Tigranes

It depends. If you loved Gothic 1 and 2, then you know the truly unique feeling that they have. Other games might be 'better', but the sense of danger, the sense of a true wilderness, the sense of a rugged world where nobody cares about you (without driving it home in some overly edgy way)... Risen 1 has a big dollop of that feeling. It will give you some great goosebumps. It ultimately is a bit watered down from the majestic G2+NOTR formula, but it's a decent experience. The later 1/3 of the game is poor, all dungeon-delving hack and slash, but G1/2 devolved at late game too. R2 & R3 don't really have the Piranha Bytes/Gothic feel at all. You might still like it if you're a sucker for open world ARPGs in general. I highly recommend Risen 1, honestly - it still has a great deal of that intangible 'essence' anyone who loved G1&2 understands.

I thought this is coming next patch? Am I hallucinating?

So agreeing with them is okay but stating that Blizzard wasn't out of place to respond in the way that they did isn't? The fanbase was trolling Blizzard because they weren't happy with it, not sure how stating the obvious is a bad thing lol I like this mature way of thinking. I mean, I understand the present community was angry, and I agree with them not liking it but the game is obviously going to be casualised. There were better ways for them to handle it instead of making the Blizzard fanbase look even worse. They weren't silly to be angry, they were silly in how they handled that anger, even the questions asked are very middle school-ish at best "Is this an out of season April fool's joke?" There is some irony there, kinda like reading complaints of complainers of complainers... #ForumLogic and #RockKicks I told you that raising pitchforks and crying rivers about Blizzard seems a bit pathetic. Do you understand?

It's a company that hasn't made a truly groundbreaking product in years and years. They're not relevant to me. If they think this new thing will sell like hotcakes, fair enough, it's not any of my business. Apparently folks are very upset about it, but I wouldn't know - I think going around checking out other people's angry videos then pontificating about how silly they are to be angry is just as pathetic.

The short answer is they added way too many ways for you to make the game easier, and took out various sources of difficulty. So now it's easier to inadvertently give yourself a cakewalk, and you have to deliberately give yourself a challenge.

I've been watching this one for a long time - they had to overcome various business hurdles to get this far, but they've really taken their time to create a solid old school RPG piece by piece, and who knows how good it'll be, but at least they've put a ton of thought into how they design it from their discussions over the years that I've seen. Between POE, Pathfinder (which is apparently amazing if they can fix literally enough bugs to fill 10 RPGs with) and this, it's a fantastic turnaround for isometric old-school RPGs. We even have room for shovelware clones like Sword Coast Legends!

A lot of these don't seem particularly useful - triple health would be an insanely boring chore, 'no map markers' hardly makes a meaningful difference in a game like Deadfire, and removing quick travel legend is like giving people an option to remove half of the inventory screen for no reason. At some point, buffing numbers like HP and defences just breaks game balance and provides the unenjoyable kind of difficulty. If we did have to buff some numbers, I'd say buff attack values over defences, so that combat is far more lethal and unpredictable, instead of 800HP people pew-pewing at each other in trench warfare.

Perhaps they want to? Either because they want the money or they think it is genuinely a good idea. Perhaps Obsidian is in bad financial state right now, or perhaps they have projected they will be in a bad state as a mid-sized independent company in the industry in the near future (financially or structurally). Who knows? Being a mid-sized video game developer anytime in the past 20 years = being constantly and perpetually in financial danger of folding if just one or two contracts go bad. This is a well documented truth about the way the industry has been structured - and it only gets exacerbated with Obsidian being in California and other factors. Given that Obsidian specifically has shaved off bankruptcies by the skin of their teeth several times, listening seriously to any buyout offer is a given.

Actually, forget everything else, this thread is probably a testament to why we shouldn't have a BG3. Really, I don't really care what it's called, any well-designed D&D CRPG will do me just fine. Whether "modern" or "old school" is not particularly relevant - I don't find it particularly mature to get obsessive about how wrong somebody else's opinions are, though gaming and other popular cultures really seem to encourage that.

Empower's a magic awesome win button, so yeah, it can result in some crazy results especially with spells. Some empowered high level spells / scrolls have been known to wipe out entire screens, more or less.

It probably won't be Bioware. And if it is, it wouldn't matter, because 20 years on it isn't the same Bioware at all and basically none of the key figures are there anymore. I'm not really sure what the point is, except marketing. It won't be the original creators, it won't be AD&D, it surely won't continue the story (unless to do so in a completely forced way), it won't be the same engine... hell, even The Black Hound back then was a BG3 in name only. They might as well just give it a new franchise, whatever it actually ends up being.

I think people generally overestimate how a single individual's personal preferences come to shape the end product in modern day RPG projects. Even when they are the lead. Especially in a development environment that is as chaotic as Obsidian's tends to be.

blah blah blah blah Beamdog probably isn't doing it anyway. More importantly, it would be 5th edition - unless there is some massive and unexpected change of policy from WOTC. It would probably look a lot more like Pathfinder: Kingmaker than, say, The Black Hound.

Yeah, it's no Pulitzer but it's great. I have fond memories of these cutscenes.... well, last year when I replayed BG2. And the year before that. And... Less is more. Keep it simple, use established dramaturgical conventions, get one great voice actor. Something latter day Bioware as well as a host of others could learn from. The only weak parts are the dream sequences where the whole "POWERRRRR" thing gets a bit old.

Simple: they couldn't budget for 200 portraits. They could remove the options that aren't represented by a portrait, but that would have its own problems.

Headshots are ugly as hell on isometric games where the character is not designed to receive a million polygons. Portraits typically look far nicer than 3D models, and they give you a different way to visualise the game. I can barely see my actual character's face 99% of the time anyway, so I just roll with the portraits as what I figure they'd look like.

I'm glad that Empower is easy to ignore and not use. That's about the only thing it has going for it. My criticism isn't along the lines of "oh players will abuse this". My criticism is that, especially at release, it was gamebreakingly overpowered (+10 Power levels), and that the combat system was much better off without it. I would not mind as much a gentler 'get out of jail' function for players with an interesting mechanism - e.g. a Wild Mage-like unpredictable effect. And one that was not a giant, eye-of-Sauron-glows-at-thee button. That doesn't make sense, though. You can only use it once per fight, so it doesn't matter whether you rest every fight or you rest every 5 fights. Especially at higher levels, you're probably rarely running out of Empower & you always can use it whenever you're in any significant fight.

I haven't played yet so I don't know how it pans out in practice, but in terms of the principle - bravo. 'Normal' shouldn't mean "mash some random buttons, still win the battle", like it does in so many RPGs.

Deadfire I think gets close to POE1 when the difficulty is right, because it's similar enough & the fundamental mechanics are there. But even when thinking of individual battles in a vacuum, Deadfire loses the resource management aspect because you're spamming active abilities all the time. Tyranny features a stripped-down, dumbed-down system that is never going to present the kind of tactical puzzles that POE or IE games can (even though they aren't exactly tactical masterpieces either). Then it is exacerbated by incredibly easy difficulty and cooldowns. Try playing Tyranny on Hard or even POTD with any decently built party - half the time I realised I could just sit there, push random buttons when I felt like it, or not, push the big shiny buttons when they glow, and the screen will just show a bunch of incoherent explosions before it's all over.

As an obsessive Infinity Engine fan that backed POE, I always knew it would be a different beast and I was (and am) happy for them to try new things. That doesn't mean I like the results of everything new they try, though. That comes with the territory of, well, trying new things. My regret with Obsidian isn't that they "betrayed us by not using D&D" or something, it's that they lost their signature style and quality of writing that defined them between KOTOR2 and New Vegas. Since then, their writing has gone steadily downhill. Mask of the Betrayer kept me excited to fire up the game again just to see more dialogues; now, it's mostly forgettable and even skippable. At the end of the day, it's a 100 person company in an industry with super-high turnover and super-high bankruptcy rates, surviving against the odds working on whatever projects they can with whoever talented people they can keep on board. So I do understand. It's just a pity, is all.

From the kickstarter page: I am brimming with confidence here, yes sir Yes please tell me more about how you could really use someone to tell you that not all your ideas are liquid gold This must be what they mean by 'unfiltered, cutting edge' specialness of the game

Incredibly, incredibly, incredibly expensive with years and years of investment required (before & after release) from a studio with no real history of massive AAA success or MMO expertise. It has a pretty high chance of killing Obsidian.

I see your sarcasm and raise you a glass, wot!

Yes, more or less. While specific battles sometimes remain difficult (especially if you avoid using the crazy magic awesome win button), any sense of strategic resource management is nearly completely removed. Systemic changes from POE1 generally tend to be lateral or backwards, rather than a clear step up. Despite all that, I find it a fairly fun romp. I just treat it as a great-looking murderhobo simulator where I set my own targets and challenges.

I'm OK with more light-hearted tone, but they could have really worked with the rest of what they had - the pirate themes, the colonial tensions, the seas and sailing. NPCs mocking each other over their accents and their ludicrous cultural ticks, party members constantly vomiting and whatnot. Instead we just get some BG-style banter that doesn't hold a candle to Minsc and Jan. (It's funny how Minsc and Jan remain the gold standard, because they were one-dimensional trick ponies of the kind that your DM would throw at you on a whim in a good P&P session. Same goes for HK47. But they had a schtick and it was a funny schtick.)