NathanH

Something like this would be extremely useful.

I am a big fan of those type of books and play a lot of them to this day. So, this is a good explanation of why I like all these things displayed in the game. Indeed, I must commend the developers for allowing all of the options to be visible, this is very pleasant and not very usual. In fact a common modern development in digital adaptations of adventure gamebooks is to hide all of that from the player, a decision I find extremely annoying.

I have all the dialogue information turned on. I want to see the mechanics of what I'm doing and the mechanics of why I can and can't do things.

That wacky curmudgeon PrimeJunta Of poor verse was ever the hunter By the end of the thread He wished he was dead But only could grumble and chunter.

People keep saying this, but no it's not. Not coming from Gamespot, which operate on a 6-10 scale with inflated value on a triple AAA publishers. Looking over their recent reviews, Gamespot have given 9/10 to 2 PC games this year (Hotline Miami 2, The Talos Principle) and 10/10 to none. So, 8/10 is a strong score for a Gamespot PC review.

Originally I thought I would dislike this XP system, but in fact I rather like it! This is because I want to go around every area fighting everything I can fight, and in this system I can do that without accidentally becoming ridiculously high level.

Oh my, I didn't notice this at all. Thanks!

It's certainly true that a metacritic score of 50 indicates a game is viewed as rather poor. The reviewing scale is not really using the full range in most cases. I believe it mirrors grading in many education systems. But, 80 still indicates a good game.

This sort of claim gets made in pretty much every thread like this in every forum ever, but doesn't seem to have a lot of basis in reality. Very few games achieve a metacritic average of over 90. It seems there are only 108 PC games that satisfy this, and this includes some expansions and re-releases. If you look at RPGs, there are only about 15 with higher Metacritic scores than 90.

Steam doesn't really "patch" in the traditional sense, it just plonks down replacement files. If there are small changes within big files, this is unwieldy

Divinity is a really good game, so it's not really going to be surprising if some reviewers think it's a better game than PoEt. I'm not sure which I prefer right now myself. But D:OS was probably my favourite game last year, along with Age of Wonders 3. I haven't played Inquisition, but my feeling is that it's sufficiently far from either PoEt or D:OS that comparing their scores isn't very meaningful.

More seriously: I think if Obsidian were to do something like backer NPCs again, or another developer would copy the system, they should impose that they're allowed to adapt names to make them fit in. Some of the names obviously don't fit in the setting and this is annoying.

Mostly it seems you can kill any of them if they're on their own, but if anyone sees it (for instance if they are in pairs) you get the rep loss even if you kill both. This isn't completely accurate though, because in some house in Defiance Bay there were two backer NPCs and I killed one, and the other didn't care. So I killed him too. I am pretending that the backer NPCs are all part of a big secret plot that you can only find out about because of your special powers. So, you must kill them where you can, but everyone thinks you're just a crazy murderer if you're caught.

To clarify: I don't mean positioning in the custom formation, I mean the order of the portraits in the bottom-left of the main UI. You can drag these around as you please. As far as I can tell, these determine your location in the scripted sequences. For instance, Aloth used to be the second portrait and appeared next to my PC in these boss fight situations, but when I dragged Eder's portrait into the second position, he took that space instead. I have never tried to drag anyone into the first position though, so I don't know whether that works.

Can't you drag your tank's portrait to the #1 position? You can rearrange all the other 5 slots as you please. I haven't tried replacing my leader though.

This is so so so annoying. Please, let me rest in the outdoor area or let me fast travel to and from my bedroom.

I've always quite like "trash mobs" in RPGs, they give me the chance to try stuff out and understand the system better in a non-stressful environment.

It's good.

I did find this rather confusing and weird. On the other hand, it means I don't have to worry about learning what everything is immune to or checking it every encounter. As with any such streamlined system, it has its advantages and disadvantages.

The key question is probably whether the PoEt designers and indeed the designers of future RTwP RPGs are going to carefully analyse the results of the PoEt systems and learn from them, or going to be dogmatic about it. My main worry from reading the designers' statements from PoEt is that they are quite dogmatic and make simplistic arguments. But maybe this is just what they say in press releases because it's easier.

My only advice is to try to stop seeing what is represented on your screen as a faithful representation of the fictional alternative reality, but rather a collection of prompts for the story-in-your-head. Thus, if your barbarian looks foolish sneaking around everywhere, this doesn't cause any trouble for the story-in-your-head, because in that your barbarian is not sneaking around, but is just naturally eagle-eyed. On a related note, a related problem is that the sneaking animations in general look fairly silly, whether you have them always activated or never.

Make a mod for yourself that gives you a 60 second loading screen and removes 75 cp when you rest, and voila, you have your awesome strategic dimensions back. Please explain why this is not exactly the same if you disagree. The point is that the resting system is telling you that you oughtn't be doing this. It's clear that you're not really supposed to leave the dungeon, go to an inn, buy camping supplies, go to sleep for a night, and then come back to the dungeon. But you can't reasonably put this hard limitation in the game, otherwise people will get irrevocably stuck in dungeons. So, leaving the dungeon and coming back again later is a possibility in order to fix this situations, but you shouldn't be looking at it as something you're planning for. You should be planning to play a dungeon with x rests, where x is your camping supplies. Having said that, I can definitely see an argument for camping supplies being used up more slowly when you have fewer party members, thus helping smaller parties.

This is quite a challenging question because the designer must balance on one hand avoiding imposing their narrow idea of what a player ought to find fun on players who genuinely disagree, and on the other hand providing enough focus and restrictions to direct players towards the styles of play they genuinely do enjoy. I think players will tend towards taking easier options, particularly if there's no inconvenience to them. Imagine you took PoEt and allowed automatic consequence-free resting at any point, but changed nothing else. I am fairly confident that many players would start to rest an awful lot more, and that for most of them this action would be bad for them. The resting system gives us some focus as to what we should be doing: I know I shouldn't be looking at resting more than 4 times per dungeon on Normal, even though it's physically possible for me to do so at only personal out-of-game inconvenience. I'm confident that this camping supplies restriction is going to be good for most players' focus. Options are a reasonable approach, with suitable "are you sure you want to be doing this?" documentation. anameforobsidian makes a reasonable point above that pre-buffing is also not so compatible with some classes; still, I can imagine it wouldn't hurt much to simply make the Cipher class unable to pre-buff individually.

I've always rather liked pre-buffing, it gives a wide range of power to your party so you have the capability of really dialling up your strength for a given fight if you want to. It also allows you to play "naturally" for most of the game, until you hit something troublesome, and then you work out how you use your extra reserve power to overcome that particular challenge. It's a bit like cast-per-rest abilities: there isn't really much in-game beyond inconvenience stopping you from blowing all your per-rest abilities on every encounter and resting afterwards, but I wouldn't ever do that, even if resting was free and convenient. Unfortunately it seems from my experience that a lot of people won't follow this "natural" approach and need more strict treatment (I remember the first time I played multiplayer BG2: my party rested after every encounter, I was horrified). You want most of your encounters not to need pre-buffing / blowing all per-rest abilities, but you also know that you have to strictly stop people from doing it because they can't be trusted with playing the way that they'll enjoy more.A number of possibilities emerge. You can ban pre-buffing, but this is somewhat disappointing. You can make pre-buffs long duration but relatively weak, so it's a question of "do you want an extra spell per day, or do you want a small constant bonus" but this doesn't really increase your power much for specific fights like pre-buffing is "supposed" to do. You can make strict restrictions on resting, so that pre-buffing is possible but only once per dungeon or so; this mostly solves the problem but is super-inconvenient or even worse unwinnable for some. You can make less strict but more elaborate resting restrictions, such as "if you rested n times since starting this dungeon, the final boss gets n pre-buffs of his own", which mostly solves the problem but is much harder work to balance. Or you can ignore the people who don't play "properly", but this ignores the people who don't play properly. Hoom hmm. Edit: It's also worth noting that if you commit to allowing pre-buffing, there's no reason why this ought to be boring for the player. If the designers are committed to it, it'd be relatively easy to develop user-defined auto-buff scripts. Many roguelikes already offer such a feature.

Party members auto-attacking confused PCs is really annoying and should be fixed.