PizzaSHARK

Deadfire has the most boring, least interesting combat in any CRPG I've played in several years, including Pillars. It's that way because of truly awful design choices and half-baked ideas. It's not the fault of the switch to per-encounter spells, but switching to per-encounter spells is part of the problem. What a crock of ****. Interruptions are not a credible facet of gameplay. They like to pretend they are, but in practice you don't interrupt spells because you just spam your CC abilities on the guy and he dies before he gets a spell off. You were able to cast spells in Pillars, what the **** are you talking about? Just because you weren't competent enough to figure out how to manage your spell use and gauge whether or not spells were needed to win the fight while minimizing health damage taken doesn't mean you "couldn't cast spells." Spellcasting in Deadfire is no different than it was in Pillars. Your argument makes no sense. There's a pretty ****ing easy solution to this - don't allow resting in dangerous areas and add penalties or changes for leaving an area unfinished. If you're invading the dragon's lair and you need to rest before fighting the dragon itself... for one, you can't rest in the dragon's lair or in the exterior areas in the surrounding area, the dragon will not ****ing let you do that. So you have to leave the region and go somewhere safer to rest, at which point the dragon either moves elsewhere or has repopulated its lair with new minions and traps (repopulating is easier but harder to fluff, especially if you slaughtered the vast majority of its minions on the way in.) This would require Obsidian to actually improve upon gameplay concepts that are nearly 20 years old, though. Or you can half-ass it and more or less remove resting/attrition entirely, except then reintroduce it in an unlimited format (why WOULDN'T you open every single ****ing encounter with an empowered AOE spell if the game lets you??) because apparently the design team couldn't make up their minds what kind of game they wanted to make. I personally prefer Vancian, attrition-based gameplay because of the strategic element it layers over top of the tactical elements, but I do agree that as it was implemented in Pillars and the IE games... it's not really much different from encounter-based because there wasn't anything of significance stopping you from resting after every encounter if you really wanted to. I think either gameplay style is perfectly fine if it's implemented well. The problem is PIllars didn't fully explore the idea (the limited resting supplies was a half-assed attempt at making people think about when to rest that didn't really do anything but make resting tedious) and Deadfire went several steps in the opposite direction and then didn't bother adjusting the game to suit it. What's the point of having an ancient crypt full of deadly traps if I can just conga line my dudes through the traps, rest every time each person caps out their injuries, and rinse and repeat until I get through?

Magic Missile, Mirror Image, Haste, Dispel Magic, Stoneskin, Greater Malison, Breach, Cloudkill, Animate Dead.. Sure, many spells were useless at higher levels, but definetly not all of them. Funnily enough, the best way to kill dragons was to hit them with Lower Resistance until their magic resistance was nullified then dump Magic Missiles into them. You could alternatively murder their saves with Greater Malison and one-hit quit them with Finger of Death or similar spells. The shadow dragon could be killed with Heal (reduced it to 1 HP.) Besides, the point of the lower level spells was that they were still useful and it meant you weren't using your higher level spells. I don't know if Siegdarth hasn't played games with Vancian magic before, or what. Just because Melf's Acid Arrows isn't as flashy as Cloudkill doesn't mean it was useless - far from it. Most such spells scaled with caster level, anyhow - Magic Missile added additional missiles, Flaming Arrow added additional arrows, and almost all spells gained damage based on caster level. Maybe they just never bothered to read spell descriptions or something. Deadfire's encounter-based system is pretty much identical to how D&D and Pathfinder magic is, except for it not being Vancian. Yep, on Pen and Paper there is no such thing as useless spell. However, on CRPG most encounters are level based the lower level spells become somewhat useless, even with increased level cast. And yeah, the magic missile strategy on dragons is still something really stupid until this day. That was carried to NWN2, lowering their defense and empowering magic missiles. Close to the endgame most players' spellbooks had about the same spells on their slots. And yes I do hate Vancian magic systems, everytime i played a caster class was a Sorcerer, less flexibility but I didn't had to preload **** and avoiding the GM to do something fishy. (like stealing my spell book, or doing an orc invasion in a cemetery that killed the necromancer we are suposed to defeat and all my "**** the undead" spells are wasted.) And no, the 3.0 and 3.5 editions the spells are daily based not encounter as we are taking BG2 as comparision and not the 4th and 5th edition. The POE1 rest based spell recharge is more close to BG2. So, on CRPGs if you know the encounter previously ok, you can "min-max" your spell book to have max utility. That does not happen in a Pen and Paper game, you can't say "Ok group, lets ignore they are taking the girl away. Now that I know we are facing these enemies I will go back, prepare my spells again and take a nap. Let's do it tomorrow" Anyway, i know i kinda overdid with the "Everything below 6 is USELESS" but i'm ok with trading some of the 200 Arcane Spells, ( i think that was the number- around 160 - to 200, can't remember anymore, but it was a selling point of the game at the time) for close to 100, so other non casting classes can have a good amount of active skills. Sounds like you weren't spending gold on consumables and leaving spell slots open - you didn't learn how to play a Wizard instead of a Sorcerer, in other words. Wizards trade on-the-spot flexibility for much more raw power. You are expected to use consumables like scrolls, wands, staves, rods, etc to compensate for your lack of on-the-spot flexibility. You should never be in a situation where all of your eggs are in one basket unless you arrived there through attrition (haven't had time to craft new scrolls or recharge wands, haven't had time to rest and reset spells, etc.)

The trouble is that Obsidian went with a system that doesn't match up to pretty much the rest of the game they built for some horribly retarded reason. Pillars was an attrition-based game, because it was meant to be an homage to Baldur's Gate and the d20 CRPGs of old while still being its own thing. Deadfire is a continuation of that design, except they threw away most of the attrition-based mechanics and design... and then didn't replace them with anything. So you just end up with a really, really shallow game that becomes incrediby boring as soon as the honeymoon "wow everything is so new and shiny!" phase wears off. I guess some people find it fun, but I don't - I went into PotD expecting to be challenged, but instead every encounter was exactly the same in terms of how I handled them and it was just a bland "are my stats better than theirs?" comparison together with abusing very limited AI (often in ways that a DM would likely never allow.) Was PotD difficult? Sure, up to a point (I'm sure 1.1 and 1.2 have fixed this)... but it wasn't making me think. It bothers me that despite how much knowledge and experience there is at Obsidian, they cooked up something this bad. I mean, christ, Tower of Time is a CRPG made by a small group of randoms with a shoestring budget and it has vastly superior encounter-based mechanics. Terrain manipulation and interaction is a key facet of gameplay and is often a deciding factor in victory or loss (especially on the harder two difficulties), the game is designed AROUND the enemies having limited AI rather than apparently wishing that the player wouldn't see how basic it is and play against it (the Almighty Doorway works, but only for a limited amount of time due to a variety of mechanics that generally discourage the player from standing around too long), etc. I'm not going to say it's the best such system I've seen, but it's orders of magnitude better than the garbage Obsidian served up with Deadfire. Probably because they designed the game around such mechanics from the outset, rather than Obsidian trying to go a complete 180 in design philosophy to cater to the whims of what's likely a minority of players (unless they were trying to poach from Original Sin's cabbage patch or something - Baldur's Gate players and those with fond memories of the IE games likely wouldn't balk at the idea of dealing with Vancian magic, after all.)

The fluff always explains this if you bother to actually read it. It will vary from setting to setting, but a typical 3.5E-era system, magic for Wizards (who LEARN magic, it's not intuitive or instinctive like it is for sorcerers and bards - a sorcerer is an artist, while a wizard is an engineer) is pretty complex. Your spell slots are essentially an abstract way of measuring a Wizard's ability to store nearly-complete spell formulas in their mind, ready for rapid access - you gain bonus spell slots from having a high Intelligence score, and you also gain spell slots through experience levels (representing the Wizard's increasing ability to manage many different spells.) Wizards are also able to fill an empty, but unused, spell slot with a brief rest (typically 15 minutes or so) by studying their spellbook. The Wizard's mind is like a gun's magazine. The magazine has to be loaded, and you only have as many shots as the magazine has capacity for AND which are loaded. A Wizard is all about planning, all about rewarding the player for thinking ahead - and a good Wizard NEVER fills up all of their spell slots unless they know, for certain, exactly what the upcoming day will hold (some editions allowed you to empty a slot and then refill it with something else, but this takes a substantial amount of time.) In exchange for this requirement for the player/Wizard to think ahead and take time to prepare, Wizards gain the most spell slots per level of any arcane spellcaster, advance spell levels the fastest of any arcane spellcaster (tied with Sorcerers and substantially ahead of Bards, Summoners, etc), and gain access to bonus feats from a limited list of options - typically metamagic feats (which generally increase the spell's level by a specified number of levels in exchange for improving it somehow - a Maximized Fireball, for example, would occupy a 5th level spell slot instead of a 3rd level spell slot but would automatically do the maximum possible damage) and things like Combat Casting, Arcane Armor Training, and so on. Wizards are also able to learn pretty much any spell as long as they are able to read the magical formula and copy it into their spellbook. Some settings even allow Wizards to copy down spells that they are currently unable to cast. The Sorcerer's mind, on the other hand, is more like a belt rather than a magazine - once it's loaded, that's all there is to it. Sorcerers are generally fluffed to have magic in their blood, so their spellcasting is intuitive and instinctual. Rather than prepare a formula in their mind, the Sorcerer just... does the thing, so the Sorcerer may cast any spell on his list, without preparation, so long as he has a spell slot of the appropriate level available. Because Sorcerers don't have to study to learn magic, they have better weapon proficiencies than Wizards do, but they also don't get the bonus feats. Sorcerers also get fewer spell slots and know very few spells - they cannot learn or store spells in a spellbook like a Wizard, and they must pick spells from a list at each level. This tends to make Sorcerers a bit more reliant on consumables like scrolls and wands to have the same toolkit as a Wizard, but because they don't need to prepare their spells, this makes Sorcerers better for players who don't want to have to plan ahead so much and makes them more versatile if the party finds itself in a fight it wasn't ready for. Sorcerers also tend to get special abilities and effects, and bonus spells known, from their bloodline as a replacement for the Wizard's bonus feats, and as a way to compensate for their few known spells. Note that Bards are in a similar boat as Sorcerers, as far as their spellcasting goes - it's intuitive, not learned. Pathfinder and later editions also tend to give Wizards things to do if they run out of spells, especially if they choose a specialization school. These abilities will generally be equivalent to a weak spell, but do scale with character level and are probably still better than the Wizard trying to plink things with a crossbow. It's expected that Wizards be spending a lot of their gold on consumables, anyhow, since they generally have much less of a need for enchanted weapons, armor, etc than martial classes do. All this is to say, it's fine to feel Vancian magic isn't enjoyable from a gameplay perspective. I greatly prefer it to the half-assed garbage present in Deadfire because it made an already shallow system about as deep as a dried out riverbed, but to each their own. But saying that Vancian magic doesn't make sense in fluff means you just haven't bothered to actually read anything.

Magic Missile, Mirror Image, Haste, Dispel Magic, Stoneskin, Greater Malison, Breach, Cloudkill, Animate Dead.. Sure, many spells were useless at higher levels, but definetly not all of them. Funnily enough, the best way to kill dragons was to hit them with Lower Resistance until their magic resistance was nullified then dump Magic Missiles into them. You could alternatively murder their saves with Greater Malison and one-hit quit them with Finger of Death or similar spells. The shadow dragon could be killed with Heal (reduced it to 1 HP.) Besides, the point of the lower level spells was that they were still useful and it meant you weren't using your higher level spells. I don't know if Siegdarth hasn't played games with Vancian magic before, or what. Just because Melf's Acid Arrows isn't as flashy as Cloudkill doesn't mean it was useless - far from it. Most such spells scaled with caster level, anyhow - Magic Missile added additional missiles, Flaming Arrow added additional arrows, and almost all spells gained damage based on caster level. Maybe they just never bothered to read spell descriptions or something. Deadfire's encounter-based system is pretty much identical to how D&D and Pathfinder magic is, except for it not being Vancian.

This has been touched on in this topic, more or less. How complex the game can be has nothing to do with whether there exists something broken in the game or not. The question is are you willing to play the game on a more advanced level, to spend time coming up with elaborate plans and setting things up. The Original Sin games are games that actually allow you to do such a thing. If you WISH to, you CAN set up complicated (even unnecessarily so) plans or "traps", and they will help you beat combat just fine, without using anything that "entirely break the game". Thing is, it's far easier to just resort to overpowered tools as soon as you discover them, and forget about being sophisticated altogether. The "combat complexity" of the Original Sin games lies in the fact that environment and terrain play a big role in combat, as well as the dynamic and multi-leveled interaction between spells and abilities. Very few other games offer this kind of experience. In contrast, the most elaborate things you can do in PoE2 are probably something along the lines of having your assassin dash to a mage, smoke bomb, backstab, then dash back out. I'm willing to take this back if you can give me some solid examples of "complex" combat moves you can pull off in PoE. Yep. Like I've said before, the complete lack of terrain interactivity in Deadfire is a huge missed opportunity. Even 5E, with its much nerfed magic compared to earlier editions, allows players to use magic to create, destroy, and manipulate terrain. Raise a wall to break line of effect, create a pit to block off an area or trap enemies, solidify sand so you can cross it easily, turn a smooth stone floor into jagged shards that have to be crossed carefully, etc. Simplifying other combat mechanics would've made perfect sense if they were to introduce terrain reactivity as a new series of gameplay mechanics (which is basically what OS1 and OS2 did - their combat mechanics are incredibly simple so that the player isn't overwhelmed while trying to grasp all the ways they can interact with the terrain through spells and abilities), but they didn't do that... so we have an RPG that's so simplistic that it makes even 5E look complex. You're just splitting hairs. Pillars and Deadfire are explicitly advertised as featuring tactical combat.

Eothas is a pretty terrible... antagonist? He's not really a bad guy, but he does kinda **** over CHARNAME when the plot starts? Even more than with Thaos, Eothas feels like a nearly literal "I'm just forcing the player to do game stuff" creature. I think Thaos is an excellent character on paper - better than Irenicus, even - but I don't think he was utilized well. Sarevok being a pretty generic BBEG and being absent nearly the entire game worked fine for BG1, because Sarevok wasn't really the focus to begin with. Remove Sarevok entirely and replace him with just, I dunno, a band of brigands with a scroll of Protection from Magic or something, and the vast majority of BG1 is largely unchanged. Thaos, on the other hand, is said to be a major motivating factor for the player character in Pillars, yet you hardly see him or hear from him at any point in the game. You're told you need to go hunt this guy down, but I never felt like my character had any actual REASON to go chase him down other than "hey maybe he can help me with this Watcher thing." Irenicus has a more generic backstory than Thaos does, but the implementation of the character together with David Warner's absurdly good acting makes him memorable. He is, probably, the most memorable villain in any media I've ever consumed - book, movie, game, or otherwise. Thaos, on the other hand, is actually very interesting to read about... but in-game, he manages to be even less interesting than a Valygar coffee mug. Eothas is even worse than Thaos. Deadfire is a pretty wonderful setting but the plot is just... man, it's just bad. You'll see what I mean.

I thought there was way too much... but that's because the combat mechanics were very shallow, so I didn't find most encounters to be worth the time. Even a lot of the bounties felt like trash mob encounters - just you lining up against some dudes in an open field and beating each other until one side wins with no real tactical depth or difference regardless of how your party was made up of or what they were using. Of course, Deadfire would feel very empty without those trash mob packs - and it DOES feel empty on story mode, when combat is just a formality you breeze through on your way to whatever. I think there was a sufficient raw amount of combat encounters in Deadfire, but I think there were extremely few encounters that were actually interesting or engaging. The vast majority of encounters consisted of "buff my guys, use spells to debuff/control their guys, everyone hit them with glorified auto-attacks until they fall over." Maybe PotD being fixed will add stuff like kiting being necessary to survive, but I always felt like PotD relied too much on abusing AI limitations than anything else - but that's a separate thread.

Eh...When comparing mods, it's very unfair to Infinty Engine games to Bethesda games. I mean, I see what you're trying to do but if we're being honest, Bethesda's modding community is worlds ahead and better than any Infinity Engine game's modding community, so much though that it wouldn't even be worth mentioning BG2's mods. Now... About Infinity Engine mods, there's another reason why they're not worth mentioning. None of them drastically change gameplay or experience of the games BUT we do have the Enhanced Editions which strangely I don't see people mentioning here. I never see the point in using mods to justify saying a game is good. The game should always be judged on it's own, without mods. If a game comes with unfinished features, any model made to fix those features should never override how ****ty those original features were. Mods show what a game is capable of. I think it's fair to compare modded BG2 with a game made easily more than 15 years since those mods were created and finalized (most are "dead," although some still get occasional bugfixes) and with far fewer technological limitations than BG2 - and possibly fewer financial limitations, too (I don't know how BG2's budget was, comparatively to Deadfire's.) I just don't think there's any excuse for Deadfire's combat to be so shallow. I don't think it needed BG2's overly complex 2E magic rules, but I think they could have improved the game quite a lot if they'd just taken a few cues from mods like SCS (which allowed the computer to literally cheat at times in order to compensate for the AI never going to be enough to match a human player) and maybe not thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it came to streamlining and simplifying things.

Challenge modes might be able to recapture my interest but I'll probably give Beast of Winter a pass. I'll just wait for a sale on a collected edition or DLC pack after all of them are out, just like with Pillars. The narrative hook has me pretty bored, but I guess that's fine - it's just an excuse to go adventuring like White March was.

Eh...When comparing mods, it's very unfair to Infinty Engine games to Bethesda games. I mean, I see what you're trying to do but if we're being honest, Bethesda's modding community is worlds ahead and better than any Infinity Engine game's modding community, so much though that it wouldn't even be worth mentioning BG2's mods. Now... About Infinity Engine mods, there's another reason why they're not worth mentioning. None of them drastically change gameplay or experience of the games BUT we do have the Enhanced Editions which strangely I don't see people mentioning here. ... what? Are you joking? WeiDU mods DRAMATICALLY alter the game. Entire, detailed NPCs with voice acting (Kelsey and Solaufein are the most popular, I believe) and romances. Balance changes, AI changes, tactical changes, completely new, custom encounters or entire areas. There are custom campaigns and total conversions. There are "ease of use" mods that don't really affect balance but make the game a lot less annoying to play (such as making arrows stack to 999 instead of 20), many of which are incorporated into the enhanced editions by default. Like... IE mods are huge, they're a big part of why BG2 was so good. I'm hopeful that Deadfire modding will eventually reach that point.

That's what has me holding out hope. Pillars 3.0 is massively improved over Pillars 1.0. That doesn't excuse it, though - that just encourages me to take a "wait a year" approach with PoE 3 whenever it arrives.

Yeah, definitely a greater degree of consistency would be good. Not just have a single score, with the good cancelling out the bad. Not that it necessarily has to devolve into an overly simplistic ultimatum of some sort where they decide to leave of course, that tends to be annoying as well. In some cases that's clearly warranted, if you do something that clearly goes against their fiber, but for it to really be immersive I'd say it needs more range. They may set aside their dislike of the main character (maybe they're quite religious and you keep mocking their faith or something) and stick around for a greater good, but still express that dislike in various other ways (preferably ones that do actually affect gameplay as well). Though conversely I'd argue that the disposition system could maybe do with more of a "two extremes of a single axis" kind of thing, because as it stands the ability to be known as both the spirit of benevolence and viciously cruel at the same time is a bit... odd. Would be even better if that's actually worked in in a more complex way, but I'd say opposite dispositions at least to some extent cancelling each other out would be better than what it is now. That always bugged me about Pillars and I was disappointed to see it largely remained in Deadfire. Reputation would work best as a weighted average of two opposing factors, with a lot of gray area. Kick a few puppies, give a few beggars some money... you're neither cruel nor benevolent, you're somewhere in that gray area. You don't have 2 points of benevolent and 3 points in cruel, you'd be at like 0.5 in one direction or the other. But if you do enough stuff to tip the scales in either direction, it takes increasingly more effort to tip them back to neutral - as a sort of way of representing your reputation as it's known by the people you interact with. I would then, also, have it be completely binary - you are either benevolent, or you are not. You are either cruel, or you are not. You aren't Benevolent 5x, or Cruel 2x, you are just Benevolent or Cruel. This would, of course, still be calculated with integer values, and those values could be displayed to the player or not (maybe an expert mode thing, where they're obfuscated in it but you can view it directly without.) Basically, you have a system that has a sort of inertia that must be overcome. It takes a lot of effort to tip the scales at all, and once they ARE tipped in one direction, it takes even more effort to get them back to even, much less change them entirely. This certainly makes a lot more intuitive and rational sense than the current system, although it would be a lot more complex to design and explain to the player - so maybe that's why we have the current system.

Deadfire is unquestionably the best CRPG to come out since the "renaissance" that started back when Pillars, Wasteland 2, etc were garnering support on Kickstarter. I don't think it's even in question, although Original Sin 2 blew me away with how much better it was than the first, especially in terms of storytelling. Tides of Numenera was, frankly, something of a disappointment and Wasteland 2 felt like it was missing a few things to be the tactical experience it seemed to want to be (honestly, just copy XCOM Enemy Unknown's basic mechanics and go from there if you're going to make a turn-based shooty tactics game.) UnderRail was a wonderful trip down memory lane but it has the same kinds of problems that the old Fallout games do (though intentionally so), Tower of Time was a massive and pleasant surprise that unfortunately began to feel rather repetitive after several hours and didn't have the writing chops to keep me slogging through it to see what happens next, and so on. That said, I think Deadfire is also unquestionably worse than the best of the Infinity Engine games. I also think that Deadfire is a horrible ****ing MESS of too many different ideas - it's trying to be too many damn things at once and I can only assume everyone at the design table had their own pet idea that they refused to budge on. I'm confident that Deadfire would be orders of magnitude better if it just focused on only one or two things, at the cost of leaving some people disappointed, than by apparently trying to give everyone a little bit of what they want. In almost every area except for presentation - because a 2018 game is obviously going to look and sound and play a hell of a lot nicer than a ca. 2000 game - Deadfire is worse than the best games of the Infinity Engine era and its contemporaries. So my praise for it definitely has reservations... and while I don't want to sound entitled or sour, I feel like Obsidian could have done a lot better despite how good Deadfire is objectively.

I'm gonna tell you about it anyways, because it is in parts about nostalgia. If you replay Baldurs Gate II now, the dialog is often really cringe worthy. And descriptions and mechanics aren't up to par for this age. I look at BG II with rose tinted glasses, because it might be my favorite game of all time. But I was 20 years younger back then, and I was more excitable and knew a lot less about most things. Personally, I find it impossible for games now in my early thirties, with all the games I have played by now, to replicate the feelings I got when I played Baldur's Gate II the first time, thou I admit Twitcher 3 did a grand job of trying. But if I played BG II for the first time now, it wouldn't be nearly as good or impactful for me, as it was then. You may like BG II more, but that is not objective. I like PoE's mature and complex writing much more now, than I like the immature, D&D trope style writing from BG II. So don't discard nostalgia like that, because it does play a significant role in your perception of games you play now. I remember when I was a kid and played through BGII, I thought the Jaheira romance was so beautiful and romantic. The best I have seen in any game. Now when I replayed it a few months ago, It seems rushed, suddenly over, and I was left with an overwhelming "...that's it?" Such is nostalgia, I suppose. It's both the best and the worst of them, because Jaheira is the only option that isn't ****ing insane to begin with (Viconia is obviously struggling to parse her new life on the surface with her life as a Drow for however many centuries before she was exiled, Aerie is working through what's clearly PTSD and has less spine than a jellyfish, Anomen is an unlikable insecure ****, etc), but she also grows less than the others. All three of the others experience remarkable character growth (especially into ToB, where Aerie is running around fighting dragons and demons while very pregnant, and Viconia can be convinced to change alignment to Chaotic Good), while Jaheira largely remains the same. Then again, because Jaheira didn't really NEED much growth... that's not such a bad thing. The problem with her romance is that it IS very rushed. You come across Khalid's gruesomely defiled corpse on the way out, she has a total emotional breakdown... and you can **** off straight to the Docks district and buy her a necklace (and the dialogue makes it explicitly clear this is not a "just friends" sort of gift!) less than one in-game day later and she gets tsundere as **** over it, like it's a ****ing anime or something. Her early interactions are clearly not romantic in nature and are in fact quite normal considering you're the only SANE person she knows (Imoen got abducted, Khalid is extra dead, and Minsc is even more Minsc-y than usual owing to him witnessing Dynaheir's gruesome death in the pre-game fluff) and a close friend besides. But it doesn't take more than a few in-game weeks (at most; romance progression is based on actual real-life time played than in-game time if I remember right, you could pause the game and leave it running overnight then take a nap and be guaranteed to hit the next romance interaction if it's available) before it's gone way past the point of relying on a close friend and into flirting and ****ing tsundere bull**** as though she's some kind of shy, chaste virgin like ****ing Aerie and Anomen (Viconia ****ing you barely a few weeks in makes a hell of a lot more sense than any of the other three's behavior in regards to sticking things into holes.) It's also kind of concerning how Jaheira is kind of almost like a surrogate aunt or mother figure to CHARNAME (who is a youngster of their respective race, although that gets a little goofy if you pick a long-lived race like Elf, Dwarf, or Gnome... hard to imagine calling a 150 year old elf a child and it actually sticking.) Granted, BG2 succumbs mightily before the if/then block, as evidenced how you can spend in-game months or years in Chapter 2 and Irenicus will just spend the time playing hearts with Bodhi, Imoen, and Wanev until the player gets their lazy ass in gear and decides to advance the plot.

Anomen is on the short list of best characters in the entire series, but unfortunately you have to romance him to really see it (to be fair, same can be said for Viconia.) Anomen changes COMPLETELY based on his personal quest and romance results, for the better or for the worse. If you get the good endings, he goes from being a stuck-up pampered brat with MASSIVE insecurity issues to being... a genuinely cool and good guy, and not the Lawful Stupid kind either. Aerie learns to cope with what's been done to her and grows a backbone (to the point that she'll fire right back at villains), Jaheira... stays mostly the same just swapping Khalid for CHARNAME (but Jaheira didn't have any severe personality flaws that needed fixing to begin with, even if she can be a bit of a bitch), etc. My only complaint for BG2, retroactively, might be that you can't really see this character growth without banging them. It's a problem, then, that Pillars and Deadfire characters feel like steps backward more often than they feel like steps forward. The character concepts are there, but the development and personality just aren't (except for Durance and Eder, and maybe Serafen.) That's never been a thing with the alignment system - that kind of mentality is specifically why Lawful Stupid, Stupid Evil, Chaotic Stupid, etc tropes exist in the first place, they're literally mocking people that think the alignment system means your character must be a one-dimensional robot. In actual play, the alignment system has never been restrictive on what your character can and can't do - it's just a set of guidelines and, if you play a relevant class, a limitation on what spells your class has access to (Clerics of a Good deity or neutral Clerics who choose to channel positive energy cannot use any spell with an Evil descriptor and cannot channel negative energy, for example) or may convey a set of behavioral guidelines (Monks must behave lawfully, Paladins must be both good and lawful, etc.) They do not define your character any more than the lines in a drawing determine what colors, materials, or textures you use to fill in the space between.

I'd definitely say not. Even though BG2 characters are largely just pastiches and homages to common tabletop tropes, they feel more complete and more interesting than PoE characters do. I think someone already mentioned it some pages back, but Pillars characters feel very much like Bioware characters - they have a page or two of dialogue, a side quest that conveniently gets wrapped up during the final act, etc. They all feel very formulaic. Eder is the only character in Deadfire that I really have trouble leaving behind - he's like a less over-the-top Minsc in that way. The rest of the characters are fun enough, or have gameplay relevance (it's tough to leave Serafen behind when he has so many connections and has useful advice for sailing-related things, even if he's useless in a fight), but I could replace them with faceless, voiceless custom NPCs and not miss a lot. In regards to Madscientist's post, it's just one more thing that echoes what I've felt after the honeymoon glow fell off of Deadfire - the game is trying to be too many different things at once and as a result isn't GOOD at any one of them.

The story is trying to be too urgent to really be an "open world story." It would've made a lot more sense for the factions and their interactions to be front and center, but I guess then you'd have difficulty drawing the Watcher out of Caed Nua. So why even re-use the existing player character? What would've been wrong with new characters? As we saw, it was completely plausible for characters from the first game to have made their way to the Deadfire Archipelago on their own - it's not like they all hung out in Caed Nua, they all had their own things to be doing.

I'm not expecting PoE to be a D&D game. In fact, I've criticized them repeatedly for refusing to just get rid of a lot of dangling threads left over from d20 systems (such as resting, injuries, per-rest items, empower being per-rest, etc) so that Deadfire's obvious emphasis on per-encounter combat rather than attrition combat can really breathe and expand. I'm pointing out that terrain and the ability to manipulate that terrain is a MASSIVE tactical element in literally every single ****ing tabletop RPG I have ever played, whether that's using a magic spell to raise up a berm of earth to create a wall, using a grenade or detpack to blow a hole in a wall or a floor or a ceiling, or even just rolling barrels around or flipping tables over so you have some extra concealment or a little bit of protection against light weaponry. ****'s sake, it's even a relevant factor in archaic, old-school board games like HeroQuest, that basically set the early template for what D&D would eventually become. The COMPLETE ABSENCE of anything like this except for very rare "Slog Zones," is ****ing ridiculous and, as far as I'm concerned, is absolutely inexcusable with as much tabletop and RPG experience as the dev team has. You could argue that they were still learning Unity and how they wanted to use it for Pillars, and that explains such a fundamental pillar of tactical gameplay being absent - but no such limitations existed for Deadfire, as far as I'm aware. Original Sin 2 has some pretty severe design flaws of its own, almost all of them being related to "they didn't spend enough time iterating on this concept." But that's neither here nor there.

Yup, and I hate it. I realize that others like that kind of thing, so it may just be that Pillars isn't going to be a series of games that are "for me" - and that's incredibly disappointing, if that turns out to be the case. See, in Deadfire, when I fail an encounter it's almost NEVER because I don't know what to do - I *DO* know what to do (because what to do is invariably "apply buffs to my dudes, apply debuffs to their dudes, and then hit them harder than they hit me"), but whether I win or lose is either heavily reliant on RNG (if stats are roughly equivalent) because nearly everything in combat is just "your stats vs theirs" rather than game knowledge, or a foregone conclusion based off of stats - if my Deflection is 30 points different from their Accuracy (above or below), I'm not going to win that fight without finding some way to abuse the game's weak AI (the Almighty Doorway in Pillars, for example.) I'm not dying to a mage, looking at the combat log and my own mage's spellbook to try and figure out what killed me. I'm not discovering new things that kill me and I have to factor in for my next attempt (literally the only time traps are interesting or cool, please stop clogging random, empty hallways with traps.) I'm just going "okay I almost had it, maybe I'll get some more crits this time and come out ahead on the dice rolls." I don't feel like I defeated a tough encounter because I got better at the game, I defeated it because I was either luckier than last time or I left and came back in-game weeks or months later and beat it because now I have +5 to Accuracy and +15% to damage! Did BG2 have this? Of course it did, such things are part and parcel of d20 and especially so in earlier editions. But the nuanced and occasionally overly complex magic system and its interactions, and the relative frequency with which you encountered Mages, Clerics, or creatures with spell-like abilities meant that many encounters DID have more to them than "buff up and hit them harder than they hit you." You simply were not beating encounters with equivalent-level Mages without knowing how things like Breach, Dispel Magic, Stoneskin, Mantle, Globe of Invulnerability, etc interacted. Even encounters with divine casters could turn out this way, because they had the most potent buffs in the game and had a selection of save or suck or mass-damage spells, too. In Deadfire, though? Wizards and Priests are just like any other class for the most part - tank the damage and hit them harder than they hit you. Debuffs don't really matter much because of the pants-on-head retarded choice to have inspirations override afflictions (rather than have them run concurrently), and having Resistance (which is ridiculously easy to get) means you're generally immune to the form of Affliction that imposes a hard CC effect like stun, paralyze, dominate, etc. Later versions of D&D have counterspelling mechanics (typically like-for-like, with Dispel Magic and related abilities filling an all-purpose function that's a little less effective than a specific counter-spell), which are also almost entirely absent from Deadfire - you either have the one Wizard spell, random weapon crits, or a few attacks specifically Interrupt in addition to their other effects. I don't think this is bad, but it needs a lot more work since it's one of the very few things that the game engine clearly has available to add badly needed tactical depth to the combat system. More than anything, though, I think Deadfire desperately needs some way of affecting the terrain. Why don't Druids and Wizards have Stone to Mud/Mud to Stone? Turn the solid floor into mud, imposing Slog Zone penalties... or maybe you're fighting a tough construct made of stone or other, similar materials and you can use Stone to Mud to damage it or lower its armor. I can place a wall made of fire, but I can't use a spell to create a pit or a wall to break line of sight/line of effect? My Barbarian can leap around and do all kinds of overtly supernatural things, but he can't smash the ground to create a Slog Zone or a pit or something? In a decent d20 tabletop campaign, the terrain you're fighting on is often AT LEAST as important, tactically, as WHAT you're fighting. 6 kobolds with bows at 5th level is a complete joke if they're just 20 yards away in a room, but if they're 20 yards away up a hillside covered in rocky scree or on the other side of a pit or in the trees while you're slogging through a swamp? Tucker's Kobolds is the ur-example of how a bunch of statistically pathetic monsters can go from walking sacks of XP to being intensely challenging encounters without any kind of arbitrary stat differences... and you'd think that JSwayer alone, given his breadth of tabletop experience (much greater than mine, I'd wager - I've never even heard of some of the games he's talked about playing and preferring to d20 systems), would realize how important it is to have SOMETHING like this in a game that claims to offer a challenging tactical experience.

People are only making the comparison because Deadfire is just that BAD when compared to something they did nearly 20 years previous. Deadfire is a good game in a vacuum but it's very weak compared to previous efforts by the same developers. I don't know if they were hoping to engender mass market appeal by over-simplifying game mechanics, but they certainly made it worse from a "tactical gameplay" standpoint. Dismissing criticisms as "different games are different," is just absurd.

If Deadfire combat is more simplistic than BG Then you must have been playing a completely different game. I dunno what to tell you. Even vanilla BG2 had more challenging encounters than anything I fought in Deadfire. Have fun fighting an Iron Golem without a +3 weapon and some way of dealing with the poison, and hope you brought that +1 Mace along for dealing with Clay Golems. If you're going to be fighting Mages, maybe you should dedicate a spell slot or two to Breach and Dispel Magic. Hell, Dispel Magic is so useful you should probably consider keeping a copy of it attuned or some scrolls handy because it's not like Mages have a monopoly on buffs or debuffs, and buffs and debuffs in BG2 could be of the "you just don't get to play" form rather than the "you're slightly stronger/weaker than usual" form that Deadfire has due to the simplification of its buffs and debuffs compared to Pillars (which probably needed to happen, Pillars was a mess.) Maybe bring some Greater Malison or Lower Resistance if you want to fight dragons or drow or other resistant enemies, or Chaotic Commands if you find yourself dealing with Mind Flayers or other stun-happy enemies. A Mage can use Protection from Magical Weapons to make himself immune to your +5 Sword of Asskicking but you can then just switch to a mundane dagger and stab him, but if he cast Absolute Immunity instead, you're gonna have to dispel it or wait it out (all of the Mantle spells are short-lived.) The game even had unique animations and sounds for different schools of spell, so you could make educated guesses as to what's coming and react to it. Sure, melee characters basically just walked up and hit things but they're the same way in Deadfire, too - oh, sure, Hobbling Strike does a thing in addition to the damage, but no one uses it for anything but more damage. Watcher's Keep had brilliant things like the floor with magic golems, which needed mundane weapons to beat - and the fact that you were finding some mundane items here and there, where normally you'd been finding magical items, was an obvious hint as to what needed to be done. Pillars ALSO had these sorts of things, but Deadfire largely did not - it seemed like Obsidian was okay with forcing the player to try again with a different combination of items, spells, etc in Pillars (which ties into the Vancian magic system, although even Wizards behaved more like D&D Sorcerers than D&D Wizards) but tried to move away from that with Deadfire. And it gets even worse, comparatively, when you look at things mods like SCS did with the game mechanics. Enemies had spell triggers and contigencies on top of contingencies. In many cases, these were ILLEGAL but they kind of HAD to be because the player could easily meta-game certain encounters and enemy types because there was no DM to adjust things on the fly to account for them being cheesy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Obsidian to be aware of one of the most popular mods for a nearly 20 year old game they had a huge part in creating. SCS and several other mods nerfed these items. In particular, Kangaxx and other spellcasting undead would dispel your Protection from Undead effects if they became aware of you (being hit in the head with a mace tends to make them aware of you), the Shield of Balduran did not reflect Beholder rays or the Beholders would ignore the person with the shield (depending on specific implementation of mods), Thief traps no longer persisted between rests and were treated as a hostile act (no more plunking 50 traps on top of the dragon and then making it upset), etc. It's not like Pillars wasn't full of this, except it was usually in the sense of spell slots or crafted items rather than equipment. The vast majority of encounters were trivialized by using a Scroll of Paralyze. Many encounters hinged on effects like stun or paralyze, and if you had immunity to those effects (through Priest spells, which also came in scroll form) then they were largely trivial. Those encounters are memorable, though, because they at least required the player to do something other than "buff up, proceed to autoattack it until it falls over." Likely, but there were enough hints and information that it WAS possible to beat him on the first try. He's clearly not someone you should trust and you know he's undead. You know there are Scrolls of Protection from Undead, and there are numerous spells and items that are very effective against undead, such as the sword Daystar, the Sunray spell, a Cleric's Turn Undead, the Mace of Disruption, and so on. It's unlikely you'd be aware that you need a +4 weapon to harm him, or what a Demi-Lich is... but if you're doing his stuff in Chapter 6 instead of Chapter 2, it's actually fairly reasonable to expect the player to have something like that available. Kangaxx is memorable because he's a fine example of what others have called a "puzzle boss" - a boss that is relatively simple once you know what to do, but is generally quite difficult until you've figured them out. I didn't encounter a single ****ing enemy in Deadfire like that (much less an entire encounter), and they were fairly uncommon in Pillars, too.

Keldorn being a racist piece of crap was just one more jibe at the cliche Lawful Stupid paladin. I don't remember him ever truly articulating why he hated the Drow, other than "Drow are evil and I'm a paladin so I have to hate them because I'm Good and they're not." I feel like the hate for Mazzy, Keldorn, Cernd (who is a jab at Stupid Neutral druids), etc probably falls flat on people without a tabletop D&D background. If you have that background, they're ****ing brilliant. Durance and Grieving Mother as originally written were much more interesting and deeper. I don't know why they were changed; I know there was some guff about inter-office politics involving Avellone, but I don't know if that's the reason. They were definitely a LOT more dark and unpleasant than anything else in Pillars. Pillars had some dark stuff but the original Durance and GM were pitch black ugly. But I think that's part of what made them interesting. That's the hell of it. If you ignore the whole "she's kinda your stepmom" angle and the fridge logic with how quickly she goes from leaning on a trusted friend to eye-****ing that trusted friend (remembering that she just saw her husband's gruesomely defiled corpse only days ago, most likely), her romance was actually very well-written and planned out. Viconia is likely the best next to Anomen, simply because of how much she grows as a character (and you even have the bittersweet epilogue, unlike Aerie's disgustingly saccharine epilogue) but I thought Jaheira was actually well done if you just pretend Khalid never existed. I mean, that's what we did in BG1 isn't it? Jaheira talks about not going on without Khalid so you conveniently get him stuck in a closet so she'll stop whining. "Khalid who?" People hold BG2 in high regard because it's just simply BETTER than Deadfire in most non-technical ways. Deadfire's combat is just too barebones and simplistic. I don't care much about balance problems because BG2 was certainly no star when it came to balanced gameplay anyway. Something something "perfect imbalance." My problem is that Obsidian went WAY too far with "we're going to do away with d20 cliches!" with their systems design. They wanted to get rid of god stats, but we still have god stats. They wanted to get rid of "automatic stats," but we still have automatic stats... arguably worse than anything in d20 since 3.5E. Having to memorize a glossary to fight Mages was too annoying/too much to ask of newbies, so they got rid of buffs as more than just passive stat boosts entirely and mostly removed dispels as well. Pre-buffing could be problematic, so they just remove it entirely. Vancian magic is bad because it requires players to think and make judgement calls, so they remove it entirely (except for when they added it back in and gave it to every class with the ****ing Empower mechanic...) which makes balancing encounters and entire dungeons ten times more difficult. See, I don't even think they're right when they claim that stats are boring in d20 games. They aren't, especially if you consider more than just the CRB and APG for the given edition. Oh, sure, your basic CRB+APG Fighter has Strength as their core stat, and will probably have some Dexterity and Constitution because they're PROBABLY a melee combatant... but Fighters get a smattering of non-combat skills which variously scale off Charisma, Intelligence, or even Wisdom - meaning you can easily justify getting at least a +1 in those stats to make your skill checks better. Rogues want Dexterity, and they probably want a little Strength too if they're melee, but because they get so many skills they need Intelligence nearly as much as a Wizard, or maybe they want Charisma to be the party face. The system, to me, wasn't in need of fixing. The six stats all had clearly defined and easily understood fluff and crunch applications and the way skills tied into stats ensured that making a "dumb but strong" Fighter or Barbarian was extremely limiting - good luck playing a Barbarian with 7 Charisma, 7 Intelligence, and 7 Wisdom with a competent DM around. By comparison, Pillars makes me feel like I'm playing ****ing World of Warcraft or Diablo 3 - the stats don't matter, skills barely matter. One Fighter is pretty similar to any other Fighter. It's a lot more accessible but I think they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't think people are wanting more Baldur's Gate, they're just pointing out that Baldur's Gate 2 did things better than Deadfire does, despite being nearly 20 years old at this point. Like, I don't think Deadfire is boring because of balance issues - although they play some role - but because there's just not much DEPTH to any of it. The gameplay mechanics, across the board, are INCREDIBLY shallow and feel incomplete. This goes back to "are mods fair game?", but if we look at what BG2 is capable of with stuff like SCS installed... it's staggering how much more nuance and depth a nearly 20 year old game has compared to a 2018 release that wasn't under the same "must use horribly Byzantine 2E rules" restriction BG2 was made to work under. Obsidian had free rein to go wherever they wanted with the mechanics in Pillars and Deadfire and they chose to cut out huge swathes of gameplay mechanics from BG2 (some of which they were absolutely right to get rid of, mind) and in most cases... didn't replace them with anything. It's incredibly difficult to defend decision-making like that without having any information about WHY those decisions were made. And I don't understand the hate for Minsc. Dude is a joke character that was well-written and incredibly well-acted. Edwin's in the same damn boat, and not by coincidence. ****, it even makes sense for Minsc to be even more loopy in BG2 because the guy was already pretty addled to begin with and used Dynaheir and his duty to "protect my witch!" to keep him somewhat grounded in BG1. Dynaheir is gruesomely killed in front of him by Irenicus in the background fluff prior to the game starting and it really causes Minsc to come fully unhinged. He doesn't stop being a Large Ham at any point in BG2, but he does become a LITTLE more grounded if you put him in the party with Aerie and she becomes his new witch. He's really quite well-written for a character that is explicitly made for humor.

Minsc - He's mentally handicapped and has a hamster. That is his entire characterization, the sole extent of his dialog, and his connection to the story Korgon - Chaotic Evil, likes murder. That's it Aerie - Complains about wings. If romanced, she complains about it more Keldorn - Cliched Lawful Good Paladin. That's it Mazzy - Same as above, but a hobbit Cernd - Damn dirty hippie (on the rare chance someone actually uses him) Jan - Grobnar 1.0 I actually like BG2's characters, and they do sometimes get a little development in personal quests, but they are usually one-note and static. IMO, even poor characters in PoE, like Sagani, are better developed. To say nothing of great ones like Durance. Honestly, NWN2's cast are all better than those in BG2, except for Grobnar. Minsc and Korgan are joke characters. They're what you'd call Large Hams. I mean, ****'s sake, Minsc is voiced by Duke Nukem - what are you expecting out of the character? They both also fill the same role in terms of party lineup, being your typical beefy front-liner in the event the player needs someone of that type, and they cover the two major party alignments (good or evil.) Minsc proved to be so popular that he's become a canon Forgotten Realms character alongside the likes of Elminster and Drizzt and has made cameo appearances in numerous D&D titles - so people calling Minsc a boring or uninteresting character strain credibility for me. You should also keep in mind that Jon Irenicus also has a rather bland plot if you're just reading it on a sheet of paper - an almost paint-by-numbers megalomaniacal big bad evil genius whose only vaguely unique or interesting bits are the nature of the Seldarine's punishment of his transgressions. Except Bioware and Black Isle gave him superb character writing (his actual lines) and by this point everyone should be aware of just how skilled an actor David ****ing Warner is. Just like Minsc, Irenicus is about as interesting as a slice of Wonder Bread when looked at on a sheet of paper but is an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable villain in the flesh. Keldorn and Cernd are cliche at first but experience substantial character growth and nuance through their personal quests. If you haven't done them, you really need to. Mazzy has less growth but is sort of a jab at 2E's ridiculous "only humans can be paladins" rules and the like. It's important to note that 3E arrived in 2000 and the team was likely aware of its major rules changes during development of SoA and ToB. Mazzy isn't just thrown in there randomly, there's a reason you get a character that is a paladin in everything but name. All of the character romances are cringeworthy as such things nearly always are, but all of the characters show substantial character growth - Anomen perhaps more than anyone else. Jaheira's is the only one that doesn't make much sense to me, and that's only because I feel like it'd take a long time to get over seeing your husband having been flayed alive and tortured to death (well past the point that Raise Dead could help, although I'm pretty sure Resurrection would've worked fine, or maybe Wish) and while I don't see anything wrong with her relying on Gorion's ward for emotional support, the fact that she's rather receptive to CHARNAME blatantly hitting on her (by buying a necklace for her, for example) in a matter of in-universe days is kind of disturbing, especially when Jaheira and Khalid were kind of like adoptive parents to CHARNAME.