Tigranes

Tyranny was always made by a different team to Pillars and always designed as a kind of spinoff. I think it was pretty crap, but even if I thought it was wonderful, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be an indication of where POE2 is going. I have no idea what the sales discussion is leading at, but some simple facts: >There's no point comparing Witcher 3 or Skyrim sales with POE or Tyranny, especially if you want to figure out how much profit they made >POE will never ever have a budget of 50 million or whatever goes for an AAA RPG these days >POE1 at ~1mil lifetime sales, we know, was a profitable venture safely meeting if not exceeding expectations.

So... you're saying, you don't need to rest very often, so you're always capped and you're leaving free camping supplies behind? OK, but they cost like two cents and are widely available in many shops, so it's not like you ever need to bother about the ones you leave behind, unless the thought of leaving anything of the slightest of value gives you the shivers. As you say, sending the excess automatically to stash would make sense.

Like almost every RPG, sadly, money ceases to be any kind of issue after the first few hours for most parties.

I do ... they don't always help very much but I enjoy getting one to actually go off and affect an enemy (much easier in later patches). (I'm not on steam though so if there are any stats about such, I'm not one of them). I was one who voted for 6 party members. Not for any tactical reasons, but just because it would mean more party interaction in fewer playthroughs. If I have to leave Eder at home, I won't get his dialogue with Sagani. If I drop Kana from the team, he won't hit on Maneha. Etc. But I'm not that worried - I'll probably get a few playthroughs anyway, and I might even be encouraged to swap the team up within a single playthrough (something I don't usually do as I get the team I want and stick with it). Provided Obs stick with the 'no forced party members' (beyond Cilant Lis) and don't pull any NWN2 shenanigans, I'll be fine. I love traps, they're fantastic. Sadly, POE traps were a puddle of poo.

You could just code it so that only one crit every few seconds fires it.

Volo, of course, was ahead of the curve, His butt has been bleeding since 1996.

Many prefer six as it is the tried and tested party balance in a ton of CRPGs going all the way back to the SSI gold box games, the Wizardry series and of course what PoE was supposed to the.... heir apparent to the BG series for starters. For Fantasy CRPGs look at most of the 'greatest of all time list' and see how many six man party games are in it. It's a lot. It is was people want. Has there been a poll on this forum about this topic? "A lot of good games had X, so clearly X is great, and changing it to Y sucks." Sorry, there's no logic there, just cliches. I strongly disagree. As has been pointed out 6 character parties have been extensively used in many of the best cRPG over the years and there is a reason for that, as there is a reason why people like and are comfortable with 6 character parties. They work very well for a particualr style of RPG like Pillars. There are also a number of classic RPGs that use smaller parties, such as KotOR, NWN2 MotB and Tyranny for example, and there is nothing wrong with that, but the important issue is that these games play very differently to PoE1, BG and IWD. IMO there is nothing either illogical or cliche about pointing this out and saying "Make Tyranny with 4 character parties by all means, I'll even play it the way it was designed to be played, but Pillars is Pillars, it is different, and I don't want you to mess with it. It is tried and tested at 6 characters since Baldur's Gate, it works, it's great as it is. I don't want it play like Tyranny or MotB. I want it to play like Pillars 1 and BG did." Good! You're starting to give me an actual argument instead of "all the other games had 6". I appreciate that. You claimed 6 parties "work very well for a particular style of RPG like pillars." Can you give me any reasons for this? Because nobody has done it. Otherwise, your post currently stands at "it works really well [no reasons given], it's great."

"Which games introduced a smaller party size compared to it's predecessors?" Who cares? Even if every RPG in the world reduced party size in a sequel, that still wouldn't mean it's a great idea. All that matters is, how will they rebalance the game for 5, and will that result in comparable or better tactical complexity - or no? Nobody has made a single argument for why the number five is inherently unable to produce a good result. The burden of proof is on people saying it's a big deal, not the people saying 'let's wait and see'. People like you. People whose arguments mostly come down to "but I like 6", "other games did 6".

Many prefer six as it is the tried and tested party balance in a ton of CRPGs going all the way back to the SSI gold box games, the Wizardry series and of course what PoE was supposed to the.... heir apparent to the BG series for starters. For Fantasy CRPGs look at most of the 'greatest of all time list' and see how many six man party games are in it. It's a lot. It is was people want. Has there been a poll on this forum about this topic? "A lot of good games had X, so clearly X is great, and changing it to Y sucks." Sorry, there's no logic there, just cliches. What if you started calling healing potions wunderbenders, and made skeletons high level enemies instead of low level fodder? Is that suddenly going to kill the game because it changed stuff? 6 in a Wizardry game (or actually, 8 for Wizardry 8 ), or 4 in M&M 6, or 3-4 in a Final Fantasy game, or 2 in Divinity: Original Sin... all of that works or doesn't work to the extent that it's designed together with the rest of combat pacing, active abilities, encounter design, etc. If you don't bother thinking about any of that and just mouth "six six six" it's hardly much of an argument.

Nah, he's too thin-skinned. Some of this finally starts brushing up against the real factors, though. Party member size doesn't mean a thing in itself. It determines tactical complexity when compared to the number and kind of classes and abilities you have, the different roles party members can play, how encounters are designed, etc, etc. So for example, having 9 party members in BG2 would reduce tactical complexity, because you would be able to cover all the bases and have a ton of redundancy, and you'd never really have to make meaningful choices about what to bring with you and what to give up. Being able to do everything and have all the options you want has nothing to do with tactical complexity. With POE1, there was nothing particularly terrible about six, of course, it worked well. But, speaking as someone who's run every party size from 1 to 6 in POE1 and every IE game, five hardly makes much of a difference - unless, as I said, you have some compulsion to run a very specific party every time. The only important question that remains is whether POE2 will prove, by virtue of other system changes, that five is a nice balance of scarcity, options, complexity and combat pacing. It may, it may not, but it's going to come down to more than the magic number of six and who worships it.

More imaginary boo-hoo self-victimisation. You're absolutely free to complain loudly that you don't like it. We're absolutely free to express our opinion that this is all much ado about nothing.

Well, they still have that problem...

" For me there are four mandatory positions in a party: Two melee specialists, a priest and a wizard." This is a good example - a lot of people who think this is going to be a Big Deal, they have a very specific setup that they always want to do every time they play the game. Some of them even think that if they can't have their roles exactly down to their template then something is going to be 'broken' about the game because you can't have a healer or you can't have a second melee specialist or whatever. People, if you really want to always take the same 4 dudes every playthrough, that's your freedom, but the game can't always cater to your whims and that doesn't mean it's broken. Just like the people who want there to be no reactivity in a game because they only play once and they don't want to miss out on anything. Or like the people who wish there were less companions so that you don't have to leave anybody behind. In all of cases, do whatever you want, it's your game - but it should be obvious that there's a grey line somewhere between "major damage to tactical complexity for many players" and "but I always take Eder and stuff and now I can't have exactly what I want for my very particular tastes about my party".

Reached the Bloom. I can live with the awful production values and presentation, and with the boring combat, but the real pity is that the writing lacks focus, and it's all over the place. It feels like someone took 6 different stories written according to the same overall concept, then mashed together. There's plenty of nice NPCs and stories, though their impact is tempered by all the drub you have to wade through; and there are interesting themes to explore, such as what 'responsibility' might be had across the parent-child castoff relation or indeed the tagline of what does one life matter, but they never really get to resonate across different NPCs and events because it's all so disconnected. You can see it in the area design - 90% of it is "here's a small clearing with 7 random visual artefacts you can click on each of which show entirely nonrelated stuff with 18 new place names and events". I expected from the KS a good game but not a classic; at the moment its just hanging on by the edges to make that grade.

PST and MOTB were both thematically coherent games with a focused direction, which then featured wacky and interesting writing. Numenera has only the last.

When the game's released, five won't be the reason it'll be crap, and five won't be the reason it'll be great. It's one of those things people get really concerned about on paper, but is going to have a pretty minor effect on tactical complexity (as opposed to, say, improving encounter design, the massive changes to the basic system features like health).

Many people who didn't like camping supplies simply wanted to rest whenever they wanted all the time - and then there were others who only wanted less restrictions in specific ways, but across people this differed hugely. So any other mechanism of restriction isn't going to satisfy, because players like Giftd who just want everything all the time won't have their problem solved, and people who wanted their specific peeve solved may or may not be targeted by the changes. There's a ton of games out there that let you regenerate/restore all your powers very easily, so I'm fine with POE having whatever kind of restriction. In any case, losing Vancian casting alone means people who put all their spells in a big bucket and throw it at every goblin won't be as bothered by it.

Option 1. Just make a good game. Why do I need experience and items from POE1? I got my enjoyment out of those things during POE1, I'm excited to play a new game and level up and get new items. No need to create balance headaches.

Having more information does not inherently equal progress. That is an assumption grounded in faith that when enough people are provided with enough information, on average, people are rational and reasonable enough to figure out what is right and wrong. That is an assumption liberal political philosophy could never actually prove, at a fundamental level; and at a specific level, we still do not know which contexts that actually happens in, and there is plenty of evidence that it may not be happening in, say, voting decisions. Just saying "that sounds like anti progress you wouldn't want to be anti progress would you" is just throwing in words that people usually don't want to fight, and letting it do the work instead of making a real argument. And it is exactly that kind of unthinking optimism that has actually contributed to where we are now: "give the people all the info", we said, "it'll work itself out".

NWN1 OC was a puddle of wet poo because they never allocated a lot of resources to it - at one point the game was meant to be mostly the MP/toolset component, and the OC was just going to be a kind of extended demo shipping with it. Then they blew it up into a full campaign, but was never able to actually deliver anything resembling quality into it.

They're actually all celled "Fettles" and no, I haven't noticed anything like that yet - but I've yet to get into the mechanical side of things a bit deeper so it might get worse. Or possibly better. Well 'Encounter/Combat' is called 'Crisis', but what it stands for is rather obvious, so that bit is just a little strange. Yeah, it stands for "crisis". Kinda like how might isn't strength. Crisis points can involve narrative events, dialogue, etc. They *can* be combat encounters, but aren't specifically so. Oh no, maybe all RPGs should just name their classes "Off-Tank" because MMO players use it? 'Buffs' isn't even normal terminology inside RPGs. Next Thief should get rid of 'taffer' and PST shouldn't have 'berk', because... I don't even know what the 'because' is here. TTON opening suffers from far too many random pieces of loredumps that never add up to a coherent set of images, 'fettles' is the least of its problems.

Only tried 30 minutes. Writing is promising, game drew me in, the presentation is bad. Awful disgusting UI, fast becoming an inXile tradition, as if you're playing some Russian B-budget platformer from the PS2 days. Who thought making characters swivel on ice skates and slowly accelerate to run in an isometric party RPG was a good idea? Anyone would be a fool to expect PST2, and it's done enough to tell me it's got its own pretty cool story lined up.

It's probably for the best, you know. Not much in that AMA so far, I'm learning Expert Mode is still in and a few other snippets.

We all know that the campaign will either break 5m anyway, or get close then Obs will announce Ydwin goal met on back of post-campaign pledges. Queue months of omg squee i dream of her winking at me while killing monsters and doing animacy!!!111

Ugh.