protopersona

I get that. But to use your example the narrator in Princess Bride doesn't go "he said worriedly" every few lines. It's the actors job to convey that. Their performances do that very well already in Deadfire. I'm not saying the narrator doesn't have any purpose. There was one in PoE1 and it did fine. The problem is Obsidian are trying to find the wrong solution to their writing problems. Instead of cutting back on unnecessary walls of prose and book style notes they doubled down on them and had them voice acted. We didn't need to have "he said" in a game where we just heard him say it. We don't need descriptions of things we can plainly see on the screen already. Narration in video games and movies are used sparingly for a reason. It's a visual medium. You show, not just tell. For some reason Obsidian thinks they're just making books with prettier pictures.

For all we know the only barrier to using FFX style turns instead of rounds is the devs really liked round based combat. Obsidian hasn't given any feedback on why they have implemented turns in this way.

There is a difference though. Say for instance a 6 in Dex gets you one attack, 12 gets you 2 and 18 gets you 3 attacks. Now any Dex from 7-11 and 13-17 is a waste of points since it gets you nothing tangible. Currently in RTwP every single point of Dex does something. With multiple attacks per action it creates the break points issue people have been mentioning. Plus multiple attacks in a single action begins to throw the action economy out of whack if you can exploit it.

More importantly, "Mary replied angrily" shouldn't even be part of the written dialog in the first place, it should come across in the voice actor's performance. The game narrates far more than it needs to. Even with a modest budget that kind of detail is unnecessary and could have been cut completely.

This isn't like choosing Mona Lisa's hair color. It's like choosing what frame to put the Mona Lisa in. The narrator is not pivotal to the experience of this game, and removing them wouldn't change any part of the story that matters.

My you're rather hostile. I don't see how asking for this is entitlement. I personally don't care about the narration, but I'm not bothered if people want the option to turn it off. I'm not even sure why you care about it strongly enough to call people out like that.

i think one of the issues here is trippy, fantastical nature of beyond. it encourages this. is fuel for my notion that the encounters with the gods should have been largely restricted to berath and executed in-engine using that little starting room. would have removed obligation/temptation to describe all that acid-trip stuff. sensation of being pulled away could have been conveyed with a little ten second jaunt along that inbetween path with chimes ringing in background. To me this is a problem with Obsidian's idea of video game writing. They spend way too much time writing out things that should have been animated. Like in the opening sequence, where it talks about Eder looking at his pimp slapping hand (it's a joke). That shouldn't have been a narration. What's the point of 3d models and animators if they are just used for generic idle and combat animations? This whole thing is weird to me because it wasn't a problem in KotOR and New Vegas, and probably won't be a problem in the new game either.

Your example from Trials is just bad game design. Crowd control should always come at a cost and have limits. Seeing as how Deadfire is much more invested in skill use and resource management I don't see how this could be a problem.

Seems to be a bug in the vanilla game right now.

No. The devs said it's an engine limitation they don't have the resources to fix currently.

Nope. The devs have stated it's a problem with the engine that they don't have the resources to correct right now.

Is this a "RTwP is always better than TB" opinion, or is there some way they could make TB better for you?

You seem to not be understanding something. ATB and the FFX-like system people are suggesting are not the same. To say they are is, for lack of better word, ignorant. ATB has everyone taking their turn independent of each other, thus why I compared it to RTWP. The FFX-like system does not have that. You don't act whenever you feel like it independent of the actions of others. You have to wait. To say that RTWP is the same system but without automatic pause is to dismiss all the critical nuances of having everyone act indepedent of each other. It makes a huge difference. If you just outright ignore it, I don't know how you expect to have a serious conversation on the topic. Woa calm down with the agression there, you misunderstood what I said. ATB is the same as the base PoE system it just pauses when the action gauge hits 0, when I say PoE I mean RTWP that's why I didn't make a distinction of it being outside the base game mode. I mean I feel they could just add a pause box that you can click that says "pause when recovery hits 0" and that would be the ATB system. The ATB system will be really slow, really really slow, rounds are fine they just need to find a decent TTK, and to work out the kinks. I just find it funny how peoole go into big explanations of things like the ATB system and don't seem to realize it's the same system of RTWP just with no pause when recovery hits 0 (the action bar filling up) ATB is NOT equal to RTwP with enforced pauses. Neither is the FFX initiative system. Pausing is not the same as turns. In RTwP everything acts simultaneously. This is the distinction of RTwP that actually matters, actions can go off at the same time. Multiple things can hit at the same time and essentially one shot you with no chance of a response. So many things can fire off quickly enough that you have to read the log just to know what happened. In a turn based system, even the FFX one, actions have a strict order. No 2 actions can ever occur at the same time. Combined with the turn order indicator you have a much easier time responding to things or just tracking the battle as it happens. A lack of distinct rounds does not make things suddenly a slower version of RTwP. The act of making actions happen in a linear order changes the game. Rounds are not nessecary for this. Dropping them would make TB mode not only work better in the context of this engine, but save the devs a lot of time and effort.

And is it? It's been out for a while now. Balance isn't that important, tbh. But a good TB is a whole other experience and would get me back in the game if it was good enough! Mechanically? Yeah TB is great. Some things in the game are a lot better than they were in RTwP, but that's balance stuff that can be sorted out.

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/105780-mod-the-class-project/?p=2136867

AD&D 2e had no AoOs, and that was the D&D version that all of the IE games except for IWD2 were based. I also wouldn't be surprised if grognards also hated 3e's changes to D&D compared to AD&D. From what I remember 3e and 3.5e were mostly well received, especially since by that time 2e had become very convoluted, bloated and had core mechanics that didn't work like you logically expected, like THACO. 3e fixed a lot of those things and began actually nailing down concrete combat rules. It was a welcome change from the abstraction of 2e, and paved the way for minis to represent combat. Now 4e on the other hand, there was a ruleset the community got up in arms about.

Gonna have to play around with these changes, but I like the logic behind them at least.

Unfortunately the problem is that the console makers are VERY restrictive on this. Xbox gives you 2 options. They can host the content for a fee, or you can host the content yourself. No third party hosts like Nexus. Also all content must be verified to ensure it won't break the system. Sony has all of those restrictions, plus you can't allow any uploading of custom files. So you can modify anything already in the base game, but you can't ever add anything new to it. This isn't just about textures and such either, you can't even add any code files that don't already exist. I highly doubt getting mods on the consoles is going to be worth the investment right now. I just don't see Obsidian having the resources to follow those restrictions. Maybe being owned by Microsoft will give some new leeway here, though I doubt Sony would follow along.

This mod really deserves it's own thread at this point, probably in the modding forum. I like the better crits idea too.

There's a specific barbarian\beckoner build using the Grave Calling sword to create almost infinite foe-only chill fogs or grave imps by killing your own skeletons.

Do not have dialogues, or anything, are like another primary character? No, they are almost completely quiet. The respond to being clicked on or getting orders, and nothing else really.

Because right now beckoner is only good for a niche build. Troubador does everything beckoner wants to better.

Personally I liked your previous version of over\underpen. I get the logic behind this new setting, but I think some kind of bonus for overpen feels right from a game perspective. Having to double the enemies armor just to get "normal" damage feels like a nerf really. Maybe 125% at 2.0 overpen, reducing by 5% each .2 down to 100% at 1.0. Could do the same for each step of underpen too. Is there a reason overpen is a ratio but underpen is integers?

I think the ship has sailed on this, honestly. I built a brand-new computer and before I had to RMA my gpu for the third time (nvidia rtx friggin sucks) and get something else, I had a 2080 Ti and the beefiest AMD cpu, plus loads of ram, and the fastest NVMe storage I could get. I basically had the same exact frame skips as I did on my 5-6 year old computer that it was replacing. Something in the game is just coded so inefficiently that at this point I have to write it off as just a systematic misdesign in the engine, since no amount of hardware can apparently smooth it out, and would require some deep re-coding to fix, something that they are definitely not going to risk doing so late in the game life cycle. According to some posters in the Steam discussions the problem is Unity didn't code multithreading correctly, so on processors with a lot of cores the game begins to starve itself of resources. https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/2572002906843374108/

Ever heard about Final Fantasy XIV? It's a MMO game that, well.. did a major and drastic shake up, completely changing it. They called it Realm Reborn or something. Other games implement smaller changes over time, but they do - today's WoW is completely different than WoW 5 years ago, for example. MMO games MUST change and evolve to stay relevant. And best part is, these changes are tied to content updates, and aren't just random overhaul patches coming from nowhere. Single-player games, however, do not have to evolve in the same way. And yet we have one that is getting an MMO treatment. I mean, they just recently nerfed a Monk ability, that worked in its previous form since the game was released. It wasn't even overpowered. Who the hell does that. Single-player games don't have microtransactions, but they do have DLC. MMOs sometimes have both (hello ESO). Paid content is paid content. Obs released 3 new DLC and a new game mode. That's great. Now imagine how great it would be if all those balance patches were actually tied to these updates, not just thrown randomly between them. Like every MMO game ever does. And finally, they're coming out on consoles soon. And since they have turn-based mode now, I expect them to get some serious sales. With a polished game, that used us, PC players, as guinea pigs for balance and bugs. You might be cool with that, but I'm not. Balance patches, or your feelings about those patches, do not change how the sales of a single player game work. They do not make it suddenly follow a games-as-a-service or MMO model. Single player games have to make their money upfront, at launch day, because the sales tail is drastically smaller than a multiplayer title. DLC in single player titles does not increase the install base of the base title like content releases in multiplayer titles. It's two entirely different situations. What Obsidian has done here was drastic by single player game standards. In all practicality they have re-launched the game here, and still have room for a final complete release for a third sales spike. My gut feeling is this was driven by a huge need to repair the public worth of the PoE IP. If you feel used because they changed up the game before it was complete, maybe Patient Gamers is more your speed. You don't have to buy things before they're complete, and nothing is first released complete anymore.