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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2020 14:39:08 GMT -5
I don't blame you if you just come back when you're way above his level. That can be very satisfying in RPGs or other games like Borderlands that have RPG elements. Leveling up -- let's look at the big three Elder Scrolls games: Morrowind. Enemies do not level. You walk in underpowered and you will be crushed unless you run fast enough. You walk in overpowered and it's a cakewalk. Loot does not level either. But you can come back and get your sweet revenge as a higher-level player. Oblivion. All enemies level (although some have minimums). All loot levels. If you deliberately avoid leveling yourself, you can play the whole game versus the lowest level enemies. As you level up, your gear becomes obsolete and you need new gear. This includes unique magic items, which is unfortunate if you find one you just love but after a while have to put aside. You can walk into a cave that has a few rats in it, then later come back and it now has grizzly bears. You can't come back to a place where some high-level foe killed you and now you walk over him, because he has leveled up too. Skyrim. Most foes and loot level like Oblivion except the leveling stops when you first walk in to a particular place. If you walk in as a low-level character, the level of that place is always low-level foes. If you walk in as a high-level character, the level of that place is always high-level foes. This does allow you to come back later and get your sweet revenge, but it's also vulnerable to a strategy where you go around as a low-level character and just poke your nose into every cave or location you find. Then you come back later as a higher-level character and they are all under-leveled.
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 29, 2020 16:45:05 GMT -5
I don't blame you if you just come back when you're way above his level. That can be very satisfying in RPGs or other games like Borderlands that have RPG elements. Leveling up -- let's look at the big three Elder Scrolls games: Morrowind. Enemies do not level. You walk in underpowered and you will be crushed unless you run fast enough. You walk in overpowered and it's a cakewalk. Loot does not level either. But you can come back and get your sweet revenge as a higher-level player. Oblivion. All enemies level (although some have minimums). All loot levels. If you deliberately avoid leveling yourself, you can play the whole game versus the lowest level enemies. As you level up, your gear becomes obsolete and you need new gear. This includes unique magic items, which is unfortunate if you find one you just love but after a while have to put aside. You can walk into a cave that has a few rats in it, then later come back and it now has grizzly bears. You can't come back to a place where some high-level foe killed you and now you walk over him, because he has leveled up too. Skyrim. Most foes and loot level like Oblivion except the leveling stops when you first walk in to a particular place. If you walk in as a low-level character, the level of that place is always low-level foes. If you walk in as a high-level character, the level of that place is always high-level foes. This does allow you to come back later and get your sweet revenge, but it's also vulnerable to a strategy where you go around as a low-level character and just poke your nose into every cave or location you find. Then you come back later as a higher-level character and they are all under-leveled. Interesting. The Skyrim exploit sounds kind of hilarious, though I suppose that would destroy any challenge to the game. Of the three, Oblivion sounds like the best system to keep the game at the appropriate difficulty level (assuming that it's balanced correctly in the first place).
Borderlands 2 is similar to Morrowind on the first two playthroughs. It is sad when your once-amazing legendary weapons eventually get outclassed by common rarity weapons just because they are at significantly lower level, but this is inevitable. Some legendary weapons are so good that you can continue to use them for another 5 to 10 levels before finally having to retire them because they can't keep up anymore. The enemies have set levels based on the area and story progress. In the third playthrough (which can be repeated as often as you like), all enemies and gear scale to your level.
The other thing is that there were a series of level cap increases. The game was initially capped at 50 before it was increased to 61, 72, and finally 80 (there's also another tier above that known as "OP" levels that goes up to OP8, but I don't play with them because they expose some bugs in the game that make certain builds unusable). The level cap increases are nice because it lets you get more skill points. The issue is that if you farmed a lot of prime level 50 gear, most of it will be obsolete pretty quickly on the way to 61. And this happens again at 72. The increase to 80 was in the very last free story DLC that was released right before Borderlands 3 launched, so it's probably safe to farm the best gear at level 80 (if you use OP levels, you have to farm gear for that also).
In Borderlands 3, it's similar to Borderlands 2, at least so far (near the end of the first playthrough). The main difference is that bosses and minibosses scale to your level throughout, which is nice because it means you can farm them for experience and better gear at any point. There has already been one level cap increase, from 50 to 53, which is annoying because three levels are just enough to make your gear underpowered but not quite obsolete. Assuming that they raise the level cap again at least a couple more times, this will continue to happen, and people will have to farm over and over again. I think I'll move on once I beat the game and the story DLCs, as I like Borderlands 2 better overall, but I wish they would have made the increases more substantial.
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 29, 2020 21:29:09 GMT -5
The mention of Oblivion's leveling system allowing a player to deliberately avoid leveling in order to face low-level enemies the entire game reminds me of my experience with Breath of the Wild. In that game, enemies respawn periodically after blood moons. Generally, these respawns become progressively more powerful as the game progresses. However, this enemy leveling system is tied to how many enemies have been defeated via a hidden counter. Once that counter reaches certain thresholds, the easier enemies at the beginning are replaced with progressively tougher enemies.
This is all well and good, but BOTW also has another system that I didn't particularly care for, which is the way its equipment degrades with use. I've seen systems like this in other games like Betrayal at Krondor or System Shock 2, and that was fine. SS2 is a survival horror game, so it fits thematically, and in both cases, weapons could be maintained and/or repaired relatively easily. But in BOTW, the weapons will actually break. Only a handful can be repaired at all, and with the exception of the Master Sword (which is acquired fairly late into the game), it is prohibitively expensive to do so.
The funny thing about games implementing systems like this is that they can have unintended results. The idea behind this system is for players not to be able to rely on their best equipment, so they'll constantly have to loot and forage for replacements. But at least in my case, it had the effect of just discouraging me from engaging in combat at all if it was avoidable. So I started playing an ostensible action-adventure game more like a stealth game. I put my unique weapons in storage and only used the minimum amount of force I could for the situation. As a result, I defeated very few enemies in combat throughout the course of the game, so I'm not sure the enemies ever leveled up. Even if they did, the toughest enemies in the game never showed up because of this.
I'm like 99% sure that the designers of BOTW did not intend for players to use stealth as I much as I did (the end of the game was an absolute cakewalk because while the enemies hadn't leveled up, I had built up my health and stamina and acquired most of the best gear), and I'm sure most players just dealt with the designed system in the way that it was intended. But for me, that was the consequence of the incentives that were in place.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2020 22:53:32 GMT -5
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2020 23:07:31 GMT -5
This is all well and good, but BOTW also has another system that I didn't particularly care for, which is the way its equipment degrades with use. I've seen systems like this in other games like Betrayal at Krondor or System Shock 2, and that was fine. SS2 is a survival horror game, so it fits thematically, and in both cases, weapons could be maintained and/or repaired relatively easily. But in BOTW, the weapons will actually break. Only a handful can be repaired at all, and with the exception of the Master Sword (which is acquired fairly late into the game), it is prohibitively expensive to do so. In both Morrowind and Oblivion, your gear degrades with use. It doesn't permanently break, but it becomes useless until repaired. You can repair it yourself if you have the right repair tools, and this is a learnable skill ("armorer"). So repairing your stuff can help you level up. But you need to have skill 50 (out of 100) armorer to repair magical items. Until then, you need to pay an armorer in a city to do this for you. This makes it a bit dicy to go out with only magical armor -- if you can't repair it it may become worthless before you can get back to town. In Oblivion, if you get to be a master armorer (skill 100) you can then fix your weapons and armor to be up to 125% repaired -- so you in fact improve them by 25% over their base stats. In Skyrim they abandoned the whole "repair your weapons because they take damage" thing and instead made armorer a crafting skill. You can forge your own weapons and improve them to be superior, elite, epic, legendary etc. quality. You can make some money doing this, because the raw materials are worth less than finished weapons (or especially finished armor). In Factorio (still "early-access"), originally you created your own tools and armor and they degraded with use. But a few months ago they rethought that because they decided it was grindy. Now you just upgrade your tools. Your armor never degrades, but you still have to build it once.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2020 23:20:50 GMT -5
The Skyrim exploit sounds kind of hilarious, though I suppose that would destroy any challenge to the game. Of the three, Oblivion sounds like the best system to keep the game at the appropriate difficulty level (assuming that it's balanced correctly in the first place). Actually, I like the Skyrim system best in practice, or maybe the Morrowind system. The Oblivion system is just too artificially balanced. I like the idea that some places are just too dangerous at first, so you need to level up and come back later. The Oblivion and Skyrim systems are because the Elder Scrolls want you to be able to play the game completely freely and do almost any mission or world location in any order. You couldn't really do that in Morrowind. (I mean, you could try to do it, but....) I kind of wish the games didn't have respawns, or if they did, the locations maybe respawned into something else. It's just a PITA when that castle overlooking a main highway that was full of bandits, but you cleared out, is now full of the same damn bandits again. At least in Skyrim they aren't a serious threat the second (or 10th) time you have to fight through them. The exploit where you lock the level in for a location just by entering it isn't actually terribly useful a lot of times, because if an area has multiple zones then only the first zone will be locked at a lower level. But it does allow you to go in, barely escape, get better prepared, and then go back and kick ass. The Oblivion system doesn't really allow you to do that, because no matter how you level up, so do the enemies.
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 29, 2020 23:59:21 GMT -5
The Skyrim exploit sounds kind of hilarious, though I suppose that would destroy any challenge to the game. Of the three, Oblivion sounds like the best system to keep the game at the appropriate difficulty level (assuming that it's balanced correctly in the first place). Actually, I like the Skyrim system best in practice, or maybe the Morrowind system. The Oblivion system is just too artificially balanced. I like the idea that some places are just too dangerous at first, so you need to level up and come back later. The Oblivion and Skyrim systems are because the Elder Scrolls want you to be able to play the game completely freely and do almost any mission or world location in any order. You couldn't really do that in Morrowind. (I mean, you could try to do it, but....) I kind of wish the games didn't have respawns, or if they did, the locations maybe respawned into something else. It's just a PITA when that castle overlooking a main highway that was full of bandits, but you cleared out, is now full of the same damn bandits again. At least in Skyrim they aren't a serious threat the second (or 10th) time you have to fight through them. The exploit where you lock the level in for a location just by entering it isn't actually terribly useful a lot of times, because if an area has multiple zones then only the first zone will be locked at a lower level. But it does allow you to go in, barely escape, get better prepared, and then go back and kick ass. The Oblivion system doesn't really allow you to do that, because no matter how you level up, so do the enemies. You make a good point about respawning enemies. System Shock 2's respawning enemies add to the atmospheric terror, but after a while, they're just a pain. I made heavy use of the invisibility psionic power to avoid fighting the respawning enemies in the latter half of the game. One thing (among many) that I liked about Betrayal at Krondor is that once you dealt with a group of enemies, they were gone for good. The game was divided into nine chapters, so there would be new groups of enemies when a new chapter started, but they weren't the exact same enemies in the exact same place. You or your party members would often spot them beforehand also, so you could choose to try to avoid them or get an advantage with a surprise attack (in both cases, success was dependent on the party members' individual stealth skills, with the least stealthy character's score being used, as they were the weakest link).
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 30, 2020 1:24:39 GMT -5
In Factorio, the enemies are "biters" and "spitters" and "worms" (collectively just "biters"). They evolve (level up) based on how much pollution you create (and you have to create pollution as your factory grows). They spawn in part based on how much pollution drifts to their location. And they spread organically ... when one biter base has enough biters, they move a ways and "plant" a new base. So you can clear out the biters near your area and they move back in. But if you build walls around an area that has been cleared out, they can't move in without tearing down the walls.
Factorio is all about automating everything that can be automated, so you don't have to fight off the biters yourself. You build a factory that builds turrets and ammo, then you put up walls and defend them with turrets and you can keep pushing the biters back as much as you need to.
Anyway, while it's still a pain that the biters move back into cleared areas, it's not at all the same as games where enemies just respawn.
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 30, 2020 10:29:21 GMT -5
This is all well and good, but BOTW also has another system that I didn't particularly care for, which is the way its equipment degrades with use. I've seen systems like this in other games like Betrayal at Krondor or System Shock 2, and that was fine. SS2 is a survival horror game, so it fits thematically, and in both cases, weapons could be maintained and/or repaired relatively easily. But in BOTW, the weapons will actually break. Only a handful can be repaired at all, and with the exception of the Master Sword (which is acquired fairly late into the game), it is prohibitively expensive to do so. In both Morrowind and Oblivion, your gear degrades with use. It doesn't permanently break, but it becomes useless until repaired. You can repair it yourself if you have the right repair tools, and this is a learnable skill ("armorer"). So repairing your stuff can help you level up. But you need to have skill 50 (out of 100) armorer to repair magical items. Until then, you need to pay an armorer in a city to do this for you. This makes it a bit dicy to go out with only magical armor -- if you can't repair it it may become worthless before you can get back to town. In Oblivion, if you get to be a master armorer (skill 100) you can then fix your weapons and armor to be up to 125% repaired -- so you in fact improve them by 25% over their base stats. In Skyrim they abandoned the whole "repair your weapons because they take damage" thing and instead made armorer a crafting skill. You can forge your own weapons and improve them to be superior, elite, epic, legendary etc. quality. You can make some money doing this, because the raw materials are worth less than finished weapons (or especially finished armor). In Factorio (still "early-access"), originally you created your own tools and armor and they degraded with use. But a few months ago they rethought that because they decided it was grindy. Now you just upgrade your tools. Your armor never degrades, but you still have to build it once. The systems in Morrowind and Oblivion sound similar to System Shock 2. You could maintain weapons to keep them from breaking (if their condition degraded too much, they could jam at any time), but that required the use of consumable maintenance tools, and the effectiveness of each tool was dependent on your maintenance skill. So if you had a skill of 1, that could only bring an item from a condition 2 (out of 10) to 3, and you had to use another tool to get it to 4, etc. If you skill was 2, then one tool would bring it from 2 to 4, 4 to 6, etc. Also, each weapon had a minimum maintenance skill required. The assault rifle is the best weapon in the game, but you had to have a skill of 4 (which is pretty costly skill point-wise on the hardest difficulty level) to maintain it at all. There were no people to pay on a zombie-filled spaceship either, so if you couldn't maintain your weapons, you'd eventually have to replace them.
In Betrayal at Krondor, weapons became less effective with degradation. I don't think swords and armor actually break, but crossbows can. And at any rate, you don't want to be using swords and armor in disrepair, as the combat penalties can be pretty severe. You can maintain the equipment with a whetstone or a hammer, and the effectiveness depends on the character's weaponcraft and armorcraft skills. It's best to have the character with the best skill handle all repairs. Their skills will also increase either gradually through use (it's a good idea to repair all weapons or armor, even the extras lifted from corpses, because you get more money from their sale if they're in better condition) or more rapidly if they read a book on the subject or get a lesson from an NPC.
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Post by Wolfgang on Apr 1, 2020 12:10:56 GMT -5
Well...f***!
Far Cry Primal (Digital Apex edition) is now on sale from the PSN Store for $10.49 during a Spring Sale. I bought that sucker a few weeks ago for $17.49, which was also a sale price at the time. Dammit. Should've waited.
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Post by Wolfgang on Apr 1, 2020 12:16:01 GMT -5
PSN Spring Sale
God of War $14.99 Days Gone $19.99
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Post by bbg95 on Apr 1, 2020 12:52:50 GMT -5
PSN Spring Sale God of War $14.99 Days Gone $19.99 God of War is one of the best games I've ever played. Looking at the sale, Metal Gear Solid V with all its DLC is $5.99. That's too good for me to pass up. Also, Uncharted 4 is free for PS Plus members next month. I have a physical copy that came with my PS4, but it will be nice to have a digital copy too.
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Post by mikegarrison on Apr 1, 2020 15:38:30 GMT -5
I played a game of Civ VI for the first time in a long while. Took me a bit to remember some of the strategies.
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Post by Wolfgang on Apr 1, 2020 15:42:48 GMT -5
PSN Spring Sale God of War $14.99 Days Gone $19.99 God of War is one of the best games I've ever played. Looking at the sale, Metal Gear Solid V with all its DLC is $5.99. That's too good for me to pass up. Also, Uncharted 4 is free for PS Plus members next month. I have a physical copy that came with my PS4, but it will be nice to have a digital copy too. Metal Gear Solid has been on my mind for a long time. But I haven't played any of the MGS games and though online forums say knowledge of (and experience in) the earlier games is not necessary, they always say, "You should play the earlier games anyway." I'm so far behind. I haven't looked up whether the earlier games are available in either the PS3 or PS4 as these are the only consoles I have. I have the PS2 but it's in a box somewhere in deep storage. I can't even find it even if I tried.
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Post by bbg95 on Apr 1, 2020 16:03:06 GMT -5
God of War is one of the best games I've ever played. Looking at the sale, Metal Gear Solid V with all its DLC is $5.99. That's too good for me to pass up. Also, Uncharted 4 is free for PS Plus members next month. I have a physical copy that came with my PS4, but it will be nice to have a digital copy too. Metal Gear Solid has been on my mind for a long time. But I haven't played any of the MGS games and though online forums say knowledge of (and experience in) the earlier games is not necessary, they always say, "You should play the earlier games anyway." I'm so far behind. I haven't looked up whether the earlier games are available in either the PS3 or PS4 as these are the only consoles I have. I have the PS2 but it's in a box somewhere in deep storage. I can't even find it even if I tried. Yeah, I'm like that too. One of my best friends is an enormous fan, and he convinced me to play the first one a few years back. It was an interesting game. It was well-written, and the voice acting was extremely good for a video game of its era (1998--even otherwise great games at the time often had truly embarrassing voice acting). The gameplay is super dated, unfortunately, but it's still worth playing in my opinion. You can get the first four in a collection for the PS3, which is how I got them (it appears that this particular collection is kind of hard to come by at this point, though you can still get the first three games in a different collection and the fourth separately). I only played a few minutes of the second one, stopping once I realized that you can't actually strafe or move around in the first-person aiming mode--I'm not exactly sure when the MGS series adopted the trappings of modern third-person action games). So I'm not sure if or when I'll play the others, but MGS V received almost universal acclaim when it was released, and I figure that I can't go wrong for $6.
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