Tigranes

You won't find over-50s as a strong minority in any online gaming forum. I'd find the 29% figure hard to believe, though if you were able to find it again I suppose I'd admit my ignorance - and in any case they are likely to be underrepresented in online forums, as juvenile as they still mostly are.

Resolve isn't persuade, and resolve is not overwhelmingly dominant for conversational solutions. Rogues can be played melee or ranged, as can ciphers, wizards, etc., so there is a lot more class variety. I don't see how it helps anybody's replayability to play a druid but without wildshape, anyway.

Both are fine, 25 is probably safer.

Without suppression, you could probably end up with something like 30 DEX, and then reach 40 with food and buffs, and then get 18 attacks a second or something.

Dwarves with guns.

Some people insist on waiting for the final final final patch to play, and are loathe to miss out on even small improvements and fixes. If you are not like that, then I wouldn't say there's a huge problem. White March itself is accessed as a stand-alone set of areas and quests, for the most part, about halfway through the game.

Keep in mind this forum, from similarly anecdotal evidence we've drawn over the last ten years, does seem to be a fair bit older than many others. We've always had relatively few teens, and a fair number of folks over 35. Not sure how it changes with the POE contingent, though.

:drama:

Haha, Cipher was an extremely popular class at release and everyone complained about how OP it was. If I want to be 2serious about it, a poll's validity plummets as soon as the pollster starts making assumptions that aren't backed up by quantitative evidence. I can't really vote if I can only choose one. Several classes are interesting in different ways, and I wouldn't, for example, rank Wizard or Monk 'above' the other.

"I am completely sick of the Pillars of Eternity Stronghold and refuse to do any more work on it. " In general, it's not a great feature and my advice to new players would be, don't worry about it. Play around with it if you want to, abandon it if you like. You're never ever going to be stuck because you didn't do something with the stronghold, nor will your characters be significantly weaker/stronger. I certainly think nobody should ever waste time metagaming the turns and hoarding money for it, unless they enjoy upgrading the stronghold for its own sake. The info itself looks good to me, thanks for posting it.

That depends entirely on what 'types/roles' there exist in the game system. Not everything has to be fighter/mage/cleric, or tank/whatever other roles those MMO people always turn every game into, for example. I wouldn't mind 4, which is what I usually play IE games / POE on now, but that's because games are too often balanced to give way too many options and fallbacks for the player, so playing below the full party actually makes for interesting scarcity scenarios. That would ironically go away if they designed for 4 to begin with.

There's ways to be wacky and funny in-setting. BG's brand of wacky was sort of appropriate for what it was - a campy high fantasy romp where walking 'seriously?' archetypes like Gorion share space with 4th wall genre humour cameos. The natural extension (going too far, really) being the Divinity series. There's plenty ways to have wacky and funny that works with POE's world and tone without introducing Minsc / HK-47. Pallegina, actually, could have been a dry-wit character if you look at how she is introduced, and Aloth could have provided some lightness if he wasn't so badly written.

Wow, good / evil path! So wacky!

I just think having Vancians and per-encs together without any moderating mechanism is asking for trouble. Either Vancians become a huge hassle, or per-encs become rote brainless spam abilities leaving the heavy lifting to Vancians. Either you get rid of Vancians for that game, or you make some changes to the non-Vancian abilities, uniting them with some sort of mechanic. It is weird that they all play by entirely separate rules. I would try to find a middle ground in POE2, some sort of resource mechanic that does introduce resource conservation across battles (which a full per-enc system wouldn't provide), while getting rid of Vancians. That might mean upkeep, it might mean some kind of magic toxicity that is purged with rest, hell, it could just be a mana system where mana potions / regeneration is actually difficult, or it could just mean stamina costs for per-enc castings, something. Right now you just have per-encs that you cast every single battle (or you don't because they suck), and then Vancians doing their own thing off to the side.

Being next to ruins doesn't mean they get the disease, though, right? It's a question of the machines fired up by the Leaden Key, which doesn't seem to have a presence amongst Glanfathans, possibly because of the difficulty in getting recruits amongst that community.

I'm sick of saving the world all the time, and I'm very happy that POE isn't overdosed on 'epic'. (In fact, you are a special snowflake with special watcher powers unmasking and ending a centuries-long conspiracy and finding the hidden truth about the gods of the world... so the fact that this isn't very 'epic' says something about how hyperbolic the genre is.)

Eww. Cooldowns tend to produce the most mindless, tedious clickfest gameplay, because you're stripping everything else away from other scarcity systems, leaving only time. So the only strategic decision that remains is that you can't use it for the next 5/10/30 seconds. If your cooldowns are too short, you might as well replace your brain with a monkey's; all you do is click the shiny button when it's not grey, and repeat ad nauseum. If your cooldowns are too long, then there's no real difference from per-encs, since POE battles are typically decided fairly quickly. Any good system for an old school RPG, where you enjoy a smidgen of strategic thinking as opposed to "OMG 80 FIREBALLZ", needs to introduce some appropriate kind of resource management. Vancians are supposed to be good for this because they actually make your resources/decisions carry over across battles, so that instead of the 5th level of a dangerous dungeon feeling like "eh whatever i just cast same spells again and again and i'm all good", you actually might feel like you're running low. The problem is that in every CRPG, it's been really hard to organise Vancians, resting, etc. so that it works well without driving people crazy. POE needs to not use so many different systems, and I'd support streamlining into per-encs if meaningful decisions were still present. This might mean an upkeep system, where, for example, your character's Resolve controls how many different spells you can keep alive at once (see: Arcanum), so that maybe your priest can only keep 1 or 2 buffs going at a time; and/or it might mean reworking the Interrupt system so that enemies can actually purposefully interrupt your castings (and vice versa). The point is that any system has to encourage gameplay where each spell cast is meaningful, instead of boring and brainless 'i spam 3 awesum abilities every single fight'.

Original game level cap was 12, not 10. Some WM content is designed for highest level parties, though you can of course do them earlier if you wish. The original game itself gives you enough XP to get past 12, while White March gives out a ton of XP so you can hit the level cap before you tackle the most difficult bits. Just play, do stuff you can handle, and eventually you'll be there without undue worry.

Everybody kept arguing every patch about who should be 'tiered' where, you had people saying wizards were way too powerful then the next post someone would say wizards are garbage, etc, etc. And anyway measuring how much weapon damage a cipher does versus a warrior seems a weird way to compare how good a class is. Most classes at this point are pretty powerful, just roll with what you want and if you start feeling one of your characters is useless shake it up. I think all this tiers and numbers and builds can do a disservice when it encourages people to wonder what they're missing instead of focusing on their own game and having fun.

Icewind Dale was made by Black Isle, BG1/2 were made by Bioware. And as I say, BG2 is an extremely unusual case in the history of gaming. In any case, I'd prefer the game comes out later and is a good game, rather than a rushed one.

You must have found a way to enjoy BG2/TOB despite Vancians being everywhere, so maybe do whatever you did then? If you liked KOTOR2, well that one is in your face for 50 hours going on and on about philosophical issues. POE isn't that extreme.

If there's 80 different things you don't like about the game, maybe you're just not into it...? In the end only you can make the call. You get more sidequests and such once you get to Defiance Bay, and there's a distinct tone in each chapter of the game. No guarantees you'll like them any more than youdid the start. You should also have met Eder and Kana, so I don't know whether you don't like all the characters or just Aloth and Durance. You can hire custom adventurers and each class can be built very differently, so you don't have to deal with Vancian magic, and you can easily go with a melee heavy group or whatnot if you like, nothing stopping you. Clerics, paladins, druids, even mages can be built in support/defensive roles.

Because (1) big teams cost a metric bucketton of money, and no, selling several hundred thousand copies with good reviews doesn't mean they have no money worries, far from it; (2) it's not a linear equation, bigger teams changes everything about how your pipeline works and the game that results from it. Extreme example is Assassin's Creed where they have to coordinate hundreds of team members across 3+ continents, instead of a dozen guys in an office hashing things out and iterating quickly. You get different kinds of games from those different processes. BG2 was an extreme anomaly that we should be surprised came out as big and as good as it did, really. People use it as an example all the time but that's not really reasonable. I expect the scope of the game will be a bit larger than POE (if only because so many people think a sequel has to be), and the kind of pipeline they're doing with Tyranny basically guarantees it won't be a rushed repackaged thing, but I wouldn't hope for Shadows of Amn, with anybody.

Paradox did not play a traditional publisher role for POE, only distribution and QA. We don't know what role it has in POE2. Besides which, the whole point of POE crowdfunding was to try and set an independent model where Obsidian takes the profits from each game and uses it to fund new games. If you have a traditional publisher, they pay for development, then take all the profits - meaning you then need to bend over to another publisher to not go bankrupt the day after your game sells 80 million copies. We could still see a kickstarter for POE2, maybe, maybe not. We know for a fact that it's not far enough along to be Early Access. Smart money would be on POE2 having a similar or slightly larger team, but nobody should be dreaming that it's going to have 100 members on it during crunch time or something.

Sure, it's a variant of the turn towards episodic / spinoff releases in the last ten years. But it's more likely to be a question of producing multiple expansion packs (e.g. NWN1/2) or milking the model with 3-4 standalones (the new King's Bounty) rather than, say, 5+ modules stretched out over three years. The barrier there is one of consumer expectations. Only 10-20% of players ever finish an RPG, and quality should matter over quantity, yet you always have people crying that a game isn't worth $40 or not a real RPG if it's not 8000 hours long, and because game journalism is filled with braindead monkeys they like to talk about game length as a significant variable. And in any case, whether it's TW3 expansions or WM1+2, a lot of gamers, for one reason or another, don't tend to come back to a game they've dropped 6 months down the line.