Zorfab

You sure took your time. I really think half of that should be plenty to experience everything worthwhile and then some out of this game. Did you read all the soul stories or something?

There are only two acceptable states for resting: 1) Resting is unlimited and game assumes you refresh your resources for every major fight (BG2 is sort of like this). 2) Resting is actually limited and game assumes you go through several fights before refreshing your resources. Spending your rests too often leads to eventual failure and forces the player to play the dungeon again with better approach or go elsewhere to level up/learning to play better. Currently PoE exists in a dead space between these, which is extremely annoying.

Did you even watch the review? He was playing combat in slow mode right there. AI and pathfinding are by no means the only faults this game has, just the most noticeable. I`d rate Pillars in its current state at ~7.8 or so, good effort with some very well done parts but also having a fair share of faceplanting moments. Vast majority of released games are barely worth a 6, so that´s not a bad thing in my books. Obviously company sales departments would always love to get 9 or 10.

It´s actually worse than that. Game offers you a slap on the wrist for not playing well instead of teaching you how to play with limited resources. It´s almost insulting and demeaning. There are a lot of games that actually adhere to their intended difficulty and are enjoyable to play until the end. Gamers are not so soft-skinned that they can´t take a little beating when trying to get through the hardest difficulty level. Not letting that happen also destroys one of the fundamental reasons for playing games in the first place: euphoric feeling of beating something verifiably difficult.

Both games have a the same flaw just done differently. In Baldur´s Gate you would/could save scum until you did not trigger a random encounter in dangerous areas. In PoE you run back to your castle or whatnot, rest to get statistics boost and full endurance and pick up two more field rest kits. Then you run back and take on the next fight.

"Not sure that's what OP was getting at. However, to your point, how does this game not provide players with the way to play (relative to progression, rest, and consequence) according their own expectations? You want to set up conditions for "success," such as making it through a dungeon without resting at all or using only the number of camping supplies you initially bring into the dungeon? Cool. You can do that. Make a save at the start and have at it. If that doesn't work, you reload from the beginning and adjust your strategy. Nobody is forcing cheesy over-resting tactics or abstract notions of personal success/progress conditions." No, I`m being serious here. Creating a mechanic in your game that can be trivially circumvented means that it is a superfluous design. If camping supplies are intended to be limited, make them limited. I have no problem with easier difficulties not having the enforcement, but on hard and PotD? Just so you know where I`m coming from: I love games that punish you for failure. Stuff like Dark Souls and Alien: Isolation. Similar things apply for facing a difficult human opponent on Street Fighter IV or leading a successful combat gang in EVE Online. Actual challenge that is not just in my head but ahead of me and opposing me, taunting and goading me to perform better and to experience the exhilaration of a true victory and the bitterness of true defeat.

I think you are not happy enough. Back to the game with you.

OP is right. If failure was actually punished by loss of progression, these areas and resting mechanics would be meaningful and you would actually have to know how to play the game and not just fight-rest-fight-rest-fight-rest through the ordeal. Quick saves would not be enough to overcome poor micro and resource management in that case.

There are two reasons for this: 1) Happy people don´t come to forums that often and may not even thought about the game in analytical way, just played and enjoyed it. There is a good chance that they will never comment on the game beyond slapping a number in Metacritic or Steam for a recommendation. They have no motivation to participate in the discussion and thus they never will. 2) Positive feedback is often of low value. "Thanks for a great game" is almost as bad as "This game sucks rotten eggs!". A lot nicer, but lacking anything constructive nonetheless.

"Even worse the tactical and strategic difficulty really went down the tubes. I had it in my mind they made interesting challenges and always played their games on the highest difficulty levels. But I barely broke a sweat beating ME2 on insanity and I had not played a FPS (well besides ME1) since Castle Wolfenstein in the early 90s. I was like 'really?'" They have consistently kept the difficulty of their later games fairly low for most part. But ME2 is a lot of fun with Vanguard Insanity. Most fun I`ve had in any TPS type game... But other classes are SUPER BORING to play. And as you said, it´s still quite easy no matter what class you use. DA:I has similar problem. Its actually even easier than ME2/3 are if you actually play the game and not just ignore the skill combos and crafting. EA actually complained lately how their games are too hard to learn. Can you believe that?

Why?

KS cares very little for full VO game. Actually most don't want it because it almost always means less overall conversation in the game. I would rather see a KS that gives us 2x those interactive adventures and have them all voiced with a cool DM/narrator kind of a voice. Voice acting costs many, many multiples more than 50k, otherwise everybody would do it. It's not a good use of money. As far as I know, voice over rates wary wildly depending on the experience of the actor. (Semi)-amateurs often work for pittance (~40-50 bucks for hour) and others charge same for each minute with a minimum charge for short commissions like ads. And this does not mean that the cheap guy is bad, everybodys gotta start somewhere. But vetting for good actors for the roles also takes time and thus money and so someone with more known quality is a safer bet.

5 is supposed to have some good improvements... Once Wasteland 2 gets it patched in we shall see if that actually holds true.

I hope it sells well and Obsidian can continue their game development business well into the future. Pillars is by no means "everything I wanted" type of game, but its still a worthy product.

"Is only half right - ALL games which didn't have a mass audience were neglected in the early '00s. It had nothing to do with whether they "required too much thought" - if you were perceived as niche, you got ditched by the main publishers. And not being good on consoles meant you were niche." Yes, businesses became risk-averse especially after the dot-com bubble and again after the meltdown of ´08. There were (and still are) fears of suffering similar crash on gaming market that we had in the 80´s, when Atari ended up dumping games into landfills since nobody wanted them even for free. Basically too many people got into the mix and released tons of crappy and unfinished games... Like we have in Steam Greenlight/Early Access/F2P and similar programs today. I`m hoping things don´t go overboard and end up with ultrasaturated market, which will then collapse and take down a lot of good development houses with them.

All of these three games have problems with difficulty: 1) Divinity has talent stacking for some defenses and AI exploits with their obsessive need to avoid area effects. Also potential for abusing the item system (stacking crates/barrels to corner enemies). 2) PoE has deflection stacking and AI that is incapable of dealing with simple chokepoint tactics due to map design and the lack of attack options available for the AI. Failure to enforce limited resting and unlimited storage add to this. 3) DA:I has multiplicative damage exploits (which is amazing considering how simple the system is) and abusive crafting that allows you to circumvent any difficulty by simply increasing statistics outside the bounds that the developers probably intended (tier 3 elite gear available as soon as you hit Skyhold).

Of course their preference is reflected in the review, that's literally all a review is - a subjective opinion about a thing. Conversely, your opinion about the game is no more valid than theirs (->who are you to deem their review "too subjective"?), and popularity/sales is a poor measure of quality. If you have discovered a way of objectively assessing the quality of a cultural item, you should probably let someone know, you'd be a superstar in academic humanities. The only reviewers worth paying attention to are the ones you find yourself in agreement with relatively often. Actual games are also functional items and not just something that is purview of pure subjectivity. Game can for example have a good art style (subjective) but poor performance or low-resolution textures (objective). This is why reviews should concentrate on the latter and leave the former mostly up to the viewer in form of images and gameplay video. Reviewer can and should bring out his own preference on subjective topics, but keep it out of the end score tally as much as humanly possible. Which, granted, might not be much. It is unfortunate that currently the review advertisement revenue is very much tied to who publishes first. Incentive is very much tipped into direction of quick reviews instead of quality reviews that usually take time. I personally like to read late reviews and buy most games couple months after release. Not only do you get the bug fixes but lower price and more informed opinions/reviews from wider audience.

Some consistency would be nice. If they'd all got 8 I wouldn't be bringing it up. Unfortunately reviewers are humans too and have hard time keeping their own preferences out of the scoring. IGN and Gamespot gave poor reviews for Alien: Isolation (5.9/6.0 IIRC), even though people who actually like the genre love the game (with few reservations, as I have not seen a perfect game yet). But if you put a action/CoD gamer like IGN Ryan to review a survival horror game on a schedule... They can´t take it and it is too frustrating to them. They will feel humiliated and subconsciously seek revenge by scoring the thing down. Problem with these big rags giving poor scores is that their scores are seen by more people. They should be able to put 2 or 3 separate people on each game and not rely on one specific individual for scoring.

I´m shocked that you are shocked. 1) People have different tastes. 2) This game is not as good as you seem to believe it is. 3) D:OS is not as poor of a game as you seem to believe it is. In actuality none of the games mentioned in OP are quite worth a 9 when you really go in and dig into the specifics. Each of them has too many actual flaws and weaknesses for that (not just style choices that are actual matters of taste and have no bearing on the actual quality of the product).

Third Edition and yes, it´s the most faithful D&D game in terms of actual PnP system integration. Just have to play if with Circle of Eight mod installed, because Troika left the patching in unfinished state themselves. Understatement of the year. In an unpatched state, that game can literally uninstall your Windows system files along with itself. Indeed. Troika made great games that were extremely unstable and unfinished. And still... Games that made, such as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines are true classics of the genre.

Third Edition and yes, it´s the most faithful D&D game in terms of actual PnP system integration. Just have to play if with Circle of Eight mod installed, because Troika left the patching in unfinished state themselves. Plot is not great, but it´s a conversion of an old school dungeon crawling module by Gygax and Mentzer which are more concerned with challenging the player (and killing them in horrific ways now and then ).

It´s more of an issue with enemies often being one-trick ponies. That is to say, they have regular melee attack and one special attack (if any). If enemies had better AI and more options for attacking the back row of the party in intelligent manner and enough different types of attacks to do it, game would become much harder. Imagine if you went against a group of soldiers and set up your tanks on a narrow bridge and the enemies would just pull out ranged weapons and start shooting your back row instead of rushing the tanks and do futile melee with them? Enemies coordinating flanking attacks and conditions in intelligent manner to give their rogue classed members huge boosts on spike damage? Basically using every dirty trick that the players can use themselves against them. Deflection defense also seems to be overvalued (too large portion of enemy attacks are against it). If game attacked the secondary defense values more often and stat system and items were tuned in a manner that would make "omni-tanking" impossible, the difficulty level would increase dramatically. You might be forced to rotate tanks between two first ranks and put some armor on your back row characters in order for them to survive, or use more crowd control to disable certain dangerous enemies before they devastate the key members of your DPS team.

Yes and no. There are some things about it that are no good whatsoever and some others that are good or even fantastic. It´s not a 90´s game for me yet, but perhaps it will be expanded and improved sufficiently after the promised expansions and future patching.

Wrong. You can also refrain from using the buffs and save them up for later. The rest of your argument is invalid. I am having great fun with people who write walls of text just in order to defend some developer's decision. There is a word for such people. I would agree with you otherwise, but the game does not give you incentive to do that. You have 0 reason to save spells because you can always get more in a snap as long as the location allows you to push rest button or go backwards until you can (and rest in an inn for long term buffs for your next attempt to boot).

No they are not. Rests are unlimited because the game does not punish or ban you from going back to a village or city and buy more of them. Having to trudge back in shame to the inn is punishment enough for me. Losing progression due to sloppy play would be a punishment. I would cry from joy if the hardest mode actually enforced the difficulty it is supposed to have!