Valmy

None. It is a fun thing. Besides it breaks my immersion when the Great Dragon of All Evil goes down without me at least sweating a bit. These games typically take me 100+ hours to finish. I won't do it if it is a boring cake walk.

Well I played a female and I thought the Anomen romance was fine. I have certainly seen worse romances since then. Besides, now there are a ton of obnoxious romances you can mod in if you want something else. I think Beamdog even put them in their new edition. I mean if you were a man you had to romance an elf and I can think of few worse fates.

Well congrats on your dialog-fu I could never figure out how to avoid having somebody in the ME2 crew think I was romancing them when I wasn't. Jack was the worst. And there was no way to tell what dialog options were of romance interest in that game. There was no heart dialog and it was very difficult to tell what exactly you were going to say or what tone you were going to say it in just based on the dialog option. In any case that was a joke. I like Bioware. I like their romances. You don't need to rush to their defense. But this isn't about them. This about Obsidian's games...like KOTOR 2. I cannot believe you would imply KOTOR 2 was not an Obsidian game on Obsidian's own boards. Come on man, they get enough disrespect as it is. I regularly see games like PS:T being called a 'Bioware Game'.

Skaen is the slave of Woedica. That is a pretty key part of being Skaen. One of his names is 'The Queen's Slave' or just 'The Slave'. Based on our interaction with them he seems to despise her but does her bidding anyway.

Only by suicide could one avoid the romances in ME2.

Bioware was destroyed by EA. I look upon them with more pity than hate, even if their doom was self-inflicted. In any case a full line-up of Bioware romances strikes me as a huge resource hog and a potential public relations and political source of controversy, even if I did usually enjoy them. Bioware itself shows that to be the case. In any case my character is married so I will not personally be partaking. I just hope this aspect does not become as large a deal as it did with the Bioware titles.

That's nice.

Bloodbourne is not even the same genre.

10.3% you say? Heck that is pretty high for Steam.

Cool idea. We already know the companions for PoE 2 but perhaps in the future? For whatever reason this series does not have many non-standard joinable NPCs except for some very subtle things like Pallegina having her own subclass and subrace.

I play veteran. I enjoy a good challenge but I don't want to be in a situation where I have to min/max or cheese my way through something. I like it when I hit a tough fight and have to fight it several times to figure it out, but I want it to be fought in a reasonably heroic way. Not where I have to come up with some sort of game-y method to stun lock the big bad while taking advantage of fog of war to break up the enemy horde or kite or whatever.

We are all going to end up toiling away in Avellone's secret iron mine.

One where an ancient Lich of extreme power shows up to blast your enemies?

this but unironically Your mom's a positive depiction of heterosexual relationships! Oh wait...that doesn't work...

Piss off Hylea? By promising to do her bidding and then betraying her.

Rocks fall, everybody dies.

Woah. This thread suddenly got dark.

This will be all the bad things about KOTOR2 with none of the good things. There will be tons of bugs and all the content will be cut. Legends will be told of the greatest disaster in all of history. The Spanish will be thankful they only had their Armada be destroyed instead of suffering the fate of Obsidian in Deadfire 2.

I just enjoy managing resources. In a non-Vancian system then I usually just end up with a spell rotation for most fights and that gets pretty repetitive and boring. I have just never enjoyed them that much even if they are better 'design' for whatever reason. I was glad to finally get a game with a Vancian system again after a very long time and I had a blast with it. I am sad to see it go. I hope the new system is good.

Yeah you can be lame in every kind of game. However it is a single player game so it does not effect me at all if people want to do tiresome lame things. So I don't see why I should suffer to stop those people. In any case if they don't want to 'waste time' they can just play on a lower difficulty level. I hope whatever costs this new system have will be worth making sure people don't waste their time being lame. I hope I enjoy this new system. It sounds like the sort of thing I will not like though, but I will give it a chance.

I don't know if it is being 'dumbed down' and I am going to keep an open mind until I play the thing. However I was a big fan of the Vancian casting system and the health system in the first game. Having them changed so dramatically is theoretically a disappointment for me. But we will see if they are a disappointment in fact.

Bethesda never had a focus on classic CRPGS. They always made Bethesda games and have continued to do so. Bioware had full VO for a long time before they shifted their focus. I mean KOTOR came out in 2003. Those examples never even occured to me. The examples you listed as counter-examples are all fine games but they seem to prove my point rather than convince me otherwise. Besides you claim that it is a fallacy to site design and cost limitations and then say it is an expense and it is a limitation but that it is a potential crowd pleaser and would generate sales to offset the expense. I mean if nothing else it creates a ridiculous situation where nobody can ever say the protagonists name. Well that is going to happen anyway unless they create a voiced protagonist and that really creates substantial limitations.

It is not that I don't like VO. I do. But it comes at a price. A steep price in a necessarily reduced story and options. One I am not always willing to pay. A toggle does nothing to address that at all.

Wait so you didn't like the voice acting so you want more of it? Full voice acting is expensive and makes changing the dialog later impossible. It reduces the amount of dialog and choice present in the game. Not a fan.

They never really explain that. THere is no creation myth that I am aware of.