Tigranes

'run back to stronghold/town and rest every 3 fights or so is not fun.' That sounds sucky, yeah. Why not put the difficulty down, build the party more defensively to avoid going gung-ho, etc? There are problems with the per-rest/per-enc stuff in both POE1 and POE2, but I wouldn't want the game to let me unload all I got every single fight, and wipe out the attrition dynamic.

I should say, I really loved how dry POE1 was. That was the big positive for me. Most RPGs have way too much overwrought woe is me cringy Disney-on-steroids drama dripping from every line of dialogue, and relative to that Eder, Sagani, etc. were really refreshing and enjoyable. (Durance and GM are very melodramatic, but I couldn't help but like Durance, at least.)

POE had a pretty decent story, it was just (1) too serious and heavy-handed, which is distinct from having a serious and dark story; (2) way too wordy with far too much exposition dumping. The combination of those two makes the story wearisome and sloggy in a way that doesn't happen in Torment, MOTB or KOTOR2, all of which again have very serious themes, but are far better written. No opinion yet on POE2. I like the first hour, though they again needed an editor cutting out all the superfluous and overwrought descriptives repeated 8 times over.

Good to have a list. Pathfinder and Chaos Chronicles are our best bet for the 'IE experience' and are definitely the ones to watch. (Black Geyser has a long history of question marks over the basic competence of the developers, such as copypasting the POE UI then adding some hilariously broken animations, but hopefully it ends up proving itself in the long run.) Disco Elysium looks fantastic, and possibly the unique, innovative story-driven experience that we didn't quite get with the new Torment. The New World, a colony ship party-based RPG, should be on the list: http://irontowerstudio.com/new-world-features

I'm trying a barbmonk now and yeah, it seems like early levels your go-to is just open combat with Swift then Frenzy, and then go ham.

I don't think the VA itself is that bad, but it's the awkwardness of voiced narration interjecting. I'd much rather mute it - but at the end of the day it's not a huge deal.

This seems to work. Thanks!

I have a grand version of this where it takes a dozen clicks to do anything, so I never got past the main menu. Non-english IME, Windows.

Would be interesting to look at the actual budgets. DOS1 sold a lot more than POE, and I think at higher average price points given its faster sales accumulation, so there will have been a lot more money to throw at DOS2. But there are many half-knowns here, including the ROIs on console ports, what cut Paradox took for distributing POE1 and whether DOS1 did better there, the fact that Larian and Obsidian are based in completely different physical areas costwise, the fact that Obsidian are a multi-project company in a way Larian only sort of is, etc.

Don't try to tell other people what they feel, and just listen. I certainly won't tell anyone playing story mode why they must be doing it and what they must be getting out of it.

"Good sir, can I ask you a question, do you actually play video games on a high difficulty?!" "Oh, since you asked, I guess, hrm, yeah, I do." "Liar! Surely this cannot be true! You braggart! Do you enjoy pretending you are better than all of us?!" "But..." "Silence! Well you can snob all you like, I am proud of my chosen difficulty rating, I have a wife and kids to feed after all!" *transform into beast shape*

Or they say they eat strwaberry jam because they eat strawberry jam. Why would you even care?

It's no surprise: if you've played many CRPGs in your life, then the hardest difficulty is usually "normal", including POTD. After all, if you've spent thousands of hours playing similar kinds of games, you're going to have some accumulated competency, however useful/useless. And if you haven't, that's obviously no cause for shame. Most people ignore a vast majority of the features in any given game, just as most of us ignore most of the functions on excel or photoshop.

I do think not making deadlines in anything is unprofessional, and the game industry should learn to stop missing 90% of all deadlines. But I also know that this happens not so much as a result of laziness or incompetence at the level of individual developers / studios, and more to do with the structural problems of how ridiculously the whole endeavour is funded, budgeted, managed, estimated... it's almost a small miracle that games, however stupidly buggy and late as they always are, end up getting made. So a small wish, as long as we're having pipe dreams, is that the industry grows and matures in a way that actually learns to have sane and professional development processes. Heh.

I don't think not having full VO was ever a 'selling point' for anybody, but for sure, VO costs so much and it really isn't very important in my opinion. But it's just going to be a constant demand for every game that doesn't have it.

" I'm not saying the company is in shambles, just saying that if it was - " "I took business classes, having a history in business is how I landed my job." Reminds you of someone, doesn't it?

My vote is for better balance design, and minimal level scaling.

Games, and a million other things in life, are delayed all the time, even with people in the industry often working 70 hour weeks in crunch time. I don't really need to add more work on them. There's other things to do for a month. (And if there isn't, and I end up terribly bored, that sucks, but that's not on them.)

I guess the dude got to play behind the doors versions of every game that was ever delayed, and knows better than all those devs and publishers.

Huh. I guess I missed out, since I never tried the beta or bothered to follow all the dev comments. I guess for me it's about the big vision of the game, where I think they ultimately stuck to the KS pitch - even if a million things changed in between.

For me, it's remarkable how similar the KS video is to launch (didn't do the beta). The major thing that's missing is proper large-scale / siege / horseback combat - hence paring it down to 'part 1' release - but the visual style, the basic combat system and even the animations, the design of medieval towns and wilderness, etc. is all there. Of course, POE for example had virtually zero in-game footage to speak of at this stage, and a single mock-up screenshot. The pickpocket minigame indeed is very silly. I still think the game would be better off without open-world - and that also goes for W3 and quite a lot of other open-world projects - but ah well, that's the vogue right now.

Fine. Get it right.

The Siamese Twin Skull Mystery in Arcanum is unparalleled. 1) You never 'solve' the mystery and make all the pieces fit together perfectly. 2) Some quests, some mysteries, some plots, are larger than you - and so, you never quite catch the 'bad guy', you realise you can't solve everything. 3) The sheer eery, creepy moments along the way, like finding that secluded island full of blood-soaked medical beds. 4) The fact that, afterwards, you'll never walk the streets of Tarant and look at the nobles in the same way again, leaving some new knowledge about how the world works that might otherwise have been a boring loredump.

You don't really need to 'upgrade' your gear very often, and if you have normal attire and only put on heavy armour at certain moments, the repairing isn't too bad (although it really should be toned down anyway). It's also interesting to larp a little bit on that account, then get caught out in standard cloth when you are ambushed. "Ha ha, assassins at the banquet! You didn't expect that, did you, Henry?" "Oh, no, I wear my breastplate to the brothel, the bathhouse, everywhere."

Parries are actually far easier than, say, the Gothics, because of the Matrix slowdown. Just tap (not hold) when the enemy begins their attack animation, and then you get the slowdown/green shield icon for your counterstrike. I like how it encourages you to constantly stay on the move, and to move your own weapon around (via the 5 directions) so that you're well placed to parry / master-strike. Combos are a different thing altogether - I almost never got them, because it's so hard to get two or three hits in a row without the enemy interrupting you. I like the fact that either side getting one solid combo will have a huge impact on the outcome of the battle, and that you really have to make each hit count, but that's the downside of it. Haven't been able to play with all my work trips, but I hear that the balancing is at its best earlier on (say, between levels ~3 and 10 of your combat skills), and then with good armour and high skills it becomes too easy, even without cheesing.