Fenixp

There's a massive difference between mechanical descriptors and in-game lore. It'd be like calling an 'Inventory' a 'Knapasnack' or renaming the 'Continue' button to a 'Pufflement'. The moment I see characters in game referring to fettles in conversation I'll stand corrected, but so far it just feels like an arbitrary name for a fairly standardized function (which is status effects, yes.) Note that I'm not at all complaining about dumps of completely alien terminology and lore otherwise. Wonder why that is.

To be fair, there's not a whole lot of space opera sci-fi shooters either, so I'm not exactly complaining. Not that I ever expected ME: Andromeda to return back to Bioware's roots.

They're actually all celled "Fettles" and no, I haven't noticed anything like that yet - but I've yet to get into the mechanical side of things a bit deeper so it might get worse. Or possibly better. Well 'Encounter/Combat' is called 'Crisis', but what it stands for is rather obvious, so that bit is just a little strange. It kinda feels like the game's really trying its best to make itself distinct in all the wrong ways, but they've not overdone it so eh. Well aside from the UI. The UI's really bad.

Played some of it. Writing's been nice so far, mostly to the point without using many unnecessary words, unlike some -other- isometric RPG that came out in 2015. UI designer has apparently been in a cave for the last 20 years, I could really do without all the unnecessary frames and other clutter that just take up space on the screen. Marking interactive objects is also not particularly elegant in its execution, albeit it is usable so that's fine. Here's an area the game should take some cues from a certain other isometric RPG from 2015. I know we're working with a set ruleset here, but since it's being ported to PC, some of the terminology could be changed to work within the environment. Why call buffs and debuffs fleffifafafans and flemeflifafans instead of just calling them buffs and debuffs? Combat's exceptional. Well, not really, combat's fairly standard fare - but if all arenas offer as many options as the first one outside of the prologue, including just talking to the monsters, I'm gonna be all over this game.

Now I totally want a cRPG with stealth system from Shadow Tactics

So Obsidian came to their senses. Excellent. And that's good, watching patrol routes and daily routines is a fun activity for a player who wants to sneak past undetected. That's good. Lunging several equipment sets in your inventory so that you can change it based on weather to maximize stealth is not fun in any way. Just as it's not particularly fun to have to rest-spam in the wilderness in order to get the night-time stealth bonus. Both of these things would be busy work, not engaging gameplay.

I'd just like to see vision cones added to enemies and potentially implementation of some sort of noise meter to make stealth more fun. And remove the requirement of remaining in stealth all the time to increase chances of detecting hidden stuff. Having things like time of day, equipment noise, visibility etc. would just make stealth a lot more annoying, not fun.

Well to be fair, I have no idea about ships in general and the ship in Deadfire, as presented, does look kinda bland. Wouldn't call it 'Ugly' per se, but I'd expect to see that parked somewhere in a dock with an NPC wanting to give me a quest, not as a base of operations I'll keep returning to.

Ships of any period weren't designed to be navigated using mouse in an isometric perspective. Or to house companions and ship upgrades visible from an isometric perspective. Judging by workflow of pretty much any experienced artist, looking up models of contemporary ships was the fist thing they've done, before proceeding to change and redesign it to fit the needs of an isometric party-based RPG. Gameplay > Historical accuracy.

I'd like to point out that these are two very different statements. All change is not for the worse, and Obsidian looking for ways to evolve the formula is not a bad thing.

Finished Steamworld Heist after about 14 hours of playtime. I'll put it this way - I got Humble Monthly for XCOM 2, but didn't play it all that much as I found I wasn't actually enjoying it all that much, which I assume comes down to the fact I played so much of the original with the Long War. I was just... Sick of the formula and XCOM 2 didn't do enough for me to fix it. But, along with the bundle came Steamworld Heist and I'm so damn happy it did. So, let's start off with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj8XRFjRng4 That should... Roughly put you on the right wavelength. It's charming, it's silly and most most importantly, it's a solid, well-designed turn-based strategy game, with soundtrack by Steam Powered Giraffe (there's even a whole bunch of proper songs, used sparingly and with care to not get annoying, along with ambient music. Yes, the band is totally directly in the game.). It's basically developers taking steampunk robots, XCOM tactical battles and Worms, putting them into a bag and stirring until Steamworld Heist came out on the other side and the polishing the hell out of it. The game takes character and weapon progression from games like XCOM, with all weapon classes and items behaving very differently while all being useful. It takes character progression, with individual characters getting XP, levelling up and unlocking skills - and yes, each out of 9 characters gets his own skill set with his own unique skills, stats and, by extension, slightly different role in combat. And then it adds in skill aspect of games like Worms or Scorched Earth. It plays like a turn-based strategy game (yes, sidescrolling one) with each character getting 2 actions per turn. If you use both for movement, you can't shoot, if you shoot straight away, turn ends - unless you have abilities changing this. There's also a strong focus on cover and having as much of your characters hidden behind it before ending turn. So yeah, XCOM. The skill aspect of the game works by player having to manually aim each shot - basically, think Worms. Grenades bounce, bullets ricochet from walls, sniper rifles work by showing you a laser trajectory of the shot you're about to take - and it all works amazingly. You're not at the mercy of RNG deciding you hitting or missing, everything is driven by your own eye and ability to gauge trajectory of the projectiles. And when you score a good hit across half a room, it just feels so damn great. Oh and you can shoot off hats from enemy bots and put them on. Because of course you can. Levels are procedurally generated with essential rooms being fixed, leading to nice replayability of individual missions. If your crew gets wiped on a mission, you lose half of your accumulated currency - but to get all the loot in each mission, you'll have to take quite a few risks. In other words, just as XCOM, a lot of this game revolves around risk and reward scenarios and improvising your way out of sticky situations. The game keeps itself fresh by shuffling around a bunch of mechanics for each of its 3 acts, which is also quite nice to see. There are some downsides of course - if you want to 100% everything, you'll have to grind quite a bit (you don't have to grind at all to finish the game tho). In spite of being relatively short, the game can get a bit samey towards the end. And the challenge ramps up quite significantly in the second act, but the first one is a bit on the easy side. And... That's it, really. So... Yah. Go play it. It's great.

I loved combat in Pillars of Eternity, enjoyed the hell out of it. Regardless, it felt like a chore ~70 hours down the line. If you feel like it's a chore already, it won't get better.

You get a different set of powers and some different lines of dialogue. That's it, really. Corvo's set of powers makes clean hands/ghost rather easy tho if you still want to do that. It also makes murderspree easier. ... Corvo's set of powers is kinda more powerful than Emily's.

What I'm not a huge fan of is that these targets get their own stories and missions, yet you can never go back and play them again. I'm still hoping that Square Enix eventually releases a pack of all of them, but it'll most likely just not happen. They're like humans in every way!

Not mutually exclusive. Not at all.

Nobody is, Tale. Nobody is. That's why we got rats, thinking they can't cause destruction on such a large scale. They can.

There was one of the most amazing side things in all the games tho. I mean the Stilton manor mission resolution. That was exceptionally cool. Shame there wasn't really more of that.

If you like fighting spellcasters, why not Chanter? Their phrases take time to build up so you don't get to cast spells all the time, but they're quite formidable fighters and spellcasters. And the songs themselves are fun to compose and find the combinations that work the best for you.

It's absolutely a thing, an increasing number of games seem to support it (and it still strikes me as weird when I can see a game supporting key rebinding and not controller rebinding as that's quite literally the same functionality). And a whole bunch of games do make use of buttons for toggling ability bars of sorts (like DA: I or Dragon's Dogma)

Because people kept complaining that companions in the original didn't have enough work put into them and you can't really have both a lot of companions and well fleshed out ones too.

That's my point, don't blame controller for developer's lack of skill.

Not much of a controller thing, considering Dragon's Dogma allowed for ... I think it was 11 active skills at a time? And then there are games that just make use of radial menu with quick access buttons.

To be fair, that's not really how mini-adventures worked - they functioned off the stronghold's 'turns' rather than the timer (yes, having the two time units is pretty bizarre by itself), and stronghold turns moved by player completing quests as opposed to by spending time idly. It's just a technicality, yes, but it essentially meant that doing side-stuff in the game was incentivized even further. Anyway, most of what you're saying regarding the adventures would be nice to see. However, it would also cost a considerable amount of development effort and if you'd give me a choice of whether I want adventures from Pillars of Eternity 1 to return or to just have my companions waiting around until I recall them, well, I'll choose the adventures every single time as even that's better than what most SP RPG games have, yet it should be relatively simple to implement. As for communicating with stronghold over distance being 'too much communication' - it's important to realize just what kind of game Pillars of Eternity is. If time management was of the essence, cutting this communication channel entirely would make sense. It's not tho, and all that stands between you and the keep management is either a button you can click or a bunch of irritating loading screens.

I quite liked the miniadventures after actual writing got associated with them in 3.0. It gave the rest of my party, even the headcanoned adventurers I created, an actual back story of things they were doing as opposed to infinitely hang out in the stronghold. The idea could be improved a bit, like some missions getting different results on what kind of party member does them, but all in all it was a nice bit of flavour giving you a feeling like something else than what you saw was actually happening in the world.