Tigranes

Making something interesting means taking a risk. You have to have everyone on the inside very convinced that this interesting cover is the right kind of interesting, and that it's not going to end up like the cover of Torment. It's very hard to get everybody to agree that this kind of interesting is the right kind. Hence, you end up with the bog standard, because the calculus is that you'd rather have the proven "hello, i shoot people, there are some boobs too" than to fail outright. Even in academic books written by single authors, where there is less risk (nobody buys them anyway), less stakeholders (a single author perhaps + publisher side), and more license to be weird, 90% of the time the author's suggestions are rejected and you end up with "this is a boring ass book, please do not buy."

I will cut you, taffer

POE Solo is obviously possible with almost any (all?) class, which is a great point in its favour. Actually, I'd have liked it if I had an option to disable the increased XP gain - it was a bit too strong. The stunlock thing was just a few players complaining, usually about a specific kobold in a specific map. Maybe that kobold should be there, maybe he shouldn't, *shrug* it really isn't a big deal. The kobold wasn't put there to prevent soloing and it didn't prevent anyone soloing.

Rogues are very powerful. POE is a lot tougher early on than later, but you should be able to just bump the difficulty to hard whenever you want. It's a design decision not to have quest markers. Obviously you do lose the convenience & sometimes you get frustrated, but I've noticed that with markers, I end up playing in this kind of tunnel vision way, beelining for the marker without really checking out the scenery or paying attention to the dialogue. You're not supposed to be able to do the whole megadungeon in one go - you'll come back every once in a while and do a bit more, and ultimately finish it with a late® game party. DA:O was consciously made as a callback to the great RPGs made around the turn of the century, because as you say they scratch an itch, they provide something unique. Other games to check out include Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 (originals, not the crappy enhanced editions), the upcoming Pathfinder game. But this does require you to play on PCs - this is really a PC genre. I thought you can turn the AI off so they don't move around? I might be wrong, it's been a while.

Quillon is correct. With POE1 the backer Steam keys were gradually made available in the 2-3 days before release, with a few exceptions where something went wrong for someone.

I mean, if anyone ever thought these kinds of lists are supposed to be a perfect representation of 'objective quality' or even the tastes of the forum, then they're barking up the wrong tree. Never going to happen. The nice thing, as epaminondas says, is that you can scroll through it and maybe find a couple of games you might like to try, and at least the recommender & recommendee is united by a shared taste in Obsidian games (maybe?). The same cannot be said for game mag lists that are like some badly tuned algorithm lifting random titles off the year's biggest advertisements.

I would really welcome any way to customise the text log - it's often a huge mess because it has to juggle so many different pieces of information, and it'd be nice to specify exactly what I want to see.

Beta or no beta?

Pacing was a widely acknowledged problem in POE1, both before and after White March - leaving aside more specific problems like POTD being too easy for some players. It's probably most sensible to focus on that - and as ninja says it doesn't necessarily have to mean less levels, I'd say the most important thing is to decouple power progression from being tied so strongly to levels via accuracy. (Haven't played the beta.) Re. 'universal', there's always been a reasonable argument that designers should just have a single difficulty level, and then put all their effort into making it very good. I'm a big proponent of modular difficulty (80 different sliders on HP, attack value, etc), but that's because (1) we don't get games with a single well designed difficulty level, often enough, and (2) as someone who plays a crapload of RPGs I'm aware that they really can't balance it for me. I'd be perfectly fine with 1 difficulty level - and in general it's been my experience that games with single difficulty levels do manage to have better pacing - and then provide easy ways to customise it, e.g. via .ini or even an external configuration tool.

Most RPGs have very steep power progression levels, too steep, and that makes it very difficult to balance. IE games (accidentally?) were helped in this by D&D rulesets; no longer were you going from doing 8 damage to 80,000 like in many JRPGs. Of course, some later D&D games "solved" this problem by making you go from level 1 to godlike 20+ levels in a single campaign. I would have been fine with POE1 going from levels 1-9 where you get kitted out with a lot of meaningful spells and you can build a clear character concept. So many people would say, I want more levels, it's more fun, I want to be powerful. Yes, but you actually lose meaningful sense of progression with more levels; in P1, going to level 12 (then 14 later) meant that you could take every talent you could possibly want and still have some left over, and later levels mostly meant numbers going up rather than any meaningful change in your tactics. The system they built was really for a smaller level range, and then they could have picked it up in Deadfire (e.g. 5-14) while changing how it works relative to now. Anyway, flatter curves would certainly help mitigate the sidequests/overlevelling conundrum - provided that you also start dissociating so many important bonuses with leveling. The worst part of POE1 system is the way accuracy is the single most important stat for anything, and it is overwhelmingly defined by leveling. It basically meant that getting an extra level, rather than what you do with those skills or the gear you have, was the most important aspect in steamrolling your enemies. In that sort of design, it becomes much more significant that you are overleveled.

For me carrying C&C over from the previous game is never a big deal - it's jsut so convoluted and difficult to do, and the payoff seems relatively minor. It seems much better to me to just wash over the previous game a little bit so that yuo can have nice references to it, but you don't need to build in 80 branches for every player choice or piss people off by presuming those choices. A 'meanwhile....' state of the world in the interim, though, would be a very nice touch.

The combat is the same rolly-rolly sword-swinging business in all Witcher games. W3 is a very accomplished culmination of the series, but it's not really 'completely different', it just has a more open world element (which doesn't really add much). Witcher's strengths were always the graphics and the writing. DOS EE is probably a decent pick for the OP. Other candidates would be Arcanum, Fallout 1/2, Realms of Arkania (originals), Knights of the Chalice.

I feel like I have only myself to blame for clicking, it's like being pranked by a four year old who cries if you tell him off. Anyway, for those who are not keeping track, the new game is definitively an original IP.

Elex is super fun, but it's an acquired taste. I'd recommend it to people who liked Gothics, and if you liked them enough to enjoy G3/R1 in particular.

If you are not waking up to hocus pocus every day already then you are DEAD TO ME

I'd imagine recording actually really helps with the editing process. I know I can read something many times over many different days, and my brain auto-corrects all my errors. Reading something out finally makes me see the errors. It would, except you almost always cannot make any changes once recording has started. The typical process is also horrible for voice acting quality itself, never mind the text; instead of having the writer there with you as you go through various parts of the script multiple lines, with situated knowledge about what scene your character is in and so on, it is more common that, again due to budget ant eimt constraints, you get one guy in the room with some producer guy (who, if you're lucky, has actually worked on the game substantially) doing the lines as quickly as they can, file out, get somebody else in, go go go. We all know that some degree of VA is here to stay, so it would be nice for the industry to somehow find ways to adjust the process making for better writing/editing as well as better voice acting. Sadly a lot of it comes down to the hard limitation: VA is expensive, and good VA is really expensive (no, having fans record themselves on a laptop mic and sending it in - as somebody suggests every few months for any partially recorded CRPG - is not the answer). 'There are budget and time constraints with everything' is not really a meaningful answer for anything, we might as well say they're supposed to be best in the biz so they should give us [literally anything you could think of that you might want in an RPG]. "But sir, how are we supposed to individually animate 9,000 combatants in this scene?" "Just work harder!!"

Isn't it you who is pretending to be such a knowledgeable person that when other people bring you facts and considered opinion, you can just dismiss it as baseless? The monetary and operational costs of voice acting that I cited last page are not deep secrets; they are very well known to anyone that's worked in the industry, talked to people who work in the industry, or have followed the industry in any level of detail for years; and even for a completely amateur fan, Bioware, Obsidian and other RPG devs have specifically talked about exactly things like word count limits or the inability to edit writing (e.g. DS3's intro, which suffered from this and resulted in repeating "Jeyne Kassynder" 80 times every 5 seconds). But, instead of offering any facts of your own or any rationale for rejecting the presented facts, you decide that 'oh no you guys dont know anything its all opinion'. I don't know what your second paragraph means, because nobody's interested in this reductio ad absurdum contest; given that nobody ever said VO adds nothing to games, this seems irrelevant to the costs/benefits equation at hand. VO is obviously wonderful when it is done well. It is also patently true that VO is extraordinarily costly. My personal opinion is that it is not worth it for games like Pillars; I equally think there's valid reasons to argue that it is worth it. I don't really see why the discussion needs to be dragged down by snarky comments insinuating that someone's deliberately bringing up baseless opinion.

I would plump for no voice acting, myself, but partial is also fine. It is extraordinarily expensive and disruptive to do full voice acting for wordy RPGs - so much so that, in an alternate universe, gamers and devs are thinking what the hell is wrong with us. For better or for worse, it's now believed that gamers expect it, so companies have to go out and spend that extraordinary amount of money and effort to get it done - with the result that a lot of voice acting is awful to mediocre, and it has other effects (e.g. RPGs getting a word count cap, inability to edit writing after a very early point, etc). The point is that, OK, if you love voice acting, I don't want to attack you for that, all I'm saying is it's really costly to do it, and "other games did it" doesn't change that equation - it just means, whether by taking out super-risky bank loans, selling yourself to a publisher, compromising on your writing, etc., they decided to go for it. And I wouldn't like Obsidian to pay that cost for what I consider to be "nice if done well, not really a big deal."

I can't imagine they're worse than the Steam hub forums. You would think the developers/publishers would have interest in moderating what's basically their forums, but I guess the endless flow of garbage is just too much for them to reasonably handle across many games. The answer in life, generally, is when you realise you're reading stupid stuff, stop & move on. It's hard, god knows I've not heeded my own advice in this very forum... Given that GOG is a kind of specialised marketplace, the real issue is that I'd like to see a more diversified mainstream marketplace, not one where Steam = 90% of the market. No matter how great or terrible Steam is, it's not good for the consumer in the long run to have a single company and platform dictate the rules of the market. Sadly, this seems more unlikely by the day.

Oh, I realize it's a bit silly but mechanically it makes sense; everyone reloads deaths anyway, so they functionaly "stop" gameplay; mechanically it's best to either eliminate them or turn them into a "knockout" type situation where you have to go get a special heal or a super rest or whatever. It'd be different if this were Darkest Dungeon and the companions were interchangeable and replaceable but they aren't. Only real argument against from a mechanics perspective is allowing for ironman runs. No, it doesn't mechanically make sense. I want my games to pose a challenge, which requires meaningful fail-states. The fact that you can reload instead of quitting the game forever doesn't mean it's the same thing to just get rid of dying. Also, I would much prefer to reload and try again than... I don't know, you lose, you get up, and then you trot back to an inn to get a super rest. Sounds like it changes nothing except wasting more time, such that I'd reload anyway? The bit about how it's silly Eder can die because it's Eder's pipe on the loading screen is just putting priorities head-to-arse backwards. Some people also like to let companions die permanently and roleplay that. They might want to ironman in a variety of ways. They might want to fight a battle knowing that there is a risk of death and thus a meaningful challenge, even if ultimately you can reload your way out of it. Removing death lets down a lot of different players with a lot of different playstyles, and it doesn't really "make sense", either. For the more specific issue of whether injuries should cause death, I'm ambivalent. i'd agree that the most important thing is making injuries themselves debilitating that they matter even without a death counter; after that players can choose whether they're the kind of person who reload/rest after every single injury, or they soldier on and see how bad it can get, etc.

Are we getting these headlines from the Daily Mail, or some other enclave of brain-free humanoids? Ironically, the players' complaint was never really about what specifically Might did, but how attributes don't have an intuitive identity - because they were being designed for viability with respect to dozens of different builds. This change is actually an extension of that latter approach, since the rationale is about the balance of viability and has nothing to do with making STR or RES any more coherent.

Given the high probability that the voice actor they choose for my guy is going to be awful or not a good fit, silence is a blessing. Another issue is - we'd need, what, 18 full voiceovers for every major race/class/sex combo in POE?

I don't think most people feel so strongly about either platform to deliberately smear them or whatever, that seems like a fundamental waste of time to me. People have their personal opinions and it's usually a good idea not to get too invested in one platform or all the perceived ways in which people with different opinions must be deluded. Sadly, re. achievements, Steam cards and other stupid and insulting tricks by which platforms just want you to become dopamine monkeys pointlessly wasting money and time living like gold farming bots even when you're not playing games, well, it's just an industry trend now (and trend outside this industry) and we'll see it with any and every platform that crops up for a while.

Not yet having played the beta, now I am less inclined to believe your opinions on the matter.

GOG is great - simple platform, no frills, lots of good games. Obviously it doesn't have everything & it has weaknesses (re. patching), both of which are remedied by Steam. Steam's not too bad these days, Offline Mode actually works now & it's easy to ignore the stupid achievements and all the other pointless, annoying nonsense.