Tigranes

What Amentep says is correct. However, Qistina does have a point in this regard: "extremist Muslims" too often imply that what ISIS does is just standard Islam beliefs gone too far. There is not enough effort by the Western media - and, indeed, by the religious leaders of Muslim communities themselves - to communicate just how and why these groups do not represent Islam. Very few people in the West know anything about what being a Muslim entails, so it is very easy for people to think that there might be something in the religion that encourages such 'extremism'.

Don't feel shame; just recognize it as junk food only to be eaten rarely. That actually looks really good; maybe I'll get some KFC on Thanks Giving. It's easy to understand why people would sometimes eat something that is delicious but terrible for you. What I don't understand is how anybody could look at that thing and think it looks delicious in any conceivable way. I love meat, I don't really like vegetables, but dear God, would people also enjoy eating candy, milk chocolate, ice cream and Coke all in one bite? ....OK, actually, they sell stuff in the US that does combine most of those. I just don't get how it could taste good, it's amazing how people's sense of taste adapt.

It's curious, because Qistina is basically saying, "the East's ability to fully integrate Western culture so that everybody eats hamburgers is proof that Asians are more creative and are rising". Whereas for the last 30+ years, many Asian societies have criticised such integration as a sign of weakness and cultural imperialism, so that they would be much happier if people ate real Nasi Goreng rather than Americanised, etc. Weve already assimilated the best that the east has to offer and continued our advancements. That's why you are trying so hard to emulate the West, without us you would be wandering and lost, like a ship without a rudder. We are here to show you the proper way so your ship doesn't crash upon the rocky shore. I know you're making fun, but that kind of nonsense is probably what makes people like Qistina get their ideas, you know...

To be fair, I'm almost entirely sure an Obsidian-made TB game will still be better than D:OS in everything but combat, because quite frankly, everything but the combat sucked in D:OS. D:OS had crap art, crap writing, but the fantastic combat & environmental manipulation made it a great title. The thing is, D:OS combat is fantastic in a very particular way. It has no sense of balance, it is far, far too easy, and there is not a lot of variability or replayability in character building. All of that becomes kind of irrelevant because they've managed to make screwing around with the environment & elements, etc. so fun. It's a game where there is no challenge but it still has fun in spades. Hence, whether an Obsidian turn-based POE or some other company's TB game, there's plenty of room for more traditional kinds of experiences. And really, more TB RPGs? Who's complaining? Bring them on.

Really? But if Muslims in America make rally and shout "Death to America!", bring weapons, burning American flag, drawing your presiden face funnily or even Jesus, burn the Bible...they will get shot by the police isn't it? Historically, flag burning has remained enormously controversial, and the current judicial interpretation makes it permissible only by arguing that it is not a 'threat' in each specific context. That means the law, and the courts, remain open to a future interpretation where flag burning in a specific way or in a specifically 'inciteful' manner would become eligible for harsh punishment and prohibition. Notably, a lot of similar decisions also go back to Oliver Holmes' back-and-forth, such that there are precedent arguments in the Supreme Court both for allowing people to spread anti-American messages in wartime and prosecuting similar activity. This is obviously not to detract from the very real ways in which America goes to sometimes ridiculous lengths to protect freedom of expression. And apologies in advance for any context I missed by not reading the first few pages.

Good to hear Story Time was a simple affair, and that it is joined by better late-game challenge. Touche. You're saying a lot of stuff that I didn't even mention or think about, but I think you're responding in good faith and not just going 'lol everyone knows i am right you are just making stuff up'. So I'm pretty sure it's my fault for writing in a hurry and making a mess of my own points. Obviously adding Story Time - especially in a simple "tune X Y Z for all opponents" way Josh describes - isn't a huge strain, and of course it's not going to be the downfall of POE2. It's really a minor thing in the context of POE itself. What I don't like is what things like Story Time share with many other decisions of this kind in the history of RPGs: (1) features which water down the design and strip down the game experience, (2) the mistaken idea that "more options are always better". Still sounds like nonsense? The longer version: A video game, just like a movie, a book, a song or even a restaurant menu, is not just a single thing existing in a vacuum, and no, people are not rational beings that know exactly what they want and just make choices. All such things train us how to enjoy them. When we were pushed to listen to entire albums because it was a big hassle to fast forward on a cassette tape, or pushed to concentrate on the music because the lack of portable music players meant music wasn't as often a multi-tasking activity, these limitations also had the effect of training people to appreciate music in a certain way. When music is more often heard as background sound effects and it becomes as easy as possible to skip, you can still say, "hey, people aren't forced to use those functions, everyone can just choose", and you're right in the short term. But over time, this kind of stuff trains people to value music differently, and you may well find that the kind of music, and the kind of listening, that you appreciate, becomes not just niche, but no longer commercially viable. All this is textbook 101 in the history of any kind of commercialised cultural activity. The thing is, this stuff isn't just super-general stuff far away from the world of RPGs. This is precisely what has happened to RPGs in a lot of cases. "Nobody forces you to listen to voice acting, you can read text all you like" - but games started training people to focus and eventually obsess about voice acting, and this resulted in RPGs literally having word quotas so that they could afford full VA, and writers' ability to edit and improve the writing was severely constrained because of VA schedules. Friendly fire and permadeath became a thing for higher difficulties, or even banished entirely from some games; after a while, people were so used to this kind of "blasty blast never-lose" gameplay that they started complaining at games that refused to cater. And so on. And you know, Pillars of Eternity, along with other KS games, were made precisely because some of us RPG lovers realised that the "choice" other gamers made - for easier, casual, consequence-less, simple games - had actually taken away our choice in what we wanted to play. Now, let me pre-empt the knee-jerk exaggerations: it would be stupid to say "OMG POE has story time its no longer old school omg refund my money plz". (Story Time is less offensive than many other possibilities, simply because it's coming in a very late patch & the game already has Paths of the Damned.) I'm saying, stuff like story time isn't my cup of tea because such things don't just "harm nobody", and I like to see games, artists, musicians, etc. stick to their own creative vision and say "this is our thing that we put our heart into, this is how we'd like you to enjoy it". It'd be silly to raise pitchforks about it.

People who don't want to play any combat in an RPG like POE (or, indeed, Icewind Dale) are a very, very different audience, yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. I certainly would like to visualise sex in everything, but this damn industry won't give me my Sex Time! Maybe I should make a lot of threads about it like luzarius? 1) Actually, a lot of games already do this, implicitly - because you can just smash '1' on every tree-structure dialogue in a lot of games and come out just fine. There are games that purposefully mix it up so that '1' isn't the "OK now let me go and help you" answer, but we've already seen the consequences of people complaining there is too much text: you think this game offers you some nice writing, but then you realise all the writing was pigeonholed in a way that you can spam '1'. Or X. 2) OK. I guess they can do literally anything and everything, cos it's their game. Eder could wear a hat made of bacon and the Grieving Mother could become a neo-nazi. Your logic says it's all fine. 3) So now you're saying "Slippery slope arguments are invalid because at the end of the day Obsidian makes the decisions." Which is like saying "no matter what happens, Obsidian knows best and they will never be influenced by anything, unless they wanted to be influenced." I guess, again, by that logic, anything and everything they do is fine by definition.

It's certainly legitimate that some gamers may struggle with, or not enjoy, the combat, and it's perfectly reasonable that they want to enjoy the rest of the game. That's why we have things like god modes and cheats. Just like people are free to just skip past all the dialogue and get into fights, without demanding a 'Battle Time' mode. There's no need to start investing development resources to creating "Let us gut out half of the game for you" buttons. "It's optional" isn't a magic phrase you can use everywhere. How about an optional Sex Time mode where you can have sex with every character? It's just like how we release Disney movies and then there's an optional R18 version where all the characters bone each other - no, wait, we don't have that, even though it's 'optional', do we? When you start having optional modes like this it's an invitation for people to never learn how to play the game, and then when such players start accounting for a portion of the sales and start demanding more things (maybe they do want to experience combat but they want it to be super easy?), or when they start putting up user reviews and spreading word of mouth about the game through a totally different experience, you get a gradual creep of a very different design. You can't make a game for everybody. Not even the biggest budget AAA games. Just like you can't write a book that is for everyone (skip to page 20 if you are in it for the sex, page 40 if you want the science fiction...). What you do is make a product, and then stand behind it as a whole.

You've mentioned that very issue about a thousand and one times, so I would welcome a piece where you lay down specifics about how you think they can be solved or mitigated. In my personal experience with POTD, it is not particularly 'rote', and no more than most other RPGs of this type (including IE games), but that's not an excuse and a more diverse and less predictable tactical challenge is certainly called for. So I don't really see the point of this poll or advertising your soon-to-come 'piece', there's not much to talk about until we start talking specifics. I don't have much time to write, but I suspect possible solutions can be found along the lines of: (1) more diversified enemies and enemy composition - POE actually has a very good variety of enemies for a new franchise game on a limited budget, but they are clumped without a thought for presenting complex tactical packages. (2) rejuggling per-enc and per-rest ability systems altogether - having both was important to achieve class diversity in POE, but it's also led to many niggling balance issues, and more broadly contributes to a repetitiveness. I don't think full per-rests is viable while retaining class diversity, but there will need to be a clearer design about what gets to be per-enc and what gets to be per-rest, etc. (3) the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth about engagement was uninformed and short-sighted. Engagement did make the battles more static, but only because it was poorly implemented - i.e. too little incentive to break engagement, too few enemies that use the space manipulation abilities that already existed. Further work needs to be done to make AI usage of engagement and space robust - and there need to be more ways to manipulate space, and level design needs to build in more interesting terrain than 'open ground' and 'doorways'. When all these things are combined, engagement will finally shine as an improvement to IE style "everybody run around everywhere", instead of being an interesting but incomplete and frustrating feature that it is currently.

The various KS RPG projects had very different funding models, and so their thresholds for profit will be different. W2 had quite a bit of Fargo money put into it; DOS was primarily funded by Larian and KS money acted as a sort of top-up, and then they put even more money into it than planned through Div2 package sales and Dragon Commander sales. So the meaning of the figures will differ for each.

That's true. Only Volourn can declare a game a success.

That's another one to add to the pile of "at least one instance of every single class / subtype complained to be OP or UP". One of the best damage dealers & easily capable of TCS, melee rogue is. Moved to a more relevant forum.

Qistina, you never actually explain why what worked for old games don't work for new games anymore. Many times you just say it without explaining it, just saying it's not 'acceptable' or it's not 'fresh' but I still have no idea why. You say gamers today 'want realism', and so they want to already be a capable knight when they start as a knight. This is plainly wrong, because that is like saying gamers would want shooters where one shot is enough to kill you. I do agree with some of the more specific things raised here. Nobody wants to fight 8000 battles and grind to just get up two levels and all. Fewer trash battles for well designed key battles is better. But you keep making these huge general statements and you never back them up, so I don't know why those have to be there. I also don't see why leveling as a whole has to disappear, rather than being improved. There are many, many advantages to leveling or other kinds of progression systems: they provide a sense of progress and empowerment, they provide new variety in ways to play, they provide concrete goals and thresholds, etc.

You actually make it sound like a decent game! Now, I tried the demo and walked off decidedly unimpressed due to the terrible graphics and the fact that the only thing making me yawn more intensely than post-apocalyptic environments is pseudo-Roman environments. Also, I found the writing to be not strong enough to compensate for these - admittedly largely subjective - shortcomings. So, does it get better later on? *shrug* both what I said and what you said will be true, for your playing experience. If you found graphics, setting and writing poor in Teron, then it won't change 180 degrees later. At the same time, everything I mentioned are real examples of what you can do in this game, and there are many more like it all over the game. It's not black and white. I wouldn't argue with anybody - AOD does require a lot of trial and error, and you can't start with any character and get by every battle. At the same time, it's factually untrue that the 'recommended' starting attributes are unplayable, and it's factually untrue that only minmaxed combat builds have a chance at fighting. Hybrid builds that spend as many skill points on noncombat skills as combat still manage to kill dozens of people, all the while stealing and sneaking their way to success. It's just that unlike Skyrim, you can't be the best thief in the universe + best talker + best fighter + best in bed all at the same time. Here, it's helpful to think about real numbers and situations instead of thinking on paper, because the latter encourages us to be black and white. Consider: (1) Maybe you could spend 50% of your skill points on combat, and you'd be good enough to beat 80% of the fights without more than one or two reloads. In that case, anybody that puts in more than 50% and specialises in combat, are going to be a walking tank and beat everybody. By extension, any tough choices - "do I trick this poor dude or do I steal his weapon? Do I avoid this fight or do I walk into an ambush?" becomes meaningless because you know you can beat them all. (2) But maybe you have a situation where if you spend 50% of your skill points on combat, then you're still good enough to beat some of the fights, but you're just not going to be good enough for some others. Let's say, for every fight where you go in, use your consumables, come out bloody but alive, but every other fight, you're going to have to ask for help from NPCs (at a price), or maybe use your noncombat skills to make the fight easier, or even run away. And maybe you're playing a game where all of those options, including running away, actually have their own rewards and consequences. So AOD requires you to be honest. Do you want to play a game where the game only throws challenges that you can win comfortably without minmaxing? If so, OK. I have no intention of judging you, it's your leisure time. Then you won't like AOD. Do you want to play a game where you really do make tough choices, and you really do want a challenge, and you want to be wounded, blooded, make compromises, in order to survive and reach your goal? That's what AOD does, in a way that very few games have even partly done. Again, I have no intention of telling everybody to play AOD. Giftd, for example, I am pretty sure would hate it. Doesn't make him any worse a human being. I love the game, personally, and think that for people with specific tastes that AOD caters to, it truly is a unique experience.

I will also say, most of the problems you describe are problems with later TES games, where they want you to be able to go almost anywhere and do anything all the time. In that design yes you are right, it is a bit silly.

Why is a mechanic bad just because it is 'old'?

It's not a Codex game, it's basically a one man game then a couple of multi-purpose significant contributors coming on board. AoD is brilliant and you should all get it. OK, in fact, not everybody. But if you want to see what a game that actually takes choices and consequences seriously, actually has NPCs lie to you and backstab you, actually has a combat which is very dangerous, actually makes you choose suboptimal outcomes and live with those wounds - that is, all those things people speculate about, wish for, or make empty promises about.... if you want to see a game that does all of that far more than almost any game in RPG history, then this is it. It's a unique thing. For better or for worse its a very pure distilled vision, without the million compromises where unique features become gimmicks and design philosophies become watered down. Which is why some people will hate it, some people will love it. Hey, there's a free demo. (Also, if you thought, regardless of the rest, Alpha Protocol or MOTB were amazing because they gave you such unique roleplaying options that you don't find elsewhere, then AOD gives you a ton of that. Ever talked one enemy group into fighting another enemy group and solve both of your problems? Ever disguised yourself as a guard, scaled the walls with rope, backstab a guard, jump down onto the floor, then smooth-talk the palace's owner about why all that means he should hire you? Ever gone on an assassination mission and then shot your partner in the face to defect to the target's side? Well, there we go.)

The main quest final bosses will generally be weaker than optional endgame fights, because nobody has to fight the Adra Dragon, but everybody is meant to have a shot at defeating Thaos. A casual-er player who doesn't do all the quests and faces Thaos around level 10 with an unoptimised party lacking some of the best loot shouldn't be able to roll over Thaos, but they shouldn't have to go back and grind or something. Or so goes the idea in most modern games hoping to reach more than a few thousand hardcore players. The number of threads in this very forum about how Thaos is 'impossible' to beat testify to this.

In games where you can't pick up everything, people complain rightly that it's unrealistic you kill a guy wearing armour wielding a sword and all you get is one zirconite. It's tricky. I'd say there should be a filter for the Pick Up All button, like in Dungeons of Dredmore: e.g. you can set it so 'Pick Up All' button ignores all non-magical weapons and armour, or all robes, etc.

D:OS was turn based, not RTwP. It is hilariously fun, yes.

Good explanation, thanks. In which case I'll state even more strongly that four tanks is overkill in most situations, and such a heavy focus on defense will probably hamper your offensive capabilities and make fights even tougher later on.

"Completely illogical, not to the point 5th grade garbage." "This forum is filled with either obsidian employees, close family of employees, paid pr trolls, poor secretaries forced to write this after work or any combination of the above." I think it is self-evident which statement is the most improbable and illogical in the entire thread. Now back to the real world, I think one thing we can all agree on - even people who don't experience the bugs themselves - is that the less bugs, the better, and Obsidian should get flack for each and every bug. The fact that bugs are common and also a normal part of every kind of software development doesn't change that.

You don't need four 'tanks'. What do you people define as 'tank', anyway? 18 CON? I probably don't understand the terminology properly, but I don't know why people want to fit their characters into those neat boxes all the time, instead of adjusting as they go. The game can be played without zero tanks, though that's obviously trickier. Better way to put it might be that you'd want each character to have some way of dealing with hairy situations. You can't just say "only one character ever needs to worry about taking damage, and this guy and this guy will just sit back with 3 HP and cast their spells from home". Your monk and rogue need not be 'tanky' - maybe the rogue has great deflection & reflex which allows it to risk disengagement hits (since it has a chance to dodge) and move away, maybe with the help of boots of speed. Maybe the monk relies on turning wheel, etc. to actually take advantage of wounds. Maybe your ranger invests in the Stuck ability, so that it can stop enemies moving towards it in its tracks. Maybe Arcane Veil for your wizard. Or maybe your wizard really is a complete glass cannon, but your other party members will stock up on ways to help him/her out - maybe the Monk gets Flagellant's Path or whatever the ability was that allows him to dash across the map and knock out the guy attacking the wizard, maybe the Priest uses repulsing seal to knock prone everybody surrounding the wizard. Once you start finding ways to handle the battlefield, there are many different ways to escape sticky situations without necessarily having two, three, four burly men blocking the doorway. (And maybe that's what other people meant by 'four tanks'? If so, apologies for being an idiot.)

On one hand, people complaining about POE being "buggy" have no idea how buggy the vast majority of games are and have always been - everything from old games to new games, indie games to triple A games. On the other hand, that's not really a great excuse for anybody, Obsidian or otherwise, because bugs suck for everybody who has them. This leads to a funny situation. All anyone needs to say is "my POE has these bugs I hate it Obsidian you suck" and they would be indubitably right. Who can tell you that a buggy game is OK? It's never OK, it sucks. Instead, a lot of people insist on trying to make up facts out of thin air and say "this is the buggiest game I've ever played", "this game is broken for everybody", and "there are standards for [insert year / budget / number of elderberries in the code]!!!!", all of which are easily disproven by anyone who knows even the tiniest bit about the industry. You'd think people would avoid saying unnecessary things that weaken their own argument. So, all the nonsense aside, the thing with POE seems to be that it has always done a pretty good job avoiding critical bugs (main quest corruption, deleted save games, random blue screens of death, etc) for the most part, but seems to be plagued with a lot of minor scripting / etc errors, especially regarding abilities, where there's a musical chairs effect and new bugs replace old ones. Dungeon Siege 3 and South Park were extremely bug-free by any gaming standard, and I think a large part of that was due to Obsidian finally using their own proprietary engine (Onyx). The middleware costs for an Onyx game made it impossible for a Kickstarter game, however, which is a pity. I don't see POE2 using Onyx or suddenly getting a massive budget, so they'll have to find other ways to improve on the bug record.

The problem is that that's like saying "hey, this Renoir is missing a little bit of black at the corner, but surely anybody can just pick up a paintbrush and fix that, right?" or "hey, this song we just mixed at the start is missing a laughter track right at the beginning, surely me and my friends can just laugh into the microphone?" A lot of people also say "hey why can't you just do voice acting for the whole game, let the backers do it", and again it's because if you've never recorded anything, you would have zero idea as to the many different ways that would inevitably sound much, much worse than even the current setup. (I don't pretend to know a lot about it, either, only a minimum.) Again, it's funny and also silly that the bug is there, Obs probably forgot to record that yell or lost the file or something.