xzar_monty

This is an age-old discussion, and if you get more deeply into it, you'll realize that it's not like you said. Besides, we're not talking about ranking everything here. We're talking about two important titles in a niche genre, and I think it's a perfectly valid discussion. Or, if it doesn't seem valid for you, it's very simple to stay out of it. There's an argument to be made for the idea that "everything is just opinion and that's it", but then, if somebody really tried to claim that The Shaggs is better than The Beatles, or that James Patterson is better than Hemingway, or that Plan 9 From Outer Space is better than The Shining, I'm pretty sure that essentially everybody sane would question their capacity for reasonable judgement. So when you get down to it, it's not just opinions -- there are reasonable arguments to be made for why something is or isn't good. In my book, both PoE and BG2 are definitely good, even very good. It's just that BG2 is a couple of notches better, for reasons I've described above.

A PoE 2 non-spellcasting character has several abilities they can use other than just attacking by level 5, and keeps gaining them. A BG1/2 one only gets some by Throne of Bhaal, in most cases. That you choose to ignore a factor doesn't make it not exist. I am not ignoring it, I'm simply saying it's not significant. There is no question that a PoE fighter, for instance, has a lot more options than a BG2 fighter, but to me that's not significant enough to make this aspect a major difference between the games.

When it comes to "auto-attacking" and/or using skills, I don't think there's a significant difference between the two games. So that's not a deciding factor, for me anyway. BG2 still wins hands down.

I think this is an astonishing comment. I always keep the party AI off, so nobody ever auto-attacks or auto-does anything in my party. And frankly, I find it kind of strange that someone would use the party AI and allow their characters to auto-attack. I mean, sure, it's a way to play the game, but I can't see why you'd want to do that. Why not watch a movie instead?

Not a lot of musicians actually think that nobody has surpassed the Beatles. Sure, there are many people who do have that view, but it's nowhere near as clear-cut as you make it sound, and I think the Beatles analogy is really quite poor. I agree that the Beatles did do a few things for the first time (although there a lot fewer of those things that you might imagine), but they have been surpassed by an awful lot of bands. All talk about "best ever" is just utterly meaningless in music: there are too many intangibles and far too few tangibles to make reasonable comparisons. With computer games, the tangibles are much more evident, although obviously it does come down to opinion in the end.

As it happens, I agree with the OP. Some of the reasons are somewhat intangible, i.e. I believe the general "feel" of the game is a lot better in BG2 than it is in the PoE franchise. And mind you, I definitely mean only BG2 -- the original Baldur's Gate is quite poor, in my opinion, because the story is all over the place, the dialogue options are often dreadful and there's way too much aimless walking around on mostly empty maps. Some of the more tangible reasons why BG2, in my view, trumps the PoE franchise, would include: -- PoE allows you to reach level cap far too early, and this is a huge minus for the game. I want to have at least the option of being able to develop. (Mind you, not all of the demigodly powers you eventually get in BG2 are that great, but it's a lot better than simply stopping to develop two thirds into the story.) -- BG2 has better music, which leads to better overall tone in the game. (I mean, better music for the game. Neither has a particularly refined score, but BG2's achieves its aim a lot better.) -- Thanks to the enchantment system, nearly all items in PoE are disposable, and there's basically nothing in the shops that you'd want to buy. Persistence and Tidefall are among the very few items you really care for, whereas BG2 has a lot of stuff you treasure. It also has a lot of stuff that you want to save your cash for. Money is almost completely meaningless in PoE. -- The spell system is BG2 is simply a lot better than that of PoE. The grimoire stuff doesn't work at all, whereas learning (and possibly failing to learn) spells from scrolls is a good idea. -- Having a bottomless inventory (and being unable to drop things!) while at the same only having room for 2 or 4 camping supplies in PoE is something that really irks me. It's a minor thing, but it's very wrong anyway. -- BG2 has Yoshimo, which was a very good twist in the story the first time you saw it. I have not played PoE2 all the way through, so I don't know what to expect in that sense, but PoE1, at least, had nothing of the sort. And no, I don't mean to imply that it should have had a Yoshimo, but *something* surprising in the story would have been nice. -- Two twofold nature of the early main quest in BG2 is really good, i.e. you want to get Imoen back and you want to find Irenicus. They amount to the same in the end, but it's a device that works well. I enjoyed the Watcher storyline early on, particularly when I encountered that woman in the tree, but after a while I sort of ceased to care. -- I don't believe the PoE characters are significantly better written than those of BG2. I agree that Minsc is dreadful, simply some very poor comic relief, but Viconia, Jan, Valygar, Keldorn and Anomen are good. I don't mean that I like them all, as characters in my party, but they work quite well, and their interplay is also nice. In PoE, only Eder was of the same quality. -- The play with language in PoE doesn't really work. You know, gul, fampyr, duc, all that. It's too clever by 'alf, as an English villager might point out. I think BG2 simply managed some things in a way that no other games have managed -- and obviously this is just my opinion. But to compare: BG1 is very poor, NWN is rubbish (the 3D gets old in an instant, none of the NPCs are good, the story is poor, every quest is FedEx), IWD is shallow (hack & slash). I managed about 15 minutes of Dragon Age: Origins before forgetting about it, about 30 minutes of Divinity: Original Sin and about 45 minutes of Tyranny. None of them had it. PoE does have it, definitely, simply not to the same extent as BG2.

I'm not sure if laborious descent into subterranean despair is the main factor, although I agree that as a device it's getting pretty cliched (in this genre), so it really takes some doing to make it work. The main factor is the story element: what's the reason for that descent, what happens during that descent and whether the rewards for and/or results of that descent are such that it makes it feel worthwhile. I think that as a concept, the Endless Paths was really good: you've got your stronghold, but there's something evil lurking underneath, and you have a pretty strong motive for checking it out. Too bad that at least half of the dungeon was rubbish. (I think it remains reasonably interesting until you resolve Kana's quest, after which it's utter rubbish until the final guardian before you get to the dragon.) Incidentally, I believe Obsidian made a huge, huge error on the dragon level, when it comes to visuals vs. content. I mean, there are piles and piles of coins in there, you can plainly see it. But when you actually loot it, you get like 1,000 cp or whatever. One of the biggest WTF moments in the game.

PizzaSHARK is really gaining reputation as a reasonable person, calling people dumb and swearing like a frustrated adolescent. Way to go, mate. Dungeons are difficult. Endless Paths was a serious victim of "too much size, too little content", whereas Watcher's Keep in BG2 got it just about right.

Where, exactly, did I presume?

Well, that was poor, I have to say! For example, you write: "Add to that, in a game with quicksave, ****ing NO ONE is going to do random encounters. They will just quicksave compulsively and revert to a save every time a random encounter comes up." This may be what you do. But please, don't presume that you know what others do.

Good post, that. I also dislike grinding, and I have no interest in leveling up to infinity (having said that, PoE was very, very deeply flawed in the sense that you reached the level cap way too early). I think BG2 style random encounters were excellent, especially because some of them also carried the story forward. Sure, they were not completely random, but they had enough qualifiers to make them appear fairly unpredictable: you had to have certain members in your party, you had to sleep outdoors after a particular thing had happened, and so on. Had I been a game developer, I would have carried this theme forward and made it even more interesting, probably to an extent where not everybody's game was the same. With PoE, everything is completely predictable, and everything in the game world just stands still in its place until you go there and meet it. Back in the day, there was a game called Ultima V, and the world of that game was alive. The resistance met near a well at midnight (you had to go there at that time to meet them), a certain bloke hid skeleton keys near a tree for a certain purpose at certain times, and so on. It baffles me somewhat that this line of aliveness has not been pursued by game developers with an awful lot more power at their disposal.

It would be nice to hear why random encounters should be left in the past or why they are garbage. Nobody has said anything as to the reasons.

There are plenty of areas where you can rest but there's a chance of monsters waking you up (this, I'm happy to agree, isn't particularly great). Anyway, I simply feel PoE missed a glorious opportunity to add an extra layer to the game. A game (in this genre) with random content is inherently more interesting than one without it, although the random content can obviously be implemented badly.

"Kind of", and "most" were your qualifiers. I'm not sure which percentage of maps went dead, but I would hazard it was less than 50%. You are right, though, that some of them did. But that's vastly different from PoE, where they ALL go dead.

That's only true to a certain extent. I agree that they are not completely random, when you think of what the word "random" means, but they are random in the sense that you don't exactly know when they're going to happen. So, for example, in BG2: -- You may come across some thieves and/or vampires at night -- You may be ambushed when you sleep, either by "random" monsters or more specific encounters -- You may come across monsters when you move from one location to another. PoE had none of this. I think it was a shame, because as soon as you had gone through a map, it instantly became dead. And resting was always perfectly safe, even with monsters right next to you.

Random encounters can be extremely interesting. For instance, in Baldur's Gate II, they were great.

This was already a problem in PoE1: the world is completely "dead" apart from the stuff that has been scripted into it. This "dead" nature of the world goes pretty far. For instance, if you want to rest when you have monsters right next to you (just outside of your reach, within the fog of war), you can: they will not move an inch, they will just stand there. There is not even an illusion of a world that is alive. And nothing random will ever appear in any location you have visited.

Yes. The translators were working under impossible conditions. Thus, the result is rubbish.

Now, if this word count (1 million words) is anywhere near accurate, that alone pretty much explains why the translation is rubbish. A million words is approximately ten regular-sized novels (350 to 450 pages, depending on the layout). If a very good translator worked at it full time, it would take approximately two years to come up with a good translation for all of it. So, what I think has happened is that either, 1) a lot of people have worked on the translations independently of each other with no one to co-ordinate their efforts and make sure everything is consistent, or, 2) a small number of people (perhaps just one) has run everything through google translate and pretty much left it at that, with some minor revisions. The enormity of the work is such that it seems more obvious than ever that Obsidian have no idea what they're doing. IF that 1 million words is correct.

It's really embarrassing when a product is brought into the market in such a state that a lot of people can legitimately claim "I could do better than this!" -- and they are right.

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Just out of curiosity: how much do you actually know about what you're talking about? I've been doing translations for twenty years, I've translated 70+ books and quite a lot of academic writing, song lyrics, poetry, magazine articles etc. I have always had time to translate properly. That is a prerequisite for me taking the project in the first place. There are specific areas where translators often don't have enough time (television and movies, for instance), and interpreters nearly always have to work under incredibly tight time constraints, but what you're saying simply isn't true.

This is not true. Although I agree that it is generally best to translate into your first language, this is by no means a rule. I, for instance, have translated quite a lot of stuff into English, which is not my first language. This may not be true abroad, but in France, in translator studies, it's what you learn. Whether something is true or not does not depend on the country where you are. If this is what is taught in France, it doesn't make it true. It may also be the first rule in professional translation in France, which is fine with me, but even this does not make it true. (I would go so far as to argue that any proper discipline should also encourage its students to question the discipline itself, just to keep themselves from becoming too dogmatic.) It's perfectly sensible to start with the idea that translations should be done into one's native language. But translating into other languages, too, is not only a possibility, it is also something that people do incredibly well. But, I agree, this is slightly off-topic.

Abel: The likely problem, I would say, is that Obsidian doesn't really care, doesn't pay properly, doesn't give enough time for the translators, doesn't care who the translators are and isn't qualified to make sure whether the translation makes any sense. Consequently, the translators make an awful mess in an awful hurry, and get paid very little. It's heartbreaking.

Yes, but the game has been paid for and released. It is perfectly reasonable to expect it to be in fine shape, which, judging by these forums, it manifestly is not.