Tigranes

'Hi guys, my name is Dave, I have great taste in games!" 90% of all games, new or old, are crap. Would take forever to list them? Sometimes there are games that make me ashamed to have wasted time on them, like Fallout 3.

You live in America, GD, so I don't think you'd be able to tell if American stuff got more coverage abroad. Honestly, I wouldn't use my own intuition here, either - would need a simple study to confirm. Well, once you decide overbooking is a planned and regular occurrence rather than a freak accident, you have to bump people randomly. What else are you going to do once nobody volunteers? In this case the whole 'seating employees' thing was thrown into the mix, but sometimes that's not it. (If the law mandated airlines to continue raising the price until someone volunteered, you'd get people abusing the process, and also delay the flights - though I suppose that might effectively force airlines to abandon this practice. And then we'd just get the cost passed on to everybody.) "Customer comes first" has never been a thing in US airports and US airlines. I've learnt that at a personal level, you profit most by being quiet, unobtrusive and invisible, lest you anger an overworked and aggressive TSA agent - and heaven forbid you pester US airline stewardesses, who are rude and incompetent to a point of hilarity (you don't really appreciate how much this is the case until you fly some other airlines) - and of course once law enforcement enters the field you are basically screwed. ...and then, of course, you profit most by being firm, aggressive, greedy, and manipulative on the phone to those airlines to get your coupons and compensation for their various failures, meaning the system incentivises you to kowtow on one end then be an arsehole to those weaker than you to defend your rights. It's a pisshole.

Having no stun abilities, or having them be too weak to ever be noticeable, would also be rather disappointing. To me the only question is whether they were so overpowering or ubiquitous to be a pain, and my opinion is they weren't, in general - but that it was not a great move to let grazes/crits linearly reduce/extend disabling effects, and some other system could be beneficial. IE games have always been massive combatfests with plenty of 'trash mobs', and on the whole there wasn't that much nonlinearity or ways to talk your way out of the fight (except PST). What POE2 should do is take the queue from IWD2 and introduce more set pieces: goblins that bang on war drums to rally their friends, exploding barrels, etc; even the simplest of environmental interactions and enemy formations would be nice.

The passenger's mistake was to act in a way that is strategically unsound given the legal context, influenced by his anxiety to reach his patients. The airline's mistake was to handle legally permissible procedures in incompetent and unwise ways, seemingly for no good reason. The law enforcement's mistake was to use excessive force and cause unnecessary physical harm on an elderly doctor. I know that as far as I'm concerned, that's three qualitatively different kinds of mistakes, and some of them are far, far worse.

United CEO implies to his employees that the 'belligerent' passenger deserved what he got United stock drops sharply United CEO apologises for 'truly horrific' removal of passenger

Legally "can" is different from morally "should" or PR-wise "should". All info seems to suggest that airline exercised its legal powers in an unnecessarily cruel way, while the police's excessive force will no doubt be written off as "OK" in the great Chicago police tradition. Good thing he was brown not black, huh? Unfortunately, almost all American airlines have been rude and inferior service for a long time, and they know perfectly well that most of their customers have no choice but to put up with it. (So, I suppose, it's not that stupid of them, just dickish.) P.S. Grom is right that in the moment, if you're facing police command, then you're best off not resisting. Precisely because America's police cannot uniformly be trusted to exact appropriate amount of violence, and you don't want to give them any reason to go on one of their regular violence binges. (And because legally it just becomes very hard to defend your case.) What's more crucial is the poor handling before the dude resisted removal. A lot rests on how competently the airline handled the voluntary bumping part of the procedure - in most cases it's just common sense to do it before everyone's boarded, and then chances are you aren't bumping an old doctor who has to see his patients.

You rolled a party that isn't just "20% less powerful at everything", you rolled a party that specifically leaves out a chunk of tools from the toolbox. Hence, stuns - which attacked that newfound weakness in your party - were more difficult. There's nothing strange or unbalanced about this. The game shouldn't "require a consistent effort from you on each difficulty" when you start running nonstandard parties. That's what makes nonstandard party runs interesting. That's when you discover that one party roflstomped the dragon but this party now has difficulty and has to come up with new solutions and tactics. There should be a certain consistency for standard parties, where the average joe running a normal full party doesn't discover level 3 skeletons are supermassively difficult relative to level 4 goblins, but in this context, what you're suggesting is a weird and improbable flattening of the experience that really seems to subtract from the fun and flavour of nonstandard parties.

You probably shouldn't buy any RPGs anytime soon.

A non-caster party is always going to be more challenging, and the point is to make such parties viable to skilled players, rather than 'every party just as good as the other'. I've also played noncaster parties, as well as solo, and such homebrew handicaps obviously add new challenges - that's supposed to be the fun. They can't be used as evidence that POE is 'stun spam'.

Phantoms and Lagufaeth are a good test of how well the player understands game mechanics instead of just hulk smashing everything. They're not the source of any perceived stun excess. What they do need to improve is the original intention of graze/crits. It was supposed to reduce scenarios where you get stunned forever just for failing a save by 1. The problem is it then added a lot of tiny stuns all over the place (2 second stuns, hardly enough for anything but irritating to players) and also made it easy for players to powergame and achieve massive crits (stunning dragons for 50 seconds, etc). I was surprised that they went with this linear gradation for state debuffs as if it was the same as damage, and something has to be adjusted there.

Are you looking for good story, good combat, and classes? That's actually a pretty restrictive set of criteria, one which rules out 90% of the games you've mentioned in your own post. Honestly, the RPG genre has always been a case of very high expectations relative to production conditions, and it's very rare to have a game that does every aspect of it to a good quality like, say, BG2 does. You're better off scratching each itch through games that excel in one specific area, even if it doesn't have everything you want. This would include: >Combat: Wizardry, Might & Magic, BG/IWD Series, Underrail >Setting/atmosphere: Underrail, Arcanum, Fallout 1/2 >Nonlinearity, choices & consequences: Age of Decadence, Alpha Protocol, FNV >Story: Planescape: Torment, Betrayal at Krondor, Fallout 1/2/NV

Fair enough, I can't talk about a video I haven't seen, I can only talk about the plausibility of the PC going for rebels in Act 1.

The video posted in the previous thread brushed on the subject lightly, that even if we try to work Kyros' rule and stretch it to be as lesser of an evil as we can - we are still actively supporting a fascist and oppressive regime. One could argue, that the only morally (if we see such things as evil) right thing to do, is to actively fight against it, no matter the odds and consequences. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil... and all that. I haven't watched the video, but that kind of blinkered "FREEEEEDOM" romanticism is to real liberalism what scientism is to real science. I never finished the rebel playthrough, but from what I saw, I was glad that the game itself didn't descend to such crude "oh but we must fight for liberal democracy". I suppose it would make sense if you roleplayed a hardcore extremist dissident lawgiver who only signed up to Tunon to cause havoc and/or became extremely disaffected, and planned to use the rebels to cause trouble from the start - and then allowed his/her beliefs to override how incredibly insane, stupid, suicidal this would be strategically... and then turns out it works out because suddenly you are super magical power fairy.

I would also give Underrail my highest recommendations.

More or less. If they want any kind of meaningful sense of scarcity, attrition, resource management, the dungeon as an intimidating space, then some kind of restriction on restoring player power is necessary. If they want to instead offer a frustration-free experience where you blast enemies with cool spells that replenish whenever you like, then just get rid of camping supplies and whatnot.

Rebels are apparently pretty fun, but as numbers says, the initial process of going with the rebels is nonsensical. The rebels clearly state all the way that they have no hope of winning - and at that point in the game, you as a lawbringer have no reason to think you have any kind of power to change the situation. (Basically, your stupid and suicidal decision only gets vindicated by the gigantic magical chosen one deus ex machina macguffin of the end of Act One.) You also need to show extreme sympathy to the rebels from the very start, to the point of dereliction of duty and simple stupidity in being so trusting of the enemy - without knowing very much about what kind of rebels they are, how they'd reciprocate your gestures, etc. I wouldn't really recommend the independent path. I'm sure most people choose it, either because they don't like the factions or because it's the standard 'have your cake and eat it too' munchkin RPG path, but it just means the rest of the game is "go here kill everybody". At least if you're with a faction it's, uh, "go here and kill half of them".

It's a huge amount of money, time, and work for something that isn't going to really be a big thing for a game like POE. And no, everybody always thinks their favourite feature just takes one dude in a basement told "go make it, i'll pay you some cash", but that's not how it works - otherwise every game in the world could have full voice acting and multiplayer and modding toolsets and arena mode and new game+ and everything else you can think of. I mean, AAA games these days have like 300 people and 50+ million budgets, they can spare two people for multiplayer, right? I'm happy for someone who's worked at a dev studio to come tell me I'm wrong and it can be done on the cheap, but that's never happened. (No, "OK so POE has 5 million, one programmer costs 70k, and multiplayer ummm I guess takes 6 months right? Somebody made a mod for some other game for free" does not count as evidence or a proper estimate.)

Of course - you don't see the added value, and you're arguing against its exclusion. As I said, that's totally legitimate. I was addressing the whole "you should let players rest if they want to more choice the better" line that I've seen a lot in previous discussions. Back to the issue itself, my argument is precisely that resting limits isn't just an anti-frustration issue. The ability to rest anywhere eliminates a strategic / resources layer to gameplay that, I would argue, is what makes a dungeon an actual dungeon, instead of a magic vacuum. I want each fight to matter in the context of other fights, and I want to feel intimidated by a deep dungeon that wears down my character, and I want to think about taking out enemies with a depleted party as a different kind of tactical setpiece rather than always fighting with the same full arsenal. If it was purely about adding pointless frustration, nobody would like it. (Conversely, I also accept that yes, there is frustration involved - otherwise few people would be against it.)

What you say here is very informative. I do agree that BG2 is a one off and thus I did not attempt to connect that game to PoE & the Witcher series. Again, right now when talking about numbers we can only compare PoE with the original Witcher game. PoE 2 is still a long way away. I hadn't thought about all the advantages CDPR have by being a Polish developer with all the extra help and cash flows. In any case, if PoE 2 does a Witcher 2 and sales spike up exponentially, is it still that much more difficult to reach a Witcher 3 level of quality for PoE 3? I admit, I want Obsidian to reach AAA with PoE because it's their flagship title. This is of course an unpopular opinion but I'm ok with it not being an isometric RPG anymore because to me the story, the world, and the lore matters to me more now. It would be good for Obsidian too. They could use the success having struggled for so long. And shamelessly, I want another developer that is an automatic purchase for me the way Bioware used to be until today, lol. I don't want to say it's impossible, of course, only that it's improbable. I think POE did well to hit a million sales given its niche stylings, and I don't see how POE2 would suddenly become a multi-million breakout hit. BG2 improved on BG1 sales, but BG was a huge hit with a very high profile back then. Remember that Obsidian have wanted to make games lke POE for a long time, but they simply could not find a way to make it an AAA title, which needs these days tens of millions of dollars and an expectation that you could make that tens of millions back. I don't think any big publisher is looking at POE and thinking "we were wrong, we should have funded this ourselves". When Feargus and others used to go to publishers and say "we need 50m to make the next Baldur's Gate" they used to scoff "no business sense, amigo" and I think they won't feel like POE is proof otherwise. Obsidian continues to invest in making AAA games, and all indications suggest there's one multi-platform publisher-funded title in the works.

Games aren't made to let you do literally whatever you want. Maybe that would be nice, but that's not how games work - not video games, not sports, not chess, not even pen and paper, CYOA or two children playing make-believe. There's always a set of rules, hard or soft, that govern what you can and can't do. Why? Because as long as you are playing with someone else, or someone else is designing content for you, those shared rules are the ground upon which you can have meaningful challenges and fun encounters. Maybe you and your mates make up a rule where someone can pick up the ball with their hands in football, or your DM lets you be a Dragonborn Bard-Monk, or you mod the game so you have infinite uses of Quivering Palm. There's nothing wrong with that, that's fine! But the actual game developer making a game for a million people can't and shouldn't cater to every person, and so they have to make some decisions about what they are going to allow and restrict,and use that to design challenges that they believe are the most fun. So. "I think resting limits should be banished from the Earth because of X Y Z"? Legitimate argument. "I think POE as a game would be perfectly fine with infinite resting because of X Y Z, so there should be an option"? Also legitimate. "Make your game to let people do whatever they want and anybody arguing against this total freedom is just interfering"? Doesn't make practical sense, and is yelling at strawmen. --- In terms of legitimate arguments then, I'm not actually married to camping supplies. I think they can be pretty clumsy, and they do offend people who are coming off IE games. I do think, however, that it's important for the game to say "hey, you're in a dungeon, not some magical fake arena where after every fight you are instantly healed so you never have to worry about attrition and it's like each fight happens in a separate universe." While resting limitations of any kind will annoy some people some of the time, I appreciate their added value, which is that you get an additional layer of tactical decisions and resource management, and they help me get less tired of combat because even smaller trash mobs becoming meaningful, instead of "haha i feel so good i blast these guys in 0.5 seconds". And no, don't tell me I could just stop myself from resting - of course, but that's the same as me telling you, "thou must not argue, if you really want there's a very simple cheat in POE that lets you rest". I'm not telling you how to play the game, I couldn't care less. I'm arguing for what I think would make a good game, because that's the kind of game I want to buy. I respect that you will do the same. And when the game comes out, if it doesn't have resting limits, I'll either deal with it (by, say, putting in house rules), or I'll play a different game.

Personally, I wouldn't mind that - but you will find a million exploding heads on the forums about people who complain how the game "forces them to wait 10 minutes" so that they can rest, or how the game "forces them to go back to a doctor to treat explosive bedsores every 30 minutes". I think it would satisfy you, but it would piss off other people - and really, I feel like no matter what they do a sizable minority will be unhappy. Resting excessively was always a crutch pseudo-exploit players used to get ahead when they weren't good enough to play on otherwise. That's no skin off their back, nobody needs to be hardcore supergood. The consequence, though, is that people now expect to be able to magically heal everybody instantly after every single battle if they should so choose, and feel it is bad design if they can't. *shrug*

The Witcher series' growth got supporting shots from a lot of other factors - CDProjekt is a major publishing house in Poland, which in fact localised some of the old school CRPGs (I think including BG), and created GOG. They were able to take advantage of these other revenue streams, as well as lower costs in Poland, to massively expand the scope of their games and the size of their teams - plus, of course, the commercial success of TW1&2. I think it'll be extremely difficult for Obsidian, a California-based studio which is stuck in the impossible financial swamp of being a US-based independent developer, one which was laying people off left and right to survive before POE KS, one which still has to scramble to keep growth going, to do the same thing. Not to mention that, as we can see, POE2 already involves Obsidian drawing on their future profits to fund their current game, which is what Kickstarter/Fig is from the producer perspective. BG2, in terms of the sales it got, and how ridiculously large the game managed to be relative to its production time and team size, etc., is pretty much a unique one-off. Its a game the people who worked on it look back on and say "that was crazy and I don't know it worked out", and it should never, ever be the yardstick for you to anticipate any game, unless you enjoy disappointment.

Most voice acting in games are awful. This would only be a minor problem of personal preference, but it is also well known that voice acting is prohibitely expensive, raising costs for everyone (or having people be disappointed), and this wreaks havoc with the writing process. It is well known that because it would be even more expensive and difficult to redo lines or have actors in the same room bouncing lines off each other, the lines tend to be recorded in complete isolation at some random point, and that writers end up being unable to edit dialogue and writing once the voice acting is locked in. And of course, projects where you get artificial limits on your writing because you have to keep voice costs down.

We can't have ammunition for normal throwing weapons while ranged weapons have infintie basic ammo, for obvious reasons. Maybe throwing weapons become less of the one weapon you slot in and fire forever, but a more specialist kind of thing - e.g. you find 8 throwing knives that are very powerful, or you find a magical returning throwing knife with some other kind of per-enc use limitation. I'm not sure what interesting role they can occupy gameplay-wise, though, other than the coolness of having throwing knives.

There are very clear, repeated, well-documented things that happen when a game designed for a smaller PC-only audience starts becoming built for consoles and larger audiences. And yes, a lot of those changes do involve, or risk, dumbing down the game when it comes to old-school CRPGs. E.g. The UI has to become simpler, which sometimes translates into simplifying the kinds of control and fiddling expected of the gamer, and sometimes just means UI that is crappy for the PC from aesthetic and usability perspective. Compare BG2 or Morrowind UI to the endless scrolling through tiny windows of lists in Skyrim. Party sizes become smaller; although I've consistently said I don't think 6->5 is a big problem for POE2, if it was done for consoles rather than systems overhaul then it is a classic case of 'dumbing down'. Area zones become smaller, because in the last decade or so smaller console memory sizes compared to their contemporary PC generations meant they couldn't handle it. Thief 3, IIRC, suffered from this. Other small changes where it's not so much a straightforward "consoles => x", but console audiences and console requirements becomes a big factor in how decisions are made - e.g. higher expectation of voice acting and/or considerations for reading text in TVs, leading to artificial limits on word count (instead of, say, writers deciding what is too verbose and what is not). That's obviously a very specific thing, not "consoles = dumb always". But many fans of old-school CRPGs have become extremely suspicious of consolisation, and with good reason.