Tigranes

I read nothing about POE2 rules, didn't play the beta, rolled what I liked, play with 4 party members, POTD is still easy. But this is not ultimately a problem of difficulty, and it's not solved by just giving enemies more HP. (In any case, a major part of the Pillars subgenre & its fans is the ability to powergame and replay with different builds. Nobody has to do it, but it's a big part of the appeal. So we can't really argue that 'if you powergame you can't expect a challenge from the highest difficulty level'.) POE1 certainly had problems. Its camping supplies system wasn't perfect, neither was the per-rest/per-enc mix. But put together, the combination was a certain system of meaningful attrition, scarcity, and tactical challenge. You could choose to cheese and circumvent it, but that's fine, the point is that it was there, and I think that's a fair design principle in a niche CRPG subgenre that is ultimately rooted in D&D. POE2 gets rid of that system almost entirely, and then does not really replace it. While there's nothing inherently wrong with, say, per-encs, now we have a combination of features that wipes away attrition, makes it very difficult to not play in a routine and repetitive way even if you try. The undertuning of POTD difficulty is not the root cause, but amplifies these problems.

Yup, absolutely. When you do "awesome stuff" every battle it stops being awesome, it becomes pointless and boring. No matter how good a fireball looks I'm not going to be entranced by it 800 times. What you really remember, what really has you on the edge of your seat, is when only your wizard is left standing in BG1 and out of arrows, you're firing off every consumable you ever found in your inventory at the hulking enemy hoping your stoneskin won't run out. It's when the dungeon has bled your health and spells dry, and you're trying to figure out how to take on that last group of shadows with only two scrolls of Fan the Flames - instead of fighting every single fight with the same abilities over and over again. It's when you think you've just about taken out this tough enemy, and then they roll a crit on your guy and smash him to pieces, pulling off a heroic victory for the wrong side. That's what you remember about great games years down the line, and inspire you to fire it up again and try all sorts of different characters; in the case of POE1, at least you have the starting bear to look forward to, or trying out Eothas' Temple with just two party members, or the big dragon fights. If I wanted to just fireball everything 800 times and go 'awesome!', I could play on easy mode, I could console myself resources, I could play more action-based games. None of that would be a crime against nature, that's fine if that's what somebody wants to do. But in a small niche of CRPGs that are supposed to be a little more about tactical challenges, I'd like the game design to still focus on that.

POE1 was pretty linear, but they still made errors with pacing XP reward. Now that it's more open-ended, it's very difficult to keep difficulty balanced. It's honestly not good enough, and hopefully they can mitigate it somewhat through belated patching.

On paper, I agree entirely with the OP. In practice, I'm still only a few hours into the game, so I am waiting to see how it pans out. But it does seem to get rid of a lot of challenge, a sense of actually being on a dangerous adventure, a feeling that your decisions in combat actually matter. Food is really funny - Pillars wanted to get rid of laborious pre-buffing, but food in POE1 was already extremely powerful if you bothered to spend time eating up for every fight. Now you have so much food you could make a cooking minigame out of the assets! I think the gap between players here is so big it's difficult to bridge. A lot of players, as you say, find it a 'chore' to prepare for combat, use their resources efficiently, and fight a big challenge every single fight. I don't say this as an insult - it's not my business to judge how you play. But as someone who gets incredibly bored and frustrated when I realise I could just win these fights not using half the available resources or spamming left click, I feel like my style of play has not been served well by these changes. To me, "making every encounter efficient" is the fun, and without it, I feel like I'm playing chess against a 3 year old and wondering why I'm bothering. Again, that describes a certain group of players, who are no more or less legitimate than others. I do wish they made the game easier to mod on this front, i.e. easy to edit variables for things like enemy HP, empowers / power sources per level, things like that.

Um, no. Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas are made with similar design principles and pursue a similar creative vision. Fallout 3 and 4 are Bethesda's own take on things. Tactics is an interesting, flawed combat-based spinoff. BOS1/2 were cash-grab shovelware. Shelter, from what I can see, is some kind of Zynga game with a Fallout skin.

Actually playing through, the availability of multiclasses is a huge gamechanger in terms of the possible flexibility and power spread, so I think it was a reasonable decision to balance it for 5 party members from a gameplay standpoint. As someone who enjoys both story and gameplay, no, I think party sizes has to be primarily governed by gameplay considerations and not story. I think it causes more problems to go "oh the default party size is 15 but people who don't want a completely unbalanced godmode experience should deliberately restrict themselves to 5". One nice trick would be to allow people to 'pocket' inactive party members and allow them to still talk and participate in questing. But ultimately, just like quests with multiple outcomes or the fact that you can choose different dialogue options, part of having choices means missing out on things, which is not really such a catastrophe except we are all such FOMOs these days.

Hovering over enemies and checking their 4 defenses is usually a good ballpark measure. If you're suddenly facing a huge jump in those, you're not going to hit them.

It could be that, or he could take a break from leading projects for a while, or he might be moving on from Obsidian. We'll see.

Morrowind had great atmosphere, from the mushroom architecture to the music to the ambient sounds, etc., everything fit together to evoke a sense of an alien world. You don't get anything like that in Oblivion, which feels like a B-grade ren fair run by scary clowns wearing badly made masks (with, I guess, some kind of broken backlight installed). The dialogue system wasn't the best, and there can be other ways the game can put players off, but that kind of atmosphere is very rarely done properly. All I want from a game is that it has very clear strengths, and that those strengths are about delivering a creative vision, rather than pandering to the player. A story-heavy game with awful gameplay is fine, it can have pre-gen PC or not, it can have romances or not, all that doesn't matter - as long as you can see the developer is trying to tell a clear story and has built the world sensibly around it. A combat-heavy game with horrible story is also fine, as long as again it is committed to delivering an interesting challenge. What loses me is when the game feels like it's just sugary junk food designed to just shoot gratification at fast intervals. You want me to go through a video game romance? OK. But if you give me 800 flowers in my inventory then I just give them to this guy and now you give me a sex scene, what a waste of time. You want me to fight a million battles? OK. But if they're so piss easy that you could win half the time just left-clicking (actually applies to quite a few RPGs), then what a waste of time.

Churning out content in a year really destroyed the health and happiness of many a developer - sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently - when it was done with games like IWD2 and New Vegas, and it only happened because BIS/Obsidian were under such massive financial pressures. I would hope that the same thing does not happen again. It will all depend on the financial viability. You can't kickstart every single game forever, and these games were always for a niche audience, so what kind of profit will they make? Will full voice acting, console versions, etc. bring in enough money? And how is the rest of Obsidian doing financially? Obsidian has survived for so long, but only through an unending series of frantic moves laying off developers, or getting half the company to work on a non-RPG money-maker like Armoured Warfare. One hopes that they can keep teams together and actually have them mature their craft.

Apparently wizards, as usual, become godlike at high levels, even with these changes. Grimoires, you're supposed to swap them around now, which nobody ever did in POE1.

I just rested for the 2nd time in about 25 hours of gameplay:-). I think you idea could be interesting, but: you have to always have PC in your party. That’s the biggest issue I have, as rotating companion composition to let them heal could be an interesting mechanic. That’s sort of the problem, which previous system couldn’t get over either - you can’t really do a serious damage to PC and companions are they are crucial to enjoyment of the game. Imagine how this system could mess with players questing - even if they didn’t need to be inactive in order to heal, it probably would be undiserabke to stack up woulds on one companion. I plan to go to the Gullet next, and let’s say that Takehu or Serafim are injured, and I want to take them with me, because of story and faction reasons. Having to wait for them to heal could have been annoying. Any long term resource management is in clash with how the game’s bigger structure is designed. I don’t feel like ditching resting (which I feel Deadfire did to some extend) is hurting the game that much. Expeditions: Conquistador and E: Viking did this, as they were much more about the strategic/exploration layer. And it worked very well. I'm sure there will be some issues if you put it in a game like POE, though I would be perfectly fine to think 'I want to quest with Serafim, oh he's injured from the last outing, I need to wait.' I don't see that as an annoyance, I see that as a nice part of roleplay and emergent gameplay situations. Whatever is done, I would at least like the option to play with some combat-related resource management and attrition. Right now you just spam every ability you have every battle in an identical way, all your health regenerates magically the instant you finish, and when you see you have a lot of wound buttons you hit the magic rest button in the middle of a dungeon. The fun of treating a dungeon as an actual dungeon rather than an amusement park where you get cookies and coffee after every 'battle', the fun of trying to make it through a fight with a low health character or a wizard running out of spells making do with ones you never even tried to use before - nope, now we have a much narrower bandwidth of playstyles supported.

No bugs for me. This kind of thing is always luck of the draw. If you go crazy when you get a bug or rebalancing patch halfway through, then.. yeah, you should give any game a year.

Now that would be really worth having, yes. Especially slower levelling.

Designed for PC, and designed to offer micromanaging tactical combat.

Early on, I'm not a huge fan of the limited selection in combination with making everything per-enc. For something like a wizard, we go from a model where you are making two interesting kinds of choices (which spells from the list, whether to conserve slots for later), to a model that basically loses both of those dimensions (eh I'll just cast the same things I always cast until I run out). If you always played by casting everything and resting each fight, this probably isn't hugely different, maybe more convenient. For me, it does seem to reduce choices and variety in combat. But we'll see how it fares with higher levels and such.

As far as I know, Deadfire isn't really any more mod-friendly than POE1, which is a big pity. I also dislike laborious cheesing, but that's a very narrow view of looking at things that only caters to your own sense of what is fun and reasonable. RPGs, especially with a degree of nonlinear exploration, are so, so difficult to balance for different kinds of players. So all I ask is that a game has robust enough systems and options that I can engineer it to provide the kind of challenge I want. E.g. I do not like regenerating health because it impacts my ability to have a meaningful attrition element. I have nothing against people who want to cheat heal or run back to rest 800 times or whatever else, but I want the gameplay systems / console / game options / etc to support a variety of styles. What you consider annoyances are important elements of fun for other people. One of the reasons BG2 & IE games were so great is that they gave you many ways to cheese, powergame, house-rule, attrition, sadistically gimp yourself, etc., as you chose - especially once mods like Tactics or SCS came around (the latter day SCS, when you pick and choose its modules, do not 'require' laborious cheesing at all, if you are familiar with the systems).

The real Torment (Planescape: Torment that is) & Mask of the Betrayer are, a lot of the time, good examples of how to have verbose and pseudo-philosophical writing without laying it on too thick and becoming indulgent.

More to this point, I think if POE1 hadn't laid it on so thick, it would provoke a lot less negative reactions. Same goes for Torment: Tides of Numenera. I liked POE1's dryness, its plot twist, many of the more polarising companions like Sagani, etc, and even then, I was speedreading half the time because everything is couched in unnecessary purple prose. The first couple hours of Deadfire, I feel the dialogues themselves are much better, but they still needed to delete all the descriptives - not because descriptives are bad per se, but because they are done so badly. *You see Tigranes furrow his brow, as if in deep thought. The shadows extend behind him, flickering in the semi-darkness cast by the Vailian lantern on the porch, which bears an ornate decoration and by the way was given by his grandmother who back in 1978...* Anyone who's done any professional writing - scholarly, fiction,whatever - knows that the first thing most writers have to learn is how to cut. I suspect there is very little systematic oversight for most RPG writing, as you get some guidelines, go and write, then it's so chaotic trying to squeeze it into however the game/level design/quests/etc have changed.

Too early - you'd need to play the game multiple times and/or look through the files to know. Maybe you're the kind of person that's well suited to compile such a list for the community?

Oh, I wasn't even aware of these. *shrug* people who like a challenge, or people who like a well balanced experience, won't choose them. People who are too busy, like god mode, or are experimenting with weird options, can use them (as well as the console). I don't see an issue. It's not like I need to prove to anybody that my achievement badges (whatever they are) are real or whatever.

If you want no-nonsense no-story combat-heavy, stick to Icewind Dale, IWD2, then other tactical RPGs. Lots of great/good ones out there. Blackguards 1. Strategy hybrids like King's Bounty. Single-character ones like Age of Decadence and Underrail. The king of tactical RPG-ish combat, Jagged Alliance 2. Some modern twists like Expeditions: Conquistador and sequel.

I liked the POE1 rogue, it was plenty powerful and it was easy to set up sneak attacks. How does it feel/play differently here?

Chaos Chronicles died years ago, and I haven't seen any information about any revival of that project. Do you have some new information? Oh, you are in for a treat: https://www.realms-beyond.com/ This is the original CC developers, now able to develop and finish the game without interference from the morons who temporarily seized the unfinished assets and released it as shovelware to make a quick buck. This is the real deal.

Yes please. Doesn't have to be done in a week, but going forward it'd be nice to have a properly difficult potd.