xzar_monty

You are quite correct. However, from that it does not follow that some random dude on an internet forum is the arbiter of everybody's biases and the extent to which they affect their judgement.

It is mostly childhood memory and the charm of the new. So yeah, its mostly nostalgia, even if you deny it. Nothing can beat the memory, as for most people the first kiss is unforgettable. The essence of your statement is: "I know the reasons for other people's preferences better than they do themselves, and even if they claim otherwise, I am right and they are wrong about the reasons for their preferences." It's patently absurd.

This is certainly the last time I will be backing any Obisidian products after this abysmal experience. I have no reason to do so in the future. I can just buy the game a year or two after release, when development is ACTUALLY done, and not worry about my physical rewards never showing up. Sorry to hear you are that frustrated, I just like giving them **** for the lack of details. I have full confidence I will get my physical copy sometime in the “soon” future. I am waiting to play the game through til I get my copy and can have something akin to the unboxing I thought physical backers would receive at launch, which needed work anyway. I played for about 2 hours at launch and my companions starting bugging out and accelerating through disposition at such a high rate that my pallegina and the new priestess acted like old enemies 2mins after being in a party together and the priestess was already trying to jump my bones. So maybe waiting for physicals and patches is not the worst thing. Regarding that last paragraph of yours: that is true enough, but on the other hand, we're really in a sorry situation if we take it for granted that a game is essentially still a demo upon release. I perfectly understand the need for patches, and I am happy to accept them as a given, but there's a difference between a game that needs polishing and a game that is nowhere near ready when it comes out.

You can read all about them here: http://www.d20pfsrd.com While not as broken as 3.5, it still has its share of broken aspects. I can almost guarantee that plays will lack most of the race options, race substitutions, and class archetypes that the system provides. I can almost guarantee that the CMD rules are going to be altered or nonexistent. Do you mean DD 3.5 edition? How is that broken? In my view, it's brilliant.

- Oghren - Leliana (factoring her appearance in the subsequent games) - Morrigan (same as Leliana) - Alistair, kinda but only if you make him king. - Isabella, especially with Aveline - Aveline, especially with Isabella - Anders - Solas - Iron Bull - Vivienne - Sera - Mordin - Morinth (soft spot for her) - Tali Ok, thanks. Can't comment on any of this. Never heard of any of them.

Companions aren't up to snuff when contrasted to whom, specifically? I'm honestly curious. Bioware's more recent offerings. That's not very specific. A couple of names, perhaps?

Companions aren't up to snuff when contrasted to whom, specifically? I'm honestly curious.

Someone's argument just lost credibility the moment they claimed something was "girly" implying that this was somehow a bad thing. Wake up. Of course, if there's a reasonable explanation for both "girly" and why it's bad, we may have a discussion again.

I haven't done the math, but I'd say BG2 had an awful lot more useful spells than PoE1. Again, no comments on Deadfire from me, as of yet. PoE1's must-have spell was Gaze of the Adragan, everything else was essentially replaceable. Some early-level spells, such as Slicken and Halt, were astonishingly powerful right to the end, while there were many higher-level spells I never found any use for. For the record, I never once cast any buffs on Aloth (mirror image and stuff like that). (I also never drank any potions, except for Power and the Visage one, can't remember what it was called, but the one that improves your Accurcacy. Never once did I drink any healing potions, ever.)

1 million words properly translated, so that style remains consistent and textual quality will not suffer, is at least a year of work for a good, experienced translator. So the OP is essentially just trolling. I think we have pretty much established on these forums that the translations of Deadfire into other languages are, kindly put, utter rubbish.

The funny thing is, outside of combat, there's nothing wrong with Pathfinding in PoE. But in combat, it's unbelievably poor.

Incidentally, there's one small detail that actually makes a huge, huge difference between the games when it comes to combat, and tactical combat in particular. One word: pathfinding. Pathfinding in combat is utter rubbish in PoE (although I'm not sure about Deadfire!), and that alone made combat a lot worse than it was in BG2. Also, the maps contained far too many narrow spaces through which only one character could pass (even if it realistically didn't look like that), and in addition to these ridiculous bottlenecks, far too many combats went completely apes**t because of the fact that one of your characters decided to run to his intended spot via some completely senseless route. This was astonishing. One would have thought that pathfinding in combat could not possibly get worse over time (in the time that elapsed between BG2 and PoE), but it did.

Precisely. Playing PoE1 approximately a year after it came out was a good experience. I do own PoE2, but I've spent about two hours on it and will wait for at least the first DLC before actually playing it. I suppose it's debatable whether developing games like this is good for the company or not. I certainly can't prove anything either way.

I think the answer to the first is no, and the answer to the second is definitely no. I quite like Ascension, except for the final battle which is so silly that I decided to remove the whole mod once I got into the end fight.

And it was frankly pretty stupid of Paradox to have expectations as high as they did. Putting aside the question of whether it was any good, Tyranny combined awful marketing and a premise that put a lot of people (including me) off from the first. I can't make any comment on the marketing side of Tyranny, because I don't think I ever saw any marketing (heck, the only reason I know about PoE is that a friend of mine told me about it -- I absolutely don't follow any internet marketing, of anything). But your second point is spot on. When I heard that Tyranny was coming out, I checked what it was about... and immediately decided that the game was not interesting. The premise was completely off-putting. Once it became available for cheap, I tried it, and decided within 15 minutes that it was just as uninteresting as it had seemed, so I took my chance of a refund (less than 1 hour of game-time) and that was it.

To be fair, most of the times they don't appear to know it the moment it is done, but the moment you first return to their area. Which can be hours or days later. But word of mouth indeed travels quickly in these RPGs. NPCs can wait for you indefinitely to solve their quest but when you finally do - someone brings the good news to them faster than you can return to them. Maybe they use horses. Good point. I'm not entirely sure how this should be solved, but it definitely is strange. Nothing at all happens independent of you, the whole world will wait for you to do something, and when you do, knowledge of what you did will instantly spread through the game world. I think there was mod for BG2 where they tried to split the reputation system in two: there was reputation, which is pretty much self-explanatory, and then there was virtue (if I remember correctly), which was a more objective measure of how you had actually done. So you could be a complete monster but look saintly, if you pulled the right strings.

I'll try to defend the current system - not because I think it is very good, just providing some counterpoints. Reputation doesn't say that you are a cruel or a benevolent person. It has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. It represents what people have heard about you. Person A has heard that you are cruel because you have killed somebody in the past. Person B has heard that you are benevolent because you have helped someone in the past. Your score of 1x Cruel and 1x Benevolent represents that. Both persons can react to you - depending on what they have heard about you (or what is more important to them). With a single scale you would be zero on that scale (neither benevolent, nor cruel) and as a result reactions based on you being cruel or benevolent won't fire at all. It is kind of funny, though, that even though we are living in a sort-of medieval world, everybody in it will know everything you have done the moment you do it. Even if you do it deep in a dungeon with nobody alive anywhere near you.

Superb comeback from @Gfted1, props for that! Loved it. I think the discussion has been interesting, and I've learned to look at both BG2 and the PoE franchise from a couple of new perspectives. That's pretty good, I would say. (Obviously, though, it's not as good as mindlessly insulting other people.)

"They are dumb". Hope it helped. How so? I don't think that's a very good argument. But then, you were probably joking.

So, you are not bothered by the fact that everything you do is instantly known by everybody in the game world? I found that somewhat hard to take at times, although I do agree that one's "reputation" is a convenient shorthand for knowledge of your deeds eventually spreading around.

Incidentally, speaking of well-written characters: Siege of Dragonspear introduced one extremely well-written character into the BG world. I mean the goblin shaman, M'Khiin. She was simply superb. A very badly treated woman who has retained her dignity and is noticeably perceptive and kind. Boy, that was good. She was a lot better than all the other new characters put together (Voghlin was particularly poor).

I also don't think the PoE characters are in any way better than BG2 characters. Apart from Eder, who is really well written. (I still haven't played Deadfire enough to comment.)

@Madscientist: That was a fairly good analysis. One question, though: would you argue that the characters in PoE are somehow more profound or less superficial than in BG2? If so, why?

I know what you're saying, but given the sales, the ruleset is sort of by definition not unpopular.

I'll wager my playthrough will be quite slow and thorough, once the game looks finished enough (maybe after the second DLC?). But I can't see there ever being another playthrough, so the question is a bit funny, in my view.