Tigranes

Even POE1's trees are "deep" enough to make voice acting prohibitively expensive for its budget... as we saw with its lack of full VO.

Well, I don't think getting rid of humour would help Divinity, you know..

As long as they can afford it, take the time. Of course, the sales metric has now become more complicated with early access..

It's also a question of whether the writers personally want to put in humour, and/or feel comfortable writing lighter things.

I could not disagree more with this assessment. First off, plenty of pre-combat buffing options already exist. Food. Potions. And priest trap spells. Regular traps too. Second, the game already has such an effortless stealth system, so that 90 percent of the fights permit you to position your guys perfectly before engagement. Not just positioning but you can literally open engagement with things like a volley of ranged shots. With all this, why does the player need more buffs? Adding such a thing would make the game ridiculously easy and actually narrow combat's strategy. The irony is that in POE, I can't think of many instances where I'd really like to cast spells outside of combat. Everything has been designed to minimise such situations - which is a pity, to see such beautiful environments reduced to being mostly static flavour for combat, but that's down to the focus of the series.

Wormerine has covered the various costs and processes involved very nicely. It is also patently false that POE1's music was done "for free". Obsidian employ Justin Bell as an audio director precisely to create and process the music, among other things. His expertise is not "free", and the equipment they have invested in is also not "free". You don't get some coders in a room and say "why don't we just get a laptop mic and record a jingle in a jiffy". Doing it in-house, or even in rare instances where you grab the producer for voice acting and realise he is perfect (which happened in Torment), does not mean that you can do it all the time, or that you can do it easily and without costs (monetary and otherwise). Some basic details re. Bell: https://eternity.obsidian.net/eternity/news/update-76-music-in-pillars-of-eternity- http://gamemusic.pl/en/justin-bell-pillars-eternity/

POE was pretty doom and gloom, and yeah, I think it could have done with certain moments of levity. Not to make it less bleak, but as others have pointed out, that accentuates the bleakness when done right.

"There is absolutely no evidence of this happening, but IF it were happening, would you guys be worried?!?!" Go. Away.

Yeah, I'm fine with a bit more 'tonal variance'. Sometimes the funny and absurd sets up the most meaningful moments for the serious themes - e.g. Mourns-for-Trees, PST.

Addressing some of the big points, like Resolve/Might, seems reasonable. I'm not really so fussed that there's some very direct, one-to-one correspndence between a fan proposal and dev action, though, only that they go into a wider pool of things they're looking at.

NWN2 had to do with the sheer number of classes and combinations available, especially after the expansion packs - there were dozens! It's always been difficult to balance these, though. Even in AD&D IE games it's often clear whether you should dual, multi or single, depending on your party and class composition (e.g. how single Thieves were often on the short end of the stick).

Oh, there's no reason to 'hate' SOD. At least it was original content sold for money, unlike everything else they ever sold. It just didn't seem to be anything great, but it's always nice to have more original IE content, so I'm glad it's around.

I liked Tyranny better than POE I know, honey, but I love you for who you are nonetheless.

If you don't like 'blobber' dungeon delvers, that rules out LoG, Grimoire, M&MX, and other recent revivals of in the area. Knights of the Chalice should be great for you unless it really must have a great story, but then, ToEE wasn't exactly fancy in that area either, so check it out.

Presumably you've played all the IE games, and even Drakensang and the like? Just in case: Knights of the Chalice is a one-man game but one of the most faithful adaptations of D&D ruleset ever alongside TOEE, and it's great fun for some old school tactical combat dressed around the barest trappings of a fantasy story. Realms of Arkania (not HD) is unparalleld in simulating the precariousness of an adventuring party. For newer games, Tyranny is a mediocre, watered-down POE with combat you can literally leave on autopilot, but the setting is unique enough that you might enjoy it. TTON is a subpar derivative and you're better off (re)playing the original Torment. DOS1/2 are nice and far more recommendable.

Honestly, when it comes to attributes, I'd say mechanical first and then dress it up in suitable conceptual so it makes sense. In 5th ed D&D, for example, the attributes make some degree of conceptual sense for roleplaying, but that comes from the mechanical system of having the attribs feed directly into skill proficiencies. So you're really thinking about that mechanical connection of, say, Performance with Charisma.

Icewind Dale, with a party of level one Jansens. Surprisingly, it's pretty fun - and pretty competitive. Amazing what a flatter power progression does.

I like having different systems to play alongside my AD&D CRPGs. I just want the system to be good.

It's not. It's OK, and if you are really hankering for fresh IE content even if it's not as good, then it'll serve just fine.

At this point, either Might or Strength will; have legions of people complain about how it's unrealistic or whatnot. Given how people opposed Might when it was first proposed, I think it's fair to say that's not the key problem - you get used to it, they are all abstractions and they're both pretty reasonable ones. So it really should be purely a factor of gameplay.

IKR, I made the thread and then I come back and it's like, "What has happened here?!?" When a thread goes on for more than 3 pages, it's not the same thread anymore.

Oblivion scaling is just used as an example because it's the easiest way to understand what a full-blown level scaled system looks like. Same goes for Gothic as its opposite. I get that we're also talking about many different solutions, including challenge rating style 'scaling' in D&D.

That could work. Also, many (most?) of the Total War games. I feel like if CA invested in a Total Re-engineering effort, and truly modernized both their engine, the core of their real-time combat, and the core of their over map ("4x-lite") into a better realized 4x game. Then they could have one of the greatest strategy games of all time. With each game it seems like they are buying a new fashion wardrobe, and slapping on the seasonal lipstick. But it could be so much more. I don't know what "modernise" means, though. What exact changes are we talking about, and how will that make the games better? I agree that they keep making the same freaking game over and over again, and never fixing the stuff that was wrong 3 iterations ago. But part of this is also down to how 'modernising' from a Risk-style map to a 3D map introduced so many problems while not really providing any improvements. I would say that returning to a Risk style map would actually allow them to provide more complexity (as you say, evolving from a 4x-lite). In combat, the graphics are already more than pretty enough - and again it might be that introducing a bit more constraint into the system will allow the AI to perform better and tactics to become more meaningful.

Hybrid builds were so fun in POE1, though - and weird ones. Muscle wizards were actually great fun to play, even more fun than standard wizards in some ways when going solo.

Cool stuff. It's nice to have a repository for posterity here.