LeonKowalski

Combat was terrible in DA:O, it wasn't much better in BG, it's not any better in D:OS, it's not any better in PoE ... bad combat and western cRPGs go hand in hand really. PS. I have tried to enjoy DSA games, but god that ruleset is bad. Of course so is PoE's ... like almost all D100 flat RNG rulesets, needless granularity gives developers the temptation to pretend irrelevant modifiers are relevant and it doesn't really make the math more intuitive because relative vs. absolute percentage changes screw that up any way ... shoulda just done D20, or D10 if they want to be different.

Almost all of that was through unnecessary choices, almost all of them bad choices. I'm not talking about Unity here ... because Unity is almost 100% irrelevant. At most it would have presented a hurdle for importing new character models, but that would have been worked around in the end. Everything else which is relevant to modding they could have done with documented data formats and open tools (there's an Iron Python interpreter on Unity's own asset store for instance). Having a well architected seperation of engine code with game code in python would probably have resulted in less of a buggy mess ... not having their world/dialogue editor would be a pain, but this would be enough for some small mods (balance patches for instance). Given the way patch 1.04 went I think they have a mess of poorly architectured overly interdependent code on their hands.

Hopefully Obsidian and others will learn something for this and will offer quality next time ... it shouldn't be too hard to get a decent margin on this kind of thing even with good quality cloth and printing (it looks like it's been printed on a set of jeans, silk would be really nice). When you offer a worse deal than simply going to a local shop with a direct to garment printer you're doing it wrong.

If you design a game around solo play you will end up with lots of samey classes ... a class shouldn't be able to do everything relatively well. I want the game to be designed about group play and be excrutiangly annoying when played solo, with every class. Where's the challenge in going solo if you don't even notice the lack of party roles?

Mana wouldn't have helped, the balance with the Cipher would have stayed exactly the same because you still have the problem of daily vs. per encounter resources ... you'd have just pissed off the people who wanted a more Vancian wizard for nothing.

If they remove animal companion fatigue it basically becomes a free summon, which would be pretty good. Of course what is more likely is that they remove fatigue but make it take health damage ... which with it's atrocious defense will mean rather than being fatigued all day it will be dead all day.

I don't think the wizard is a problem really, cipher is just silly OP. The low level powers of the cipher need to be far weaker, something like a charm shouldn't be available as a fight opener to the cipher (but it should be to the wizard, the wizard should be an alpha striker ... the cipher should need long fights to get good). The game needs at least one Vancian caster who with a full complement of spells rules supreme and at least one simple beatstick ... there will always be players who want to play one of those.

Unity is entirely irrelevant for modding of game code ... most of the game code could have been handled in say external Python files (like with ToEE) without the Unity license getting in the way (they would have had to do the integration of Python with Unity themselves, but it's not a big deal ... it's been done before). Most of the data could have been in seperate well documented files without the Unity license getting in the way. Only for adding 3D content the Unity license might have gotten in the way, but I'm sure if the developers had wanted to find a way they could have (like they did with NWN2, which had much bigger license hurdles). Making a code base moddable pretty much goes hand with making it maintainable and debuggable (it prevents you from taking stupid short cuts to "save" time, which don't really ever save you any time in the end). If they had spend the time to architecture it right for modding I don't think we would have seen the patch 1.04 cluster****, which broke as much or more than it fixed.

The division between engine code and game code is more an (lost) art than a science ... but there will be a lot of original code in PoE which most people would count as engine code (the dialogue system, saving/loading etc). The easier to mod a game is the more slack I'm willing to cut the developer ... I'd prefer to get polished AND moddable games, but if I restricted myself to those I'd not be playing many games. Although if I had known the state of PoE I would have held off buying it, I'm not playing it any way (waiting for my ranger's pet to stop being fatigued all the time). I'll certainly be more careful in the future (like I have become with Bioware games).

In the old days separating game code from engine code was standard operating procedure, a practice which was perfected by Carmack and Sweeney ... and it's all been downhill from there. In D:OS and PoE the game developers seem to have gone out of their way to make their games unmoddable ... and somehow the community hasn't stood up to say DAMNIT WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT? Open source without capitalization doesn't mean open licensing ... just because we could mod the hell out of Infinity Engine games doesn't mean we could just take all their dialogue and copy/paste it, we could edit it. Given the quality of this game now there is no hope in hell of this being truly polished by the time they pull all their coders off it, it needs community fixing more than any of the Infinity Engine games ever did ... it has made it harder for the community to fix anything than the Infinity Engine games ever did.

I think failing quitly on unacceptable, detectable and almost certainly detected failures is something they learn in modern game development ... I've been annoyed by these quiet failures in other games as well. I think this kind of cover up shows a really bad mindset towards your customers and frankly it's unacceptable in a game this riddled with bugs. Even if failing forward is the default program behaviour even on the most heinous of failures because you consider it the best PR ... at least bloody log stuff like this. I'd prefer an ini setting as well "If the game state is so corrupted that playing on is just stupid, would you like to get a warning?" but at the very very very least bloody log it.

Guess this is not fixed in the latest patch?

Unless you get access to a bugzilla you're not really part of a beta, you're part of a PR program.