cokane

I have some serious reservations about Deadfire but I'd highly recommend buy. I think if you liked the original that much, Deadfire is guaranteed to be entertaining for at least the first tens of hours. It may not be enough to hold your interest for a while playthrough, but I still think you'll get your money's worth. Perhaps, worst case, I'd say buy once the third DLC is out and maybe there's some total package edition slightly discounted. I also think it's important to support indy developers who are making games in the genres that are not the highest sellers. If you want to see more games like these.

Make every battle the same level of difficulty. In an open-world, potentially 100+ hour RPG? That is not a recipe for fun. Unfortunately it is the corner the game has backed itself into, due to the underlying mechanics.

The chief reason Deadfire's combat was easy, especially right at release, was because spells were not rebalanced to reflect their ability to be spammed. This is why one of the first changes in the game's patch history was a broad nerf of numerous abilities. And this nerf is why spells now lack a lot of the drama and why combat feels rather un-engaging, imo. But they had to be nerfed given the core ruleset. Think about the difference in Baldur's Gate when something simple like say a ghoul sucessfully gets off a hold person effect on one of your characters? Much more dramatic, a true hold person spell on several of your toons from an enemy cleric? Heck, even original Pillars had dramatic stuns and paralysis in the White March. Contrast that with paralyzed or stunned in Deadfire. A lot less dramatic.

For me the difference isn't in the writing but rather in the combat and management mechanics. There's just a lot less there to worry about. This results in several shortcomings. First is that because classes and abilities are much more similar, subsequent playthroughs are less interesting. Second, combat itself and especially any series of combats such as a dungeon or an untamed island are significantly less interesting. Cast all your spells/abilities, rest if you need to, rinse and repeat ad nauseam. This gets even worse on both the higher difficulties and later in the game. Combats becomes an absolute drag in these situations, which strips away all their drama. Powerful spells and abilities are less decisive and more just things you *have* to cast as part of slowly grinding away at a monster. Lastly, gear and gearing up is just less interesting. It's not the gear itself that's bad, it's the combat mechanics. Much like I just said about high level abilities, even seemingly awesome gear upgrades are often nothing more than incremental improvements. And also since classes play similarly, gear is less dynamic. As I've repeatedly said on these boards, I think moving away from a more limited spell system is largely to blame. Per encounter spells have to be nerfed if you can cast them all the time. Having all the classes expend a very similar resource pool is what adds to the game's homogeneity. Different resources and different ways of replenishing them is something the designers should have embraced, because that's what can make tactical/strategic style combat in an RPG interesting, and it's especially what gives it replay value.

This isn't quite true. Weapon proficiencies are also tied in to a few class abilities, especially on the fighter. That being said, the complaint definitely seems ridiculous to me. Level Eder up, gain new proficiencies. Complaining that Eder doesn't have the proficiencies you want at *level one*? Come on now.

I fail to see how it's "immersion breaking" at all that your party needs to rest AND heal its wounds after taking on several groups of dangerous enemies. It's certainly no more immersion breaking than the fact that you or the monsters can take multiple axe swings to their bodies before going down.

I'll never understand the criticism "more time spent around campfire than exploring/fighting." It's completely untrue from any player's experience. Camping in PoE or any of these games takes seconds.

Agreed IC. Or perhaps the easiest solution would be to just change the experience requirements for higher levels, as I think Tigranes suggested above. It's probably the easiest solution.

I'll also add that given the distribution of content and area levels, it makes more sense for any XP nerf mode to more or less keep levels 1-10 the same, and to instead spread out the leveling process of 11-20 (or perhaps even more precisely 14-20). This is doubly true given what we can assume about the future DLC.

The problem with this solution is in the early game, at least on PotD, is quite challenging with scarce means to overcome it. Especially if youre using a class or build that is weak in the early levels. Getting out of Port Maje is already something of a chore on PotD with no other added difficulty settings included, I cannot possibly imagine what it would be like if you're only able to get to level three or so before having to take on the tough fights. I think if any XP nerfing is going to be included, it probably has to be tied somewhat to player level, with say, diminishing returns starting at level 10 perhaps. Because even after Port Maje, much of the early PotD content can still include some challenging fights. This also means that I don't think some kind of player-calibrated option should be included. Instead, any kind of XP nerf is going to require some special balancing by the developers, simply because of the current layout of much of the early game depends on your characters' level. That is to say, this has to be a God's Challenge, and has to have a precise design. Otherwise it's going to be virtually unplayable for a variety of classes/builds. I have no problem restricting this kind of thing to PotD either, since those are overwhelmingly the players who are going to want this kind of inclusion, and thus Obsidian can design this challenge mode with precision.

I think this is a perfectly fine outcome. If you don't play at least semi-completionist, you don't hit max level. I fail to see what's wrong with this outcome. I feel like the players who aren't interested in doing every single quest will be satisfied with not being the highest possible level at game's end.

Yeah, there really needs to a be at least a god's challenge where the experience gain is severely nerfed, as Tigranes suggests above. It's amazing going back to the original Baldur's Gate, I did a semi-completionist playthrough. The only thing I really skipped was the EE companion quests. Did everything I could possibly do before Durlag's Tower. Hit max level midway thru that. So the only parts where I was max was the remainder of that dungeon and the final stretch to face Sarevok. Whereas a recent playthrough of the original PoE1, I was trying to maximize difficulty while being mostly completionist. So I did all of WM1 and then all of Twin Elms. And I hit max level at the start of WM2, with sooo much content left. This issue is worse in Deadfire and will only worsen with the DLC's. I think the best solution is an experience nerf as one of the god's challenges.

Again, what I'm pointing out isn't wrong, and it was something I *knew* I guess you could say, even if I wasn't 100%. It was rather obvious there was audio in the game that had more than one speaker and there'd be no earthly reason for those to be separate files. I dunno why you're being negative towards responses that point out the obvious challenge of implementing your feature request. I mean there's literally moments in the game of "God speaks" "Narrator speaks" "God continues". And yeah, I still don't understand this insistence that the devs should reply to you at all. This is a relatively obscure and, imo, not fundamentally important request, even for those who want it. It's not even worth slowing down the roll-out of the new god challenges/boons, imo.

I'm not sure this is such an easy thing to fix as the OP suggests. Considering a number of scenes involving the narrator include scenes with the gods and other voice actors and I'm not sure those are always separate sound files. So yeah, I don't think this is a request that should occupy Obsidian's time because it wouldn't be a such a simple fix nor is it something that's a popular request. Nor is it even something ruining the game of folks who want to see it.

Balancing things, tweaking systems, etc is always something that happens post-release on nearly every game. Most games don't change story and character elements after release! I don't know why you think this observation means Obsidian is focused on the combat versus the story.

One thing that's super accurate here is the contrarian nature of Deadfire's writing. This really became apparent doing a second playthrough. But the writers just seem over-eager to always go against type. One example of this is the abundance of monster type creatures who are actually intelligent and can be civilized. This kind of twist works well with restraint. For example, Viconia stands out in BG, especially to DnD fans, partly because she's the only classically evil being that you can recruit. But in Deadfire this kind of twist is used ad nauseam -- there's an ogre you can recruit, a xaurip, an imp, a vithrack you can reason with, a lagufaeth you can reason with and on and on. For one it kills the special nature that these twists would have had in a more restrained game. If there were only one or two non-kith crew members, that would make them special. Second, it also breaks much of the previous world building. If these "monsters" so frequently become civilized, why are there so many hostile, wild groups of them? Third, it's a cheap trick to make a quest, encounter or NPC interesting.

I don't think this is true. Outside of Port Maje, Deadfire is easier than its predecessor, even the original PoE's later areas. As well, PoE is always rewarding players for more efficient combat. Because of health decay and per rest abilities, the upper limit for maximum efficiency in the original game is extremely high. In Deadfire, once you're avoiding knockdowns in fights... that's literally it, you've hit the upper limit of the combat's difficulty.

Hmm... I get that this kind of argument sounds good on a superficial level. "Let's make a game that's suitable for everyone!" But I actually think this is really bad thinking. Games should actually be more modest in their goals. Because games that try to have an option for everyone often fail to deliver any of those options adequately. And I think that's a big part of the issue with Deadfire's design choices. For example, quests have so many solutions that they almost never seriously test a player's problem solving or reading comprehension (i.e. understanding of the world) in any deep way. There are so many class combos that most of them end up playing similarly because there's no other feasible way to balance them. While I don't think people are being productive when they call for empower to be removed at this stage from Deadfire, I do think people are right to complain that the width of new features in Deadfire has cost us players the experience of a deep RPG.

I think this is an unreasonable request. It's simply too ingrained into the design. Personally, I've found it useful, even necessary, on a number of challenging early fights on a recent PotD run. Yes, I know you could technically work around this, but there's not a lot of tools available for players in the early game, and empower lets builds that are not optimized for low levels get through that tough stretch. It's the only "per rest" resource in the game, meaning its removal would make resting/camping even more vestigial. I think it's fine to complain about features that are not working that well, but I think some players on here should be a little more realistic in their suggestions. If you want to actually be heard by Obsidian on this forum, you shouldn't contribute to the forum's noise ratio.

It's not a good system for this kind of RPG, IMO. It contributes to making the classes play too similarly. High-power abilities should be the most distinct things across the classes. That is, the abilities a player will use sparingly but which can have the greatest effect. That's how it should be in a party-based, tactical combat RPG. Sadly, I think empower was a compromise for dumping all the per rest abilities. And it's simply not an interesting replacement.

RPGCodex is decent, you just have to look past the juvenile edgelord attempts at humor. I understand not everybody wants to do that, and I don't understand that community's own attachment to that way of talking, especially when many of its members are in their 30s and 40s. It's super cringey. It's unfortunate, because in terms of actual RPG analysis, they do a fine job.

Thanks for posting. Agreed with a lot of it. Exploration was definitely the game's chief strength. This passage, on the combat system, really captured my thoughts succinctly: "But as it is now, long-term planning or temperance in ability use is neither required nor recommended, and once your Awesome stuff becomes your bread and butter, it stops being fun."

Original Pillars story and writing holds up imo pretty well to multiple playthroughs. The world building, indulgent descriptions, and lots of detail worked really well. I think the largest problem with the original story is that it relied too heavily on merely withholding information from the player. There are twists in the plot of the original game, but they all rely on keeping information from the player. There's no twists where the antagonist decided to change his plans because of what you did, for example. And the game relies on an enormous exposition dump that radically alters things once you learn who Iovara is. This is why a lot of players feel the story was "told" to them rather than "shown" or experienced. For most of the game, the key moving pieces of the narrative are outside of even the player's knowledge, much less ability to interact with. If you forgive this glaring flaw though, I think it's a story that holds up quite well, and does a lot of work with the possible choices you can make. As for Deadfire, I can't speak with utmost authority not seeing the end yet, but it definitely starts a little deep in the rabbit hole, in that it's probably difficult to grok for someone who hasn't played the original. It also relies strongly on withholding information, but much less than its predecessor.

Just because you believe it to be true doesn't make it factual. Specific or not, your evidence is colored by your opinions of it. This isn't an opinion though. If you have access to the same level of resources in every fight and fights are of varying difficulty... this isn't hard.

So you are of the mind that without meta resources to manage like in PoE1 you can't make a challenging game? Cause I don't agree. The resource management only added tedium to PoE1. Making challenging encounters comes more from creating better enemy abilities and behaviors. The Divinity: Original Sin games managed this pretty well. Unfortunately I think it looks like that's more work then Obsidian is going to invest in the game. That's judging by their habit of buffing things by a flat amount for PotD. It's undeniable that if you want variety to the difficulty level of combat encounters of Deadfire, you will create a large percentage of absurdly easy encounters. If you make 10 fights in one dungeon, and want one to be the hardest fight, a boss fight, that's the only one that's going to be truly difficult to the attentive player. What I'm saying is specific and backed up by the evidence in the game. "Making challenging encounters comes more from creating better enemy abilities and behaviors" is overly vague to the point of being meaningless. It's boilerplate advice. You may have found managing resources "tedious", but it's only by having a cross-combat layer of resources that the designers had freedom to make encounters of varying sizes and difficulties while still allowing those encounters to be meaningful experiences for the player. In Deadfire you can half-effort about 75% of the fights and you'll suffer no consequences (nor see benefits from giving full effort there). This is the chief reason the game feels so much easier, imo.