Fenixp

You don't even need to watch, just looking at the thumbnail image of that video, his arm would be cut off if that were a double-edged lightsabre :-P And that's the issue, isn't it? Lightsabres need to be short and easy to follow at all times to even begin to pretend that they work like a real weapon. The moment there's one end of the weapon which will burn your skin off by even touching you unexpectedly when parrying the weapon is pretty much useless. Darth Maul lost because he needed to concentrate on his own weapon not killing him along with the weapons of his opponents :-P

Here you go. You'll probably need to resize them for PoE's format as Nonek already mentioned.

The game is so bloody long. And most of the content is, frankly, kind of boring. Even exploration isn't particularly fun. Which is a shame as really loved all the previous Witcher games. Oh well. Not a PC port, the game has been simultaneously developed for PC and consoles.

To do similar experiments, you either need to create a game where loss is not necessarily an undesirable outcome (modern roguelites with overal progression triggering on character death) or change what does it mean to 'win' a game entirely. It would be interesting to see a reverse progression curve where you'd start at max level with all possible skills and abilities unlocked, and instead of leveling up and gaining party members slowly lose your friends and close ones, perhaps romance an NPC just to break up a bit later on account of you getting bat**** insane. So at the end of the game you'd be weak, alone and mostly just fighting yourself. To win would be to survive to see another day. ... ... Holy crap, we need to make a game about aging.

And there's why I always cut myself from all information about a product that I look forward to before getting into it, and allow as few influences as possible while playing trough it. After adopting this policy I have found that I just enjoy games, including many dumbed down AAA bull**** games ruining the industry (I loved the new Tomb Raider to bits and only later on found out that I was actually supposed to hate it. Whoops.) I guess being a moderator around here you don't really have that choice... Then again, I guess you're not the only mod :-P Whatever's wrong I hope it gets better! Damn meatshells, ruining all the fun.

6 rangers with familiars. I mean... Yes, just that. Enjoy your army.

You don't have to play Pillars of Eternity, Baldur's Gate won't go anywhere. In the meantime let's allow Obsidian to experiment instead of regressing to 17 years old design.

I have literally never heard anyone say they have "talent with gunpowder"

A very powerful wizard with a ton of talent for wizardy things, but without the mental capacity to fully comprehend effects of his actions or to get the most efficiency out of his powers. A cruel, impulsive and aggressive wizard wielding enough power to make people respect him would be a good fit. Or a simpleton who tries to use powerful magic for what he considers good, to various degrees of success. You can create a dumb barbarian and with the right build he'll probably work well enough. However, naturally, an intelligent warrior will be more effective at being a warrior, especially when he needs to quickly analyze situations featuring multiple adversaries at once, which is what the Barbarian class focuses on. I do believe you need a lot more mental capacity to be able to multitask and fight on numerous fronts than a fighter as fighter would focus more on muscle memory and reflexes to beat his foe (or just sheer endurance). I assume a dumb but powerful barbarian would be a lot more effective at dealing with smaller groups than his smart counterpart, but with more punch so to say. a) Go and ask in the character builds subforum about effective high resolve builds, I'm sure they already made plenty. b) I think you're making a mistake in thinking about stats as about "Combat stats". They're not combat stats, instead, they're basic physical and psychological makeup of your character, which form both his personality and from which he has derived his 'career' choices. Naturally, he is going to only be able to behave within this makeup - he is just not capable of making resolute and single-minded decisions without high resolve, as he is not able to intimidate people without enough raw power/talent backing him up.

You get Scotchmo quite early into the game, training him to use energy weapons could be a good idea to complement shotguns for soft targets (if you trust Scotchmo with delicate equipment that is)

I ****ing hate driving :-P

You should try Age of Decadence, Sedrefilos.

At this point I have automated such processes to an extent that these effects might as well not be there. Most of the time there's nothing restricting my movement so it's not like I have to care about my positioning or even think about using these spells, I just use them, the only annoyance is that I can't hotkey them. You're right that the gameplay is reactive, but the reactivity is so narrow that I never have to come up with creative solutions to situations which arose, I just do what I always do and carry on. The more of Baldur's Gate I play the more I dislike the fact that there's a counter to every affliction as it just becomes a case of having all counters memorized and then applying correct counter to the correct affliction as opposed to improvising and playing around the afflictions, which is something Pillars forces you to do quite a bit. As "luck" would have it, you encounter very few mages at early stages of the game, and at later stages there are about one or two per map. Since there's barely any need to use spells outside of mage encounters, having three magic missiles memorized at any given time gives me a spare per map. Sirens were a bit more of an issue, but when I encountered them, my archers already had good enough accuracy so they never really managed to cast a spell (aside from aforementioned charm) Well it's not like there's anything else I can reasonably use them against :-P When I encountered a mage in Pillars, he became priority target and I used a spell/ability to knock him out of the combat. Not much different from how I handle them in BG. Pillars, however, forced a lot more reactionary behavior and improvisation out of me precisely due to engagements and afflictions which I can't just make go away. Edit: Simply put, I find the combat in Baldur's Gate objectively worse than combat in Pillars of Eternity. It makes me think a lot less about how you approach situations you find yourself in, vast majority of my characters can do next to nothing but autoattack during combat, there's no planning or preparation needed and I actually do only rest in inns and do my best to explore an entire map without resting each time I enter one (I believe I didn't succeed and needed to return back to town once.) There's next to no resource management as most of the time I have plenty of everything I need to survive. I guess it would be different on higher difficulty (playing on Normal), but I can't see the game evolving past me having to return to town more often as without healing spells you quite simply can not carry on - there's just not enough options. Edit2: Read trough your edit. By responding I'd just repeat myself for the most part, so I won't - if there's anything in particular you wish me to respond to, feel free to point it out, I do believe I have said all I wanted to say. I don't want to take over the thread again, feel free to keep it with Zenbane :-P

Pretty much, yes. Pillars of Eternity has a tendency of presenting you with various situations and telling you to deal with them - you can't just remove afflictions to do so, you need to play around them. You can remove engagement, but it requires time and effort. When you decide to use a buff which protects you against an affliction, your priest gets occupied for a few precious seconds, and then you're put on a timer to kill creatures causing said afflictions because the priest buffs don't actually last all that long. All spells have different utility at various parts of combat, from those which are the most efficient to use before combat even starts, trough spells which are powerful, but slow burning all the way to spells which afflict injured characters the most. Pillars of Eternity forces you to react quite a bit - it's usually not just muscle memory of clicking a spell to counter this other spell and you need to even be aware of position of your opponents in relation to position of your characters as to prevent disengagement attacks from occuring, when the spellcaster is in front row engaged in combat, he can't just turn around and go cast whatever needs to be cast - first you need to free him of the engagement.

Click appropriate button -> remove effect Click magic missiles and prioritize the mage. Of course, you prioritize the mage anyway, so that's actually all tactical decisionmaking there is to it (it's a bit more interesting when two mages are around, then you have to tell both your mages to use magic missiles.) If "by significant tactical reaction" you mean "kill the dudes before they kill your dude", then yes, it does :-P That's actually what you have to do in Pillars of Eternity tho, in BG you just click a button and make it go away. Spells like Mirror Image require you to do what you would do anyway with a mage and cast magic missiles, because magic missiles are basically a dispell mage spell. You're right that I was in a huge tactically challenging situation when all of my charm persons were gone and my cleric was the one charmed. I have then had to tactically run around in circles while Benny Hill music was playing and wait until the affliction went away. Of course if only engagement system was present, that would change the situation quite a bit as most people don't want to be stuck in melee with my cleric. Alas, it's not, so mindlessly running around works perfectly. See, clicking a button is not a tactical decision as casting of spells removing afflictions usually takes very little time. Choosing the right spell to remove an affliction is not a tactical decision, it's just a matter of associating the right affliction with the right spell. Of course if you could not buff outside of combat, well that would add a whole bunch of tactical decisions as you'd have to commit to how do you wish to use your priest at any given point in time, but... You can. So you do that and then auto-attack. And occasionally click a button. You really make it seem like one would spend hours in pause mode, thinking of his next move in Baldur's Gate, where in fact pretty much all problematic situations can be removed by clicking a button and then the combat goes back to auto attacking. Pillars of Eternity quite simply doesn't allow you to do that, so you need to play around afflictions of your characters as opposed to just removing them.

So in Game of Thrones there is hope in spite of everything getting progressively worse and there being pretty much no tangible evidence of anything getting better any time soon (well such evidence is occasionally provided, just to be shattered into bits some time later). In Pillars of Eternity there's no hope in spite of your character actually achieving more and more victories and progressively better understanding what exactly is it that's causing all that's wrong with the world. The game actually has an ending. Which can be very good depending on what you do. The outro sequences show you that you have achieved quite a lot.

Pillars of Eternity has been designed in such a way that no single character can ever see all the content and have all options available. This is fully intentional and not a part of faulty design. You are not supposed to minmax a character to have as many dialogue options available as possible, nor is there an incentive to as you will never be penalized for not picking specialized dialogue options. While I understand that the system annoys completionists, the way dialogues work in Pillars of Eternity is by far my favorite way of handling things I have ever seen in RPGs, every single stat is used in conversations (albeit not all of them equally) and by picking when do you wish to use them and when you don't, you build reputations to help you make likeminded decisions devoid of stat checks in the future. Dialogue options with stat checks are very rarely more 'powerful' than the ones offered without stat checks, are often only give you more options as opposed to better options. What I'm saying is that you don't realistically need a character with all options in dialogues open, nor are you supposed to create one. Just design a character around a role and then play that role in the game.

Jagged Alliance 2 combined RT and TB systems seamlessly. Well... Sort of seamlessly. Wasteland 2. Fallout. There's actually quite a few of those.

I suggest a mode in which game world would react to how much money player has collected. Of course, all blacksmiths would go bankrupt after PC has sold him 3.000 halberds he'll never manage to resell. PC's pocket would become the basis of a country's economy as opposed to gold stockpile. All mints would get closed. Banks would borrow money from PC. Debt do PC would constantly rise until all countries on Eora would be deep in debt. Economy would collapse. Money would no longer have any meaning.

Are you suggesting that these RPGs are the mainstream now?

AndreaColombo: I wouldn't put much trust into bestselling list on GOG, it takes some ... Weird considerations into account.

I was trying to make an argument here while also carrying a conversation with my wife about Christmas presents for various family members I do not care about as to not get "Are you even listening to me?" It shows :-P Anyway, I mostly just felt that you were taking a little piece of my argument and exaggerated it far too out of proportion, i. e. taking "Developers can be trusted to do what's best for their game" and turning it into "Developers can do whatever" (not saying I have voiced this argument in the best way possible.) Still, I do understand your argument and sort of realize where are you going with it. My argument is that you worry for no good reason. Is there any precedent for Obsidian to make a dumbed-down game based on community feedback? All I can really see is them sticking their guns to mechanics which are not universally accepted such as engagement - they clearly have a vision for the game and try to stick to it, no matter what a big part of their community thinks about it. That's because Obsidian has been around for a very long time and know pretty damn well what they're doing, I for one would like to believe they are capable of identifying what still works with their original vision and deviates too far from it. Aside from that, you are offering a comparison to cassette player, which I believe is by a large part comparing something that can't really be compared. The big difference between videogame like Pillars and playing music is that your cassette player will never say "All right, stop. Now you need to resolve this issue in order for me to allow you to listen to the rest of these songs." Traditional media will never gate content from you behind skill checks, all you really need to do is to suffer trough things you dislike (and perhaps even get a taste for them.) What happens here isn't that combat would be entirely skippable - on the contrary, you still have to get trough it and perhaps acquire taste for it. However, even for players who aren't too capable at real time with pause combat, content they have paid for is not gated behind challenges they might not be able to get past. Anyway, you're wrong, I'm right, lol. Edit: Since we're not in a cultural vacuum, I'd also like to point out that it's kind of funny we're talking about not wanting a game which is supposed to be a spiritual successor of Infinity Games to be streamlined. Remember Infinity Engine games and other RPGs which existed before Baldur's Gate came out? Infinity Engine was a very successful attempt to streamline a genre which was, to that point, extremely niché (not that it wasn't after it, but Baldur's Gate was an attempt to bring this particular genre to larger audience.) Just thought that's kind of funny. Planescape Torment? I'm sorry, combat in that game sucked and was only present for the sake of being there.

Except target audience of Pillars of Eternity is audience of Infinity Engine games. And the issue with that is that Infinity Engine games ranged from strongly combat-focused to strongly story-focused. By allowing us to make combat easier, Obsidian is not inviting audience which has not been on their radar previously anyway. I do have a few friends who enjoy Planescape Torment a lot more than any other IE game, and it's certainly not for its combat. They'll welcome the change, and are most definitely part of the original target audience. Cool, so we already had a mode to skip story. Now we also have one to skip combat. Win-win. So, where is it that you complain about the option of making heads of all characters into huge balloons? Not everything and anything they'd do would be fine - forcing features which hugely change the game on players owning Steam version of the game would naturally not be fine. That's not what they do tho (well it sort of is at times, see immunities, I don't really care tho since I have the original installer and patches backed up from GOG), and what they did manage to do is to create an optional game mode. There's nothing they can do right now to take the game I enjoy away from me, and that's all I want. If they screw up the second game, it can be due to many factors, possibly including them reacting to influence they should not react to. But do you honestly believe that inviting more players to play their game is the difference between them screwing up the sequel or not? That this influence would not exist if they didn't include an easy mode?

First of all, I can't imagine that changing the game in such a way that combat is considerably easier is a particularly difficult task, whereas changing the game in such a way that you can skip all dialogue would be a lot more daunting task. Second, if Obsidian wanted to implement an optional Combat Time mode and optional Sexy Time mode, I mean it's their game and they would give us, the players, more stuff to do with the game. Why the hell not. Now, the only argument which would sort of make sense to me is that attracting wider audience could shift focus of the game for the future, but it's a bit of a slippery slope argument. At the end of the day, it's Obsidian who calls the shots and they're experienced enough to distinguish between arguments of people who quite simply dislike what they do and arguments of people who actually provide constructive criticism which will lead to improvement of the game. Besides, they damn well realize who is it that made the game possible and what kind of niché they filled on the market. They can't possibly compete with big AAA titles for popularity, so they'll have to stick to that niché whether they like it or not. And given Obsidian's positive reaction to PoE's sales and reception, I'm pretty sure they'll like sticking to that niché. Nope, Obsidian can't compete with AAA, so making the game as pretty as possible is not the way to go (altho it is quite pretty.) The path they decided to take was to make a game which appeals to a certain niché. Problem is that market for classic RPGs consists of more than only people who enjoy real time with pause combat, while most people liking classic RPGs seem to enjoy a good story. By making the combat semi-skippable they open the game to people who like classic RPGs with good story but do not enjoy the game's combat.

Pretty much what Sedrefilos said. There's also the small issue of not everybody enjoying the combat, so pretty much giving an option to skip all combat is a great addition. As for "You should rather read a book", even if we kicked all combat out of the game, it would provide a significantly different experience to reading a book. Don't forget, making story-based decisions and predicting outcomes is also a form of gameplay.