Tigranes

Minsc was funny cheesy, like you'd find in some demented children's story. Deadfire banter tries to be funny cheesy but is a wet fish. It's no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's weird to look back at one-dimensional gimmick characters like HK-47, and think he gave you more laughs than anybody in the Deadfire cast.

I wholeheartedly support allowing players to select any mix of blessings, challenges, and other options as they please to customise their game experience. As for 'achievements', could not care less, they're just Skinner boxes - rat press lever, rat gets food pellet - in an insultingly blatant form. I don't play video games for 'bragging rights' and I don't need their idiotic badges to feel good, I play games to have fun. So mixing blessings, challenges, mods freely to have the game experience I want to have is what matters. Moderators have nothing to do with the game development, sadly.

Well, you know when you buy a car, and the steering wheel tilts, the leather seats smell, and the noise is a bit of a downer, but really, you spent all that money on it, do you really want to send to scrapheap and get another one, when you're sort of broke? I mean, I'm sure with a bit of love and care it'll come good, right? Right?

It's like watching an ant being herded by sheets of paper, making 90' turns every two seconds until it's stuck in a corner.

It's terrible. Ever since my tiny forum of 20 Arsenal lovers faded away, I've had to use reddit for news. There's just something about reddit, though it's present in forums as well, where every single freaking conversation: "Here's a gif of Ozil's great passes last night!" "OK but he is so lazy, he must be the laziest player since [insert name]" "Nah I would actually rank him third, the laziest one has to be [insert name]" *30 replies of vigorous argument about which player is slightly more lazy than whom* "But anyway Ozil is crap and it disgusts me to see the Ozil apologists out in full force" "Yeah Ozil is wonderful and it disgusts me that some idiots can't see how good he is" *80 replies of handbags* The answer, as always, is to ignore the fans, ignore the 'pundits' (half of whom are no better than the above), just watch the game. My best experiences always come at the stadium, when there's no commentary or TV camera either... if you can ignore that one dumbass sitting next to you yelling out "Ozil why are you so lazy", that is.

I've found that it's about the player as well as the game. As someone who started with Infinity Engine games, anything earlier would be initially offputting - but many games would prove highly playable & worth the trouble if I read up on some usability tips and gave them a couple of hours to shine. (Some would, of course, prove not worth it.) Adventure games from their golden age are far, far better than most of the latecomers; I've found that King's Quest 6 is very playable and looks charming. (In contrast, KQ5's no-text voice-only design makes it very annoying for me. KQ4 lacks some of 6's bells and whistles, but after enjoying 6, it gives me the motivation to try it.) And of course, later big-budget titles like Grim Fandango look simply fantastic and are even easier to pick up and play. Far better than, say, the recent Broken Age which I thought was very disappointing. RPG side I'm currently playing through Wizardry 1, which got a great SNES remake in the '90s. I suspect that the addition of rudimentary graphics where the original '81 features only lines, helps a great deal; but most importantly, in all versions, Wiz1 is very crisp and fast in how it plays, and it's really refreshing after most contemporary RPGs that take 800 years to get anything done. Fire up Witcher 3, Kingdom Come or whatever, every menu takes a flourish to open and 8 tabs to navigate, picking up a bloody apple takes a lengthy animation, then you're running for 10 minutes from here to there just to get started. With Wiz1 you're in the dungeon within 5 seconds, moving through it with a snap, blazing through combat options. There are classics I've found difficult to get into, though. Darklands - by the way, very much beloved by Josh Sawyer - is a fantastic game evoking late medieval Germanic like few other games, but the real-time combat is just incomprehensible for me. Strategy games have been far more difficult; things like, say, Lords of the Realm. Once we go before Age of Empires, C&C, Civ2, etc., strategy games seem to demand too many functions & usability becomes a real issue for me. That said, I vastly enjoy Shogun 1 and Medieval 1 in the Total War series; the overworld map's simplicity speeds up gameplay, and at any rate, Creative Assembly have largely failed to make any meaningful improvements to their core gameplay for over a decade now, introducing mostly pointless sideways and backwards additions. In terms of how the actual gameplay has aged, I find that games which still get talked about today, tend always to be very good games. Their strengths remain very strong. The difference is that their weaknesses might be more pronounced today in light of more diverse competition. So if I know that I really like a sense of dangerous exploration in my RPGs, I know Wizardry or Ultima Underworld will deliver, or even Arx Fatalis. If I know that I really enjoy a good story, then I know it's worth sticking with Vampire Bloodlines, even if the game was clunky even at release to begin with.

Obsidian has flirted with an acquisition for most of its history, and it's not really a secret. Feargus in particular I don't think would ever take a "independent or death" line, and would seriously discuss any actual approach by Microsoft. I'm more skeptical that Microsoft or other big players might have actually approached them. Studios change, people change, and it's hard to ever keep a particular style going for 10, 20, 30 years. Obsidian no longer produces what used to be their 'signature style' in the days of KOTOR2 or MOTB, for better or for worse. I would assume that after any takeover there will be more changes.

Honestly, and I say this as an Arsenal fan, I think Spurs have done remarkably well to keep everybody they already have, without even public sagas and the like. I don't think Tottenham's wage bill or prestige level at the moment can afford, say, someone better than Eriksen, or someone as good as Kane to replace him. We had a problem when we signed no outfield players in 2015, but that's because we had spent the last couple years with a dysfunctional squad with tactical and injury problems (and, uh, have continued to since then). I do think Tottenham are in a precarious place, where this might be their last chance to actually win something or risk having the bubble burst, but I wonder what world-class player they could have brought in that fit their budget & pulling power. It's a very hard market out there. If they had sold Kane for 100m+ or something, they could have tried to leverage that and improve the team. But like with the Bale money purchases, such 'trolley dashes' are high risk as well.

Magran's Challenge looks totally useless. It's not wacky fun, it's not tactical, and it's something you could really really easily do already (e.g. map the pause button to something obscure). It's a bit of a joke. I don't necessarily need massive rebalancing every patch, so for me it's ok as long as this isn't the end of patching.

It was almost impossible for the timer to matter in Tyranny, unless, I don't know, you went back and forth and back and forth all the maps 80 times for no reason. It was stricter in MOTB, but after one or two mishaps any RPG player would figure it out. It would only be annoying if, for example, you got stuck in some quest, got confused, and had to comb through two maps trying to find something.

SF's Delfina is indeed very good. But then, I didn't even eat pizza the last time I went to Italy, so what do I know. I give up on tasting anything nice whenever I go to Germany. I'm sure there's good stuff if you look, but as someone passing through the easy options are mostly awful.

I've lived in several countries, though not a huge amount, including the US. I always wonder what opinion I would have had, if I had spent my whole life living in the same country. Personally, it's been my experience that only when I move somewhere else and spend some time, I can get a better perspective on why things were like that back in the previous one (good and bad). You can get an impression very quickly - e.g. my first impressions of the US were awful public transport infrastructure - but it takes a while to appreciate why it is like that or why it's better/worse than you first thought. But then, someone like me who moves around, our impressions are affected by what period of life you spent there. Going back somewhere I spent my childhood, I realised it's actually not somewhere I can live in anymore, for a variety of reasons like work culture and even the weather. I'm not sure where I'd want to live. I enjoyed the few months I spent in Amsterdam, but strangely didn't feel like I'd want to settle there, for example. I liked my recent couple years in Boston, but crazy prices, American healthcare, etc, etc.

I'm having trouble understanding your point, even though I really want to. Apparently to make money from games, one shouldn't be in game business (how does that work?) and absolutely cannot have any free time at all. In the real world, you can be a successfull game developer and still frolic with the dwarves all you want. Oh, nothing that complicated. I just think the games or books or films that give me the best experience, usually doesn't have much to do with how commercially successful they are. And if I lived life thinking quality/success = commercial profit in all cases, well, I wouldn't touch those silly video games, for starters - so it seems odd to care so much either way. Here's hoping, of course, that Obsidian, Owlcat and everyone else keeps making enough money to try and make a good RPG.

Doesn't it break your immersion that most of your powers magically regenerate after every fight, such that fighting 80 waves of orcs in a deep underground dungeon is functionally the same as fighting them in a carefully controlled lab experiment with Powerade breaks in between? I guess that's why it's so tricky. You never know what breaks people's immersion and what we accept in favour of gameplay.

Couldn't care less which game is bigger, only that the game is good. The size of a game might have something to do with its quality, but it seems to me such a pointless and secondary thing to focus on. Not sure how it all got to the argument that the best games are the ones that make the most money, but hey, if that's what you care about, you probably shouldn't be in the game business or wasting any of your time playing games. Or posting on forums. Seems pretty weird if you want to judge everything by monetary success and then you sit around fooling about with axe-wielding dwarves. Me, I don't have such problems, because I know axe-wielding dwarves are the frickin' best.

The sad thing is that in the wider scheme of things, POE1/2 are small budget niche games. The problem is that the budget and scope keeps getting larger; fans demand more content, devs feel the need to provide cool bells and whistles, it all leads to the games getting too big a budget for their own good - i.e.they need too many sales to remain viable. It would be nice if we could just have 8 different POEs all with a different focus, each of them made on a small enough budget that they only need to sell 100k to celebrate rather than a million. The tradeoff is we won't get full VAs or POE-quality backgrounds or other such things, but that's better than every single medium-budget CRPG being an improbable tightrope that has to knock it out of the park in order to not drive the developers into bankruptcy.

Yeah, I don't really feel it, and I've taken various melee characters on solo, on party, in POTD with upscaling before & after the 1.1 changes. If you're soloing, sometimes a character might be in a zone where they don't do enough damage to kill fast enough and don't have enough ways to stay alive long enough, but those tend to be temporary slumps that appear in different moments for different builds.

That's a failing of POE1's spell balance, where some spells were far too useful and others were not. That's a separate problem that causes issues no matter what system (in POE2, that just means you'd never pick them on level ups to begin with). You'd usually rest/potion up for bosses, but I've fought many battles in IE games and POE1 at lower health, or lacking half of my spell output, and that's often produced many an enjoyable and memorable moment. I mean, I would also argue that potions and consumables should be rarer in most RPGs, but that's yet another story... (Also, I'd love a system where, yes, the hits you took from the goblin hurts because you don't have a good spot to rest before the dragon at the end. That would be great. The whole dungeon would feel like a coherent story and an adventure, instead of some amusement park where you step out for energy drinks whenever you want. People play action games and have no problems arriving at the level boss on low health or low ammo, right? But yes, this would be a departure from IE norms.)

I haven't used the console much in Deadfire, but if it's like POE1, couldn't you just use it to teleport to any location, and then fight any battle you wanted to fight? Don't really think it's something taht deserves development resources, but it'd be cool to be able to console it like that.

Agent fees is a cancer, but it has only grown instead of being controlled. If anything, we will see a future where clubs don't even own players, they just 'rent' them from their respective agencies, and every star player regularly changes clubs every 12 months - because hey, more transfers, more money, and more stupid media speculation and tabloid pages and terribly edited 'unveiling videos' and all the other useless crap to make money off. That Atlanta stat is great - the US has the population to have a truly robust football league going, and a lot of work seems to be going on the last 10 years to make it happen. The national team's success will follow, for sure.

I see this expressed a lot and I don't understand it, since all PoE2 does is replace the occasional frustration of being out of rest supplies with the **almost every encounter** frustration of being out of casts. To the OP, I feel your frustration. Wizard seems to be still powerful enough to make it worth single classing, but druid is boring and feels quite limited in PoE2, whereas it was a lot of fun in 1. I mean, I love attrition, but I often hear people say, I hate not being able to cast my best and most awesome spells every single fight. POE2 certainly solves that problem. On average, I'd say you're able to throw a lot more spells and abilities around per encounter in Deadfire, unless you played POE1 by resting after every single fight. More relevantly to the OP's complaint, I do think that spell selection for spellcasters has become a bit too limited in Deadfire. The issue is, if you give them huge spell choice flexibility, what do you take away as a tradeoff? Number of casts? That is obviously unpopular to people who like to fireball every 10 seconds. Mana? Mana has never seemed a particularly interesting system in any game, for me.

There's essentially zero meaningful oversight, yeah. A salary cap is years overdue and honestly the sport would be far, far better off with it.

If you always end games with billions of stuff because you feared to run out of them, then sure, your playthrough's going to be far more tedious than other people's. That really is on you, especially if this isn't your first RPG. Doesn't make you a bad person, you can certainly keep doing it if you like, but nobody inflicted it on you. It all depends on where you're coming from. If you're more willing to roll with the punches and come out bruised, and to enjoy the challenge of thinking about the dungeon as a dungeon, then Deadfire kills a lot of that. If you hate the feeling of running out of something or not being at your optimal state, then Deadfire will be much better. Or other cases, of course. There was that guy in page 1 that just wanted to go wow I cast big huge fireballs all the time! And that's certainly a popular opinion. Often it feels like the solution is easy when you only think about your own playstyle, and what would cater to it best. The trouble is the wide variety of playstyles these niche games have tried to support.

Qualifiers, who watches the qualifiers? With the International League business, soon we are going to have a million meaningless international games a year - and star players pushed until they get injured all the time, or more likely, turn to more drugs to help them out. Then after that they can qualify for a World Cup with a gazillion teams and a gazillion terrible games. I don't know. Maybe the good outcome will be that NTs spend so much time with each other, the level of NT football goes up too?

When an item is badly designed to be ridiculously overpowered, rebalancing it is obviously the right way to go. I still use them and find it fine. Whether some people spam summons or not, or don't use them because of hyperanxiety about charges, or install mods to roll that back, is all their business and not a problem.