xzar_monty

Yes. But we don't know if there even exists a wider public (anymore) for the kind of game PoE and Deadfire are. It's possible that the niche has simply become too small.

The fault in your logic is that in order to get a proper first impression, a game must be bought. As for your claim that "if the game is good, people will buy it", this is simply not true. It is also not false, as such. This is how it goes in all commercial ventures: 1) There are rubbish products that turn out to be immense successes. 2) There are rubbish products that don't sell and are forgotten. 3) There are superb products that turn out to be immense successes. 4) There are superb products that don't sell and are forgotten. 5) All possible levels of success are also possible for all products that fall between rubbish and superb. Before and upon release, it is impossible to know what becomes of any particular product.

So the question is, where do you get your numbers from?

You wrote: "Role-Playing games for the PC have consistently shown that they accrue success over time rather than being big trendy hits over the week." I asked you to back your claim up. You mention less than five titles. This does not constitute anything resembling proof, not even close. The main point remains that the overwhelming majority of sales takes place right after release, and even though there are anomalies (there tend to be, no matter what the subject), what you say doesn't change it one bit. Again, care to back your original claim up somehow?

Ha. I no longer have any interest in cloth maps and somesuch, but I do understand your nostalgia for the Ultima manuals. Those were the days etc. Delightful games, too!

Can you please back this up somehow? I don't think you are right. As Josh Sawyer himself commented when discussing the poor success of Deadfire, a vast percentage of sales come from the very first days/weeks the game is out. I think the quote is in this very thread (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain this is precisely what Sawyer said).

That's a fair point. Baldur's Gate II, for example, does have a tutorial where you get to do some really simple stuff -- can't really remember what.

Like you, I am undecied. I really have no opinion on that. Btw, in PoE, on gaining levels, I overwhelmingly favored "per encounter" abilities over "per rest" ones, because the former seemed so much more useful, given how rare it was that you absolutely needed to rest.

Ah, good point. This may be one reason why I never even thought of this before this discussion, such was the extent to which it was a non-issue. I don't do solo runs, and I don't min-max (coming from PnP, I regard min-maxing as very much a no-no). Heck, I gotta say now, folks, talking about this stuff really makes me yearn for a proper CRPG of this genre to try. But I suppose there aren't any. At one point, I even tried Temple of Elemental Evil, but it wasn't very good, I only got to maybe level 4 or 5 before I chucked the whole thing.

Wow. This really is very interesting. I did all the bounties, even the hardest one, on Hard difficulty (or whatever it was one notch below PotD), and I never had to resot to that. I also never suffered from the system in the way you describe, although thelee is right in the sense that a couple of times I did rest precisely because one of my characters was so low on Health that they were close to permadeath and were not healable by anything other than rest. And like Boeroer, I definitely think the system was better than Deadfire's.

Wow! Very interesting. Thanks for that. It never caused any confusion for me. As far as I can remember, I also never (or practically never) used consecrated ground or any other persistent regeneration spells, so I didn't notice any of those effects. Obviously I am not denying anything you say, simply pointing out that my experience was very different indeed.

An interesting thing to note is that back in the ancient days, games like Ultima IV and V had quite a few cities (eight, plus three villages, plus three castles), each of which gave you a number of quests, many of which were related to one another in a way that made you travel from one city to another in pretty much the order that happened to please you. More recently, the big CRPGs tend to include only one or at most two major cities that tend to give you maybe a bit too many quests at a time, creating a certain confusion and a sense of I've no idea what I should do next. While I don't want to sound like an old-timer, which I probably am, I think that modern-day game developers could learn a thing or two from those early trailblazers, the Ultimas, especially IV and V.

It's still difficult to take your line of reasoning seriously, as it's a matter of opinion. Like: in PoE, resource management related to rest / health was still there, and in Deadfire, it was no longer there. I preferred the former. You may deem it ridiculous all you want, but I think that's being slightly obnoxious, since we're just talking preferences. Also, I never said we were talking about a fantabulous feature (or any linguistic permutation thereof), simply a feature. Definitely no need to take this any further, so let's just stop now, right?

It is not ridiculous, it is simply a different preference from yours. Like you have a distinctly different preference to the way you use language, and I am inclined to think there might be some people likely to call it various unpleasant names. Like Boeroer already said, it's a question of resource management, and I happen to prefer games where that is a relevant concern. In Deadfire, it most decidedly is not. In PoE it still was, to a certain extent (with Health). Resource management gives you a sense of accomplishment, the feeling that you've been able to work well within your constraints. This does not exist in Deadfire. It doesn't ruin the game, of course, but to me it is a drawback.

@Boeroer: Which game would you say achieves this balance most satisfactorily?

Agreed. PoE's mechanic was better and for exactly the reason you describe. Deadfire trivializes encounters because everything gets back to square one immediately afterward.

But you see, this is metagaming. Nothing wrong with it, but when you start the game knowing nothing about what's in store, you don't even know there's a mace of disruption in the game. Or that you can get an amulet of level drain immunity, etc. That's what makes the vampires scary, and that's just great.

To give another example of this: part of the lengedary status of Baldur's Gate II relies on the marvelous fact that early on in the game, you are afraid of the night. The vampires are just too damn dangerous. You really have to think where to go and what to do and at what time of the day. This is superb, absolutely superb. The nighttime Athkatla at early levels is the scariest place I've ever encountered in all my years of cRPGs. That's what you get when enemies actually hurt you in a way that you can't brush away.

I understand where you're coming from, but I suppose we'll just have to disagree here. My main battle-related grievance with PoE / Deadfire is that everything is rendered meaningless. If you survive a battle, it's as if it's never happened because everything is back to where it was (in PoE, you may lose some health, but in Deadfire, you can't lose even that). Thus, there are no monsters to be especially afraid of, there is nothing to particularly prepare for -- everything is the same, and if you survive, everything is meaningless: all the terrifying abilities that the monsters may have mean absolutely nothing. To me, that just makes the whole gaming experience much more bland than it could or should be. Yes, I know the possible injuries are there, but they are a very, very minor thing and you can always negate their effect immediately after the battle, there's no way they can actually hurt you. Both approaches are logical and consistent, and it's a matter of opinion which one you prefer. I absolutely prefer the approach where things mean something. You mentioned level drain. I agree, it is an extremely annoying effect. But that's the point. That's why you're supposed to be extra careful with certain undead. There are vampires in PoE / Deadfire, too, even if they're called fampyrs, but they mean nothing. They might as well be wolves, or monkeys, or slime molds, or rothes, or grid bugs, or any of the hundreds of fantastical creatures that appear in role-playing games. Nothing they can do can possibly scare you in any way whatsoever. I want enemies that can scare me and make me seriously consider whether I want to face them.

Btw, I went so far as to check the Swamp Witch's cottage area to see I'm certain what I'm talking about. So: I'm baffled that you went there at lvl 5-7. Also, the way I dealt with the area was to go there at one point (can't remember the level), deal with some of the creatures, notice that other creatures were way above my level and then return there something like five levels later. I regard this as sensible playing, and I did it with quite a few areas in the game.

You're putting it much too strongly, there. I can demonstrate it by pointing out that I survived those situations without communal protection from acid. I agree that P:K is ruthless to the point of being cruel(*), as I said, but pre-buffing is not necessary anywhere close to the extent you describe. (*) Sometimes I actually wondered what the designers were thinking, i.e. did they really think that some of their decisions were fun for anyone. They made me think of PnP GMs who would've been without any willing players after only a couple of sessions.

Your comment made me remember one big reason why I basically gave up on buffing in PoE and Deadfire altogether: you can't access your inventory during battle. There's a huge number of scrolls and potions in the game but only a relatively small number of quick slots to put them in, and if you don't happen to have the right ones there when the battle begins, forget about it. Because of this, I pretty much forgot about buffing fairly early on.

I'm sorry but this is just not true. While it is true that P:K is ruthless to the point of being cruel, pre-buffing to this extent is not necessary. I have only played the game once, so I never knew what was coming, and most of the time I did fine (on Normal, with enemy damage yanked up to 100% from the 80% it is by default on Normal). This only changed at the very end, at the House at the Edge (or was it End?) of Time. That whole area suffered from unnecessarily cruel design and was a big blemish on both the game and its makers. Three kind-of caveats. 1) I have been playing D&D since 1980s, so this type of world is something I know quite well. 2) While pre-buffing in the sense of using all you've got is not necessary, I will add that when travelling in dungeons, especially, it is only sensible to buff yourself with spells whose duration is 10 min / level or longer. (There are not that many of those, however.) 3) While it is not pre-buffing as such, I am quite happy to concede that P:K suffers from one of the annoying mechanics-related problems of the D&D world: as soon as combat begins, casting a combination of Haste on your party and Slow on the enemies is too powerful, as a general tool.

Ok, fair enough, good to have that cleared up.

I'm not sure if they're beloved. I don't understand your comment concerning saves -- it seems to me that you're either flat out wrong, or you're articulating yourself poorly. Needing a consumable to rest is a definite downer for me as well, particularly given how it worked in PoE: you have an infinite inventory, and you actually can't drop stuff (other than by putting it into containers) but you still can only carry 2 or 4 sets of camping gear. I thought that was just silly, and I still do, but it didn't put me off. Not being able to prebuff is, in the end, quite fine, but I suppose this is related to the difficulty: you don't really need to prebuff, in the same way that you don't need to optimize your gear, you'll do just fine (except maybe in the very beginning of the game). In the end it seems to me that removing the idea of prebuffing also removed the need to ever use scrolls or potions in the game, and I feel this is a bit of a loss -- especially because they are all over the place in the game, in terms of loot, items on sale, etc. But you just don't need any.