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?

Didn't you hear? the Author is dead Either by conscious or subconscious design, the game has an unusual focus on history both personal and cultural and treats peoples very souls and identities as their accumulated and continuous memory. The game has some characters who are defined by their ability to either recall and witness history to which they shouldn't naturally be able (watchers) and others that have, through means always presented as insidious, preserved or attempted to prolong their grip on their soul/memory. If the writers thought this was a boon and made such characters the caretakers of benign tradition and wisdom or the bearers of some other virtue then it would obviously have something different to say about it. But it doesn't. The character most defined by his unwillingness or inability to forget and allow the passage of time its due harvest is Thaos, the leader of a malignant cult who sit around all day writing about how dope it's going to be when all the heretics who have forgotten get their comeuppance when the queen that was and still is returns.

I never got the sense the fanbase was rebuked at all by Pillars - which I presume you mean it missed the mark of our collective expectations. In some sense yes I would say the game did not live up to expectations, it never could of course, but that isn't to denigrate its quality but instead acknowledge its own message to us about the nature of expectations, especially those born out of nostalgia and memory. The whole game is suffused with melancholy and many of the characters and quests involve people in some ways trapped in the past to their detriment. The soul reading mechanic seems to exist only to reinforce the idea of the cyclical nature of violence through cultural memory, the dozens misappropriate the collective memory of others to justify themselves, you literally enter GMs memory, Saganis vision quest involves her village memory and she frets about whether her own husband will remember her in her absence. The game explicitly says 'hey you shouldn't live in the past because it's the past and it's not like you remember it anyway. Don't let your memory of the past dictate your future, things change and it's unhealthy to try and pervert that process'. Is it a coincidence that a game that was made by strapping our memory of the infinity engine to a table and forcing 4 million dollars into its lifeless husk has so many Frankenstein references in it? The whole world of Eora is on the cusp of change. The gods are dead, boomsticks obsolete the arcane, people are weary of religious conflict and so modernism is approaching fast. Our heroes solving problems with swords and chivalry are an anachronism. A bunch of people who can't adjust to the changing times, every one an exile in some way, six outsiders marching gamely in lockstep to the next area who can't accept that everything around them has changed. Therein lies the rebuke. A sequel just begs the question: Is it desirable or right to brute force into existence a facsimile of something that expired not due to evil publisher machinations but simply because it's time had come and gone? to which PoE already answers a resounding no and again no. As far as whether it makes financial sense because profitable ip or whatever I just find that kind of talk weridly mercenary. I'd expect Obsidians accountant to use that justification sure, but as a customer I can't get excited about the words 'profitable', 'intellectual property' (lol) or any of that nonsense.

I thought PoE was a requiem for IE style games and partly a cautionary tale about unnaturally prolonging life past its natural span, and that memory is a false and dangerous state of mind to wallow in? I liked that it gently rebuked us all for refusing to let go. A sequel feels like it dilutes the point. Obsidian really want to be under the backer lash again? The whole thing was dysfunctional and at times pretty unpleasant. Seeing creativity yoked to the frustrated demands of thousands of first time patrons wasn't always edifying I have to say.

You might not but maybe the writer would. If for instance you wanted to say something like "Adultery can be an expression of true natural love and isn't always an affront to morality" then Sagani would be the perfect candidate for a romanceable NPC. That she has a family must of course remain an integral part of her character in this scenario where cuckoldery has divine mandate. Similiarly with Grieving Mother. What is she? the cosmic mid-wife. Maybe you want to make a romance with her all about how we spend our lives chasing fruitless ambitions in a vain attempt to reaquire the unity we felt in the womb. Again, your fears that she would be forced to become more grounded and less mysterious in this scenario are unfounded. Point is before you consider having romances you have to decide on what you're going to say about love. A lot of people criticize the Jaheira romance in BG2 because she doesn't grieve for Khalid for an appropriate amount of time I guess? Ignoring the fact that she never loved Khalid. She belittles and despises him and privately she's glad he's dead. So there's no inconsistencey in how rapidly she expresses romantic interest in the PC. Theme of her romance is 'don't waste your life grieving over losers you never loved because it's expected of you. Get on with your life.' Jaheira also isn't particularly nice either so without saying whether it's an interesting idea about romance or love, it is at least consistent.

I'm a little dismayed to hear Eric is enthusiastic for shorter games, though clearly this sentiment need not be expressed with any coyness or qualification in the future as It obviously resonates with a large and receptive audience here, and on other gaming forums. While I wasn't looking everybody got old, busy and accumulated a 'backlog' of games that are simultaneously important enough to infringe the length of theoretical future titles but not important enough for people to actually sit down and play in the meantime. On the slim chance any body in a decision making role both reads these forums and agrees with me that the majority can be wrong I want to advocate for length and substance in RPGs as things inherent and absolutely necessary to their quality. It's funny because people have criticized people like Fargo for using word count as a metric for the new Numenara which boasts over a million words, and at first I agreed that word length as a measurement can't indicate much of anything other than verbosity. But maybe it can. Or rather it indicates the potential for something great. Do you need a million words to satisfyingly explore an original idea? maybe not but, can you do it in twenty thousand? or ten? I want to see something bullish and daring. Something that will demand an investment of the players time to appreciate. A vision that refuses to compromise itself in the face of calls for brevity and sneers at your cries of 'muh backlog' and can't be reduced to a 'solid 15 - 20 hour experience'. It's 100 hours or bust and if you don't like it, the other 99 % of the market has you covered. CRPGs are the natural vehicles for long-form narrative games and that has value, let's not sacrifice it so lightly on the alter of modern day convenience. There's a time and place for short and superficial but one also for glacial and magisterial. A place for 'pointless filler' even. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when reading the introduction to a translation of les miserables where the editor cheerfully describes excising an 100 page detour into French revolutionary politics Hugo took part way through the story that he felt impeded the plot. F*$! plot. The book is hard enough to read as it is but should I do it an enormous disservice because boredom offends or scares me? Despite having little literary merit I have a similar respect for The Wheel of Time series. A turgid and unbelievably difficult death march of thirteen door stop sized volumes at the conclusion of which you can genuinely from the bottom of your heart say I have stared into the depths of tedium and I did not flinch, petty distractions and amusements are beneath me now. Let's see some of that in POE2.

Immersion is anathema to your appreciation and understanding of culture and/or entertainment. It is choking your imagination and its yearning to engage with metaphor, symbolism and thus the narrative and ultimately what the game is about. You are not an elf. You are a human being possessing a personal and unique imagination and psychology, rich in stripe and hue through which you experience and try to make sense of this weird but generally under-appreciated thing called life. Other humans are trying to share ideas and experience with you in forms and ways familiar and exotic, beautiful and abstract. Immersion, or the demand for simulated reality slams the door on poetry and silences your very soul. You are not an elf. Skyrim with mods is bad. Skyrim without mods is bad. Pillars of Eternity is good. One of its central themes is the empirical vs the transcendental and you and the champions of 'immersion' are the disciples of empiricism. Stop doing that. You need Magran. It also has things to say about reason and faith and the value of collective culture its symbols and how we try to give meaning to our existence and not fall into a void of despair when the absurdity of life stares us down mocking our hopes and fears. It's cool to think about. I think it's more edifying and fun than thinking about persuading myself that I'm immersed. I mean I am immersed, right up to my pseudo intellectual eyeballs because I think the game is trying to say things to me about mind/body dualism, memory personal and cultural, divine authority, mortality and badass gods that died and re-made themselves as a massive golem. You are not an elf. Skyrim is bad. Artifice and inauthenticity is bad. 'Immersion' can go to hell.

You are not wrong, both BG1 and 2 have day night cycles and NPC schedules.

Well, they'll stop when the 2nd or 3rd disengagement attack fells them but yes you can tell them not to stop on being engaged. With the pathing and general AI I would never do that myself though.

Decided to recruit Edwin and killed Dynheir, came back to Nashkel and Minsc was hostile. I slew him in the street, this bald lunatic I've been through the underdark and literally to hell and back with more times than I can count is dead before the mines are even cleared. If he now doesn't show up at the beginning of BG2 that's some pretty cool C&C.