Urithrand
Fri, 9th Nov '07, 8:22pm
While playing through MotB it began to grate on me just how rubbish the party AI is. Despite promises that it had been worked on for the expansion, I must admit I'm not impressed, but then it struck me, where did this sense of "I just want to play my character and the others should be able to look after themselves" come from?
Back in what we mostly call the "good old days" of Baldur's Gate and the like, you had no choice but to control all of your NPCs to a great extent as well as your PC, but somehow this never hindered gameplay, in fact it gave you a great sense of what your party was doing, what spells they had memorised and therefore allowed you to plan what you were about to do in a much shorter time, you could say "It's ok, I've got X spell memorised with so & so" and plough on through. I find with recent games where the characters are largely left to their own devices, I am often left trawling through spellbooks trying to fluke my way out of some nasty situation with whatever crappy spells one of my casters happens to have at the time.
I think in my next run-through of MotB I'm going to disable party AI completely, and see if it improves my impression of the game. Not that my impression was that bad the first time round, I just think we all need to find a new game to refer to as the headstone of the "good old days", instead of sitting and moaning about nothing quite comparing to X game from ages past :p
Back in what we mostly call the "good old days" of Baldur's Gate and the like, you had no choice but to control all of your NPCs to a great extent as well as your PC, but somehow this never hindered gameplay, in fact it gave you a great sense of what your party was doing, what spells they had memorised and therefore allowed you to plan what you were about to do in a much shorter time, you could say "It's ok, I've got X spell memorised with so & so" and plough on through. I find with recent games where the characters are largely left to their own devices, I am often left trawling through spellbooks trying to fluke my way out of some nasty situation with whatever crappy spells one of my casters happens to have at the time.
I think in my next run-through of MotB I'm going to disable party AI completely, and see if it improves my impression of the game. Not that my impression was that bad the first time round, I just think we all need to find a new game to refer to as the headstone of the "good old days", instead of sitting and moaning about nothing quite comparing to X game from ages past :p