Adaptive difficulty or region locked?

[Mazzle Dazzle]

What feels immersive to you and is better for someone looking to play through for their first run?

[Kypamop]

I've started my first run on adaptive difficulty and I feel that I made a mistake.
Maybe it's good for 2nd run, but for the first one I'd choose region locked now.
Thinking of starting anew with region locked without finishing my current run tbh.

[Mazzle Dazzle]

Thanks, I put in 6 hours last night and I tried adaptive and it felt a little odd going into the later regions without any real difference so I suspected that might be the case. Thanks for your input.

[Spawnling]

I prefer adaptive. Allows you to explore the world without doing each region after the other.
Others like region locked for a sense of progress. For me it's annoying to fight way too large groups in the beginning and way too weak enemies later.

[ShepherdOfCats]

I like adaptive too just for the freedom to move between regions without getting trounced.

Fighting larger groups is just annoying IMO. You can tell even on adaptive when you (occasionally) go against lower level enemies that the game throws more of them at you and you're just running around healing people who are being poisoned to death or burning to death or bleeding to death. Even if the enemies aren't doing much physical damage, I hate the stacking modifiers. Getting poked by dozens of poisoned daggers sucks.

[JackInTheBox]

First time playing I started on adaptive and started to hate it after a while.
With fixed region you can enjoy some "down-time" to recover by going back to other regions, adaptive just felt like a slog where you just get punished so hard to the slightest mistake.

[mrak20105]

If you want to lose interest in the game after region 3, then play on the Regional mode of passage. But you will have fun in the first region. Some people like the "meat bags for punching". Some even consider themselves geniuses, using such tactics.
On the Adaptive exploration mode, you can always change the difficulty. If you do not understand why the battles are difficult. But you will not be able to go from the Regional mode to the Adaptive mode, when your army consists of crowds of animals and people, you will get bored. You will want to apply tactics and a combination of skills. But the regional mode has taught you not to think. All challenges are solved by sending bears to plug holes in the defense.

[Galahad]

I played both modes, first on regional, then on adaptive. I can say with full confidence that adaptive is much better.

The problem with regional mode is that your squad develops much faster than you complete the region, and by the middle of the game the difference between your level and the level of the region will be strongly in your favor.

Items and rewards that you will get from the enemy will be below your level and useless. In fact, you deprive yourself of most of the armor and weapon sets.

At the adaptive level, your game is always up to date, it plays like a sandbox and you can still play it and progress after completing regions and wait for new DLC on your old save.

Regional mod is like a campaign mode, you complete it and there is simply no point in sitting in it, collecting weapons and resources.

[watcherzero]

Adaptive level is more sandbox, its the same difficulty with the enemy the same strength as you all the way through which gets boring fast, basically tic tac toe. You can never do a mad dash across a far higher level region to get a trade route or a particular recipe/ingredient feeling that any encounter could be fatal, you will never get a sense of peril in adaptive making it ideal for those that don't like a challenge.

Regional you start off a region and the enemy is several levels stronger than you, you have to gear and level up to become competitive then as you near the end of the region you are stronger than the enemies and it gives you a feeling of progression and character growth. You move to the next region and the power curve resets meaning you get that same sense of initial underdog challenge and progress again.

I disagree on the equipment point. You will still get the given equipment, most of the time it will be the same or lower level though you do still occasionally get items that are far higher than your level and will be a while before you can equip them. You can level up the legendary quest items to your current level at the Legion camps, but region locked places a much greater emphasis on crafting. You dont just get given the best equipment you can use, you will have to make it yourself making crafting a far more integral game mechanic.

[Galahad]

Originally posted by watcherzero:

I disagree on the equipment point. You will still get the given equipment, most of the time it will be the same or lower level though you do still occasionally get items that are far higher than your level and will be a while before you can equip them. You can level up the legendary quest items to your current level at the Legion camps, but region locked places a much greater emphasis on crafting. You dont just get given the best equipment you can use, you will have to make it yourself making crafting a far more integral game mechanic.

In the middle of the game, being already level 15, you will want to collect the strongest and most relevant sets of armor and weapons, for example, Inquisition (or even collect a collection of all armor and weapons in the game at level 15, as I like to do), you will not be able to do this, they will be tied to the region, and will be level 13 (maybe now Drombach and Belerion are lvl 15, I have not checked). Legendary weapons are upgraded, good in stats, but not the most interesting in the game, items that are obtained from enemies are sometimes much better.
And armor and weapons that are crafted are level 12. They have long been out of date, since Belerion.
As I said, the adaptive mode is a sandbox. It plays great even after you've completed the game. You can still find something to do. Collect missing items, upgrade everything to the maximum level, etc. The regional mode doesn't make sense in the post-game.

[mrak20105]

Originally posted by watcherzero:

Adaptive level is more sandbox, its the same difficulty with the enemy the same strength as you all the way through which gets boring fast, basically tic tac toe. You can never do a mad dash across a far higher level region to get a trade route or a particular recipe/ingredient feeling that any encounter could be fatal, you will never get a sense of peril in adaptive making it ideal for those that don't like a challenge.

Regional you start off a region and the enemy is several levels stronger than you, you have to gear and level up to become competitive then as you near the end of the region you are stronger than the enemies and it gives you a feeling of progression and character growth. You move to the next region and the power curve resets meaning you get that same sense of initial underdog challenge and progress again.

I disagree on the equipment point. You will still get the given equipment, most of the time it will be the same or lower level though you do still occasionally get items that are far higher than your level and will be a while before you can equip them. You can level up the legendary quest items to your current level at the Legion camps, but region locked places a much greater emphasis on crafting. You dont just get given the best equipment you can use, you will have to make it yourself making crafting a far more integral game mechanic.

If you are not being disingenuous, and if the Adaptive mode is extremely easy for you, then attack the Guardians or Merchants faction at levels 1-3. ;)) But no, you will choose the Regional mode, and still will not attack these factions. Because they adapt to the level of your squad. ;) You will beat up bandits and boars with a huge squad until you reach level 8, and then go to the next region where the enemy will be level 6 and there will be fewer of them than your squad. You will turn off the game, and in the reviews you will write "The game is not balanced. The fights are too easy." -- And this is the MAIN part of the players in War Tales.

[Mazzle Dazzle]

I will say I tried both adaptive and regional. I ended up sticking with regional. I recruited like 20 boars I wouldn't really call this a tactics game anymore but it is kinda fun.

[Inzu]

I like playing in region locked.
If you like to complete every quest in a region, you will quickly out level the enemies in the lower level regions, but if you're more interested in exploring and living in constant danger, then it's a blast heading off into regions that are set for higher levels.

Pure scaling doesn't really make sense to me. Why would my party of seasoned mercenaries be challenged by normally weak enemies? "Look out ! It's a level 160 rat !"

Out of the two options I prefer region locked.

It might be interesting if there was a hybrid option that incorporated both region locked and scaling in the same zone. Scale battles that would make sense to be scaled - an enemy planned ambush of my band. And scale them in a creative way that makes sense for the zone.

[Tlewnipla]

If you want to experience the game as it was intended, play adaptive. Region locked was added pretty late in EA as an easy game mode and hence is poorly balanced.

[Go0lden_Archer]

immersive = adaptive.

do whatever = region locked.

Adaptive actually rewards you investing into your mercs, while region locked allows you to circumvent all the management and just throw bodies at the problem, or overlevel said problem.