On 'Grinding'

[IJBall]

This post is apropos of nothing, but...

I don't like "grinding".

If I'm playing a game, let me know quickly whether I'm going to win, or lose, a combat encounter. Don't make me pound away for 30 minutes to find out if I'm going to win an encounter or not. I know some people enjoy the challenge of a 'grind' encounter, but I'm not one of them.

I think that's one of the things I've appreciated most about the Eschalon series - there are essentially no 'grind' encounters.

The only exception to that that I can think of is the Stone Golem at the end of Fathamurk. (Incidentally, that's the only part of either Eschalon game that I've never finished - once I went up against the Stone Golem and realized that I was going to have to 'grind' that encounter, one way or the other, I put that game aside, and have still never gone back to it. So I still haven't completed the Fathamurk expansion, because the only way to finish it is to get past the Stone Golem... ) I dunno, maybe Gen. Ghorr is a bit of a 'grind' encounter too, but he seemed much more of a mild 'grind' than the Stone Golem to me, so I was able to finish Book II. Gramuk, from Book I, was a relative breeze, by comparison. But this is also why I tend not to play Eschalon games where I attack the guards - those are 'grind' encounters too.

I haven't gotten to Avadon yet (saving that for Christmas break, most likely...), but I really liked Avenum 6... with two exceptions. The first was the Liche - that was a grind encounter which I think literally took me a half-hour to get through (and even that was only after I'd checked the SWS forums to figure out what to do!). The second was the final battle - more grinding! As a result, I've finished 98% of Avenum 6, but have never finished the game - the last encounter is too tedious a 'grind', I find.

If 'grind' encounters are bad with a single-player game like Eschalon, they are beyond tedious in a multi-party game like Avernum!

Anyway, I guess the point of this rambling is - BW, please keep up the good work, and don't subject us to 'grind' encounters in Book III! 'Cos there's at least one guy here who's not a fan of those!!

[BasiliskWrangler]

No grinding. Check.

[Necromis]

but but but I like fresh ground coffee. So a little grinding is ok.

@IJBall, you know if you use the exploding casks the golumn is pretty easy to beat and not a real grind.

[Randomizer]

That is one definite problem with Spiderweb games is there is usually several boss fights that you know you will win if you can survive the tedium of the half hour fight. What's worse is making a mistake near the end and having to replay the fight.

What I hate even more is grinding through trash mob fights to gain experience to level up for the next major fight.

[sirdilznik]

What I hate even more is grinding through trash mob fights to gain experience to level up for the next major fight.

Yeah, that's always what I think when the word "grinding" is used, fighting easy enemies over and over and over for a while to gain a few level before proceeding to a more difficult part of a game. This is most commonly associated with jRPGs and Diablo style dungeon crawls, at least for me it is.

Anyway, I'm fine with long major fights like that as long as they occur very rarely in a game. Sure fighting an enemy for 10 minutes straight only to die just before the end is frustrating, but surviving and winning one of those encounters is also very rewarding, to me it is anyway. As long as a fight is fair I can live with it being lengthy once in a good while, what pisses me off to no end are unfair fights. For example in Final Fantasy 7 there were a couple of super duper obscenely difficult boss fights, it's been so long I don't exactly remember what they were called... Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon I think? Anyway they were optional fights not necessary to finish the game, they were just there as a special challenge, so I understand making them extra difficult. You'd fight one of them for what seemed like forever, slowly chipping away at their hit points (they had like a billion hit points), constantly healing your characters , and then WHAM!!! the enemy decides to use its You're All Dead attack. To the best of my knowledge there was no way to survive that attack. My party was maxed out pretty much; 9999 hit points across the board, the most uber weapons and armor, fully buffed out with power ups. I could stomp the final boss, Sephiroth, like he was nothing at that point. It didn't matter, when that enemy decided to use that attack your whole party was dead. It's not like I did something wrong during the fight, I couldn't go back and identify a mistake or a faulty tactic, or the enemy got lucky and got several criticals in a row, it didn't matter if you were all fully buffed and fully healed at that moment, if he used that attack you were all dead. Good lord that was frustrating.

[CrazyBernie]

Ruby and Emerald Weapon required some out-of-the-box strategies that involved using specific combinations of items and materia to make the fights a lot less difficult.
Check the end of this faq for details: http://faqs.ign.com/articles/431/431878p1.html

I don't mind some level or boss grinding... as long as the rewards are there. In Eschalon you're getting skill points every level to apply and improve your character... so it's more than just leveling up for some HP. It's nice that the types of loot you find tend to get better as you level as well.

Of course, I'll take some good grinding over the Oblivion scaling system any day of the week...