Tigranes

It's a win win if you can afford it, maybe, though I'd be genuinely interested to see how many people consider the trainwreck VA of the narrator added value. Larian have quite clearly squeezed every penny they have (and don't have) and risked the whole company, banking on bringing in the kinds of gamers for whom stuff like full voice acting is a dealbreaker. I hope they succeed, and I'm glad I can turn off the absolutely awful narrator, but that's not a "win-win situation" as if there are no costs or risks involved and that everybody should do it as a matter of course.

It's like, the dude just loves his Star Wars.

This would be a catastrophe. While I'm sure the OP and some others will appreciate it, there will be a torrent of complaints and criticism about the "terrible voice acting". Most people just won't understand that here's this part of the product which is of awful quality because it wouldn't be there at all otherwise but some people wanted the awful quality option. They could try and have a pretty competent but not celebrity/actor VO do it, but then the difference in costs starts diminishing.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10753 Some description of Swen playing through the game at Gamescom and showing off some of the weirder things you can do. It's like somebody wrote an imaginary article about the ultimate RPG, but it's coming out tomorrow. It's amazing. " To use the mask, you first have to use an item called the faceripper, which allows you to rip faces off any NPC in the game, as long as they’re dead. Swen uses it on the dwarven woman he'd just killed, and a ripped dwarven face appears in his inventory. By using it with a source orb, he crafts a mask of the dwarf, which he promptly equips. It magically changes the appearance of the undead Fane into that of a living dwarf, allowing him to walk through cities undisturbed."

Yep, that is definitely the tone of Larian games. If you don't like silliness and tongue in cheek humor, it is not a good fit for you. Honestly, if you don't chuckle when you hear the name DIVINE DIVINITY, you really aren't in the target audience. I don't mind either but I don't see what in these videos indicates to that silliness being deliberate, or self-aware. To me it's just, well... Bad. But if you say the games are more self-aware and tongue-in-cheek humorous, I guess I'll try them out. Well, it's very subjective. I've played all of their games and I've found all of their humour awful, but it certainly is deliberate and self-aware.

I'm pretty sure this will be great. They had a very, very solid game with a great formula worked out for the first one and this will probably be the bigger & meatier version. Sure, the combat system's gimmicky and ultimately supereasy, but those gimmicks are fantastic enough to last you quite a while and it looks like they've thrown in even more cool stuff. Larian writing has been bottom of the barrel Disney channel cringe for the entire company history, but DOS1 was excellent enough even with Gandalf and the idiot imp and whatever. We'll see if their investment in writers has paid off - can't really judge by origin intros, those kinds of things always make any character look like a stereotype. The presentation on those videos are mindblowingly slick, though. The narration for the combat video should be the new standard for everybody else.

Larian is pretty clearly betting the entire company on DOS2 being a multi-million seller - and to be fair DOS1 proved better selling with a broader reach than POE or WL2. They know that for them, once they invest so much into the game, they have to pull out every penny for expensive bells and whistles like full VA because that brings in a lot more sales from people who aren't huge RPG fans.

Honestly? Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel as an adventure-RPG, a work which details medieval folk mythology in such a way that it is entirely foreign to modern sensibilities and a masterpiece in the grotesque, before that came to mean just totally wacky alien stuff of horror in the 19/20th centuries. You have senile pregnant hags; you have festivals where the king is made clown and birthing and other rituals are given mock enactments; glorious banquets with corpulent giants; medieval toilet humour and more. Hell, it's already a series, with the first one "The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua". Gustave Dore's illustrations are ready-made for the CYOA sequences:

Progressed a fair bit now, well into what I think might be the mid-game. The party's now a pretty well oiled system, though very rudimentary and no doubt incapable of cutting it in higher difficulties. The exploration and puzzles are good, so that's actually been the main draw so far. It's weird; the game frequently breaks fourth wall, doesn't feature a huge amount of NPCs, but there's a certain efficiency and harmony in what is there so that each area and each new bit of lore sets the tone very effectively. You just never find yourself wondering what this quest or piece of dialogue or whatnot is doing here. And then, of course, someone tells you about something named the Psychopomp...

Anything that takes after TOEE combat wise would be a step forward, yes. It would be a nice feature to have.

Gaming news websites are almost all, almost always, crap. As time goes by I spend more of my spare time playing games and having fun - which gives me a good radar to know what game I would enjoy when I see it - and less time reading substandard trash written by hacks who don't know games or writing and work with terribly low pay and deadlines in a bribe-infested industry. If you insist that you still want the best of whatever's out there, Gamebanshee is decent, RPS used to be decent but now they're so concerned with writing in some pretentiously incoherent way that it seems to be a tossup as to whether they have anything rational to say about the game. Polygon seems to do big splash stories which can be a source to glean info. For RPGs German, Polish and Russian sites seem to be more levelheaded, but finding / translating can be a chore. The Codex can be great for news on indie and lesser known RPGs that most sites wouldn't know existed, e.g. it was one of the best places for info on Underrail. If you don't like their posting then just skim the news.

My Sage could memorise it around level 4/5. In general resources seem pretty plentiful, and weirdly spellbooks and the like seem easier to come by, almost, than decent weapons and armour. Of course, then I let some worms rust my warrior's armour, and now he's feeling very vulnerable..

You wonder how many years ago he placed that monument. I've been slowly learning basic tricks of the trade. Having at least 2, I'd say 3, meaty fighters seems important to bulk up for the frontlines and to do damage in early levels (when you can hardly find arrows for your ranger or whatnot). In turn you want to keep up their VIT so they can penetrate enemies, perhaps with copious use of the Refresh spell (available to Clerics, etc). Having one dude with both inspection and lockpicking is important, since you use both to pick locks. Drop items on the Assay icon to get detailed mechanical info (though not that detailed, heh). Mindread is super cool / useful, just try it on any NPC you fancy. Status effects seem to be king, for both sides, and they work standardly on 'boss' enemies as well, which is a nice break from the (j)RPG convention.

Bruce is still superior in my eyes. But sometimes, I miss the old-fashioned bluntness of Volourn, who at least had the honour to present a coherent faith in the greatness of NWN1. At one point Cleve talked about Grimoire being a trilogy. It's a race against climate change induced planetary disaster, really.

What are you talking about? What is this post trying to say? Why is it in this thread? Are you some kind of weird RSS scraper that gained half sentience? Gripping stuff. I had my sage try to read a scroll of Fireball, forgot I didn't put incantation skill on him, and the thing backfired wiping half the party. Stellar. One nice thing is how the dungeons will drop little omens of the boss or other weird denizens as you approach, from the weird pungent smell to the little traces. Definitely needs to sort out the enemy sound looping, and a few things like that, though. And there's no telling whether quality/bugs will hold up later on in the game.

Game seems to be in a pretty stable state since *.*.*.12 or so. I've had no problems (and, in fact, no crashes since v1) and the savegame crisis also seems to be over. Now he just needs to do the quality of life stuff like removing looping enemy sounds and that manual (which, anyone who's played the game will realise by now, is actually going to take a lot of work to write). I've never actually been a huge Wizardry/M&M fan, but beyond the clunky interface the game content is actually really good, something which still surprises me. Here you have this wacky guy with a wacky development schedule and tons of wacky interface / coding decisions, but in terms of level/quest design and the like the game is really sensibly made: every dungeon is full of interesting stuff (probably the equivalent of 25 Skyrim dungeons each time), and discovering little quest hints and solving puzzles through hints in NPC convos and environmental secrets is intuitive and logical. The combat experience also settles down after the first 2-3 levels where you die like flies, especially as you work out basics like keeping VIT high for penetration. I think anyone who still enjoys playing old dungeon crawlers or other old RPGs can get with it. We'll see how it gets mid-game, of course, I keep restarting the first few hours...

Health for the two frontliners is good given how many hits they take. After that, who knows? I've been doing attributes mostly, and then skills for the likes of Sage who have a lot of things to spend on.

I enjoyed the stylus semi-manual mapping in Etrian Odyssey recently. Made me think that although I never really played, say, the earliest Wizardries, there is a certain fun in mapping the dungeons yourself if the game provides extensive, labyrinthine, dangerous dungeons full of interesting stuff. After a couple hours to figure basics out I'm starting to really get into it, it feels like a really good game despite the suboptimal interface. Actually, even with the suboptimal interface, it's faster to grow on me than Wiz8 or M&M6 was when I first tried them (long after release). It feels like those days when you are figuring out what skills do and what this new item does instead of reading it all up online or in-game and never having to discover anything.

I just can't be bothered rolling for a templar at the start, especially since I can't tell yet what most classes do. A lot of classes seem to gain equivalent spell selection with other classes later on, and with 8 character slots coverage is never the problem I think. I've gotten a lot of mileage with an Aeorb Sage, who can lockpick and identify and detect secrets right off the bat, in the first areas. The lockpick minigame is totally weird, you get a little cryptic phrase clue then essentially play the game of hangman? It's fine, it just boggles the mind who would choose hangman as the mechanic for a lockpick game. I suppose all the locks in this world are primarily magical, and locksmithery is seen as a literary art that tests travelers in the ways of symbolism, or something.

The map works well and you won't need a separate notebook, there is a lack of class reqs and other information until Cleve puts out a manual and/or the community info pooling comes together a bit more. Right now it's more like if you fired up Wiz7 but didn't have the manual, which can be fun in a trying different things way.

I found a way to fix that. Set turning to "single step" - it just turns off the turning animation that causes the wall tearing, and it's more oldskool that way to boot. By the way, when starting out and if you play a race with natural weapons, go unarmed. Claw rending and biting deals a good deal more damage than the measly starter equipment. Yeah, I also worked it out. I actually like Supersmooth or whatever it was that offers a bit of animation but pretty quick. Taken a fair bit of trial and error to not die horribly in the first few fights, I suspect it'll take a couple hours until every character gets the skills and equipment they need to get properly set up. The early recruitable NPC is apparently superstrong, but for now I'm trying to persevere without. Sleep and other disablers are a must, which makes you work for every battle instead of autoattack. There's a few annoying bugs for me (like enemy sound looping) but no crashes or anything, and right now the impediment is the lack of a manual rather than any bugs or design problems. You need to roll high enough points that, combined with the attribute distribution of your race, you'll meet the prerequisites for the class you want to pick. Going by game's recommendation of race+class combo then rolling over 22 is what I've tried to do. Pretty cool that there's 5? different starting areas, each with a different distribution of challenge and resources. And how there's skills you won't know about because they won't appear in the character screen until you find them in the world.

Tried basic functions for half an hour last night, and tested for a couple of bugs others mentioned. Everything ran well on Win10 in my case, except for one cosmetic bug related to walls when turning. At first glimpse the game feels like a classic dungeon crawler with all the parts functioning, with a degree of interface clunkiness (like non-snappy turning) and there's hints of some great extensive mechanics - use bushes to get fruit, the sheer number of separate defense values, the aptly named 'penetration' handling damage types vs. enemies that already come into play with the very first enemies (rather than, as in most games, mattering only for a select few later types), disease giving you progressively debilitating secondary ailments if not treated. Hoping to have time to try more tonight.

Boring. So you haven't played the game, you don't know anything, but some random stuff you've picked up from Steam reviews or whatever blah blah. Hoping to fire it up tonight and have a look myself, from folk who've actually played several hours I'm gathering (1) if you liked Wizardry 7 and the like this is pretty awesome, (2) there's a fair number of crash bugs and like so as with any buggy game you might get lucky or not. If Cleve can release the manual soon then at least I can sit around and roll characters for a bit of old school fun.

"Realistically and without bias, it's the $#ittiest game of the year. It's on sale for $35.99 and it's an embaressment to all the indie industry. Wtf is going on here? It's certainly not a scam but it's just as bad lmao it's so poorly made that it will make you wonder "Why?"" Nobody can even figure out what you're talking about, since there's never any proof or reasoning, just one hyperbolic phrase after another stoking each other into a self-righteous bonfire. It's a weird ass one of a kind game by the weirdest guy this corner of the Internet, but Wizardry / etc hypernerds who've played the old demo say that what content there is is actually pretty excellent. So the real question is how buggy it is and how long the content keeps up. (Sonicmage apparently already knows exactly how much 'content' is there.) We won't know until people have actually played a fair few hours in. Steam "reviews" as usual are full of "OMG ONE STAR COS IT HAS NO ACHIEVEMENTS" vs "OH GOD ITS GREAT".