------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Kingmaker was significantly less punishing at the same level.
...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

I'm sure that's a big factor. Core D&D difficulty is not really suitable for video games as a rule, I think. Also, I just don't have the patience to reload and strategize every encounter to death anymore. Back in my BG2/Torment/IWD days I could do that kind of thing. Nowadays I have a job! XD

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

>I'll tell you how I feel. Fuck you and your game too is how I
>feel, you assholes.

Yep! Know EXACTLY what you mean. This is the primary reason why I will never, ever, play a Far Cry game. Because they're EXPERTS at this. Not necessarily by having the character die, though that does happen in several of the games, but certainly by going, "Oh, those X number of hours you spent? Yeah, those were all for nothing. See, life is shit no matter what you do, and you must learn this!"
Fuck you and your horse, monkey, car, and everything else.I do not play games to be shat on, there's the news for that.

>That's just my opinion, though. There's really no need
>to go spreading it around.

Actually, I think I WILL go spreading it around. Because it deserves to be spread around.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

I'm kind of okay with that - as long as the victory matters, and it isn't some stupid But Thou Must problem. ("I don't want to die for the world. Can't we send the guy with the magic shielding in there with a how-to-fix-it guide?" "But Thou Must die for the world!")

Heroic sacrifice, sure. "Too bad, you lose, and everything goes wrong," not so much.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Anyone else remember the original ending to Fallout 3, with a monumentally stupid But Thou Must die to radiation moment? With a party member available who is completely immune to radiation? At least Bethesda retconned that nonsense later.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Yeah, I thought about this earlier today, while I was out doing Things and not near a computer.

>With a party member available who is completely immune to radiation?

At least THREE FO3 companions are immune to radiation--Charon, Fawkes, and Sergeant RL-3. (Possibly also Star Paladin Cross, if she'd ever put on her damn helmet, but hey ho.) And, IIRC, they all have bullshit excuses for not going in there, which IMO makes it worse than if the game just didn't even let you ask them to go, because it means the writers knew that was a massive plot hole and made the flimsiest, most token attempt possible to close it.

>At least Bethesda retconned that nonsense later.

Half-heartedly! Broken Steel doesn't rewrite the end of the main quest at all--you still get the flimsy bullshit railroad into the control room. They just added a bit where you survived Contrived Certain Death for completely unexplained reasons. I mean, I'm glad they at least went that far, but still, it's pretty weak.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

A slightly more insulting variation: "We set you a task 5 years and 3 games ago to save the entire galaxy by wiping out the greatest enemy to all life. At no time over the course of these games did we ever suggest that the goal of this quest was anything other than to wipe out that enemy in order to save the galaxy. Now, in the last five minutes of the game, when you've already seen some of your favorite characters sacrifice their lives, billions wiped out, and entire planets ravaged...we're gonna give you a choice between three shitty options that all effectively lead to 'You Fucking Lose.' Either you wipe out your enemy but also billions of more innocents including an entire civilization you just got done helping make peace, you sacrifice your life to become the very thing you've been struggling against, or you sacrifice your life to help your enemy win by other means. Why are we doing this thing that we never hinted at any time was a possibility? BECAUSE IT'S ART!!!"

Then months later: "Okay, so we're adding in a fourth option: YOU CHOOSE TO LOSE! NOW STOP MESSAGING US!!!"

And now, a decade later: "So uh...yeah...about the ending that we said we'd never go back on, that the series was over, and the main protagonist's story was finished? Yeah, we lied, we're making another game."

No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

Basically going 'You don't like having your choices not batter? Well fuck you for being too STUPID to understand our V I S I O N!'

Well, obviously you're supposed to farm 10,000 Steel Widgets to trade for the Titanium Widget, either on a market you can't access until you've reached level 20 or from a trade partner whose inventory changes constantly so there's never any guarantee that he'll have the Titanium Widget when you've got the Steel Widgets. Oh wait, a factory broke down and you need 100 of those Steel Widgets to fix it less than an hour before your trade partner's inventory updates, guess you'll have to wait until next month.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

This kind of makes sense in squad-based tactical games, where there's no mechanism in the game itself for giving the squad members stories as such (where would X-COM be without disposable chumps?), but yeah, in games where you're "driving" a single character who is doing things in the world, it doesn't really work for them to be total ciphers.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

But those seem pretty uncommon.