prodigydancer

/facepalm Sensuki does calculations and testing so that we could play and enjoy a decent CRPG instead of struggling with a mediocre one where nothing makes sense.

Opinions based on actual gameplay facts (proven by videos) and math are no longer opinions.

I'm not a fan of either to be honest. It's nothing but busywork padding allowing the developers to say "hey, we have 100 hours of gameplay!" Well it's not meaningful or in any way interesting gameplay.

This depends on your definition of success. As far as I know PS:T only made a tiny profit and IWD/IWD2 probably fared even worse. Try to find a (non-J) RPG here.

Great CRPGs tend to be economically unsuccessful. Sad but true. If everything Obsidian cares about right now is profit, PoE is doomed. (Doomed as a good RPG I mean, not financially.)

You're desperately grasping at straws here because it has nothing to do with the plot of BG. Sarevok wasn't after Gorion and Gorion died only because he was protecting the main character. Now compare this with e.g. Dune where Baron Harkonnen actually hated Duke Leto and didn't care about Paul at all (until it was too late). P.S. My apologies to everyone for offtopic. Just can't stand people badmouthing BG for no reason.

Purely subjective. I like Planescape more than FR and that's why I prefer PS:T. But I wouldn't rate PS:T story higher than BG/BG2 story. To me they're both equally excellent. And no, just because they had villains in BG and BG2 doesn't mean the story was cliché. I think you mix up progression with development here. IWD/IWD2 didn't have character development (and they didn't need it being hack'n'slash RPGs) but they sure had character progression. BG2 and PS:T had both. I must say you have a weird opinion on what RP is. --- So it seems you didn't like pretty much anything about IE games. Why are you backing PoE then?

Wait, you've lost me here. How is their opinion valuable if they CBA even to voice it? For all we know they don't have any opinion at all.

"Unfortunately, at launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and unexpected technical issues." A pity I'm at work and can't laugh as loudly as I'd want. Oh, and the list of games they offer as a compensation - is it supposed to be yet another insult?

at the expense of their backers? Of course it's not my place to judge so I'll confine myself to a mere observation: it doesn't really sound like a fair deal. Especially considering the sub-par results we've seen so far.

I admire Sensuki's patience. It's almost inhuman to stay so calm when your opponents obviously have nothing constructive to say and are only wasting your time.

If they give us non-full loot, kill XP won't make me any happier. Both XP and loot are rewards but one is not a substitute for the other and there's no need to paperclip them together in this discussion. --- However, now it all feels almost as though Obsidian simply wants to discourage players from taking violent paths by ultimately making all fights purely optional. The thought would be preposterous of course if not for the current state of the combat system - does Josh really believe he can properly fix this train wreck in progress before release? Is it even possible without tearing down everything done so far? As time goes by my doubts grow. Without participating in BB I can't form my own opinion but what I see in videos is mostly disheartening. So how did we get here? What went wrong?

Mind = blown. --- So I finally forced myself - no, not to buy DA:I of course, just to watch a letsplay a little. I wish I didn't. I thought I was prepared to see some retarded **** but now I can only say... WOW, THIS **** IS RETARDED! Yeah, caps intended. I could only watch it for an hour or so before my brain rebelled and told me it'd hate me for the rest of our symbiotic life should I continue torturing it like that. I realize that if I were 10 and DA:I were my very first game then perhaps I'd have a different opinion. But it's rated M, isn't it? (Not that I didn't play M-rated games when I was 10. So maybe 10 year olds are indeed the new key demographics for BioWare.)

This is because DA:I is a next gen console game and every next gen must be more dumbed down than the last gen. For example, watch Destiny play Shadow of Mordor: So it's just the new norm. Nothing special.

A reasonable tradeoff. I've played many games and can't remember any where backtracking to your stash was fun.

Well, maybe I like to collect magic swords and throw them on a big magic swords pile in my castle. The point is that I should decide. If I fight five guys wrapped in magic stuff from head to toe and I win - I want their stuff, all of it. This is only honest. Rather than restricting loot, developers should think more about their encounter design and how it fits (or doesn't fit) the setting. For example, a +2 weapon in Forgotten Realms isn't a big deal because everyone and their dog has one. But in a less magical setting enchanted items may (and probably should) be quite rare so it won't make any sense if enemies have plenty of them. And when they don't drop them to boot, it only adds insult to injury. Random loot works for ARPGs because in ARPGs you naturally farm the same levels again and again in hope to find better gear. Getting the same loot again and again would make no sense. But random or incomplete loot in a CRPG is just lazy design.

I don't see how it could be a spiritual successor to IE games without full (WYSIWYG) loot. The loot system is very important and I've had enough of random drops nonsense in D:OS. Leave random loot to ARPGs where it belongs, please.

I think the closest match would be Guild Wars 2. You can put five class abilities on your action bar (no matter how many you have unlocked) and you have five per-weapon abilities (you can't choose them at all - they depend on the equipped weapon type). Plus active dodge and maybe (depending on class and build) some special cooldowns. And that's it. The game is boring as hell (or at least it used to be). But what really comes to mind is Diablo 3. And, massively flawed as it was, it was still a better game than DA:I.

Now you know why.

The Banner Saga - nice (as a breath of fresh air). Shadowrun: Dragonfall - not bad but I liked the original SRR campaign more. Child of Light - amazing, absolutely loved it. D:OS - (act1) sort of alright; (act2/act3) lethally boring. WL2 - awesome, instant classic. Shadows of Mordor - worse than AC2 but mostly playable. Everything else was garbage.

Looks like the EU didn't like DA:I one bit (if I'm not mistaken the European launch was today). There's a steady influx of red on Metacritic with few green spots. It's another ME3 just without the outcry and that's mostly because most people now expect BioWare to screw up everything. Also I like how my "non-review" review was spot on. MC deleted it again by the way. Ah well...

No, it's not as bad. It's much worse. I'm not a codexer myself but I sure like their attitude.

These are the issues BioWare community cares about because people who cared about anything else are no longer there (got banned or simply gave up long ago). So when you label the codexers "luddites" please remember that the BSN crowd is a nice snapshot of your "progressive" alternative.

Exactly. Constructive criticism is OK but petty squabbles over combat mechanics or sources of XP should not make us forget that PoE is being developed for us and the alternatives right now are poor console ports like DA:I and equally poor MMOs like TES Online. That's why I also defended WL2 on inXile forums when people attacked it with bad reviews. WL2 may have minor flaws (very minor if you'd ask me and some bugs (like every game) but it's a game I can really enjoy. And why would I give a low rating to something that I like?

Just an answer everyone at once to save time: a review is just an opinion. I have my opinion on DAI now and it's final unless we'll see some pretty big changes which I believe isn't going to happen. With this said I suggest that we agree to disagree on the matter.