PizzaSHARK

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. The dialogue is pretty good, though I'm sure there are side quests where it's weak. The gameplay is about as good as you could have expected 2E to be. I'm not sure if it's fair or not to compare modded BG2 to vanilla Deadfire - but I also think that those mods for BG2 have been out for a VERY, VERY long time and Obsidian has had more than enough time to go over them, so I consider it fair game. And the fact is, even with 2E's ridiculous nonsense getting in the way, modded BG2 (especially with mods like Sword Coast Stratagems) is DRAMATICALLY better than Deadfire. It's not even a contest. I feel like removing the buff/dispel mechanics entirely (except for Arcane Dampener, I guess) was a really terrible decision for the Pillars games. That dynamic made battles so much more interesting in BG2, especially when mods let the game cheat (such as by having illegal Contingency or Spell Trigger spells, or Contingency on a Cleric, etc) to compensate for the Ai simply never going to be able to match an attentive player. People bitch and moan about how you had to refer to a glossary to fight a Mage (maybe the first couple of times, afterwards you always knew to just have a copy of Breach, Dispel Magic, etc ready to roll, or a scroll of such spells in your hotbar), but at least fights with spellcasters in BG2 were INTERESTING. You had to REACT to what they were doing. In Pillars and Deadfire? No, you just buff up. Then they buff up. Then you and them beat each other with sticks until one side's numbers end up being better than the other side's numbers. Oh, sure, Flames of Devotion is a very flashy, SHINY way of beating someone with a stick but it's fundamentally no different from a 2E Paladin walking up and twatting someone upside the head with Carsomyr. I don't see anything wrong with having fights that REQUIRE certain spells or actions to be taken in order to have a decent shot at winning. This isn't tabletop or a roguelike where one death means you're done - it's a CRPG with the almighty power of quicksave and quickload. Give Wizards and Priests their full spell lists back, make encounters REQUIRE certain responses or abilities, and then let the player figure out what tools they need to pull out of their great big toolbox. And then, once they know what tools they need, let them then have to figure out where those tools should be used and in what order.

Lol assassins have been screwed for a while. Thanks for the tip, I forgot all about the beta branch after 1.1 dropped Edit: looks like they went a little overboard, imo. With only a 10% sneak attack damage difference in exchange for free spells at every power level, there's basically no reason to choose a vanilla rogue anymore. They shall make tricksters access to these spells, but not get them freely, -10% sneak attack is like nothing compare to the huge versality you get. Yeah, I don't understand why they reduced the sneak attack penalty. I think just making the spells more accessible (by reducing resource costs here and there) was plenty. I'm actually concerned Trickster will be overpowered now. 10% less sneak attack damage for the ability to cast some incredibly good Illusion spells like Gaze of the Adragan and Mirrored Images sounds too good to pass up. I do think that Street Fighter is still very competitive, though, especially for challenge runs. I still figure Street Fighter will be a required class for solo runs just because of how GOOD its benefits are when you can activate them reliably.

I agree. I think Endless Paths simply had too many levels - maybe because "15 floor dungeon!!!" looks really, really good on Kickstarter advertising blurbs as a stretch goal. It might have made more sense to condense it severely, to like five or six floors that are much larger. You could easily have each floor or two having their own miniature narrative, keeping things fresh and interesting both from a narrative and gameplay standpoint. I feel like a broken record here, but Durlag's Tower in Tales of the Sword Coast is still one of the finest dungeons Obsidian ever had a hand in making (as Black Isle Studios, I don't know how much input Bioware had on the creation of the dungeon, if any.) It never overstays its welcome, it contains a wide variety of gameplay styles and types and has its own interesting little narrative. In more recent terms, I think the Temple of Eothas in Gilded Vale (hell, everything involving Act 1 in Pillars) was also really good. The dungeon was short, so it didn't feel like the encounters got to the point of being boring and most encounters were different from one another - you had spiders, wisps, and skuldrs on the first floor, and various types of spirits, oozes, and one big fight with a king skuldr and its buddies on the second floor. There was a clear narrative throughout the area, some simple puzzle-solving, and at the end you're rewarded with some loot and a choice on how to resolve the quest (such as by having your 3 foot tall orlan pick up a nearly 6 foot tall human by the throat and throw him around like a rag doll!) There's also a dungeon on a random island in Deadfire rang the same bells as the Temple of Eothas did, involving some of those always-fun Woedicans, and I ****ing loved it - too bad that sort of thing seemed to be the exception and not the norm, at least from what I played before getting bored and stopping. Maybe it's tabletop experience talking here, but I REALLY go for a "less is more" philosophy when it comes to dungeons/adventuring areas. Fewer combat encounters (so that each encounter can be unique and challenging in different ways), more exploration, and ideally some means of tying non-combat skills into the adventure. Sadly, neither Pillars nor Deadfire have much in the way of meaningful non-combat skills although Deadfire made great strides towards improving that compared to Pillars.

Does the Illusionist's +2 PL apply to Trickster spells? If so, it seems like you'd have some degree of synergy there, seeing as how you can use Guile instead of spell slots to cast certain illusion spells. Looking at Illusionist, it definitely would have synergy with Trickster, assuming you wanted to use Guile instead of spell slots for specific spells. You lose Conjuration and Enchanting schools, but you still have Transmutation and Evocation, and at only a 10% recovery penalty for each, and you gain an automatic, free Mirror Image every combat. Between Transmutation and Illusion you have access to the most potent control spells in the Wizard lineup. It could make for a fairly effective front-line character.

Although the mega-dungeon was a nice stretch goal idea for PoE1, it clearly got away from them when it reached 15 levels and I never though it was a particularly engaging piece of content. Each to his own I guess, but I vastly prefer "dungeon content" similar to Raedric's Hold -- which we got in Deadfire in the shape of Fort Deadlight and Hasongo, which were both awesome. I also really enjoyed The Hanging Sepulchers and The Old City, both in Neketaka, though the latter admittedly could've been a bit bigger. But yeah, I'm always for more dungeon content, though I don't think they need to be 15 levels. In fact, I think I'd prefer them not to be that big. Some of my favorite dungeons ever -- Durlag's Keep, Dragon's Eye, The Severed Hand, Upper and Lower Dorn's Deep, Durgan's Battery -- are between 5 and 10 levels, which IMO is the sweet spot. Laborious descents into subterranean despair are content unto themselves. Some people just lack a classical sense of adventure. Alternatively, some people have seen laborious descents into subterranean despair so many times across so many games that they're no longer capable of being an adventure in and of themselves. It's worth noting that, in many cases, the dedicated CRPG players that really love the subgenre have also played a LOT of tabletop.

Say stupid things, and you get called out on it. Maybe being a pretentious **** makes the little girls swoon over you but I've long since lived past the point where people give a tin **** about choice of words versus what's being said.

Cut the bull****, dude. Your statement unequivocally implies that your position is the one that "most people" would follow, which is why you accuse mine of being presumptuous.

I know what others do because it was something that was CONSTANTLY mentioned in BG2 discussion forums back in the day, hell the scene in Jaheira's romance was quite literally the only time I actually had a "random encounter" after taking a nap. I know what others do if they are playing to win, and you balance around players that are playing to win because balance changes nearly always have a trickle-down effect - you balance around the very best players and the changes trickle down to the players that are less skilled or are simply less interested in playing to win. You're the one making presumptions to what players will and won't do. If you don't prevent people from just reloading a save if you get woken up by monsters, and there is nothing meaningful gained by fighting those random monsters... PEOPLE WON'T FIGHT THOSE RANDOM MONSTERS so they have no point being in the game at all. Just like, because there's nothing preventing people from blowing everything on a single encounter and then immediately taking a nap afterwards, people do exactly that. The idea that players will self-limit themselves in order to preserve challenge in a game doesn't bear out in the real world - most players are interested in winning and if they discover something that helps them win, they'll use it as needed to win. These players may not specifically look for such things in the way that power gamers invariably do, but it doesn't take much to cotton on to there being absolutely no penalty to quicksaving or any penalty to resting 20 times in a single dungeon. You COULD just seed things so that you can't get around random encounters with quicksaves, but then you're just forcing the player to grind through tedious, uninspired battles that have no connection to the region's mini-narrative or the overall narrative and you're then also left to confront the problem of whether or not you reward players for these battles. If you do, some players will grind them (because they aren't challenging) to gain an XP/economic advantage. Other players won't grind them, but may have cleared more of these encounters than others and will end up ahead of the designed XP/gold curve (or, if they had very few encounters and you balanced around players having at least an average amount, they're now under the curve.) Or you can make them give minimal rewards, or no rewards at all, in which case everyone hates you for wasting their time. So, for a third time - random encounters are garbage.

That's just because, quite honestly, people are dumb. I backed Pillars and Deadfire because of what they had potential to be (potential that was never QUITE realized for Pillars although by 3.0 it got really damn close, I'm confident that Deadfire will EVENTUALLY get there given how much better Pillars got with patches and DLC), not because of stretch goals. I think stretch goals also have a serious problem of setting unrealistic expectations for a game. Deadfire advertised ship combat and pirate stuff and so I immediately thought of the numerous tabletop modules and campaigns that take place on whatever the setting's example of the high seas are (best ever was in a gargantuan desert and played like Pirates of the Caribbean was banging Mad Max over Dune), and of course it couldn't ever come close to that - but that's what the marketing set expectations for and it failed horribly on that front, just like Pillars failed miserably by trying to act like it was going to beat BG2 (it didn't come even remotely close at launch, and still doesn't even with 3.0; it at least met or beat BG1 at launch and kicks the tar out of it by 3.0). Tyranny is my favorite Obsidian project, and I think that's both because I didn't have any expectations (I didn't even hear about it until barely a month from launch) and because it's a small project. I feel like Pillars and now Deadfire have been an example of Obsidian biting off more than they could chew. High seas campaigns ALWAYS have room to have more content added in later, it's one of the big draws of such a setting. There will always be islands to discover, you can have tectonic or magical events CREATE new islands (which then clearly beg to be explored and looted), there will always be room for a cops-and-robbers pirate economy, you can fight ****ing krakens and sea dragons and all kinds of legendary seaborne gribblies, etc. So I frankly don't think that Deadfire NEEDED to try and do everything all at once for launch. I would've been quite happy with JUST the critical path content and a smattering of side quests - the nature of the setting means it's not terribly difficult to add in additional content post-launch... PLUS they could have emphasized and focused heavily on the critical path and really sold it as urgent, leaving the side content to quite literally be added in later, after the narrative is resolved (and that in itself gives you tons of avenues to pursue!) Instead, the core narrative is almost like ****ing Fallout 4 where you exit the Vault screaming about finding your baby and then 30 in-universe minutes later you're discussing wallpaper options for your new settlement with your somehow-still-functional robotic butler, then at random points during the game you go back to screaming incoherently at people about your baby before returning to bashing desk fans against solid objects until they vomit screws at you.

The reasons are pretty self-evident, I'd think. Random encounters are incapable of being tactically interesting or complex. Instead of hand-picking monsters to suit the terrain, and then placing them in that terrain in order to craft a specific flow and concept for the encounter, you just grab a handful of minis out of a bag and plop them down on the board and go "let's you and them fight!" It's boring, it's uninspired, and it doesn't have any sort of connection to any kind of narrative. The BEST you can hope is that the encounter is at least rational - starving wolves may decide to risk attacking the party, oozes and the like are mindless and are incapable of differentiating a threat from prey, and so on. Add to that, in a game with quicksave, ****ing NO ONE is going to do random encounters. They will just quicksave compulsively and revert to a save every time a random encounter comes up. Finally, random encounters DESTROY your game's economy and XP curve - or they don't reward anything and then you're DEFINITELY going to see everyone just ****ing reverting to a save every time one comes up because then there's literally no ****ing REASON to fight them in the first place. Random encounters are garbage.

Pillars suffered terribly from Endless Paths clearly taking development time away from frankly more important things. It would've made more sense to have just the first few levels, enough to resolve Kana Rua's quest, and then have some kind of blockage or whatever that the player can't clear away until a post-release DLC adds in the project or something. Deadfire ALSO suffers from "too much, too little time," in this case especially in regards to basically everything involving the ship. Obsidian should probably not do stretch goals anymore. They seem to have severe issues managing the additional workload they create. Either do it, or don't do it - don't let people decide whether or not you should cram in a half-finished idea via funding amounts. I would have greatly preferred a fully-developed and fleshed out ship combat DLC/expansion for a reasonable price than the half-finished, uninspired crap that's in the game now, even if it meant I had to wait some months before I could give it a whirl. You can only make a first impression once.

Not really. The game world is already crammed full of paint-by-numbers combat encounters, and Endless Paths in Pillars wasn't particularly great. There's already not enough in the world of Deadfire to make exploring actually FUN - since it's all just mindless combat encounters and equipment to either vendor or use to fight more mindless combat encounters, for the most part - so the last thing they need is even MORE reason not to go explore. Any expansions need to concentrate on making sailing around the Deadfire Archipelago exciting and engaging rather than just a mindless pursuit of map completion.

Because random encounters are garbage.

DW should just impart a Penetration penalty on both weapons. It makes the most sense from both a fluff and crunch perspective and is in line with how most RPG systems handle it (they may also include an accuracy penalty, but I don't think that would be necessary here and missing is never especially fun.) An alternative might be to increase the resource cost of Full Attack actions by +1 if you're dual wielding, but that seems dumb.

Because they went from an ad hoc buff system to a unified inspiration/affliction system and basically just directly ported over buffs as close as possible without trying to balance them out. It's also why Priests are pretty weak outside of healing and one or two buffs that give you something you can't really get anywhere else (Devotions giving a flat +20 Acc for example.) Wizards and Priests got hit really hard by the change to the system, especially since Confused is no longer a CC effect and instead just a relatively weak debuff. It'll probably get fixed in later patches.

Even if I had known that, I wouldn't have done it. Feels like cheating. Like stabbing a vampire in his sleep. It's something no DM in their right mind would ever allow. If you were a lich and getting smacked by someone you can't see, you'd immediately start casting spells to dispel protections, gain true sight, etc. I believe that's what SCS updated lich etc AI to do if they were getting smacked by people with Protection from Undead active.

Fully modded game with SCS had lots of tough fights. Maybe I'm a bad player, but some of them took me very long, or at least felt like they did. A fight that I remember that was part of the original game was of course Kangaxx. That took always very long and I had to reload a lot. That's because there's one item in the game that makes it really easy to survive for some time (Scroll of Protection from Magic), and only 2 or three weapons that could hit him. Without the Scroll, it was possible, but highly unlikely to defeat Kangaxx. With the Scroll, the fight was over in < 30s. SCS nixed that, along with the Shield of Balduran trivializing Beholders.

Ugh. You're going to make me launch the game up now, aren't you. Alright. Rogues get the ability to Shadow Step at Power Level IV. Wizards at Power Level IV get access to Pull of Eora (essentially a black hole). Dimensional Shift (two person teleportation/swapping places + a seismic pulse effect). Wall of Flame (summons a literal Wall of Fire) Minor Grimoire Imprint (Allows them to steal a third level spell from any other spell list in the game) Barbarians get Spirit Tornado at Power Level VII Wizards at Power Level VII get Delayed Fireball (self explanatory) Substantial Phantom (Creates a clone of themselves) Citzal's Martial Power (One of the best buffs in the game) Ninagauth's Killing Bolt (A spear that summons a Spectre if it kills it's target) And this isn't including any spells that came before in the power levels below these. Play a Barbarian, and then play a Wizard. The difference is night and day. Ya, you guys are not getting what I am saying. I get they are not exactly the same and the wizard has a wider selection. I get it... I get it.... I get it.... But the fact that BARBARIANS ROGUES, FIGHTERS and every other class in the game has access to powerful magic, that in most games are the realm of sorcerers and mages, ruins the whole concept of what a wizard is. It ruins the feel of being a powerful practitioner of magic, when many of your abilities are mimicked by every other class. There is nothing special lore wise about a wizard, that doesn't really monopolize magic. The one thing that makes them unique, every other class has. You guys keep stating game play differences, I am talking about the lore. You're the one not getting it. You have been shown, time and again, where you're just wrong - that this kind of "everyone has magic" is very common in fantasy media and is even present in some of the oldest of fantasy media. Just because YOU do not like doesn't mean that everyone must dislike it, and then when you go off and insult "the new generation" as though you're some wise old sea dragon that just "knows better"... jesus ****ing christ, dude. Just stop posting. You done goofed, so just let it go.

I actually find all this deal "difficulty was not a priority" bizarre. You have a party based game where most of content is about combat, and difficulty was "not a priority". If combat difficulty was not a priority, then what was? What is even the point of the game then? It's main gameplay is combat. It's not a project like Numenera where combat, indeed, might not have been a priority. Um, its NOT all about combat. Obsidian deliberatly reduced the amount of combat in this game compared to Pillars1 and then went so far as to include FAR more options for avoiding combat. People are complaining about not getting Dark Souls level of "difficulty" in a game that has been almost entirely tuned around story, character interaction, world interaction, and roleplaying. Deadfire is quite clearly combat-focused, though less so than Pillars. The default solution to almost every encounter is "fight it." You CAN talk your way out of SOME encounters, but very few. Almost all of the side content is focused on combat - every single bounty is combat. All of the islands you can explore and name? You have to clear some little dungeon or scripted event that - you guessed it - involves combat. Everything involving the ship? Fight ****, yo. Oh, sure, we have discrete SECONDARY skills that allow us to diplomancy our way through SOME encounters... but it's piss poor compared to what's on offer in many other CRPGs, let alone the tabletop systems they were all built using or inspired by. Even ****ing Pathfinder, RAW, has better diplomancy options than Deadfire does... I liked the way they ramped up fight difficulty in BG2. they gave everyone, including enemies, the ability to set combination spells that trigger instantly on conditions. like... iron skin, spell reflection, and mirror image that are cast instantly on combat start, for example. that made a lot of the fights much more interesting, and you had to plan ahead to deal with tough defenses by using counters like ruby ray, etc. so, at higher difficulty levels in PoE2, have the enemy ai be able to instant cast some defensive spells or abilities at the start of combat, and/or when certain conditions are met, like 50% health, immobilized, etc. again, the scripting for this kind of thing is already built into the game... the ai just doesn't do well using it. This is still perfectly doable if we let the computer cheat - and it HAS to cheat, because no AI is going to be a match for human powergamers and we don't have a human DM slapping them on the wrist or adjusting the dungeon on the fly to prevent some gimmick or playstyle from breaking the game. SCS was well known for creating illegal Contigencies and Spell Triggers just so that players couldn't faceroll encounters in the opening rounds, and even the Improved Tougher mods usually let the game cheat a little just to deal with how overpowered players were by that point. Obsidian have painted themselves into a corner with systems design here, and I don't see a "legitimate" way out of it unless they want to add in multiplayer with a human DM or something. I don't think "that's unrealistic!" is a valid complaint for PotD, so just go nuts. We have quicksave, so who cares if an encounter is designed such that the surprises will PROBABLY TPK the first time the player sees them?

Fighters and Barbarians are specialists in their field with actual training. These are not laymen. These are individuals with at least as much practice in their specific professions as Wizards have at their respective levels. Furthermore, given how intrinsic magic is to the universe of PoE, many concepts of magic are commonplace. This is a high magic setting, remember. This is the point I'm trying to get across. In Eora, magic would be studied by anyone hoping to improve past a certain point in their martial expertise, and magic can be improved similar to a person's muscles because the soul is merely another component of their body. Learning how to harness it's power is absolutely comparable to learning how to harness the power of our bodies. EDIT: Additions/TL;DR Wizards understand the nature of the world and the soul with far more depth, breadth, intricacy, and nuance than a Rogue or Barbarian, but it makes sense that those professions would also have some level of magical knowledge, and an understanding of how to harness their soul to supplement their abilities. Similar to how a sniper has some level of understanding of math to calculate trajectories and account for wind, temperature, pressure, etc. And even if they don't, the soul being part of the body means training it is, at least to some extent, similar to training your body. Wizards apply their knowledge to exponentially increase the potential power and variety of these abilities. --Apologies for all the edits. I dunno, I think the ability to teleport, render oneself invisible, instantly switch positions with a target, fly, throw explosive weapons, and blast people with magic projectiles from your voice are pretty spectacular displays of magic that rival anything the wizard can do. And they don't have a 4 second cast time.... The point is, these are not little feats of magic they are performing. These are very powerful effects from classes that are not really supposed to specialize in magic. Is that not what the multi-classes are for? For people who want martial and spells in one character? The whole thing is poorly put together and makes very little sense. These are all gameplay abstractions...

Who are you even responding to? Also lol, blaming "this new generation of gamers."

It seems to be an Obsidian thing. Pillars was undeniably hardest in the early stages of the game, Tyranny peaked at the end of Act 1 and was downhill from there, and Deadfire is little different. Maybe the majority of their effort is on the early stages of the game?

Skipping fights you can't win is your idea of a challenge? Ahahah. I mean, that's how tabletop is. A party that doesn't decide "lol **** that" or "wow we're getting beat, it's time to gfto" will often end up TPK'd even with a fairly lenient DM that's willing to fudge rolls or bend the rules in their favor.

Not really? Fighters get all kinds of magical armor and tools that let them do different things, and ToB added in HLAs which let them do all kinds of wickedly awesome stuff. **** like Mantle, Absolute Immunity, etc exists because Wizards will get mulched by Fighters if they don't have them. Wizards are unquestionably more powerful than Fighters, generally speaking, but the way it's done so is still interesting and engaging. 3.5E and Pathfinder and 5E have all given them more active means of hitting things with sharpened sticks. I like that someone mentioned trash mobs, because trash mobs have ZERO PURPOSE in a game that's not built around attrition death. They just serve to make the game tedious and monotonous and holy **** I'm bored I'm gonna go play something else, especially when difficulty levels are just "enemies fall over when you fart at them" and "enemies have absurd amounts of defenses and health but are still developmentally disabled so have fun kiting the dragon's special needs class in circles for 5 minutes." The closest you come to trash mobs having a purpose is in something like MMO raids, but even Blizzard cottoned on to the idea that trash needs to be meaningful and playing raids at anything approaching actual difficulty can result in a TPK if you don't fight the trash packs intelligently - they're certainly NOT "go afk and watch numbers scroll across the screen," not anymore. Trash is generally used as a sort of combination palate cleanser and prep period before the next big encounter, often showcasing some minor elements of the upcoming encounter or setting the narrative stage. Trash in Deadfire is just the equivalent of speed bumps in an empty parking lot - we'd all really prefer to just drive around them if at all possible.

The AI can't "use the environment against you" because the engine doesn't support it and the battle areas are basically just giant open, featureless rooms because Obsidian couldn't figure out ways to deal with the Almighty Doorway method of encounter strategy. It's the single-biggest flaw in all of Pillars, IMO - the lack of ability to affect the terrain. I've been playing Tower of Time instead of Deadfire and while I'm not gonna say it's BETTER than Deadfire, the first character you get, at 1st level, has an ability that lets you draw a line to create a wall and that single ability DRAMATICALLY affects combat in so many ways it's hard to overstate - you can draw a circle around one guy to take him out of the fight, draw a line between two areas to block an area off, etc. You can take the skill that makes it a low wall that blocks movement, but your archers can still shoot (and be shot...) over it. One skill, and it can do all that. Where's all the D&D-esque terrain manipulation in Deadfire? I can't raise walls, I can't create pits, I can't even turn solid dirt into mud to create a slog zone to kite melee enemies through, or turn rocky scree into a solid, smooth stone floor to let my fighters get to their targets faster. It's ridiculous. There's no reason they can't just make the AI not terrible at the game. If you want to funnel dumb animals or mindless undead into a chokepoint, fine - they're animals or mindless, they aren't sapient. But xaurips are sapient and smart enough to know a death trap when they see one, much less kith. Making the AI worth a damn is probably the top priority for Deadfire and all of these games, IMO. Oh, you want to retreat to a chokepoint? We'll cast persistent AOEs on you, or the xaurips will throw gas bombs or other stuff at you since we all know they're "kobolds but totally not kobolds" anyway. And then the mage will raise an earth wall behind you so you can't escape... They don't balance or design the game around this. Why play a ****ty "I wish I was playing a Roguelike" game instead of, you know... an actual Roguelike? Rogue, Nethack, Stone Soup, etc are all free - I can just go play them if I want the Roguelike experience.