Sven_

I think it's been done. Saving Private Ryan, opening vs. the rest of the movie. However in here it was a deliberate decision of a skilled film maker to film this particular sequence in such a way, to engage the viewer in the same chaos the protagonists are facing. This is a generalization, but more oftenly it appears a sloppy way to cover up that the action, if actually being focused by the cam, wouldn't provide anything worth dropping your jaw over. Cover ups may include: - bad stuntwork, bad effects - popular / character actors being hired for physical roles despite not being ideal for the job (obviously Schwarzenegger's never been much of an actor, but he could tore off your arm with ease -- and for this one, Theron has a background as a dancer and a pretty big statue she could bring to the table too) - lack of superior action story boarding skills and choreography There was an article about the tendency to hire people in general who have no experience in doing action too, not thought about this much. http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/Why-most-modern-action-films-are-terrible I think in doses chaos is just fine. However it is more oftenly used as an excuse for a lack of any drama/tension, and arguably goes against a very fundamental and primary rule of visual storytelling, one of classic movies anyways (which is why it's probably so easy to get wrong if trying to be diverted from). If porn movies were shot in such a way, barely hinting at who's taking on whom and tiptoeing around the "action" -- aren't action movies at their purest porn of a different kind in some way -- they'd be practically exctinct. In any case, it's hugely great to see a movie that tries to take your breath away with what's actually shown on screen, and succeeding at that, rather than with what's barely hinted at. What is undeniably gigantic is that it doesn't feel outdated to anyone at all.

You'll probably enjoy this quote directly from Miller. The noise has become the norm, and it isn't recognized as such, but for film makers has become a distinct style slapped onto everything. Upon giving it a thought, I agree and that's another thing that made me instinctively draw the connection to the actual classics, apart from the no-nonsense take on things. You probably know this essay as well, I figure? https://vimeo.com/28016047 In an ideal world, this would be a highly influential film -- it's made like the classics, but doesn't feel outdated an iota, in fact, it makes contemporary action cinema feel real odd (which the media picks up on too -- lost count on the articles that argue Furious 7 to feel real old hat and slow in comparison, and that's a franchise all about fast speed and faster cars and not much else to begin with). However it requires a certain kind of personnel and schooling likely, and there's no doubt that Miller and John Seale grew up with classic cinema rather than video games or music videos. It appears they're the last dinosaurs on that block, though. :-/

Don't know about movies, but looking through this list it doesn't look that there's a whole lot of r-rated movies that rake in 50M+ domestically upon their opening week, i.e. do significantly better openings. Seems about onpar with last year's 22 Jump Street, which actually used to be a pretty mainstream franchise. If WB expected this to become some uber killer at the box office, big if, it's their fault. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/mpaarating.htm?yr=2015&rating=R&view=releasedate&sort=gross&order=DESC&p=.htm Not even Terminator 3 hit that, and the Terminator franchise has sadly been milked beyond its once thrilling premise into the realms of the absurd to this day (assuming this is taking inflation into account). I've personally done my deed and went a third time into the thing. This time taking my father too who could appreciate it as he grew up in the age of classic cinema, i.e. classic western movies and stuff. I think it'll do just fine, in particular as I have the impression that some still are misguided, as me initially, that this might be another case of Hollywood squeezing old assets, banking on nostalgia and remaking stuff ad infinitum (with better technique, but less actual competence and personel). As said, I liked the Max movies, but I didn't exactly follow the entire production for this one. Even so, if this was the last we seen of Max on a big screen, at least it went out with a bang (until somebody runs out of scripts in 2030ish anyway and wants a movie that banks in on the success of that Fallout 6 game). Not many series you could say that about anymore...

Probably not the greatest thing ever. For a dumb movie though it sure as heck takes its characters pretty serious. For all the over-the-topness, in your standard action flick, nobody would have turned heads for five super models appearing, for instance. They'd just be typical Hollywood casting tropes, pretty faces to please a primarily male audience, for instance. Yet they firstly rather tie in well with the movie's plotline, and also really everyone reacts to them in often quite extraordinarily ways upon first meeting. That's something that hit me personally anyways whilst watching. As the previous entry in particular had some similar religious undertones, there's probably also a symbolic thing about their number, and their clothing, and the way they are framed when we (and Max) initially get to really see them. As an aside to casting cliches, if you get a boner out of Theron in this one, you're one heck of a weirdo. I mean they don't exactly put her pretty face behind a leather mask, but she's cast the way Weaver was in Aliens or Alien³, a strong character (which she nails), not Aeon Flux. Wanna say hello to the lady? I don't get the "dumb action" thing much. There's something as bloody stupid as typical Summer Blockbusters usually are, with frantic cuts being mistaken for action, CGI overload for a bang and flash backs and contrived exposition for storytelling. And then there's this, which is something on occasion so grand, the storyboards for the action sequences would likely fill books -- and personally I also think that there's a lot of stuff being told just by the set pieces and faces, with the only thing really missing is a more gripping emotional hook to Furiosa's motivations, one that is actually translated to the audience (when the movie opens, she's actually about to detour already and take "revenge" to what's happened). And the occasional flash backs of Max' memory not doing a particularly great job of depicting his conflict, in particular as this conflict is what firstly drives Max and leads to the movie's resolution. Those flashbacks alter the original movies too and make old fans a tad confused In a sense tough, the lack of any exposition bar setting the absolutely basics you need to know for the next two hours in the beginning couple o' minutes plays into the movies favor though. As WHEN the movie slows down, in relative terms, you're eager to hang on these characters lips and soak up anything that gets you a clearer picture of what the heck is actually going on. Interestingly, I read that Miller and his co-writer had fleshed out back stories for every character, from the main guys to the war boys to the Guitar Guy . It's not explicitly translated to screen or phoned in to the audience, but this in parts explains why the movie clicks rather than "just" being a series of interconnected car crashes without any coherency backing them up. Here's somebody who cares about the world he's about to wreak havoc in, as over the top as it may be. Dumb movies are the likes of xXx, Transformers, Fast And Furious. This is on an altogether different level though, leaning more towards the likes of the original Terminator, Escape From New York, Assault On Precinct 13, basically the good stuff, as unlikely you'll get to see that from big budget Blockbuster studio productions. At times it's so raw it's unreal, whilst still having all the obvious polish from a big budget production. It's not necessarily the movie that explicitly demands anyone to think about the meaning of life and the Secret Of Monkey Island and the universe or anything, it primarily wants to thrill you and knock you out of your socks. But in its own ways and inherent action movie form, it's not just explosions galore either. I don't think it will be quite as influential nor iconic as the above mentioned. For all the greatly inventive action scenes you've never seen before quite like it, the movie basically draws from all the things of previous Max movies, only amplifying them and then some. My opinion anyways.

This movie is rad. Seen it twice since Friday, and I don't often go to the cinema. I hadn't much followed any of the production or promotion, actually, even though I've always liked Max. Really all the PC bull is distracting from what's actually going on. Which is an action movie that actually delivers and has a sense for framing images and even pacing, which is an odd thing to say considering that it's 120 minutes on full-speed non-stop. Almost a pity that this isn't released as an alternate PG13 as well, as all those fluff directors couldn't excuse themselves that they were intentionally making movies for 14 year old boys -- those 14 year olds would demand better after watching this. It's interesting that it needed to a take 70 years old called babe to get out of family movie retirement, a cinematographer who was already enjoying life after Hollywood as well to do that. Hell of a ride -- and considering that there's so few talking, there's some emotional punches as well. As this too is partly a revenge story of kinds, it isn't as huge as it was in the original Max though. An equal to the infamous hunt pack mowing down Max' family is not to be found here. Prior to my second viewing, the trailer for the new Terminator reboot was screening. And considering that trailers are running their respective movies in crunch-time, picking most of the punches and editing them into one shortie, it looked hopelessly out of sync in comparison. Don't know where Miller and crew would go from here though if they'd do another one. Trying to amp the action even more seems kind of pointless, as is trying to squeeze even more car crashes into another movie. If they do another, hopefully it will be as surprising as this one.

Obsidian are a comparably big developer considering their independent status. Hugely doubtful that a big number of those worked on PoE though, that is all throughout, full-time, exclusively. It's not viable. It's not even doable given the budget. I don't get the "million or bust" remark though, which might be a language barrier interfering. inXile are doing projects of largely comparable scale to PoE and according to Fargo could keep doing this for years if they sell 100,000 - 200,000 games. They wouldn't mind selling a million. But they certainly don't need to hit it or go bust, nor would they consider anything less a failure or anything - and if they would, that would be a huge failure in management and perception. There's not overly many PC exclusive titles that sell those numbers, not even all the Total War titles hit that. There aren't all that overly many titles that sell a million copies full-stop, thinking about it. Certainly not those being released for a single platform. According to recent news, Alien:Isolation was considered a disappointment for Sega after selling reportedly 2.1 million copies across all the platforms it's been released on, which was at least 4 consoles and PC (though that doesn't mean the title didn't turn a profit either -- it's been one of their few, perhaps arguably the only "big" product in their last year's portfolio and despite all it's also been the one that shipped the most units). Naturally 1) independent companies such as inXile work very differently from the ground-up and 2) PoE never was considered Obsidian's current big project. It may have saved, or helped to save the company back in 2012, but considering there's 100+ people working there, it's fair to assume that other projects such as Armored Warfare utilizing fairly advanced tech saw more permanent man power and experience being allocated to them. The Stick Of Truth also shipped in 2014. Might be that the number of such projects will go down in the future though. 2013/4 in particular saw a very high number of "classic" CRPGs coming out, in particular compared to the ten years before in which there was barely anything available in comparison. A lot of those are attracting similar crowds. And whilst PoE was probably the most anticipated so far, it also came last, Torment not counting. It's already quite a different market compared to when say Baldur's Gate or Fallout were initially released (both after a period of much dry and nothing), and the D&D license carried significant weight back then. Also nobody really continues pursuing expansion packs for games which are considered flops.

I'm not particularly fond of so many games getting more "streamlined" either -- in particular as argued before it has led to outright lazy design that is then being forced onto everyone rather than offering an optional "helping hand" for those who want it (there's nothing wrong with that). As posted, all these huge worlds being advertised, and then reverse-engineered to the degree that you cannot possibly get lost in those (or explore and discover at your own pace). Rather than doing it the opposite way and not creating those huge worlds in the first place, and then even on "AAA" budget ever so often desperately trying to fill them with the most inane of fetch quests and busy work. In a similar sense, based on older gameplay videos that are much slower in pace, I wonder what Bioshock initially had looked like before Levine had chickened out and realized he had to sell real copies of this. A game such as Doom³ was never advertised as anything profoundly else but being loud and dumb -- and whilst the plasmids in Bioshock provided a fun diversion for a while given the somewhat limited possibilities of the environment, the core fast-paced gunplay that was far less prominent in its forebear System Shock (2) was far less responsive and pleasing than in id's intentional piece of Sci-Fi schlock. And compared to Doom³, which isn't exactly a game of diversity, the super small cast of enemies is hugely repetitive in retrospective. I'm not arguing Doom³ to have been a particular great game or anything, but it had delivered what it had aimed to deliver, being a loud and dumb shooter of kinds that doesn't shy away from calling it's main antagonist Betruger for cripe's sake, whilst for me Bioshock was one of the more underwhelming experiences considering its inherent make-up, DNA and cosmetics hinting at something far more engaging initially but then sizzling out to be quite a simple game of shoot-the-baddy (and being a worse one at that than Doom³ in terms of mechanics anyways). Never played any of the subsequent sequels, but from comments Infinite actually doubles that and then some, even reviving the classic static straight shooting galleries almost unheard of in any major production except maybe the Painkiller series. In a sense, it's probably the game of the classic Looking Glass lineage being made for people who don't actually like games of the Looking Glass kind, similar to how open world games are being created for people who can't actually cope with worlds being wide open -- or how Bioware are making some of their RPG series such as Mass Effect appeal to people who don't actually like RPGs -- before anyone jumps on me, the "classic" ones anyways -- but shooters instead. It's frustrating for anyone who buys into this expecting something else, only to find it doesn't quite deliver that for whatever reason. Of course that's the more cynical way to look at this. The more upbeat one is that of Obsidian's Tim Cain, who said in an interview a while ago: Some of the games we started out with likely were pretty light-hearted too, heck, even some of the classics such as Wasteland at their core have a super simple combat system that almost plays itself -- and I've the feeling that folks who initially started out with the Infinity Engine series of games may initially have picked one up thinking it to be similar to Diablo by looking at the pack shots or because they could get into them comparably easier because of their engine's roots being real-time strategy, some the most popular and accessible kind of game you could get on PCs during the mid to late 90s. For all the rules and spells, it was all left-click to select and left-click to move/attack/talk, which for RPGs was almost unheard of. It's just questioning the often blanket statements that "AAA games suck" -- or questioning the very connotation of that very term that appears to include such a wide range of games from Dishonored to Alien:Isolation to Call Of Duty. It's like a catch-phrase being picked up from somewhere and then used as a generalization for like everything one deems to be wrong with the video gaming market. By nature there's many more small productions that underwhelm as there are far more than that, there's Kickstarters that are never finished, get cut short during production or never actually make it through the funding stage, and the majority of indie games aren't worth writing a damn about. And closing off with another Tim Cain quote, it's probably neither the "AAA" nor the "garage" to rave and rant about, it is the middle ground that appears at stake, and this includes some of the projects Obsidian Entertainment are doing, hugely likely. Certainly something such as PoE, which is neither/nor. That's all, folks. (Source of Cain quotes: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8416)

Dismissing games or anything because of their inherent A class blockbuster budget, distribution and marketing is kind of stupid, though. Dunno about you guys, but I'm very excited about going to Mad Max tomorrow. And damn, from all the reviews it seems Miller's actually nailed it (even without Gibson)!

In terms of VO's, It's often not so much the length of the actual lines. Apart of eating its parts of the budget, it's that the recording process is a huge deal and dictates much of the quest and dialog design. It means everything needs be locked pretty early on, for a start. For most fully-voiced games these days it doesn't end with that. As the dialogue is then also presented in a cinematic way, i.e. there's also the lip-syncing and animation process for each response and course of action. It kind of boils down to this: Back in the glory days of text adventure, a single guy sitting in his garage could blow up the Earth and have the universe implode and collapse around it within a single line of text. All that he needed was a keyboard, a 'puter and a somewhat decent skill of communicating images via prose, as well as some BASIC programming skills. That requirement's quadrupled ever since, right with the arrival of graphics (let alone voice overs), and it's getting ever more expensive since. Even for big projects, that's a challenge. Sounds Mr. Obvious, but that's just the way it is. The important thing to recognize here is that no matter the representation and effort going in, it's the exact same bottom line. You can have an entire horde of 3D artists rendering the apocalypse and then some, hire a fully professional army of voice cast providing the screams of end, despair and terror, and pay a dedicated task force of cleaning staff to deal with the aftermath. In a movie, which is all about presentation and showing you things, that is all that it's about. In a game, in which the core is interaction, having means of player action result in a consequence (and if it's just the player firing rockets on alien vessels and them blowing up), it's the exact same thing and consequence for the player no matter how it is being presented. It's the world's end, Big ****ing Game Over either way. http://www.lar.net/2011/12/19/the-cost-of-dialogue/#more-100 http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/voice-acting-in-rpgs-may-be-more-trouble-than-its-worth/ http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/7588-Voice-vs-Choice Just seen a video review of the upcoming Witcher 3, and the guys talked much about the chains in choices and consequences, and the world reactivity, which actually reminded me of Wasteland 2 I've just finished. Witcher 3's a game that's fully-voiced, but if would be a first, and is naturally a huge amount of work to get that rival older games such as the Fallouts, Arcanum or the more recent Wasteland 2 in these regards. Without spoiling anything, Wasteland 2 has even minor characters popping up in different ways depending on how you treated them hours later, entire areas disappearing off the map, you can flip the main quest upside down by opposing your own guys of kinds (and get an ending to that) and even though like 99,9% of players would reload when the "companion" rangers you can bolster your initial squad with die, it recognizes such too right to the very end and reacts to it (I didn't reload in one such an instance). Apart of that, rather than all the personal bickering and preferences, it'd be good for anyone here to recognize that there are distinctive styles of games which can be all made viable. I'm not overly fond generally of games turning into interactive movie kind of experiences again often (seen that in the 1990s already). But surely something such as Kotor, obviously being anything less than superbly cinematic would be kind of missing the point -- and a South Park game without the original voice cast joking around, really? Similarily, words and text can express things in ways that no fully-voiced cutscene can ever hope to do -- and Pillars Of Eternity was clearly communicated to offer a more novelized style of prose and story telling. Part of that is budget reasons (VO=expensive), part of it is concious design reasons (telling a story a certain kind of way). And that likely won't change. Now, 'bout that combat...

Could not had said it better. And yet it had taken years to figure something out that appears to work, for more specialized RPGs anyways. Going by the Road To Eternity videos, it speaks volumes that some of their staff predicted they'd barely rake in 100,000 Dollars on the first day after their Kickstarter had launched, I think some significantly less. And that's the funny thing, as this kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: If nobody is making the games, obviously they don't sell a single copy. Almost every major Kickstarter is off a studio that got burnt by more traditional models of development/funding. Larian opted to become fully independent prior to doing Divinity OS (and risked the entire studio by doing such) http://www.pcgamer.com/how-divinity-original-sin-almost-bankrupted-larian-studios/ Brian Fargo of inXile (Torment, Wasteland 2, the already announced Bard's Tale sequel) doesn't grow tired of telling the disheartening stories of even pitching games, let alone handling them getting made. http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/5/2/5613114/wasteland-2-fallout-brian-fargo http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/15/brian-fargo-on-inxiles-darkest-publisher-driven-days/ And had Obsidian actually considered pitching PoE to the fans directly had they nod been in severe trouble likewise? http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-11-before-pillars-of-eternity-obsidian-nearly-met-its-end For a studio such as Obsidian, doing entirelly Pillars-size projects hugely likely isn't viable, though. It may be independent, but it's too big for that. Meanwhile over at inXile, they've scaled back to 25-30 employes give or take, and given interviews they should be super pleased how Wasteland's 2 been performing for them. I don't know why it took so long for RPGs in particular to figure something out. In particular Europe has specialized publishers for almost everything -- from adventure games that are far more niche to strategy games to pretty much PC specific things, such as Paradox Interactive, who are doing greatly and who make games commercially viable that are in my opinion far more hardcore and niche than any old CRPG ever was. Naturally it took Double Fine to make crowd funding appear viable, but considering that you kind of wonder what publishers were being approached and what the projects that were turned down looked like, in particular in terms of scale and budget. "Back in the days", someone like Fargo was running one of the biggest PC publishers there had been; and the Infinity Engines games weren't that hugely niche either. Even Troika Games, the follow-up of the original Fallout team of kinds, were as ambitious to be the first in line to license Valve's then fresh Source Engine who nobody expect their own coders likely had much experience to develop in. If you've already climbed from apprenticeship to the top, it's likely tough to go back to more humble beginnings and do something comparably small. It's like Tim Schafer doing Broken Age after so many years of adventure gaming hiatus; at heart he may have loved them, but they weren't viable for the house he was running and the scale of the projects he had in mind. Well that and that a lot of those studios and their follow-ups who were responsible of the make-up of the classic CRPG kind of thing are based in locations that in terms of upkeep and living are fairly expensive. Games development on average is more expensive in the US anyways than in Europe, for instance, even Western Europe. But in California where studios such as Obsidian, inXile and Double Fine are from, by reports it's another step up on. Which is all contributing to things, as the more expensive a game becomes, the less likely it is to be made -- in particular for more specialized kind of games that aren't following the blockbuster model of copying like everything that's popular on the market at any point, i.e. the Ubisoft 3d real-time action open world kind of formula that is slowly creeping into everything or Bioware willing to sacrifice their expertise in tightly scripted interactive movies in an attempt to hit on their own Skyrim. There may have been a demand, but it took an entire decade after IWD 2 had shipped for somebody major to step up and put it to the test. This is not a criticism. But it's still a story of two sides: One of joy and one of wonder no less.

Before this goes into a semantics argument (which I think is pointless), we can likely all agree that until more recently, had somebody asked for something closely connected to games made by Black Isle, Interplay, New World Computing, Sir-Tech, Bioware (of old) or Troika, say, you couldn't have pointed them to a heck of a lot of games, in particular new ones. And that despite all these companies either having folded years ago or their successors being committed to different things to various degrees. Computer and video role-playing games, in particular initially, had super strong connections to pen&paper rule sets, in particular of the D&D kind. It's crazy to think how popular Wizardry despite all the stats was in Japan too. I happen to enjoy complex character systems being translated fully into a video game, but I can also recognize and appreciate that there are other flavors and different spins -- in particular now that the market sees a much more diverse range of games again. Of the more recent Obsidian games I enjoyed both New Vegas and Eternity, despite the former obviously being a very different kind of thing. Despite me liking complex character systems, combat rules and more cerebral games all fully translated from the P&P origins, I quite like this Looking Glass piece of awesome, by the way: http://web.archive.org/web/19980224020118/http://www.lglass.com/p_info/dark/manifesto.html But this was coming from a developer re-known for thinking (brilliantly) out of any kind of box, whereas nowadays it's mostly commercial reasons why somebody would class complex p&p trappings to be a hindrance rather than a burst in creativity. It is pretty clearly admitted as such though mostly. Mostly. I think Bioware had been pretty open about where they were going, and if it wasn't them, it was Electronic Arts stepping in, like announcing that Skyrim would have changed everything (by which it was pretty clear that this was about setting sales records first and foremost). The one mistake was perhaps announcing that Dragon Age would be their return-to-roots PC exclusively series.The initial reportedly about 2 millions of BG on PC wasn't enough, Mass Effect wasn't enough either -- now they're aiming for Skyrim as well. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as that doesn't pave the way for like the entirety of the market (which had happened now for the better of the last decade). There's got to be quality games for everyone on any platform. What personally bothers me though is when I'm playing an otherwise brilliant game that on occasion borderlines on being destroyed by the design-by-marketing-committee, excessive focus group test kind of culture which on occasion influences far too much the overall design. A fairly recent example would be one mission of Dishonored in particular, which is a whodunnit of sorts, and which after a couple of minutes just phones in whodidit via an NPC appearing out of nowhere -- this NPC clearly wasn't part of the original design as it defeats the entire purpose of the mission. http://www.pcgamer.com/dishonored-clues-hints/ Also "modern" features such as the much talked about quest compass has lead to lazy quest, journal and world design being forced upon everyone, and they can outright contradict the exploration, in particular in open world games. Rather than taking these missions out, changing the design's core or making and communicating the game's world as something that players cannot possibly get lost in in the first place, this seems plenty weird. But then people on evidence have always been easily impressed by huge numbers -- and as such games are being made as huge as then some, and then reverse designed to cater to those who get lost on their way from bed to bathroom (which is has nothing to do with intelligence -- more experience or a lack of sense in direction, which can be pretty bad and is something you're born with or aren't). That plain doesn't make sense. I recently read a making of article about a then popular R-Type kind of game developed in the 1980s for Commodore 64, and the company doing that hired play testers by going to a local arcade and interviewing those making the top of the high score tables. It was experts giving feedback, exclusively. Different times and different audiences. Different budgets too though.

Managing a ranger's AC isn't THAT much work. Plus I found it immensely useful in my playthrough (it's fast and unlike regular party members is only caught against the fastest enemies in the game, hence great for scouting and luring enemies into traps, be it some you set up yourself or just luring a camp of bandits to meet&greet the group of trolls next to theirs). :D I wasn't aware how differently people played these games until I recently saw someone declaring PoE borderline unplayable for missing party AI and scripts. Some people apparently used them regularly, whilst others (like me) micromanaged every single character all the time. I came to the latter approach in two ways: I'm a bit of a control freak and wouldn't trust an AI to cast the correct spells and position itself correctly (though in retrospect, I'd gladly had accepeted an intelligent AI for casters that would auto-buff the party rather than going through the click fests required every single time -- BG2 was a bit over the top in that regards). But also because I've grown up on micro-management characters from early party RPGs. But there's also an influence that in retrospective is easily overlooked. The IE games have become as much of a synonym for the last Golden Age in strictly PC RPGs that you can easily forgot about their initial roots. I think it's easy to miss that connection nowadays, but there's a reason why compared to early Ultima and similar, top down games that are very fiddly to play today, the Infinity Engine games are quite easy to pick up. Sure, the interface takes too much screen space, and the path finding even outside of combat can be a pain in the ass, and depending on the screen resolution of unmodded games, you won't see further than two meters left and right. Plus inventory management is missing some auto sorting of stuff, though in fairness, it's nowhere near as convulted as in some "modern" games such as Skyrim, which out of the box are made with controllers in mind even on their PC ports, thus come with huge font sizes and have you slog through your inventory and abilities one item at a time. Anyway the IE started out as a prototype for a real-time strategy game (Battleground Infinity). Here's Feargus Urquhart talking about how it clicked for him and the marketing at Interplay when they saw that kind of combat mechanics and they knew they had this freshyl aquired D&D license in their portfolio (that's how Baldur's Gate was born): www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Q0E6bQ_i0 (it's from minute 12 onwards). RTS games are a lot about second to second micromanagement, I think anybody who has played Warcraft 3 can testify to that. It's much more intense in that regard, as in particular early-game losing but a minor unit or two in multi-player can lose you a game. Pulling units out of combat to heal them, casting spells on specific units, it's all done in real-time (without actually pause) and positioning is also important as well. As it's this intense, you need controls that are very refined, naturally. And the basics have always been here too, I think really the template for RTS controls are the most intuitive you got in terms of PC gaming for mouse and keyboards (right next to WASD+mouse for first person action games plus point&click for adventure games). Which likely is one of the reasons why during the mid to late 1990s every publisher had a Command&Conquer or Warcraft clone cooking. All you need to do is pointing on a character (or draw a box around a group of characters), which makes them selected. And by the time BG arrived, those systems were intelligent enough to recognize the action you wanted them to perform by simply left-clicking (like moving somewhere or if the mouse was hovered over an NPC talking to him or if it was an enemy attacking him). Unlike Dune 2, which is a pain in the ass to play nowadays, you don't need to select "attack", "move to", or anything to get them perform their tasks. Point your fingers on your character of choice, add another left-click -- it doesn't get any more intuitive with a mouse to this day. That's why the current Starcraft game and similar at their core play and control exactly like Warcraft 3 -- and Warcraft 3 came out in 2002, the year Icewind Dale 2 was released, the last of the IE games. On top of the core still being intuitive to control on PCs despite their age, I think the IE games at their combat core have always had a lot in common with these kind of games. It was build into their line-age from the way the game initially was set-up (see the video above). Yet I can see and sympathize with anyone who played these games differently; despite micro-managing units being a huge part of any of those games, and having auto-functions for that taking a lot of this away. It doesn't appear likely that such AI scripts will be included until the expansions though, if posts on this forum are to be believed.

Yup, it's set up a particular way to stir you up. It's not meant to have a fair shake on anything. It's meant to illustrate a point in an overly polemic way -- as somebody enjoying a wider range of games I don't merely get a mocking of like all new games out of it, personally, at all. The reason it resonates is that there's some truth behind. For some advantage in technology and presentation has also come with a price tag, and that tag isn't merely about higher hardware requirements or higher development costs. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/7588-Voice-vs-Choice Personally This is acknowledged by developers working on these games as well, and was also a topic of talk during the promotion of PoE.

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.