xzar_monty

So now, holy moly, I have made it to where I have to defend the tavern against an onslaught of enemies. It seems to me that if there ever was bad game design, this is it. 1) Irabeth and her folks just stand around, doing nothing. 2) I am defending this tavern against an apparently endless amount of invaders without any indication as to whether something else is going to happen at some point. I've destroyed an awful lot or arsonists, cultists, dretches and what have you, and nothing else seems to happen. Obviosly I'm going to be running out resources, namely hit points, in the end. Incidentally, I just reached level 5 before this fight began. I have no idea whether this is a good level or not. But the game design surely doesn't look in this battle. Anyone has any thoughts on this?

Sounds very interesting. Let's hope it'll also be available on PC.

I wonder if the game has been a commercial success so far.

By the way, this is just astonishing. I still can't figure out why they do it. In P:K, the cheating against the player was so blatantly obvious -- and it was also mean and unnecessary. Why did they do it? I'm not sure I've seen it in WotR as of yet, but I'm inclined to trust you if you say it's there. (I'm still in very early game -- I've made it to the market square in the first city, and that's about it. I mean, the game starts at the market square, and I don't mean that. I mean making it to the market square after some dungeon crawling.)

That's an opinion, and there's nothing wrong with it. But almost every aspect, really? Does it not bother you that in-combat pathfinding in PoE is most likely to be the hardest opponent you will face in the entire game? Does it not bother you that as soon as the number of combatants crosses a certain critical threshold, it becomes well-nigh impossible to figure out what's going on? Does it not bother you that many outdoor maps are absolutely littered with trash mob battles that are nothing but a waste of time because you get no XP and no meaningful loot? If not, again, that's fine, it's an opinion and a preference.

I have started playing the game now, and the only bug I have encountered so far (famous last words) is a very peculiar one. Whenever you take your cursor over vanquished enemies to check their stats, they're all wrong. AC in particular.

You do recognize that there's no way your claim of cutting corners on everything for 2 games in a row can be true, don't you?

Ha! Yeah, I found this a bit annoying at times, too. It didn't bother me much when I found the "other" voice actors doing multiple characters, but when it was the main ones, i.e. the NPC actors, it did bother me. It didn't feel at all cool to think "Hey, that's Eder talking!" when listening to some fairly anonymous character in the game.

There has been no aggression whatsoever in this discussion. Don't be a martyr.

Your logic doesn't work. In order to see that maps and other art assets have been reused, you will have to buy the game. The sales of Deadfire were poor right from the start, right from day one, and at that point no one knew that the game contained the issues you brought up. The question of poor sales is much more complicated here. Similarly, it doesn't matter one jot that I think D:OS2 is rubbish, as a game. I am one of the people who contributed to its sales success, because I bought it. I only played it for about two hours, but I did buy it.

This, again, is a matter of preference. It took me all of two hours to get completely fed up with DOS2. It doesn't look good, it doesn't play well and the game itself is decidedly uninteresting. So here we are: two rather contrasting opinions. As for breaking the charts, I'm not sure if you mean playing quality or commercial success (I suppose it's the latter), but either way, it's not much of an argument. The relation between quality and success is extraordinarily difficult to analyse or break down, and quite often they don't have all that much to do with each other. (Like, there's a fairly convincing argument to be made that essentially everything in the Star Wars movie franchise after the Empire Strikes Back is rubbish, but that certainly hasn't hurt its success one bit.)

Ok, thanks for this. I also understand your example and can't argue with it, but it didn't bother me when playing the game. Clearly I'm not as sensitive to the occasional copy-pasteing as you are; I suppose this is a matter of preference. Here's another thing that's clearly a matter of preference: I've just now tried playing Pathfinder: WotR, and once again I find that I am very sensitive to poor writing. Owlcat is really quite poor when it comes to writing, unfortunately.

What makes them nostalgia based? It's fine if you don't like them, but why are they nostalgia based? I don't see it. In my view, Deadfire is graphically the most gorgeous game I have ever played.

Yeah, I know. It's still supremely irritating.

Mule Kick, btw, is either bugged or (more likely) just badly designed. If it hits, the enemy falls prone, which is fine. But when the enemy falls prone, all targeting on that enemy also disappears. So, if someone was attempting to cast a spell on that same enemy when he gets a mule kick, that spell is either cancled or lost. This is irritating as heck.

This is an interesting point. If what you say really holds, then I suppose it explains why I found the unique weapons (and loot in general) underwhelming. I dislike metagaming. I don't want to know where the loot is, I want to find it myself -- or miss it, if that happens to be the case. Given this, and given your description of where the unique items may kind of fail, I can see why I had problems with the loot in this game. It just didn't click with the roleplaying choices I made. It might have clicked, but it didn't. Sounds logical, doesn't it?

I think both these statements are true. So yes, I guess it's a case of you win some, you lose some. Luckily, the end result is a great game -- just with some flaws. I can live with that. I wouldn't say I couldn't care less about the mechanics and fiddling around with them, but certainly my main interest is in the story and roleplaying. This is why I agree it's also nice that you can use Xoti's initial weapons right until the end, because it seems right from a roleplaying perspective. I also hesitated to give Eder anything other than his initial mayoral medal, because, well, I got the impression that Eder was sort of proud of that thing and would prefer to keep it. (I was faced with a nasty roleplaying problem when Serafen gifted me with an item that was worse than the one I was already wearing in that spot. But gifts can be like that.)

Btw, in both of my playthroughs, Xoti used both of these from start to finish. It didn't feel as if she ever needed anything better. I thought this was a bit odd, again.

This is an interesting one. In PoE, you it took essentially no work at all to get the Whispers of Yenwood. I found it to be quite good at the start, i.e. when I found it. Later on, I replaced it with something else. Fair enough, nothing wrong here. It took quite a lot of work to get the Blade of the Endless Paths. By the time I got it, I was mightily disappointed: its attributes were in no way exceptional, and in my view, the game has a much better two-handed blade that you can find just lying around (Tidefall), and much earlier, too. So, in my two playthroughs in PoE, I never used the Blade of the Endless Paths, even for a second. In Deadfire, I was able to forge the Whispers of the Endless Paths. I think it's so-so. In one of my two playthroughs, I used it for a while and then replaced it with something else. It had no standout qualities for me. It's not bad but there's very little to really recommend it. The place where you get the Whispers of the Endless Paths also contains another remainder from PoE, the Devil of Caroc Breastplate. I bought that when I had the money and never replaced it. It's very good. You clearly know the system an awful lot better than I do, there's just no question. You also know how to optimize a lot better than I do, again, no question. But even playing on Hard, there are very, very occasions where extensive knowledge or optimization is needed (Neriscyrlas is one example). Pretty much all items and character combos work quite well. This is somewhat odd.

(I thought it wisest to quote just this. No disrespect; your comment is good.) They are deliberate design decisions for sure, and I'm not saying that they worked badly, just that they took away some of the magic these games generally contain, for me. When it comes to point b concerning the consumables, I'm sure there's a lot of things you can do with them, but my point is that you never have to. Even when playing on Hard, there was never any need for scrolls or bombs. I thought it would have been really nice if I had had to rely on them even a little bit. There are some scrolls you can (almost?) only gain by crafting them, I think one was called Rusted Armor or something. I thought it was a great idea, and I did in fact use it a couple of times, only to be bitterly disappointed: it only brought the enemy's defences down for something like 5 to 8 seconds. There was never a fight where something as minute as that would have made a difference in my game. When I talk about awesome loot, I mean stuff like Celestial Fury or Carsomyr from Baldur's Gate 2. Obviously I'm not blind to the problems of these items, either: they are somewhat unbalancing to the entire game. In Deadfire, the developers really went for the balance, and when it comes to the game as a whole, it most certainly worked. But when it comes to the loot, I was not too impressed by the results, because there was no "wow" factor for me with any of the loot I found. It's fine if we disagree on this.

Ok. Then we'll just have to disagree. My view is that "awesome" should mean something. If you have a page long list of awesome things, they are not awesome. Their number must be quite limited, by definition. The game itself is great, no question. But there are a few very odd things. The difficulty curve, the fairly indifferent loot and the fact that you can completely disregard all scrolls, potions, bombs and traps and not suffer one bit for it.

This, by the way, is really interesting. The difficulty of an opponent is more a factor of your absolute level (low level = more difficult) than it is of level difference as measured by these skulls. This at least has been my experience. I played on Hard, or whatever is the name of the difficulty setting one notch down from PotD. Autoscaling everywhere, only upwards. And so: on Gorecci Street and the Engwithian Digsite, the enemies have one white skull, at most. But these encounters are by far and away the most difficult ones in the game. Later on, I would meet many encounters with three-red-skull enemies, but none of them ever posed a problem. I remember being particularly disappointed by the Engwithian guardian on Poko Kohara, the one in the desert before you can enter the dungeon. It was a three-red-skull enemy for me, but it was dead easy, and soon dead.

Can you, really? My point is that Magistrate's Cudgel is not an especially potent item. There are no such items in the game. (There are both positive and negative sides to this. One positive is that there is no must-have, better-than-everything-else loot, and one negative is that you're never thrilled when going through your loot, because there's never anything that's especially good.) Your original words were "Superb Hammer of Awesomeness". Magistrate's Cudgel is neither superb nor awesome. It's better than an ordinary item, but not that much better. It's a souldbound, yes, but you will never miss it you don't use it. You won't miss Lord Darryn's Voulge or any of the other soulbounds, either. They're just not very special.

I wonder what you might be referring to, even in the abstract. I mean, I don't think any of the dungeons yield any especially potent items. There just aren't any in the game.

Could well be. I find TB so uninteresting that I haven't even tried it, but I can see what you're getting at.