xzar_monty

I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but I believe Obsidian's difficulty with loot can be captured pretty well with this example. In PoE, there's this sword that you even have a kind of a quest for and that you can build once you explore the dungeon below your keep. The thing is, though, that the sword is not worth the effort and you can actually get a (little bit) better big sword early on dead easy from a fire drake that you almost can't lose to if you know how to play at all. And that sword is going to be the two-handed piercing/slashing weapon of choice for the rest of the game, DLCs included. D'oh. To me, this screams faulty design.

The OP is right in that there's a whole lot of strangely indifferent loot in the game. He's also probably right in that there is no real killer loot in the game (no Robe of Vecna, to compare to BG2). Whether this second point is good or not is of course subjective. I have no complaints about the loot, although I do feel that both PoE and Deadfire are a bit too balanced in the sense that most equipment ends up being fairly indifferent. The strange this is that this doesn't matter: not having good gear won't hinder you, and good gear doesn't really help you that much.

I agree that Eothas' words do not even register with Xoti. However, this does not make Xoti uninteresting as such, although it quite possibly makes her irredeemable and unreachable. I think the Eothas encounter nicely illustrates the extent of zealotry that Xoti has got herself into. In other words, her faith controls her to such an extent that even cataclysmic outside facts don't register anymore. In a sense, this is comparable to a flat-earther or a conspiracy theorist presented with evidence against their beliefs and unable to see, hear and understand it.

I agree that a lot hinges on the definition of "meaningful". My understanding is that our general sense is not that different, we simply have a different idea of what is meant by this "meaningful" change. A lot of the time, the way I see it, a character arc is not so much about changing, rather the character becomes more clearly what they were in the beginning, i.e. their main characteristics are tested and therefore honed (hopefully) as the story unfolds. Sam is a classic example of this in LotR. In the end, he is what he was in the beginning, only a lot more so -- he is the same but from the point of view of experience, not innocence or ignorance anymore. (Frodo does change, though.) Durance was a very interesting one for me: because the game was so easy that I didn't need to camp in the wilderness, I never got to the end of his quest. (I understand it was precisely sleeping in the wilderness that triggered his dialogues.)

I disagree with the general idea of your post (I don't think people in the game are like you describe), but you are quite right in saying the end of the Tikawara quest is seriously flawed.

So now, and honest question arising from curiosity: do you consider that any of the characters change meaningfully in PoE? I haven't seen all of their quests to the end, but I don't think they do. However, I would say that some of them have very satisfying character arcs. Eder and Sagani in particular. Aloth would also, except for the fact that the choice you make in the very end appears to have no consequences (correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that it doesn't really matter what you choose at the end of the examinations in the sanitarium). So Aloth is left hanging in the air a bit. In BG2, only Viconia and Sarevok have potential for real change (Anomen to a lesser extent), but nearly all NPCs have excellent character arcs. Yoshimo is superb. Edwin is hopelessly unsatisfactory.

Ha. Would be interesting to know how that's built, i.e. whether you actually need an ally for the counter to start to work.

algroth, I think you're overplaying the importance of the change aspect in the companions a bit. I mean, it's a well-known psychological fact that very few people undergo any significant changes in adulthood. For example, the general happiness level of almost everyone undergoes a great change if they win the lottery or lose a limb, but after approximately six months it is, astonishingly enough, back at the old base line. However, I do agree that the companion quests could have been a lot more interesting and contained more narrative surprises. Were there even any?

Couldn't think of a better way to demonstrate how differently people approach these games. Here's a metagamer whose intention is powergaming, plain and simple. I couldn't think of a more displeasing way to play -- if the intention is to be as powerful as possible, why not simply rig stuff in your favor? And if the intention is to metagame, why play at all? I mean, you've already ruined all the surprises the story may have, so why bother? Again: no blame or criticism intended in any of this. I think it's just lovely that our approaches to the same game are so diametrically opposite. There are dozens of us ^^ I enjoy meta/powergaming starting from 2nd playthrough and beyond, as well. And to answer your question about riging: any "I win" button is taboo. As for intention, it is: to figure out how to tackle the highest difficulty, and make it feel almost easy. One gets the satisfaction of puzzle solving here. Fair enough, that's a perfectly satisfactory explanation! My playing is so story-oriented that there's almost certainly only going to be one playthrough, and I am not interested in spoilers. If it turns out I've made bad choices in terms of specialization or skill selection, so be it. If I don't find the weapons I've been betting on, so be it. I can see the attraction in battling against the game mechanics, so to speak, but my main interest is in the story, the character interactions and discovering stuff on my own, for the first time.

What I think is really interesting is that PoE emphasized the darkness of the tone and setting. Soulless children, a group of people hung on the branches of a massive tree, funereal-sounding bells tolling at the birth of a child, and so on (all these examples from the start of the game). And it succeeded. Deadfire, on the other hand, has a significantly lighter tone which is reflected in just about everything, including the actual colours used. And this, again, succeeds. Frak: The best thing about Deadfire combat is that there is approximately 90% less filler combat. I really like that. There's way too much of it in PoE. Thus, combat almost never gets boring in Deadfire, while it does just that much of the time in PoE.

Pretty much everything works better in Deadfire, in my view, although early on there were a few strange moments before coming to term with the changes.

It's amazing what a different conversation this would have been if the original post had gone along the lines of "Hey, I'm having problems with this, has this changed since the last game, what should I do?" instead of essentially full-blown anger and resentment.

Yep. It goes back all the way to DD and concentration checks. In fact, that's probably where it comes from, given that Concentration is the skill used to resist interrupts in Deadfire. It's fine if someone doesn't like the rule. But it's absolutely logical and there's nothing wrong with it.

Why do you insist on being wilfully obtuse? There is a significant difference between volitionally canceling an action and being disturbed while trying to perform an action. It is painstakingly obvious. It would have been possible to write the rules differently, but there is absolutely no lack of logic in the way they are implemented now. Again, you may not like them, that's fine, but there's no error in them. In reply to your linguistic quibble: the spell is not spent as such, it is ruined, which ends up meaning the same thing.

There is no lack of logic whatsoever, and your example is not analogous at all. It is not interrupted FROM being cast, it is interrupted DURING the casting process. Please do check what the word actually means: "to stop the continuous progress of (an activity or process)" or "to break the continuity of (a line or surface)". There is no argument here, you're simply wrong. You may not like it, but the rule in the game is perfectly logical and sound. You're doing a high jump. Your feet have already left the ground. Someone pushes you. That's your jump ruined, the bar comes down. But it's a jump nevertheless.

To interrupt means to stop in the process of doing something. So, spellcasting has already begun, and it is ruined by interruption. Makes perfect sense that you lose the spell. Maybe calm down the anger a bit? Or do something else instead? There are perfectly viable means for solving the problems you're having, as Purudaya points out above.

Love that term, "deity squabble". It should be a contradiction in terms, shouldn't it (except maybe in the Greek pantheon), but that's exactly what it is in Deadfire.

I think the amount at least was a very conscious decision, given how a dungeon crawl has pretty much become a cliche of the genre. I for one definitely enjoyed the fact that there was no biggie of a dungeon in the game (unless the last DLC contains one -- I haven't visited that area yet). As for the quality, I'm not too sure. I very much enjoyed the Undercity, because some of the encounters there were nicely planned. There's one where you initially come across a set of enemies and then, some time later, additional enemies surface (literally) and attack you. I thought that was a brilliant move and required some off-the-cuff readjustment of my strategy. Od Nua was a lovely idea in PoE, and some of it was really good, but quite frankly there were a couple of levels where you noticed the developers had run out of ideas and just had to come up with something (the one with the spiky floor room, the one with the confusion-inducing critters, at least).

So, maybe my tastes is horrible, but I prefer texts with actual info in them and not detrimental to game pacing in their quantity. I read high literature when I want high literature and no attempts for it from yesterday students and twitter stars who have more brilliant ideas and political opinions than common sense. Yo. To the extent that you had an argument, you just ruined it with this last piece. Like: #1 you don't know these are "yesterday students", whatever that means, #2 you don't know these are twitter stars (they almost certainly aren't, even if such people exist in the first place), #3 you have no idea about their political opinions (which certainly aren't apparent in the game), #4 the game does not allow one to make a judgement on their common sense. You kinda tried to make it look as if you're commenting on the Obsidian crew, but in fact you were only talking about your own unbased opinions and biases. Which is kinda poor. I'm always up for a good discussion, but that didn't really qualify as an argument or even a properly considered opinion.

Ha, I just went through some of the White March yesterday and thought that bloody heck, at least half of these battles should have been dropped. They were just filler. Luckily, Obsidian did just that in Deadfire.

Yep. The writing in Kingmaker is utterly terrible. Here's an interesting paradox that has been extensively discussed in the relevant literature (with rather few definite conclusions, for obvious reasons). 1) Questions of taste are inherently subjective. I.e. there are no rights or wrongs. 2) But then there are cases where this simpy isn't true if you have like any sense whatsoever. Suppose that someone genuinely values Kenny G over John Coltrane. Ed Wood over Stanley Kubrick. Britney Spears over Ella Fitzgerald (as a singer). James Patterson over Edgar Allan Poe. Andy Warhol over Leonardo da Vinci. It'd be extremely difficult to take that person seriously, wouldn't it?

Btw, here's something that I think is genuinely interesting (and occasionally worrying, but not in this instance), from a psychological point of view. It goes like this: The foulest and most abusive language, that which centers around feelings of disgust and hatred, along with fantasies of destruction and ruination, is almost without exception directed at female NPCs. Xoti, Grieving Mother, Aerie, etc. This forum is as good an example as any other forum.

I don't agree with that. Eder and Aloth are old friends of the Watcher, so they don't really count in this regard (ditto Pallegina, but I can't say anything about her since I've never had her). Serafen and Maia Rua contain some pretty decent character development, for example. Also, there's nothing cool/snarky/cute about Eder or Konstanten, for example. Could you be a bit more specific about the try-hard quality you refer to? I don't see it, to be honest, and I'd like to understand you better. I think pretty much all the characters are written quite well. Serafen even has a few genuinely creative interjections, which was a surprise.

Wow! I mean, nothing against P:K, but are you seriously saying the writing in that game isn't all cliche? There's nothing original in it that I have seen, and even the acting is all cliche. What's more, I believe this whole "we're nothing but cliche, every single one of us" is completely intentional, i.e. there was never even any attempt at proper writing, it's pulp and it's meant to be pulp. I like the game. But it's basically the equivalent of the Batman TV series, the campy one with Adam West & co.

I also agree that the White March content is really very good, although somewhat marred by the fact that the Durgan's Battery part of it is ever so slightly reminiscent of Moria. I mean, the parallels just about couldn't be more obvious. Given how good Tolkien was and how poor nearly all post-Tolkien fantasy is, I'd really go out of my way to avoid parallels that are too obvious.