Fenixp

Why should there be information on its content? It's not a rule. I guess Obsidian just wants to either start building hype closer to release or to give players as little info as possible and let them discover everything by themselves.

Eora. We don't know much about it yet tho.

In fact, the site was founded by former COO of Double Fine.

Might not be pretty mediocre is one of the vaguest statements on quality I've ever seen :-P

Yeah, he seems to be extremely good at taking what's happening on the screen and weaving it into a proper story. I'll definitely check out more of his videos.

The XCOM 2 vids by Beaglerush look amazing! The sequel seems to have taken a lot of cues from the Long War mod (and from cut features of the original I suppose since that's what Long War is built upon) + adding its own bits. Which is great.

Higher difficulty essentially just gives you less room for error and ... That's it, really. I found the beginning to be far too difficult (I didn't actually have trouble with dying too much, but every encounter being absolutely deadly felt tiring after a while) and then, at some point, the game suddenly got way too easy. I think Witcher 3 is a prime example of why is limited level scaling not always a bad thing.

Fair enough. What you should realize tho is that NWN was built, from the grounds up, as a platform for distribution of user content. Development of modding tools also costs money and is not particularly simple, especially when you can ignore a lot of internal tooling due to Unity's editors. Even with 3D graphics, it's highly unlikely Pillars would end up any more moddable than it is right now.

That's not much of a reason either, have you seen the amount of mods for IE games? The reason why Pillars of Eternity isn't moddable is because Unity 4 doesn't handle modding particularly well, and that would be an issue both in 3D and 2D environments.

No. No! Of course PoE doesn't contain scripted interaction because it needs to be cinematic, that statement makes no sense. Have you ever read a book? With illustrations? Has there been an action sequence? Does it mean that the book instantly needs to be turned into a movie? ... No? Yeah, didn't think so. And, more importantly, scripted interactions contain choices which have consequences, often wildly different. That would be a feature which would get kicked the moment you'd turn it into cinematics, because cinematics are a lot more expensive than written text. Writing 4 results to a situation as a text is relatively easy, creating a cinematic for all of them is damn difficult and time-consuming - I've never even seen Bioware or, hell, Telltale to pull that off properly. As for clarity, 2D graphics are inherently more clear than 3D graphics. Personally I find this with icons telling me what exactly is which character doing and no camera angles to obscure things infinitely clearer than this: The only way you could perceive combat in DA: O clearer than that in Pillars is because in one game you only control 4 party members and in the other one it's 6. Characters blend in with the background, you can't easily tell actions of individual party members (yes, they're written next to their portrait, but since everybody looks similar, it's impossible to properly distinct them in the heat of battle), and don't get me started on Darkspawn fights which make you battle a bunch of enemies who all look the same.

You, personally, are always better off just waiting until the finished product comes out. Every. Single. Time. For your person, there's no real benefit to kicstarting a project, to preordering a game, and Early Access titles are only ever worth it when you know for a fact that you'll get enough enjoyment for your money playing the game in the state it's in, not to pay for a promise. Kickstarter is neither a preorder nor is it a certainty - and I'm going to slap anyone who goes "Oh but you need to kickstart it you'll get the game cheape-" *SLAP* I believe that people approaching KS as a preorder service were precisely the reason for the big wave of disappointment after a lot of projects failed, and my first thought was along the lines of "Told you so." That being said, I like KS. I like the concept of it and I have enough disposable income to not miss 10-20 bucks I throw at a KS project. At any rate, I thank people like you for going out and saying "What are you doing, you're not even buying anything!" because people need to understand that.

I'm not. You might. But it's your predicament, I can't see why the game should limit this. You can also kill backer NPCs for quick cash, should that be removed too now that many builds depend on it? And, more importantly, I still don't understand what the big deal is I didn't sell NPC equipment and I rolled in credits after hitting act 2 anyway. If not having money is your thing in PRGs, well... I suppose Pillars is not the game for you

You will gain powerful equipment in exchange for powerful equipment and gimping some of your companions - it seems like a fair trade to me. Generally speaking, I don't like limiting player without a good reason. When I don't want to sell companion items, I just don't sell companion items, it doesn't take any additional effort from my side to not do something. But in case someone wants to build the companions in a different way than they're intially envisioned, restrictions on equipment swapping would be extremely irritating - it's only the case for a single piece of equipment Devil of Caroc and you'll already see people complaining about that.

Well even when you know for a fact you're right and the other person is wrong (and I'm naturally always right and the other person is wrong, I mean is there even any argument about that?) you can put up that information is such a way that it's not offensive. Now I'm not going to pretend that's what I always do, I'm not great at wrapping my argument in such a way that it doesn't look exceptionally arrogant (I'm being actively taught at my job to just present my arguments with as few bells and whistles as possible which makes communication more effective but also looks very arrogant), but the general guidelines one should abide by are: 1.) Attack the argument, not the person. When you make it clear that you respect the one making an argument as a person and only try to counter their arguments, it goes a long way in making discussion a lot calmer. Furthermore it leads to much more in-depth analysis of the argument itself, so it also serves to properly further the discussion. 2.) Use as little emotion as possible in your argumentation. The moment you're being sarcastic, write a lot of 'lol's or otherwise try to arrange your argument in such a way that it's interpreted as funny or witty, chances are the other side will feel like you're ridiculing them. Don't. 3.) If you're presenting an opinion, make sure it stays an opinion. The moment you start introducing factual, quantifiable statements into your opinion, it stops being just an opinion. Good news is: Most of the time you can completely avoid doing so and only stick to the opinionated side of the argument. 4.) Stick to the point. If you're discussing quality of encounters in Pillars of Eternity, stick to discussing quality of encounters in Pillars of Eternity and try not to derail the discussion into something entirely different. When you dislike encounters in Pillars of Eternity in such a discussion, trust me, statements like "Obsidian is ****" will not help your argument, they'll just start a new one. See? Exactly what I'm talking about. Just because there's a game which, in your opinion, did something better than another game doesn't make the other game low-effort. The important information out of that statement is that you believe IE games did spells better and why do you think IE games did spells better. Information that Pillars is low-effort will inevitably take the discussion away from spells in Pillars in comparison to Infinity Engine games and start discussion about whether or not Pillars is a low-effort game, as nicely showcased by Zenbane right over there. That you think Pillars is a low-effort game brings nothing to the discussion, doesn't help you further your point, distracts everybody from the original argument and just antagonizes fans of the game. For absolutely no good reason. Essentially: 3.) Amount of effort that's been put into systems in game development is very quantifiable and can't any longer be passed as an opinion. Unless you have source of data on how much effort has Obsidian put into developing spells it's best to not mention it at all. 4.) Amount of effort that's been put into spells in Pillars of Eternity is completely irrelevant to comparison of spells in Pillars of Eternity and of spells in Baldur's Gate. While there's a loose connection in that it might be cause of why you find spells lackluster, it's also a whole new discussion and has no place in comparing spells from IE games to spells in PoE.

Just because we're discussing art likes and dislikes doesn't mean people can't point out inconsistencies and inaccuracies in your argument and compare them to reality. I'm sorry, but if you don't want to read criticism of your opinions, you should not put them out there to be criticized. Edit: Or at least be careful about what you post - if you go on Pillars of Eternity subboards on Obsidian boards and start talking about how system conceived in Pillars by Obsidian is low-effort without having any actual data to back the statement up, what kind of reaction do you expect?

Thinking is great and all, and I'm sure Gfted is right and the system has largely been conceived a lot sooner than with beginning of development of Pillars of Eternity. But when it comes to actual implementation, thinking just doesn't cut it. You throw your thoughts on a paper and then they go trough repeated peer review, revisions and changes until it becomes more than just 'thoughts'. The moment you start realizing your thoughts it'll inevitably turn out that half of them were **** and the other half won't quite work as well as you'd think, the process is just not nearly as simple - I should know, I worked in software analysis for years.

We don't, I'm neither trolling nor attacking your personality - you just can't get away with "It's just my opinion" on every turn, it's an argumentative fallacy. Kind of relevant (links to youtube)

I do understand what he's referring to, but it's just not correct. In 3 years or so, Obsidian designed, built and balanced a brand new RPG system. While the system itself is heavily based on Dungeons and Dragons, it's not Dungeons and Dragons and draws inspiration from a lot of other sources as well and doing all of those things is actually a pretty huge deal of work. The system itself realistically only exists 3 years, and has been released to the 'wild' about a year ago. That's a lot less than 17 years. I'm not particularly happy about archangel979 downplaying Obsidian's work.

My opinion is that the world is flat. I'm also pretty sure that the topic is kind of ... Well, off-topic :-P

I thought Pillars was in development for 3 years.

Isn't that a good thing? Why would I want to be locked to only having a certain party composition?

The gods constructed by Engwithans were not just some ordinary inanimate objects infused with souls tho. It seemed to me like each and every god is a huge and complex machine, essentially powered by souls, so I don't think a lot of consumed souls necessarily equals power of a god. Engwithans were quite exceptional at the whole souls business, hell, they probably finished Dark Souls without dying once on their first try.

It has? Do you have a source on that information? The way I see it it's actually precisely the other way around. When 3D acceleration was introduced in late 90s, every game had to be 3D. This is not the case anymore and there seems to be an increasing number of 2D games - hell, even Valiant Hearts or Rayman Legends with Ubisoft funding. Classic 2D adventure games are also slowly gaining in popularity again with stuff like Primordia, Broken Age or Blackwell series. Given the fact that there are just more games in general, I don't think a statement "There are more popular 2D games than there's ever been" would be far off the mark, but I don't have any actual data to back it up. 3D is quite simply not a natural evolution/progression, there's absolutely no reason for it to be. With how increasingly unsustainable AAA development became over the last decade, I honestly believe that even big AAA publishers will start looking for ways to make their games more efficiently. Looking at those games and asking "Does this need to be 3D or would 2D be more suitable?" is one of the ways to bring development costs down from ridiculous to sustainable again. You can't talk about one without talking about the other, and I think they're pretty good proof about average customer not giving a damn whether a game is 2D or 3D. Of course, not all of them are shovelware, visual novels are hugely popular, just as hidden object games (yes, many hidden object games are shovelware, and then there's many which aren't. Remember, 90% of everything is ****.)

You literally said: "This game done properly could have and should have outsold BG games by a lot." If what you meant wasn't "IE games are better because they sell better", what did you mean? I just stopped playing BG1EE. It absolutely pales in comparison with Pillars of Eternity. Vast majority of that game is standing in place, auto-attacking. Conversations don't even give you an option to role-play 99% of the time. All maps contain one quest and one NPC which will talk to you, there's barely ever more than that. And I'm not criticizing the original BG for that, it's an ancient game, of course it's going to sport ancient design (altho Fallout was out at that time. Bioware, damnit.) Still, I sure would not want Pillars of Eternity downgraded to BG1 quality. And how is sales comparison between mainstream AAA title and an indie RPG an 'excuse'? That's a fact, it's pretty difficult to deny. Info I have managed to find in the meantime is leaning more towards a 1.500.000 figure.

a) Call of Duty sells a lot better than Baldur's Gate. Therefore, Call of Duty is strictly and objectively better game. Is that correct? There's a reason why argumentum ad populum is fallacious. b) Are you saying that an AAA mainstream RPG (Baldur's Gate) sold better and was a lot more popular than relatively small indie RPG (Pillars of Eternity)? Well... Yes. Yes, it did. It doesn't make it a better game, it just makes it a game which pioneered streamlining and simplification so it appeals to mainstream audience. Most of that audience moved on to other mainstream games and Pillars of Eternity is no longer an appealing concept to them. c) Pillars of Eternity outsold Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate, by quite a large margin, I have no idea where you got the information that it's the other way around. Not sure what sales figures were for the original Baldur's Gate back when it got released, but I'm pretty sure they were higher than those of PoE.