Fenixp

I have finished Titanfall 2 in like... 4 hours or so. The campaign was quite a blast actually. There are better FPS games on the market tho (DOOM, Wolfenstein: The New Order) so unless you have exhausted your options, get it for cheap. It is, however, definitely worth playing through, it keeps changing up its mechanics to remain interesting and there can never be enough fast-paced shooting. How!? I suppose I'm just blind. ... It does bring me back to my point of horrible UI tho :-P

Openly mocking select quotes from a frustrated author hardly constitutes "Unbiased news" in my book

I actually hoped it'd be hundreds of years in the future, in a somewhat more advanced Eora - not a total shift towards steampunk, but a beginning of the industrial revolution would be amazing. But it's not. And I'm mostly okay with it.

I also didn't find a sensible way of just matching myself against a friend - you can only form a party and go against other random people. Which is bizarre. Edit: Eh, might as well add some thoughts. I feel the game focuses far too much on heroes with ordinary units just being trash on the battlefield you can control - don't get me wrong, they can do a lot if correctly managed, but a single hero ability can wipe them out in legions when you're not paying attention for a second, but it does not work the other way around. And yet, in spite of that, I didn't find a way to customize my heroes like I could in skirmishes of Dawn of War 2. I'm not entirely sure what to think of all units getting an array of active and passive abilities while, at the same time, massively increasing scale of the battles. While I felt micromanagement in Dawn of War 2 was a lot of fun, I can't seem to quite enjoy it in 3. In addition to that, I felt like using abilities of large groups was a lot easier in DoW 1 than it is in DoW 3, but that may again just be my failing (while I'm at the topic of my failings, a lot of them stem from absolutely dreadful UI. It's busy and makes no efforts to properly emphasize important info - I spent like 10 minutes not knowing where the hell are resource amounts displayed) As for the battles themselves... Destructive battlefields, panicking units fleeing from the front line, combat barks and yells of panic while battling the enemy - I didn't really see any of that in DoW 3. The whole game kinda feels like an attempt to mix StarCraft 2 and League of Legends and penetrate competitive scene with it. Which... Isn't something I believe they can do. So now I'm just hoping for a decent campaign.

Yes, there are Steam games that don't need Steam running to also run. There's a subset of these games that don't need Steam installed on the system to run (they'll continue running when you uninstall Steam) Then there's a subset of these games that will work when you copy them over to a different machine that didn't have Steam installed (games that don't need any special installation steps or that verify such steps on their every launch) - and these are Steam games that I consider truly DRM-free. Of course, the moment patch comes out for said game, you need Steam installed to install that patch again, whereas you can just download it and back it up via GOG, or install it on an offline machine. There's a list over here. Even in spite of that, all I can find are games that don't need Steam actively running in the background to work, not games that don't need it installed or those I can take with me on a thumbstick and that'll work regardless. And naturally, none of this is officially supported by Steam and a DRM-free game can become DRMed without any notice (like Fallout 3 did in the day). All in all, not a particularly impressive feature all things considered :-P

I said you did? But the questions I was asking you in both of my previous posts are actually questions you have to start asking when designing a new system. (Notice how 2nd and 3rd DnD edition's spells and abilities often have their own rules and conditions they play by outside of just their effects) I can guarantee you that Obsidian went through the same process, albeit a longer one. And so far (to my knowledge), majority didn't come up with consistent answers that would always manage to apply in the same manner for all applications. Except for the system devised by Obsidian. Now they have to streamline stuff like attack speed and the way stacking works and the system has the potential to be absolutely amazing.

Got the [E]nding. Got through the credits sequence. Answered "Yes" to everything that came after it. I feel... Like I won't ever forget this game.

To an extent, yes. So how would you solve it? Your strength already influences physical damage. Do you also want to remove active skills from meele characters? And: Also yes, because I feel it leads to very interesting emergent combos in character creation that designers of the game never envisioned (just like all mechanical solutions to problems do.) The biggest issue I've always had with systems like DnD (and a similar trap you're slowly falling into yourself while envisioning your own system) is that designers try to think of all possible combos and create individual exceptions and conditions for what they believe would be good ways for players to play their game (a tendecy you have actually shown yourself by implying that low-Int mages are not a good thing). The thing with systematic solutions, like a +Damage stat encapsulated into some fluff to make sense in-universe, is that designers don't have to do any of that. They just give player a system and player can do whatever he wants with it, and then what players does with it will most likely work if it makes at least a bit of sense. PizzaSHARK is right about balance being poor - but I still adore the sentiment and wish Obsidian to continue in that direction. And ... Well, we already have tons of games with DnD-like systems in place, I really don't think we need another one. Eeeeeh... We already agreed to disagree on that :-P Anyway, "Let's not try new things" was never much of an argument for anything in my book.

"damage with weapons and the level of armor he would be able to wear." is one problem in and of itself, but let's gloss over that for now - you seem to be missing the implications. Might is +3% to damage. Always. Even with healing spells. It's always the statistic that influences the endurace shift you're going to cause and it always influences it in the same way (well... More or less, Obsidian still has some work to do for the abstraction to work 100%, but they're getting there.) Now... What about Paladin whose meele attacks may be semi-magical? Does the damage buff get split between Strength and Intelligence? What about other abilities of other characters? What about wizard spells that summon weapons? Is the weapon damage fixed? Which abilities and spells are considered intelligence-based, strength-based or combination thereof? Can I tell that at a glance without remembering descriptions for dozens of abilities? To make these work, you're going to have to come up with more "ifs" for your system. There's your advantage of clearly laid-out rules right at the base level of attributes. The more exceptions, limiters and modifiers you add, the more confusing is your system going to become down the line for any reasonably complex system.

Basically, your suggestion is becoming a "Strength will influence your damage unless you're a mage, then something else influences your damage, but your accuracy is actually influenced by Dexterity and Perception, perception is weaker tho. Oh and 1 point in these stats means a thing, unless they are higher than a <number>, in which case it means a different thing. There are also thresholds that you should know in advance because they unlock yet other things." And then a wise man will approach you and say: "1 point in Might will always increase your damage by 3%, 1 point in Perception will always increase your accuracy by 1 and 1 point in Dexterity will always increase your speed by 3%". One solution is clear and easy to understand. The other is unnecessarily contrived and will have me consulting manual for each use of it. They are both, however, abstractions disconnected from reality.

Looks more like recklessly overpowered hedge trimmer

Obviously, considering Obsidian doesn't have license to DnD. Tell that to the people who insist on the comparison tho.

No, I'm yet to try another decision at the end of the game.

As long as Pillars of Eternity isn't a carbon copy of Infinity Engine games, people won't stop arguing about why is that wrong. Obsidian brought that upon themselves by building their KS on IE legacy I suppose. At any rate, Josh Sawyer seems to listen to arguments, not to how many people are making them - which gives me hope.

I'd like to point out that this would be you advocating less roleplaying options, which I don't like in a roleplaying game (for obvious reasons)

Holy carp, NieR: Automata was insane. Finished it for the third time (and you really want to do that to see majority of what that game's narrative has to offer) and it was a blast - the game just kept bombarding me with surprises, both gameplay and narrative related. Well done, Yoko Taro and Platinum. Well done.

I have started NieR: Automata for the third time. It keeps me a little confused, yet intrigued.

It's effectively the first iteration of a more or less new system, PizzaSHARK. I agree with your points (to an extent, tank with dumped CON isn't particularly effective in my experience), but I want Obsidian to work with it and improve it (in many areas) as opposed to completely obliterating and remaking it into another DnD clone.

You mean RTS games?

I actually do, yes. Thank you for discussing in a respectful manner.

That comes from Pillars of Eternity being a lot more grounded setting in which a man quite simply can not become a juggernaught by the means of working out and where training and experience > inherent physical and psychological attributes, usually. I'm hard-pressed to see anything inherently wrong with that. Yes, and the only oft repeated example of why is that a bad idea was that you can't create a physically weak mage, which is factually incorrect even if you do interpret spiritual strength being directly dependent on physical strength (in other words, mages do not need Might to be effective.)

Give him a few months, majek, and the boards will go back to grumpy old men complaining about what they're playing, complaining about news and posting screenshots.

Kinda like in DnD you mean? Of course min-maxed builds are going to be the most efficient ones in any system under the sun, I'm not entirely sure what point are you trying to make here. In fact it's better in Pillars as all attributes are more or less important for all classes. And attributes in Pillars of Eternity matter. Unless the gap between them is big, what matters more is skill and experience. Like it should be.

Woah, that's a nice straw man you built there! Shame if something happened to it. Let me put it this way: When two fighters of the same level with the same equipment and skillset fight, the one with higher might, resolve and constitution is going to be statistically more likely to win, even if the difference isn't that big. That's all I need from roleplaying perspective as that's kinda how it works in life too, unless the difference in their attributes is too great (like a min-maxed vs weak character)