Posted December 13, 2017
I really liked the last game (minus the teleporting spiders), so I have been plowing through this one; however I have NOT been enjoying it most of the time.
The single player campaign in this game is unfair, buggy and generally annoying just on normal difficulty!
1) ALL enemies have 2 to 5 times more stats then my party members; most having somewhere between 2 and 3 times more stat points for the SAME level & race characters.
This is total bullshit; it pointlessly extends combat time and makes the enemies far more powerful then they should be.
This is extremely bad game balance!
A great example of a ridiculously overpowered enemy is the corpse of the witch on fire and located in a field of fire, northwest of Driftwood.
She is SOOO overpowered that she can insta kill the ENTIRE party, no matter what you have equiped.
This is true when your characters are her level or below and remains true until you outlevel her.
EVEN at two levels higher, this monstrous enemy can usually strip away ALL your armour in the first cast; meaning if you don't lock her down with knockdown, etc constantly, you can still lose your entire party in the next couple rounds of combat!
Perhaps MOST offensive, is that when you finally manage to kill this RIDICULOUSLY overpowered enemy, you get crap reward for it.
That battle should reward a few pink or gold items for all the shit that we had to go through to take it down!
2) Most encounters are spawning enemies out of the blue, instead of having them in-world already.
This is bad design, unfair and just plain lazy encounter design.
Seriously, almost all encounters are an ambush!
3) EVERYONE has teleport!
This is just plain stupid.
A great example of why this is stupid, is shown in the in-between zones encounter after escaping the first island.
You are supposed to block the enemy off from getting to Malady, while she casts that dimensional travel spell.
You literally have NO chance of doing that because two out of the three enemy types can TELEPORT!
GRRR!
Teleporting is an ability that should be given sparingly, if at all!
Yet whoever is responsible for the single player campaign gave EVERY single enemy this cheap ass spell in one form or another.
Do you developers not get that there is no possibility of there being a front and backline when you do that shit?
4) The AI is stupid.
This mostly comes into play when a character has been charmed; usually when it's one of mine charmed by the enemy.
The laws of self preservation say when you are hurt, you will always seek to help yourself before you help someone else.
This becomes a more powerful motivation, the more hurt/afraid, etc you are.... yet whoever made the ai set it up so they IGNORE their own health state and do their best to buff/heal the OTHER enemies in the area while they are almost dead.
Nuff said.
5) The AI is CONSTANTLY trying to avoid exploitable positions.
This means they will ALWAYS put their back to a wall/edge, if a wall is to be had, just to avoid backstabs.
This makes no sense unless they've FIRST been backstabbed!
This is another thing that probably shouldn't even be available to the average ai mook.
Think about it; is the average person going to be constantly trying to keep their back to the wall in the off chance someone will move behind them and stab them? NO!
This mechanic is supposed to be there so that the rogueish player (and rogue ai characters) can actually do damage!
Without being able to backstab, a rogue is just a SHIT damage dealer; this CONSTANT behavior makes the rogue unable to do their job most of the time due to their skills being half or less damage compared to other classes.
This makes rogue class essentially useless next to ANY other due to the fact that others don't need to position themselves to do normal damage!
6) Every enemy has spells.
The Crocodiles in the first island have ROCK THROWING abilities!
They are already MASSIVELY powerful melee units; there's no good reason for this crap!
This pattern is repeated across the entire single player campaign, where anything from animals, to people, to monsters, to plants have spells.
It's even worse then that though; every enemy also has LEVELING spells, meaning they get more spells from the spell list, the higher level they are.
This makes no sense!
Most regular units should ONLY ever have basic spells & abilities!
When we encounter a powerful mage, it should be a special encounter... not just another regular combat, because you made everything overpowered!
7) Giving npcs the ability to do things the player cannot do, is unfair!
The most blatent example of this cheating is when we goto Black Pits harbour and the enemy there casts a PERMANENT multi target pain link.
I don't care what your excuses are, that's just plain cheating.
Likewise, npcs being spawned for encounters and hazard fields spawned without an npc having cast a spell is also unfair!
This is also bad design!
The single player campaign in this game is unfair, buggy and generally annoying just on normal difficulty!
1) ALL enemies have 2 to 5 times more stats then my party members; most having somewhere between 2 and 3 times more stat points for the SAME level & race characters.
This is total bullshit; it pointlessly extends combat time and makes the enemies far more powerful then they should be.
This is extremely bad game balance!
A great example of a ridiculously overpowered enemy is the corpse of the witch on fire and located in a field of fire, northwest of Driftwood.
She is SOOO overpowered that she can insta kill the ENTIRE party, no matter what you have equiped.
This is true when your characters are her level or below and remains true until you outlevel her.
EVEN at two levels higher, this monstrous enemy can usually strip away ALL your armour in the first cast; meaning if you don't lock her down with knockdown, etc constantly, you can still lose your entire party in the next couple rounds of combat!
Perhaps MOST offensive, is that when you finally manage to kill this RIDICULOUSLY overpowered enemy, you get crap reward for it.
That battle should reward a few pink or gold items for all the shit that we had to go through to take it down!
2) Most encounters are spawning enemies out of the blue, instead of having them in-world already.
This is bad design, unfair and just plain lazy encounter design.
Seriously, almost all encounters are an ambush!
3) EVERYONE has teleport!
This is just plain stupid.
A great example of why this is stupid, is shown in the in-between zones encounter after escaping the first island.
You are supposed to block the enemy off from getting to Malady, while she casts that dimensional travel spell.
You literally have NO chance of doing that because two out of the three enemy types can TELEPORT!
GRRR!
Teleporting is an ability that should be given sparingly, if at all!
Yet whoever is responsible for the single player campaign gave EVERY single enemy this cheap ass spell in one form or another.
Do you developers not get that there is no possibility of there being a front and backline when you do that shit?
4) The AI is stupid.
This mostly comes into play when a character has been charmed; usually when it's one of mine charmed by the enemy.
The laws of self preservation say when you are hurt, you will always seek to help yourself before you help someone else.
This becomes a more powerful motivation, the more hurt/afraid, etc you are.... yet whoever made the ai set it up so they IGNORE their own health state and do their best to buff/heal the OTHER enemies in the area while they are almost dead.
Nuff said.
5) The AI is CONSTANTLY trying to avoid exploitable positions.
This means they will ALWAYS put their back to a wall/edge, if a wall is to be had, just to avoid backstabs.
This makes no sense unless they've FIRST been backstabbed!
This is another thing that probably shouldn't even be available to the average ai mook.
Think about it; is the average person going to be constantly trying to keep their back to the wall in the off chance someone will move behind them and stab them? NO!
This mechanic is supposed to be there so that the rogueish player (and rogue ai characters) can actually do damage!
Without being able to backstab, a rogue is just a SHIT damage dealer; this CONSTANT behavior makes the rogue unable to do their job most of the time due to their skills being half or less damage compared to other classes.
This makes rogue class essentially useless next to ANY other due to the fact that others don't need to position themselves to do normal damage!
6) Every enemy has spells.
The Crocodiles in the first island have ROCK THROWING abilities!
They are already MASSIVELY powerful melee units; there's no good reason for this crap!
This pattern is repeated across the entire single player campaign, where anything from animals, to people, to monsters, to plants have spells.
It's even worse then that though; every enemy also has LEVELING spells, meaning they get more spells from the spell list, the higher level they are.
This makes no sense!
Most regular units should ONLY ever have basic spells & abilities!
When we encounter a powerful mage, it should be a special encounter... not just another regular combat, because you made everything overpowered!
7) Giving npcs the ability to do things the player cannot do, is unfair!
The most blatent example of this cheating is when we goto Black Pits harbour and the enemy there casts a PERMANENT multi target pain link.
I don't care what your excuses are, that's just plain cheating.
Likewise, npcs being spawned for encounters and hazard fields spawned without an npc having cast a spell is also unfair!
This is also bad design!
Post edited December 13, 2017 by ast486
