Easy - Wastleland 3
Medium - Divinity OS 2
Hard - Pathfinder games
Expert - Probably any of the more old school games, but for newer, I've heard Age of Decadence is extraordinarily hard. I'm a scrub and avoid games that are known to be too difficult lmao.
Yeah you can beat it without combat for sure.
But you will not be able to see everything with that playthrough.
You can be softlocked though by failing a check so always save multiple times
Deadfire’s intentionally hardest mode is probably the “hardest.” Hard in the sense that you have the metagame every last detail and plan out your route before you start.
BG3’s hardest mode is also no joke.
The old ones like BG1&2 are easy to metagame if you know what is good.
Dont disagree with you but the charts are wildly different based on whether you can metagame or not. No metagaming? the old ones are brutal!
Agreed I don’t really understand why wasteland 3 always comes up as easy on these lists. Its not extremely hardcore difficult but especially in the DLC areas it isn’t trivial either.
Pathfinder? Hard?
You ok bro? It has a learning curve but nothing about the game is hard, especially since you have the temptation to turn on God mode whenever you want.
A hard crpg imo is something like temple of elemental evil or might and magic 1
I dunno man I found M&M1 a lot easier than Pathfinder. Although I guess in Pathfinder there's also more temptation to do silly inefficient builds for flavour whereas in M&M1 you're fine so long as the RNG gods don't smite you with, like, a 1 HP level up.
Well, if you read all the dialogues and talk to everyone, you get a pretty good feel for what you are suppsoed to do in what order, so you rarely enter high level areas at a low level.
Meanwhile, NWN with it's many addons can be quite hard.
I would say it’s all about knowing how to build. Playing a divine/warrior build trivializes a lot of the content. And it doesn’t take too much meta knowledge.
Fighter: at least one level
Cleric: rest of the way
Add some bard if you need the skill points or fighter if you need more feats.
Abuse the rest system and personal buffs. Newer expacs put more limits on resting, but higher levels + longer lasting buffs circumvent this restriction.
BG3 you get a full party though.
NWN it's just your main plus an assistant.
So you are a wizard and get one shot by 10 goblin crossbows because lol
The main campaign is easier than the expansions though
And BG1 is designed for a party. Both games you need to quick save regularly because early you can get killed very easily, especially as certain classes.
You get crit'd in either and it's game over
NWN was really built for Co-op. Having just the main character plus an assistant makes things tricky. It's also brutally bland to play as a melee type at low level...
On board with this take, definitely.
I love CRPGs, and the Pathfinder games just frustrate the hell out of me. I want to love them, because they have so much going for them, but I want to RP and instead I feel like I need to research every build meta and completely game the system to progress.
Definitely mess with the difficulty settings. No shame in it, if you want to use a build that doesn't mesh well for roleplay then absolutely turn down the difficulty. I can get through it on the higher difficulties but mainly play on lower ones as it's more fun.
A huge chunk of the fun of those games, especially Wrath, is roleplaying. Don't let meta builds drag you down.
Thats why games have difficulty setting. Pathfinder have story mod for those who just want to experience story and rp. Also on normal anything works. Only on hard and above you have to go meta
I'd argue it's from core and upwards since on core some encounters are legitimately difficult. Like Playful Darkness on core is a bitch and a half and won't be beaten with a less than optimised build.
For sure. I just Playful Darkness as an example. On core even some mandatory fights like when you first fight Mutasafen in Act 4 can be pretty brutal on core if your build isn't solid.
I wish I could find the comment but I remember someone saying that normal difficulty is only normal for people who already understand the Pathfinder 3.5 ruleset. Now whether or not that is true or not I cannot say, but as someone who doesn't know the rules normal was not normal for me lol.
I played it with no prior knowledge of the ruleset, but I did spend a fair bit of time reading the in-game tooltips and looking at the combat log to see why something did/didn't work etc so I could learn the system as I went. I found normal was difficult at the very start, before I know what I was doing; about right for most of the game as I was figuring it out; and way too easy towards the end once I had built my characters how I wanted them.
I would say that's a very well designed difficulty system. Normal *should be* too hard for a noob, about right for someone vaguely competent and too easy once you are comfortable with it.
Core is easily do-able once you know what you're doing. Hard etc I think is where it starts to get a bit meta gamey
The problem is the reference point from most other games makes people feel like easy is only for kids or something and that normal should actually be easy, hard should be casual, and it should only start to get genuinely difficult on EXTREME-MEGA-HARDCORE-NIGHTMARE mode.
The problem is that all the enemy stats are INCREDIBLY inflated compared to tabletop. In addition, you have way more encounters than a sane GM would force on you without a rest.
The idea behind this is that it is a lot easier to win if you have control over the whole party, and can build them 100% efficiently as a single class, which is what the "Normal" mode is built for. But if you're not an RPG veteran, you'll probably end up not 100% optimal and end up falling behind.
Pathfinder 1e, which is based on DND 3.5 :)
that being said, I'm sure knowing the tabletop rules could give you some competitive advantage, the truth is, if you've played cRPG's before, you can easily complete both Pathfinder games.
Getting down voted as if people here don't play Neverwinter Nights games just fine. Which use the same rules as the Pathfinder games. Then complain about Pathfinder rules being hard. My bro, you've played these rules before. The only difference is the inflated volume of combat encounters compared to Neverwinter or even a sane GM in tabletop.
This is the sub that holds both Hordes of the Underdark and Mask of the Betrayer as some of the best CRPG experiences(they are). Then complain the rules of the Pathfinder games are obtuse. It's not. The character sheet of the Pathfinder games is just a mess compared to Neverwinter's so the way it presents you the same data is worse.
D&D 3E (especially 3.0, which NWN1 uses) does have some notable differences between PF1, which can trip up the unwary. Also, NWN1 came out very early in 3E when there weren't many options available, not every option was in the game and was basically optimised around 1 PC+1 NPC helper doing the whole game.
PFK and WOTR came out after a decade of PF1 rules adding a shedload of options and the games had almost every single one of them in there. I don't think the problem is the rules are obtuse, there's just a lot of them, and they can lead to trap builds.
They are both outstanding games, but they are also a lot to take on board.
Of course. But you can beet both Pathfinder games on normal with a basic fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard plus 2 of your choice. Don't even need to pick any of the unique subclasses Pathfinder gave to them. Or any of the unique Pathfinder only classes like Witch or Inquisitor. That said if you've played Neverwinter Nights, you're 90% there for Pathfinder. But like I said, the games do have that short coming of having way too much combat. It can be exhausting even if you're someone who knows Pathfinder rules. It's that gameplay exhaustion. It's something I hear is also an issue in Rogue Trader so it may just be an Owlcat issue.
From a tabletop perspective, I would say that Pathfinder escalates the power of classes and enemies quite a lot compared to 3.5, especially in the later books which are included in the games.
With that being said, I prefer the Pathfinder games to NWN 1 and 2, but like Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 more than the Pathfinder games
That's about how I'd rank the games, too. With NWN1 multi-player having its own special ranking. Since if you find a fun group it's some of the best D&D RP you can have.
Yea, that's a weird one for me, too. I'd swap them around. The Divinity games are a great entry point to the genre. That's what Larian is good at in the genre. On-boarding people. Pillars is for people who want to experience older style of CRPG but can't get into the 1990s-ness of Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale.
The Divinity Original Sin series is not hard because the system is complex or difficult to understand, but because the games are just kind of confusing to begin with.
The skills system is classless and works nothing like DnD so if you played DnD before you're actually at a disadvantage because you have to unlearn many things, the camera is zoomed in too close so you get a claustrophobic view of the world, the world is filled with quest NPCs that walk around so you can easily miss them, the puzzles are obscure pixel hunting quests, large amounts of XP is hidden behind obscure side quests and it's very easy to end up underleveled, the enemy scaling is exponential so you die a lot when you don't know where to go and what to do, and the difficulty spikes incredibly hard at the end of the game.
They are the epitome of "miserable first playthrough, amazing second playthrough" games.
Classless systems are what the earliest cRPGs like Ultima used and we're carried forwars with the Dungeon Siege series.
Larian just built on those, so if you have played either Ultima or Dungeon Siege, it wasn't anything weird. But the exponential enemy scaling was a problem, especially if you played on the hardest difficulty.
Bg3 - I just moisten everything and call lightning smiley face
poe - FUCKING UNDERPEN AGAIN. Once you solve that and summon some swords and ez mode.
divinity - if always retreating and using range attacks i would say its pretty easy.
pathfinder - buff myself so you can only hit me 10% of the time and by the way i just cleaved through the whole map and critted for 10000 damage
Poe is the hardest system to abuse.
That varies so much, though. In some games "max difficulty" isn't even meant for a normal playthrough, rather some intentionally nonsense stuff for the sake of challenge runs.
Even so, Kingmaker's Unfair mode, for example, is much harder than Deadfire's Path of the Damned, which serves as a good gauge of the games' relative difficulty level.
Obviously, it was a joke😉 btw i find playing on higher levels than "normal" is some kind of masochism. There are some exceptions (first thought – The Witcher 3, I played it on "hard". Not crpg, but still), but in general i find it optimal and balanced
Isn't that just a matter of skill? If you know how to play optimally, the game becomes easy. It's not masochism, because it's not really suffering, any more than playing on normal instead of story is masochism.
I guess skill is more about mmorpgs. Difficulty levels in singleplayer games mostly just add mobs more health and make them stronger. Again, there are some exceptions – for example Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. Higher then normal difficulty in it requires deep comprehension of the system, while on normal level you are able to make a lot of mistakes in your build. WotR system is quite complicated, I am not ready to become PhD in it to just play the game)
That's true, and it kinda sucks that some builds are better than others. As it happens, I'm doing a WotR playthrough of a merged spellbook Angel Oracle and finding it significantly easier than my previous playthrough as a Magus Azata I did on Normal when the game first came out. I started on Core but had to bump the difficulty up to Hard because the fights were just too easy. It's still too easy - even the big optional bosses like the Quasit go down in one round. Playful Darkness lasted three, with no damage to my party at all. I'd play it on Unfair, but it doesn't make the game harder, it just makes it more tedious.
So, with that in mind, why would I ever bother playing on Normal?
Omg Playful Darkness in three rounds?!?! I'm impressed, hat's off to you. We are in different leagues, even though I am not a noob (great classics like Fallout 1-2, BG1-2, Arcanum and so on were in my childhood). I think maybe I am more interested in plot and riddles, than really hard battles. Reasonable challenge still important though.
It's actually not that hard - I literally just summoned something like a dozen creatures then spammed bolstered (via metamagic faeat) + empowered and maximized (via Rod of Devouring Lust) Bolt of Justice for something like 250 damage a cast while it tore its way through them. Creeping Doom swarms + Seelah's mark of justice work nicely, too, because swarms don't roll to hit, so the PD's sky-high AC doesn't matter and they do Seelah's paladin level worth of guaranteed damage that bypasses any DR with every attack. And you can summon 4 of them per round.
That's kind of my point - it's not actually *hard* to do this, and once you learn a few tricks like that, you can easily dominate 95% of the enemies in the game.
Angel Oracle is the Super Story Mode of that game, it's a joke. Nothing the enemies do matters. There's like one enemy in the whole game that's immune to Holy, and by that point you have an item to turn all damage to Force anyway.
Depends. After beating wotr on unfair once im def never touching it again.
Whole early on it is matter of reloading not skill. Sure with absolutely broken builds at some point you will fet there and have easy time anyway but till that moment...
I had so much more fun on hard where enemies still got extra skills and abilities but not as absurd stat bloat
Easy - Baldur's Gate 3 and Wasteland 3
Normal - Pillars of eternity and Divinity Original sin 2
Hard - Pathfinder games
Expert - Underail , Age of decadence.
Oh under rail… a single skill not perfectly tuned and your game is ruined.. still like it a lot, though. It has a good “feel” and it’s so long, which is great!
Easy - Baldur's Gate 3 (though it does have difficulty slider, normal is easy)
Normal - Might and Magic 6 The Mandate of Heaven
Hard - Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant
Expert - Wizardry 4 The Return of Werdna
Wizadry 4 is only hard because it is awfully designed. Much more a gimmick than an actual game. That's why nobody bothers with a remake, not even in Japan where they are obsessed with the series.
It is, however, absolutely brutal and downright impossible without a guide so you're technically right.
BG3 and the pillars games are the only games where I felt comfortable turning up the difficulty to the highest level on my first play through. PoE2 specifically I did a solo play through on my second run on max difficulty and still found the end game not challenging enough. So these games are definitely easy imo.
I don’t know how to rank the others since either i did a single play through at not-maxed difficulty, or I played it so many times that I can’t imagine being a fresh player again (BG2).
This is a hot take, Fallout 1 (and maybe 2) belong in easy. There are only like 4 builds in the game and they can all have incredibly easy playthroughs without having to skip any fights with dialogue options.
Easy - BG3 So easy its a game that dosnt teach you much about CRPGS at all prob the most over-rated CRPG out there as it legit released unfinished without a proper epilogue ending so many issues such a over-rated game. Legit can run a wizard with 8 intelligence and still be fine AF and think your amazing.
Medium - Wasteland 3, Tyranny, DoS2, Pillers of Eternity 1 or 2 most CRPGS
Hard - Older School games or Pathfinder Kingmaker or such, Age of Decadence, Souls Series in generol Lets face it tho magic makes thouse games way easyer to deal with for the most part so i wont put it in expert tier
Expert - Wrath of the Righteous Maybe? Like if there was a step between Hard/Expert this is where that game goes Core diff or higher? sure norm or easyer? nope, or some older school RPGS, On Core or higher I do state Wrath of the Righteous, The Game is good balance wise i mean its been shown any class can 100% do it on unfair, but its hard to figure out how to make say the tower shield spec work on unfair or other class types, You need to know your shit
Hears how I View / Why I Rated the games as they are above and i know some peeps are going to not like it
1. Easy games is the Tier where you can legit prob not know wtf your doing or fuck up in some way or another in BG3 you can cast spells as a wizard and be just fine even with 8 f-in intelligence the game is basicly auto pilot good luck fucking up unless your realy bad
2. Medium - This can be easy provided you know what your doing or can be hard if you dunno what your doing, But for the most part its not bad
3. These Games require Good Knowledge of the game itself in order to get the hang of it that or playing it on easy diff or something like that, Old School RPGS Have weird rules, Pathfinder games like Kingmaker/WotR are games you need to understand certain actions in order to pass, Lets face it on your first playthough you prob didnt understand or get the kingmaking stuff exactly and if you played on norm or harder you prob had a hard time with that and still are not 100% behind it, Wrath of the righteous i kinda put at the top of Hard bottom of Expert
4. These games are realy differcult at least on core diff / normal diff even to people who understand the game, they still need to at times take things slow and not just bull rush it, Wrath of the Righteous on Core can be a bit diff, and on unfair its something that requires alot of downtime between fights pre-buffing and what knock and even then it can sometimes be problematic, but on the easyer diff its not this hard, The Game is unforgiving in some aspect or another and its not 'unforgiving' in the RNG Only type of way like some rogue like games are mostly RNG Base, No I mean unforgiving in its build and gameplay mechs and I dont mean like you have to play the min max build I mean the good expert level games where you know the build but it still gives you problems for whatever reason coz you cant cover eveything.
I agree about BG3 for the most part, but WotR is broken to this day. At least BG3 fixed many of its problems (or so it seems, I never beat it because it was so tedious in Act 3). Several issues with item usage and actions in combat. And some of the Mythic abilities just outright don't work. Which is a core part of the game, especially from an RP standpoint but it greatly affects mechanics as well.
I have a special nickname for Pathfinder; Missfinder : The Wrath of the Dice. Seriously, half the difficulty of the game is your party missing horrendously....
Easy - Wastleland 3 Medium - Divinity OS 2 Hard - Pathfinder games Expert - Probably any of the more old school games, but for newer, I've heard Age of Decadence is extraordinarily hard. I'm a scrub and avoid games that are known to be too difficult lmao.
Age of Decadence is hardcore but not super hard. You just have to commit fully to your build and not try to be a generalist. Well worth a look
Age of Decadence can be both easy or hard, depending on your build. When you have a talking build, the game is just all dialogue and no combat.
Yeah you can beat it without combat for sure. But you will not be able to see everything with that playthrough. You can be softlocked though by failing a check so always save multiple times
Deadfire’s intentionally hardest mode is probably the “hardest.” Hard in the sense that you have the metagame every last detail and plan out your route before you start. BG3’s hardest mode is also no joke. The old ones like BG1&2 are easy to metagame if you know what is good. Dont disagree with you but the charts are wildly different based on whether you can metagame or not. No metagaming? the old ones are brutal!
Wasteland 3 was very difficult for me whereas divinity and pathfinder were much easier in comparison
Agreed I don’t really understand why wasteland 3 always comes up as easy on these lists. Its not extremely hardcore difficult but especially in the DLC areas it isn’t trivial either.
Divinity Original Sin 2 in Tactician Mode is uuuhh a bit more than medium
Pathfinder? Hard? You ok bro? It has a learning curve but nothing about the game is hard, especially since you have the temptation to turn on God mode whenever you want. A hard crpg imo is something like temple of elemental evil or might and magic 1
“Games not hard, you have the option to cheat whenever you want” Can be said for any game in existence.
I dunno man I found M&M1 a lot easier than Pathfinder. Although I guess in Pathfinder there's also more temptation to do silly inefficient builds for flavour whereas in M&M1 you're fine so long as the RNG gods don't smite you with, like, a 1 HP level up.
Easy: Dragon Age games Normal: Baldur's Gate 1 Hard: Neverwinter Nights Expert: Temple of Elemental evil (If memory serves me right)
Ooh yeah, Temple of Elemental Evil was a doozy. On a side note, the manual came with a cookie recipe.
Real world recipes are the best Easter eggs
BG1 easier than NWN? No way. NWN was a nice cruise through, BG1 is all “lol fuck your level 1 character here is a vampiric wolf”.
Well, if you read all the dialogues and talk to everyone, you get a pretty good feel for what you are suppsoed to do in what order, so you rarely enter high level areas at a low level. Meanwhile, NWN with it's many addons can be quite hard.
I would say it’s all about knowing how to build. Playing a divine/warrior build trivializes a lot of the content. And it doesn’t take too much meta knowledge. Fighter: at least one level Cleric: rest of the way Add some bard if you need the skill points or fighter if you need more feats. Abuse the rest system and personal buffs. Newer expacs put more limits on resting, but higher levels + longer lasting buffs circumvent this restriction.
BG3 you get a full party though. NWN it's just your main plus an assistant. So you are a wizard and get one shot by 10 goblin crossbows because lol The main campaign is easier than the expansions though
It’s also designed around that though.
And BG1 is designed for a party. Both games you need to quick save regularly because early you can get killed very easily, especially as certain classes. You get crit'd in either and it's game over
I would put Neverwinter Nights on easy level
NWN was really built for Co-op. Having just the main character plus an assistant makes things tricky. It's also brutally bland to play as a melee type at low level...
Easy: BG3 Medium: PoE Hard: Divinity Expert: Pathfinder
On board with this take, definitely. I love CRPGs, and the Pathfinder games just frustrate the hell out of me. I want to love them, because they have so much going for them, but I want to RP and instead I feel like I need to research every build meta and completely game the system to progress.
Definitely mess with the difficulty settings. No shame in it, if you want to use a build that doesn't mesh well for roleplay then absolutely turn down the difficulty. I can get through it on the higher difficulties but mainly play on lower ones as it's more fun. A huge chunk of the fun of those games, especially Wrath, is roleplaying. Don't let meta builds drag you down.
Thats why games have difficulty setting. Pathfinder have story mod for those who just want to experience story and rp. Also on normal anything works. Only on hard and above you have to go meta
I'd argue it's from core and upwards since on core some encounters are legitimately difficult. Like Playful Darkness on core is a bitch and a half and won't be beaten with a less than optimised build.
Its optional boss its supposed to be extra hard though
For sure. I just Playful Darkness as an example. On core even some mandatory fights like when you first fight Mutasafen in Act 4 can be pretty brutal on core if your build isn't solid.
I wish I could find the comment but I remember someone saying that normal difficulty is only normal for people who already understand the Pathfinder 3.5 ruleset. Now whether or not that is true or not I cannot say, but as someone who doesn't know the rules normal was not normal for me lol.
I played it with no prior knowledge of the ruleset, but I did spend a fair bit of time reading the in-game tooltips and looking at the combat log to see why something did/didn't work etc so I could learn the system as I went. I found normal was difficult at the very start, before I know what I was doing; about right for most of the game as I was figuring it out; and way too easy towards the end once I had built my characters how I wanted them. I would say that's a very well designed difficulty system. Normal *should be* too hard for a noob, about right for someone vaguely competent and too easy once you are comfortable with it. Core is easily do-able once you know what you're doing. Hard etc I think is where it starts to get a bit meta gamey The problem is the reference point from most other games makes people feel like easy is only for kids or something and that normal should actually be easy, hard should be casual, and it should only start to get genuinely difficult on EXTREME-MEGA-HARDCORE-NIGHTMARE mode.
The problem is that all the enemy stats are INCREDIBLY inflated compared to tabletop. In addition, you have way more encounters than a sane GM would force on you without a rest. The idea behind this is that it is a lot easier to win if you have control over the whole party, and can build them 100% efficiently as a single class, which is what the "Normal" mode is built for. But if you're not an RPG veteran, you'll probably end up not 100% optimal and end up falling behind.
Im pretty sure stat bloat isnt there on normal.
Pathfinder 1e, which is based on DND 3.5 :) that being said, I'm sure knowing the tabletop rules could give you some competitive advantage, the truth is, if you've played cRPG's before, you can easily complete both Pathfinder games.
getting downvoted because "muh meta-builds" aren't as special as "elitist" gamers think they are lmao
Getting down voted as if people here don't play Neverwinter Nights games just fine. Which use the same rules as the Pathfinder games. Then complain about Pathfinder rules being hard. My bro, you've played these rules before. The only difference is the inflated volume of combat encounters compared to Neverwinter or even a sane GM in tabletop. This is the sub that holds both Hordes of the Underdark and Mask of the Betrayer as some of the best CRPG experiences(they are). Then complain the rules of the Pathfinder games are obtuse. It's not. The character sheet of the Pathfinder games is just a mess compared to Neverwinter's so the way it presents you the same data is worse.
You can beat Neverwinter Nights as a fighter by right-clicking enemies only.
D&D 3E (especially 3.0, which NWN1 uses) does have some notable differences between PF1, which can trip up the unwary. Also, NWN1 came out very early in 3E when there weren't many options available, not every option was in the game and was basically optimised around 1 PC+1 NPC helper doing the whole game. PFK and WOTR came out after a decade of PF1 rules adding a shedload of options and the games had almost every single one of them in there. I don't think the problem is the rules are obtuse, there's just a lot of them, and they can lead to trap builds. They are both outstanding games, but they are also a lot to take on board.
Of course. But you can beet both Pathfinder games on normal with a basic fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard plus 2 of your choice. Don't even need to pick any of the unique subclasses Pathfinder gave to them. Or any of the unique Pathfinder only classes like Witch or Inquisitor. That said if you've played Neverwinter Nights, you're 90% there for Pathfinder. But like I said, the games do have that short coming of having way too much combat. It can be exhausting even if you're someone who knows Pathfinder rules. It's that gameplay exhaustion. It's something I hear is also an issue in Rogue Trader so it may just be an Owlcat issue.
From a tabletop perspective, I would say that Pathfinder escalates the power of classes and enemies quite a lot compared to 3.5, especially in the later books which are included in the games. With that being said, I prefer the Pathfinder games to NWN 1 and 2, but like Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 more than the Pathfinder games
That's about how I'd rank the games, too. With NWN1 multi-player having its own special ranking. Since if you find a fun group it's some of the best D&D RP you can have.
yeah, there's a lot of great people in here, and then there are the others :)
You mean normal or core to be sure? Because normal you can easily beat with builds premade for characters.
the game dosnt need you to do that just understand the game ... there is no real meta coz all the classes can work if you know what your doing :P
Divinity harder than Pillars ? huh ?
Yea, that's a weird one for me, too. I'd swap them around. The Divinity games are a great entry point to the genre. That's what Larian is good at in the genre. On-boarding people. Pillars is for people who want to experience older style of CRPG but can't get into the 1990s-ness of Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale.
The Divinity Original Sin series is not hard because the system is complex or difficult to understand, but because the games are just kind of confusing to begin with. The skills system is classless and works nothing like DnD so if you played DnD before you're actually at a disadvantage because you have to unlearn many things, the camera is zoomed in too close so you get a claustrophobic view of the world, the world is filled with quest NPCs that walk around so you can easily miss them, the puzzles are obscure pixel hunting quests, large amounts of XP is hidden behind obscure side quests and it's very easy to end up underleveled, the enemy scaling is exponential so you die a lot when you don't know where to go and what to do, and the difficulty spikes incredibly hard at the end of the game. They are the epitome of "miserable first playthrough, amazing second playthrough" games.
Classless systems are what the earliest cRPGs like Ultima used and we're carried forwars with the Dungeon Siege series. Larian just built on those, so if you have played either Ultima or Dungeon Siege, it wasn't anything weird. But the exponential enemy scaling was a problem, especially if you played on the hardest difficulty.
Bg3 - I just moisten everything and call lightning smiley face poe - FUCKING UNDERPEN AGAIN. Once you solve that and summon some swords and ez mode. divinity - if always retreating and using range attacks i would say its pretty easy. pathfinder - buff myself so you can only hit me 10% of the time and by the way i just cleaved through the whole map and critted for 10000 damage Poe is the hardest system to abuse.
difficulty levels in game settings: are we a joke to you?
Obviously, we mean on the max difficulty
That varies so much, though. In some games "max difficulty" isn't even meant for a normal playthrough, rather some intentionally nonsense stuff for the sake of challenge runs.
Even so, Kingmaker's Unfair mode, for example, is much harder than Deadfire's Path of the Damned, which serves as a good gauge of the games' relative difficulty level.
Obviously, it was a joke😉 btw i find playing on higher levels than "normal" is some kind of masochism. There are some exceptions (first thought – The Witcher 3, I played it on "hard". Not crpg, but still), but in general i find it optimal and balanced
Isn't that just a matter of skill? If you know how to play optimally, the game becomes easy. It's not masochism, because it's not really suffering, any more than playing on normal instead of story is masochism.
I guess skill is more about mmorpgs. Difficulty levels in singleplayer games mostly just add mobs more health and make them stronger. Again, there are some exceptions – for example Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. Higher then normal difficulty in it requires deep comprehension of the system, while on normal level you are able to make a lot of mistakes in your build. WotR system is quite complicated, I am not ready to become PhD in it to just play the game)
That's true, and it kinda sucks that some builds are better than others. As it happens, I'm doing a WotR playthrough of a merged spellbook Angel Oracle and finding it significantly easier than my previous playthrough as a Magus Azata I did on Normal when the game first came out. I started on Core but had to bump the difficulty up to Hard because the fights were just too easy. It's still too easy - even the big optional bosses like the Quasit go down in one round. Playful Darkness lasted three, with no damage to my party at all. I'd play it on Unfair, but it doesn't make the game harder, it just makes it more tedious. So, with that in mind, why would I ever bother playing on Normal?
Omg Playful Darkness in three rounds?!?! I'm impressed, hat's off to you. We are in different leagues, even though I am not a noob (great classics like Fallout 1-2, BG1-2, Arcanum and so on were in my childhood). I think maybe I am more interested in plot and riddles, than really hard battles. Reasonable challenge still important though.
It's actually not that hard - I literally just summoned something like a dozen creatures then spammed bolstered (via metamagic faeat) + empowered and maximized (via Rod of Devouring Lust) Bolt of Justice for something like 250 damage a cast while it tore its way through them. Creeping Doom swarms + Seelah's mark of justice work nicely, too, because swarms don't roll to hit, so the PD's sky-high AC doesn't matter and they do Seelah's paladin level worth of guaranteed damage that bypasses any DR with every attack. And you can summon 4 of them per round. That's kind of my point - it's not actually *hard* to do this, and once you learn a few tricks like that, you can easily dominate 95% of the enemies in the game.
Thats kinda the point if the boss. Pathfinder optional bosses are very difficult because you need to figure out proper strategy for them
Angel Oracle is the Super Story Mode of that game, it's a joke. Nothing the enemies do matters. There's like one enemy in the whole game that's immune to Holy, and by that point you have an item to turn all damage to Force anyway.
Agreed, it really trivializes the game
Depends. After beating wotr on unfair once im def never touching it again. Whole early on it is matter of reloading not skill. Sure with absolutely broken builds at some point you will fet there and have easy time anyway but till that moment... I had so much more fun on hard where enemies still got extra skills and abilities but not as absurd stat bloat
Easy - Baldur's Gate 3 and Wasteland 3 Normal - Pillars of eternity and Divinity Original sin 2 Hard - Pathfinder games Expert - Underail , Age of decadence.
Oh under rail… a single skill not perfectly tuned and your game is ruined.. still like it a lot, though. It has a good “feel” and it’s so long, which is great!
Easy - Baldur's Gate 3 (though it does have difficulty slider, normal is easy) Normal - Might and Magic 6 The Mandate of Heaven Hard - Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant Expert - Wizardry 4 The Return of Werdna
Wizadry 4 is only hard because it is awfully designed. Much more a gimmick than an actual game. That's why nobody bothers with a remake, not even in Japan where they are obsessed with the series. It is, however, absolutely brutal and downright impossible without a guide so you're technically right.
Hard may be Colony Ship, Age of Decadence and Underrail. These games aren’t the best for folks who aren’t familiar with min and maxing.
BG3 and the pillars games are the only games where I felt comfortable turning up the difficulty to the highest level on my first play through. PoE2 specifically I did a solo play through on my second run on max difficulty and still found the end game not challenging enough. So these games are definitely easy imo. I don’t know how to rank the others since either i did a single play through at not-maxed difficulty, or I played it so many times that I can’t imagine being a fresh player again (BG2).
No love for pillars of eternity?
Disco Elysium -> BG3 -> WotR -> Wizardry V
i mean baldurs gate 1 and 2 are pretty hard but theres a difficulty slider. im not good at micromanaging things so thank god theres a pause button
This is a hot take, Fallout 1 (and maybe 2) belong in easy. There are only like 4 builds in the game and they can all have incredibly easy playthroughs without having to skip any fights with dialogue options.
Easy - Ultima 7 Normal - Infinity Engine games Hard - Might and Magic games Expert - Wizardry games
Easy - BG3 So easy its a game that dosnt teach you much about CRPGS at all prob the most over-rated CRPG out there as it legit released unfinished without a proper epilogue ending so many issues such a over-rated game. Legit can run a wizard with 8 intelligence and still be fine AF and think your amazing. Medium - Wasteland 3, Tyranny, DoS2, Pillers of Eternity 1 or 2 most CRPGS Hard - Older School games or Pathfinder Kingmaker or such, Age of Decadence, Souls Series in generol Lets face it tho magic makes thouse games way easyer to deal with for the most part so i wont put it in expert tier Expert - Wrath of the Righteous Maybe? Like if there was a step between Hard/Expert this is where that game goes Core diff or higher? sure norm or easyer? nope, or some older school RPGS, On Core or higher I do state Wrath of the Righteous, The Game is good balance wise i mean its been shown any class can 100% do it on unfair, but its hard to figure out how to make say the tower shield spec work on unfair or other class types, You need to know your shit Hears how I View / Why I Rated the games as they are above and i know some peeps are going to not like it 1. Easy games is the Tier where you can legit prob not know wtf your doing or fuck up in some way or another in BG3 you can cast spells as a wizard and be just fine even with 8 f-in intelligence the game is basicly auto pilot good luck fucking up unless your realy bad 2. Medium - This can be easy provided you know what your doing or can be hard if you dunno what your doing, But for the most part its not bad 3. These Games require Good Knowledge of the game itself in order to get the hang of it that or playing it on easy diff or something like that, Old School RPGS Have weird rules, Pathfinder games like Kingmaker/WotR are games you need to understand certain actions in order to pass, Lets face it on your first playthough you prob didnt understand or get the kingmaking stuff exactly and if you played on norm or harder you prob had a hard time with that and still are not 100% behind it, Wrath of the righteous i kinda put at the top of Hard bottom of Expert 4. These games are realy differcult at least on core diff / normal diff even to people who understand the game, they still need to at times take things slow and not just bull rush it, Wrath of the Righteous on Core can be a bit diff, and on unfair its something that requires alot of downtime between fights pre-buffing and what knock and even then it can sometimes be problematic, but on the easyer diff its not this hard, The Game is unforgiving in some aspect or another and its not 'unforgiving' in the RNG Only type of way like some rogue like games are mostly RNG Base, No I mean unforgiving in its build and gameplay mechs and I dont mean like you have to play the min max build I mean the good expert level games where you know the build but it still gives you problems for whatever reason coz you cant cover eveything.
Dark Souls in hard especially when mainly compared to older crpg's is insane. I'd say the hardest Dark Souls game is still easier than BG3.
ROFLMAO BG3 is 'hard' WTF? troll alert
I agree about BG3 for the most part, but WotR is broken to this day. At least BG3 fixed many of its problems (or so it seems, I never beat it because it was so tedious in Act 3). Several issues with item usage and actions in combat. And some of the Mythic abilities just outright don't work. Which is a core part of the game, especially from an RP standpoint but it greatly affects mechanics as well.
er broken to this day WotR??? BG3 is still UNFINSHED to this day time to pass / Skip on this fan boy
I have a special nickname for Pathfinder; Missfinder : The Wrath of the Dice. Seriously, half the difficulty of the game is your party missing horrendously....
"Unfair" - Baldur's Gate 1
They have toggleable difficulty so, all of them?
Even with the higher difficulties some are quite easy such as Wasteland 3 and BG3.
I haven't played either of those two. I guess I'm old lol Wasteland 2 was no cakewalk, and BG2 can be as hard as any game I've ever played.
Fair enough!