xzar_monty

<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.

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.