NWN2 sidesteps from DnD

Surlent · Aug 13, 2006

So I learned something new about NWN2 today. At nwn2 news they posted some differences to DnD rules. You can read some of the differences in the original post on bio forums. I guess you could expect lots of changes when you know they are sticking with real time with pause, but some of these blew me away. Sawyer didn't deny any of these changes but responded to them, so I assume they are all going to be in retail version.

The "Mitchell Brothers" resurrection system. - NWN2 will grant your characters complete and utter immortality. Death is merely a temporary inconvenience and all party members will be revived at the end of a fight (or even during combat if the implementation is anything like KOTOR2).

This one bit put me thinking the game might result in pure munchin fest where only numbers count, how much you do damage and heal.
I was expecting good DnD fix really hard after all these years.

They even improved rangers in 3.5 version.
Can anyone still say there is hope for the single player campaign or do I need to go and create my own drow/tiefling lesbian spank inferno mobule with the NWN2 tools ?

Admiral Rimjob POOBUM · Aug 13, 2006

The "Mitchell Brothers" resurrection system. - NWN2 will grant your characters complete and utter immortality. Death is merely a temporary inconvenience and all party members will be revived at the end of a fight (or even during combat if the implementation is anything like KOTOR2).

...WHY?

Whipporowill · Aug 13, 2006

So what's the use for healing and resurrection if there's a system like that? Death and injury has always been a integral part of rpg combat and thus focus on several classes - for instance the DnD Cleric.

Azarkon · Aug 14, 2006

Deaths have always been a temporary inconvenience in CRPGs:

*death*
Reload
*death*
Reload
*death*
Reload

They simply replaced the practice certain PnP purists followed (personally, I just reloaded each time one of my characters died in BG 2; can't be bothered to cast resurrect and then have to deal with the tedium of re-equiping the character and his/her inventory) of resurrecting dead NPCs at the local temple with a system that's much less annoying. While I understand that the threat of death is what gives parties the incentive to bring a cleric, from a gameplay standpoint no CRPG has ever really implemented a meaningful version of true death. For that to happen, players would have to lose the ability to reload whenever a battle didn't go their way, and that simply doesn't fly with today's easily frustrated players.

Surlent · Aug 14, 2006

Sawyer is hesitant to defend Obsidian's case.

JE Sawyer said:
This is not my design. It is not my story. It is a choice that I inherited from the original lead designer, so I can only explain that it is integral to how the campaign functions but not to how the game itself functions. I'm not going to defend it because it isn't a choice I would have made.

If I were making my own campaign, people would drop like stones, you'd have a level cap of eight, and no prestige classes.

However, you'd still have max hit points. ^___________^

JE said:
I'd only really do something like that on a personal project. For the most part, people like overpowered PrCs. They like having things made easy. They like hitting 20th level. They like strong, linear stories (some branching) with good scripted narratives more than they like open worlds with radically diverging storylines. They like clear good and evil. And they tend to not like my writing, which is why I avoid writing dialogue now.

JE said:
It's pretty difficult to establish causality of popularity with games (as with most things, I guess). ToEE was a hardcore game with an early level cap and no PrCs. It was very popular among hardcore gamers. I liked it a lot, personally. The problem is that hardcore gamers are a small portion of the larger game market. As with Torment and both Fallout games, ToEE sold anywhere from "poorly" to "slightly above okay" (depending on whom you ask).

Crichton · Aug 14, 2006

This one bit put me thinking the game might result in pure munchin fest where only numbers count, how much you do damage and heal.

Personally, I thought this was one of the best features in the KOTOR games. Without some implementation like this, you have two options,

A) Dead is DEAD. No one comes back, every time you lose a party member you have to reload the game, hire a new one, or soldier on with four characters instead of five.

B) Death is the most trivial inconvenience, anyone that dies a violent death can be brought back for a small donation to the local chapel or as a minor exertion for the party healer.

There's really no way around it. The vast majority of all CRPGs fall into catagory "B", ToEE tried to do something in between with an xp penalty for people brought back, but if I have to choose between having one of my five characters a level behind everyone else for the rest of the game or reloading, I'll just reload every time.

The KOTOR / shining force system keeps being "taken out" there as a tactical consideration so that you still care about a character's defensive stats without having mircacles strong enough to start their own religion occuring every time the party fights hobgoblins (I got really sick of that in BG2 and IWD2,

"Cleric, the rogue's dead again"

"F**ing F***, this happens every time! Why do I have to give up one of my spell slots to keep bringing him F***ing back!?! His spirit's been through this so many times he can probably find his own damn body!

Higher Game · Aug 14, 2006

At least Sawyer isn't absolutely batshit insane, the way a lot of developers are these days. I appreciate his honesty, and I probably will get NWN2, if only for mods.

Volourn · Aug 14, 2006

The death system is like KOTOR series. I cosndieir it pretty lame; but acceptable in a SW games. In a DnD game. It's retarded espciallly sicne there's no option to ignore it. At least with NWN1's respawning; you could friggin' gnore. NWN2's death system is patehtic, and unneccesary, and forced upon the player for some illogical reason.

psycojester · Aug 14, 2006

JE wrote:
I'd only really do something like that on a personal project. For the most part, people like overpowered PrCs. They like having things made easy. They like hitting 20th level. They like strong, linear stories (some branching) with good scripted narratives more than they like open worlds with radically diverging storylines. They like clear good and evil. And they tend to not like my writing, which is why I avoid writing dialogue now.

Translation: I fucking hate the morons i have pander to in this job

Bradylama · Aug 14, 2006

It could also mean that he's too lazy to design a non-character reliant storyline, or there's not any "room in the budget" for it.

kingcomrade · Aug 14, 2006

Sawyer always sounds so bitter. It must suck having to produce games are that way less than they could be just because your audience sucks.

DarkUnderlord · Aug 14, 2006

Azarkon said:
Deaths have always been a temporary inconvenience in CRPGs:

*death*
Reload
*death*
Reload
*death*
Reload

Death has always been a temporary inconvenience in any game. Imagine Doom 2 without the save game feature: "You died on Level 17. Start New Game. Level 1..." The stupidity behind it is when you get games like Prey where instead of dying, you're teleported to lala land, fight a bit and go on. So what's the point in conserving ammo or playing carefully to look after your health before you get to the next medikit? The point about a save game system is that you can't save until you've reached the next point. If you just can't figure out how to defeat that end-game boss, there's no reloading that's going to help you get passed him. And even if you do get passed with no ammo for the BFG left and on 10% health, you may only go on to find another Cyberdemon behind the next door instead of that medikit you needed. Then you have to ask yourself whether you can take him on with the resources you have left-over from your previous battle.

Re-loading simply lets you try again. Having everyone magically re-appear at the end though defeats the entire purpose. Imagine a large battle where you may lose 2 companions of the 5 in your group. Harry the Paladin and Mary the Bard. You re-group and move on and are later attacked by zombie's which Harry would've been quite useful for. Before, you could re-load and "try again" and this time, sacrifice Steve the Fighter instead (or work some miracle to get your entire team through unscathed). The tactics you employ to do that become crucial. Steve is taking too much damage, I'll move him out of there and sideline him for the rest of the battle. John the Sorceror has run out of spells, damn. Ohoh, I better use a health potion quick before I lose Mary for good, I might need her later on and can't afford to lose her now.

Instead, some idiot's decided that everyone should pop back to life. All of a sudden, what may have been a tough second battle simply isn't. The first battle too. Your tactics change. "Harry's low on health, I might need him later, better pull him back or use a scarce health potion on him" instead becomes "KAMIKAZE HARRY LOLOLOLOL" because you know he's going to pop right back up unharmed afterwards. Why care about my companions? Why worry about the battle? Just send them all in there and so long as one of them survives, everyone else will magically come back to life. Yay.

Somewhere, somehow or another, game designers became stupid. Maybe growing up with those arcade games with 20 levels and no save-game made them really pissed so now they're seeking revenge?

kingcomrade · Aug 14, 2006

I wrote in the news section version of this that a checkpoint based system that gives you a traditional save when you leave the game would be a good compromise. Most FPS games already have autosave checkpoints. ALl it would take is some intelligent placement, and the traditional save when you leave lets you get up and do something else if you need to in the middle of two checkpoints.

Bradylama · Aug 14, 2006

It sounds like somebody's been playing Final Fantasy. Or that's probably the target audience. Is NWN2 on the Xbox?

It's a shame that Hideo Kojima can drop green on watermelon decomposition, and Bethesda can waste cash on soil erosion while Obsidian is stuck making Bioware's sequels.

DarkUnderlord · Aug 14, 2006

kingcomrade said:
All it would take is some intelligent placement

Well, that's never going to work then.

Gambler · Aug 14, 2006

Why care about my companions?

So the only reason you would care about companions in RPG is because they give advantage to your in combat? How boring.

It might not be about combat. It might be about advancing through the storyline without stupid reloads that spoil the game.

If companions die, they should die permanently. Without resurrections. It should not make you reload, instead it should have some meaningful effect on the story. And the game should provide environment where it doesn't happen every five minutes because 15th goblin suddenly decided to score a critical.

Azarkon · Aug 14, 2006

DarkUnderlord said:
snipped

Good post, but there's something missing here that you might want to account for - the alternative to NPC immortality here is not repeated reloads, but walking back all the way to the temple, getting ressed, and then going back to where you were, which was always an option (that, or mass availability of resurrection spells/skills) in games that did support party deaths. This is partly why true deaths rarely exist in CRPGs - when it does happen, ie with a disintegrate under core rules, there's always reload.

Of course, the reloads are one reason why deaths in CRPGs were never significant to begin with. In a game where dice rolls often determine the difference between victory and defeat (do I resist that Finger of Death - or don't I?), the ability to reload vastly depreciates the tedium associated with making a failed roll - namely, simply roll again.

Norfleet · Aug 14, 2006

DarkUnderlord said:
Instead, some idiot's decided that everyone should pop back to life. All of a sudden, what may have been a tough second battle simply isn't. The first battle too. Your tactics change. "Harry's low on health, I might need him later, better pull him back or use a scarce health potion on him" instead becomes "KAMIKAZE HARRY LOLOLOLOL" because you know he's going to pop right back up unharmed afterwards. Why care about my companions? Why worry about the battle? Just send them all in there and so long as one of them survives, everyone else will magically come back to life. Yay.

Yup, KOTOR's definitely guilty of that one. With the KOTOR death system, I routinely used injured partymembers as "Polish Minesweepers", because I knew I could. That would have been unthinkable under the traditional rule. Sure, I could reload if I did that, but then the MINE WOULD STILL BE THERE. A lot of really cheap tactics become possible when you know you're invincible, and it doesn't add to the game at all. I mean, in PST, *YOU* may have been invincible, but your partymembers weren't, but this was slickly integrated into the plotline, and, indeed, you were expected to occasionally suicide yourself like that. KOTOR never really gave any explanation of why anyone in your party could throw themselves on a landmine without harm at a moment's notice.

Nedrah · Aug 14, 2006

I'm indifferent about the save/load issue.

Take Gothic 2. That game would NEVER have worked without saving at will. You just could die in such a variety of colorfull death throughout the better part of the game - just by leaving that road for the flower behind the big rock - and the fucking shadowbeast lurking there. If every time I died in that game had meant replaying only 10 minutes I can see myself having a more frustrating than entertaining experience. Then again the game lost a lot of the tension and challenge it might have provided because I just got so used to quick saving and loading all the time.

Pirates! Gold, the new version, on the other hand, would be so much better without the automatic saves whenever you a)engage in battle b) arrive at a town c) quit the game and the option to basically save whenever you are not fighting. Only c) should have been there. a) and b) just make it too damn tempting to reload after having lost your ship of the line and basically everything else including some more lifetime (spent siting on an island, doing nothing at all) of your already aging pirate. I tend to find excuses for reloading in these situations.

For something like NWN2 I would like to see your party dying permanently, unless you do some ridicolously hard and / or expensive task and carry their decomposing corpse around until it's done, causing you to lose 10 cha for the whole party, or something... Saving should then only be done when, say, sleeping at a tavern or upon leaving the game. That would satisfy the little sissy in me (Oh Noes I don't want Harry to be gone forever! *sob* *sob*) as well as still not be as cheap as the current system. oh well..

Twinfalls · Aug 14, 2006

Nedrah said:
I'm indifferent about the save/load issue.

Take Gothic 2. That game would NEVER have worked without saving at will. You just could die in such a variety of colorfull death throughout the better part of the game - just by leaving that road for the flower behind the big rock - and the fucking shadowbeast lurking there. If every time I died in that game had meant replaying only 10 minutes I can see myself having a more frustrating than entertaining experience. Then again the game lost a lot of the tension and challenge it might have provided because I just got so used to quick saving and loading all the time.

And there you have it. People have lost the fear of death in their games. If you'd played Gothic 2 properly, you would have recognised that it's a dangerous world, you'd have ventured out carefully, you'd plan your forays, you'd use strategy and avoid most dangerous encounters, in a rational way. Gothic 2 is NOT a game in which you should die every ten minutes.

Instead, people are now playing games with the 'gimme what's coming next now now now, screw this dying shit, I PWONZOR ALL'

The next gen of RPGs should have the player fucking electrocuted at re-load.

Sol Invictus · Aug 14, 2006

Instead, people are now playing games with the 'gimme what's coming next now now now, screw this dying shit, I PWONZOR ALL'

I don't think it's fair to make some retarded generalized quote about gamers, Twinfalls.

None of the people I play with in World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or any other competitive online or even offline game cares for that shit. If you fail or die, that means you suck and should try harder so you don't fuck up next time. Don't whine about dying, because it's part of the game.

It's like playing darts. If you can simply walk up to the board and stick a dart in the bullseye and declare yourself TEH WINNAR then you're a fucking idiot.

I don't get why the fuck they're catering to idiots.

Thrawn05 · Aug 14, 2006

The "Mitchell Brothers" resurrection system. - NWN2 will grant your characters complete and utter immortality. Death is merely a temporary inconvenience and all party members will be revived at the end of a fight (or even during combat if the implementation is anything like KOTOR2).

Yeah! The sequal to Torment! TEH NAMELESS ONE goes to Neverwinter!!!!!

Sol Invictus · Aug 14, 2006

Actually it's more along the lines of KOTOR. I don't think there's any story-related reason as to why your characters will immediately rise after the battle has ended.

I should also like to add that they seem to be catering more to the below average imbecile instead of the roleplaying audience that enjoyed the first Neverwinter Nights and the Baldur's Gate games. Roleplayers generally dont reload when npcs die and continue their campaign with everything that has happened. That's how the game's meant to be played, after all. You only reload if your entire team wipes, including the main character.

That they're using a stupid mechanic to keep every character alive and resurrected at the end of every battle simply detracts from the immersion of making contingency plans in case your party wiped, like an expensive resurrection scroll, or in the case of World of Warcraft: a soulstone, an ankh, or what have you.

Like World of Warcraft, it's all a part of the D&D experience, and they've removed a huge chunk of that from the game. All to cater to imbeciles who can't handle the idea of a challenge.

Thrawn05 · Aug 14, 2006

They should be make an RPG where if your character dies, it and all the saves you used are deleted. HE/SHE'S REALLY DEAD!

Higher Game · Aug 14, 2006

I've never seen a mainstream RPG with the roguelike system. Has there ever been one?

NWN2 sidesteps from DnD

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