cokane

And I don't think a difficulty spike is going to address this. I think the decision to move spells and abilities to be entirely per encounter has doomed this aspect of the game. Added to this is the removal of long-term health, the focus purely on wounds and removal of limited camping supplies. These changes together have led to two big problems. The first is that bite-sized encounters no longer matter. They are just wasting the player's time. Any fight that does not threaten to knock one of my characters out is meaningless. Because these fights no longer drain meaningful resources from the player, they no longer have any long term effect. And for players who take any effort to study the game's systems, the overwhelming majority of encounters in the game are going to fall into this category. Think back to PoE1 with the temple below the first village, Gilded Vale. It was one of the first difficult areas many players would encounter, and yet no single fight in that temple is a maximum effort "boss fight". This kind of dungeon crawl cannot exist in Deadfire. Upping the difficulty isn't going to change this, it's actually only going to make even more of a chore. All it means is that I go from using almost none of my abilities in these kinds of fights to having to use more and more of them. So long as my characters aren't getting knocked out, I don't have to worry about optimizing my performance in the majority of fights. The second problem is that, even when the game throws a tough fight at you, requiring you to burn per rest items, empowers and suffer wounds, the cost of resting afterwards is so minimal that it's a no-brainer. Food is cheap. Camping is unlimited and risk free. The only kind of "agony" a player might feel in whether to rest or not rest is perhaps if they will burn nice inn bonuses or previous food bonuses. It's a shame because I greatly appreciate the other aspects of the game such as expanded factions, better companion interaction, better thieving options and on and on. But combat, which is a core focus of the game, feels like a repetitive grind for all but the absolutely hardest of fights.

To be honest, that's perfectly fair. Obsidian managed to excise one of the core strategic elements of CRPG's dating as far back as Pool of Radiance by my memory. A strategic element that made these kinds of games compelling both in a game-y way but also in an immersive way. Fans of the genre are right to be turned off by it. Like I said above, it's deeply unfortunate as much of the rest of game is deserving of the highest praise. I don't understand why they felt the need to redesign out the camping and attrition elements of the original, as they were one of the best tweaks on the old IE dungeon crawling experience. It's a failure as is, imo.

In a way though, they did have to redesign everything from scratch. Altering some of the core combat mechanics created a ripple effect of requisite changes, which means a lot of labor had to go into pretty much building a new combat system mostly from the ground up. It's unfortunate actually, because I think the new combat system offers significantly less depth than PoE1. It's doubly a shame because I think the gameplay outside of combat is greatly improved in the sequel but could have been even better if they had mostly stuck with PoE1's combat, injuries and resting rules. I have some more thoughts about this and will probably make a new topic on it, but suffice to say, almost all the combat encounters ask the player to play one way and only one way, and to do so over and over again. I think you will enjoy it more after they fix the difficulty issues, It is currently impossible to die with a party of five on POTD I'm skeptical this is the case. Because there are only an extremely scarce number of things the player has to manage between combats, most of the challenge of combat/dungeons/wilderness has to be centered on encounters that threaten to wipe the party. Gone is any attrition during dungeon crawls. There's no agony over whether to burn a camping supply or to push for one more fight. There's no agony about using a high level spell in a fight. I do not doubt that the game will get better, but I think it's impossible to match the strategic depth of the original with the major design changes.

In a way though, they did have to redesign everything from scratch. Altering some of the core combat mechanics created a ripple effect of requisite changes, which means a lot of labor had to go into pretty much building a new combat system mostly from the ground up. It's unfortunate actually, because I think the new combat system offers significantly less depth than PoE1. It's doubly a shame because I think the gameplay outside of combat is greatly improved in the sequel but could have been even better if they had mostly stuck with PoE1's combat, injuries and resting rules. I have some more thoughts about this and will probably make a new topic on it, but suffice to say, almost all the combat encounters ask the player to play one way and only one way, and to do so over and over again.

Ya, can't diagree with what you said here. And yeah, the combat engine in PoE1 shined the most precisely in those big boss fights where you're expected to fully prep. I'm not super far along in Deadfire, so I am super curious how it handles those kind of marquis fights.

Really easy "hack" to make the opening of PoE1 easy is to buy a merc at the inn, then bee-line to Durance and Kana. You can then take your full party to clear out the wilderness areas and tackle Raedric and the temple. The latter two parts are still somewhat challenging. I also disagree with the further above comment that PoE1 wasn't strategic because you could just pull out of the dungeon, rest and then come back. Yes... you could technically do that. But most players want to avoid that kind of tedium. And so I think most players still played the higher difficulties while strategizing around the limited camping equipment. I played several PotD playthroughs, and I didn't grind out dungeons by hoping back to town all the time. I cannot imagine many players did. I mean for one example, you could technically grind out almost the entire Cad Nua dungeon as soon as you had Brighthollow up. But, I think, most players instead chose to do the dungeon a little bit at a time, matching their levels to the monsters.

I'll play Vet the first time then probably every game after will be PoTD

Ya it's definitely easier. I'm playing on Veteran and haven't had to reload once. I've had a few fights where party members dropped, but nothing has ever felt threatening. I haven't even used an empower once and I'm almost never using potions or any other limited consumables because my party's basic skills seem to dominate every fight. And with casts per encounter, there's just no reason to hold back on those spells. About 14 hours in and at level 7, so no true boss fights yet. We'll see. I'll be curious to try PoTD on a second playthrough.

I think I get where you're coming from. I'm about the same amount in, and have definitely found it easy and lacking combat. But I don't think it's a bad thing. The one key difference is that there doesn't seem to be any early wilderness/dungeon areas that are loaded with essentially an army of enemies. If you take a zoomed out view of PoE1 early areas like Magran's Fork and Anslog's Compass, you essentially had areas that were loaded with tons of fights and you could just binge on a dozen or so straight combats. That doesn't really exist, at least in the early parts of PoE2. But I'd argue that the dialogue, questing and things like thief skills are all way more interesting in the sequel and so it makes sense for the game to focus a bit more on that.

oh...i thought there was monk and fighter and lots of others?...buggerHe is absolutely wrong. He is just salty that they nerfed the rogues sneak attack skill. Rogues have plenty of utility and are excellent when multiclassed due to the utility (through some cheap/good DoT and debuffs) and mobility they provide Check out their skills by going to the Pillars of eternity Reddit and seeing the ful lalbum of skills. Seriously, he was complaining all of yesterday in threads that weren’t even his own at one point. F off rogues are weaker in deadfire then POE1 easily u seem mad

Dunno what you're talking about, but I've almost always done playthroughs with Aloth using that soulbound rod, and the dominate goes off all the time. It can actually get quite annoying after awhile.

Definitely the biggest advantage the BG games had over Pillars was gear. Some folks touched on suppression, which is definitely part of it. Suppression existed in BG, but was pretty limited, I think only to armor class. In Pillars, it's every stat, and just really limited viable gear builds. But also Pillars suffers from having too many gear options for too many classes. Restrictions really helped the BG games. Obsidian almost seems to acknowledge this in White March, where the best gear in the game, soulbound, is all class restricted. As others have said, there's way too many items that do little more than increase your damage by 0.2% or some such, and along with suppression checking, gearing up becomes a bit of a chore of just seeing how you can maximize every little piece of gear among your party. BG series did a much finer job by giving you item drops that were often enormous upgrades but would be restricted to say only two or so members of a balanced party.

I didn't know the White March failed to make back its cost, thanks for pointing that out, if it is true. FWIW, I bought both expansions at their release, but actually did not feel hugely motivated to play them at the time, in large part because they seemed designed to be best enjoyed as part of a new playthrough. And that is how they're best enjoyed. I'm glad I've gone back and can second others who feel they are the best parts. Excellent dungeon designs, combat encounters, quests, writing and scripted interactions. Outside of the Defiance Bay section, they've been my favorite parts of subsequent PoE runs.

I can say the original benefited immensely from patches and from the tweaks added post White March. I sure hope they do the same here, if necessary, and I don't think that means they lacked vision or whatnot. It's not easy to plan for every contingency on such a big project as this. Game publishing isn't what it used to be, with constant internet access, publishers don't have to move a final product only when they're absolutely certain it's all polished. I also suspect it's not going to require as much tweaking as the original did. Building a world and set of game systems from the ground up is way harder than tweaking them.

Have to strongly disagree here as well. I didn't actually find the dialogue spoken by characters to be "flowery" but rather drenched in the game's lore. I'll agree that it's a bit inscrutable on your first playthrough, but it holds up well over multiple campaigns. Once you understand the world a bit, almost all of the dialogue is believable, which is a feat in of itself for most games. The dialogue often reveals both facts about the world and the character's attitude about them. IMO, the line by line writing is solid. Maybe it's not Hugo Award winning, but in the context of games, it's excellent. Where the writing failed was a bit more structural. The main story relied too heavily on withholding key information. I guess they thought that would be a carrot for the player. But on my first playthrough, I remember losing interest in unraveling the main plot.

I strongly disagree with the OP take on this. I think partial voice acting is just fine. The only objection I'd have to partial voicing is that a character shouldn't stop mid-dialogue if they began voiced. i.e. You have to click the "continue" button or enter a dialogue response before it switches to text only. I think people don't appreciate how many labor hours and thus how costly voicing a game is. And think about Pillars' reactivity, NPCs reacted to your race, your sex, your freaking background, your dispositions, your reputations... Fully voicing the game is going to mean making sacrifices elsewhere and one of the easiest things to sacrifice will be cutting down the number of lines to be voiced, thus killing alot of reactivity. Additionally, partial voicing leaves quests, tasks and other encounters open to being modified during patches, and I'd love for the developers to have the opportunity to improve not just the game systems, but the NPCs in patches if they need to. Suck it up and learn to read. Why else you playing these games if you don't want to do some reading?

Disagree that the game wasn't humorous. It's just that none of it was as over the top and obvious as what you had in BG2 or Divinity. People have already listed great examples, but man there was excellent dark humor from the Devil of Caroc and Durance, once you got in to the game's lore. And the things your characters shout during crits? Sagani's "Settle!" Lots of great little moments.

I could not disagree more with this assessment. First off, plenty of pre-combat buffing options already exist. Food. Potions. And priest trap spells. Regular traps too. Second, the game already has such an effortless stealth system, so that 90 percent of the fights permit you to position your guys perfectly before engagement. Not just positioning but you can literally open engagement with things like a volley of ranged shots. With all this, why does the player need more buffs? Adding such a thing would make the game ridiculously easy and actually narrow combat's strategy.

I want to offer a hearty "amen!" to much of what Tigranes has said in the thread. He's made a more eloquent case than I could have why stuff like Skyrim type level scaling would be terrible in PoE games. Just take some early encounters in PoE, such as having to hold off on Raedric or the temple below Defiance Bay. This may not be "story" in a narrow sense of the word, but the fact that the player has to play around these challenges by first tackling easier quests is good for creating an immersive play experience. That being said, the only options are not zero level scaling and one to one level scaling. Even as far back as Baldur's Gate 2, there was some monster scaling based on your level. A number of the early quest areas added more monsters if you did them at a higher level, for example the Firkraag quest. This is because the designers thought you might run through a bunch of the main plot before tackling every single little sidequest. This scaling doesn't level up the monsters, it just added more of them. Similarly, Pillars itself added a scaling option after the White March expansions. In my experience it works without breaking game immersion. Though I wouldn't say they're ideal options, just a workable middle ground. All this being said, folks are too stuck on the idea of over-leveling itself as being the key issue with why the second half of the game is easy. Frankly, I think an experienced player could easily beat PoE on PotD while mostly sticking to the main quest, say skipping Cad Nua dungeon entirely. You might have to camp more often, but I still think few fights would pose a thoughtful challenge. Frankly, once you hit about level 8, the difficulty really ramps down, especially if you're using 3 more or spellcasters. The problem is that the player has too many skills and buffs but with too few opportunities where they really need to use them all. The spells-per-fight really helps making a formula that burns down all but the bigger fights. In a recent playthrough I was really struck by Galvino's workshop in the White March and how the combat in there is fun, challenging, and unlike much of the rest of the game. One of the key reasons is that the rote tactics you use to stomp most mobs doesn't work as well there, and you have to invent new ones.

This post hits the nail on the head. Again, over-leveling should be something the players get rewarded for. Being overpowered for content half way thru or 3/4 thru isn't necessarily bad game design. What doesn't make a ton of sense is having max level skills/talents and high end items if there isn't something putting those things to the test. In the original PoE there wasn't much content that did this. As you state, clearly the Llengrath and Concelhaut sections were attempts at this. And while they were decent attempts, they could have been better, especially on the highest difficulty setting. My personal experience with the Llengrath area involved me not dying in a single fight on my first playthrough -- on PotD. And I'm not a great player. That seems like there is room to move the difficulty upwards. Moreover, if there's going to be an expansion and an increase on level caps, I do think the designers would do well to revisit and rebalance upwards any original final sequence from the core game. For example: I'm not saying Thaos has to be as hard as Llengrath, but it would have been nice if there was a little more to that final section other than just what is essentially a monster stat boosting option.

I'm going to focus on one little part here. Point me to where I said the *amount* of experience reward is what makes quests not boring? Experience works as a quest reward for three reasons. First the obvious, it's intuitive player character progression. Second, it's a universally good reward -- gear or reputation boosts aren't going to help every player. Experience is guaranteed to. Third, it allows designers to add a dynamic element to quests that have multiple solutions. For example, you fetch some powerful amulet but you can either keep it and thus get less experience points or return it and lose the gear but get more experience. Not saying they always do this, but it allows for these kinds of options. Striking experience from sidequests means never having this in the toolkit. I think it's uncontroversial that less varied quest rewards = boring. I'm struggling to understand why or how you extracted such an uncharitable reading from what I wrote, since I never said anything about experience amounts being relevant to boring/interesting. Lastly, I'll just note that while you clearly have a lot of passion and lots to say, you are not making an effort to have readable posts. I'll ask again, why make folks slog through prose like that if you actually want to participate in a discussion on the substance of these games?

I don't understand why you insist on dumping on a suggestion that expands the game's capacity to entertain. "Personally I found PoTD easy" directly contradicts your suggestion that they shouldn't make it harder. Again, no one is insisting that normal playthroughs should be harder. Nor -- afaik -- is anyone from here jumping on other suggestion threads to say "don't work on that." You're the only one here insisting that a facet of the game not be tweaked because you specifically do not care about it. FWIW -- per Steam stats, about 6% of people who beat the game also beat PotD. And that stat isn't even showing folks who have tried PotD or just not done it all the way through. When more than 1 out of 20 members of your core audience want a feature that was universally seen (even by you!) as a bit under-developed -- maybe it merits focus? Edit to add: Also per Steam stats, of all the hard, game ending achievements, PotD is tied for the most popular along with expert mode. Beats out by a wide margin ironman, playing solo, no knockouts, few rests, and pacifiist. Since expert mode isn't something that requires labor, yes, there is a constituency for tweaking PotD upwards just a bit!

No experience during side questing would make side questing boring. This is not a solution. Moreover, fixed experience rewards means that experience is already a "taxed" reward. Experience points produce diminishing returns as players level up because the gap between levels increases. Ironic that you're lecturing Obsidian on experience while missing this obvious fact. Moreover you're missing the central criticism of people talking about the game's difficulty. It's not so much over-leveling, as simply that the late game enemies are not that difficult. This can be solved by doing nothing to the player, rewards, or messing with the game systems. It simply involves tweaking the difficulty of the monsters a bit upwards. This is not a big ask. Also, with respect, your stylized prose makes for a tedious reading experience. Why insist on writing that way in a discussion forum? The point here is to communicate ideas clearly.

I agree with much of what you're saying here. I am reminded of the original Baldur's Gate and how few levels you actually achieved despite it being a long playthrough. BG really benefited from being very stingy with experience, especially in the early levels. This allowed players to learn the game's systems and monsters a bit before spending valuable class skills. One thing about PoE1 that was a bit of a missed opportunity was how quickly the game shot you up to level 3. Level 2 is almost entirely skipped! This is despite the fact that early game fights are still quite engaging. I realize that perhaps there's business decisions to design RPGs so players get some quick levels so they don't get bored. But I think they could take a risk here, especially on a sequel, and let players enjoy more low level content.

I have to strongly disagree here. The game is already a CRPG and a 2D throwback. That means its audience is destined to include a large percentage of difficulty-seeking gamers. I don't think it's right to insist that the developers focus on your personal criteria without taking this larger context about the community into account. Moreover, there are plenty of options, which no one has complained about afaik, for having easy and very forgiving playthroughs. There's nothing wrong with calling for an included, team-designed *maximum* difficulty that is harder than it was in the original. Importantly, a specific problem being complained about is that the second half of PoE1 is the specific complaint here. For just one example: Nothing after Gilded Vale, in my experience, feels as difficult as the Raedric fight feels if you do it before Defiance Bay. That's two-thirds of the game!