Fenixp

You mean "Some people agree with me, the others don't get it"? :-P I can pretty much guarantee you that everybody understands your point, it's not difficult to grasp. If you want a bit more balanced discussion, not ignoring points being raised which contradict what you're saying would be a good start. And yes, posting criticism of a game on a site which is filled with fanboys will generally mean a lot of people'll disagree with you, unless you raise a point which is widely criticized about the game. Since the game's class differentiation seems to be one of the things most people agree on being exceptional, well...

No, why should it bother me? The lore already mentions paladin orders and monk schools, if I want my character to belong to one of the factions the very rich lore provides, I will construct my character in such a way that it fits these. There's nothing stopping me from doing that. But if I want to do something untraditional, like a man who's been suffering his whole life and managed to find strength and equilibrium in suffering, thus gaining same set of talents as a monk but using methods very untraditional for a monk - I can do that too and there's nothing stopping me.

Which part of Pillars of Eternity lore states that all wizards come from a school? Which part of Pillars of Eternity lore states that wizards can't undergo training outside of that provided to them by a school?

All right, this argument is starting to slightly frustrate me, so I'm going to spell it out for you: - Barbarian - abilities to cause AoE damage with melee weapons. Great at dealing with crowds. - Cipher - regenerates 'mana' by attacking. It's a class which should be built as an offensive character and as a reward for this offensive, they'll receive more options in combat. - Fighter - Traditional tank, able to engage many targets in combat and take damage, but also capable of dishing out a decent amount of single-target damage - Paladin - Great tank and a support character who can help survivability of the party - Chanter - highly adjustable character who can use various combinations of chants for offense, defense and support, while he can also work as a ranged fighter, tank or offense. And then he can cast limited spells. - Wizard - very traditional wizard with daily amount of casts of crowd control and support spells, but his spells even give him the ability to be a frontline fighter if you build him well enough - Druid - The only character who's able to shapeshift with very individual abilities based on what he shapeshifts into. Also sports a huge array of offensive spells. - Ranger - massive ranged DPS and animal companion who, if built properly, can very nicely synergize with the ranger in taking down even the most powerful foes - Monk - Can be just about anything you want him to be with a wounds system, unique to him, which allows him to use extremely powerful abilities based on how much damage he takes - Rogue - highly mobile character, able to dash in and out of combat on a whim. Nightmare of squishy characters due to unique ability to cause massive amounts of damage to disabled targets in short timespan. And then there are weapon focus talents, which give your chracters lore-based reasoning to use a certain weapon class and makes using any other weapon class inefficient. With a character who relies on a weapon, not taking weapon focus is not efficient.

When I was taking a shortcut to a quest in Skellige and forced by 4x4 mustang to travel offroad, I ran across a small, desolate hut. When I decided to investigate, I found a letter with a small story and a treasure map inside. No map marker there - just a picture to lead me, and I wonder if the story will continue. So I got back on horseback and ran across a cave in which I thought I'll find the quest. So got in and all I did find was a bard who fell in love with a hag who I then proceeded to murder. That's why you randomly explore in Witcher 3.

Funnily enough, amazingly designed worlds are still created Witcher 3 is an example, but world design in Skyrim is absolutely stellar ... Once you disable the compass. The entire thing is filled with both conscious a unconscious markers thrown around the entire gameworld subtly leading you towards various points of interest, yet 90% of players won't get to see any of that as they follow the black markers towards closest dungeon/town. And yet, the most memorable moments for me was finding a ton of tiny locations which told little stories and were not even marked on the map at all. Skyrim's world design is genius - betrayed by the game's requirement for accessibility.

Oh I sort of do that by default, but questions marks are not necessarily an issue of mini map - they just sort of bug you on the big map.

How does it make sense from roleplaying perspective that a bunch of your characters are physically not capable of lifting a firearm? I absolutely "loved" the situations at the beginning of the original Baldur's Gate with base weapons where my Cleric's mace broke, but it was okay since her inventory was filled with swords so she at least had basic means of self-defense, right? ... Rrrrriiight.

Well Bethesda has -always- been just about the best when it comes to designing open worlds in the industry. Still, wanna know simple way to vastly improve Witcher 3 experience? Go to map -> Filters -> disable question marks. Never enable them again. Done. Suddenly, discovering random crap is something which happens while you're exploring as opposed to blindly following compass. Most question marks which are worth seeing are those you'll notice on a map anyway - caves, ruins, burned towns etc.

Clearing question marks is not all exploration in W3 has to offer tho - the game's strong suite is narrative, and indeed, completely random locations are dotted with quests. Not to mention that some of the question marks are really cool too, but they're definitely in the minority (instead of what they've done, I would have preferred questions marks to be a lot less numerous and contain small stories within - some do, but not nearly enough. And as I said, the game is mainly driven by its narrative.)

Given how incredibly similar this was to Episode 4, I hope Episode 8 will contain the following:

Well... It was pretty good. There was a LOT of Episode IV in there. And I don't mean inspirations, there literally were bits from episode IV. At least lighsabre duels are weighty again. And the villain is a wimp.

That's a very ... Specific bugbear to have. Yeah, it's not realistic, it's just gorgeous :-P But even as far as realism goes, I don't remember a game depicting forests this believably - trees of different kinds and sizes mixed together, thick, varied undergrowth - I suppose you might find the wind so jarring precisely because it's so close to reality.

You'll be very disappointed once you figure out Witcher 3 essentially ignores the first two games :-P If you want to know what Witcher 3 actually does follow, it's the books. You'll gain a lot more going into W3 reading the Witcher books than playing the games - altho doing both is probably the best option.

I'll be playing Witcher 3 that I rediscovered last week. Can't stop playing it. My personal life is suffering - I'm not even kidding. As for what gets released this month - not much really, there are never too many releases in December. This year has been so incredible for gaming tho that there's no way you have played all the awesome it's got to offer. There's PC release of GTA 5, there's Witcher 3, there's the stellar Alien: Isolation, there's Dragon Age: Inquisition everybody seems to have forgotten about, there's Fallout 4 that I have not played yet and believe it'll be worth picking up in about a year or so. If you're more into indies, Age of Decadence is absolutely worth picking up, Director's Cut of Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin got released. The new Shadow Warrior got spruced up considerably as well. Just look at any top 10 list of 2015 and pick just about whatever, it's almost guaranteed to be fantastic.

Yes, people on official discussion boards about a game will generally be biased towards liking that game. What I don't understand is how is this surprising. Yes, I personally believe Pillars of Eternity improves on vast majority of aspects of old Infinity Engine games. Do you want me to apologize for this or where exactly are you going with this line of argumentation? And I'd argue the game is so balanced that even this kind of crazy composition will work if you pull it off well enough. All classes are equals if built smart. Why you'd want to play the game in such a boring way I don't understand, but it's up to you - the game doesn't force you into anything. As far as I'm concerned, that's fantastic design. Look, I get it, some people need restrictions to have fun. I have more fun without restrictions. It really is as simple as that. I hated weapon restrictions when playing Infinity Engine games originally, I hate weapon restrictions in just about any game I run across them, I'm happy Pillars of Eternity dropped them. Am I running around discussion boards of games with weapon restrictions, demanding they switch to a system I personally prefer? No, I'm not, because I know it's important games cater to all audiences. If you're so bothered by lack of weapon restrictions and need a game to restrict you to have fun, there are many games out there which offer this.

PoE is a far better balanced game than Infinity Engine games. That's not even a subjective argument, it just is. Not saying it's perfect, but the difference is massive. That's up to you, isn't it? If you build all your characters in such a way that they're all effective with crossbows, you only have yourself to blame when all your characters use the same weapon. In Pillars of Eternity, it's up to you to roleplay your characters. And don't say that one ranged weapon is inherently more powerful than another one, because that's not the case - I found a mix of ranged weapons was generally more useful than everybody using the same one. That might have been the case after PoE got released, but after heavy patching and balancing, it's just not true. Here you have a full thread of people complaining about those systems. Where does PoE not respect the lore when a class is using various weapons? No class that I know of has any weapons dictated by its lore.

I might now keep spamming the topic with Witcher 3 screenshots. I have never seen a game portray nature so mindblowingly well - and it looks even better when in motion. Brilliant. I mean, downgrade, sorry.

In reality it's exactly the other way around. A lot of people have a tendency of seeing old Infinity Engine games with rose-tinted glasses, but the truth is, those games were insanely unbalanced. Even base classes played how they were intended were not all really viable - ranger was the king and a party without mage, cleric and a rogue had a very hard time getting trough the game. I believe it was combo of Cleric and Ranger? which essentially broke the game. Pillars of Eternity, on the other hand, offers a small selection of classes, but all of them are similarly viable. And pretty much any logical build you can think of will probably work fairly well. And then there's a ton of builds which will work well in spite of being insane - check out the character builds subforum to see all the weird combinations which can work very well. As for getting a sword which you'll get to use on your next playtrough... There's been quite a few weapons I found in Pillars that none of my party members was focusing on and therefore his performance with the weapon did not do it justice. There are builds emerging which essentially rely on a character using a single weapon. In spite of being able to use all weapons, it's almost never efficient to use different ones than those you have constructed your character around. And that's exactly why you can choose weapon focus. The weapon focus talents even describe what kind of backgrounds do they portray. Using weapons which you are not focused on will be a lot less efficient than using those you are focused on. What I do not understand is why would a man trained with swords be entirely unable to use a spear when he has no choice to the point where he'd rather use his bare fists than a weapon.

You can combine various classes, talents and equipment. You still get a lot of weapon specialization, you just get to choose which weapons do you specialize in instead of the game dictating this for you. Various combinations of statistics, talents and skills will work differently with various weapon classes. It's a system massively open to experimentation and given low amount of classes, the game would not benefit in any way from weapon restrictions - on the contrary, instead of playing 5 different kinds of rogues which play very differently you would only get to play, say, 2. The reason why it sort of worked in IE games is that they've had a ton of classes, but replayability within the individual classes was very low.

I am now torn between internet rage of "THAT'S NOT HOMEWORLD!" and excitement of "THAT'S A NEW TRADITIONAL RTS!"

Depends on your build, that's the point. Why do you keep ignoring that all classes have completely unique mechanics which will only ever work with those classes? I said it twice already and each time you have jumped straight back to "But weapons!" I get it, you want weapons restricted, but that's not necessarily an argument for a classless system for a game which already has classes differenciated.

So, I'm playing this downgraded POS again. Just look at it: See the bloody render distance? Are we back in 90s? Geez, I think I can see mere hundreds of miles ahead. And do you see the foliage? I've seen that bloody birch tree 10 hours ago. Repeated assets in 2015!? And see the corpse there in the back? It's wedged between the rocks in a way that no corpse would ever be. Rightdown insulting. And I don't even know what to say about this. So unrealistic. No detail. Geez. That architecture is so unrealistic. Seriously, does CDP take us for fools? Quality control like this has no place in 2015. Witcher 3 looks like 20 years old game.

Because every class has a unique mechanic or a set of mechanics which makes them special. Pillars of Eternity doesn't need restrictions on weapons and armor because classes are sufficiently varied even without these restrictions - a wizard in full plate plays very differently to a warrior in full plate. The reason why weapon restrictions are imposed on classes in other RPGs in the first place is so that these classes feel different. Since classes in Pillars are differenciated on a much lower level, they no longer need equipment restrictions. I mean, go ahead, create your own party consisting of a rogue, wizard, druid, monk, cipher and a chanter. Give them all the same equipment - full plate, pistols, two-handed swords. And tell me they all feel the same after playing them for some time.

Classes are well-defined in their playstyles, but they're not defined by their gear. I love that about classes in PoE - they have specific mechanics and talents tied to them, but they don't limit you otherwise so you can construct any insane combination you can come up with. Just go and take a look into the character builds subforum, it might change your mind entirely - it's incredible what kind of insane stuff are people able to come up with, and a lot of it is fun and works! I honestly don't see how exactly would the game benefit from equipment restrictions.