again. The hundredth time you flashbang a sectoid isn’t as exciting as the first.

The Grognard: So the hundredth time you hit “attack” on a trash mob…

Achilles: Exactly. And then there’s the animations. XCOM – the original, I mean – has animations that last forever, unless you use the “Stop Wasting My Time” mod. At first they’re not so bad, but after twenty hours or so they get to you. And I’m guessing Baldur’s Gate III is gonna be longer than twenty hours long.

The Grognard: Timing is tricky in a game like this. Of course more game is better, but too much of the same can creep up on you. You need variety – variety in gameplay, variety in encounter design.


Link (YouTube)

(From Rock Paper Shotgun’s Youtube)

Achilles: I don’t know about encounter design, but I see gameplay variety here. The crime and punishment system is right up my alley. To me, nothing is more satisfying than getting away with pretend crime. In Skyrim, my house in Whiterun had a bigger hoard of contraband than Alduin could ever dream of.

The Grognard: Those mechanics do sound promising. Just as similar ones sounded promising all those years ago, from Peter Molyneaux, or those others, from Todd Howard. I may have been hurt too many times to hope again.

Achilles: Look, we’ve discussed this. If one game disappoints you, just forget about it immediately and entirely and get worked up about the next one. That’s what I do. The anticipation is half the fun!

The Grognard: No. Not half. Twenty percent, at most, and it should be excruciating moreso than fun. However, certain of these changes have promise. The crime system, the verticality of the levels. And I was also encouraged by what we’ve seen of the camping/resting system.

Achilles: Like I’ve said about every RPG since the first Dragon Age, why haven’t they done this in every RPG since the first Dragon Age? You camp out, you get a little campsite, you get to talk to your people, check their gear, and make sure you haven’t missed any dialog.

The Grognard: It’s spelled “dialogue.” But other than that, I agree. And as for encounter variety, they’re working off an established ruleset with a good-sized library of sourcebooks, and the inclusion of dimensional travel in the storyline means you can basically send the players anywhere.

Achilles: And think how crazy things will get in the sequel!

The Grognard: Sequel? Isn’t that a little premature?

Achilles: The level cap is only ten. D&D goes up to twenty, even I know that. There’s definitely going to be a sequel. Not to mention mods. There’s going to be mods for days! Look at what they said in their community update:

We’ve built an engine that allows all 250 people at Larian collaborate to become the ultimate DM. Allowing for near-limitless reactivity, responsiveness, and a memory that never forgets who you are, or what you’ve done. No matter who you roll, dice-rolls, modifiers, and physical simulation have all been designed to simulate a D&D experience that feels as though it’s straight from the imagination, where no matter the dice roll the story will continue.

Achilles: That definitely means mod tools. This clinches it, I’m getting “SWEN LIFE” tattooed across my stomach in gothic lettering.


Link (YouTube)

(From Fextralife’s Youtube)

The Grognard: Before you make any big decisions, remember that sometimes you read things into marketing materials that aren’t always there. This is the game’s pre-honeymoon, when promises, real and imagined, are thick on the ground. And also remember that we haven’t even started to discuss the story yet.

Achilles: Yes we have. The story is Baldur’s Gate II, but with Octopus Guy instead of Evil Bald Elf Dude. You said so yourself.

The Grognard: That paraphrase is inconvenient to my point, so I’ll ignore it. What I meant was we haven’t started to speculate about the story yet, which is even better than discussing it. That same community update promised “an epic adventure that subverts the binary morality found in many RPGs.”

Achilles: That just means there’s either going to be some kind of fake out or they’re not going to do a reputation system.

The Grognard: It’s more than that. Now it’s my turn to read too much into marketing materials. We’re doing it all: writing, camerawork, voice acting, the whole thing.

Achilles: Good thing we have all these supplies, then.

 


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88 thoughts on “Achilles and The Grognard: BG3 Gameplay Preview Materials

  1. Mattias42 says:

    …Really, only level 10 level cap?

    Dammit, was really looking forwards to getting to actually play around with some of the high level cool stuff for once in 5e.

    Guess there’s always hope for an expansion or sequel as the article says, but can’t help but feel a bit disappointed. That’s a seriously low level cap, and that’s been a bug-bear of mine all the way since Arcanum.

    1. Agammamon says:

      For 3/4/5th edition, its actually a pretty decent level-cap. This is the mid-point of the power curve. Its equivalent to level 20ish for 2nd ed.

      The real issue with it is that people are used to the constant ‘ding!’ of leveling up – even if each level is only a tiny increase in capability. DnD online managed that by having ‘interim levels’ where you get to pick a small boost in between the actual level-ups. You’re getting a constant drip of power increase and not getting stuck ‘not progressing’ for long periods.

      1. Hector says:

        Level 10 in 3rd+ Edition is most definitely not equal to level 20 in 2nd. I have no idea where you would get that from.

        1. General Karthos says:

          I agree. Level 10 in 3rd+ edition is significantly more powerful than level 10 in 2nd edition, really. You have more hit points for one thing, and your armor class is almost certainly better.

      2. Nimrandir says:

        I’m actually happier with lower level caps. Even in tabletop settings, my gameplay sweet spot is from levels five through eight, and I’ve always been intrigued by the E6 variant rules.

        1. Mattias42 says:

          I can see the logic for a level cap on a theoretical level… A fair balance for all players, and such.

          But honestly, I’ve never liked them in practice, doubly so in RPGs. For every one I’ve barely noticed (in a good way), there seems to be 3-4 that just cuts of my character from growing at some arbitrary, usually stupidly low level. Arcanum, KOTOR 1, New Vegas, just to name a few all had the problem of just… stagnating half-way through a playthrough.

          I mean, fine. Content costs money… but at least don’t tell me I’m The Special, but have me play what’s clearly sub-standard mortal even in-universe. Way, WAY too many games pull that particular variant of story/gameplay segregation crap utterly straight faced to have their ‘Hobbit’ cake, and eat the ‘Gandalf The White’ cake too, and I’m really tired of playing that half-baked fusion of two widely different character concepts.

          I mean, at least go The Bard’s Tale (the snarky, 2004 InXile one) route, and have it be outright in-story what an exploitable, errand running loser you are, or something. Have some fun with the whole deal instead of just ignoring it.

          1. Nimrandir says:

            Interesting. I just wrapped up my first playthrough of New Vegas, and I reached level 20 right before I triggered the endgame. I presume that was the original level cap, so I can proceed to 30 by pursuing the DLC.

            Similarly, I reached character level 20 in KotOR somewhere on Rakata (my memory may be fuzzy, as I played that game back in grad school). I’m pretty sure I hit KotOR II’s maximum level in the final area, too.

            Maybe it’s a difference in play styles? I was sufficiently invested in New Vegas’ plot that I ignored most side content unrelated to companions. I’m not sure where the KotOR games would have hidden stuff from me, though, since I recall filling in all the maps.

            1. Philadelphus says:

              I’m pretty sure I hit KotOR II’s maximum level in the final area, too.

              Really? Wow, I’m impressed. I’ve played through KotOR II fully at least 6 or 7 times, always being completionist and getting as much XP as I could, and I don’t remember ever hitting the level cap (of 40). I’d always end up somewhere in the mid- to upper-30s, which felt pretty good—enough that I didn’t feel like I was seriously missing out on anything, but with that feeling of “At least I haven’t hit the level cap yet!”. Though if you’re going to hit the cap, in the final area would probably be the best place to do it.

              Edit: Although, I do remember at least one playthrough where I abused the infinitely-spawning enemies in the Sith tomb bug in the old CD version to grind out a couple of levels to pull off…something, I don’t remember what. (Probably getting access to a certain force power at an earlier point in the game than expected or something.) That playthrough might’ve let me reach the cap, though I don’t remember it if so.

              1. Nimrandir says:

                Oh, if the level cap in KotOR II is 40, I know I’m misremembering. I recall reaching level 30 in each of my two runs through the game, and I must have forgotten that the ‘next level’ indicator didn’t stop at that point.

            2. ivan says:

              The original NV level cap was 30, extended to 50 if you have all the DLC. I have all that, but I don’t think I’ve ever hit 50, tbh. I’m actually quite curious about how this person managed to hit 50 at the implied halfway point in the game, this strikes me as a shockingly difficult feat to achieve, especially accidentally. Let alone repeatedly.

              1. Mattias42 says:

                Fair point about playstyle mattering. Can tell you from personal experience that if you’re a completionist level caps get really, really irritating, though.

                Think I had… half of New Vegas itself, the vanilla world map left, when I just gave up because my character had barely changed outside a hat or such in twenty hours. Not to mention, my reputation got ‘helpfully’ reset because I’d been putting off the main quest AFTER I’d done near every NRC quest in the game, so things just felt really pointless to push on through at that point.

                (That was after vacuuming the DLCs pretty dry, though. Admittedly. Still doesn’t change I still haven’t seen the real ending in that game.)

                Interestingly, never had that feeling in 3, despite it being generally accepted that’s the weaker game. That one I’ve 100% twice over. Think its because New Vegas is so much stingier with its levels, perks, items and so on? It wasn’t as naggingly irritating to be stuck at near perfection, vs seeing all the flaws and things I’d like to be better at every time I opened my inventory and character screen.

                Not that flawed characters is wrong by itself, but I’m way more towards the power fantasy end of things why I play RPGs, and getting to play the ‘gnome paladin’ just isn’t my cup of tea, you know?

          2. BoljohnNane8 says:

            Mattias42 speaks wisdom. I feel your pain my brother. I have no idea why so many game designers seem to think dying over and over again adds anything to a game about immersion. I die far, far less in Dark Souls than I did in Neverwinter Nights 2. The irony is I like Dark Souls precisely because it is is more FAIR than virtually all D&D games. It is a game willing to stand back and LET you work to stack the odds in your favor. And it is considered more challenging because of that fairness. D&D games often just try to cheat to create *struggle* instead of being fair to create *challenge.*

            1. Zaxares says:

              Heh, for me, that’s when I just mod/edit the game to turn my character into a near-godlike juggernaut of destruction. Like, right now I’m doing a re-run through of NWN2 just because I had a craving for a party-based D&D experience again, except that I started my character with massively boosted stats, waaaaay more feats than he should be entitled to (Hmm, which School of Magic should I focus in? How about… ALL OF THEM! Mwahahaha!), and of course, giving him enough gold at the start of the game to buy out every single shopkeeper’s inventory at 10 times the going price and STILL have coin left over to buy the kingdom. “But where’s the risk, the challenge??” I hear you ask? Well, that comes from trying to keep my far less godlike companions alive in combat. But more than that, I generally don’t play games FOR the challenge. I get into games more for the story, memorable interactions with characters, and playing around with character builds and loading out my party with cool/shiny/memorable equipment like a form of dress-up. I suppose in a way, it’s similar to the satisfaction one gets from building something in Minecraft or the Sims.

          3. John says:

            I’m pretty sure that it’s mathematically impossible to hit the level cap half way through KotOR. You may be thinking of another game.

            1. Nimrandir says:

              In fairness, slogging through the Star Forge can feel like it’s half the game. Don’t ask me how many thermal detonators I chucked in the final battle.

              1. Mattias42 says:

                OK, fine, KOTOR is a bit less head-meets-desk bad about its level cap then the other examples I listed. Fair enough.

                Still find it a failure of game design when your character just stops growing when the time left in game-time is measured in hours, a la KOTOR’s last-planet/starforge.

    2. tmtvl says:

      Yeah, Temple of Elemental Evil had a cap at level 10, and…

      Hang on, is Larian just making ToEE again?

      Anyway, I don’t know anything about newer D&D versions (I stopped caring after v4 ruined everything ever), but in 3.5 a level 10 cap was fine because it meant you could spend some XP on having your wizard craft stuff without having to worry that you’ll end up gimping yourself in endgame.

      1. AndrewCC says:

        I will never understand the logic of crafting with XP.

        1. Joshua says:

          It used to be permanent points of Constitution prior to 3rd Edition, which was crazy. Doubly crazy was the mathematical bonuses for the success rate, which reduced the chance of success by 1% per +1 (maybe +1 equivalent, can’t remember). So, you could make a +1 Longsword with around a 75% chance of success (I *think*), or you could make a +5 for a 71%, which means in practice everyone would go for the best possible things they could make, if they were going to go through all of this effort anyway.

          3.0 tried using XP as a gentler method of “creating these items takes a lot out of you”, but it didn’t really reduce item creation abuse. Instead, it could cause one of two problems, depending upon your group’s play style. Either you had one or two members who started slowly dropping behind the rest of the party in levels while doing all of the crafting for the whole team (we had that happen in my first 3.0 group), or the DM might allow XP donation (maybe the Fighter who’s getting the magic sword gives up the XP) which then leads to insane ratios of magic to XP.

          1. Nimrandir says:

            Then Pathfinder did away with anything beyond the material components of item creation. I have no idea how well the system functions, since I do organized play (where item creation is on a really tight leash).

            1. The Puzzler says:

              It means that in Pathfinder the only major barrier to getting any magic item is money. It works fine in a typical adventure, and makes more sense than paying with XP, but side effects include: (1) The GM basically has to award money and items on a fairly strict curve in order to keep things balanced. Sorry, you can’t steal the king’s treasury, it would make you too powerful. (2) It means that wealth spent on items = power. Sorry, you can’t buy a castle, that would make you too weak.

              1. Nimrandir says:

                Well, Pathfinder’s first edition kind of has a problem with assumed bonuses anyway. Half your magic item slots need to be dedicated to statistical increases the system takes for granted, or else you can’t hit anything and risk failing crucial saves.

              2. analogHyperdrive says:

                I’m playing a crafter in Pathfinder now, and I can say that there is another barrier: time. The other players are always asking me what’s on the queue, how long until they get their item, etc.
                Our campaign has some downtime, but not enough that we can just dump all of our gold through me into items. Obviously, different campaigns will have different amounts of downtime which will lead to more or less item crafting being possible.

          2. Zaxares says:

            Magic item creation is one of those weird things where if you make it too difficult, players get annoyed at how painful/unfun it is to do, but if you make it too easy, then logically the world would be FLOODED with magic items to the point where even your regular pig farming peasant has a +1 dagger. As a DM and storyteller, I prefer systems where magic item crafting is very hard, which makes players treasure magic items they come across much more, but I can understand why that would be dissatisfactory for players who enjoy being able to craft their own gear.

            1. FluffySquirrel says:

              I think the obvious answer to it would be that magic items are no longer permanent or something. So a +1 sword lasts maybe.. 10 years or something.. or maybe they slowly degrade in power over time, that’d actually work really well, would explain why the fabled sword of legend that has past down through your family is .. actually a +1 or masterwork sword now when you take it as an heirloom at chargen

              Maybe give a cheaper bonus to power them back up again, meaning legendary weapons are still cool to find

              1. Zaxares says:

                I guess that’s one way to do it… But still, depending on how easy magic items to make, that might still result in a glut of magic items, which would alter the way the world operated and felt. In a high magic world, where even peasants have easy access to things like Potions of Cure Wounds or a magic dagger to defend themselves, the atmosphere would be a lot different to one where, say, those same peasants are terrified of the night/wilderness because horrific monsters come out at night and there is very little the average commoner can do against them.

                I personally favour the system that Mongoose Publishing did for the Lone Wolf RPG series, which was that while “magic” items are very rare and few and far between, alchemical and masterwork items are far more common, and these serve as the typical “magic equipment” rewards in most adventures. To give an example, while town guards would have to make do with standard arms, just about every knight of the court would own a masterwork sword (+1 bonuses), due to their ability to afford the services of better skilled smiths. Nobility might own a Superior sword (with +2 bonuses), created by some of the best and most talented smiths in the land, perhaps using carefully guarded techniques. Only the king owns a Sublime sword (+3 to bonuses), which are weapons that are so masterfully made that only one specimen might emerge during a generation. (Or, conversely, they might be extremely rare relics from a lost Golden Age where the knowledge of how to make such incredible weapons has been lost.)

                Because these mundane bonuses stack with magical effects, it is possible to wind up with, say, a magical superior sword (+1 from magic, +2 from the sword itself), meaning that you could have a magical weapon that was actually inferior to a mundane one, and players would no doubt be eager to get their hands on more exceptional gear that they can then enchant themselves.

            2. The Puzzler says:

              Of course the pig-farming peasant needs a +1 dagger. How else can he offer a party of level 1 heroes a reward to rescue his pigs from the goblins?

      2. Hal says:

        I’m one of those weirdos who liked 4E, and I think “ruined everything” is a bit dramatic. Ignore the least popular mechanics for a moment. It still made quite a few changes to the game which were welcomed (and retained for 5E): Way fewer save-or-die effects, death saving throws, more action variety for non-caster classes, removal of level/XP loss . . . I could go on. I feel like the change in core mechanics (controversial, to say the least) overshadowed many of the other good changes brought to the game.

        Which speaks to that last one. Crafting in 4E/5E no longer requires XP expenditures. Players no longer have to be concerned about losing levels to create items. That said, crafting isn’t really prominent in 5E; the implied setting indicates that the art of crafting magic items was lost to history, and what crafting rules have been included are limited in what you can make. Scrolls and potions, mainly.

        1. Nimrandir says:

          Wait — isn’t the Forgotten Realms the default setting now? Did something happen to Thay? At one point, the Red Wizards were flooding the market with apprentice-crafted magic items.

          1. The Puzzler says:

            Something happened to everywhere. The lore is full of Spellplagues and similar that are supposed to explain why magic works a bit differently now.

        2. tmtvl says:

          Yeah, D&D 4 ain’t that bad, it still does what D&D does best: give your players at least one big fight per session.

          It just wasn’t the massive improvement on all fronts that DSA 4 was over DSA 3.

          1. Mattias42 says:

            Really hoped 4th edition would get a computer game, honestly, but to my knowledge it never happened.

            All those bonuses, maluses, skills, abilities and effects going off left and right just sounded exhausting to deal with on a table with humans doing all that math, but with a computer doing the bookkeeping I think the result could have made for a spectacular turn-based tactics game.

            1. MelTorefas says:

              Exactly how I felt about 4E. It feels ideally suited for CRPGs, but the only digital game I know of that used (a variant of) 4E was Neverwinter (the MMO). Dunno if it still does, haven’t played in many years. The 4E system they used worked well but the overall design of the game was… not good.

    3. GloatingSwine says:

      BG1 you could cap as low as 7 (8 for rogue, bard, and druid).

      The expansion let you squeeze an extra level or two in depending on class.

      A lowish level cap and slower progression allows the designer to use more breadth from the monster manual without it all getting outscaled into irrelevance.

  2. Sleeping Dragon says:

    I am soooo glad the game is turn based. Could be my aging reflexes, could be my deteriorating eyesight, could be my generally low perception scores but real time with pause is just too messy for me. On top of that I’ll probably be playing it coop with a friend and in my experience that escalates the problem with constantly making sure the other one is ok with unpausing the game.

    The level cap… it’s probably fine though I’m a bit disappointed in that I like to have extensive mechanical options, but maybe it’ll be flatter but wider (I did not watch the videos and would actually like to limit spoilers, even mechanical ones).

    1. DerJungerLudendorff says:

      In my experience, in depth RPG systems like D&D and real-time with pause just don’t mix very well.
      D&D is designed for pretty complex characters, each controlled by a separate player who only has to choose a couple of actions every 5-20 minutes.

      Giving players half a dozen characters and making it real-time just means you have a massive complexity that suddenly moves really quickly. So then you either have to automate most of it (which kinda defeats the point of the complexity), or leave players floundering.

    2. FluffySquirrel says:

      I’m kinda fine with the main campaign being capped at level 10 .. but it kinda takes a lot of option out of modding if there’s a tiny level cap

  3. tmtvl says:

    the original XCOM

    I see what you did there.

    1. Nimrandir says:

      Isn’t he missing a hyphen if that’s what he was going for?

      1. Asdasd says:

        That vein on your forehead is bulging again.

    2. LCF says:

      “eternal September.”

      Likewise.

      As for the topic at hand, if BG3:RTWP is good, we might need to ask Larian for Arcanum 2.

  4. baud says:

    I’m pretty sure that the “Stop Wasting My Time” is for XCOM 2 and it doesn’t change animation speed in combat, it only removes some pauses after actions.

    1. BlueHorus says:

      Ironically, after the success of Stop Wasting My Time, Firaxis introduced an optional ‘Zip Mode’ patch to XCOM 2 that DOES speed up animations.
      It makes everything a bit slapstick, the way your soldiers run around like a Benny Hill video.

  5. MechaCrash says:

    The “eternal September” thing was a nice touch.

  6. chris says:

    The real question is how G managed to derive how A spells dialogue from pronouncation.

    1. baud says:

      The same way G can make A realize he’s talking in hypertext

  7. Hal says:

    Came for the discussion about Vancian casting. Leaving disappointed.

  8. galacticplumber says:

    There’s a simple method for any game designer that wants turn-based, and fast trash fights. Just include a button that automates turns with simple actions that while never really optimal will murder stuff far below you dead without your imput.

    Or just have stuff far below you die instantly so as not to waste your time. Get dunked on by EARTHBOUND, modern RPGs.

    1. dogbeard says:

      I believe some of the SMT/Persona games have an option like that where you’ll just automatically do basic attacks against enemies. It’s a pretty great system since it’s HORRIBLE for anything that’s a threat against you and decent for mopping up trash. There’s still a pretty large gap between “this thing isn’t really a threat but I still need to use specific moves against it” and “just sweep it away” but nothing’s perfect I suppose.

    2. Ninety-Three says:

      There’s a simple method for any game designer that wants turn-based, and fast trash fights. Just include a button that automates turns with simple actions that while never really optimal will murder stuff far below you dead without your imput.

      It raises the question of why you would include fights so trivial that the designer is giving players automation tools.

      1. Syal says:

        So the enemies can drop items. And for catharsis after the hard fights.

        1. Cynic says:

          Those are both also bad ideas. Including trash mobs to drop trash loot inflates the economy, and risks the player literally picking up everything and selling it, breaking things, which then requires solutions of its own. You can put as much loot in chests behind fights as you like, there is literally no good reason to throw in more enemies so that there are more of them to be looted. It creates a stack of other problems too, like forcing the player back to inventory management.

          And they aren’t cathartic. The catharsis of a hard fight is FINISHING the hard fight. You struggle, you fail a bunch, you succeed, you are rewarded with plot and loot-catharsis and closure. Throwing more trash enemies at me is just annoying, if you plan both your easy and hard encounters around the idea that they have meaning, and give the player the chance to return to old areas where things were less dangerous, they will get all of the satisfaction of killing trash out of their system.

          Baldur’s Gate as a series has a massive problem with this. While good automation and behaviour programming helps (I wish the personalities were better in BG), it also helps to think through what you’re asking the player to do.

          1. Syal says:

            Including trash mobs to drop trash loot inflates the economy,

            Limiting fights risks the player running out of money and getting stuck. I’ll take overpowered over underpowered every time.

            The catharsis of a hard fight is FINISHING the hard fight.

            Not when you know the next one will be harder. Then it’s just climbing ever steeper stairs.

            1. Lino says:

              Also, it’s good to be able to just turn your brain off for a second and just enjoy the pretty colours. To me, this is one of the main advantages of ARPGs. Also, trash mobs make the hard fights stand out more.

      2. galacticplumber says:

        If the player feels like backtracking, if the player got overleveled by doing more sidequests than expected, if the player is grinding money, because they saw something expensive in the shop that while probably designed for later they want NOW, if they’re mopping up quests they missed in the area they just did, and many more.

        Most importantly, BECAUSE ASSUMING ALL YOUR CONTENT IS HIGHS IS ARROGANT! That’s like saying if you make the cutscene pretty enough the player will never want to skip it. Unskippable cutscenes are never justifiable. No not even then.

      3. Decius says:

        Earthbound would sometimes automate trivial fights out with a “you win”. I can’t imagine that kind of thing in a different art style.

        1. Syal says:

          Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass had random encounters, but if you were overleveled for the area you could cancel them before they started.

      4. Asdasd says:

        Well, I agree with you if nobody else does. The combination of turn based fights and random combat is especially aggravating, because the design assumption is that these can’t be too challenging as the player resources are an unknown. So instead you get little oases of interesting combat (the designed encounters) surrounded by vast deserts of trash fights designed only to be taxing in terms of time, not challenge.

        Fast forwards and fight automation are actually a genre convention in JRPGs, and have been since the 16-bit era – an acknowledgement of the problem, but woefully insufficient as a solution. Somebody mentioned SMT – I finished IV recently, and from the stats the game provides I can tell you the number of interesting fights from the 2679 I endured was very small. This is a game in which autoresolve can get you killed if the enemy has certain element resistances. I actually appreciate that – at least I need to pay attention rather than slipping into an absolute state of JRPG torpor.

        But by the end of the game I was instead running away from almost every fight, at which point the entire combat system felt like a monumental tax on my free time. This was more akin to Earthbound’s autowin mechanic – sure, I avoided the combat, but I didn’t avoid the 30 seconds of transition from and back to the world map, tapping through messages, while my progress was arrested and my orientation was interfered with.

        Fortunately, modern turn-based CRPGs usually don’t go in for random combat, so at least their slower combats are more finite and tend also to be more interestingly designed.

        1. John says:

          Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

        2. Cynic says:

          I feel you there. I’m a fan of the Total War series, and when playing that, I initially play out every battle. By the end, if I don’t need to, I let the AI do it, and go for sheer numbers against small groups of enemies. The battles I want to play are the ones where I get to pit my massive deathstacks against their’s, capture cool resources, or fight really tricky actions where I’m badly outnumbered or outgunned. Letting me skip the busywork fights and stay on the strategic level planning the cool ones keeps me from getting bored.

          1. The Puzzler says:

            I wish Total War had a ‘switch on AI for unit’ button so I could play out a battle without having to micromanage everything…

      5. Daimbert says:

        As others have said, it’s less that you are including fights that are trivial and more that players might, at times, need to go back to places where the fights are trivial to them right now. Unless you do auto-leveling where all the enemies always level up to a level that could challenge the party — which has its own problems — that’s always going to be the case.

        In the Persona games, sometimes you get a request to get an item or do a fusion and you’re overleveled for that dungeon. As the monsters are replaced at higher levels, if you didn’t get the items or the request before that point you’d be screwed. Here, you can just go in and grind it out until you get it, even if the fights are trivial.

        In Suikoden III, there are areas that you might need to cross later in the game that have random encounters, but as they are starting areas the monsters are lower level. It’s annoying to have to fight those weak things again, but it would be a lot of work to replace the random monsters or eliminate the encounters if the player is too high a level, and again they may not want that if they need something from an encounter there.

        Also, in any party-based game you may need to level up some of the party members that you got late or haven’t used a lot, and these encounters can be good ways to do that, especially if them being knocked out means that they don’t get XP and XP is given out to each party member based on their level.

        So there are reasons why a game might end up with some of these encounters and might want to include a way to mitigate them.

        1. John says:

          No. Combat automation tools do not solve the problem of boring fights. Getting rid of boring fights solves the problem of boring fights. Getting rid of random encounters–or even just turning off random encounters in areas for which the party is over-leveled–would solve most of the problems you describe. The rest could be solved by giving XP even to characters who don’t participate in combat and by not padding the game by randomly requiring the player to repeat areas.

          1. Daimbert says:

            If I need to kill a specific monster to get a drop or an item that I need for a request and I sold the one I had — or it didn’t drop as I blasted through it — how does turning random encounters off solve that? If I need to get a specific type of Persona card that only appears in an earlier dungeon because I merged mine away, how does turning off random encounters solve that? As for the Suikoden III case, I noted more that it would be too much work to do — how do you determine how overleveled is overleveled, for example? — not that it would solve the problem of boring fights. My whole comment here is simply saying that boring fights aren’t things the game puts in, but are the side effects of other things and that the potential solutions aren’t necessarily good ones.

            Conception II adds a mechanism where if you are sufficiently overleveled, you can run through an enemy and you’ll get money and items from it, I think, as if you had actually fought it. They also identify ones that you need for a quest so you can choose to only fight them. The Persona games tend to have it — at least Persona 3 did — that if you are sufficiently overleveled the monsters will run away from you so you have to deliberately attack them to have to fight them. Persona 5 has a Confidant level that allows the Conception II fix for the dungeons. So there are combat automation tools that allow the game to not have to play too much with the random encounters but let the player skip the ones that would be boring or are unnecessary.

            (That being said, a big part of the problem is probably the frequency of random encounters, as that can impact you when you are low or high leveled, but that’s probably another topic).

            1. John says:

              If I need to kill a specific monster to get a drop or an item that I need for a request and I sold the one I had — or it didn’t drop as I blasted through it — how does turning random encounters off solve that?

              Well, without random encounters the game designers can’t give you busy-work quests like that in the first place. This is actually one of the things I had in mind when I mentioned “not padding the game by randomly requiring the player to repeat areas”. If the game designers want you to go kill a monster or fetch an item, they should do the decent thing and make a proper, scripted quest rather than ask to you go fight random battles until you finally get lucky.

              As for the Suikoden III case, I noted more that it would be too much work to do — how do you determine how overleveled is overleveled, for example?

              I honestly don’t see how this is difficult in concept or in practice. If player character level exceeds threshold, do not start random encounter. The developers can determine the appropriate threshold value by either (a) using their knowledge of the game’s systems and good judgement, (b) getting feedback from play-testers, or, ideally, (c) both. From your own description, it sounds as though the developers of Conception II managed it just fine.

              1. Chad Miller says:

                The developers can determine the appropriate threshold value by either (a) using their knowledge of the game’s systems and good judgement, (b) getting feedback from play-testers, or, ideally, (c) both.

                As a starting point, they could also use the concept of Challenge Ratings that already exists in the D&D tabletop game.

                1. galacticplumber says:

                  Good luck with that. CR in D&D is often hilariously inadequate, because the game’s designers had absolutely no understanding of what was, and was not powerful. Even relatively simple stacks of HP who just attack aren’t always weaker than the same general style of enemy at a higher CR.

                  That’s the easy stuff. If your combat system has any real complexity to it, you’re going to want to let the player judge these things in the moment.

                  1. Chad Miller says:

                    1) I did say “starting point”

                    2) There is a very high error tolerance in the kind of system we’re talking about. All John was asking for was some system that says “hey, this is a trivial fight” and lets the player skip it accordingly. “The system thought this fight would be trivial, but it’s merely easy” is an acceptable problem to have in that instance.

              2. Daimbert says:

                Well, without random encounters the game designers can’t give you busy-work quests like that in the first place.

                But not having random encounters introduces its own problems. While it’s not an RPG, I love the strategy game Disciples 2, but it only has set encounters on the map. The problem with this is that if you’ve cleared out most of the weaker encounters and want to start a new party or have a party mostly wipe, there’s no XP left to build them up to a reasonable level. This essentially means that in the endgame if you’re playing against another player and have a party wipe it’s all over for you except for the crying, as you will not be able to build your party back to the level that they need to be competitive against your enemy. This also can apply to RPGs, because random encounters allow for grinding if someone isn’t as skilled. My main strategy in The Old Republic before they introduced the casual difficulty level was massive overleveling, and without random encounters you can’t grind to a higher level if you’re having trouble. So eliminating random encounters is probably not a fix to the problem, although tweaking rates can.

                If the game designers want you to go kill a monster or fetch an item, they should do the decent thing and make a proper, scripted quest rather than ask to you go fight random battles until you finally get lucky.

                The rewards are just the standard rewards from winning fights, that later you can either get a quest to get or that you need for crafting or other sorts of merges (in the Personas, it’s for fusions to get specific personas to use). There are a lot of ways to make this less likely, but players can make mistakes and so sometimes the easiest way for them to recover from that is just to kill them again until you get it back. This would specifically be the case if what you needed came from encounters that at the time you were too low-leveled or unprepared to face but can face now.

                I honestly don’t see how this is difficult in concept or in practice. If player character level exceeds threshold, do not start random encounter. The developers can determine the appropriate threshold value by either (a) using their knowledge of the game’s systems and good judgement, (b) getting feedback from play-testers, or, ideally, (c) both. From your own description, it sounds as though the developers of Conception II managed it just fine.

                They can get away with it because the random encounters still exist, you just don’t have to actually do the fights. This means that you would still get XP and items and money, at least, if they guessed wrong about what level you are effectively at. That’s not true if the encounters go away completely. I consider that approach a combat automation tool, not a way to get rid of random encounters. I like Persona 3’s better, as it allows you to avoid any encounters you don’t want and forces you to trigger them yourself (and gives you advantages if you DO trigger the combat anyway, making things even easier if you want to take them on). But both do work to allow for both grinding and avoiding combat if it won’t benefit you.

                So if you think those approaches are good ones, we don’t have much to disagree about.

                1. John says:

                  For the record, when I say “combat automation tool” I’m not referring to mechanics that let you skip fights but mechanics where AI controlled player party-members fight AI controlled opponents as the player watches. Without a fight, there’s no combat to automate and no combat automation tools can be involved. In that light, I don’t think that Conception’s auto-win mechanic and Persona’s opt-in random encounters are combat automation tools. The Persona system actually sounds pretty good. I’d certainly much rather have a system that makes me chase down the enemies that I want to fight than one which initiates combat without my permission and then makes me hit some buttons to get out of it.

                  That said, I still don’t like random encounters, by which I mean randomly-initiated encounters. You know, the kind where the party is walking along minding its own business when it is suddenly and unavoidably thrust into combat with a random assortment of monsters. I’m not opposed to grinding, however, at least not in principle. I’ve been doing a little of that myself this month, playing Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, a tactical RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics. The thing that makes grinding in Fell Seal tolerable is that, like Persona it’s opt-in. Not only that, I can control the level of opponents that I fight and the selection of crafting ingredients I can get by choosing an appropriate area on the world map and initiating a fight there. Every fight is a fight I want to be in. There are never any surprise fights other than those that are part of the plot.

                  One thing that Fell Seal does to reduce grind that it sounds as though Persona could learn from is that, while you can get random crafting ingredients as part of the reward for completing a battle, non-random crafting ingredients are also available in many areas and the world map will tell you which crafting ingredients are available where. So to get a specific ingredient I just need to go to the right area, start a fight, grab the crafting ingredients I want, and then survive the fight. It avoids the whole “repeat until I get lucky” problem that I mentioned earlier.

                  1. Daimbert says:

                    Random encounters can be annoying, but it depends on their frequency. As a note, though, the Personas and Conception II don’t really have random encounters in that way. Instead, they stock dungeons with monsters that you can see but you don’t really know what monsters are inside them until you trigger the event. Persona 5 gives you an ability later that can tell you what their level is, at least, and Conception II colours them appropriately (weaker ones are a specific colour, and the ones that have or are the ones you need to kill for a quest are coloured gold to make them stand out). If you can dodge the monsters, you don’t need to fight them (I don’t think that Persona 5 kept the “monsters scared of the party” mechanic from Persona 3, but it added some Conception II-style autokills and also if the levels are too low when you start the fight the monsters will give up immediately and let you negotiate for things like items and money and the like, which is important for various things in the game).

                    Still, those games are more story-driven so you’ll only ever get a lot of unrelated combat when you’re trying to grind for some reason, so it isn’t as annoying anyway and you’re usually fighting things close to your level. I do think that a story focus works better than just random encounters.

          2. Cynic says:

            Well, it does solve the problem, you’re just pretending it doesn’t.

            I agree that you should ideally get rid of filler fights and content, but some games do rely on random encounters for pacing, and some games are going to have stuff in there for pacing.

            If the AI wasn’t so abjectly bad in Baldur’s gate and could be relied on to follow common sense, if the personality system worked better, I wouldn’t mind watching my squad tear down trash on the way through-though I will resent the looting. I’d rather they remove blatant filler fights, but there are merits to systems where the player can skip stuff they are already ready for.

            1. John says:

              The problem with an automated fight is that it’s still there. It may waste less time than a non-automated fight, but it doesn’t waste no time. In that sense, while they might improve things a little, combat automation tools don’t really solve the underlying problem.

              1. Asdasd says:

                It may waste less time than a non-automated fight, but it doesn’t waste no time.

                This is really the crux of it. Additionally, combat which requires zero engagement of the player’s brain feels like a more infuriating waste of time than combat which at least carries a degree of risk to be negotiated, even if the latter takes longer. That’s the hidden poison of combat automation; it highlights the extent to which a game is (or rarely, isn’t) arbitrarily sandbagging the player’s time.

          3. Bubble181 says:

            Also…who decides what combat is “boring”? I like a fight against trash on occasion.
            What’s the point of being a Super Strong Uber Wizard if, at that point, you’re only going to be facing other Super Mega Lightning Warlocks? Show my growth is real, thanks.

            1. John says:

              A boring fight and a fight against weak enemies are not necessarily the same thing. If a game includes a few fights against weak enemies for reasons of plot, pacing, or power-fantasy, that’s fine. But who’d need or even want combat automation tools in a game like that?

              1. Gethsemani says:

                This is it really. Having a few fights were the player can savor their high power level by just stomping all over the opposition is cool. Having two dozen fights of that kind in the final dungeon, that add nothing but time filler and repetition to the game, get boring incredibly quick.

          4. The Puzzler says:

            In some types of RPG ‘get rid of boring encounters’ isn’t possible because there are no encounters, just situations. If I pick a fight with the town guard, or provoke a mammoth-herding giant by stealing his cheese, that’s not something the game decided would happen, so it’s not going to be balanced around giving me an interesting experience. If I sneak into a dungeon and pick off enemies one at a time, that’s a series of easy encounters that I created for myself.

            In Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, if I skip the kobold dungeon (which features no random encounters, only designed ones) and come back to it a few levels later, the battles are going to be trivially easy. And that’s fine, if easy encounters aren’t too much of a hassle.

            A game featuring only interesting fights implies one that only gives you fair fights. Which suggests something extremely linear, or featuring auto-levelling treadmill enemies. Which solves the problem of boring fights, but at a cost.

      6. DerJungerLudendorff says:

        Especially if they come with long animations that you need to skip manually.

    3. Algeh says:

      The first Breath of Fire, way back in the SNES era, had an “autobattle” button when your four front row characters would just attack (rather than use spells or items) on their turns each time. (Breath of Fire had a visible front row/invisible back row system where all 8 party members were “with” you for story purposes and could be swapped to outside of combat to use their various abilities, unlike games like Chrono Trigger where you had to actually decide who to take, but only the 4 in the “front” were actually present during battles.) I’ve resented its absence from pretty much every turn-based game I’ve played since. There are battles that require me to think about which options to use, and then there are the ones where I’m just going to be hitting the “hit the other guy until he goes away while not consuming resources if possible” option for each of the characters anyway, and even an SNES game could figure out how to automate that second kind.

  9. Decius says:

    Wait, The Original XCOM split the difference quite well, allowing you to choose on a per-battle basis if you could dodge or not.

  10. Larian did a really good job in Divinity Original Sin 2 with avoiding the turn-based combat slog. Combat was fast-paced and intense. They know how to do animations that won’t bog the combat down, and they used a lot of movement-based powers that would let you hop around the battlefield instead of having to walk everywhere. Tactically it became extremely complex and you had so many abilities to pick from that you didn’t get bored with it.

    And, yeah, they did some serious variety in the encounter design.

    If you were actually fighting “mooks” (there weren’t many fights of this description though–the fights were spread out more), you could usually blow up one or even two in a round with each character.

    Unlike in Baldur’s Gate, Divinity Original Sin 2 has a lot of terrain and object puzzling that means that there’s interactive stuff to DO other than read dialog, make the map not black, and fight, so the fights can be further apart, have good-to-high stakes in each fight, and each one can be designed as its own unique encounter.

    If you compare the two side-by-side, I’d say that D:OS2 is just flat out an objectively better game than BG1 by every measure. The story in BG2 was a bit better, but when it comes to combat and gameplay design it’s still WAY better than BG2, even.

    1. Zaxares says:

      I’ve never played any of the Divinity games, but I hope you’re right. One of the reasons why I couldn’t bring myself to finish Temple of Elemental Evil was because fights could just get so, SO tedious to do, depending on how many enemies there were, and what sort of attacks/movement they used. To paraphrase the encounter that finally broke me…

      *makes camp to rest, combat music starts playing*
      Me: “Oh crap, there are TEN zombies?”
      *Because my party is surprised, the zombies go first, and I have to spend nearly a minute watching each individual zombie sloooooowly shuffle over towards my party. They STILL don’t reach me, and while I could charge my Fighters forward to engage the zombies, that would mean exposing them to danger when they still haven’t been healed, so I Guard them, and then the zombies begin to slooooowly shuffle over towards my party again*
      Me: “… OK, forget it. This isn’t worth it.”

      From what we’ve seen of the BG3 gameplay demo, enemy actions are much quicker, but I think it might also run the risk of being enough of an information overload for players trying to keep track of what each enemy is doing, especially since the video showed that it’s possible for party members to be quite some distance away from each other, in separate rooms and the like.

      1. John says:

        I can’t speak to Original Sin 2, but the thing that I appreciated about the first Original Sin is that there were never any fights that I particularly wanted to skip. I don’t think that there’s a single fight in the game with more than a dozen opponents. My guess is that most combat involved between six and eight. Most of the time you can see enemies on the map before you get to them and combat does not begin until you get fairly close. I can’t think of a single combat where at least one of my characters was not within melee range of an enemy by the start of his second turn.

    2. BlueHorus says:

      I’ll second this.

      While I’ve never played a Baldur’s Gate game and so can’t say if it’s better or worse, The Divinity: OS games have real effort put into the combat to keep it interesting.

      Sometimes it’s mixed enemy types, sometimes it’s environmental effects that alter the gameplay, sometimes it’s flying crocodiles…the only thing guaranteed is that it’ll always be different.
      It’s a very welcome change from the ‘genre standard’ I was used to: copy-pasted identical fights (AKA ‘Goddammit, there goes ANOTHER five minutes and two healing potions…’).

  11. Thomas says:

    I’m really exciting for the Synapse system where you plan out all your moves, but it gets executed all at the same time. I can’t wait to see how that pans out.

    I think the Divinity games make the enemy execute their turns in a speeded up mode. That reduced the grind, but it also helps increase the feeling of chaos.

    1. Lino says:

      Wait, wait, wait! Is this game going to be like Frozen Synapse? As far as I understood, it’s a traditional turn-based system, the only difference being that initiative and turn-taking is party-based. E.g. if your party gets higher initiative, they go first (in any order you like), and then it’s the enemy’s turn. But it won’t be like Frozen Synapse (although I really, really wish it was).

  12. Gautsu says:

    In old Baldur’s Gate, relatively low complexity lead to RTwP being viable. You didn’t need to micromanage 6 characters since your melee characters had relatively few abilities to use, and it was much more important to move your rogue for a booby trap or backstab, or micro-manage your spellcasters.

    Pillars of Eternity’s relatively low difficulty level (base game), along with the realtively soft penalties caused by the Health+Stamina system meant not overcoming each fight by the most optimal path didn’t necessarily force a reload or camping. Pillars 2 wasn’t that much worse until you reached some of the end game (Mega-Bosses, Seeker,Slayer, Survivor). Beating those was much easier (almost pathetically so) with turn-based enabled

    Pathfinder: Kingmaker on the other hand was a pain in the ass until the turn based mod, due to the complexity of character options and interactions available to all characters; imagine if your BG party were all spellcasters to give you an idea of what is available. Some people still find this easily manageable, some people also can micro-manage zerg invasions through siege tank defenses. I know that while comparing 5th edition to Pathfinder comes with 5th edition being streamlined and simplified, comparing 5th to 2nd is a definite increase in complexity.

    The turn based mod for PF:KM allowed for it to be switched off at any time for easier fights. The turn based mode for Wrath of the Righteous is promising the same thing. This woild seem to me to be the easiest way to balance CRPG’s going forward: allow me the chance to utilize strategy and tactics in turn based when required AND allow me the other to roll-stomp speed bumps in real time when tactics aren’t

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