Sven_

You do realize the inherent ridiculousness and invalidity of this image, yes? It's a polemic and it's old. How you react to it depends on what you're taking out of it, I guess. And that's just the kind of thing PoE is targeting for. I think it's fun, though in fairness obviously something such as DA2 aims for a completely difference experience first and foremost, though as was acknowledged by DA1's lead who left the company here too, he's aware of strength and limitations of cinematics, voice-overs and stuff also. Still it's not as if it all came from out of completely nowhere either. http://www.lar.net/2011/12/19/the-cost-of-dialogue/#more-100 The reason I felt strongly enough about this to post in regards to PoE and similar games isn't that I don't enjoy fully-voiced games full-stop, but because people demand fully voice overs for there games these days no matter what, and often without realizing at what cost it may come (and there is a lot -- games such as Torment wouldn't look the same, and though it's not merely voice-overs, there's probably a reason why after so many years BG2 is still king in terms of content and why the TES series is still playing catch-up to some really old Ultima games in terms of world reactivity, and NPC believability, though it's getting better). That said, the poll so far pretty much reflects the audience PoE has been attracting anyway, which is mainly people who are familiar with games that aren't fully voiced and don't demand them to be such.

Voice overs and cinematics are the cancer of the games industry (yes I know this is old stuff). To put this a bit less polemic, and this coming from someone who digs adventure games that are all about fully voice-overs and scripted cinematics even on tight budget (presentation is total key in most cases), I'd wish far more developers would actually consider before going down certain routes by default (but then most games are funded by people and made for an audience who consider the above stuff not as something great to experience once in a while (I'm looking forward to what The Witcher has on offer as much as the next guy) -- but an absolute must entry requirement before even considering picking anything up). http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/voice-acting-in-rpgs-may-be-more-trouble-than-its-worth/ As for Obsidian doing these kind of games (Pillars) next to their bigger projects, I'd personally like them to scale the voice stuff accordingly to what was experienced in production (see above). And for a game of this ilk, I'd take more branches and more elaborate quest design / last minute changes over the voices any day -- whilst the IE games had appropriate production values for their time for sure, back then Bioware could point out that there was very little cinematics at all and actually be applauded for it, times have changed, haven't they. That wasn't for a lack of technology. Hours of voice overs had spread half a decade before Baldur's Gate shipped (in particular for adventure games), and companies such as Cryo Interactive were frequently rightfully panned for offering more cinematics than actual gaming content. Still for the more cinematics kind of stuff surely there's going to be Kotor 3 and similar one day anyway, and for that kind of game it's also appropriate considering the source material and how it's being presented in any media.

BG2 didn't really have a wilderness -- and if you want to, you can go straight to Raedric's Hold or even Caed Nua after getting out of the starting temple without engaging in combat at all by just staying on the paths through the wilderness rather than deviating from it. I saw the comparison to IWD before, but in the case of most wilderness areas that's not the case. IWD is/was on purpose designed in a way that you couldn't get from point A to B or traverse an area without encountering baddies, and it didn't matter if you were in an actual dungeon area or else. This is not the case for most of the wilderness in PoE, though the game doesn't specifically rub it on your nose that all you have to do is stay on the paths. I think in BG1 it is similar if you keep on the road that leads from Candlekeep to the Friendly Arm, but I think there isn't any other area where this is the case. However, as PoE has much fewer areas of wilderness to wander, and some of them are quite compact and small, that impression may be skewed somewhat (I agree that you can wander around in BG for much longer periods of time without being attacked though, and the few wilderness maps PoE has are comparably packed with encounters overall; guess they wanted to squeeze the most of "content" out of the assets they were able to produce on their budget). But still, you can walk straight up to Caed Nua being level 1/2 alone - and be ripped to shreds probably in the courtyard. The one troll you will encounter in the marches by keeping on the road is easily avoided due to trolls being slow. Most of the roads are safe, that includes the one from Caed Nua to Defiance Bay later too -- and though getting from there to Twin Elms isn't as simple as just staying on the paths leading there, it is easily doable do without actually fighting. In generally I agree that in an ideal world combat shouldn't be all filler. However whilst there are games that do it better than PoE no doubt, the history of computer and video game role playing games for me is to a degree one of stretching games by adding this combat. Even in the much cherished BG 2, whilst the encounter design overall may have been more varied, with over the top high level epicness such as fighting beholders, dragons and drows right in their own lair in hugely unlikely sequence, if it hadn't been for the totally random attacks whilst resting and stuff, I probably would have finished the game in half the time (exaggerating, naturally). And on consoles, the much cherished Final Fantasy games including the legendary entries number VI and VII; the only real special fights are the bosses, everything else is a grind; and as creatures attack you randomly, i.e. you can't even avoid them because you don't actually see them, that really gets on your nerves. There are exceptions, but yet filler combat is and has always been where some of the advertised 10000+ hours campaigns have come from; ditto recycled dungeons and assets, phoned in fetch quests, etc. That shouldn't keep anyone from pointing this out though and demanding better! History has also shown that people are still impressed by these numbers, though... But without the filler there wouldn't be the standout. Naturally if the unremarkable is all there is and it forms the backbone of a 90 hours routine slog, there's gonna be trouble afoot. In the same way, if everything's aiming to be special, naturally nothing will be. Naturally good combat mechanics belong to this, as they are the core of every fight no matter big or small, special or routine. Btw. to the previous big post, IWD was great and offered pretty much what it delivered (it also had more varied dungeons and encounters which it fully concentrated on compared to Pillars); and NWN1's campaign didn't blow so much because of the combat (which it had much of), but because that it was all it had offered (and it was much simpler than in the IE games due to the henchmen system and you controlling but a single character rather than a party of up to six). Anyway the meat of the game was the tool set, and the original campaign and story phoned in at the last second before shipping the game. And IWD again, because that had some prolly good stuff in terms of combat (whilst it being the meat of the game): I think it was admitted by J. Sawyer that they weren't yet able to add the quite complex scripts to their core engine, like for example IWD's orcs using war drums to call for enforcement if you don't destroy them and similar. Hopefully they will be able to do so the next time around, though. That'd be a step to more complex and more varied combat in an on itself.

I think where this is going. In fairness, last time I checked Inquisiton, the latest of Bioware, wasn't exactly a badly received game. I think it was mainly targeted heavily by those who still expect "old Bioware" of which essentially has become a different company -- and that includes the people running the house as well as designing the games to various degrees. If anybody remembers, "Dragon Age" initially was supposed to be s strictly PC kind of thing, a true successor to Baldur's Gate after Kotor and Jade Empire, tailored completely to mouse/keyboard controls -- and as years passed by even the end product is quite a bit of a different game to the sequels. However, those responsible for the series' initial direction are gone, such as the lead on Origins who is a strong advocate for tactical combat: http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Brent_Knowles I remember playing the demo of DA2 myself and immediately figured that this wasn't my kind of game. It was everything lukewarm about "interactive movie RPGs" molded into one repetitive block of tedium: simple combat, advance, watch movie sequence, simple combat, watch movie sequence, combat, movie sequence, combat - nothing to explore or really do, the game just rolling along and playing itself. Interestingly, Knowles, Origin's lead, posted his impressions back then as well: http://blog.brentknowles.com/2011/03/14/dragon-age-2-demo/ However for all the slack it got it also had its fans. And as far as I know Inquisition in fairness received some awards by editors as well as gamers alike. That's okay. The good thing is that the folks who have left Bioware have started working on their own projects, some of them anyway, such as Sword Coast Legends. I don't think it's going to be much of a stretch to predict that there's a lot more of BG/NWN going into Sword Coast Legends than into the inevitable sequels to both Inquisition as well as Mass Effect. Also the ressurgence of smaller scale RPGs has so far even made Ubisoft, else known for milking plenty of Assassins Creed, publish a totally distinctively retro Dungeon Crawler in Might and Magic X Legacy -- kind of like Legends Of Grimrock, it's as retro as having you move around one tile at a time rather than subsequent sequels of the original series, the last of which was actually based on a 3d engine of Monolith (FEAR series of games, AvP 2), though it looked badly. Things have never looked more diverse on that front, and unlike three, four, five years ago, there's RPGs of pretty much any kind. Hopefully things will stay that way though. Talking about balance, it's a bit of a different thing obviously, but in the Fallouts I genuinely enjoyed that depending on your character build you were in for a really really tough time in the wastes. Lots of combat can be avoided (the least in Bethesda's take, who unlike Obsidian in New Vegas never translated the original's concept as much into a 3d world anyway), but building a physically weak character more apt at wisdom and technical skills actually felt that way... the game responded to that not by means of scaling eventual encounters to your skill sets, but by making them as bloody hard as you'd expect such a character to struggle in such a world. On the opposite you can completely pump everything into strength and melee combat, and a few levels into the game you're able to one-hit everything (Death Claws excluded). I remember a subsequent fun playthrough going that way and thinking: gee, that's easy this time 'round. But I also appreciated how differently the game felt, even if things were easier/harder to play depending on which. It's like experiencing the same world through the eyes (and abilities) of completely different characters. It's my favourite character system anyway. However, balancing a party based game is something else completely obviously as is the core gameplay mechanics.

That's an interesting take especially considering the shift in subsequent Dragon Age games after Origins was amongst the causes of original Bioware staff leaving the company who felt it was strongly moving away from that direction (see my link I edited into my previous post) -- and even fans of DA 2 in particular hardly argue the combat to be very tactical. The design changed hugely in between DA:O which was originally pitched as a "back to the roots" title with much of the lead designers of vintage Bioware still involved whilst that changed later on and people left the company or opted to stay out of designing the sequel; and Inquisition takes hugely cues off Skyrim, which is a completely different thing entirelly. My bad for jumping to conclusions about what you actually enjoyed about the IE games, but it was both me as well as the games you mentioned to blame. For the bottom line is that most of the games you listed are really very different games and have always been. As such the message your posts got across to some (intentionally or unintentionally just by wording and that list of games) obviously rubbed off on some. Your posts didn't say "I don't like the game". They argued the game to be outdated and mediocre by its very nature and core idea in parts, not the quality of its content and execution of those core ideas. Obviously that saw some response, some of it quite knee-jerk though. Games sharing the core ideas of the IE games have been few and far between for the better of the last ten to fifteen years. Which naturally encouraged responses of that kind -- imagine your favourite type of game pretty much just going away. I acknowledge such whilst being in a different kind of camp than you (that the oldies would be all about nostalgia); the one that thinks that beyond the pixels, the pathfinding issues and fiddly inventory management, a lot of the boldness in design in the "oldies" has never been matched, and much is to "blame" on games trying to be made ever more accessible to the degree of them treating you like someone who's never played a game from start to finish, as well as games ever more trying to mimic movies. However the IE kind of games are the farthest back you can go and that is no coincidence. For they were released at the tail's end of an era where technology had advanced enough to allow for all the complex quests to be found in Baldur's Gate II that arguably still are a landmark in terms of content to this day; similar the openness of Fallout's sandbox providing different experiences which each character build and player choice; and for all its clunky combat how about Torment's mature themes explored in a way you're unlikely going to find in a blockbuster production of epic scale. However at the same time the public's "entry-level requirements" in terms of production values wasn't as steep as it's become. Whilst the much older Ultima VII is obviously hugely clunky to play today and erroneous to look at in its 320x200 pixel art; everything could be picked up, every NPC has individual dialogue and still believable routines, and compared to the three houses, a closet plus, three NPCs and a bush per city in Skyrim (exaggerating), cities were actually a bit like cities. That's a very brutal irony in the history of video games that is only to be found in this medium of entertainment at the moment, as ever-changing technology dictates so much: Whilst some art can be copy&pasted without the experience suffering hugely, the cost of producing assets and 3d objects has grown significantly; thus the same goes for games; and generally, it's still growing. And with rising costs naturally comes a need to sell more games. That doesn't mean I'm all about old games. That however means that I don't push myself into believing everything and their Pip-Boy is down to nostalgia. Because it isn't if you ask me. And whilst I enjoy Bethsofts latest crowd pleasers too, the more recent crowdfunded RPGs are to me a reminder of why. We won't agree on this one. However maybe on this, as this was the imporant bit: TES (entire series really) and subsequent Dragon Ages certainly don't fit the bill as points of reference for a game like PoE, for the TYPE of game that it represents (anybody who plays TES looking for tactical combat and party management must be pretty weird and I don't think you do either), and even the Neverwinter Nights with their companions or reduced parties have never offered that to the same degree either (their strengths are something else completely, like their toolsets providing unlimited adventures from small campaigns to persistent online worlds and human dungeon masters to boot -- the latter a feat that will only attempt to be repeated in the upcoming Sword Coast Legends, by some of the Bioware folks who left the company, no less). Good point about the character scripts though. For some reason I've never used them in the Infinity Engine games (I liked to have fully control over any character at all times rather than them following scripts), but for anybody who did they're obviously going to miss them in this one. Just saying!

Which is fine. But you need to realize that some of these arguments you intentionally or unintentionally made by your initial wording got some riled up for reason. I figure that from the Infinity Engine games it wasn't particularly the more strategy game-based approach to things you enjoyed. The additional micro and party management both inside and outside of combat, picking formations, dealing with the complex character and combat models and rules, that kind of thing. In fact, the original iteration of the Infinity Engine developed by Bioware was actually made for a prototype of a real-time strategy game, which are still around to some degree (though have always been more of a PC focused thing). You order characters around and give them orders and formations, hence the view, whereas in The Elder scrolls you've inhibited a single character and engaged in real-time action game combat right from the first game in 1993. In any case, both are obviously completely different playing experiences. That is an important distinction. The more action based mostly single character 1st/3rd person approach is more "modern" in that action games have come to dominate most parts of the market, whilst PC-specific strategy games have mostly become a thing of specialized PC publishers, such as Paradox Interactive who are distributing PoE. Over at Bioware, such shifts have contributed to original members leaving the company for good. http://blog.brentknowles.com/2010/08/15/bioware-brent-year-10-fall-2008-summer-2009/ Those more action based games have been available during the IE heydays too, like the Gothic series. However those are a different kind of thing, which is actually great. Obviously as you rightfully pointed out, a game being played from top-down perspective isn't a requirement for a game to be an RPG or anything. Diversity is a good thing. And it's been sorely lacking. Remember that the story of PoE and other RPG Kickstarters was one of a strictly PC/Mac game at heart and their makers seeing little chance seeing it funded in the traditional way. Had nothing to do with the core mechanics being been there done that outdated -- if I would deal in polemics, I'd argue that beyond the fresh coat of paint I've played Skyrim (which I enjoy) to death and beyond in the past ten plus years too, and talking about idiosyncrasies the simple push-button combat as well as the creature AI didn't get much better likewise (in particular companions are as bad as ever, and the simplistic dungeons have become even more simplistic). It's all about more with the publishers Obsidian get do deal with doing different types of games as they expect to shift more copies across all platforms. It's a money thing, no more, no less. And it may be personal preference. However it's still a preference about two different kind of games.

I don't think he's trying to convince anyone (though he keeps posting and arguing). He argued that this just wasn't the type of game for his. I agree with your assessment here strongly though. One of the best responses to the game I have seen was actually by somebody younger, who wasn't around when neither the classic Dungeon Crawlers (which also saw a bit of a resurgence) nor the isometric, tactical style RPGs were first around, including the entire series of game based on the Infinity Engine. He was like, "Woah, I'd never thought that so much reading in a game would be this awesome an experience." And gladly the press picked up on similar sentiments as well. Because whilst the Kickstarter pitch may have banked on nostalgia, this style of game hadn't just become extinct -- it became outmoded because the developers and publishers formerly focusing on this type of game went either out of business or cross platform and tried to make the games even bigger and more popular as they were. However, as the hardware and means of input are this different on PC/Mac and consoles, the micro-management required of these more tactical, isometric types of games aren't as hugely viable on consoles, not in the same way, certainly. And until recently memory and other hardware restrictions also proved difficult. This is the kind of game completely designed around keyboard and mouse, kind of like football and sports management games which are big on PCs but never took off elsewhere. Plus, as was pointed out, by the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a push towards 3d, like publishers seeing mostly 3d games doing well and concluding: "If you don't do this in 3D, you're out." PoE isn't as revolutionary as the first Baldur's Gate was when it first came out. It also adopts some of the idiosyncrasies of these titles, some have been mentioned, another is that on some occasions, having a fixed 2d top down isometric view means characters are hidden behind walls, trees and, well, pillars (and you can't rotate the camera). In that I agree that going strictly 2D for the game's world wouldn't have been a necessity as such. It's a choice in aesthetics, and was clearly communicated as such -- lots of juice into 2D as well, as many titles show. However first and foremost it's a completely different style of game compared to Skyrim, even Obsidian's own New Vegas (which I both enjoy too). There's for one more tactical combat including second to second micro-management of a party of up to six characters with dozens of abilities and spells to boot; and if you compare it to big releases such as The Witcher or the entire current Bioware setup (or many other modern games), there's also a distinct lack of Hollywood-pretend movie sequences that have you gawking on the screen for minutes without interacting; with much of the storytelling being more akin to literature and your own imagination being demanded to become actively involved as well, rather than mimicing action/fantasy movies and spoon feeding you all throughout. Obviously when these games were made in numbers a lot of the design was down to limitations in technology -- the original Wasteland couldn't even fit all of its strictly TEXT on all the disk space available at that time so outsourced some of it into the manual. However there's more than just nostalgia and retro to it for sure. I'm glad that the press by and large picked up on the latter as well; there's something about words that pictures can't do (it's the opposite too of course). You're not going to get the equivalent of a big studio approved Lord Of The Rings kind of CGI mass carnage out of this one, that's for sure. And that's fine. It's awesome, even. The more and diverse, the better. Still I'd go as far as arguing that Pillars Of Eternity, Wasteland 2 and all the others, in terms of design in particular, at their core are as cutting edge and bold as any of the games mentioned. And that's got much to do with the industry going down the interactive movie road in the more recent years, where you kind of get to pick a character and a hand full of skills if you're lucky, and then watch the thing safely guiding you through the rest until the credits roll -- and where much of the budget is spent on making these sequences hit home. As that Bioware classic has it: "If you push a button, something awesome has to happen." For on top of the differences in presentation, there is also no arguing that higher budgets mean complexity in mechanics is often out of the window. Nothing wrong with spectacles, naturally. The Witcher 3 with its open world full of stuff and action and relentless combat and over the top movie sequences looks like turning into an instant hit. However save for a few specialized niche developers, nobody would or did go down the tactical, real-time with pause/turn-based combat, fully party and more complex character system route in recent years whatsoever. Arguably the bulk of the last fifteen years in games development, in particular for RPGs, has largely been about trying to make games ever more accessible (and prettier, of course) in attempts to ever increase the audience. And whilst this might be folks advertising their game, there's probably a reason why some of the old folks at Bioware kind of argue the same: http://www.pcgamesn.com/sword-coast-legends/inside-sword-coast-legends-back-to-baldurs-gate-with-the-director-of-dragon-age-origins

They don't, that's the problem. The KNIGHTS do ie. if you go to take their 2nd quest. The DOZENS do not, however. Possible bug?

It's not a crime, but it's been established by the game (and could be done better) that simply working for a faction might be pretty dangerous and that each faction is keeping a very close eye on those who agree to do -- you don't get membership by agreeing to do their most important work by the way, as some suggested, you merely agree an important job for each of them at that point. There are people lured into traps and beaten up for doing such. I stand by my opinion -- the dialogue is intensively suggestive (is there really an option to LIE to the dozens? There isn't one for the Knights 100%), and if you meta the thing to the point that definitely suggests and hints at the mechanics underneath, everything becomes stale and clicking through a bunch of options to get a desired effect. I know there are different opinions on this and can be, but in a game that establishes that dialogues aren't to be arbitrarily clicked and merely mood flavour early on (that choice and consequence thing), that would feel very empty and hollow an experience. However, there will be different opinions on this, naturally. Some actually like to game and beat a system rather than "immersing" themselves without being reminded of all the numbers and switches underneath, for others some ambiguity is part of the game. In a pen&paper for instance your dungeon master might not tell you outright, in such a case, however, he might talk to you equally as suggestive if not more -- in a game like this, we only have text to go by, with a real person acting it out, the mimics and body language applied would certainly seal the deal. Plus you aren't limited to the options being presented to you but could try to further enquire rather than say yes or no (again, at this binary point, is there really an option to outright LIE to the Dozens?). Any game made of this mold that makes players think about the context rather than accepting quests left and right is a success in this regard in my book. Maybe the mistake is having this card blanche first quest that you can do regardless of anything, and "arbitrarily" the second quests featuring the warnings. Though the second quests seem to be much more risky and important in their objective, and on the case involve beating up actual members of other factions outright. Agreed with everyone about possible issues with the introduction of the factions, their struggle and how closely they are keeping an eye on each other actually and how you're forced to pick a side to a degree -- obviously some did pay attention and still missed the message. However I don't agree about making this so blatantly obvious that it would remove all kind of involvement with the actual context and remove the risk and uncertainty with picking such an option regardless of all the warning signs all over the place (depending on how you get to the choice anyway). Maybe the writers would have ensured to make these even more in your face if this faction choice had an actual bearing on the main story arc, which it doesn't. In the end, you're being asked to align to a faction to get into the Duc's hearing, and whilst helpint out one of the factions affects politics in Defiance Bay, in the grand scheme of things as far as the main conflict of Pillars is concerned it won't mean a thing. I suspected that this wasn't the sole reason for anyone to stop playing outright (and it likely isn't), but doing such would be a tad daft, which most will likely agree in retrospective. edit: To expand, as the whole faction stuff isn't anything that a) puts you into a dead and b) hugely alters the course of the rest of the game or anything, I'm actually of the opinion that you SHOULD be able to screw this up. Like, why have factions refusing to do business with the player when it's super clearly telegraphed to him which and what triggers this and how? Of course nobody's going to do that then. In a sense, people reporting they screwed this up is a good sign to me. It won't end the game for anybody, it won't hugely affect anything on tops, and as such it's a "fail state" that makes having that risky choice and consequence worth having in the game in the first place. The problem really is when someone feels the entire conflict and context isn't communicated to him any, but each faction gives you that warning, no matter if the first thing you do in Defiance Bay is running up towards the Dozen straight out of the bat without actually meeting anyone of the other factions you're being warned about in person. If you want to know more, it's up to you to cfind out then first and chose "I must think about this" rather than clicking yes, m'am just cause. My take.

I hope they made enough money from sales. According to Brian Fargo, with their games, which seem a similar scale (and backed by Kickstarters just as big), they'd be fine and could continue making those by selling an additional 100,000+ copies. Which PoE has easily surpassed already, for what it's worth. It'd be interesting to see how Double Fine do with theirs though. That doesn't even compare, they initially asked for but I think 300,000 Dollars, and in the end the couple million they got wasn't enough. To top that off, adventure games don't sell as much as RPGs, their in-built audience certainly isn't as big. Unlike the Kickstarter RPGs, which are successful considering their budgets and no to little publishers taking any cuts, this one probably won't convince as many business people about the viability of adventure games who weren't already convinced before (there's much more commercial adventure games being made than hardcore RPGs, by the way -- in particular the end of the first decade of this century saw countless of games). Budgets alone don't tell the story though. There's a huge discrepancy depending on where a game is actually being made. It seems that the upcoming Witcher by all accounts appears to become just as big as Skyrim, just as pretty and full of latest tech, but if anything is to be believed, will contain even more hand-crafted content, from dungeons to no-generic-fetch quests to everything and cities with far more individualized NPCs and banter. However, developer CD Projekt is located in Poland, where games are significantly less expensive to make than say in the US. That's stretching it, but California, where Double Fine and Obsidian and inXile are hailing from is almost a luxury to afford for someone running these companies in some ways. Whilst projects such as the Armed Assault series earn a good deal of money by their ultra-realistic and high-fidelity engines also being the core of simulations that are actually sold to real military, there's probably a reason why those mostly come from Europe, Eastern Europe in particular these days. There's even a series of Sherlock Holmes adventure games made that can afford to license the latest in Unreal Engine tech -- even though there's a chance you likely have never heard hugely much about it. There's an article on this on Gamasutra, though it's ten years old an in terms of total numbers very much out of sync. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130582/the_state_of_game_development_in_.php This might exclude marketing, but The Witcher 2 reportedly cost 10 Million Dollars to make, too, if this is to be believed. http://n4g.com/news/1342740/the-witcher-2-cost-10-36-million-the-witcher-3-and-cyberpunk-will-cost-2-82-million-in-h1-2013 Similarily, those 300,000 asked for initially by Double Fine may have been a modest budget, but that's actually the budget most bigger modern adventure games have to deal with, but they're made in Europe. Such as the more recent The Book Of Unwritten Tales 2, which was developed in Europe too, and all of its speech (easily hours of it) being professionally dubbed and localized all the same. Those are considered real hits by their respective publishers if they sell 50,000 units+ during their first run. And they keep on being made, although that has slowed down significantly. I like to cite it as, unprofessional and a bit childish as it was, one of the publisher guys joked on social media about that they could have afforded to make a series of multiple adventure games had they been given the Double Fine Kickstarter money. However, that is short-sighted as obviously the lower costs don't only come off the lower costs of living and "upkeep", but also of the kind of staff you can attract and hire. The US has by the far the biggest pool of talent and developers, and as such it's the biggest talent also moving there. Part of the appeal of all those Kickstarters was that, after all, it is proven genre and industry legends returning to their grass roots rather than indies filling in the blanks. Not sure what PoE would have looked like. But reportedly for just about any commercial game, (it's the same for niche adventure games, reportedly) a good deal of the budget goes straight into producing art and art assets. I think for a 2d game with 3d characters PoE has some tricks up its sleeve that are very advanced, such as the lighting and stuff. I'd expect there to be cuts that may have been made first, ditto everything else audio/visual, such as the score, the animations, and all the extra stuff "hardcore CRPG players" who after all are the target audience would gladly neglect in favour of finally getting a CRPG like in the old days from some of the greats of the old days; one that only really works as it does on Macs and PCs (sadly) and whose design isn't as heavily dictated by publisher, huge budget and focus group testing demands. But naturally, as RPG design is rather complex, a lot of the quests and maybe even systems (dialogue, personality system, general world reactivity, quests, allignment/factions) wouldn't be too. And character classes.

Me neither, that's a great thing. Just not salient to this discussion, because no choice was made. a choice were made. you were oblivious to the choice... possibly willful. HA! Good Fun! It certainly is making a choice when someone says "REMEMBER OTHER FACTIONS WONT WORK WITH YOU" and you say "OK!" You keep saying that, but that never actually happens in game. They say that other factions will be "angry" at you, but they never flat out state that you will be locked out of a future game mechanic just by accepting the quest. Those aren't quite the same thing, especially for more casual gamers that don't have finely tuned meta-game senses. actually, meta-game is precisely what you want. you are given a choice. you are told quite clear that you are making a choice, so it is not ambiguous or accidental and you are also given an, "i need to think about this option," that the player doesn't see in most other dialogues. that alone should warn folks that this choice IS different. the fact that you are not enlightened o' all the mechanical implications is indeed avoiding the meta-game force-feeding, but you do know you are making a choice and you should realize that the choice is different. also, as were noted elsewhere, and given that this is now a spoiler thread we don't mind mentioning, the ultimate choice you make at the hearing is unaffected by the faction you aligned with. If the more heavy stuff (and there's more to it than in PoE 2 hands down, here's an interview with MCA about it: ) would be telegraphed to the player in that meta kind of way (if you push X, then definitely Y), the game would completely fall apart. For the purists, it's also very unlike a pen&paper adventure many of these games harken back to at their roots -- naturally you can debate to which extent a video game adaptation of those should mimic everything found in the pen&paper, different formats, tech and all (as an anecdote, by the time Thief came about the folks at Looking Glass kind of "mocked" traditional CRPGs in a manifesto, tongue-in-cheek ranting that all the carefully recreated stats, to hit rolls and similar wouldn't cut it on a computer; and that the mazes of multiple choice dialogue they also had done would be no replacement for the social activity that would form the core of the forebears). F'r instance, early on in W2 you're forced into a situation which lets you decide which of two distress signals to answer to. By the standard of most video games, it wouldn't matter. In this one, it does. How harshly it does it kind of sort of the appeal, actually. Personal opinion and preference and all, but for similar reasons I played PoE without dialogue options being flagged, the hints how each of them might affect your personality in the game (see MCA's comment about Kotor 2, and how a lot of people would just meta the thing and chose options in a pursuit to gain light side/dark side points without caring about the actual context down to ignoring what's actually being said). Even if the factions were introduced better, I think in a case like this there should be some minor ambiguity (it's pretty clear to me, as argued, what's on stake here). Imagine you at least were aware of the conflict and power struggle, the intel in between factions, how they're keeping a close eye on each other as well as the people doing work for them (which is established in quests, at very least) -- accepting such work by any of them SHOULD feel dangerous and make you wonder about the exact consequences and whether it would be a good idea to do so rather than mechanically accepting everything. In some cases it may be good to remind you that this is a video game and that there are limitations and abstractions you have to deal with, however from my point of view such can prove a huge distraction and should be rather avoided whenever possible (i.e. the argument that there should be a clear message warning you of points of definitely no returns). In this case, the concept of LYING and betraying people had been established long before you get to this decision, which is clearly a yes, please, or no one rather than a yes, please, LIE: yes please and no one. Established was also right in the prologue that clicks of the mouse aren't arbitrary, but can steer the course of actions into multiple ways, both most immediately and also an hour further into the game. What I've personally didn't like about the whole thing is actually how the narrative demands you to chose one side (without necessarily doing a particularly good job of introducing them immediately). Without spoiling anything, it won't matter for the main story arc in any kind of way anyway, but for some it could feel like it would be some kind of major thing when it rather isn't as far as the main arc is concerned. My rogue who didn't give a rat's ass about any of them ended up being promoted into their ranks eventually and being treated as such, which felt kind of weird. Then again, this is actually very much like Gothic, thinking about it, if anybody remembers. You have to align to one of the three factions to progress, which actually makes up a huge part of the game unlike here. New Vegas, now that was a different story. Speaking of which... I think you can complain about that as a design decision, i.e. you not being able to go back and quest further but the story being wrapped up Fallout-style and end of (which I am convinced some did). However if anybody was seriously surprised to find out then that is their fault entirelly, true. That was blatantly this-is-a-video-game-about-to-end-so-take-care-instrusive-popup-alert spoon feedingly obvious.

Some more recent comments -- I think those are great and viable at all, but I feel and could be wrong about it (sorry if I do), but we're entering the realm of a target audiences the game simply isn't made for. The great thing about projects such as this in the first place is that they aren't (or shouldn't be) the result of super extensive focus group testing ("developers should care that each and every player who will happen to pick up their game will finish it") -- and about the level of combat difficulty that crops up, I thought that if anything the feedback from the IE veterans who form the majority who backed this was that if anything it would be a far more straight-forward affair. That's my take, but early game Baldur's Gate certainly is a heck of a lot more deadly than this, as you arrive with but a couple of hit points into the world and killing your first bear becomes an achievement you feel proud of, going early into Nashkel mines ill-equipped results into you being target training for goblin archers. In all of those cases but a couple hits or a critical means your dead immediately, unlike in PoE. And that's just the type of game that's being targeted for and has been communicated during development as well as the initial pitch to the backers. To get back on the issue with the factions, taking feedback aboard by those who paid attention and did misunderstand it, that is viable to look at. However this is not the kind of game that caters to "more casual" players as was suggested, in particular in terms of involvement and reading and story-telling. This is a kind of game that's become extinct, in particular by major studios and developers, and it was one of the driving forces in the first place to bring that back into the blockbuster, more streamlined, pick-up-and-play stream of RPGs that has basically dominated the market for like fifteen years now. There is nothing wrong with those, however, there is a heck of a lot wrong with another type of game becoming practically extinct because design by extensive market research/commitee/focus group testing/hand-holding has rules supreme. And for the sake of SOME polemic in regards to a more casual commitment to what's actually going on, dialogue "written for people who don't like dialogue" (thanks Mr. Sawyer) has cropped up in many a game of some calibre. PoE wasn't communicated to be one of those by any stretch. Combat, in particular early on in Baldur's gate was rough, and as it had even more open design, you could quickly venture somewhere and find that you're not up to snuff for the challenge present in multiple areas simultaneously. Icewind Dale, in particular the second part, had some fiendishly hard encounters (and was beloved by its fans for exactly offering that). Likewise, without reading much and thinking about events, Torment was no joy to play at all. I must add another thought and that since the game makes accepting the aforementioned quests appear like a major choice (and it does do that), the first thing I'd do if I wasn't sure was just saving the game before accepting.

What is probably throwing some people off about the above is that "after this" could mean after completing the quest. Maybe it should be reworded to something like "if you accept this task, I expect they will learn of your association with us...." Should arguably more of a problem with the "completionists" who suck each subsequent map try in the pursue of quests, loot and XP. I.e., the Dozens are the first faction you'll meet that way as they are located in the area you'll arive in at Defiance Bay and you may simply complete all of their quests without a) getting to know the others and b) having been around the place hugely much in general. Depending on your playthrough, it is pretty obvious that none of the factions and those that are aligned with them can do as they wish and are not being observed. Doing the first Knight's quest anyway in particular, on which you can embark on without aligning towards them (Spoilers therein) pretty much establishes the "intel" that's going on by having one of the main quest characters who's not actually a member of the Knights as such being... taken care of by an opposing faction: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Built_to_Last The lead-up to the above yes/no choice (depending on your companions, they'll comment on this rather tellingly too). Not trying to solely defend the game, maybe the factions in general and the eventual choice you're going to make should be introduced better -- or more obvious. But even without having say Aloth around, at this point it was hugely obvious to me what's going to happen next. At the very least those who already had a clear picture of how they're going to join should have steered away from making such a decision such as accepting such telling (re)quests of other factions, though.

Pretty much, unless something was screwed up in the translations. That may be not the game going out of character and asking and warning and demanding you straight to consider, like: Will you help them? If you accept, all the others factions will hate you. With the two options being: Yes. No. But that's pretty straight foward to me. I stand corrected. Apologies. Not a problem, I think my general tone, which was a bit sarcastic, suggested as much, so it's myself to blame too. I was just amazed because this seemed so blatantly obvious to me what's going to happen next (the quest that followed basically involved slaughtering opposing faction's people too). I've seen that this was brought up when the game was released and thus it may be these "issues": https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72460-choosing-a-faction-in-defiance-bay/ 1) There aren't that hugely many points in PoE that basically lock you out of content; as some of the guys says, he didn't expect there to be that kind of (faction) choice in the game at this point 2) In many other games, choices you make are windows dressing and don't actually influence much of anything to begin with (Skyblivion and its popular ilk, where you basically can do as you please and nothing in the world, huge as it may be, reacts to any of it -- and MMORPG's too) 3) Even if you've never played those, you may be one of the completionists and accept basically anything by default and have been used to do so until this point deep into Act 2 which didn't "hurt" you out of much previously 4) The general message you get by the factions upon embarking on their quests may be too subtle (I dunno, see above) 5) Just clicking "yes" in what is basically the game asking you whether you really want to align with this faction (to the anger of the others) may be seen as just "accepting another quest" despite the pretty telling options (I need to think about this!!!); that is only upon actually embarking on it one may expect it to have a real consequence for any of the factions and your eventual alignment towards them

Oh, yay! We're going to insult peoples' intelligence now are we? How is that an attempt at insulting somebody's intelligence? It only is such if you seem to infer from this that Skyrim would be a game for fools (I like it, by the way, even though nothing you do has any consequence, which is pretty shallow and warrants a mock like this in my book). This is a mocking of the game, parts of it anyhow, not the people who play it. However: The PoE kind of design is the designated niche, the Skyrim one where nothing you do has any influence is the mainstream -- thus the latter design is the one people are used to (and may have come to expect), whilst PoE ain't that much. Has nothing to do with intelligence, more with habit and expectation. Is all.

On top of that each one of them lets you interact with them initially, that is the "first" quest is pretty much a card blanche, but after that it should be bloody obvious what's going to happen next both by what has been communicated through the dialogue and the quest objectives too. Like why do you help the guys clearly opposing your favourite faction in the first place? Making it more obvious would have taken it into the realms of META hell (NOTE: POINT OF NO RETURN BEHIND THIS). And every time the game lets you lie, the dialogue option has been clearly marked as such up to that point, like LIE:.... I doubt that this is the only reason that made him stop playing, but I'm speechless all the same about this. PoE isn't even that straight about this. The factions are pretty much the only area in the game that has fail states such as this. In Wasteland 2 for instance there is a choice about an hour in that may lock out an entire region (more will follow), there is an optional ending screen into the game about just as much time being played, you can make your own people hunt you down as they can outright oppose you depending on your actions; your squad members may leave you depending on what you're doing and not return, and on smaller scales taking the "good guy" option by freeing someone captured might bite back to haunt you a hour or two later in the form of massive goons of the capturer having finally tracked you down, etc. Must be the influence of Skyrim, where you can join the Assassins, The Royal Guard Of Fubar, save the World From Dragons AND become the King Of Thievese all at once without anybody giving a darn either way. :confused:

I think the official website of Baldur's Gate 2 is still accessible via the Internet Wayback Machine. There is or used to be an FAQ section where various player feedback to part one was adressed. I think the "busy" city as well as the more linear structure rather than the exploration that was present in BG1 was a direct response to that feedback of the not_so_silent majority of player feedback they got. I don't hate it really but... There's another thing with the city, by the way, and it's that the entire chapter has so many quests and strongholds and what not that you can do this like forever, despite the narrative strongly going against that kind of thing. Your has just been captured. The thing initially tries to push you into wanting to save her. It's obvious that there's personal preference at work here -- but yeah, this all contributed to the game feeling more staged and gamey rather than a real "place". Every place, every click brings you immediately to an area of interest (or should I say quest objective). Whilst BG's wilderness was by some critisized for the exact opposite, just woods and nothing in them, I think that firstly a) travelling to places actually felt somewhat like travelling, and b) it seems the Biofolks took all of that criticism and didn't merely try to adress it, but to an extent outright reversed some of the original's design in the process. In my opinion this was the first step towards the more compact interactive movie kind of experience of the games they made thereafter. As for the density, obviously working on comparably tight budget restrictions it's less likely for a game such as PoE to have "flair" stuff, in quality 2D art all the same. Whcih means in busy places such as cities areas of interest might be all related to quests/NPCs directly in one way or another, and weren't there wilderness areas to be planned for and cut, actually? I don't remember. Hell, even big budget titles are under constraints, and this is the ultimate irony in the history of video games: back in 1992 and 320x200 art a hand full of guys were able to populate complete cities full of individual NPCs in Ultima VII -- by the time Ultima IX (and eventually subsequent Elder Scrolls games) came about, capitals of major fantasy realms consisted of the local pub, two make-shift shags, the court's yard and a bush. As a result, the city of Daggerfall alone in the 1996 rendition could house all of Skyrim's places and then some. In terms of sheer numbers, content, like quests, is often overvalued. Still for PoE I took my time and played for 70+ hours and still had like close to ten quests on my list I did not finish/take due to my rogue not willing to save every old lady's kitten from the tree (if you catch the drift). Maybe that will be different in a subsequent run, I dunno. Expecting this to ship with as much stuff in terms of numbers as some of the old IE games was never advertised nor realistic to begin with (at least not in comparison to BG2). There have been I think various interviews in which some of the lads actually voiced concerns about that BG2 kind of thing, equally it was said that the AI and encounter scripting won't be as complex yet... the thing was packed with stuff and probably has the most (hand crafted, quite complex) quests of any RPG for a reason to this day. Lots of character/creature art that could be reused, the tools that had been in place for multiple titles, the staff being used to them and the game coming out in an age where fully voice-overs and playing Hollywood-pretend cutscenes weren't considered an entry level requirement probably didn't hurt either. But the density, that's some good points made there. I think some of the backer NPCs actually contributed to it all. I.e. most, if not all of the NPCs who have something to say besides the brief standard lines for the respective location that are cycled through are those backer NPCs. But in fairness, they naturally deserve to be in the game, or to put it in another way, the backer NPCs are fine, maybe it's also worth looking at the "generic" townsfolk, at least some of it.

That's ONE theory of how the game came to be as it is (which you can like and dislike as an end product, opinions and all -- I'm pretty strongly one of the former group). One thing I've personally gathered from developer interviews as well as those KS pitches, and that is a trap of KS in particular, is that "design by committee" thing that can kick into place. Kind of harkens back to my claim about how people argue for that they think they'd want rather than what they actually want in some ways. I didn't follow the process much, but retrospectively I became interested in the design and read a lot of older interviews. It became immediately apparent that some stuff was taken out outright or at the very least altered because a majority of backers/Big Beta Testing Group didn't like what they saw. The important thing is that the game likely wasn't completely finished at that point, i.e. the balancing of all systems wasn't done yet. So whilst the designers may clearly have had an intention going into a particular direction, all the beta testers may see was incremencial steps trying to get there fully -- and then, this is a bit of a harsh word, "sabotaging" it outright. I think feedback is important, from players also, but I'm actually a proposal of an author, of authorship with a clear vision being grabbed and being run with (it's not as if a studio such as Obsidian would be totally inbred, there's lots of people with experience also giving feedback from inside and both outside the direct development process). Kickstarter in a sense is all about the players and their whishes that with the money they personally put in may come true. In some regards, that can be a hugely pitfall right there. Naturally, that's the other way to look at it. I've briefly been involved into the beta testing of a sports simulation about a very ambigious sports, and as it is an ambigious sports in which few key moments decide matches and thus you don't in any way need to "dominate" your opposition to a degree to win and thus nowhere near a proven science, and luck and chance play such an important part, and everyone is suspect to confirmation bias to some degree and has a preference of how the sports is supposed to be played (beautifully) --- anyway, let me end: because all of that, it is no NDA breaching super secret that feedback might differ. An RPG based on clear cut P&P rulesets at its core might not be as ambiguous as that, though naturally chance plays its part also (that roll of the dice, party rosters are up for grabs and to be filled individually to each tester too). But yeah.

They primarily wanted to increase their audience, there's little more to it, and there's nothing wrong with that inherently, and they have undoubtedly made people consider RPGs that wouldn't have otherwise -- and if all their subsequent IPs made people happy, more power to them. It was admitted by some of their own founding members here: http://www.pcgamesn.com/sword-coast-legends/inside-sword-coast-legends-back-to-baldurs-gate-with-the-director-of-dragon-age-origins. As for Bioware now, there are a number of people still at the company from back then, but hoping for them to return to more specialized games is kind of like all the people who had hoped for Lucas Arts post 2000 to return to the classic adventure games that brought them their initial reputation as quirky, creative studio before it turned into milking Star Wars: a lot of people have left the building anyhow, and whilst marketing and brand recognition does it's best to trick you, ultimately it's about the people making the games, not a brand name or company logo it's being released under. Obsidian genuinely wanted to go back to a style that has been abandoned in favor of multi-plattform larger than life blockbuster games, save for some indie developers, and they did. They also had the experience and staff to do so though as there's a big overlap with Black Isle/Interplay of yore, and there are members from defunct Troika aboard as well. Some of those go way back years before Bioware was even founded by its original founders who have left the company years ago. Even so, and I can't see how all of those different games wouldn't be able to happily exist alongside each other, which I hope they'll do - this talked about "renaissance" of PC RPGs is a comparably recent thing, remember, and I don't see even specialized PC publishers for some reason picking those guys up (which exist, and which support much smaller projects). Currently I have a strong preference to more specialized games as with games it's kind of like with movies: The more money's going into it the more it'll have to earn back eventually, and that increasingly means catering to just about anyone the bigger you get. It's not even worth arguing that a game such as PoE would have been a much bigger compromise had it to be released on more platforms as PC/Mac/Linux, as even with the higher resolution and more RAM of current consoles the amount of micro-management required isn't suited to game pads. Also a fun blockbuster romp full of over the top stuff, boobs and special effects to boot can be very entertaining if done well, but if that's all there is then ugh.

Useful things to take from here on: - Not everyone is going to like your game (which is fine) - Kickstarter has its pitfalls, and it's not merely one of budget constraints, like why is this game not as epic as epic quest II, not as dungeon crawley as Dungeon Crawler Dale and why are the NPCs not as fleshed out and manyful as in all of those games combined. It's all about the people, as they give you the money in the first place. However, people on occasion ask for what they think they want rather than what they actually want for far too many reasons to discuss Sorry, I can't take you seriously if I read something like this. I'd say that both BG1 and BG2 had a pretty weak story, so saying that BG1 was slightly better due to a better pacing is justified. I'm totally okay with that. But saying that BG1 had better quests... really? I mean; really? Name me just one quest that wasn't just "go there, beat **** up" in BG1? Certainly not clearing the endless levels of Nashkel Mines. Or all the pointless dungeons filled with hordes of copy & paste encounters. I can name you dozens of memorable quests in BG2: The Unseeing Eye, the De'Arnise Keep, the Planar Sphere, Getting the dragon eggs in Ust Natha, the Skinner of the Bridge district, the Umar Hills deaths, etc. Literally every zone of BG2 had at least one memorable, multi-stage optional quest that you will definitely remember in almost every single detail. In comparison, I can't even remember almost any of the sidequests in BG1. Like literally, I played BG1 at least 5 times now and I still struggle remembering the quests. QFT. Anyone who says that BG1 had better quests or better dungeons than BG2 or PoE is clearly not talking about BG1 the actually existing game, but rather about BG1 the sugarcoated memory of how playing a fantasy cRPG for the first time as a teenager made them feel (when it had no prior expectations to measure up to). True about the quests, absolutely. And yet I have replayed BG1 many more times than any other of the IE game (plus the obviously rather oftenly underrated Icewind Dale 1). Whilst it was justified by the plot, the amount of high level content in BG2 on occasion borderlines on the ridiculous (in that extent, it's the opposite of PoE, where there are few if any completely unique OP items that could turn you into God-like), the combat quickly descends into micro-management clickfests even against the most mundane of opponents (it's mostly all routine, by the way - buff, combat, save, buff - and rest and pray for no random encounters whilst doing so in between). The exploration and pseudo open world was ditched in favor of a far more streamlined "fast travel to area of interest/quest immediately" design (and ultimately ditched for something even more linear later on); and the much cherished chapter 2 is basically doing quests and managing castles for as long as you like despite someone close to yours just being captured. On top of that, and I have to admit that this is ultimately it's appeal, it's cramming as much of D&D into a single game as it can, so you're first fighting the legenday Beholders, the even more legendary Killer Bunny Of The Underdark Or Something and finish the job off by finishing The Lord Almighty himself. It's not that it's a lesser game or anything. But it is different enough designed to the original that each will have its fans and detractors -- on top of that, it didn't break any completel new grounds, as the original did two years prior (D&D had been done before, but not on this scale, sorry Gold Box and SSI). That said, in terms of quest content, there is hardly an equal to this day, and that's not nostalgia. There are various retrospective articles to be found on the web, and they are mostly all about how it was a huge advantage to the team to have all the systems in place and just about pumping concent all day long. Though BG2's quests really aren't as open as some are arguing (not that BG's were in any kind of way) -- what some of the fine folks at Interplay/BI were doing in Fallout a year prior was way bolder in many regards. Which is why I personally don't hold any BG that dearly that I uber glorify it to be RPG perfection to this day. In the same ways, I hugely enjoyed playing Pillars personally -- but in terms of reacitivity and world design in Wasteland 2 is actually better than that. It'd be far more important if these games, RPGs that (sadly) only work on PCs and thus don't attract that hugely many ways to fund them, would stick around for a while and get the chance and build their own line-age, which I hope they do. inXile has another promising game in the pipeline anyway, and pretty much announced another sequel to another legendary Tale too.

What do you mean? That player has to forego character effectiveness in combat in a combat oriented game in favor of flavour options in dialogue? Nah. It's just that the game isn't catering to these types of character sets exclusively. In parts, the character system is about avoiding that huge gap you can have between min/max chars and more balanced ones you'd find in a pen&paper, as attributes neglected will affect all types of characters. Plus, none of the companions are of that min/max type either -- if at all possible to do in PoE. The game may be focused on combat for most parts of the playing time, and that is all fairly well, but I still think there was, given the source, a bit of an irony in the assessment and analysis how you'd presumably have to pump certain stats to totally maximize efficiency.

Some valid criticism aside, I find it a bit ironic that the review pretty much outs the guy as a min/max powergamer who puts up tanks and super casters (which doesn't work the same way as in D&D by the way as every stat affects every character class there is -- a high int Barbarian for instance has a much bigger range in his AoE abilities as well as a much longer duration of those -- in a typically combat heavy D&D computer game that'd be a complete waste). I thought the Codex was about putting back the "role" back into "RPGs", though. That said, experiences will differ, and so will opinions (as an opinion piece, this is as valid as any -- how much of it is useful is up to you to decide). One of the strengths of RPGs is also their inherent weakness, to a point. Pillars, like other games, doesn't cater to a specific set of party. In a pen&paper environment, a highly intelligent Brute kind of character is atypical but viable, as there is a human at the whelm of the adventure who adapts, and there is the actually activity we use to call, well "role-playing". In the (mostly very combat intensive) computer games, that is a little different. Pillars goes a step further though. F'r instance, I recently saw somebody claiming that some of the skills, such as lore, would be basically useless. Yet without it, I would have struggled more to finish the game, or at least would have to adapt my strategy greatly. My party didn't include one of the classic "casters", only a priest who buffed the damage dealers. Thus many AoE spells and similar were only available to me if my party had that knowledge. In a sense, the pains of making the game viable for any party build (and every character build suffering/benefitting of all attributes), can fire back. In particular as all the levels of difficulty adjust are the number and strenghts of enemy types. That said, the Codex isn't as "elitist" as you think. You don't need to look further than their adventure gaming sections, where there are threads of appreciaation for just about any mediocre adventure game ever released during the adventure flood of the 1990s -- and as there is no type of game that relies as much on somewhat compelling writing as this one, and it was easy even for the best of designers to apply moon logics to their puzzle solutions (GK3's cat hair conundrum being the most prominent standout, naturally), there were a ton of those, inevitably. That is the forum side of things -- on the editors' they could improve on their editorial standards, as the quality of content varies hugely. And in fairness, there's a lof of interesting stuff being covered that isn't covered anywhere.

Baldur's Gate wasn't exactly my first role-playing game, having grown up on a diet of 8bit systems. But I can relate completely, in particular as in terms of D&D games, there hadn't been anything of its complexity before. The more open-ended exploration, the decent narrative pulls, the party members who would on occasion outright get into fights amongst themselves, the dialogue trees as complex as in a Lucas Arts adventure game -- D&D had been done on computers before, but not on such a grand scale. I know that the wraith of the Goldbox fans will crush upon me any minute now. But at that point, the contract between TSR and SSI had been bust for half a decade already, and advances in technology and complexity in design were not mutually exclusive entities. Alongside the big releases, I'm playing other games that aren't powered by the latest in tech, but PoE is another one of those reminders that the desperate arm's race for technology hasn't made games any real better. In particular the big productions from the last 15 or so years were all about upgrading visual stimuli, which can be important depending on the overall experience targeted (no point in going for the most realistic combat simulation on the market aka Armed Assault and then going for the pixel looks of early Doom id tech) -- and equally if not more about making games more accessible. However, very few have thought about a player's input, and how (deeply) he is engaged or not. That is why Pillars, even after these fifteen years in between, "retro" aesthetics aside, totally plays like a cutting edge role-playing game from start to finish. It may flirt with the past and aims to do so, but some path finding and camera issues aside, at its core lays as engaging an experience as ever. That is also why games such as the original Fallout still look massively bold to this day -- heck, depending on your character's build and decisions, you'll have a completely different experience and ending. Most games made by Looking Glass equally look as futuristic and advanced as they did back then in a lot of ways -- if you can look past the pixles, that is. In some ways gaming has come full circle ever since the hype surrounding Interactive Movies in the 1990s. But whereas it used to be actors and grainy video sequences being put onto CDs, it is now huge amounts of money put into polygons pretending to be actors. Talking Baldur's Gate, you can't blame Bioware for what they've become in a sense, they've outgrown their specialized niche to keep up with the big guys on the block -- however you might be interested in this interview I found today all the same. Even the developers basically acknowledge such on occasion. http://www.pcgamesn.com/sword-coast-legends/inside-sword-coast-legends-back-to-baldurs-gate-with-the-director-of-dragon-age-origins

I wouldn't class the opening dungeon of Baldur's Gate II a tutorial though. Actually, it's pretty hardcore and fairly long with some tough encounters, especially if you're not familiar with the mechanics. TES has opened with a dungeon ever since Arena (Morrowind is the only exception in the entire series, if you don't count the spin-offs) -- going back to my first one, Daggerfall, I think this is intentionally done. I think it took me hours to find the exit on my first run, and then you get out and get some breath of air after being locked into endless caves for days and nights depending on which, and the world really opens up. It is that key moment when you get to realize you're free to explore and go wherever you wish. Probably BG II was aiming for the same thing, considering that you'll immediately get to a big city in bright day-light. But yeah, the flipside of design like this is that you have to repeat this each and every time you start a new game and character (and the TES design has become a lot more tutorial-ish in recent titles... which naturally goes along to streamlining the mechanics and making them ever more accessible for just about anyone. I think Pillars did pretty good in avoiding that kind of feel overall).

Had the time to let the ending sink in (and already bought and installed Wasteland 2 to get some additional fix). Really enjoyed this game, and will be a Kickstarter if there will ever be another thing like this. To me this wasn't merely nostalgia, this is state of the art role-playing more than ever. Speaking about nostalgia though... Any way to get this signed? Not sure whether there had been an equal in American/English promotional material back then, but that's a very fitting tag line for the game: "The first role-playing game in which you don't know which role you're going to play." Good times back then with Torment. Good times now with Pillars. Thank you.