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Comment by Qworg | Hacker News Reader

A player shouldn't have to play your game just to learn in the end game that their fighter isnt going to cut it and they'll have to reroll as a wizard. That sucks (and is bad game design). Things shouldn't be perfectly balanced, but all play styles should be equally viable.

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I wouldn't said it's inherently bad game design, different people have different preferences. Here's a good blog post discussing such decisions.

http://nethack4.org/blog/strategy-headroom.html

I mean but one has to expect this. In what sane world is a wizard and a fighter going to be equivalent?

I think the main thing as pointed out is that in seeking balance a lot of 'fun' or 'interesting' elements have to be thrown out.

It's fine if your world is designed this way, but in that case you shouldn't be allowed to play as a fighter. Do it like Magicka, say, and offer your players their choice of wizards.

On the other hand, there are things warriors can do that mages cannot. For example, in many fantasy texts, wizards are social outcasts and warriors are anywhere between accepted (but maybe not highly regarded) members of society all the way through respected members of the court. A warrior and a wizard might not make sense going head to head in combat, but they occupy different places in the social structure.

In a tabletop RPG, you can represent this easily. I'm sad more games don't play with this social/physical power dynamic.

Low level wizards are incredibly weak, and are basically free kills for anything, fighter or otherwise. It's only if they survive into high levels that they become demigods. Most of the spells I mentioned aren't available till the very end of the game.

This makes sense, as mastery of the Weave grants powers that are physically impossible to perform within the world's natural laws.

Magic by definition is bending/breaking the rules of the universe, and as such it should feel like it if you spend the countless hours needed to master it and persevere to the end. It took me dozens of hours of reading the spell descriptions from scrolls to just understand how spells interacted and worked together. It would have been far easier to say "screw it" and go with a fighter or paladin that focuses on disrupting enemy magic users. But I stuck with it, and am glad I did because using the magic system in BG2 is immensely satisfying. It requires an absurd amount of knowledge and expertise. It rewards future time orientation, patience and planning over impulsive "give me whats best right now".

Fighter and wizard wouldn't be very different if they were equally as effective from level 1 to level cap. They'd just be the same class with different variations of the same skills...which is exactly what happened in WoW.

Furthermore, unless you're soloing BG2, you have a party of six consisting of a variety of classes. Therefore, you'd never have to re-roll as a mage, because there would be a mage in your party ready to make up for any magical shortcomings you may have as a fighter. Your role then becomes keeping him safe and taking care of the less magically inclined enemies.

The MMOification I mentioned also has this issue of only allowing you the control of one character. This means all characters must be jack-of-all-trades, because otherwise someone will have to be stuck doing the less sexy roles such as tanking, healing or buffing/debuffing. Or in the case of the BG2 wizard, being completely useless for half the game.

Multiplayer game design has a long way to go before it reaches the wonders achieved in the past decade in single player games.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that enemy wizards also turn all of your strengths against you, because the player does not have any particularly special powers that enemies are denied. In fact, the player is at a far lower level for most of the game than enemies encountered and must rely on wits alone to survive most fights. There's a mod (Sword Coast Stratagems) that enhances enemy AI, and it is universally acclaimed as making BG2 into one of the most difficult games in existence. Every fight becomes a high stakes chess match...one small mistake leads to instant death. Aside from Dark/Demon Souls, I don't know of any games that come close to this level of tactical difficulty. I find these experiences to be immensely rewarding, and have a hard time playing mainstream games because they seriously lack this element.

One of the things I liked about BG was that it faithfully implemented all kinds of loopholes in the AD&D rules (which have since been "balanced" more-or-less out of existence). E.g. the optimal way to create magic users was as two-classed (indeed the female character you pick up is designed to be turned into a two-classed mage). So you go to level 5, say, as a warrior, then switch to mage (starting at level 1 all over again, but with warrior hit points).

Indeed, I didn't comment on multi or dual classing because that just changes everything. I haven't played any of the 3rd/4th/5th edition games, so I am unfamiliar with those rule sets. But I wouldn't be surprised if multi and dual classing were heavily nerfed. They really are just too much...unless your character is actually a demigod.

But again, the fact that they allow you so much freedom in creating your character is incredible. You can even triple class! I sincerely miss this kind of freedom combined with the incredible depth of the AD&D 2nd ed rules.

I'm looking forward to Pillars of Eternity, but I'm quite sure that mechanically it won't be nearly as fun as BG2. Those developers just know better than to implement such insane mechanics again. Which is why it won't be nearly as entertaining.

Starting with 3rd edition, two-classing is completely nerfed. Multi-classing is the norm (each time you go up a level you pick a class to level in) but unless you pick highly compatible classes you just create a basket case.

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