Cronstintein

Man, all you stash-haters really surprise me. As much as I hate this response, I'm going to use it: "you could always not use it". If you only want to carry stuff on your characters, by all means do so! It seems a terrible waste of time (I hate having to do it in BG2, blech!). It would cost a little bit of gold, not being able to sell all the 5cp spears, but whatever, hardly the end of the world. I mean, BG2 has rest anywhere/anytime but I always try to do dungeons w/o resting because I think it's more fun. If you think juggling armor on individual character inventories is fun, you have that option. (In fact, switching to BG2, I really miss the multi-character inventory screen. An under-appreciated improvement.)

100% agreement with OP. Especially about immunities that has a thread all it's own. Um... he's just saying the player should only be able to use one figurine at a time. That wouldn't have any effect at all on solo runs (since they can already only use one). Spamming multiple figurines at once basically creates a completely disposable meat shield that you can bomb to hell, trivializing the bigger encounters.

From what I can tell, stretch-goal game design is a horrible way to plan a project. They were basically throwing things at a wall and seeing if it stuck then feeling obligated to put it in. Rather than using an iterative process that is as much about removing as it is about adding. If they kickstart the sequel I hope they don't fall into that trap again.

Yeah the comments got me looking into it as well. From what I could gather from as an outsider, pathfinder has more comprehensive rule structure but 5th is a bit more streamlined. (which could be good or bad, depending on your PoV). PF has also been out much longer so there are many more books in general.

I don't find these boards particularly harsh. People here, for the most part, are pretty polite with the criticisms. I have noticed some strangely defensive people who seem to get offended if you don't think this game is perfect. Maybe you're assuming the devs feel the same way? It's certainly possible.

That's a good point. Though the only place I see this in PoE is the temple and maaaaaybe Radrick's. After that, I was overpowered every place I went.

A very well-written deeply personal and philosophical story with true consequences to your actions/choices. Huh. Do you feel they succeeded with that? I didn't notice a whole lot of C&C tbh. Well I do like the non-verbal stuff in the dialogues. The themes... not sure how well I would consider that stuff. There was a dark mission in act2 I thought was pretty good. I didn't mind bg2 good/evil where good=generosity and evil=selfishness more or less. Even Korgan (neutral evil dwarf) didn't approve of the child slavery and was down with putting an axe to some skulls

I have to agree with View619. If you are going to claim to be successfully drawing the best from IWD, you really need to step up the combat. Both in dificulty and tactical complexity. I haven't played that series in years (I prefer the more RP/exploration focused games, personally) but I remember them being hard. As in, hard for me on normal. PoE on PotD still isn't really scratching my difficulty itch so... Also, as someone who sadly never managed to really get into planescape:torment due to interface issues, what exactly is PoE trying to pull from that game? To me, PoE just seems like a spiritual successor to BG1.

Oh man that trap detection... You are NOT wrong about that one, it's brutal. Having to stop every few meters and wait 6 seconds is excrutiating. Also THAC0 vs AC was a horrible-to-comprehend system. Why WotC ever thought that was better than just comparing a positive armor class against a positive accuracy stat I will never know. The priest/druid weapon stuff I don't really mind. Someone's gotta use those non-longswords Interesting. Exploration I would have said was reasonably similar. BG2 had more interesting stuff in nooks and crannies (liches mostly!) but I wouldn't say they're drastically different. But Companions! My god I'm truly shocked you'd say PoE has better companions than BG2 -BG2 companions' interjections would actually be responded to in dialogue. -BG2 companion quests generally had more interesting stuff going on. Korgan's is kinda weak but most of the rest are pretty interesting and can go down in a couple different ways. The standouts for me are Anomen and Yoshimo. Though I haven't done them all so I could be missing a few gems. -Romances. How much you care about that differs between players, but they're there. Also a love-triangle with Haer'dalis, Aerie and the PC -The sheer quantity. 16(!) in the base BG2:SoA (not including them new ones in BG2EE, as that's not fair and they're not as good.) -Inter-party banters. So many and so many of them are actually good! Having a mixed good/evil party gets so many awesome banters. I would never play this game with self-made npcs for this reason alone. I try not to be a total grognard about BG2 but companions is the thing I think they do the best so I felt the need to reply a bit there *cough*.

Ehhhh I have some arguments but I'll try and keep it under forty points The containers thing... no argument. That's one of my favorite changes from PoE. Just start me with the bag of holding and give me a nice shortcut (shift-click, in this case) to stick stuff in it. Beautiful! Complex systems in character creation. I actually like that, personally. And, to be fair, that stuff is straight from the DnD source material so blame WotC. Plus dualing/multiclassing was totally optional, not what most people did on their first playthroughs, I assume. Just rolling a straight class was not particularly complicated. If anything, it was probably simpler than PoE (note, I'm not saying better. I like PoE character creation). Dump stats. Well DnD definitely had them. They still exist in PoE. Maybe not 100% worthless stats, but close enough that the distinction is certainly debateable. PERSONALLY, I don't like dropping anything below 9/10, but that's entirely a player choice. Kiting. I didn't even know this was a thing as I was never one to kite in the old games. If someone was beating on my mage he would probably run away, but I don't find that particularly exploitive. Although I could see that if you played a character wearing boots of speed and a high APR shortbow you could probably pick apart the AI pretty ruthlessly. I guess I just don't see the point, it doesn't seem fun to me. It's very easy for me to ignore small AI holes like that because I don't have to change my playstyle to avoid them. Whereas the primitive AI in PoE seems much more problematic in that simply putting tanks in front completely seems to negate the need for any further tactical considerations. ANYWAY, these are the kind of discussions that I actually like on these forums. Discussing the various strengths and weaknesses of comparitive titles allows us to get one step closer to the ultimate rtwp rpg game :D

Oh I dunno. I'm sure nostalgia has it's part but I went back to BG2 to see if it really is as good as I remember... and it's still pretty awesome. The NPC banters are freaking fantastic. This time around (this is my first replay since my original run 12+ years ago) I had Viconia and Aerie in party... Vic is a real biatch! I remember dragon age: origins being pretty good with this, specifically teasing between the blond knight and the witchy lady being pretty funny. But BG2 takes the cake, these banters know no equal.

I'm pretty sure all the individual things can be turned on/off for IE mod, what exactly are you wanting to avoid?

Aw that's too bad, that looks cool!

I think you can pretty much do it in whatever order you like. You don't get locked out of the Vale after getting the stronghold. And I don't think the quests leading up to it have any effect on the stronghold itself so... do what you feel!

That's kind of a weird stance. It's not likely getting more interesting gear actually takes extra time to equip... EDIT: People play these types of games for lots of different reasons I think. Story, Choice & Consequence, role-play, combat tactics, exploration and yes, loot-lust. For me it's (in order): combat, loot, exploration, C&C, role-play, story. This game is more like (in order of strengths)... story, rp, exploration, loot, combat, c&c... so I'm not QUITE satisfied. Now keep in mind: a rtwp rpg being successful, which this one seems to be, raises my hopes for the future. If this was a huge bomb we'd probably never see a sequel and other developers would be less inclined to take risks on this niche genre.

Well for me that was a real downside. Although I really enjoy technical rtwp combat I appreciate the other elements of BG as well. Namely the companions, exploration, quests, etc.. Especially the companions, I love those guys! For justice!

Well if you liked the IWD series so much clearly combat is a big factor for you. So then I'm not surprised you aren't enarmored with PoE. You also have a much higher tolerance for replay than I do, holy smokes!

Shadowrun Returns was made with unity but it's super modabble and even shipped with modding middleware. Clearly Unity is not the controlling factor here.

Wow good work guys. I've taken a break away from game but when I come back this will absolutely be coming into play!

I'm with OP on this one. Obsidian saying they want to help modding happen and actually doing it are two different things. As it stands, PoE is a long way from being mod-friendly. 2d backgrounds isn't really an excuse, the old IE games had the same deal and they were modded extensively. Even if creating new maps is difficult, adding npcs, items, dialogue, quests, etc should be reasonably straight-forward.

Even when they are there, they're pretty unimpessive. Unles a fan of flames scroll impresses you for some reason.

While I admit that list looks impressive at first glance, the vast majority of those bonuses are derived from the enchantment table. The standouts for me are: Moving grazes to hits sounds nice until you realize it's actually just a worse version of an accuracy buff. Anyway, I must say that list is a bit better than what I thought it would be. Certainly better than Dragon Age: Origins which, before reading Elerond's post, is where I would have put PoE on the itemization scale. As an aside, has anyone tested the attack speed bonus since 1.4? Did they finally fix that so that it does something? While I completely agree it's better than BG1, was that the target? Why not aim for the better game? I'm not sure "lower-level" is a valid excuse tbh. At the end game you're kiling serious foes, is there a reason to hold back serious loot? Striving for balance in a single-player rpg doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I would have preferred if they went balls-to-the-walls crazy rather than worrying so much about unbalanced items. It kinda reminds me of MMO design-philosophy where you have to be very incremental with the power increases because throwing balance is such a big deal. Gimme some crazy stuff like an evil dagger with 2x sneak attack damage but reduces endurance by 80%. a flashy sword that causes blindness in foes but has a small chance of doing it to the user. (with a nice sparkly fx) Armor with large bonuses to a certain defense (not deflection) and maluses to others. a tinfoil hat that protects the wearer from mind-control (ok that's a little silly, but you get the point) etc.. Most of the stuff I see is pretty timid.

Bash was cool! Not particularly effective, but cool. Spell strike I actually mentioned. Coordinating and disorientating are ok too but at least admit this stuff is in the tiny minority. 95% of the non-worthless gear is of the enchant-makable variety. And of the few non-reproducable ones I found, half of them were bugged and not working :/ Crom Faeyr is awesome but that's hardly the only example to pull! Daystar, The Drinker, Mace of Disruption, Celestial Fury, Belm, The Equalizer, Harrowing Redeemer, Impaler, etc. etc. etc.. just off the top of my head BG2 has a pleathora of interesting weapons in it which put PoE to shame. (to be fair, they put many rpgs to shame, but come on, lets learn from the past!) PoE's complete de-emphasis on counter-play and powerful status effects have somewhat tied their hands on available options. Negative plane protection and Mindshield protections were super useful in BG2 because those effects mattered! While you could put anti-blind stuff on PoE equipment it wouldn't matter that much because the durations are short and the enemy AI hardly does anything but rush headlong into the meatgrinder.

Yeah, Divinity's was also interesting! I liked it, but it did tend to make me want to 'game' it so that I could manage the perks intentionally. While the fluffy way it's handled in PoE is okay, I would like a mechanical/consequencial style difference even better. Even something simple like: [dishonest > 2] Ack, I'm not going to ask this guy for help, he'll probably just take my gold and leave!

I let my enthusiasm get the best of me but Sabin has the right idea. Waiting for patches (and hopefully mods) is definitely the smart way to go.