xzar_monty

I had bought a couple of them, and immediately after the change my thought was that I shouldn't have.

Yeah, I noticed the Wael challenge but haven't tried it. Might [sic!] do one day.

He's not doing that, though. You're getting personal and unpleasant again. It's not appreciated.

Boeroer: Yep. I can also live with the lack of logic in the firearms / might question. Things would quite quickly deteriorate into chaos if everything was taken into account. Btw, back in the day, late 80s / early 90s, there was a game called Dungeon Master where you could gain levels in fighter, ninja, priest and wizard. What was great about this system was that you didn't see your XP points and you were never explicitly told what kind of actions gave you points in what. The game was a great success, and I think the concept was superb. If somebody implemented that kind of thing these days, it might work much better because there are so many more possibilities with today's computers. The thing I loved the most about this was that it made you concentrate on the game, rather than its mechanics, because you didn't see the mechanics. I know there are players who'd hate this, but I thought it was superb.

Btw, when it comes to might and realism, what I think rather seriously sucks is that might affects firearm damage (unless I'm very mistaken, for which I expect to be told off if that's the case). I mean, there's no universe where that's logical.

I agree. I think appeals to "realism" are ridiculous when it comes to game abstractions; these aren't life simulations we're trying to go for here. Whenever I see a "realism" argument it's almost always an ad-hoc rationalization of something someone likes or dislikes. So long as you aren't completely subverting basic definitions and concepts of reality (like having an "intelligence" stat that in actuality influences how much surface gravity there is in the world, except gravity is a repellant force instead of an attractive force, and also it only works at dusk... actually i would play that game), any game meets its necessary realism bar. The only thing that matters after that is: does it make for a fertile design space? This is a rather complicated question, and I suppose we can only draw lines and make distinctions upon a one-case-at-a-time basis; i.e. we cannot make any general rules. You're pretty much on the right track in what you write. Funnily enough, in June 1958, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in a letter how important it was for his fantasy world that "leagues are leagues, days are days, and weather is weather". So the realism principle, so to speak, is often crucial to our ability to suspend disbelief. Two examples where these games failed, in my view -- but I've come to accept both of these and only find them mildly annoying. Something I definitely wouldn't have done like that but I'm not losing my enjoyment over: 1) In PoE, you can carry absolutely everything else you come across and you'll never be even slightly burdened, but you can only carry 2 or 4 sets of camping supplies. This sucks. 2) In Deadfire, no matter how peacefully (i.e. dealing no material damage at all) you capture a ship, it just blinks out of existence. This also sucks.

false In my mind, people who are stubborn about not using hirelings for Gorecci St or the Engwithan Digsite are making the game harder for themselves, intentionally or not. Those encounters aren't balanced for a party of three (though they are doable with three via pulling and splitting), they are balanced for a party of five. With a party of five, Gorecci St or Engwithan Digsite are challenging, but not really that much more challenging (if at all) than any other PotD encounter. As you seem to be rather good at the game, I'd like to hear your opinion on whether pulling and splitting tends to be rather hard in Deadfire. In my view, the answer is yes. Fights tend to result in mob combats. Sometimes the architecture allows for other possibilities, but often not. Would appreciate your thoughts on this.

How is it unintuitive, much less one of the most unintuitive? I'd like to hear this one explained.

This is low. And it doesn't help your reasoning. yeah, 1. English is not everyone's first language on these boards, so one should make allowances. 2. All you're demonstrating about affect and effect is that you're fully capable of parsing the pragmatics of a sentence, but you're choosing not to because you want to be an annoying pedant about the semantics. moving on... Then they should look at someone pointing out their grammatical errors as a learning experience and take responsibility for their errors, rather than blame others for their own inadequacies. This is low. And it doesn't help your reasoning. No, it's truth. People should learn from their mistakes, not blame others for pointing them out. What you have done is not pointing out another person's mistake (note: you can do that very simply by saying: "FYI, it's spelled 'affect', not 'effect'"). What you have done is deliberately and maliciously mocking another person from your self-appointed superior position, sneeringly underlining their perceived inadequacy in every possible instance (i.e. every single time you use the word affect) and then finally emphasizing that you regard the other person as stupid -- you wrote that the stupidity of something is "Right up there with not knowing the difference between 'affect' and 'effect'." That's petty, immature, mean, and unnecessary, and gives the impression of a person with astonishingly poor social skills.

I stand corrected there -- you are right. I hadn't looked at the title in ages, only the discussion (which is mostly ok).

I agree, it's delightful. It's so upfront. "Look, you're not going to survive, but if you insist, just go ahead and try." It's really good. (I'm playing P:K on core rules, which is plenty difficult, thank you very much.)

Precisely this. Pathfinder:Kingmaker has a difficulty level called "Unfair". There was someone who chose that, got very severely beaten and then moaned he had no chance. Well, why should he have had any? That wouldn't be unfair.

I'm disappointed with the DLC, it seems to require min-maxed characters that are designed to exploit game mechanics or require a chanter to spam skeletons for 40 minutes. This content isn't for people who RP or who don't min-max, it's for people who have the time on their hands to spend a whole day on one fight or for people who want to test out builds. Personally I don't. I can vouch that you are wrong. I never min-max, I don't even know the game mechanics well enough to exploit them and I've never had a chanter in this game. I just role-play. However, the dragon is hard. Not as hard as the alpine dragon in PoE, but it is hard. It looks manageable in the beginning, but once it starts casting that protection spell, things become considerably more difficult and you're going to need plenty of wit and resources. Also, the three helpers you may have gathered along the way can prove invaluable. I only had one of them, because I had apparently been overly generous during the DLC, but he turned out to be extremely useful.

You may have been a kid when you played BG, and there's nothing wrong with that. But do not base your arguments on the idea that your experience is universal. There's plenty of people who were definitely not kids when they played BG. Maybe some of them already had kids when they played BG, you know.

That's a fair point. However, there are also players (like me) who specifically won't go on the net looking for the best loot locations etc. because they want to discover stuff themselves and feel that checking out stuff on the net would ruin the game.

He has called people out for not having an avatar. So there you go. Again, I agree, this is not about entitlement, I haven't seen any sense of entitlement here. There's talk about having an option.

Exactly. The main problem is in the curve. On Veteran, the Engwithian digsite is really very difficult. After that, there's not that much difficulty. And this is a bit strange. I agree that insta-death situations are not particularly good, and there were too many of them in BG, less so in BG2. (This is partly due to the fact that in BG, you start at level 1 and are particularly prone to insta-death.)

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In the first sentence, you are intentionally misunderstanding what other people mean. In the second, you are basing your action on metagaming, which is fine but nicely illustrates the problem with basilisks.

I know it's not particularly nice, given that your post in general is a good one, but I'd like to highlight that basilisk issue. I'm absolutely certain you are right: basilisks were dropped from BG2 because they simply aren't very good. It's essentially a nonsense to have an encounter where your success or failure is determined by a single die roll. It's something you cannot be good at, it's just about luck. The basilisks were the most foolish thing in BG1, and they were rightly dropped for BG2. (Of course, you could bypass the luck question by metagaming, but metagaming in general is not something I'm interested in. By and large, I don't want to know where the best loot is, etc. I want to find out myself.) As for Kingmaker: I agree that some of the design choices appear quite poor. Spider swarms, for instance. It seems simply cruel, or nasty, to put something like that in the game, because the way you're going to beat them is not through intelligence. They're almost comparable to the basilisks, but not quite, because basilisks are insta-death and spider swarms are not.

u can win every fight in that series by pre-buffing and auto-attacking everything to death. in BG1 u just give everyone bows. in BG2, u get keldorn to cast dispel magic occasionally. like, i cant dispute there are builds that can solo the game with minimal input. there are peeps here that spend all their time trying to develop such, but i think its fair to say most of these strats arent immediately obvious to us normal saps. Im unsure why u highlight the examples u do. The ciphers in sss can be dealt with using normal anti-caster strats + aegis of loyalty + intellect resistance. Theyre too squishy to be that hard a fight, nowhere near as annoying as splintered reef imo - those fampyrs take more of a beating. (Praise kyros for chill fog) u can interrupt anyone casting disintegration, and if one lands u can use barring deaths door/withdraw if ur regens not up to scratch. as for the soul mirror match, u alpha strike the back line, leave ur tank til last, debuff their defences and whittle them down. ai dont use the aggressive cheese strats available to a player or else something like bridge ablaze would be like pulling own fingernails out. Like i also find it odd that u could prep enough to stat check everyone to death yet not figure out u could blast every ship to smithereens with double bronzers. like if u crush the ship fights u can proper clean up early game and take advantage of some powerful gear. i dunno man, too much of what ur saying just dont jibe with my experience of game. I didnt feel ready to touch potd until id cleared the game veteran-upscaled and knew the craic. like if ud said 'game too easy, herald kill everything with zero input on highest difficulty' that would have at least backed up what people have been saying elsewhere on this forum but eh... Ah, should have made myself clear. BG1/2 are both easy once you get to know them... but don't tell me you never got a) one-shot critted by gibberling/hobgoblin/random encounter bandit archers spawn in BG1 b) instakilled by Rayic Gethras' Finger of Death in BG2 c) imprisonmented by Kangaxx d) level-drained to death e) petrified by Beholders f) had brain eaten by Mindflayers g) died in Cloakwood spider webs h) blasted to chunks by Thaxy dragon's level drain breath j) paralyzed by Ghasts k) ghasted by Aec'Laetec .... ..... ..... This never, ever happens in Deadfire. Not even remotely close. It's easy even if you don't know squat about it other than stacking Deflection is apperantly equal to God mode, which kind of sums up my knowledge of the game. Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is the best comment on this thread. Pardon if I quoted it wrong. But starting from "Ah, should have" to "knowledge of the game" is pure gold. This is precisely how it is. I myself brought up Firkraag earlier. It is indeed true that you can use a wand of cloudkill to kill him without any trouble. It is also true that a finger of death preceded by lower resistance can insta-kill him quite easily (if you get a bit of luck). Etc. I'm not questioning this at all. However, this is stuff that I had to figure out (and let's be honest: I did not figure out the cloudkill trick, I only learned about that later on). There were plenty of encounters in BG1 and BG2 that I absolutely couldn't do the first time and where I had to do some fairly serious thinking. Almost nothing like that exists in either PoE or Deadfire. I was going to say nothing, not almost nothing, but then I realized that there has actually been one fight where I had to understand that there was a totem on the screen that allowed an enemy naga to do some pretty nasty summoning and that I had to therefore destroy. That's the only thing. There is almost another example: on one island, there's a very hard fight that can be bypassed if you fire a cannon. And what the game does is this: it very clearly points out that there is a cannon which you should probably fire to avoid the very hard fight. Friends and neighbors, can you get any more I-wanna-hold-your-hand than that? So the point is not that Deadfire can be made bloody difficult if you tie one hand behind your back, wear a blindfold, only walk backwards on one leg and refuse to eat (i.e. ramp up the difficulty and take all the challenges you can). The point is that Deadfire is designed to be dead easy even if you know absolutely nothing about it. And, again: I like the game very much. This is not about that at all. It's only about these particular design choices which appear fairly odd. Now, I am not making this following point, because it's too simplistic and not very kind -- actually it's downright rude. But let's just say that it is something that had crossed my mind, and I am not the only one. It goes like this: 1) Pathfinder:Kingmaker is designed by Russians, and it has absolutely no hesitation about being harsh, difficult and unforgiving -- if you want to survive, you better be tough, son. 2) Deadfire is designed by North Americans, and its premise appears to be that the player needs to be mollycoddled lest he gets his feelings hurt. I am neither North American nor Russian, but somehow both of these choices appear to reflect something in those cultures.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. When a player with almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98). Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway. There were two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party. Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again... The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat. I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't. You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play). Firkraag, for instance, is a lot more difficult than anything I've seen in Deadfire, or anything I saw in PoE. I know that there are techniques, but I had to come up with some of them myself. That's one interesting thing: I had to discover a way to beat the dragon. There has been no such necessity in these two games (which are very good, don't get me wrong).

Please, read again. His tone is not one of complaint. He describes a perfectly legitimate progression. You start the game on normal difficulty, and it's impossible to lose. You raise the difficulty a bit, and again it's almost impossible not to win everything. Only when you crank the difficulty as high as it can go can you expect to be properly challenged. Can anyone deny this? I mean, this is how it is. The game goes out of its way not to be difficult for you. I've been playing CRPGs since they were around, which means something like the mid-1980s, and Deadfire is the easiest by some considerable distance. I'm not complaining. I'm just describing.

The Pirates! comparison is not entirely fair, because Pirates! was built around naval combat, whereas it's just a small feature of Deadfire. However, it is true -- and as far as I know, generally agreed upon -- that the naval combat in Deadfire is pretty bad. I understand it was meant to be more extensive, but something happened along the way.

That's a good question, and I suppose our only answer at the moment is that we don't know. I appreciate the ambition shown at the level of language in PoE and Deadfire, and for the most part, Obsidian pulls it off very well. (In the English original, that is; the translations into other languages appear terrible, although I cannot comment on all of them.) I suppose one could say that PoE and Deadfire attempt to raise CRPG language from the level of pulp to decent literary quality, which in itself is something worth applauding. What's even better, they succeed. Some of the coinages in PoE (duc, gul, fampyr) don't really work, in my opinion, because they are so close to the original that they simply appear forced. But that's a minor problem.