xzar_monty

Yes, fair enough, you do have a point, I did generalize too much. For my game and money, the best item found in Od Nua (if memory serves!) was Persistence, the bow, which is just lying around. I don't remember what I got from the alpine dragon (without a fight), but I think it was a +3 resolve item or something, which is good but not remarkable. Tidefall is an astonishingly good piece of loot from an indifferent or even easy opponent. You touch upon a more general issue there: the Pillars games don't really have items that make you go wow. I'm not sure whether that's a good or a bad thing, but I probably thnk the balancing act has gone a bit too far in the sense that (to overemphasize just a little) essentially everything in the game can be replaced by plenty of other things without anything really changing. And that can sometimes make things a bit... bland. I do agree that over-the-top killer items are not that interesting, either. But it feels a bit strange to carry around this huge amount of unique items, most of which I have never used and will never even try. The concept of "unique" doesn't really have that ring anymore after that.

[cut]Only that you get the best shield of the game there. [/cut] I think it's good that nice loot is not always hidden behind bosses you can only kill at high levels. Fully agree with this. But getting no real rewards for high-level-requiring bosses is an annoyance. Erm... not sure why you cut "Only that you get the best shield of the game there" from my quote - which totally contradicts your statement...? That doesn't look nice. Because Eder has a fully-upgraded soulbound shield already and I am perfectly happy with it. He's the only one in my group using a shield; never even considered even trying the one in the dragon's hoard. It may be good, no argument with that. It's just that it's totally not needed. Contrast this with Tidefall, for instance, found on a drake, which really is a major treasure. I understand why you may see a contradiction there, and that's fine. From my point of view, there isn't any, given the way my group is formed and armed. Eder has a shield, but he only uses it some of the time; he may very well use just Tidefall. So, pretty much of the time, nobody in my group carries a shield.

I think it's good that nice loot is not always hidden behind bosses you can only kill at high levels. Fully agree with this. But getting no real rewards for high-level-requiring bosses is an annoyance.

Enurale: If you don't mind me asking, what is your first language? I find your English fascinating. If you do mind, simply ignore me.

it might be an extremely rude surprise to you that PoE1 also had a lot of confusing and unintuitive aspects to its systems (the various ways in which different action speed/recovery speed boosts worked was the subject of a gigantic spreadsheet that was posted somewhere). but i guess we didn't have to deal with inversions then. if you can get over the inversions hurdle, i think deadfire is generally more transparent and clear about how things work (especially stacking rules, which mostly work as per general outlines, whereas with poe1 it was frequently mysterious when it came to active effects... suppressing triumph of the crusaders because i drank a minor potion of regeneration?? huh???). boy, the prisoner part of the stronghold--i completely forgot about that, probably because i repressed the memory. i'd say more than half the time i took someone prisoner, they would almost immediately escape! if i was "lucky" an animancer would come by before a jailbreak and i would sell them the prisoner for a paltry amount of pocket change (less than what i think even an exceptional item sells for). in the end i just ended up killing everyone or reporting them to the more proper authorities. You are quite right about the paltry amount of pocket change. I have had offers of 200 (!), 750 (poor) and 2000 (ok, that's something at least). Speaking of paltry amounts of pocket change, yesterday I killed the adra dragon and honestly could not believe -- even on this second time -- how poorly executed the dragon's hoard was. I mean, this was paradoxical and foolish beyond belief. There's a clickable question mark there in the hoard, and it says something along the lines of "You push your arm all the way into the gold and never reach the bottom". Fair enough, that's a proper hoard. There are also four spots where you can pick stuff from. Three of these contain copper pieces. You can pick 400+, 700+ and 500+ pieces. In other words, nothing, nothing at all. And yet the screen shows you in the middle of all this treasure. I would also argue that the dragon's hoard is a major disappointment in another way, too: by the time you get there, it's pretty certain that none of the items found will interest you. They're totally unexceptional. I did take one of them as a secondary weapon for Durance, but that's it, all the others were instant trash. This kind of thing can be shockingly bad in these Obsidian titles, I'd really like to hear the developers even try to justify this.

and ugh, don't remind me about caed nua. that stronghold was just a pointless money sink that was mostly annoying ("you can either stop what you're doing to fight a bunch of low-level skeletons, or let them destroy like five structures") and pretty much bug ridden (at some point in patch history, caed nua vendors stopped restocking, making them pretty useless). Speaking of the stronghold: I'm actually replaying PoE1 now -- which I thought I'd never do -- to get a continuous story from the start of PoE all the way to the end of Deadfire. And boy did I get a nice problem with the stronghold. It's not a bug, as such, I'd say, but it's really, really stupid anyway and shows how badly the strondhold stuff works. At Ondra's Gift, there's a quest called Supply and Demand, the culprit of which is called Aefre. Now, if you have the prison built at your stronghold, you can imprison Aefre instead of killing him. I decided to do that, just to try things out. So we fight, he surrenders, I take him as a prisoner. He's instantly teleported into the prison, apparently. And then, immediately after that, during my walk from Aefre's dwelling to Salty Mast to report Aefre's capture to Maea and complete the quest -- yes, during a walk across a district in Defiance Bay -- Aefre escapes from his prison cell in my stronghold, at which point I can't finish the quest. I can only reply "Not yet" to Maea's question about whether I have found Aefre. Now that is really, really bad from Obsidian. On so many levels, as they say.

At level 14, I'd go for Beast of Winter, then Ashen Maw, then the other two DLCs. Mind you, BoW is going to be a challenge (but I liked that a lot, personally).

Given what we know of the sales, it appears that nobody has done or is going to do any milking around Deadfire.

Precisely. That's a big problem. Especially if you consider that this side of the game was done a whole lot better in 1988 on a computer with "38911 bytes free", as its opening screen famously pointed out. I think it's a combination of laziness ("nah, we won't bother") and complacency ("this is how it's been done in the genre, why change it"), and the result is not good.

Have you played Ultima IV and V? Both are old and dated, no question, and depending on your age, you might have not have had any impetus to even try them (which again is perfectly fine), but I still regard both as superb examples of Open World CRPGs. What I particularly liked about Ultima IV was that at the beginning of the game, you kind of didn't even know what to do, the world was just there. It was amazing (at the time) and a totally new take on computer gaming. There's one thing that baffles me a bit: technology has taken huge leaps since those times, but even some of the newest CRPGs do not contain the kind of subtleties that these two titles had. As an example, in Ultima V, there is a resistance movement working against the prevailing government, and it holds meetings in a certain place at a certain time. At other times, its members are either working on the fields, sleeping, eating at an inn or doing the kind of everyday things people do. So, you might visit their small village, look around, talk to people and leave without realising that there's anything out of the ordinary going on. It's a lovely feature that the modern games, for all their technological prowess, very rarely have. I mean, even in Deadfire, way over 90 per cent of the population just stand around in one place through the entire game.

Again, the only RPG that ever left me feeling that way and I played hundreds of RPGs through my life. I guess the only way they could have screwed it more is if the loot was auto-scaling to your level like in Skyrim or Divinity Original sin. But even there, at least the numbers are constantly going up, instead of loot just ending up in your stash, because you didn't find any use for it. There aren't hundreds of RPGs in existence. If you can get the number up to one hundred, great. But at that point you aren't even halfway there, going by the most charitable definition possible.

I can appreciate you not liking the crafting system, but I'm not sure if more items would be a good idea. I mean, there are already like way too many uniques in the game: you can only use a fraction and will most likely sell nearly all of them. (I feel the overabundance of unique items in both PoE and Deadfire is a bit of a downer: you don't have to play very long before loot ceases to elicit any emotion, because there's just so much supposedly-unique stuff lying around that you don't know what to do with it.)

I would have loved to like NWN and was really looking forward to it at the time, but the 3D graphics were such a disappointment. After about ten minutes it was nothing but repetition. This is what I like about the isometric stuff: each screen is actually unique, whereas in an NWN-style 3D game nothing is, everything is just rearrangments of the same tilesets. The NWN official campaign also contained some horrible oversights. Like, you could (obviously) play a rogue but almost nobody actually carried anything you could steal. Boy, that hurt.

I tried to like IWD2, because of Baldur's Gate 2 and because it had the same actor who'd done Jan Jansen, but there was just no way: it was terrible. It also hammered home the fact how important (to me) NPCs are. I found I had no interest playing with a full custom-made party. Creating it was fun, no question, but actually playing was not. Wasn't the AI also really very bad? I mean in terms of who the enemies targeted, how they moved, and so on. I'm not sure about this, but that's the way I remember it.

No. That's an educated guess, of course.

rjshae: That's where the problematic paradox lies in the White March. It has an overabundance of battles, but you don't get any reward for them. One or the other would need to be different for it to feel justified.

That's exactly it. And as I tend to view CRPGs as interactive movies/books of sorts, I tend to lose interest in the game as I lose interest in the story. I can understand the allure of powergaming and all the rest of it, but I've never really got interested in it. (Even when we're playing PnP's with our decades-old group, I'm generally the person least interested in loot and most interested in the story. Even my attempt at a classic dwarf didn't really work in the boy-am-I-hungry-for-gold sense, a few years ago.)

Your post was a good one, I simply wish to comment on this point. I would argue that any game where everything always happens the same way does not encourage multiple playthroughs, or even a second one, but that's obviously just my view. Just a little bit of randomness in encounters, quests, quest availability, shop inventories, shopkeeper appearances (in the sense of who's where and when on the maps, not in the sense of what they look like) etc. would add an awful lot of spice and replayability to a CRPG. And yes, I understand the extra work this would entail. I often think how lovely it would be if a huge new CRPG title (such as Deadfire was when it came out) contained this type of stuff to a significant extent. You couldn't go to a forum and ask for the location of the best <your favorite thing here> because your game would be slightly different from mine. And yes, I agree it'd be a nightmare for the players who want to check out everything in advance.

Boeroer: In a way I admire your persistence and coherent reasoning, but given how needlessly rude, childish and offensive the OP has got, I'd just give up. The talk about smelling farts would be unbelievably stupid for a ten-year-old, and I believe we're talking about a (physical) adult here.

Then you were very very lucky. I mean you would have to start with a rogue who has the right cultural background and maybe (?) also get the gloves by accident and skill mechanics consequently. Hired rogue from Gilded Vale + Mechanics bonus from Caed Nua. I think that's it. Can't be definite about the gloves. Given that there was no rogue NPC available early on (had no idea where the Devil of Caroc was), a hired rogue was the best option, since I'd had enough of deliberately triggering chest-traps I couldn't disable. Mechanics bonus from Caed Nua was also among the most reasonable ones early on. I remember it took me a while to realise that it would have also been better to quickly build that place which provided you with regular "spell components", i.e. stuff you could use in enchantments.

Right. I don't expect anybody to bother to respond to anything you write in here again. Which is fair enough.

If you ever want to be taken seriously, do learn some manners.

There isn't any fuss, and we were talking about loot. Bought items are not loot.

Boeroer: I would agree with what you said about getting Tidefall. However, it just so happened that on my first and only playthrough, I happened to get it at lvl 6/7 without even knowing it was there, without metagaming or anything. I was searching for the fiery whatever the woman at the temple was looking for. Never switched to the Blade when I got it much, much later, as it didn't look any better. So, that was the point of view I was writing from.

As I brought up the term killer loot and you were therefore kind of responding to me, I'll just point out that you could be perfectly right about this piece of equipment: I have zero experience with druids in the game (ok, I had the fish guy with me for like five minutes). So, I made my comment with less than perfect knowledge of all the permutations.