NegativeEdge

OK I've been thinking about this. To put it in terms a modern audience might understand: The Eothasian temple is Twitter, the spirits are Trump supporters and you wanna be slaying and dragging all day but you only have three Concelhaut's clapbacks, two Llengrath's lesser sassy gifs, and one Crowns of the Sanctimonious. you wanna be here for it all day don't you? so you gotta pace yourself. ~man pointing at head meme~

can i ask the people who insist POE1 'forces' you to backtrack for camping supplies: why do you unload your spellbooks on every single encounter? don't you think the per-rest system incentivises and rewards, by design, judicious use of lower and higher spells and abilities over a period of time? Do you just barge into the temple of Eothas at level 2 w/ Aloth & Eder, get 3 rooms in then hump it back, over and over until the temple is clear? and never think 'there has to be a better way?' cos that's funny as **** tbh

Imma let u finish but can I just say: Jagged Alliance 2 has thee best rest/resource management/injury system of all time! If not that, then copy BG1's resting system, where you could not 'rest until healed', you could only recover a certain amount of health every 8 hours dependent on the characters CON. In all other IE games the resting and healing is massively inferior and simplified.

The 'improved' potrait is very wrongheaded. It neuters and flattens the character. Pallegina is all about dualism: Duty Vs Heart, Lace Vs Steel, Passion Vs Stoicism, Human Vs Godlike. You know she is a person deeply and dramatically divided by an inner conflict because of the enormous blood-red slash that is sundering her unyielding breastplate in two. She wears her heart on her breast. It's the most prominent block of uniform color and demands your attention, saying 'hey this person has a streak of heart literally a mile wide. It divides them'. Maybe that's too subtle? This simple visual representation of a person conflicted is suppressed in the new portrait. In the original her feathes are clearly demarcated from her natural hair - her humanity is distinct from her godlike divinity. Again, an uneasy truce, tense coexistence. In the new portrait, this is diluted. The feathers just bleed into the hair. Pallegina the human is at peace with Pallegina the Godlike. Boring. Because the tone of her skin has been lightened the feminine lace of her shirt is harder to see, taking the energy out of its struggle to breathe free of the suffocating steel encasing it. She's no longer struggling to express a more caring, gentle side of herself. Everything about the original portrait illustrates a tremndous pent up energy resulting from these layers of inner and outer conflicts. The half snarl she's wearing reinforces the impression that this character is sublect to raw emotional turbulence. She is the center of immovable objects meeting irresistible forces. That try as she might, she is unable to suppress her rich inner life because it bursts out of her collar, in brilliant feathers out of her eyes, in a huge slash across her body. The new portrait sucessfully supresses Pallegina. Its as if the artist thought 'how can I take this powerfully conflicted person and pacify them?'. It sucks.

Cool thank's for sharing this. A staff, I like it, it's juxtaposed nicely with the character's otherworldliness. Can't get more earthy than a nice solid piece of honest wood. A shephard's or priest's weapon, he's grapsing it pretty tight; looking stoic, resolved, & determined, perhaps fortified by its reassuring solidity. It also frames you well, drawing our eyes upward; the staff and the person are in harmony, and the tiny glimpse of gold at its tip symbolises the character's aspiration to great heights of fortune and glory. Overall it puts me in mind of the word meek though not in the common sense of cowed, or passive, but the biblical idea of quiet strength, inner fortitude, & conviction without zeal. I wonder if the golden tip of the spear in this context represents the character's vanity, which though well-hidden is neverthless still present. Please don't take offense when I say this would be very appropriate for a backer portrait! Again thanks for shraing it with us.

The linear brushstrokes of the face along with the narrow tonal range and restricted palette result in a flat portrait that is completely overshadowed by the background. Wow! what is going on here? The artist has broadly stroked out the tiniest variations in texture and tone of the background, and clearly spent a great deal of time and attention here. The wider palette and complementary blues and golds create irresistible drama. This is a background with a powerful identity all of its own and serves not to ‘pop’ the subject out but in the end invite us to look around the head and pay attention to what is hidden. So while on the one hand it’s a pandering, finely delineated illusion, fusing the backer with the game, on the other it suggests that this in itself isn’t exciting, it’s a little flat, and perhaps argues that to force the real into the fantasy will result in something boring obscuring something interesting, bullying it out of view. Is it saying that the picture space is the artist’s time, and when the subject bought and paid for this they gained a portrait but something else was lost?, something potentially brilliant? In the end it is the work of an artist obscured by a money-exchange motivated work of a craftsman, as all backer portraits are. I delete them from every game they appear in. P.S. what was the removed item?

Well, you might expect it but sometimes reality confounds our expectations. I'm sorry I don't have a source on hand but the devs have talked about it somewhere and the fact that they're emphasising per-encounter over per-rest in PoE2 is in line with 'solving' the problem of people nuking everything that moves then complaining about having to rest or return to an inn.

But that's not how people played - they unloaded their spell books every encounter, rested, then and ran back to town to replenish supplies, often half way through a dungeon or area. BG didn't have a 'rest spam problem'. The player may have but not the game. It dissuaded resting with ambushes (though these should have been more punishing and frequent) and the superior original did not allow 'rest until healed'. No it didn't.

What's wrong with failure? failure is interesting and can lead to new emergent and unique situations. I love jagged alliance 2 mainly because of its combat but one of my fondest memories was tackling a difficult mission without a star merc who took another contract because I hesitated to re-up him. Failure on my part sure, and I really wanted him on the mission but my ragtag scrubs pulled it off and turned something routine into an under-dog triumph of bigly proportions. Failure and defeat make for superb drama and excitement, success stretched any longer than momentary is tedious - Veni, Vidi, Vici. Now what Julius, nice cup of tea? yawn.

Characters sprinting around like a clown-car in IE games is awful. I'm currently playing Planescape and only toggle run for engaging enemies and backtracking - the walk animations are superior to the running ones and I get to enjoy these insanely beautiful and atmospheric environments as very high quality and cool sprites move through them. Nothing to do with immersion, I just enjoy the art. Barrelling past it is blasphemy, what's the hurry? my only complaint is no footsteps audio. Planescape also discards the massive decline of tab-to-win highlighting added in lesser versions of BG & other IE games - another feature I'd like as a returning toggleable in POE2.

To end...like this!?

i dunno about translations but seeing people shift from writing articulately in one language to another is the coolest goddam thing ever

Agree, I only wrote so much because it was a fun idea to kick around in my head; abstract away and if we get Black Isle Bastard Pirates/an Island of any kind in the game it shall be in the spirit of collaboration not competition, for we are nice fellows!

Black Isle Bastard themes: poverty toursim/imperalism/fish-out-of-water comedy. The 'bastards' are a cloistered, wealthy group of bored individuals that naively romanticise piracy as a heroic struggle between noble savages and greedy colonials. They fund their own adventures at sea driven by fantasies of encountering tribals with whom they engage in rituals of mutual respect and cultural exchange interspersed with lots of distressed-damsel emancipation. Lampoon this attitude and their ineptitude generally by focusing on the collision between delusion and reality; their ill-fated voyage is a clumsy metaphor for backer attitudes to game development - overly ambitious, divorced from reality, and doomed to failure & disappointment; they packed fifty crates of golden pantaloons and none of them know how to sail, read a map, tie their bootlaces. They wreck just out of harbor on 'Black Isle' a designation unknown to the cannibalistic natives who have been periodically kidnapping and murdering members of the hapless bastards since they shambolically arrived. The player encounters the survivors holed up in a small cave, desperate and starving - and can either rescue (Merciful - minor) or abandon them to a grisly fate (Funny - major). TL:DR Dances with wolves meets the Donner Party and it all goes a bit Deliverance.

I'm not a troll in that I say things to be provocative but I will admit it did occur to me yesterday that appearing to argue against a games sequel on that games own forum is a bit...odd. But I like this forum and generally much prefer reading the thoughts of others than espousing my own but I'll try and summarize better my thoughts and will always read any response in good faith. As you brought up Fallout I'll use it to illustrate my point and I agree PoE is much closer in tone than any of the IE games to Fallout 1 which was partly inspired by A Canticle for Leibowitz, a book about the how even nuclear holocaust won't put an end to human blundering. In it the monks of surviving organised religion covet the remnants of historical knowledge and dogmatically misinterpret them and in doing so ensure a continued cycle of assured annihilation. Basic message from the book and which Fallout 1 captured beautifully is that the real wisdom in pre-apocalypse knowledge is that it's from a world that destroyed itself, any attempt to re-create it is doomed to fail. New Vegas has a lot of this going on and are the best parts of it but are unnecessary because Fallout 1 doesn't need repeating. It's a cruel irony that Fallout itself was delivered into the careless hands of people who did not understand it and grossly and with great ignorance took all the wrong lessons from it. Seeing Vaults, Plasma rifles and ultra violence as the important things in Fallout has lead us from something that was original, intelligent and hermetically sealed to what is now simply a juggernaut commercial franchise. An empty power armor shell hoisted into an upright position and held aloft by the shackles of financial expediency. Bethesda are perhaps better (or worse) than their counterparts from Canticle because they appear to know exactly what they are doing. So unnecessary sequels make me cautious and the least persuasive arguments for them are that it's commercially compelling to do them. Overall I think PoE advances a beautiful and subtle argument that to everything should come an ending and not because Josh Sawyer says it or the developers even intended it. The game just makes that argument to me in a thousand ways large and small that belong in another thread entitled 'NegativeEdges sophomoric reading of PoE" and not here. This quote from Julian Barnes: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” For me sums up the games sub text if you like as a passion project for 70,000 people who could stand to be reminded of that, myself included of course. What does a crowd funded sequel, another appeal to nostalgia wait to tell us? the same? anything?