xzar_monty

Oh, absolutely. No question. But somehow the description gave me the sense that the approach itself contributed to the fact that the game was no joy. In which case I assume there are better games for that approach. Also, the claim that metagaming or retraining is necessary is simply not true. No way. That's a result of a particular approach.

Judging by the other stuff you write in your comment, you lean very hard on the second side of this comment (as edited by me), i.e. although there is role-playing involved, you seem to approach the game as a math puzzle. Even from the outset, that doesn't seem to be an approach that produces much enjoyment. Let us suppose you come across a monster in the game. You can defeat it, or not, these are the possibilities. Let us suppose that in this case, you can defeat it. Tell me this: What exactly do you gain from the fact that you seem to make a huge and calculated effort to defeat it with 2.6% more efficiency and 1.38 seconds faster than I do? This is what your approach looks like to me. As I said in my earlier comment, none of the calculations you make are necessary. No meta knowledge at all is needed in the game. You don't have to retrain your group once, ever. I am 100% sure that in my playthrough, I made choices that were less than 100% optimal, mathematically speaking. Those choices were motivated by the idea of role-playing: I am playing a character that likes this and that, makes choices on that basis and then lives with the choices. For example, on these forums, there's been plenty of talk about what you can do in stealth mode (in Deadfire); how you can lead people astray and then steal stuff from them. I never did any of that. I didn't play the kind of character who was into stealth and sneaking. That was a role-playing choice. It was far from optimal (there was plenty of stuff I didn't acquire because of my choice), but it was a choice that felt natural to my character and made playing a lot of fun to me.

These are very odd claims. Would you care to specify them? I can say from my own experience that you NEVER have to retrain your party, and the game also requires NO meta knowledge. To me, this is painstakingly obvious -- after all, I have finished the game without retraining my party or using meta knowledge. So where does your claim come from? What kind of an approach do you have?

I will also be happy to admit that I'm not logical here: sometimes the flaws I described above will ruin a game, sometimes not, and often I can't really explain why. However, there's no uncertainty about actually knowing whether they ruin a game or not.

Ok, fair enough. I agree that P:K is not that great visually. It is also not that great in some other respects, either, but I still finished it. Even if - heck - the whole of the last chapter was just a mess. The encounter design was so unnecessarily cruel that you wouldn't believe it. (I switched to story mode, i.e. the easiest difficulty you can get, anything else wouldn't have sense for me.)

It appears to have the NWN-flavored 3D approach, though. I find that quite off-putting: no matter how interesting the tilesets look initially, they get old very quickly. The graphical side is one of the absolute draws of Deadfire for me; the individually created city (and other) visuals are so damn good. Like, the rooftop terrace at the palace in Deadfire is just gorgeous. I don't mind the complete lack of graphics. I love playing NetHack in ASCII. But the 3D gets old very quickly, in my view.

I am looking forward to Black Geyser, which should be coming out fairly soon. It looks modest but I'm going to buy it anyway to support the developer (unless the initial reception it absolutely awful).

I fully agree with what you say. I appreciate the difficulty of making games like this. But it's still sad that there aren't more of them. I'm not complaining, and I certainly don't feel entitled to games like this, as they're extremely difficult to make well, but heck, I am sad that there aren't more of them around. Given the right circumstances, I would be very keen to provide writing content for a title of this sort, as I think I'm pretty good at it, but I could certainly not help in any of the programming areas. Pathfinder: Kingmaker was a game where I often thought, "Dang, it wouldn't even be hard to write stuff that's an awful lot better than this".

I understand this very well, and this mirrors my experience, too. Every once in a while, I go looking around, but there's nothing there. It's very sad. There's BG2, then there's PoE and Deadfire, then there's P:K (with all of its faults), then there's Disco Elysium (which was good but which I won't play again), and that's it. Boy I wish there was more. IWD lacks character interaction and narrative finesse, the 3D approach of NWN gets extremely repetitive and destroys most of the party interaction, ToEE had too many faults, turn-based games like D:OS just put me off, and so on. So yes, I'm picky, too.

Thanks for that comment. Those language errors are astonishing, if what you're saying is true. I don't doubt you, because P:K also has a lot of language errors. I suppose they are explained (but certainly not justified) by the fact that the game's produced by a Russian company. I don't know whether anything similar applies to Tower of Time. Even Deadfire had a couple of language errors, but I wouldn't describe that as a problem, even if it is annoying. Most books have them, too, even good ones. Ha, I was just working on a book by a famous writer who suggested that basically everyone's life is exceptionally difficult. That made me chuckle. Evidently he didn't see the impossibility there. Everyone's life can be very difficult, that's true, but there is no way everyone's life can be exceptionally difficult; anyone who claims that simply doesn't understand what "exception" means.

I don't think there is such a thing as "bug-inducing content". I agree that Owlcat's effort was misguided to some degree, but I can easily forgive that because it was a result of ambition. I trust they will do better with the next game. For me, P:K is clearly better than Tyranny, hotfixes or not. The entire system in Tyranny is off-putting, as is the thematic starting point, although I do agree that there is more quality in the writing.

But this is just your opinion. Pathfinder: Kingmaker has sold twice as much as Tyranny, so people clearly like its approach, even if you don't. I would certainly suggest P:K to the OP, as I think he might enjoy it a lot (even if the game does have serious problems, especially in the writing department).

Hmm. Thanks to both of you. I suppose I'll have to take a closer look at it, then. Maybe this weekend.

Deadfire is, indeed, a strange beast. The story doesn't really work if you look at it carefully; it's just strange that the great revelation of PoE is essentially ignored in Deadfire, and then there's the paradox of the apparently urgent chase for Eothas, on the one hand, and the fact that the game is clearly designed so that you're meant to also explore the entire archipelago, on the other. It doesn't add up, it's just weird. However, the game's still great. I will happily agree with everyone who thinks that the game's foundations are shaky, but the game is still great.

Interesting! I took a quick look at it, and it seems to emphasize dungeon crawling and combat a lot. A bit like Icewind Dale, perhaps, in that sense. There doesn't appear to be much storytelling, so I probably won't give it a try, but at least it's nice to see that there are games like this around.

To a great extent, I agree with both you and what @Boeroer says above. However, I think the OP also has a point. The intro and beginning of the game rather strongly suggest that the player character has been involved in actions and with institutions that aren't exactly salutary, to put it mildly. This is obvious, isn't it? So there can be a bit of a conundrum right at the start. I did find a starting point like that a bit difficult. But I got on with it, and I agree that you don't have to play evil. I also agree with Boeroer in the sense that the game has a lot of other faults, as I didn't get even close to finishing it.

Apart from Pathfinder: Kingmaker, there aren't any games that you can really try, as far as I know. For a complete change of scenery, try Disco Elysium. It's an excellent story, heartily recommended.

They may well be too hard. As I said, I only attempted two of them, and both of them only once. (After reading these forums, I have realized that I am probably not a very good player when it comes to the battles. I would probably struggle on PotD in the main game, but then I'm mostly interested in the story and the sense of adventure, not battles as such, so I'm fine with being just average at fighting.) The megabosses also have the problem that they can realistically only be beaten at or near the end of the game. From this it follows that whatever items you're going to gain from them are not going to help you a lot, if at all. So there's no real motivation to beat them, except the sense of completing everything (which I don't have). I certainly like to do all the quests I can find, but beating all possible monsters is not on my agenda. So what happens if you chat with Aloth in Ukaizo after FS? I have no idea, I didn't do it...

I can also vouch that the DLC can be completed without the side quests. I only ever did two of them, because their FedEx nature felt a bit cheap. I wonder whether there's a consensus regarding the respective merits of the DLCs. For me, Beast of Winter is by far the best. The problem with FS is that it comes so late: by that time, I already want to finish the game. Also, epic-level adventures are not as interesting. But I'm happy to agree that these are not so much faults of the DLC as such, simply its placing. The story in FS is quite all right. SSS doesn't have much of a story, which is always a minus for me.

I agree: SSS is not super hard. The megabosses are, although even with them I'm not sure if it's a question of difficulty (mind you: could well be) or simple grinding. I have tried two of them once, and as it felt like I was banging my head against a huge wall of hitpoints, I quit mid-fight, because it was just taking too long and felt pointless. I hadn't thought about those loading screens in SSS, I wasn't bothered by them. But now that I think of it, it does appear you're quite right. There is a design flaw there, and it can cause a lot of frustration on some computers.

Neither my computer nor my video game were bought directly from ads. My book and record collection also numbers in the thousands, and essentially none of them(*) were brought directly from ads. Buying my home also had nothing to do with ads. And so on. See? You don't know what you're talking about. Don't make ridiculous claims. You have your world, and it can be whatever it is, I'm not claiming anything about it. But please don't make untrue claims about other people's worlds. You just don't know them. (*) Essentially = there may be a few whose purchase had something to do with ads, although I can't think of any, and they are certainly less than one per cent.

You are perfectly entitled to regard yourself primarily as a consumer. But please don't assume that anyone else sees the world that way. Your claim that everything people have came from an ad is also quite obviously untrue.

For a while I thought the problem might be in the fact that English is not his first language. But actually, this does not appear to be the case: English is his first language, he's just really bad at it. I could be wrong, of course, but the errors he keeps making don't look like the kind of errors people make in their second or third languages. (English is not my first language, either, so I'm willing to be quite forgiving as long as people get their point across, but when someone's being as obnoxious as this person constantly is, it doesn't actually provoke kindness in me.)

You know, a number of people have pointed out that your superior attitude is not helpful and your arguments, if they can be called that, are quite poor. Yet you maintain that attitude and produce even worse arguments. Could it be a good idea to just stop and let it lie?

This was interesting in the sense that I never knew the term "pillars of eternity" was around before this game. Did you people know this? Would be nice to hear! My ignorance is probably explained by the fact that most of the religious knowledge I have is not in English. That is, I have not read the Bible or other religious works in that language.