Xavori

Because we're getting into a realism vs fun thing, and in a game, fun should always win. If you really want to get nitpicky tho, guns didn't replace bows because guns are more damaging. Crossbows replaced bows because a good bowman needed a virtual lifetime of training. A crossbow could be handed to any yokel who simply pointed it at what he wanted to kill and squeezed the lever (or eventually pulled trigger). The gun replaced the crossbow because it's even easier. Reloading a crossbow takes a bit of strength or an excessive amount of time winding. A gun takes less time than winding and pretty much no strength at all. Back to the game... What the OP said is massive alpha strike then go to something more sustainable. If you want real cheese, build a stealth party with a mage who can open up with fan of flames and then the 21 gun salute followed by everyone switch to faster weapons. And if you want ultimate cheese, have your party be mostly moon godlike chanters who will all be healing each other non-stop. Maybe throw a rogue in for actual DPS, and a priest for those really rare occasions when the enemy all end up piling on to one character.

My suggestion is the opposite of dumbing down the game. Dumb is where we are at. You are blindly stumbling into fights (and the bestiary in-game is no help until after you've already won several fights...which means you don't need the bestiary to tell you if you can win a fight). You are forced to reload all the time because you end up fights that are flat out unwinnable with no idea that that is the case until after you're stuck in the fight. (well, at least until if you're like me you've done so much side content, and killed so many extra mobs, that you've outleveled and outgeared the content) I actually agree with pi2repsion that you need to be able to plan for fights without all the information. That's why my suggestion is for only level (the completely arbitrary bit) and the not the full beastiary listing. I'm not asking for the game to tell me if I'll win/lose the fight in advance. I'm only suggesting that we get the information that we cannot deduce in any way on our own because it's completely arbitary. Honestly, if I were designing a CRPG in this day and age, I'd dump the whole idea of levels period. Computers can handle much more complex bookkeeping and don't need that holdover from the pen and paper days where counting how many swings of a blade a character made would have been beyond tedious. Computers don't care about tedious. And once you get rid of levels, you can then get started on getting rid of hitpoints which are another holdover to let pen and paper players simulate the idea of lots of swings and parries and dodging in a single dice roll instead of having to calculate each and every one until you get to that one good strike that ends the fight. But these are topics for another day and another game

A few replies to some of the points made: Fledgling adventurer who knows nothing of the world: No. I'm not. I should know quite a bit about the world I'm in. I should be able to visit the libraries and read the descriptions of mobs from other adventurers. I should be able to identify by looking at least some of the difficulties a particular mob would present. However, in the first case the devs didn't bother, and in the second, that level of detail in the graphics/artwork would be seriously prohibitive without adding as much fun as spending that time adding more critters and story while short-cutting the need for such artwork just by changing the color of the critters name or by giving me level info I can get other places (ie. wiki's and guides) No, you don't. All you know is that the encounter beat you, with a vague sense of how badly you got womped. You don't magically know the precise level of every creature in the game! A con system is just an absurd level of hand holding for a game that purports to be the true IE successor, which is by any reasonable definition an RPG with bite. Knowing in advance the difficulty of an encounter dilutes the game's strategic difficulty dramatically. For example, I went back to a certain castle a couple of times (had skipped a bit of start zone content) and was beaten back before finally winning. If I had known the exact level of the monsters then I would probably not even have engaged once at level 2-3. Same deal with the famous bear. The surprise beatdowns my party took are part of the core experience. I'll remember them. Being able to know the difficulty of an encounter is in my opinion game breaking and should be a mod addition only, never part of the core supported gameplay. Knowing in advance the difficulty is the ONLY WAY TO HAVE A STRATEGIC ENCOUNTER IN A CRPG. Anything else is a guess, not strategy. Hiding that info in game doesn't make the game harder or give it more bite. It makes it random. It makes it annoying. It makes an alt-tab-to-wiki fest and/or a save-reload fest. Neither of those are "bite" or "harder". They're just a PITA. Now, I'm all for making it an option for those of you who've expressed the desire to save-reload or just guess randomly whether you're ready to take on the big flying lizard. I'm all for lots of options in games period. And since this is single player, your choices and my choices for options would have no effect whatsoever on each other.

TNSTAAFL You'll spend more on the upgrades for your beddie bye room that you'd spend on just sleeping at an inn. On the other hand, once you have all the buildings, you can always pick which bonus you think will be most beneficial for your next little bit. As for the OP's point.... I'm more irritated with the lack of camping supply slots than I am the cost. Money gets easy. The lack of camping supplies does not. And since pretty much all the good skills are tied to per-rest, you really have to camp/sleep a lot (at least if you're playing on a real difficulty level and aren't cheesing the game to get the 10-rest-only achievy)

For those who haven't found him yet, you must haz him in party. Then you absolutely must haz ask him for where he is from. This is mandatory. I will hunt you down and take away your birthday if you do not. And to celebrate this discovery, I give you my absolute favorite Shakespeare moment. Titus Andronicus. Act IV. Scene II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tcmb5nLpfM

IMO it's hilarious to even consider choosing PotD for the 1st playthrough. PotD should be for people who WRITE the guides, not for those who need or read them. Myself, I'm a BG/IWD veteran, and I chose expert/normal diff. on my 1st playthrough. And I seriously regret picking expert/normal instead of non-expert/hard. About the level info, etc. I LOVE the feeling of not knowing whether I am too powerful or too weak (cause in non-scaling RPGs you will always be either of those). On some maps I was too powerful and too weak on the same map! That's great. Creates some suspense. Once upon a time, I did write strategy guides. I'm also a very, very long time CRPG gamer (you named it, I've prolly played it...including text based games). There is simply no good reason not to give players an indication of mob strength via an obvious mechanic. As I've said previously, levels are a completely arbitrary contrivance designed to simply bookkeeping in character/mob growth. Why is a bear level 5? Because some dev said so. That's it. No other reason. Well, you can't know that some dev assigned bear = level 5 which means you can't make a rational decision whether to fight it or not. Unless.... You buy some strategy guide that has an actually useful bestiary that tells you the mob levels before you guess, or (and this is why strategy guide writer is a former occupation rather than current) you look it up on the net. This adds nothing worthwhile to the gaming experience. And when you get to mobs unique the PoE gameworld, you're truly just guess or looking up stuff external to the game. There is nothing fun about randomly guessing whether a fight is winnable. The way it is now: I look at a wuzzatthing. I decide to attack because it's standing right next to a chest, and therefore, you can't sneak past it. First tho, I save the game. It roflstomps my entire party. I reload the game. Where is the fun in that? The way things should be: I look at a wuzzatthing and see that it's five levels higher than me. I make a tactical withdrawal and a note to come back when I've drank a lot more milk to grow big and strong with healthy muscles and bones. Now, maybe if it'd been closer in level I might have tried it because I'd made a lot of extra cash and had some sweet gear and a well-built (ie. no official companions) party that worked like a well oiled machine. But the important part is that I make a decision based on information I have rather than make a guess and use save-load to mitigate the potential loss from a bad guess.

Oh, if you just want to game the game, sure. But why do we have to go to lengths like that just to be a rogue? Also, only being able to turn invis twice between rests is a whip. First, we shouldn't be turning truly invisible without some kind of magic. Second, twice per rest is weaksauce since you can burn that in a single encounter with a large number of enemies. p.s. Trying to initiate all fights with your rogue will get your rogue one shot eventually. Trust me. It's coming.

That's fine by me. I really don't think PotD is intended for a first-time playthrough, even for seasoned Infinity Engine fans. That said, I think having some sort of rough combat approximation is good. A MMO like system, perhaps, where enemies are rated "Trash", "Easy", "Challenging", or "Impossible" could work. Just a quick sizing-up of your foes. And see, I don't think PoE has the kind of content that makes it worth multiple playthroughs. So the game needs to get things right with players from the start. I also don't think that multiple-playthrough is a good excuse not to give players the information they need to make good strategic decisions. Oh, and when I say not worth multiple playthroughs, I'm not saying the game is bad. I'm just saying that the world doesn't really lend itself to multiple ways past obstacles the way, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution did. In that game, you can smash through, stealth, hacking, pacifist, sometimes diplo, etc. PoE's maps aren't designed with multiple routes in mind. Eventually, you're going to have to kill someone.

I had to think a bit before settling on "bland" in my subject. I wanted this to be a critique for future games/expansions, not a rant. This is also why I will not be questioning the parentage and/or sexual appetite of the maternal parent of any dev. One of my favorite run throughs of BG2 was having Aerie and Viconia together in my party (well, for a while anyway). The way they interacted was great fun to watch (I also like watching train wrecks, so...). PoE has nothing like that. Sure, the companions pipe in with comments from time to time, but nothing like the seriously important interactions between characters you get in BG. Oh, and no Minsc. How can you build a game anymore with a Minsc or a HK-47? Better yet, let us have both!

And, more relevantly, they've forgotten BG1 - an 80 hour game where you can count on 1 hand the number of magical weapons that offer anything other than a simple to-hit and damage bonus. Nothing other than Modern RPG conditioning/brain washing can explain why BG1 never got bashed for its "boring" loot itemization, while we sit here and watch PoE getting raked over the coals for it. Um. I don't think you played the same BG1 the rest of us played. Either that (and more likely), it's a bit easy to forget what a game released last century (seriously) was really like. But as I said before, while I don't necessarily agree with the OP, I do think Josh failed in his goal to make variety a viable option. Regardless of what he may have intended with the design, padded armor still sucks. Daggers vs stiletto is a no brainer in favor of stiletto. And whatever cloak throws the most defensive buffs on you is the right choice regardless of class.

And that's a pretty dead giveaway that you don't normally play stealth characters (nothing wrong with that...if you have fun wagging fingers or bashing skulls, fun trumps any specific style of getting there) Stealth is seriously important to rogues both in mechanics and role-playing. Part of what makes a rogue a rogue is the willingness to do whatever to get what they want without caring about 'rules' or 'laws' or 'honor' or any of that nonsense. Mechanics wise, so much of how rogues were designed requires them to be able to fight positionally, not be engaged directly, etc. That means that not being able to stay sneaky at the start of a fight is a major impediment to how they need to be used in order to get the most out of them. One thing I do agree on is that stealth does not mean invisible. I like that my very high stealth rogue can't just walk up to people while scouting and not get noticed. But it drives me batty that I can't sneak past people who are distracted by other things as well.

I suspect the problem is that there is a definite lack of rogues working for Obsidian, and hence, it never occurred to them that individual stealth might be necessary.

Right. Likely a gimmick party like a cadre of Rifleman Chanters or some-such. Not sure if you'd want chanters or paladins or priests. You'd also want to stick them in heavy armor with heavy ranged weapons so they can nuke stuff without much fear of getting nuked in return.

I haven't finished the game yet, and I'm playing a rogue main, so keep that in mind with my response... So far, contrary to Josh's goal, you want the heaviest armor possible in all cases. I don't care if I could theoretically "do more stuff" with lighter armor. When dead, I can "do no stuff" so what difference does it make? And in a game with so many nuke spellcasters as enemies, dead is a pretty normal outcome of a guy in light armor trying to participate in a fight. Sure I'll get a couple quick hits in, and then boom, dead. I've even got draining stilettos which are fantastic at keeping me in a fight most of the time. Lots of hits brings in lots of endurance, and life is good. And then I run into a single big heavy attack that lands, and there I am, sprawled out on the floor hoping my two tank fighters can grind everything down. So switch said rogue to plate. Yes, big reduction in speed. But guess what happens when the big, slow hit comes in? I live. And then I get my endurance back via draining, and do so faster than the next big hit can come in. I should prolly also mention I'm really, really good a breaking games. I have no doubt by the time I finish I'll know exactly what's going on with enemy AI, what the min-max building tricks are, etc. Pity writing strategy guides doesn't really pay that well anymore in a world full of free wikis

You'd think by now every developer of every RPG would understand the need for giving players some kind of indicator of mob difficulty since there is simply no way to expect players to make rational decisions without that information. This is not a new problem. It is, however, a significant one when ignored. I don't want a game experience based on luck and guessing. So I have to have some way to get information about the challenges I face. In a level based game, that means conning mob levels. Yes, it's somewhat "unrealistic", but so is the whole concept behind levels. And it's not like it's even a difficult thing to add. Just color code names to show mob difficult vs player level or explicitly give the mobs level when your right click it

The suggestion is pretty straightforward. In a level based game, the player has to be provided level information on the adversaries he faces. First, levels are a total abstraction. There is simply no real world skill that links to what Obsidian's designers decide a mob's strength to be. Sure, I can sorta guess a bear is going to wtfpwn my newbie self, but how soon can I come back? And what exactly is the difficulty level of a shadow which has no real world counterpart at all? And what about humans? How am I supposed to know how strong that sellsword is compared to my sellsword self? Now you can argue it adds difficulty and rewards learning and experimentation. And I'll counter that all it adds is save-reload when you guess wrong. And worse, it is a guess. I like being strategic in my fights and decisions. I hate save-reload. And yet, here I am, playing massive amounts of save-reload because I took on 3 high priests that could heal each other faster than the 6 members of my party could bring them down or because I took on what I thought was a group of ordinary bandits who turned out to be anything but. And don't even think about trying to guess when you can do your bounties. Just go straight to the web to get their levels. I also have this crazy dream where I'll finish this game on Path of the Damned. Except that changes all the levels and makes save reload impossible. So how exactly, short of constantly alt-tabbing to guides, am I supposed to know what I can and cannot fight at my current level? (as a side note, I like the game. This isn't bitching. This is wanting the game to be better.)