» Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:07 am
Supermage has never been the problem. The lack of superwarriors, superarchers and superrogues, however, was always disconcerting. The fact that a mage could do anything was annoying and game-breaking. Not everyone would like to or can invest several hundred-hour-long marathons in a game, and having difficulty spread all over the freaking place even when you make the very best choices for every build is, simply put, poor balancing. Yeah, it's a single player game and you won't annoy anyone by being mega powerful, but it makes character development compromising, a common staple on good RPGs, void.
I am, admitedly, a munchkin. Never been so in tabletop RPGs, because you can roleplay there. The very same years I've spent rolling dices are the reason I can't wrap my head around the notion of standing in front of my monitor going "weeeeeeee I'm this guy dude and I'm a-saving the world and a-seeing the sights! Gonna sit on this stool and look around 'cause that's what he would do". I want to just find stuff out, kill stuff and overall see and play the most I can out of the game. By being a MEGAMAGE I could do everything and this min-maxing got in the way of joy dearly. I have terrible memories of old times RPGs when you could simply screw your character up and be stuck forever with an useless lump of beef, had you made bad choices and I avoid that by trying to make the very best character I can, and it comes at the expense of having my inner munchkin just play the game and shutting up.
I know it's a matter of choice, but it compromises difficulty setting balancing and overall denotes sloppy balancing. Every RPG demands class balancing to make for wholesome experiences. The fact that I can't be a MEGAMAGE makes me more inclined to try something else, and that's probably what they're aiming for. BY the way, I'm going sword/magicka and I'm taking only Magicka and stamina, precisely because of this change. Health is for the weak!