Tigranes

From your description, it's impossible to say why you feel that way. For me, it's pretty simple: Deadfire's writing is markedly worse than POE1 (and POE1 itself isn't one of Obsidian's best either). It's more the free exploration, looting, pillaging, tactical challenge that keeps you going, and not really a sense of exploring a cohesive world with thought-provoking problems and wonderfully strange locales. I mean, I really enjoy being a traveling murderhobo, and I like Deadfire - it just means I'm not looking forward to another episode of the 'gods' filming their next B-grade daytime sitcom.

I'm all for letting players mix & match. It basically becomes a fun way to further customise your game using available options. I'm glad there's no pointless 'reward' for completing them, it helps us focus on actually enjoying the challenge and the gameplay.

*shrug* what I want is content that is enjoyable to experience, not some artificial set of 'rewards' that an algorithm hands out.

Remember playing BG1* on Hard or Insane? That mothercrocker in the north side house of Candlekeep could murder you dead and you'd be rerolling before the tutorial was over. I'm hearing great things about how it really feels like an IE knockoff. It's funny to say it, but after 20 years of never getting one, I'm happy to have a Baldur's Gate clone from Russia. *(The actual original, not the modded ports to BG2 engine, or the beamdog crap, because all of that changes the power equation to yield a different experience for better or for worse)

Right, it's a 3.5ed derivative, no? We ain't getting an official AD&D, so this is probably as good as it gets.

Are those the base portraits? They are.... pretty incredible. I mean, I can totally get with a campy, B-movie style high fantasy adventure module. From screenshots, they really knocked it out of the park with the UI conveniences.

Too busy with work, but I really look forward to buying and playing soon. Main thing I'm hoping is that the combat is sufficiently robust, challenging on higher difficulties, and snappy to give it even half of the replayability the Infinity Engine in particular managed.

Enlighten us, oh great one - Which part wasn't true? Most people who judge Telltale games in such negative light haven't even played them or have never completed one. What else is new? But it looks like everything I said rubbed you the wrong way or another. Oh, that's not the point at all, buddy. I'm not an adventure game connoisseur, and I don't have strong opinions about this issue. I certainly wouldn't want to insist my views are completely true without bias and force them down your throat. In fact, you might be right for some or all of this stuff! The only thing is, when I hear someone say they're not biased at all & that the other side spews lies and hate, it just makes it hard for me to believe them, you know? It's all about self-awareness. I know I'm far too opinionated about RPGs. As I said before, I certainly think it's no mortal sin for some adventure games to go light on puzzles and go for cinematic storytelling. But you know that already, you read my post.

"I know some extremely picky people will disagree, they will probably say some stuff none of which is true! But anyway I know I speak for all of us when I say they were great!" Yeah, sure. Not quite Telltale, but I faced a version of the issue with the recent release of Unavowed by Dave Gilbert - who has made a series of cool point-and-click adventure games in the past, and Unavowed is still in that format, but in reality gets rid of most puzzles or gameplay in favour of a visual novel-style story delivery. Unavowed has very few puzzles, very little exploration, just a long track of dialogue after exposition with a couple of story choices thrown in. I've never been a big old school adventure game buff, and some of the more hardcore puzzling was never for me, so I don't really think adventure games are required to have that by law. What I took issue with in Unavowed was that when you take away this gameplay, what you are left with is the story, the writing, the cinematography, to make the whole experience worthwhile. And then I think the bar really does become a lot higher. Now your storytelling has to be so bloody good that you don't mind you're not actually doing a whole lot other than watching it. And whether 'new' or 'old school' adventure games, I don't think there are many where the storytelling passes that bar.

Natsume Soseki's Botchan [Little Master]. He is perhaps better known to some for I Am a Cat (1905): From academic works like Simmel, to of course the well known reflections of French literature, accounts of the lonely individual and modernity from the very early 20th century I find have a special resonance with today - not the least because, in many cases, so many of our present fantasies and angsts (about technology, etc.) are reprising eerily similar stuff from late 19c/early 20c.

It's part of the nonlinearity problem - if you nerf XP gain, then some people miss 40% of the XP out there without even realising, and then they're level 10 at the endgame. With the god challenges they have the answer on a plate. Would be delighted with options to turn off increased XP gain with less party members, and/or some kind of curved XP cut where later game XP is cut far more (or just redo the levelling table, which is probably easier).

I'd rather they rebalance the progression, than add meaningless levels or add more abilities than they can properly design.

Yeah. I hate the narrator and I think the VA there is horrible, but I'm not really going to sit here demanding that they add a mute button. What's the point of constantly asking devs to add a button for every single thing? I'd rather they focused on the big issues.

Kickstarter age inXile has never, ever released a polished product; everything about the game on your screen screams awkward. They make early Obsidian look like Bioware in that regard. They just really seem to have trouble getting genuine RPG-making talent to come through. They're a second-rate studio with their heart in their right place, which is tragic, because I'd love for them to have become powerhouses churning these things out.

Awful, awful reviews on launch, serious optimisation issues, and very haphazard media coverage on a niche RPG with terrible clunky UI and B-grade graphics? It ain't making any big bucks, ever. As for the entirely separate question of whether it's a fun game to play - too early to tell, I'm waiting until real people have put a few hours into it.

Icewind Dale was fantastic, and it would be amazing to see a focused, combat-oriented spinoff of POE. People who hate the concept can stick with the main franchise. Sadly, I can no longer rely on Obsidian to provide entertaining and memorable writing like they used to with pretty much every game. Now it ranges between pretty OK and pretty bleh. I'd be more than happy to see a spinoff title that doesn't have to try and do everything in the book.

Ugh, that sounds like an awful system though. I don't want to sit there just watching HP numbers go up (and those of the enemies). In some ways it's even worse than staying at level 20. They really need to learn to curve XP right, which neither POE nor Deadfire have done at any point.

The middle one, you could easily find in perfectly solemn Chinese or Korean art. The other two look like Nickelodeon, though. Interesting.

I can't imagine isometric ship combat being any fun until they developed enough systems for it to, well, be a full scale combat system comparable to the actual combat? Oh look, I'm controlling one ship, it moves kind of slow, I guess I click on some abilities on some enemies. It will suck until they have systems for relative rate of fire, rate of turning, crew bonuses, 'wound'-like maluses to simulate crew taken out of commission, different types of 'injuries' / 'status effects' for the ship being damaged.....

Thats actually the only one that bothers me of the main story, they could have used this opportunity to make new players interested in the background of the gods and let them search in books and lore about how to better interact with each one but they instead handle you all the info about them in the same conversation like some bad TV novel's character exposure The gods were better when you only got to talk to them in short, flashy, ambiguous snippets, and even better when you talked instead to people like Durance or that lady in the city temple conflicted about her faith in Magran. The only god that wasn't a cringey waste of time in Deadfire was Eothas, who at least maintained some semblance of a thinking entity that has lived far longer than humans as opposed to "I am wael I am god of mystery I want everything to be mysterious did I mention i like mystery".

Bio/Obs style companions have always been very costly to make, sucking up a lot of resources. Some people say "but you're just writing a bunch of dialogues and stuff", but by that token, anything from movie scripts to UN reports should be cheap. Character design, portraits, scripts, banter, reactivity with every possible other companion and quest and situation, editing, voice acting if you have it, it all takes time and money and affects your pipelines. My view is that we would be better off if a hypothetical POE3 drastically dialed down the companions, and we just had a bunch of lightly written, low-drama folks that adventure with you, closer to BG1. Obsidian can't seem to write top-notch companions like they used to, and they're not worth the expense. But that takes us back to a dilemma BIoware have had ever since BG2; companions and romances became so wildly popular with a sizable chunk of the target audience. You can't afford to do them or not do them, it seems.

Feargus has been known to want to do a big open world AAA game for years. He's spoken numerous times about personally wanting a POE spinoff of that sort. Open-world has ended up diluting the really enjoyable bits of games like Witcher 3 in the recent past. Obsidian can do a good open world (see: FNV), but only by piggybacking existing engines and systems (see: FNV) - otherwise it would have to be the biggest project they've ever done, when they've struggled with scope management with almost every title they've ever released.

Of course it's not high art. The difference is that someone like Tiax is silly without being cringy or overstaying his welcome, whereas in a Larian game they would milk that joke seven times over. Xzar and Montaron, though, were horrible. I can only presume that for BG1, they wrote the minor companions like you roll new characters when the DM's already killed your last eight in the same session.

I'm pretty sure this thread now contains a lot more talk about gays than that entire review.... ...in which the writer isn't ranting about queers, but using offensive language to criticise romances & other aspects of the writing.

Some bits I agree, some bits I don't, but some points I think are worthwhile: Probably one of the great new additions POE franchise has made to the IE formula. I really hope we see more of this in other RPGs. I mean, it's also great for lower budget RPGs - no need for superexpensive voice acting or cutscenes to have good writing and player choice. I don't even mind that the PC isn't the protagonist and basically just follows Eothas and misses out on doing anything massively consequential. It's refreshing to be in the shadows of a truly powerful entity making a momentous decision. But jesus, listening to the 'gods' were excruciating. Half the time they're trying to sound important when they're clearly not going to do, say, or debate anything of import, and the other half is spent trying to establish their portfolio - "hey, I'm Rymrgand, did I mention I think everybody should just die?" Itemisation is so often poorly done in RPGs, that it's worth calling out when it's done halfway right. And unlike the reviewer I think the patches haven't fundamentally changed this strong point. It's also pretty shocking that after all the feedback about lack of clear combat visual feedback & chaotic spell effects, we still got: (Great, I can't copy images, I can't IMG code their image, and when I save & upload it myself it's the size of a wilted testicle.) We shouldn't have to check a massive chart on how Hobbled compares to Weakened and whatnot, if you can even mouse over the wound icons to see what's wrong with you (and anyway there are often so many effects on a well buffed character that it spills off-screen).