xzar_monty

Yesterday I tried creating a character and just checking how the game starts. I must say it does look impressive, in the technical/mechanical sense -- quite a lot of choices. But I also noticed straight away, in the very first dialogues the game starts with, that the writing and voice acting are extremely cheesy. I wonder why that is. Oh well, we'll just have to live with it. Obsidian did a very good job of grown-up writing and voice acting in PoE and Deadfire, whereas Owlcat's Pathfinder games are written and acted at the level of "Beware, heroes! Terrible monsters ahead! We must be brave and put them to the sword. Then, and only then, do we have any chance of making it to the next encounter where we can once again prove the world how incredibly heroic we are!" I mean, there's not even an attempt at good writing here. It's all cliche and cheese. (I thought it was funny, btw, that the game starts with a situation where the PC has been attacked by demons. Plural. And the PC is a first-level character. And (s)he survived. What?! Maybe there's an explanation to this later on, I really didn't go any further than the very first dialogues.)

Things I really enjoy: - The graphics. By god the game looks lovely. - The fact that you can solve the same quests in different ways, often with or without violence. - Serafen. His story, his dialogue lines and his voice acting. This is extremely well done. Stands out from a group of well-written NPCs. - A change of scenery, i.e. the archipelago setting. A brave choice, and I applaud it. It works. - No big dungeons. Again, a welcome change. A brave choice, and I applaud it. This works, too. - The Beast of Winter. An extremely tight story that is written really, really well. (Btw, notice how Obsidian plays with the dragon encounter: it is displayed on the loading screen whenever you're in BoW. But when the encounter finally happens, the dragon is sucked away from you into the void. Once you get into the void, the dragon again escapes from you, diving through the ice into yet another layer of the realm. Then, only then do you finally get to meet the beast. This was very clever.) - Neketaka is right up there with Athkatla as the best city in all the cRPGs I've played. - Apart from Mirke, none of the characters are overtly cheesy (but Mirke makes up for it!). The characterization is really good. The writers have done an excellent job, in general. - The meeting with Eothas in Ashen Maw looks frigging fantastic. No wonder Xoti just about dies from astonishment, awe and other big words beginning with A. Things I don't really enjoy: - Well the story is all over the place, and there's a fundamental lack of logic at the heart of it: you're supposed to be in a hurry to stop this Eothas fellow, but he only ever does anything when you go to meet him. So you have all the time in the world to explore the entire archipelago. And if you actually play the game and explore the archipelago, you'll come to realize that the main story of this game is essentially reduced to an afterthought -- it's just something that happens while you're doing other things. I don't know the percentages, but someone could probably do the math, and I'm fairly certain that most players spend a lot less than 25% of their game time furthering the main story. - The factions. Obsidian should just ditch this line of thinking altogether. You're very clearly and strongly suggested to side with one of the factions, but I just wasn't interested. I didn't like any of them, but I also couldn't completely ignore them. In the end I did what I did to avoid having to side with any of them, and I wasn't entirely satisfied with that. - The difficulty curve. It's singularly odd. The most difficult encounters, by far, are on the first island: Gorecci Street and the Engwithian Digsite. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, comes even close. - I understand that there's been a conscious effort to create a balanced system, and I must say Obsidian has succeeded in this very well. However, this creates a problem: nothing stands out. There's no must-have loot, there was never a moment where I found something that gave me any kind of wow moment, because I knew this item was going to be good. Granted, some items are better than others, but the differences are minute. - You can do perfectly well without ever once using potions, scrolls, explosives and drugs. It's a bit of a pity, because clearly a lot of time and effort has been spent in creating all of that stuff. - The hugely annoying bug where a character spends all that time going through the potion-drinking animation but ends up not actually drinking the potion. Shame on you, Obsidian, shame on you. Overall: a superb game, one of the best in the genre.

Agreed. The camp system in PoE1 was also illogical beyond reason. You had an infinite inventory, and in fact it was impossble to simply drop items (there had to be something to drop them to), but you could only carry 2 or 4 sets of camping supplies, depending on your difficulty mode. Makes no sense whatsoever.

Having first played BG2 and having regarded it as the pinnacle of cRPG gaming, I found BG1 almost intolerable. It's really a poor game. There's an astonishing amount of aimless wandering around maps that are mostly empty. Bioware were very wise to cut all that pointless walking around from BG2.

The situation is seriously messed up, but I don't think there's any realistic chance of it changing. There's no way a computer game should be able to be full of functional problems when it becomes available for purchase, but that's become the industry norm.

I know what you mean. I'm almost the opposite, though. My main interest is in the story, so I want it to work when I start playing, and I don't want to get to know story stuff before my playthrough. I trust I'm familiar enough with the system (although I may turn out to be wrong, of course).

WotR is going to be a "buy now, play next year" release, trust me on this. I *am* going to buy it on Sept. 2nd, but heck, it ain't gonna be playable for quite some time. Okay, let's say "worth playing" instead of "playable".

The extremely low budget made me slightly suspicious, but I thought that maybe the writing was superb, or something. I'll check it out once the full game is out, but I'm not having my hopes up as of now...

Yes, the first level do have that sense of wonder, I agree. And they are definitely more interesting than the really high levels. But because your options are so very limited at those levels, for me they aren't nearly as interesting as levels, say, 4 and above.

To give you an example: in my current playthrough (while I was still playing it, which I'm not anymore) I had one of those "Research into the nature of curses" cards appear twice during an encounter that was supposed to give it to you. So, after researching one of them, the other is still on my kingdom screen under "Curses". I have no idea whether the one I did research counts as done and dusted. I suppose it's impossible to tell. Also, mathematically speaking, I'm almost 100% certain that the "50% failure chance" you get for your spells in some areas of the First World is nothing like 50%. It's exceedingly unlikely that you could fail over 20 times in a row if your odds are 1/2. It's not impossible, mind you, but realistically it doesn't happen.

Low-budget games that try to capture the feel of the IE games are perfectly fine with me. But the performance and bug issues I've read about don't sound too good. Yes, I know it's early release.

Thanks for that! Not much feedback, but it doesn't look too promising, I have to say.

There's too much railroading in it for my liking, and the "epic" levels aren't nearly as interesting as the lower ones. I mean, in DD, for me, the most interesting and rewarding levels are somewhere between 4 and 13ish. Before that, you're likely to be killed by a frail kobold accidentally dropping a feather somewhere near you, and after that you're essentially unkillable if you have a proper group and you know what you're doing. BG2 is my all-time favorite, but I hardly ever touch ToB anymore. Interestingly, I very much enjoyed SoD the first time, but I subsequently tried playing it again and just couldn't do it.

In PoE, one of the most annoying enemies and one that you constantly had to face was called In-Combat Pathfinding. There was no way to beat it, the best you could do was to circumvent it. It appears that Owlcat has taken these kind of problems to a completely new dimension.

Why, how?

Ok, thanks for that. I only used the gnome sporadically because I found him irritating as a character, but I wholly agree the ranger is powerful.

Who are these 2 of the most powerful companions? Is there a consensus on this? It would be interesting to know. I'm pretty sure I recruited all of them, and I'd say Nok-Nok is probably up there, but as for the other one, I'm not sure. Amiri the barbarian is the only one I think is rubbish.

I played the previous game on PnP settings, which translated into "Custom" in the game, because the "Normal" difficulty has enemies dealing less than 100% damage on criticals (may have been 50 or 75, I can't remember). I changed that to 100% so the difficulty was exactly as it says in the original manuals. I didn't min-max, as I intensely dislike the whole idea. The game was occasionally hard, but I liked the challenge. It did get ridiculous towards the end (the last chapter, which has been roundly and deservedly criticized for its encounters), so I changed to the easisest mode simply to finish the game. I would like to think that Owlcat has heeded the criticism it received and that there is no repeat of the last chapter in this game. Based on this, I'd say you do NOT have to min-max if you play on Normal or close-to-Normal difficulty.

Clearly. But the example highlights a problem inherent in language. Legislative text is cumbersome, because it attempts to be unequivocal and cover all possible angles. But clearly this is impossible, which is why we have these hilarious and often irritating court debates on what some particular word actually means. Anyone remember Bill Clinton...

I'm going to buy the game at launch but I'll start playing sometime next year. That seems safe at the moment. I mean, Kingmaker still has plenty of bugs...

After some considerable delay, this game is now available on early access. Anyone tried it yet? Looks both promising and low-profile to me. I'm intrigued.

I can imagine lawyers having a field day discussing the meaning of "obvious".

So, judging by what I've read here and elsewhere, we're heading for a veritable bugfest in a few days.

I can't think of a way how that could be "unlawful" in any jurisdiction, even Hammurabian.

<ignore this. was going to do an unnecessary necro, 'cos I didn't recognize the topic was over a year old. apologies.>