xzar_monty

Hmm. I completely agree on PoE, the amount of trash fights is the worst problem in the game, but I don't think there are that many in Deadfire.

Well, if this person really did leave the forum as they indicated, that was some visit. Start with insults, receive criticism, get angry and even more insulting, leave. Boy o' boy.

This reminds me of Stormwall Gorge in PoE. Correct me if I remember the location wrong. Anyway, there's a flood there initially, you can't go further. But once you do certain things, the flood eases and you can proceed. I thought this was a nice touch. It's so obvious that the flood is there only for storytelling and balancing reasons, but it also works, as a device. This was a good way of doing what you just said.

Sometimes even being unaware of the difference between facts and opinions. Here's a fact: you can play Deadfire both in RtwP and TB mode. Here are two opinions: TB sucks. RtwP is awesome. And as we have just seen, the difference between these categories can be too much to process.

You start speaking of your own opinion as if it's fact and then you insult people who happen to think otherwise. Demonstrating such bad manners in your first post on these forums is quite an achievement, but not in any positive sense. This, in fact, suggests that unless you are very, very young, your only intention is to troll...

The first claim is true, no question. But surely there are huge differences in degree. Just compare PoE, Deadfire or, especially, Disco Elysium with P:K or WotR. The differences are enormous, in language, tone and everything.

Not true, though. This of course depends on how you define "comic relief". But humour is not necessary. There are superb writers without essentially any humour in their works. Changes of tone tend to be very good, this is true. But adding humour is not the only way to change tone. Naturally, you can always ask whether a superb work without humour would have been even better with some humour. But there's no way to ever know, so it's not really a worhwhile question.

When it comes to this side of these games, Disco Elysium really raised the bar. It's a resounding success in this sense.

This is a good illustration of the manifold ways people approach these games. What you describe is a perfectly valid way of finding more potential content in the game, but I'd have absolutely no interest in that side at all. None. For me, it's mostly about the story and the character interactions within that story. The mechanics as such (for instance, character builds) are not interesting. I've played both PoE and Deadfire twice, and both times I was a monk. Once a male, once a female. I tried various story options and character combinations and found plenty of interest there, but didn't care for any build tweaking at all. Note, there's no criticism here. This is just to point out that people come to these games with wildly different preferences. And it's excellent that this is possible in the first place.

And changes so much harder to make (which is sort of included in what you say, but not explicitly). I agree completely. Full voicing also creates the slight annoyance that with longer texts, my reading is a lot faster than the voicing, and so there are to distinct verbal streams in my mind, one read and one heard. It's not always good. Classic BG style with just the main lines voiced is ideal.

My thoughts exactly. I come to this thread every now and then and this is the thought I leave it with.

Given your rather unusual specs, my guess is that not a lot of people know the answer to your question. However, I'll hazard a reasonably educated guess: yes you can. Concentrate on doing all the bounty quests if you want to increase the chances of reaching max level. I want to emphasize that I don't know, but I think the answer is yes. I hope I'm not wrong.

David Lee Roth's singing in the 2000s has been quite something to listen to. I mean, he's not even close to where he should be in terms of time or pitch.

The big problem is that on the first playthrough, there's often no way to know which mobs are meaningful and which are not. There is essentially no way to tell whether a group of monsters is worth engaging or not, in which case my general solution, for a long while, was to engage rather than not, until eventually it turned out that there were neither loot, XP or quest rewards for most of them. That was a fairly big mistake on Obsidian's part, in my opinion -- and one I believe they've admitted. This is why there is so much less filler combat in Deadfire, and the game sure benefited from that.

Because about half of them are not possible to go around. Plenty are, that's true. Longwatch Falls, for example, is terrible in this sense. And the lower level of Galvino's workshop (yes, it's indoors, I know). Absolutely full of stuff that you mostly can't go around.

Oh, so there's that, too. Heck, some of these design choices beggar belief. But to be fair, so did some design choices in PoE. Like: removing XP gains from battles but still filling the outdoor areas with trash mob fights. What were they there for? Absolute waste of time, that's what.

Defeating it and then receiving all of 34 XP (or somesuch ridiculous amount) feels like a major post-battle insult, though. Makes no sense at all, that.

All turn-based, so I'm going to give them a pass. Turn-based is the only sensible way of playing PnP, you know, with friends around a table, but I don't see any good reason to use it in a computer game.

I also think this is quite probable. I have a major soft spot for RtwP-based fantasy cRPGs and let's face it, there aren't many of them around. The good ones that appear to have stood the test of time are, for me, BG2, PoE and Deadfire. P:K is almost there, but much of the writing and Owlcat's blatant cheating mean that it's not quite up there. However, in my view it's a lot better than Icewind Dale (poor AI, no party interaction) or NWN (bad story, awful 3D). With WotR, I know I'll be getting an awful lot of cheese and an awful lot of terrible writing, but given the dearth of games in this genre, I'm up for it. I've played the game's prologue (so to speak, meaning the first maze and up to the city), which has made me roll my eyes quite a bit, but I'm still up for it, after a few months. Maybe very early 2022. Now, if only somebody wrote a RtwP-based fantasy cRPG on the level of Disco Elysium when it comes to story development and all that, I'd be happy to pay twice the price for it. It's almost certainly not going to happen, though. (But in case someone wants to hire me... )

In many of the quests, this works very well and deserves applause. It was a really good idea. But many outdoor areas, some levels of Od Nua and even some interiors (such as Galvino's workshop) are utterly hopeless. There's a trash mob every few steps, you can't avoid it and you get absolutely nothing for dealing with it. It's a dreadful waste of time.

This, btw, was an absolutely huge mistake in PoE. So, Josh Sawyer & co decided to essentially remove XP gains from battles. Fair enough. But they forgot to remove the battles. So, PoE is absolutely full of trash mob battles that give you NO XP and NO LOOT. They are nothing but a huge waste of time. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

Ha. I remember well those absolutely ridiculous amounts of XP you got from succesful skill checks in P:K. The mind boggles.

I was thinking the same. Such a broad and not very well defined statement, I didn't know what to make of it.

This is a good point, by the way. I wonder how many left the game at that point and didn't come back for Deadfire. I was in Twin Elms when I reached the level cap (this was before the DLCs came out), and I remember totally losing all interest in the game. I did finish it, with White March 1&2 installed, but I remember feeling exactly like you did.

Has a Lada ever abandoned you in the middle of your road trip? No, but I have abandoned mine several times.