Fenixp

Yup, that's roleplaying. To quote you: Roleplaying is literally pretending to be something you are not.

I'm... Pretty sure it's up to Obsidian to decide whether their product has been a success or not ;-)

I absolutely see your point, and understand how it could feel aggravating. It's a videogame tho, and an RPG to boot. Main issue with these is that you'll either make a fight for which you need to play the game and actually game the systems or you make a fight which is too easy. There's hardly an easy way out of this - I kind of liked how the original Witcher handled this, as in it allowed you to research various monsters and prepare for them before you even encountered them, but even that system had its flaws.

We are comparing two estocs of superb quality here - quality of craftmanship is already represented in weapon stats. Yup, agree 100%. While there are some weapons with interesting modifiers, especially in soulbound weapons, most are kind of boring. There's a lot of unique weapons which have powerful effects, but most of them are neither particularly fun nor interesting. Oh it's way easier to read, purely thanks to contextual help. How to get out of this situation and keep my cred... NO, YOU'RE STUPID!

But it obviously is an estoc. Why should swinging one estoc cause more physical damage than swinging a different estoc? It's the unique attributes which should give a blade its uniqueness, not a bloody damage modifier. The design philosophy which keeps one steel sword from causing 500% more damage than another, precisely the same steel sword is by far one of my favourite design decisions in PoE.

Is it? What you don't seem to understand is that roleplaying goes two ways - you as a player may pick which role to play and game may use its mechanics to enforce a role on you. Different systems are designed to place different amount of importance on player choosing what to roleplay and on game mechanics limiting roleplaying. The reason why classes were dropped in Skyrim - and thank you for that, Bethesda - was that they did not actually limit roleplaying in any way, they were just meaningless text on your character sheet. If you need that, print a paper with "assassin" written on it and glue it to your screen. Ever since Morrowind, a single character could join (almost) every single guild and finish almost every single quest. Bethesda has always designed games in which player chose what kind of role does he wish to play in the game's world and didn't limit him in any way, so if you want, you may feel free to play a role of a herbalist who never even fights. The game doesn't tell you that this is your role - you do. I mean, what I just described is the definition of roleplaying. On the other hand, there are games in which you create your character and they then force you into a role, like Dragon Age Origins. In these games, however, you as a player also need to play a role - it's not a good roleplaying experience if your character constantly does things differently, is it? He's peaceful and reasonable here, murders everyone there, is nice to a character at one time, complete **** another time - that's not playing a role in spite of the game telling you what you can and cannot do. As to your original post, in Skyrim: Spellsword: I'm wearing a light armor and fast, one-handed weapons to be quick. I use offensive spells while I close in to my opponent and fast swings of my sabre while retreating from reach of slow enemy weapons. I'm a mercenary - I'll never join a guild, never stick to one place for too long, traveling the land and looking for worthwhile contracts. Battlemage: I'm a mage focused on arts of making my opponents not breathe any longer. I am a highly ranked member of Mage Guild with a cosy house in Windhelm. I usually stick to the area around Windhelm and Winterhold, but may travel further if Mage Guild requires me to. I carry a poisoned claymore and am clad in heavy armor, but I prefer my conjured creatures and destructive spells to take care of my opposition. Both of these I have tried and they were a lot of fun. I guess neither are roleplaying and are actually just my personal preference ;-) I personally don't really care if a game limits me or not - I'm going to roleplay anyway.

Last time I played Skyrim I went with a sort of peaceful assassin - only kill when you have to, only kill who you have to. I only accepted quests which asked me to target specific NPCs. I know of a lot more efficient ways of playing "my build", but I didn't. Why?

Adra Dragon is supposed to be one of the most powerful forces to exist in the game's explored universe. I too was kind of pissed when I encountered it for the first time by the massive difficulty spike - now in retrospect I realize that if the fight was too easy, it would kind of cheapen the game's lore, and that there's a reason why the fight is optional. It's far too easy to get accustomed to modern game design which hands you everything on a silver platter.

I wrote this up some time ago, with a goal of making Skyrim into a game I always wanted it to be, might help you. Unofficial patch would definitely be a worthwhile addition tho, and keep in mind I wrote it over a year ago so new and better mods doing the same might have emerged: So anyway, I love Elder Scrolls games. One of the most powerful moment of my gaming history was starting to play Morrowind, looking around and thinking "Holy ****, I can go absolutely everywhere!" - Then I have proceeded to play Morrowind for the entire following year, played it every single day when I was able to, at least for a while. When it comes to Skyrim, on the other hand... I didn't like it very much at the beginning. I wanted to properly mod it and get more out of the game, but as expansions were getting released, more and more mods required them and I gave up until I get my hands on them. So, this wednesday (or so) I actually got Legendary edition and finally started the modding spree (not really, I'm using 14 mods currently which is not that much by my TES standards) - it's now pretty much the most impressive RPG I have played in a long, long time. Aside from Skyrim and what it got right (rich and detailed world and loads of content would be strongest parts here), there was a fair bit of stuff I flatout wasn't satisfied with and a fair bit of stuff I liked, but felt could have been done better. Below follows a list of my complaints and how to fix them, for those who might be interested. All of these mods actually feel like they're part of Skyrim, not just some tacked-on content: I'm gonna be mentioning Skyrim Redone a lot. What can I say, it gets a lot of things right. It consists of modules, so I'll try to mention the relevant ones. Still, it's best to install all of them - they're very well thought-trough and interconnected. - Feeling of empowerment - one of my biggest complaints about Skyrim was the fact that it went out of its way to make you feel like a powerful warrior capable of overcoming the greatest obstacles right from the beginning. Not a thing of level-scaling, not really as you could still hit crazy difficult spots at time - but the design decision to give you this 'power' is still around, and... Well let's just say I prefer to start my RPGs as a whimp. So, my fix for that? Skyrim Redone - Combat Module + Enemy Scaling Module Basically, what the two of these do is turning you into a whimp from the getgo. No loger will you be able to run into a bandit camp and murder everyone within and you'll get a much greater feeling of progression as you'll be able to take on more and more powerful enemies as you level up. It's not one of the 'hardcore you'll break your teeth on everything' mods - the progression is actually reasonably fast and incredibly rewarding. Now add the combat module to the mix - it overhauls the combat and a lot of equipment in a way that makes fighting a lot faster and more deadly. It forces you to actually use tactics and environment to your advantage, and when you get jumped on by a character of roughly the same level as you are, you will most likely die, so caution is a good idea - it works the other way around as well tho. It's also important to learn to properly manage groups of enemies and similar. Combat suddenly feels a lot more involved because of that. - Boring perks - now, the addition of perks into Skyrim was a genious idea, allowing your character to profile more in what you want him/her to be. Thing is, the tree was a) unbalanced and b) rather boring, with a lot of passive increases that didn't really influence the gameplay. So, the fix? Skyrim Redone It was a plugin that was started to overhaul the skill tree, so that's what it does. It changes all the trees substantially, puts a lot more balance into them, and makes them a lot more fun. For instance, it merges pickpocket and lockpicking skills together (as lockpicking was rather boring) and adds a new Wayfarer skill, that allows you to learn lore of Skyrim's fauna and other inhabitants, survival skills if you have certain another mod installed (will mention it below) and, in the end, masquerade as a member of numerous Skyrim's factions, even usually hostile ones, to move freely amongst them (I imagine this should work wonders for asassins). That was the most drastic change, but there are heps more, equally as interesting and fun. You can build dwemer constructs! - No real feeling of harsh conditions - Basically, what bothered me a lot about the game was that everybody kept claiming how harsh and inhospitable Skyrim is, but you could swim in freezing water and then go jog butt-naked over its mountains, in a blizzard. And absolutely nothing would happen. Well, the fix? Frostfall - Hypothermia Camping Survival Yeah. Basically, the mod tracks your body temperature + wetness and you can freeze to death if you're not careful. It offers three variants - basically casual, normal and hardcore - and you can actually tweak individual options of the mod via an in-game menu, so if you don't like something, turn it off. The way I'm playing now is without fast-travel, with different types of clothing offering different amounts of protection from cold and rain (both can be turned on or off at will). What you're always going to get with the mod are ways to craft camping equipment (so you can make fire or shelter when you don't currently have access to some) and heat, wetness and weather tracking, all seamlessly included into the game's UI. Basically, it forces you to put a lot more consideration into conducting long journeys into mountains, ideally packing a tent, some firewood and good, protective equipment. This mod is also interjoined with Skyrim Redone, where SkyRe adds a new branch to its wayfarer tree, concerning survival and even adds spells that help raise your exposure protection. It just all feels like it was in Skyrim all along, and is brilliant. Right, those were my biggest bugbears with Skyrim. Now, for any in-game mod menu to work, you need to have SkyUI installed - but you should have that anyway as it improves the UI in every possible way. So, anyway, to my general mod recommendations: Realistic Needs and Diseases - you need to eat, drink and sleep. That's it. Skyrim community uncapper - is needed by SkyRE. Skyrim Script Extender - is needed by all the mods ever. Run for your lives and When vampires attack - makes NPCs less suicidal. Peasants won't try to fisticuff the dragons and will rather hide away, those who should fight according to lore stay and fight tho. Improved NPC clothing - hi-res - Well, that. Sounds of Skyrim - adds a lot of ambient sounds to the game, which in turn adds to immersion. Just... Wonderful and atmospheric. Realistic Lightening Overhaul - That. Makes only sources of light in dungeons actually emit light, so there's no 'fog' allowing you to see in pitch black, so ... be wary of that. You can actually turn that feature off tho. Warning - you're gonna need compatibility patches provided with Sounds of Skyrim for it to run properly. A Quality World Map - It makes the world map hi-res and adds roads to it, so you can actually plan properly. I have also turned off compass markers of undiscovered locations as I feel it make me look around much more, and I find more cool stuff. Otherwise I just follow the black icons on my compass and it's terrible. So anyway, there you go. My Skyrim is now ****ing awesome. I wrote all that on the offchance that someone had similar problems with Skyrim as I did - because this just about makes it a perfect game. I recommend installing as much as you want from that list via Nexus Mod Manager - does just about everything for you, and offers installation wizard for mods with more that a single flavour.

I don't think locking player anywhere would be a good solution. Giving him better reward for doing the dungeon in one go and lessening it every time player leaves could work rather nicely tho.

Gfted1: Eh, from what I have seen it still scales up from easier to more difficult encounters, forcing player into conserving his resources and only going all in when things get quite tough. Generally speaking tho, I'm pretty sure encounters in Pillars are just generally easier than if you could always use all your abilities. You have hit nail on the head tho - the biggest issue with per rest mechanics seems to be balance. Encounters in RPGs are hard enough to balance as it is, with all the potential tools player has at his disposal. Adding a sort of decreasing power curve to that and guessing where will player restore it is completely insane. Then again, many times in the past have experienced designers shocked me in how accurately were they able to predict what will player do at which point in their game.

I Roll 20: Keep in mind that a lot of complaints come down to it not being Infinity Engine combat as opposed to anything else. That being said, it's quite easy to find a universal tactic and then stick to it for the rest of the game, which will become boring after a while. White March expansion added some enemy types to mix things up a bit and most boss encounters are great, but for majority of the game, you need to be willing to experiment to enjoy it (because at their core the combat mechanics are great.)

Okay, the nature of how is the game designed is getting on my nerves. It all comes down to what I mentioned previously in the thread - there's an NPC who has a crucial component of a certain device and the only way to get this component is to kill him. If you persuade him to leave you alone, he leaves the area and there is no longer any way of obtaining this device. If this was any other RPG, I would have picked his pockets or found some creative way of disposing of him. At one point, rubble is blocking your way, and the only way to bypass it is to have high enough strength. I can think of tons of ways of removing that rubble, including explosives, hiring a mercenary etc., but the game gives you no such options. The whole thing encourages metagaming on a massive scale, and if you want to roleplay a character, you'd better make sure to look up which statchecks at what value are you going to go against in advance if you want that build to be viable.

It's not necessarily anti-choice, I mean choices which actually have consequences would be the same regardless. Problem is that you can't use a consistent array of skills to make those choices. What does that even mean? It's a post-apocalyptic settings with all social constructs collapsed, of course being nice and kind will weaken you. Well, good news would be that it is. Trying to be an extreme is difficult in the game in general - you either prove too weak to do what must be done, or too ruthless and unreliable to keep any allies.

Okay, Age of Decadence is one of the most bizarre RPGs I have ever played. It's incredibly compelling, yet broken on so many levels. The game has amazing combat mechanics - seriously, they're incredible, very polished and surprisingly clear. Also, every RPG needs a sandbox arena as a part of its tutorial, I got stuck there for two hours. The world and writing are amazing, I'm pretty much in a constant state of depression while playing the damn thing and the first thing I learned is that goody two shoes dies fast, so I cheat, rob and kill my way towards hopefully improving the larger picture. The first time I saw the Abyss sent shivers down my spine. The graphics are spartan but effective and all you need to survive is to use common sense. Mostly... ... Mostly because the devs clearly bit more than they could chew. Most of the issues with this game come down to the fact that it presents many of its quests in the interactive book format. This means two things: 1.) Player interactions are strictly limited to what writers thought of, 2.) Gameplay is not partitioned properly 1.) Good RPGs tend to give players a world with which they may interact creatively using the tools developers gave the player, potentially in ways devs never expected. Let's say a designer deems it appropriate to place a door somewhere in the game. Every single such door will then have the same set of interactions associated with it, with predictable outcome. Lockpicking skill will open the door quietly. Bashing the door open will aggro nearby enemies. Blowing it up will aggro everybody. Important thing is that these options are consistent, with predictable results. Additionally, no matter many how many skills there are in the game, to make those work, you just need to properly associate them with these objects. Bad design is when writers and scripters don't take all your options into account, but the worst thing that's gonna do is raise some eyebrows. AoD, on the other hand, only offers what writers could think of at any given moment. If you see a lone guard, sometimes you can attack him. Other times you can't. Sometimes you can impersonate a member of some group. Other times you can't. Hell, at times, the game doesn't even offer a choice to back out of a situation you could easily back out of, whereas in proper gameplay you could just walk out. Which brings me to... 2.) Due to the unpredictability of your actions and their results, you need to savescum. Due to the structure of quests, you can't even savescum and allocate your skills properly. I mean, if the game absolutely has to be structured this way (and I suppose that's because modelling the entirety of many interiors would take ages), at the very least allow us to save and open character sheet while in the dialogue mode. Ideally, you could also show us the threshold of those rolls so the most efficient strategy in case there are no viable options for our current build isn't "up a needed skill by one. Try again. Die. Up it by two. Try again. Die. Up it by three. Try again. Succeed" All in all tho, I enjoy the game quite a bit. I do believe devs sort of dug their own grave by giving player a lot more options than they could ever account for, both in amount of skills on offer and combinations of various player decisions. But oh well.

Ooh, I see, I get you now - I guess I got too stuck up on IE games being designed around resting, because I think developers realized how the system works. As for Pillars, it does a lot better job of communicating its intent to the player, which doesn't mean the limitations aren't technically nonexistent, but it does mean a lot more people will play it that way. Limiting player and how far should it be taken is a very difficult issue to tackle and I believe that as far as limitations go, the current system is fine - developers are constantly giving me a very clear indication of how do they want me to play their game and I understand that the game will be at its best when I respect this. I guess the issue comes from the fact that how developers want me to play the game is not really the most efficient way to play the game, it does need a mechanical reward for finishing a dungeon while returning to town as little as possible - make loot lower quality every time a player leaves perhaps? Eh, I'm sure this issue has been discussed back and forth so much around here that people are sick and tired of this discussion.

Well, what I'm trying to say is that resting system in IE games was completely inconsequential - if it got removed and your party automatically fully healed and restored all spells after every fight, it would have worked just as well. There weren't any actual mechanical implications of resting or passage of time, perhaps save for fatigue which you could easily dissmiss by essentially pressing a button. You did not have to worry about food, water or other camping supplies. While the mechanic was called resting in the game it could have been fully automated or renamed to "fixall" button and nobody would notice. With that in mind, I do not consider a game which doesn't actually have nearly any concepts of resting mechanically implemented to be balanced around resting as its balance doesn't need to account for it (or lack thereof) at all. All that makes resting "resting" in those games is their basis in Dungeons and Dragons ruleset (and I'd like to point out that most DMs I played with found ways to severely limit or discourage rest spamming) Pillars of Eternity makes a lot more sense, both mechanically and roleplaying-wise. Resting can't be automated as it has consequences. Resting can't be renamed as several concepts of fatigue are included in the game and are very consequential. You can't stay in a single dungeon for several weeks without the need to resupply. Pillars of Eternity actually is balanced around resting, because fundamental workings of its mechanics ensure it needs to be. Now I'm not saying the implementation of resting in Pillars of Eternity is perfect, there's a decent amount of issues with it, but it's a big step in the right direction.

Teioh_White: I think you got it the wrong way around, Pillars of Eternity is based and balanced around a rest-based system, IE games are strictly per encounter save for a few locations which disallow resting. There are no penalties for resting in IE games, well save for some random encounters, and nobody cares that you spend half a year in two rooms of a dungeon so those games don't really need to care about appropriately scaling encounters - designers can count on a party being at full strength at any single point. Pillars, on the other hand, has mechanics simulating battle fatigue (in form of endurance/health system + fatigue system + vancian casters) and encounters designed appropriately to count on parties not being to go all in all the time, along with systems designed to discourage player from rest spamming (upon which said player will start to moan about abusing the system being inconvenient).

We've actually got stats you know. All of my caster characters (Kana, Aloth and Durance) have rudimentary training in their respective ranged weapons, yet Sagani outperforms them all in total damage done. Closest to her is Kana, but he also uses meele weapons with higher DPS on regular basis. + add the utility of her animal companion. Fenixp(druid) - 1st to join, 64614 dmg done Aloth(Wizatd) - 2nd to join, 14586 dmg done Éder(fighter) - 3rd to join, 34535 dmg done Durance(cleric) - 4th to join, 6992 dmg done Kana(chanter) - 5th to join, 21873 dmg done Sagani(ranger) - 6th to join in Act II, 28933 dmg done Besides, you are complaining about the game being too balanced and now about it not being balanced, pick one.

Wonderful track, thank you for pointing it out. *sigh* Bring the soundtrack to Spotify, Obsidian, I beg you! Aaand I found px1_mus_combat_i_boss. Brilliant.

4ward: re-reading my previous comment, the way I phrased it was rather rude - I'm quite sorry for that, I was typing in hurry and this was not my intention. Anyway, to the non-topic at hand: You are correct, the old games were cited as inspiration, however inspiration does not imply a carbon copy. Never in my life have I played a game as close to IE games as Pillars of Eternity, so I woud say the whole inpiration thing worked out rather well. Still, inspiration by definition means an influence, that the creators will take the original work as a baseline and start building their own product from there, it does in no way imply that they will take the original work and create a copy of it - in fact I believe that is called plagiatorism. I uttered the whole "Go play BG instead" not to say that you clearly don't understand Pillars as this phrase seems to be widely used, what I meant was that there already is Baldur's Gate, it's excellent and we don't really need more of it as it's quite replayable. Personally, I find Pillars of Eternity to be significantly better than both BG games combined, the game is as if Obsidian was reading my mind while playing them and took notes as to what do I dislike, then fixed it in Pillars. Some people didn't have these issues with BG, and these people will clearly consider such changes for the worse - but, well, you already have your perfect game. All right, I believe I spoke my mind so I'll stop derailing now, I hope I have sufficiently elaborated on my rather dreadful previous post.

4ward: Yup, the biggest weakness of this game is people wanting it to be something it is not. This is not BG. It plays differently, you need to watch out for different things, tempo is different, tactics are different. Might be a shock but it is a different game. If all you want is more Baldur's Gate, go play BG instead - I for one vastly prefer the way combat is represented in Pillars to combat in IE games, in my opinion, turned based mechanics of aDnD don't translate all that well into a rtwp system.

4ward: If you need 2 supplies for one level of endless paths, you are either underlevelled or are quite simply playing badly. Remember, managing those resources is an integral part of the challenge.

When it comes to item balance, one of the things I really like about Pillars of Eternity is that it threw a lot of RPG logic that has always bugged me about this gnre out of the window. One of these things that I really came to appreciate while playing Witcher 3 was itemization. I hated how in Witcher 3 you could encounter a club which, upon hitting your head, would just tickle like a summer breeze - but behind the next corner was exactly the same club which would cause your head to implode after a gentle nudge. In Pillars, however... Let me put it this way: If I recall correctly, sword with the most powerful base stats is about 50% stronger than the one with least powerful ones, which sort of makes sense - it's sharper, more balanced etc. The end result is that master swordsman with old and rusty blade will regardless defeat a novice who wields the most expensive weapon out there. So, at the end of the day, success of using a weapon lies in the hands of the weilder, and while more powerful weapon will give you an edge, it won't save you from incompetence. At the end of the day, I'm not playing story-based RPGs for phat loot - if that's what you are after, you can still buy Diablo. I play these games for immersion, and details like these help immensely. That's not to say itemization in PoE is perfect - some more interesting effects would not go amiss, and I for one would welcome uniques to be a lot rarer than they are. But I'm so happy there are no +5 swords of justice which for some reason stab 1000x harder than any other sword, and if I see a single arbitrary "But you need to be level 100 to use this item!" I will go strangle somebody.

Skirge1: Turning off AI is given. Alternatively, instead of constantly hitting spacebar, you can set the game to autopause when: - Character kills a target so you can instantly choose a new target - Character finishes spell / ability so you can instantly start casting a new spell / ability - Character has low health / endurance so you can think about how to protect that character These autopauses will give you a chance to react to nearly all significant events you can possibly think of without having to constantly keep pausing the game.