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Holofaust

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Everything posted by Holofaust

  1. Yeah, I don't see that at all. Especially since you're given the option to side with Thaos, condemn Iovara to the Wheel (destroying her knowledge), and empower Woedica. My character was not repentant at all as I agreed with Thaos and Woedica.
  2. I chose Woedica because I believed that Thaos and the Engwithans were correct in creating the Gods to decrease the level of religious strife in the world, even if it was an imperfect solution. Woedica represents the status quo, which is something I agreed with. I think left unchecked, the pantheon without Woedica would allow animancy to grow to a point where kith would rediscover how to create Gods. Then we'd be left with an even worse situation where nation states would got to war in order to sacrifice their enemies to create new Gods. That world is even more horrific than the world without Gods and a world with a limited and restricted Pantheon. I was overall disappointed that I could not completely side with Thaos. Though I was happy that I was able to massively **** over Iovara as I considered a naive idealist.
  3. There is most definitely a connection between your character and Thaos! In the past you betrayed a woman who you cared about deeply on Thaos' orders because she claimed the gods did not exist. If she was right, you're actions had meaning, were horrible! You tried to ask Thaos this question but were refused an answer, and this haunted you till you died. Meeting Thaos in the context of the Biawac reignited this question in your soul, which is why you ultimately needed to find him and ask it to him, in order to get some closure. PoE I think is like Torment, in that it is based around a fundamental question, which in Torment's cased was "What can the change the nature of a man?" In PoE this question is left unstated, but is probably something like, "if the meanings we ascribe to our lives turn out to be false, what can we do about it?" The problem I think is that unlike Torment, PoE tries to be subtle, and I'm not sure subtlety works in this case. Agreed. I felt like PoE was a midpoint between BG and PS:T with neither greater narratives being fully developed or realized. I get what Obsidian was going for and can appreciate it. I just don't think they hit the nail on the head like they did with PS:T and BG. My problem is that the game is just to nihilistic. Everyone just feels lost and like they are just making it up as they go, which ultimately I think is the point of the narrative, but thats a painful point to make in a game this long if we aren't given any bright spots. It turns it into a slog through murky greyness.
  4. Can we look forward to you no longer posting on these forums as well?
  5. I will probably use the first one in my next play through.
  6. Same, my interpretation is that Woedica exists to keep all the Gods in check and to maintain the status quo which I happened to agree with. What I don't understand is why she was deposed in the first place.
  7. I think the problem I have with both PoE and Dragon Age is that for the most part they are very one note emotionally, DA:O especially. I think that by going for gritty realism where the world is very nihilistic and there are no answers, both games end up beating you over the head with nihilism. I get that Obsidian wanted to create a world where it's difficult to tell if your moral choices actually resulted in the conclusion you wanted, but for me the results too often leave me feeling conflicted. The entire game I just felt uncomfortable with most of the quests and when that's the only emotion I feel the entire game it just starts to become grating towards the end. There are a few good moments that evoke different strong emotions, like the Temple of Skaen left me feeling disturbed in a unique way. It was unsettling that worshipers of Skaen lead such desperate lives that they would happily undergo the horrors of becoming The Effigy. Well written quests evoke strong emotions and PoE is well written, it just unfortunately evokes the same emotion over and over again. The game just feels like a depressing slog through a grey amoral world which is fine to a degree, but there needs to be bright spots. There needs to be some hope.
  8. Atheists generally believe that all religions are man-made and manufactured in a very obvious fashion. The allegory here is not subtle. The religious establishment that Thaos represents is 1) a system of lies created for the purpose of control and domination, 2) relies on the premise that people are too weak-minded to bear the truth, 3) obscurantist to the extreme and hostile to "science", 4) entirely willing to commit atrocities in order to preserve the status quo, and 5) not only unnessecary for the world's peace and prosperity, but an active impediment thereto. These are the same arguments and criticisms pitted against real world religion by atheist polemists. Add the fact that Thaos' organisation has many similarities to the Spanish Inquisition, and that Thaos himself is the ultimate religious boogeyman, and the ending feels like a preachy progressive morality play wherein an atheist protagonist is beating the stuffing out of a strawman that wears a papal mitre. It is within Obsidian's creative freedom to make whatever points it wants, but personally I found the ending's heavy-handed allegory to be a swing and a miss. Despite the early association of Thaos with Woedica, it wasn't clear throughout most of the game that the narrative was building to a smash-the-church climax. Iovara is too under-defined and introduced too late in the narrative for me to care about her person or her valiant undying stand against the establishment, and it doesn't help that much of her dialogue feels like it jumped straight out of an argumentative youtube comment (the "my reality is true whether you believe it or not" or somesuch line caused an involuntary eye-roll). The big revelation was a surprising twist, sure, in that I certainly didn't predict it, but it wasn't an effective one. The motivation behind the engwithan manufacture of their counterfeit gods falls flat for me; a civilization that was (with the exception of its skill at animancy) less advanced than modern Eoran civilization proved the nonexistance of god(s) with such certainty that it altered the course of their civilization and the world... so we're dealing with a civilization that learned how to prove a negative (a logical impossibility) before it mastered metallargy, or chemistry, or invented the printing press. Not particularly convincing. But, okay, I can put up with dodgy logic. The larger issue for me here is that this twist about the truth of this setting was delivered in the very same game that first introduced us to it. I've only just started learning about these gods, I'm not yet remotely invested in them, and therefore I'm not emotionally affected when they are discredited by a sudden revelation that comes with all the theatrical power of sitting on a half-inflated whoopie-cushion. If Obsidian had made Baldur's Gate 3 and written an ending which revelaed Ao the Overfather as some super computer responsible for generating the multiverse, or as the eventual apotheosis of a time-travelling Tiax or something, I might have been impacted. As it is, exposing these gods as fake really meant nothing to me in the context of the narrative. It only becomes meaningful if I consider that Obsidian is not just imparting information about the gods of their new setting, but rather is making a statement about religion in general. Which again is their point to make if they want. I just find it dissapointing to get to the end of the road and find nothing waiting for me but one-sided allegory. You really summed up how I feel about the narrative pacing in this game. I feel like it jumped into esoteric underpinnings of the PoE world way to quickly. BG1 was an accessible story where the main concerns were regional and political in nature, only at the very end was it revealed that there is way more going on than simple political machinations. I felt like PoE was just too much world philosophy crammed into one game. I guess this game feels more like a PS:T successor than a BG successor. Which is good on its own, but I was hoping for a story that was a little more accessible to start with.
  9. Not a silly easter egg, but the stained glass window that is at the entrance to The Blackhound Inn is the main poster artwork for Baldur's Gate 3: The Blackhound.
  10. The results of this poll are hilarious and only serve to illustrate that a very small minority makes up the vast majority of discontent on this forum. People love to bitch. Here I am bitching about people bitching.
  11. I would like to see the following: -Difficulty curve smoothed out a little. Reasoning: Early game is especially brutal for newcomers (I had no trouble on hard) and mid to late game just feels like a cake walk for the most part. -Level X spells as once per encounters needs to come wayyyyy down to like level 4 character level for level 1 spells and level 6 for level 2 spells and level 9 for level 3 spells. Reasoning: Up until level 9 priest and wizard just feel really non-interactive outside of their once per days. The only time they feel like useful classes is on difficult fights. This leads people to believe that wizards, in particular, suck because they are so squishy and don't do very much in most fights. I understand that in BG it was bad gameplay to not have to think of spells as strategic resources because of rest spam. The game shouldn't be set up to encourage thoughtless spam of your most powerful spells every fight. But it would be nice to get a few spell levels to work with every fight. I also think that overall fight difficulty should go up so that I feel the need to use low level buffs and low level wizard spells on most fights. -Wizard Arcane Veil as a Per Encounter ability also baseline. Reasoning: Early game wizards have it rough, and while there is counter play Wizard feels unnecessarily weak. There needs to be some counter play outside of Withdraw to save them. -Ciphers need nerfs. Reasoning: Way too much spammable AoE CC and Damage. In their current iteration they feel like a cheesy class.
  12. I would like to see the following: -Difficulty curve smoothed out a little. Reasoning: Early game is especially brutal for newcomers (I had no trouble on hard) and mid to late game just feels like a cake walk for the most part. -Level X spells as once per encounters needs to come wayyyyy down to like level 4 character level for level 1 spells and level 6 for level 2 spells and level 9 for level 3 spells. Reasoning: Right now priest and wizard just feel really non-interactive outside of their once per days. The only time they feel like useful classes is on difficult fights. This leads people to believe that wizards, in particular, suck because they are so squishy and don't do very much in most fights. I understand that in BG it was bad gameplay to not have to think of spells as strategic resources because of rest spam. The game shouldn't be set up to encourage thoughtless spam of your most powerful spells every fight. But it would be nice to get a few spell levels to work with every fight. I also think that overall fight difficulty should go up so that I feel the need to use low level buffs and low level wizard spells on most fights. -Wizard Arcane Veil as a Per Encounter ability also baseline. Reasoning: Early game wizards have it rough, and while there is counter play Wizard feels unnecessarily weak. There needs to be some counter play outside of Withdraw to save them. -Ciphers need nerfs. Reasoning: Way too much spammable AoE CC and Damage. In their current iteration they feel like a cheesy class.
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