xzar_monty

It's precisely that. A very good analogy. Given how obvious the error is, I'm actually surprised they made it. It's a very bad call.

While I can understand someone not liking the performance (though personally, I disagree) this is the weirded argument to be made, and I see it pop up over and over again. Of course you can read it faster. Reading is faster, than reading aloud. Sure, she takes extra time, as she builds a scene, and creates atmosphere, but that is a weirdest criticism of voicacting I can think of. She is performing, not being a google translate "read" function. How is this a weird criticism? I am genuinely very curious. It's a perfectly legitimate and logical criticism concerning a fault in the game. It is an excellent idea to go through all the text presented in the narration. You have, essentially, two choices: 1) Listen to the narrator, 2) Read the text yourself at your own pace. If you choose #2, which I want to do, the narrator is a constant pain in the butt while you read. She also takes a *huge* amount of extra time that provides absolutely no extra value whatsoever. So, how is this a weird criticism?

Amentep: Ahh, so that's what happened. I was trying to comment, but stuff just disappeared. Now I understand why. Good call on your part, that. The OP should really learn some manners and take a thorough lesson in how to respond to good constructive criticism. Their deleted comment showed that they have problems in both.

The problem with the narrator is extremely simple. She reads the text very slowly, a lot slower than I read, so I would rather read the text myself to get along with the game. But reading the text while the narrator is also reading that same text aloud, lagging behind me, is extraordinarily jarring. It has nothing to do with the quality of the narrative performance.

This is a really good question. The narrator is very poor, and not giving the player an option to turn it off is just unnecessary.

This highlights an interesting and important point. Owning up is actually very powerful: if you have the guts to come out and say, Yes, we screwed this one up big time, we're sorry for it and we intend to learn our lesson -- it's actually surprising how much people are willing to forgive. Quite probably because they know that they themselves have almost certainly also screwed up at some point and know how it can happen. But if you just shut up and don't even acknowledge there's a problem, it makes you look like a <insert a reasonably ugly word here>.

I wonder whether anything can be read into the fact that nobody from Obsidian has said anything on this topic. Perhaps not.

You might be on to something here. That's a really good potential explanation. Which, of course, doesn't make it an acceptable way of doing things.

So, how is it possible that they've gotten significantly worse from PoE1, as the OP suggests?

Incidentally, if you don't click on this "X has something to say" icon, will they ever speak? Has this been tested? I for sure know from my PoE1 experience that it took me a long while to realise people wanted to talk to me, by which point there were plenty of them and they'd probably been wanting to talk for quite some time. I found this approach slightly immersion-breaking, because it strengthened the sense that I am the center of the universe and nothing will ever happen until I will it to -- and this, in turn, strengthened the sense that the world of the game is essentially dead.

So the new DLC essentially sounds like Black Pits from Baldur's Gate:EE.

Absolutely! I just don't find those spells meaningful. But it's Power Word Kill that sucks more than anything else in the 9th level repertoire. I mean, if someone has only 50 hp left, they're already dead. Thus, the spell is useless. 4 and 9 are the spell levels that don't provide much for the wizard in BG2, in terms of quantity.

Nope. I never, ever use or used Time Stop. There's just no need. Most 9th level spells are pretty useless, I would say. In fact, I have never even cast most of them. The ones I use are Spell Trap, Spellstrike and... that's it.

I've never had inventory lag before. It's likely not a graphics issue. I imagine (I may be incorrect), that you have a rather large amount of items in your inventory/stash that the game is trying to reference all at once; it might be an issue with system memory- especially with the memory leak issues after long periods of play. A reasonable theory, but the lag is there right from the start of the game, when the inventory is basically empty.

The inventory lag was already present in PoE1 and was really quite noticeable. It has got worse in Deadfire. Interestingly enough, although toning down the graphics settings will fix all other graphics issues (i.e. lag) for me, it does absolutely nothing to the inventory lag. I wonder if a graphics expert could make an educated guess on the basis of that.

<dang. can't delete post. ignore>

But you see, you are now referring to something that I have never done. I have never even insinuated that BG2 did nothing wrong or poorly. Of course it did.

Why? I'm honestly curious and would love to hear your opinion. In my view, BG1 is utter rubbish, because 1) Dialogue options are extremely limited and badly written (no humour, no spark, no consistency, very often no opportunity to say anything sensible). 2) There is far too much aimless wandering around huge maps with almost nothing on them. (There is none of this in BG2, and very little of it in any subsequent CRPGs -- clearly, game developers took notice of this blunder.) 3) The story is all over the place, and while it's not exactly illogical or incoherent, it is not well-written either. 4) There are far too many foolish insta-death opportunities, with basilisks and so on. This is just bad writing, and this was a feature that was rightly removed from essentially all subsequent CRPGs. 5) None of the NPCs are interesting or well-written. To me, #2 is the biggest killer, and #3 is the nail on the coffin. BG1 looks like a rudimentary sketch towards something that would ultimately become extremely worthwhile, namely BG2. But as a game, it's just tosh.

If a fight is designed around the players knowledge of how to exploit the game systems, it is a bad fight. It's a problem with most high level D&D campaigns. The most enjoyable levels to play in D&D are, roughly speaking, 4 or 5 to something like 13 to 15. In the lowest levels, dying is too easy, and once you become substantially powerful, the game loses much of its appeal. Funnily enough, this applies to both PnP and CRPG, in my view. PnP remains slightly more enjoyable at high levels, because a human GM is always, and without exception, more intelligent than the AI of a CRPG. For instance, if a human GM is being remotely serious, a group of let's say six adventurers will realistically never beat a demi-lich (and if they do, they are so powerful that the best thing would be simply to retire and start over). But in BG2, beating a demi-lich is dead easy once you know what to do. So yeah, high level D&D campaigns aren't that great. I disagree. For me Epic Levels are the most fun. BG3 after you've become the god of murder would be so awesome. Killing other gods and stuff i'd love that so much. Consider your own plane which you have to defend against other gods then invade their planes and kill them off oh well. Yeah, nothing interesting in that. Doing that in a sensible way would require a lot more AI firepower than is currently available. At the moment, it would just be a regular fight with more hit points, spells and so on.

If a fight is designed around the players knowledge of how to exploit the game systems, it is a bad fight. It's a problem with most high level D&D campaigns. The most enjoyable levels to play in D&D are, roughly speaking, 4 or 5 to something like 13 to 15. In the lowest levels, dying is too easy, and once you become substantially powerful, the game loses much of its appeal. Funnily enough, this applies to both PnP and CRPG, in my view. PnP remains slightly more enjoyable at high levels, because a human GM is always, and without exception, more intelligent than the AI of a CRPG. For instance, if a human GM is being remotely serious, a group of let's say six adventurers will realistically never beat a demi-lich (and if they do, they are so powerful that the best thing would be simply to retire and start over). But in BG2, beating a demi-lich is dead easy once you know what to do. So yeah, high level D&D campaigns aren't that great.

The fanboyism is right there in the thread title. Specifically, if he wanted a fair comparison that concluded he preferred BG2 he could have written a title like "Baldur's Gate 2 vs Deadfire: which games comes out on top?", or "Why I feel BG2 still holds up compared to Deadfire". But no he wrote Baldur's Gate II is GREATER THAN Deadfire. That's just an opinion, not necessarily fanboyism. Mind you, it doesn't in any way prove that the OP *isn't* being a fanboy. But I don't agree that that, as such, constitutes fanboyism.

Just out of curiosity: where is the war? And where is the fanboyism? I agree that there are some not particularly relevant posts on this thread, but overall, I think this has been rather interesting. However, the idea that they are too different to compare is just wrong -- and yes, that is not an opinion. I mean, within the vast panoply of computer games, BG and PoE are basically right next to each other, precisely the kind of games that almost should be compared.

Yeah, I'll have my first and only playthrough once the last DLC is out in December. Strange way for Obsidian to go about things, but if the game turns out to be worth it, I'll go along for the next ride (if there is one), too.

Ascension is great except for the final fight, which is so ridiculous that I uninstalled the whole mod as soon as I saw what it contained. There are characters who, once defeated, should remain so, otherwise they lose all dignity and meaning.

I suppose so but I always felt more of a desire or need to go after Irenicus and not so much of a reason to go after an unkillable 300 foot tall statue. Ha. I've still only played Deadfire for a couple of hours (waiting for the patches, waiting for the DLCs, waiting for probably Godot, and not in a hurry), and I've only got to the Engwithian digsite on the island. But you hit the nail on the head: the premise of Deadfire, the reason for the adventure, filled me with the sense that, simply put, I Don't Care.