Hassat Hunter

It's in the Steam topselling list. That, by itself, is concerning... for ALL of us.

I did read it, including stuff like "the expansion could answer plotholes left in the maingame" or "tying up the loose ends"... I also have no objections for the expansion adding to the main game. What's bad about more worth to your re-play with an expansion. Isn't there only good to that?

I rather have to object, "rip out stuff for DLC style"... I much rather have a full story in the main game, then "to be continued in the x-pack" pre-buildin.

The "sollutions" in the last 2 posts seem to me a bit, soft? Like making the game very very easy, cause you can easily overcome anything with anyone? I wouldn't want that. On the opposite, I wouldn't want my "charm opponent" spell only be actually that what the spell is supposed to do on a critical hit (what defines critical in PoE anway? Still 20 in a 1-20 roll?) All in all, it seems the sollutions offered are worse than the 'problem'... "medicine worse than the disease"

Domination/charm could be far more lethal than outright dead... and actually did the same if on the PC character (in BG1 atleast... I recall a siren insta-ending my game right there).

Well, an expert in exploring ruins, caves and the like would be called the "Playable Character" and his/her party . I much rather have the spot door and read strange script be 2 skills than 1 (I'm just a skillnut like that). As for suggested skills? Ehhhm...

Meh, it was okayish. Way more fun than actual sex-scenes from Witcher II or Mass Effect... that really was just... waste of time.

Alice: Madness returns. Camera sucks, control sucks, auto-save system sucks (it places you back on dying location rather than where you died, so if you ever fall, it automatically means re-doing a lot of stuff... what?). Yeah, I'm sure glad I got it on sale so it's not that much wasted money...

I got that with the dungeon... 15 still sounds a bit too much to make a proper balance/feel/storyline...

Since when should skills and powers be 100% useful instead of situational. There's one of the main dumbing down things of modern games I hate... that apparently 'situational' constitutes useless, and thus should be eliminated. Result, well, we know the results

Yup... DS1's MP-map is amazing... had some good times playing MP before shut down / cheater overrun it all.

@ Wombat; It can't be that we dislike buggier games at release due to 'free' beta-testing rather than professional and just earlier than ready releases? It can't be we dislike raising prices for less quality/gametime? It can't be we dislike the DLC nickle and diming, season passes, on-disk DLC etc. etc. No, it can't be any of that, it's because it's not RPG... well, you would be wrong. The more people happily let themselves be exploited, the more we will see developers aim for that, as DLC and micro-transactions have already definitely proven.

The underlying code of ANYTHING is a "disaster"... that's what timelimits and just having to make stuff work does. Obviously anyone coming after it, having no such deadlines or limitations can look at it freely and make that observation then. But what else is there to do... make a 10-year development just to 'tidy up code' no one ever sees anyway most probably?

@ Caerdon; I think the answer to 'why do we care'... is 'because those things *MAKE* the game fun. The game being fun is the goal. Good combat etc. are a goal towards that. Difficulty should be a part of combat to make it fun in the end. It's not an or/or. It's the means to achieve said fun. Aaanyway, I don't think 'hard hitting' is that good. DA:O had that sometimes, where on nightmare, enemies would just beat 50% of your HPs away. That's... not difficulty done right, just really arbitrarily making you keep your HP up since all enemies hit like freaking brickhouses. It made you do cheap 'walk away, shoot, walk away shoot' cheesing rather than being fun or difficult. So IMO a big no-no. The best thing is variety to stop what's mentioned here as stale gameplay. Not one tactic all over, not *this* tactic or *that* tactic, but a variety of all of them. And excluding one out of on purpse, obviously I cannot agree with that, lowering the variety of possible encounters achieved, exactly to lower the staleness of doing the same stuff over and over.

This... From a respectable company to go EA+... it's a sad day.

Some trial-and-error can be fun, as long as it's optional. No need to have only one or the other, if you can have a nice mix...

Ehm, tile sets? That would be a waste of a 15-layer dungeon, if it's tiled AND combat-only. Actually, that's my fear, it's a complete and utter waste of time. Diablo should stay in Diablo, not be part of Baldur's Gate. Can't say I've seen it before in UNITY. Must be new for 4. Even so, it only seems to talk about fixed real-time lightning sources, not variable like the day-night transition PoE will have. Just cause it's 2D doesn't mean it's automatically 'cheap' or 'inferior' to 3D games. Or, you know, less expensive. Most "animating" in modern games is rigging. A lot of hit-stuff is dealt with with physics. I'm not sure how many animations a modern 3D game even has. But PoE will definitely be needing them. It's not because it's 2D and isometric walking takes less animation time. Hit/miss/flank will require animations, while 3D games can use ragdolls with impact (if gunfire gameplay), etc. etc. Because, it is. 15 year ago you didn't need to make normal maps, bump maps, 3D layers, real-time lightning, 3D setpieces that realistically move with the wind, higher resolution backgrounds, widescreen and 4:3 HUDs, and who knows what else. Yup, BioWare made IE. But now Obsidian needs to do somewhat the same for PoE. That it has an Unity base doesn't necessarily make it easier or cheaper. Maybe a good question for the Devs would be how much stuff couldn't be done now that was wanted, similar to the IWD(2) story from Josh using IE. I'm pretty sure it works for installed, rather than actively in use. Re-installing constantly would be a big hassle to save just some money, but is possible. Maybe in the modern streaming world it's changed to X at the same time, but I doubt that very much myself. Not in the least since it would cost corperations a lot of money And I am disagreeing, saying gamemaking is far more demanding now than 15 years ago. Mostly due to raised expectations of graphics. Making an UE1 level is much faster (and thus cheaper) than making an UE4 level. There's still much progress made to make it easier and more efficient to do various things, but all the required additions for graphical fluff don't make up for that. Similarly, making an PoE map would be far more timeconsuming, "harder" and thus more expansive than a BG2 map. Simply because it needs to be bigger, more detailed, have all kinds of special layers and particle effects, all which a BG2 map could do without. A point, which I am trying to prove through various means, that is false.

I really didn't follow the entire conversation, but for lockpicking, if you got to an area "too high-leveled for you" and the chest is locked, it's simply locked. Much rather have every area be flat-generated, then having levelscaling locks and stuff, the bane of modern RPG's. Area's should be X strength, and that's it... not [Your power] strength, in any skillcheck or otherwise.

No Kangaxx? But... those are memorable fights

Yup, Fatback is a DotA2 player alright... There's a distinct difference between balancing PvP and PvE. For starters, the counters will be alot less useful since by default an AI will use them less useful than a player. So a purely PvP based setting will be too easy for PvE. That's why RTS against AI are very different than PvP for example. And thus in RPG's (PvE) instead of just using stuff like that which would make sense if players use it, are making it up from the very wrong outset from the start. Something which should be avoided if you want the player to actually an interesting and slightly challenging experience.

The anime-look on pretty much all of them scared me away this week. :/

Enable vsync, and it should be gone...

No, it does not. Unity doesn't feature real-time lightning, the devs had to add their own tricks to the bag to make the engine do so, and work on pre-rendered generated backgrounds and 3D objects with an evolving day-night time progression lightning system. You're making it sound like it's a magic button press, it's not. It took quite some time to implement and work out. Sure, you're doing out of ignorance, but it's still majorly downplaying OE's part in making this game working as it is. Ehm, no. Again, you want to somehow make it seem like this game can be made by 10 year olds and the quality is the same. It's very insulting, if I may say so. Obsidian didn't make infinity either, it was a BioWare engine. Infinity was pre-made for drawn backgrounds and to be used for RPG purposes. UNITY? Not so much. So a lot of work was to made to make it act like infinity in the first place, something you would get pre-given with Infinity. Yet you make it seem you need to do less work with UNITY for the same result than Infinity. Which is boggling me, cause even common sense could tell you using the engine used previously makes it easier to make an "infinity-like game" than using a brand new generic engine not specifically suited towards RPG's for years. But apparently, it's not :/ Basically what you're saying is "Deus Ex was a easy to make. They used Unreal. So everything they needed was pre-delivered by Epic, nothing they needed to do to make it work entirely different than Unreal"... And you couldn't be more wrong. I'm pretty sure that's almost what I said. Except the infinite, since that's BS. You buy a license PER PC. Sure, you can uninstall it from one PC and onto another, but there's an absolute limit on the amount of PC's it can be installed at the same time. They check it, and they will fine people for violating that. It's not they can install it everywhere, and just use it on X PC's simulataniously, that's not how licensing works. Installed, not used. True. Manpower (wages) are the largest part of it. Obviously. If the software is the largest part of it, well, that would be pretty stupid. Still doesn't mean software (and hardware, and facilities) cost money. Outsourcing costs money. There are a LOT of things that cost money, a slice of that 4M. You were claiming that they need less without a license or "modern technology", I just wonder if that's the case. Infinity was an in-house Interplay engine, this time, there are licensing costs. Again, outsourcing costs money. The licenses for art-tools cost money. It's not unlikely overall that would be more than in the past with Infity games, especially keeping inflation in mind. Yes. But that price will probably raise near the end when QA gets involved (although probably the x per month rather than full for them). So say around... 25.000. People vowed that not paying WoTC would save money. It really all depends now does it, on how much that license costs. Does it more than 25,000? The licensing also was over several different games. Did they just bought it once and got an alloted years (like EA and Star Wars currently), or did they pay a license per game? Unless someone knows all these details, we can hardly tell if they save money not using the license this time, or if it was just a drop in the 4million buck, as much waved away as you guys now try to do with UNITY licenses...

That's... not how real-time lightning is done. Most obviously, there's the real-time thing. No one "calculation, done"... but "calculation, calculation, calculation, calculation"... probably much more effective than that (since recalculating everything constantly is a major resource hog), since *it doesn't work the same way.* It's like taking a picture of a sunset, and saying 'done'... that's not the same as making an actual sunset behave properly inside a game engine during night-time transition. From what you're talking I think you mean a LIGHTMAP... not real-time lightning. Again; Not the same. May not be so. A lot in GTA V and modern games is done with PhysX. They might do the same here... but overall, you still need somewhat a same sample of animations (walking, running, hit animations, miss animations, spell animations, etc. etc.) In this system you can't let physics and a ragdoll work out your work for you. Unreal Engine 4 isn't doing anything new. It's only adding to UE3. Why does it take years then? Aren't they only adding to the old anyway? Not even taking into account that UNITY and INFINITY are so wildly different, they might as well are re-inventing the wheel. They're all remaking it from scratch, not just adding more fluff to the old engine... Then, as far as you know, you're wrong. That's not how professional commercial licensing works. "They had to have it"... again, what? You *must* know licensing has to be paid annually. That's 2 year of licenses for PoE. Which would thus be part of the cost of Project Eternity as a whole. That's... not what next-gen is. I know most people prefer to think it that way, and blur the lines even more when saying it's the next console generation graphics (which look like current PC-graphics...), but it really means *just* that... next generation. And with the toolbox of additions they are doing to isometric games, they definitely deserve said title.

Well, in their defense, they don't really need to anymore. When was the last time zombies were threatnening? By now... even gigantic mobs are no threat at all. Kids(!) can outrun zombies and play with them. People can run out of ammo, and 5 min later return and shoot 400 rounds at zombies (as happened in the last episode). Where did they get that ammo? Who knows? Didn't that noise call zombies usually? Not anymore, they can simply camp out in that tunnel they made such a noise for the night, having only one escape route left. I suppose it's one of the main reasons TWD has become so boring, the zombies it was all about have become a non-issue entirely... :/