When in the course of Icewind events.....

[Heat Miser]

okay-- when designers of any RPG game set out to create "difficulty" levels for the party and their encountered beasts, do the programmers forecast that somewhere down the line a bright person(s) will construct a "cheat/helper" program (a la Dalekeeper)?

is that why the final battles of each world/level are always seemingly insurmountable with a measly 79 h.p. ...when the monster /evil priest/ hellspawn seems to have like 179 h.p.?

do the programmers assume that eventually (not right off the bat) folks are going to say "enough of this butchery! i'm gonna get past this point..." and then the gamer increases his h.p. to like 279? so the make the final battles darn near impossible?

-H/M-

[the new JR Jansen]

I don't think so. The reason behind those though monsters is probably more because they expect you to play with a party of six. Multiply those 79 hp's you have by a factor of 3.5 and you'll be outmatching the monster in the hp range. 3.5 because you probably wont be playing an all fighter team. Unless you play solo, this is probably the reason.

[andrewas]

Ive never found a battle in any of these game to be impossible. If you outmatched your opponents all the time there would be no challenge anyway and thus the game would be pointless.

You get outmatched so that you have to be more subtle than just hitting 7 to select your tanks and clicking on the end boss.

But yes, most programmers these days know damn well that if their game is popular then keeper-style programs will appear. Bioware dont really like it, but they could have made it nigh-on impossible to do and they didnt, so I guess they accept it.

Also there is the CLUAConsole which they know can and is used to cheat. They removed that in PS:T 9FOr some unknown reason) but they left it in IWD. Guess they know that proper players wont cheat enough to spoil the game.

[ronan]

sorry guys and despite the large numbers that do use cheats the vast majority of gamers don't. The end battles are hard because THEY ARE THE END BATTLES. How crumby would it be to get to the end of a game to find the last battle a walkover. I have completed BG, NG2 IWD and others and have never used a cheat. I find that if you start to use cheats you tend to think of any difficult moment as impossible and constantly use the cheats and therefore lessen the enjoyment of the game. This includes guidebooks and even forums. I have to stop myself from posting every time i hit a hard patch as the game is just more fun if you don't unless you're really stuck. There is no way any games developer is ever going to cater a game to cheats as the vast majority of their potential market would be wiped out of consideration.