Tigranes

I like long RPGs. I like good RPGs even better. It is exhaustively documented, across dozens of games, that genre expectations about length and size often force developers to scope too much relative to their budget. Some people ignore the facts and say 'oh dumb/lazy/crap devs' as if time was free. It is... for Blizzard. As Fenstermaker says, it's often a zero sum game.

Nobody said that. If anything, the point is that guides have suffered from fundamental flaws for a long time, even if you thought they were gravy. Guides are the way they are because of certain fundamental issues. Guides have to be printed, and that often means they have to be written before the game is gold - so even discounting later patching, the guides are often written quickly, by people who haven't even been able to play the release version (and often don't give a crap anyway). You've got a couple of people rushing through a pre-release version with little to no oversight from the developers and rushing to get it out - which is why so many guides are filled with errors, do not contain very in-depth analysis, and often amount to "hey guys I played this game once real quick but this is how I beat that boss". This also means printed guides are often less vetted than online, amateur ones. It is uncommon for the developers to have the time to go through and check the contents of the guides thoroughly, and for the aforementioned reasons, people writing the guides are in a much worse position than hardcore players who have time to continue playing, fiddling, updating, under the scrutiny of like-minded players.

How is the Cold War something to "survive" for the EU, which wasn't created until 1993, and whose precedent forms were created as a direct response to World War II? You're basically saying 3+2 = Pasta.

Obsidian has always been a multi-project company, and we know there's at least one unannounced RPG in the works. POE2 is pretty sure to happen at some point, but who knows if it'll go through another KS, change engines, etc.

That's just a calculated way of building up his votes by bragging. Many people are susceptible to ineccessant and extravagant bragging because they see it as a sign of confidence, and over time even believe some of it. Just because he said it doesn't mean he believes his own bull****. He's got nothing on her spontaneous outburst of psychopathy "He bull****s on purpose, so he shouldn't be held accountable for bull****ting"?

"They have taken RPGs to a whole new level. Outselling the absolute top action games that exist. A feat that is beyond amazing." I fully agree. Pity it's a level inhabited by boring, un-fun games that aren't good RPGs and aren't good action games either.

Check this forum on ways to scale XP gain for any future playthroughs. For this one, I guess try losing a couple party members or putting up difficulty if it's not already POTD. It's shocking how badly they screwed up the progression - and it was pretty bad in vanilla as well.

The latter is more likely to be a troll than the former, these days... I'm quite sure Trump will win. GOP was far too late and far too divided in organising itself to attack Trump seriously, when they should have organised their richest donors and heaviest weights to assassinate his character a long time ago. The only remaining option, especially now after tuesday results, is to basically game the system, prevent his 51% and then have delegates pick - a move that would be almost as scandalous as a Trump nomination itself (not because it's new but because it's so blatant).

There are female characters, from very early on too. Anyway, wouldn't real Codexers have objectified sex toy women all over the place? Wait, no, that's just mainstream gaming...

At some point you can't stop determined players, or you make the game frustrating for everybody. If some people want to go halfway to god mode and rest after every single battle, or waste their time going back to town 3 times a dungeon, or whatever, let them. I know if I wanted to do that, I would just use the console and save myself time - and I wouldn't go online talking about how the entire game should be redesigned to suit me.

It's day-related as you say, and I think some people on these forums have gone to great lengths to tabulate what you get on what day. If you mean actually modding the tables, I'm not sure it's possible. (To me, if you're going to waste that much time and effort just to get better loot you might as well just cheat it in, but hey I'm just one guy.)

Why is anyone actually trying to judge Trump by his policies? Do they think he will stick to them? Fun exercise: politicians changing their minds because politicians v. Trump changing his mind because Trump, which is going to be worse?

Wouldn't the exact same thing happen if you had, say, 4? Unless the cap is infinite you're going to have to leave some behind or come back for them. Converting excess supplies for copper is a good idea. Given how cheap they are it will be utterly irrelevant after the first couple hours, but why not.

Voice acting has gotten better but it's still often bad. And bad voice acting is not only bad in and of itself, it prevents players from imagining the characters in a different way. Just like Mona Lisa doesn't become necessarily better if 3D animated, adding more detail isn't always a positive thing. One major problem with VA is not the VA itself but how it hurts good writing. VA makes it much more difficult and costly to edit/change lines, or to write as much as the situation demands. You end up with lines that are not sufficiently polished, lines that no longer suit the final plot/situation, lines that seem too squashed, etc. as a result. I'm supportive of VA when the budget is used to get the really good voice acting and iterate it right - spend that million dollars on one or two characters done properly (the money is often about studio time as much as expensive professionals).

No, it isn't. It is well known amongst those who read historical works or otherwise have an awareness of writing over history that 'conciseness', which now means 'plain simple words, short sentences, minimal poetic language', etc, etc, only became a golden rule for every kind of writing over the last century (at most). It is no coincidence that this has happened where poetry has become relatively marginalised, scholarly work has been forced to become basically a more pretentious form of journalism, and journalism itself has become so 'concise' sometimes that it is hardly worth reading. In other words, the insistence that everything is written in the same plain style has solved some inefficiencies while destroying many good kinds of diversity. There is no reason to say anything and everything should be concise as if there was one rule for writing. That said, of course there should be good reasons to not be concise. POE's issue I would suggest is less to do with individual pieces, which are often fine, but their effect as a whole, and how you come across one detailed description then immediately another. Again, POE needed better deployment of writing, not "less writing". The basic confusion over this issue is why so many movies, games, etc. today basically read/sound like trailers + TV Tropes. "We have a problem!" "The [bad guys!] They're going to regret crossing us." "My [weapon] is with you." "For [homeland name]!"

It is never to do with the number of words, it's about their quality and their pacing vis-a-vis the rest of the game. The opening sequences commit the familiar mistake of cramming too much exposition, and throughout the game too often key information is packed into singular key NPCs, from Maerwald to Iovara. There is never such a thing as too much or too little text, and people use cliches like it's a book, it's a movie, but what does that even mean? The burden of dense reading required by books and movies themselves have changed wildly over the years. POE2 simply needs to improve how it tells its stories.

I like Minsc and Edwin too, but Baldur's Gate was quintessential campy-epic high fantasy where you expect to find larger than life characters at every corner. I like POE's more understated tone for what it is, and Sagani as a character, for example, is often misunderstood by players who are used to everything in RPGs being melodramatic. POE is also, for better or worse, a pretty serious game, so you couldn't have voice direction that gave birth to Jan or Kagain. (I never thought I'd hear anyone praise Valygar, who is so forgettable that if he teamed up with Cernd everybody in the room would get amnesia.) I think Devil, Durance, Pallegina, Eder work well with the character concepts. Aloth is a bit teen-Disney in both incarnations for me, and I'd probably have preferred a different style for Hiravias.

87 Bernie / 86 Hillary, but I should have jacked all foreign policy questions to Most Important, since that's really the only place where US presidents can do big things. It's disturbing how high Bloomberg scores across everybody's results.

Sometimes options violate core game principles. For example: removing ammo restrictions in a survival game, disabling permadeath in a roguelike. Doing so might make the game more enjoyable for you, so you're free to mod it however you wish (or find another game that fits your playstyle better), but it drastically changes the experience the developers inteded for you to have, the emotions you were meant to feel. Restrictions give us form and direction. We always work within the confines of some system; classes are restrictions, locks and traps are restrictions, damage type immunities are restrictions... They all create problems to analyze and solve - the game's more fun this way. Making every challenge optional would leave us with a very bland RPG. I don't think removing camp supply restrictions would break PoE or anything, but generally speaking, yes, more options aren't always good. This. People have somehow begun shouting "more options are always better" as if this was Braveheart, but hey, the game with the most options is a padded room where you imagine everything yourself. Games, throughout their entire history in human civilisation, have been about designing a set of restrictions. Without restrictions there are no meaningful choices, no challenge, no point. Of course, games have also had house rules and modifications throughout history. So should a game allow you to change everything about itself? But that's not practically possible, and more than that, there's a slope here where you end up destroying the various interlocking parts of the game by making too many core variables available to change. You turn the film's protagonist into Johnny Depp, you push a button to delete all swearing from a book, you use a frequency filter to blot out all the bass and drums from a song - OK, if someone hacks it that way, cool, but why should that be demanded of the original creators? As Rosveen says it's not like killing camp supplies suddenly destroys everything about POE, but it does destroy the pacing, strategic considerations, the meaning of the level design, the effects of the encounter design, the balance of the character abilities, etc. You get a very different experience. Do you really want to play a game that is quite complexly different from the game that is sold? OK, fine. That's why we have mods, and that's why we have console commands, and cheat engine programs. The devs have already given you the tools - just spend 1 second opening the console and typing 'rest'. But to argue that any and all choices make all games better and that the designers are obliged to provide every option toggle is baseless. Gfted to be blunt, I think it's understandable why you find the counterarguments to 'more options' puzzling, but that's because you're imagining a really crap counterargument. Nobody cares if you want to play that way. But by the same token it's not like the devs should provide enough buttons for every player's idiosyncratic desires. And in the case of camping supplies, you already have a button, use it. If some people just want to use noclip in, say, Jedi Knight II, and zoom around like a ghost through the walls, they can - but there would be no cause to argue it should be installed as an official toggle.

Curious, do you guys play with AI and not control your characters? I've never really had a problem, but maybe that's why. Or maybe IE games just immunised me..

It's rude and ignorant to poop on somebody else's research without knowing all the details, so I won't do that, but it's always difficult to figure these kinds of things out. Sometimes research of this kind ends up getting a Disney finding despite best practices because (1) there's a self-selecting bias on the type of people who agree to be, say, interviewed about video LPs, i.e. they are pretty passionate; (2) there's a self-rationalising process going on when people talk about what they do which can sometimes be very different from what they were motivated by when they really did it. This isn't to say the community aspect is wrong, I'm sure it plays a role, but I'd be curious to know to what extent these videos sometimes are treated like television by couch-youtube-surfers and how LPs that focus almost entirely on the game and not the presenter works. I don't watch video LPs because 99% of presenters are either nauseous annoying HAR HAR goblins, but I enjoy text/image LPs because they're avenues for telling stories that really are independent. Paradox forum LPs being a good example - they're basically a form of historical fan fiction with the game serving as a visual simulator.

" You more or less had to make do with whatever you had on you at the time. " This is exactly what the supplies are supposed to do. I agree with you that, especially for certain playing styles, it doesn't really accomplish this goal. On one hand, IE games arguably made what you describe (let's just call it attrition for now) a non-factor for many people, because you could rest 9000 times like this was some hotel. Pillars fixes this problem, but in some cases players apparently end up taking boring treks back to town all the time, which isn't much better. I'll say this - a player who really commits to saying, I'll clear this dungeon with my camping supplies without silly trips back to town, will get a really good attrition effect. You learn to prioritise and make tactical choices not only to conserve per-rest abilities but to conserve your health. It's also possible to keep fighting with low health; it's not impossible like you say. I've had some of the most fun when I had to have a couple of party members hang back due to low health, and try to make it through the next battle. Similarly, you get some great attrition when you don't abuse the rest system in IE to fight every single battle with max HP and spells. In other words, both systems rely on the player a lot (too much, probably), and a better solution I hope is found in POE2. Increasing the number of rests won't really help - even on Hard/POTD's 2 limit, nearly every dungeon worth the name contains 1 or more camping supplies to be found. e.g. Temple of Eothas thus allows 3 rests on POTD, and there are 11 fights total if you kill everything; on Easy, you can already rest after almost every single fight. If we're going to gift players even more supplies, we might as well just get rid of it and go back to IE, less fuss that way. I think this issue is so tough to resolve because it's clear that players have wildly different ways of approaching resting, and wildly different thresholds for what they imagine is 'bad outcome'. There are people who clearly enjoy resting after every battle or whenever they lack their most powerful spells and lose a bit of HP, and find the inability to get back to 100% a stupid frustration, and on the other extreme there are also many people who like restrictions that force low-resources fights and strategic planning. How do you satisfy everyone? Probably impossible, but in that case how do you at least design for a decent range of people?

You had random encounters, but that itself was an awkward solution. Resting in a D&D system is never supposed to be as free as it was in the IE games, which effectively made a Super Easy Spam Mode available with the flick of a hotkey. POE's camping supplies isn't 'overdesign', but a restoration to a normal state - which also makes it easier to design encounters keeping in mind that normal players (not the ones who go back to town 8 times) will not have unlimited firepower. The problem we have now is a weird historical legacy rather than a discrete problem, where IE trained a lot of people to play in a 'rest whenever use all the spells I like whatever' way. It's not IE's fault, either - it's tough to represent D&D resting and its restrictions in a meaningful way in a CRPG. So they did the best they could, and IE itself wasn't bad. It's just that after 15 years of deregulation, POE tries to restore some sensible restrictions, but discovers that it's jarring with some players' expectations. At this point I'd probably support just getting rid of the rest mechanic. You can get more meaningful and balance-able long-term resource management with mechanics like addiction, healing supplies, wounds, upkeep. But I don't know if Obsidian's willing to make huge systemic overhauls for POE2.

You probably threw it in the text adventure sequence to save the guy?

OK, what's your point?