Monday, February 2, 2009

Unbalanced campaign

By that I mean I'm not going to scale encounters to the party. Scaling encounters are seen in a lot of games, most recently for me when I played Oblivion. In practice this is a sop to new game players, the developers wouldn't want them to get too frustrated. But if you're playing NWN2 this long after it's release, you're almost assuredly familiar with the game and with the D&D world.

I am not a fan of scaling, in any realistic (well, as realistic as a fantasy game can be) world you can walk into something you are overmatched for, or something you can walk over. Baldurs Gate 1 definitely gave this feel. Wander off the path from the Friendly Arm Inn to Nashkel and you could wind up staring at a basilisk in the face at level 2. Or you could enter the xvart village at level 6-7 and run them over. You never knew. It kept you on your toes and showed you how powerful you'd become when you plastered the xvarts.

I have great memories of my party barely rescuing Dynaheir only to discover a bunch of gnolls now blocking my escape and preventing me from resting. It was a great and hard fought victory using every tactic and pretty much ever potion, scroll, etc I had to get out of there.

Once you reach a certain point in the POE campaign, almost all the gameworld will open up at once. And while it will be suggested you go certain places, you will be able to go where you want in the gameworld. This means you could wander into a higher level area at lower level and get pasted. Maybe you should have thought about that before insulting that beholder at level 2*

*there are no hidden beholders to insult in the Nest. :-)

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