xzar_monty

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.>

Ok, thanks! Yes, I also noticed that priests' damaging spells tend to be themed around fire. This becomes very apparent once you meet those creatures who are actually healed by fire spells and you have to come up with alternatives. It's not so easy with a priest. I understand why people might be moved to pity him, but I found his combination of dishonesty and cowardice just too much for me. I certainly didn't want to kill him, but I didn't want him in my party, either. Which, by the way, can simply be good design: if an NPC provokes emotions like that in me, it often tells of good writing. Similarly, in BG2, I found Anomen quite irritating (good writing!) but I was still able to tolerate him long enough to produce a change in him, and I found Edwin's arrogance so annoying (again, good writing) that I kicked him out of my group quite quickly, even if he is clearly the best wizard in the game.

Heck. What makes it the most interesting? The reason I ask is because in both of my playthroughs, I was quite stern with Vatnir who seemed to be a very dishonest coward. I didn't like that at all -- and I didn't want to take someone like him with me. So, Vatnir is the only NPC/sidekick I've never had with me, even for a moment. All the others I can talk about, but not Vatnir. The only thing I made a beeline for on my second playthrough, btw, was that excellent two-handed weapon that you can simply pick up from the map (and has something to do with storm and lightning, later on. I'm 100% you know what I'm talking about.)