Just curious!
I’m currently replaying BG3 as a cleric PLUS I got myself a ring of abilities (utility mostly, modded) and I’m absolutely loving it.
It feels like old-school RPGs where you could choose from 10 specs and each one had 50 abilities for you to play with.
Does anyone else vastly prefer it to a streamlined combat that seems to be more popular now?
I always think back to DAO and its countless abilities compared to DAI that has just a few and, honestly, I think it’s a change for the worse.
If I’m gonna spend a reasonable amount of time in combat (and in RPGs, I will), I don’t want to be clicking the same 5 abilities every time. It’s boring. I want to have 30 of them, so every turn I can just sit there and think what to choose and make the encounters that much more fun and engaging.
I do! I mean sure, sometimes you just have to Magic Missile the heck out of an enemy with high defence, but it’s also good fun to hit them with lightning bolts, or cast an ice spell so they slip and fall over, or turn them into a sheep 😂
I like both — some days I want to have a million choices to think through carefully but some days I just wanna pewpewpew and click on things and watch them die lol. But if you want the extreme end of things, you should definitely try out Owlcat games — Pathfinder Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous are based on the Pathfinder system which is a modified D&D 3.5e (where BG3 is on the more streamlined D&D 5e). And their newest Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader is almost as guilty of ability bloat lol.
With that said, one of the interesting distinctions between BG3 and the Pathfinder games is that in BG3, pretty much every ability has some use, whether in or out of combat (except you, Witch Bolt; you’re pretty much always terrible) — so there’s a ton of creativity available for the dozens of skills on your ability bar. In Pathinder there are even more skills, talents and abilities — but a lot of them are virtually useless or simply inferior, and the challenge comes in cutting the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, to figure out what’s good and what’s not.
No, Not really. I used to but as I get older, I realize the thing I care most about in games is the story and characters lol.
yes! it’s so old school and reminds me of my favourite games like DAO. i’ve always preferred it over the often dumbed down and simplified systems of newer games, so i really appreciate it in Larian games 😀
honestly i do
Only turn based really. I do not enjoy button bloat in world of Warcraft.
Honestly no, video games are typically more of a “brain off” activity for me but I totally understand the appeal for other folks! If I had more time to play all the games in my log I might enjoy complexity more 😅
BG3 and Elden Ring are my games of the decade so far, and I don’t see anything else coming close
Sometimes, but honestly I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 (or, by extension, Dungeons and Dragons) has a good implementation of it. So many spells are useless — there are dozens of spells that are some flavor of “remove X character from the fight” which are *all* useless because they will never work reliably. Meanwhile, characters who fight with weapons get almost nothing except for whatever they get from magic items, and all of those are “once per rest.” It’s honestly hilarious to go from leveling up a fighter, who gets *no* decisions after picking a subclass, and then leveling up a wizard who gets a huge list of spells to pick from.
Honestly, Divinity does it a lot better. Fewer spells and abilities in total, but they’re all useful and combine in interesting ways, and every character gets some.
See, I understand the appeal and I want to love this, but somehow I can’t. Too many abilities give me anxiety as I’m always worried that I am doing something very wrong. So I am rather glad that reduced combat systems exist as it reduces the amount of potential (wrong) decisions for me. Otherwise I would feel very overwhelmed all of the time!
Absolutely love tinkering with all the spells and abilities.
I hate it SO MUCH when a game assumes I am an uncreative imbecile with no more than 4 fingers total.
I love it, it can work so well with challenging battle mechanics, but I don’t enjoy it in mmo games. As I’ve often found only a few of the abilities, in a certain combinations (that’s usually insanely spammy), still becomes the only “acceptable” way to play a class in groups and get maximum output DPS wise 😔
Loving this in BG3 though 😊 and agree with you on Dragon Age – that the changes to combat can make it a lot less interesting/challenging (though I still love DA:I ❤️).
Depends what play-style I’m in the mood for 🤔😂
Honestly no. I’ve never even liked party based rpg games if I can’t just turn on AI for everyone but the main character. Probably around 15-20 buttons is the highest I can manage without getting frustrated. 10-12 is ideal.
I don’t think I ever managed playing as a mage in a game like BG2 or DA:O for longer than a few hours before re-rolling as someone who can just stab the monsters instead.
I’m really glad there’s options out there for gamers like you though.
In BG3 in particular it’s nice because you’re also using the spells to get around the environment. There are few things more annoying than realizing you’re going to have to do some kind of long, elaborate path because 3/4 members of your party can’t jump and you don’t have Fly and Misty Step for all of them. It’s also nicer to hit K and grab remove curse etc. when you need it instead of heading back to camp to switch party members.
I also like DAO’s bar going all the way across the bottom of my screen. With the newest game we’re getting three abilities at a time (with some extras being added by runes or whatever), and some people are like “but with your two companions you actually have NINE whole abilities!!!” And I’m looking at DAO where your three companions each had 9+ going “…sure.” lol.
For me, a game can either be fast-paced/real-time *or* it can have a large suite of abilities.
If there’s 20 enemies running at me in a game with no pause button and I’ve got about half a second to do something or die, I can only keep track of about five skills before I’m just totally overwhelmed.
That doesn’t mean I don’t love games that require a thorough glossary to even have a hope of playing. But they had better let me spend twenty minutes on a single turn if I need it.
Ugh yes 🥲
Camera cuts to Dragon Age the Veilguard 😭
Streamlined! I play games for fun, not to have homework and having to look up everything on my phone on what works.
I like both I guess? It’s always good to be able to customize the play style to my own preferences (Hades was great in that regard as well, and it was fun to do builds), but it’s also nice to just not think too much about it and simply fight. I don’t want every game I play to have deeply thought out combat, I just want to slay my enemies and have fun.
That being said, holy shit, I can’t wait to finally get started on BG3 once I cleared my current back log a little. I feel like I’m gonna need aaaall the attention for that one, lol.
yes and no
on the one hand yippee plenty of abilities to play around with, on the other AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA what do I choose ;~;
No, that’s just decision paralysis in a package for me. I like my combat to be fast and in the moment, so those kinds of overly complicated choices pull me out of things
Besides personal preferences I think that rather seeing it in terms for good vs bad or simple vs complex(aka binary) it should be seen in context of the combat experience a game is trying to create. I like both if they fit the experience the game is after.
I absolutely love variety and customization, so I do. Just love when there’s seemingly endless ways to play a game
It depends on what you meaan by streamlined. Like in tabletop RPGs, I usually dont like making character builds, I usually just go with whatever vanilla class, but I have fun working around those limitations. The same way in video games, while something like uncharted isnt particularly fun to me, a game like thief where I have few tools and combat is a bad option, working my way around stealthly is fun. I like the way Pat Stares At put it: “I dont want to make a build, I want a fighting game character”; their tools are fixed, you have access to them at any time and some of them are bad in different situations, but the fun of it is figuring out how to use those tools
Totally! The most annoying part of console ARPGs these days like Dragon Age Inquisition or Dragon’s Dogma 2 is how you hardly get any slots for your abilities 🙁
Absolutely! I am always completely overwhelmed at first but with that feeling of being overwhelmed comes excitement at the same time.
It lets me know that there is potential for the game to become my new favorite. Sometimes it is just a convoluted that needs to be streamlined but a lot of the time it means the game is going to be great for me.
I hate it unfortunately. I’ll find 3 moves I like and use only those for the rest of the game.
I’m much more of a(n old) WoW/MMORPG type of player. So not 40+ to choose from, but more than like, Genshin’s 8~9 to rotate through.
Me toooo I miss the old works of Warcraft
If you like build complexity, try Path of Exile, difficult game but endless possibilities
The last game I played with many abilities was Neverwinter, I believe. And even then there weren’t THAT many abilities, but I did enjoy the variety there. I feel like there were just enough moves that I could actually remember what everything does lol. And being able to choose a loadout with only like 4 (?) abilities at a time makes it even easier. Too many abilities and I just get confused and forget what they all do.
Definitely. If I wanted streamlined combat. I would play a first person shooter
No bc I can never remember what each of the symbols mean. That said, I still enjoy playing them, clicking random buttons, and being surprised when I find out what happens.
Truthfully not really just makes me more confused on what does what.
I mean truthfully I play final fantasy 14 with just one bar.
I set up the bar to be like in an order of spells & abilities that work together so that I don’t have to have multiple bars & believe it or not all works out even in dungeons & parties.
You can say i am not using my class to it’s true potential by only using a limited amount of abilities & spells but I literally work it out so that only one bar is needed while still getting the job done be it killing things, healing, buffing, & etc. manage to work it all into one bar.
I mean the game may not be streamlined but it does have a lot of broken spells combinations, like making a puddle and then a lightning storm for extra damage, with certain sorcerer builds, you can pull out insane amounts of damage in 1 turn, one shoting bosses
Yeah I really do like it. One of my favorite rpgs on steam gives you 20+ abilities by late game. It’s so fun juggling them
It gets overwhelming and I end up just keep on using the same 2 or 3 abilities
Yes!!
This right here is why I got reaaal concerned when the released the Dragon Age Veilguard gameplay footage.
I love when a game has a lot of build variety but as a player I like to focus on only a few skills.
Some games ill only use basic attacks and just level attack speed and crit chance/damage. Or in games like pokemon, id much rather have a team of 1-3 mons instead of a full 6.
At a certain point it just feels like I have too many options and certain abilities ill only use once every now and then so i just axe em til i have like 2 or 3 lol. Mainly tho i prefer buffs, especially ones I can just activate and forget about like in dragon age origins.
But having so many abilities available def encourages me to replay with new builds
the “streamlined combat” you make reference to is the “casualization” of videogames. They have made games more and more casual to reach more people and sell more.
It’s like the “enshittification of the internet” but in videogames.
If you like these “old school feeling games”, I can recommend you a list. Specially if you’re into “turn based strategic/rpg combat” games.