Balance of story vs grind in remastered BT1

[StephenT]

As a teenager I played BT a LOT, on Apple 2 to start with and then on PC. I remember needing to grind a lot to get enough levels to progress, and the big fixed fights were obviously favourites.

Playing and finishing the remastered version over the past couple of weeks, I found that I was progressing more quickly than I'd thought that I would. I realised after a while that it was because I was not playing in "legacy" mode and therefore needed less XP per level. Once I got over the sense that I was cheating, I thought that this did work out quite well because once I had explored each level of a dungeon completely, I had gained enough levels and items to progress to the next dungeon with very little replay / grinding required. By the time I beat Mangar, my party was mostly level 26/27 which was enough.

So while this was a different experience to what I was initially expecting, I felt that it was a good balance that kept the storyline moving rather than needing lots of XP grinding. And the automap is obviously so much quicker than drawing maps out manually. As an adult with less free time than I had 30 years ago and not being able to "live" in Skara Brae for months on end, I enjoyed it. On to BT2!

[Marcycle]

Enjoy!

Yes, this change was very much appreciated by new players, and the option to play with certain Legacy features turned on (e.g. higher XP requirements, replayable boss fights) was very much appreciated by old players.

BT2 is a bit more of a grind since you really need to map out each and every square in order to collect all the clues for a Destiny Snare. You can run from most of the fights while mapping though, which can save time.

[[MOSS]-BurningUp]

I feel like dungeon crawlers should all have some grinding involved however the automap is most certainly needed in this type of game. It was way too time consuming back in the day to map with pencil and graph paper. i get that some people found it enjoyable and somewhat of a hobby but personally i did not have the patience.

Doing that for D&D was one thing but for a game like this it was like omg. The plethora of Legacy options is really nice which makes the remaster even better.

The typical old school, more hardcore RPG setup... was that if you came up with a good party composition and understood the enemy types it would lessen the headache of leveling up and getting more powerful. Like Might and Magic might throw 50 enemies at you on screen but if you knew what you were doing you could wipe them out fairly fast and get a lot of experience fast.