xzar_monty

Plasticky! That's an excellent choice of word. Couldn't agree more with that. I also agree with pretty much everything else you say about D:OS2. It's not a good game, I wouldn't recommend it. As for BG2, I completely understand what you're talking about, because pretty much the same happened to me as well (although I do think that the beginning of PoE is just a little bit better; the biawac is a brilliant device right at the start, absolutely brilliant). The feeling you get when you enter the Promenade and the game world opens up was magnificent. I also went into the game blind, and after finishing ToB I decided to go all the way back to BG1, and I must say I was mightily disappointed. Was barely able to finish the game. Obviously I didn't know it at the time, but BG2 benefited from the fact that most of the dross in BG1 had been cleared away -- one particularly notable example being the monotony of walking around all those maps that were mostly empty and on which essentially nothing worthwhile ever happened. (ToB was way too railroaded, by the way, so it's BG2: Shadows of Amn that is the true masterpiece. Man oh man it's good.)

You didn't ask me this, but I'll answer you anyway. The dialogue system appears really poor, i.e. the manner in which your possible answers are presented differs from the way they are generally given in games like this, and the way it's done just doesn't look good(*). This was a huge downer for me, especially because the writing didn't appear particularly good. The game has no Tab key that highlights stuff in your neighborhood, which, again, was just a bad call in my view. The graphics, although good, are nowhere near as gorgeous and interesting as in Deadfire. But of course the main clincher is the world and the story, and both of them were ordinary enough for me to go "ho hum" in approximately two hours. This was in huge contrast to PoE, whose start was superb, even better than the start of BG2, which is really saying something. (*) You can do a youtube search for "divinity original sin dialogue" and you'll instantly see what I mean.

NetHack and chess are turn-based, and I enjoy both. But in isometric cRPGs, it just doesn't work for me -- so the context and setting are also extremely important. It will be interesting to see how BG3 succeeds. I know very little about D:OS2, because I quit it rather early on, but it didn't give me any impression of great storytelling.

Hey, that was good reading! One of your most pertinent points was this: "Difficulty: I played on POTD with 'all' upscaling and felt that the game was hardest in the beginning and gradually got easier. Maybe the first few battles were almost a little too hard, but I can't complain as it's the hardest difficulty. But doesn't it make more sense for a game to start easier and get harder instead of the opposite?" Yeah, this is a strange one. Gorecci Street and the Engwithian Digsite are (for many) the hardest fights in the game, and they're right at the start. It does feel very odd. But, in the end, I would also rank Deadfire up there with the best of them, ever so slightly below BG2 and Disco Elysium. (BTW, we apparently share the exact same disappointment with Neverwinter Nights and D:OS2. Boy oh boy, they both seemed to promise so much, but...)

This tends to be a major difficulty in everything on the internet: from the noise itself, you cannot determine which percentage of opinions it represents.

It's funny that although both P:K and BG2 are both rtwp, they are still both very much stuck in a "round" format, as you say. It's doubly funny because for me, turn-based is a total turn-off. It is reason enough for me not to even give BG3 a try. It just looks stilted, so artificial, even if I'm fully aware that rtwp in P:K and BG2 are technically almost the same, under the hood. But when everyone pauses in turn-based and then everyone moves on their turn, it just looks so damn awful in my view. Can't help it, I'm afraid.

Ha. Recovery is actually something I've thought about, at least in passing. I've never played Deadfire on PotD, as it just doesn't appeal to me. Are you saying that recovery doesn't mean much even at that difficulty? For it surely doesn't appear to matter (basically) at all on the lower difficulties.

I am also optimistic. The dev team simply must have learned quite a bit from all the criticism it received from the first game. It's also good to know that the team is a lot bigger now; this was news to me.

It's not a big thing, but I also happen to think that the cover and repeating loading screen is a blemish on the game. It makes you expect something that never happens. This is not good.

Yeah, I know this. It's utterly baffling, and my thoughts mirror yours: what were the game designers planning/thinking? It's so strange. But yes, you are right, this kind of thing is a definite weakness in the game, and I can see why someone could quit because of it. I did not quit, however, and I did finish my playthrough, although it has to be said that the whole final part of the game is utter nightmare in terms of design: unbelievably cruel encounters all the way through. It seems as if the designers wanted you to metagame, i.e. enter an area, get beaten, reload the game, completely rework your strategy, enter the same area again, either get beaten or not (and either repeat the reload X times or not, at this point), then enter the next area, and repeat. This was extremely poor and received a whole lot of perfectly warranted criticism. There was no sense of adventure or discovery, it was very much a grind-fest. It has to be reiterated, though, that the game does have a lot of charm as well, because I did finish my playthrough. And because we still have corona and I started another playthrough (surprise for myself as well), I noticed that there's one thing where P:K has the upper hand over Deadfire: in Deadfire, everything is pretty much all the same every time (give or take a little), whereas the randomness built into P:K means that individual games look more different from one another. This is good and increases replayability, although I am not in the habit of replaying.

There are other ways to cheat than rigging dice. A blatantly obvious example of the way P:K cheats against the player is the encounter at Verdant Chambers where the PC has to go alone to meet the nymph. Enemies and even traps appear out of nowhere into the map (mainly, the plant creature and the difficult trap outside the gate) once you speak with the nymph. There is no way to legislate for that, that is cheating plain and simple. There is also a wolf lair where wolves appear out of nowhere into areas you have already walked through and made sure are empty. And these are ordinary wolves (even if big), they don't know how to teleport. So I very much stand by my argument that P:K cheats against the player and appears to be quite happy to do so.

You're dead right. But it's hard to write well. Good writers are few and far between. I would argue that pretty much every style can work if the writer is good enough. Your parody of PoE/Deadfire style is good, though, and I do agree that when verbosity goes overboard, it's really easy to spot and it looks more foolish than most. But it's also true that simply working at "less is more" doesn't make anyone a Hemingway. It's a style that's really hard to do well, too.

Would you care to elaborate on your grievances with the encounter design? I'm really interested. And I can certainly agree on the writing: much of it is simply awful. What also bothers me a lot is that the game so obviously cheats against the player. This is a huge no-no. In tabletop role-playing world, GMs like that would lose their players very quickly. I honestly can't understand what they were thinking.

Tartuccio is his name. I agree, he is awfully poor. You also describe the contradiction quite well: the setting is trying to be doom and gloom, but many of the characters are pure cartoon stuff. It doesn't really work. However, lots of things in the game do work, and I did enjoy my playthrough. The writing, though, is often simply poor.

My understanding is that like D:OS2, BG3 is turn-based only, which is enough for me: I won't buy it. The turn-based approach in D:OS2 was a huge turn-off and I won't be playing games that only use it.

Avellone wrote Nok-Nok, the goblin character. It's written well from a technical point of view (i.e. the language works), but it's still cheesy and unsubtle. And yes, the romance options can be... dubious. Btw, I haven't experienced those bugs you mention. However, what does bug (sic) me an awful lot is that the "slow walking mode" tends to randomly activate in nearly all battles, and I have to press space + V (or whatever it was) to get everybody back to proper walking speed. I can't see how that's anything other than inexcusable from a game that's been out for so long. Also, if you remain in your stronghold for extended periods of time through narrative reasons alone (like, conquering a new area), you don't gain hit points back even in a period of two weeks. That's a massive oversight for me. Earlier on, I seem to recall that you didn't even get rid of fatigue... it was like you were awake the whole time or something.

Most of these games don't sound like classics to me. Two, yes, but not the others. And yes, I may be ignorant party here.

It doesn't look too buggy to me, but then of course this may vary from person to person, i.e. how they play and what they encounter. But what kind of bugs are you talking about, for instance? And yes, the characters and writing is nothing to get excited about. Deadfire had ambition, even literary ambition, and I applaud that, even if some of it went a bit overboard. But in P:K, the writing is just cheesy and oftentimes poor. My question to you is: what is your sense of the writing, is it intentionally poor and cheesy and tongue in cheek, or do you think somebody actually thought this was good adventure writing? Linzi is just too childish, Amiri is way too much of a cliche, and so on. But then, every now and then there's something that gives the impression that somebody actually tried to write good stuff but didn't succeed. So I'm a bit confused and can't really decide whether it's serious or tongue in cheek or whether it actually even mocks the player who's prepared to enjoy that kind of writing.

Your last point is almost cruel because it so effortlessly dismantles the other person's argument -- but yes, you are correct. What you highlight there is something that appears to be common on forums like these: people have strong opinions, but they have difficulty appreciating that no facts or conclusions naturally follow from their strong opinions. When we try to determine the relative failure of Deadfire, opinions don't really count for much (including my opinions, of course). Heck, I think D:OS2 is not a good game at all. I gave up on it in something like three hours, because it's so poor, in my view. But in terms of facts, I am one of the people who contributed to it being a huge success, even if I think it's rubbish.

Hang on a minute now. Most of the classics? Really? I hereby challenge you to name five classics that only became successes years after release. I couldn't name any myself.

The turn-based option was not an intended standard (though I'm not sure what you mean by this), it was an extra. Also, your argument doesn't really work, because Poe2 sales were poor from the start, and at that point people certainly didn't know what was wrong or right with the game, especially because the reviews were perfectly normal.

Fair enough.

Ok. Then we just have a difference in temperament, here: for me, it's interesting to try something and see what happens, while it's not interesting to already know what's going to happen and then just go through the motions.

Why don't you go ahead and see what happens.

Whoops. I was wrong there, so apologies for that. Anyway, I was still disappointed by how easy he was.