algroth

This is another sub-species of complaint that never made sense to me. I never understood why people play these isometric, combat-focused RPG's and then insist that what they really lack is a way to play the game with almost no combat. In the IE games and Obsidian's games, none of the quests or puzzles or dialogue segments are difficult in any real sense of the word. The only thing that's an actual difficult puzzle in these games is the combat. If you strip that out, these games are not much more than a choose your own adventure novel or an interactive movie. There's not much game left in them. Look, I think it's perfectly acceptable to have RPG's where you can eschew combat, but that's not what these games do well. An RPG that welcomes pacifist playthroughs should be ones where there's other actual challenges -- quests with failstates, deep puzzles, dialogue/factions that you can easily screw up. More than half of your character creation is all about how your toon performs in combat. This is even more true in the Obsidian games, as your class skills have zero use outside of combat! Games should know what they do well and know how to limit themselves to focus on their strongest elements. These aren't RPG's built to be that fun on pacifist playthroughs, and I'm glad the BG series had that self-awareness. Trying to have an RPG where you can do everything, and you end up with something super shallow like Skyrim. Edit to add: As you can see among Steam players for the original, the pacifism playthrough isn't that popular. https://steamcommunity.com/stats/291650/achievements Fewer than half as many players did as they did Trial of Iron. Hell more players did Triple Crown Solo! If this is what you're wielding to say Pillars is better, you're not making good arguments. A couple of things worth mentioning here: firstly, there's much more going on with the Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity sagas than the actual combat, and I for one do not play either because of the combat strictly speaking (though I find the latter more engaging in this sense than the former), but because they offer immersive experiences into well-developed settings and interesting stories, that also open themselves to be played and interacted with in many different ways. Secondly, **** that "choose your own adventure novel"/"interactive movie" bull****, as if there isn't more to the gameplay beyond the combat and dialogue or something. It is the kind of remark that immediately shows someone doesn't understand the medium. Precisely one of the things Deadfire does really well is to approach other challenges and forms of gameplay beyond dialogue trees and combat with greater attention and equal reward than any of the IE games or most other RPGs of its ilk usually do. For a *role-playing game* - which both sagas first and foremost are - the ability to find alternatives to sheer combat always adds new dynamics into the "how" to resolve a certain quest or objective and this is another means in which to embody a character and tell their particular story. The means through which you resolve a particular conflict, and how the game reacts to your particular resolution, is as valid a form of telling a particular character's journey as any other and which is also driven entirely by the interactive component of a game, not any forcefully perceived "movie" or "literary" qualities to it. Next, how is the character creation in Deadfire "more true" to your assumption that "more than half of your character creation is all about how your toon performs in combat" over the likes of Baldur's Gate II exactly? At what point in Baldur's Gate II did you have to define a character's cultural background, or passive or additional skills to their class, or character traits and so on? Further during the game, how does it keep track beyond a very linear reputation scale of the general trends to your choices of action and responses, and your reactions to the various factions within Amn that you interact with, be it the Cowled Wizards, the Athkatlan administration, the Shadow Thieves, the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart, Bodhi's coven and so on? This, alongside utterly ridiculous statements from your behalf the likes of stating Planescape: Torment had more engaging combat than Deadfire (???) makes me question whether you're not desperately trying to grasp for any argument that might defend the precious IE classics in the face of the new, no matter how obviously and demonstrably wrong they are.

Why? I'm honestly curious and would love to hear your opinion. In my view, BG1 is utter rubbish, because 1) Dialogue options are extremely limited and badly written (no humour, no spark, no consistency, very often no opportunity to say anything sensible). 2) There is far too much aimless wandering around huge maps with almost nothing on them. (There is none of this in BG2, and very little of it in any subsequent CRPGs -- clearly, game developers took notice of this blunder.) 3) The story is all over the place, and while it's not exactly illogical or incoherent, it is not well-written either. 4) There are far too many foolish insta-death opportunities, with basilisks and so on. This is just bad writing, and this was a feature that was rightly removed from essentially all subsequent CRPGs. 5) None of the NPCs are interesting or well-written. To me, #2 is the biggest killer, and #3 is the nail on the coffin. BG1 looks like a rudimentary sketch towards something that would ultimately become extremely worthwhile, namely BG2. But as a game, it's just tosh. While I agree BG2 is a better game than BG1, you sure are ignoring a lot of the same mistakes in the sequel you call the first out for. Do you honestly believe there was less insta gib death in BG2 than 1? Really? I have an army of mind flayers, beholders, level draining undead, and various other things that strongly disagree with you. I also remember wandering around plenty of super huge maps in BG2 that also felt pretty boring and uninteresting, you are right, BG1 was worse, but not that much worse. The story of 1 is not even remotely incoherent, and is certainly no worse written than BG2, nor is it all over the place. Dialog options could have been better, true, but again, isn't like this was all roses and sunshine in BG2 either. I do admit BG2 had more (and better) "funny moments" but is that really what you judge the writing quality of an RPG by? As for that last point... really? None of the characters in the entire game were interesting or well written? Not even one of them? That one is going down in the history of unpopular (and probably patently wrong) opinions man. Funny enough it's with the roster of Baldur's Gate companions that you can already see a lot of the humour and spark that is such a staple of the saga overall too, what with Minsc's quixotic heroics, Edwin's obvious two-facedness, Tiax's delusions of grandeur or Xan's overdramatic hopelessness and so on. Heck, one of my favorite comedic moments in the series comes from the encounter with the "boy" who lost his puppy, only to realize later that the "boy" isn't that at all but a demon in disguise. I would say Baldur's Gate II is undoubtedly the better-written game but there is plenty of charm and humour to be found in the original game as well, whilst a few of the companions - despite being largely one-dimensional and sticking closely to a shtick - embody that same shtick rather well. In Baldur's Gate II and xzar_monty's defense though, I think that whilst you can certainly claim some areas in the sequel acted as filler (e.g. the Chapter 6 wilderness areas, or the Windspear Hills exterior for the most part) and certain areas invited to backtrack way too much (see the Druid Grove and how you're made to walk through it all several times through the Trademeet and druid stronghold quests, for example), I also have to admit that there is *far* less of it than there is in the first Baldur's Gate, to the point this aspect never left much of a lasting impression in BGII but most certainly made me quit several attempts through Baldur's Gate and is rather crucial for me enjoying it much less than any other IE game. It's not that Baldur's Gate II doesn't have filler but I do think it isn't as defining of the overall experience for it than it is for its predecessor, and so I can definitely see how it's a problem to highlight in the first game but not (or far less so) in its sequel.

By the same coin you can take the entire set of skills of any of the fighter classes and compare them to BG2 and say BG2 doesn't hold a candle to Deadfire. Arguably that's an even more important case since it distributes the complexity and micromanaging more towards all classes and thus all characters, and thus in practice non-caster types are made into active roles opposite to the usual auto-attack bots that they are in the IE games. Even if the depth of the wizard/mage is reduced (I don't see how it is, but let's pretend it is so), it is pretty clearly made up for in other areas. An Epic Level fighter does get actives though but yea i do agree that some classes are Kind of bland in BG2. However it is a Party game so you will have casters in your Group Right? Could you imagine a spell like Mislead or Simulacrum in Deadfire? it would get nerfed into he Ground immediately for the sake of "balance". There were some fun Things in the game Right after launch but all of it got taken care of. Left is a very shallow Gameplay experience no matter which class you Play. It's funny to me that you speak of balance in such a sneering fashion: you see, I played through Baldur's Gate II on insane mode again earlier this year, right before the release of Deadfire and not even *once* did I either use Mislead or Simulacrum, or even consider adding them to my spellbook repertoire. Why, when all I need to cast to trample through practically every fight is Haste and the occasional Breach, Stoneskin or Remove Magic? And later in the game the occasional Horrid Wilting and Dragon's Breath just to clear out large enough mobs faster. Ultimately Haste is such a powerful ability and such an immediately determining spell that it renders just about every encounter absolutely trivial. This is why balance is important. If the same action turns every fight into an absolute stomp, then why even consider other options? Even in its release form I had more incentive to read through the spells and abilities in Deadfire than I did through two thirds of the arcane spellbook in Baldur's Gate II. Unbalanced makes for shallow, because it heavily promotes a set build and style of play which will also trivialize almost every encounter, whilst making fringe builds unviable and thus discouraging players from attempting them. And this is even worse of an issue in the Baldur's Gate saga compared to Deadfire when you take into account gameplay as a whole and not merely combat. You plan on playing a pacifist route, and either sneak or talk your way through as many encounters as you can? Well, too bad, enemies be enemies and stealth, while doable, comes at the cost of piles of great loot and XP and at the benefit of... Nothing at all. Not to mention it hardly leads to a fun experience. At the very least the series sort of justifies the unilaterality of action relatively well what with murder being in your blood and all, but really it hardly makes for a flexible system that accounts for various styles of play the way Deadfire actually does, from a sheer mechanical standpoint at least.

By the same coin you can take the entire set of skills of any of the fighter classes and compare them to BG2 and say BG2 doesn't hold a candle to Deadfire. Arguably that's an even more important case since it distributes the complexity and micromanaging more towards all classes and thus all characters, and thus in practice non-caster types are made into active roles opposite to the usual auto-attack bots that they are in the IE games. Even if the depth of the wizard/mage is reduced (I don't see how it is, but let's pretend it is so), it is pretty clearly made up for in other areas. Not sure I agree that this is good though. Spamming the same set of buff + knockdown type skills (just for an example) isn't adding interesting depth. It's an illusion of depth and ultimately more tedious combat. I found myself doing the same thing with Eder roughly every battle in Deadfire, and it was effective, considering I've had zero wipes. But, from a tactical standpoint, it's not any different than "auto-attack bot", it's just more tedious because it requires more clicking. You're not making interesting decisions with those skills. I'll add the interrupt mechanics and fighters' effectiveness at that is substantially more interesting in the BG games. Giving them a role beyond just tank + hit. I've never understood this push by developers and some fans that all the classes need to have actives skills as cool as the mages and priests. You're controlling at least 5-6 units in every combat. I don't want all my units to play the same way. That actually strips strategic depth from the combat. Going back and doing my first run at BG in years, it's striking how much faster and more deadly combat is when compared to Pillars and Deadfire. In Pillars, the weaker status effects and bullet-sponge nature of enemies and your own PC's has created a combat that really drags by contrast. I don't see how you can look at classes like the chanter, cipher, fighter, paladin, rogue, ranger and mage and say with all honesty that they all "play the same". I can get how there's a little bit of crossover between general frontline and spellcaster classes but precisely the extension in their respective skillsets makes them more unique respective to one another, not less so. Likewise that you played a fighter as "buff + knockdown" only refers to your personal approach to the class - personally I used knockdown on occasion but far preferred to use charge + vigorous defense, and mix both with my cipher Watcher's Amplified Wave and Defensive Mindweb respectively. In contrast I yet again cannot see how you can assume the same accusation cannot be levied at Baldur's Gate II's gameplay which aside from *very* specific encounters can largely be reduced to "cast haste, then auto-roflstomp", and maybe the occasional remove magic/breach to get past some contingencies, even on insane difficulty. And yes, plenty of spells in Pillars can act as mere filler but I'll be damned if the same isn't absolutely true, even truer, of the IE games' selection. In all honesty it baffles me that this is even in question, and I hardly say this with any ill will towards them.

My crew asks me for lager, and that's what I give them. Woe is me, my ship is piloted by Bohemians.

By the same coin you can take the entire set of skills of any of the fighter classes and compare them to BG2 and say BG2 doesn't hold a candle to Deadfire. Arguably that's an even more important case since it distributes the complexity and micromanaging more towards all classes and thus all characters, and thus in practice non-caster types are made into active roles opposite to the usual auto-attack bots that they are in the IE games. Even if the depth of the wizard/mage is reduced (I don't see how it is, but let's pretend it is so), it is pretty clearly made up for in other areas.

For my own silliness, I'll go ahead and respond to these thoughts with some of my own...

Agreed. And while the Five were already mentioned as those who should have remained dead, they left out another crucial pair who got resurrected in that last battle, who for me are even more greviously done so. Overall I have to also say that, despite the increased difficulty for the fights with the Five which is all well and good, I can't really tell what was *else* was added, narratively, to Throne of Bhaal via Ascension. There are things I thought were Ascension-specific but turned out to be in the vanilla game already. There's Sarevok reuniting with his sword, I suppose that is alright enough... Overall I can't say it changed my experience much from a narrative perspective.

I suppose the actual 'campaign' that could be told could be getting together the Dozen who would hold Waidwen at the bridge. That'd be a pretty interesting story to tell, especially knowing more about what happened after and behind it, all to the characters' ignorance. It would be a pretty sobering ending if so - the player knowing that their party of heroes collected precisely for holding a god was not for the 'righteous cause' they believed they were serving. Or *most* were serving (what if one had been a member of the Leaden Key and spurred the rest of the party on in their 'duty' and whatnot - just a thought of course). In the end though, if such a story was ever told I don't think it ought to be part of the main saga as such. It could however be a very interesting DLC independent of a main campaign.

I also think people ought to start looking at level systems as something that is abstract and independent from the diegesis itself. Within the setting of Deadfire your character has risen to legendary status and even taken on the archmages and avatars of the gods themselves, and even as early as level 5 you are openly regarded via diegetic interactions as a figure of great power, for example as shown by your early interactions with Furrante or Clario. The purpose for the characters to be of a lower level from the start has more to do with accessibility and a mechanical/ruleset learning curve than your character being a rookie or even particularly 'weak' from the get-go. Imagine asking players to build a level 16 character from the get-go and be familiar with the skillset of every companion you meet early on at that level, that for the most part would be daunting. I know I, even as a veteran player of the first game and the IE/D&D predecessors, took it slowly when examining and learning each class ability table. To give another example, see how the Witcher saga handles levelling too - the saga is all about the main character and he is a particularly legendary/notorious witcher too... Yet as you start the third game in the series, you still do so as a fiest level character. Yet it's understandable as you never truly relate Geralt's level directly to his actual power in his context. From a game design standpoint it's a smart decision, I would say - especially for a game that, unlike Baldur's Gate, already has you reaching the epic levels by the end of the first game in its series.

New film from Debra Granik, director of Winter's Bone: Currently has a 100% tomatometer with 158 reviews. Looks pretty good.

I never play turn-based games so perhaps they have more flexibility in this regard than I'm aware of, but I would think one quite defining difference between truly turn-based games and RTWP is that in turn-based games everything is sequential, whereas in RTWP it is parallel. Hence, in RTWP I can react to what the enemy is doing or to the outcome of something I did (especially now that we have easy retargetting). And similarly, I can coordinate the actions of multiple characters, or anticipate actions of enemies and time my own accordingly. That, I would argue, makes the two distinctly different. Things like Deadfire's Recovery mechanic make it a moot point. A fighter swings at a baddie and is locked into an attack animation or recovery animation and gets hit with the fireball the enemy mage was casting, because the fighter couldn't begin moving until the attack or backswing animation completed (maybe he was able to start moving, but he couldn't clear it in time.) A fighter moves on his turn and swings at the baddie; the enemy mage's turn comes up before that fighter's next turn and the fighter gets hit with the fireball. Well, that's not quite how it works in practice however, since the recovery for each character is mutually independent. In the time it takes for one character to recover or cast an ability/spell, another may have performed two or three actions. Both may likewise perform their actions simultaneously, and do not wait for the previous party to finish their action before beginning or concluding their own. That's what I believe Loren refers to, and it's actually a rather distinct difference, both from a mechanical/gameplay standpoint as well as one of mimesis and pacing - RTwP in this regard assumes a greater degree of realism and diegetic consistency with the pause function acting as the main abstract mechanic, whereas turn-based, at least of a traditional kind, tends to be a lot more abstract in its approach to pace and action (after all, in a conflict people don't just sit about waiting for another side to conclude their turn before performing their next action). What Loren refers to above is with systems that tie individual recoveries together into a global sequence, moreso than the actions of individual characters being performed sequentially due to timers and animations and recovery and cooldowns and so on.

No we don't It's how we call them in Argentina at least, and looking them up I'm seeing no other name for it beyond masa para tacos which is used rather interchangeably too. Where are you from and what do you call them where you're at? Edit: Wikipedia's description: https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taco I think it's safe to assume that regardless of whether you call it something else where you're from, "tortilla" is a term used in Spanish to refer to taco shells. Granted that "tortilla" can also refer to the Spanish tortilla which is a very different food, but still it doesn't preclude the Mexican tortilla from being called the same.

In Spanish we call 'taco shells' tortillas.

I can't say I'm disappointed overall myself in the conclusion as such, only aspects of it, but to add to the above, which I'm generally in agree with, I also don't agree with the notion that the ending is meaningless or any such thing - yet, granted, it feels rather open and inconclusive, as if leading towards a final chapter to close out a 'trilogy' (doesn't necessarily mean that we'll only ever have three Pillars but I would suspect a third game would finally close up the Watcher's arc). One of the central themes of the first game is that of a cultural transition from a more theocentric worldview to a more anthropocentric one, to some extent capitalizing on a similar change of current that we went through during the Renaissance and so on - I think a similar arc seems to be at hand here, with the first game finishing with the reveal of the origin of the gods and their authenticity placed in question, yet their power and the structure that upholds them remaining intact, and with this game's plot being all about that structure being put in crisis as it is literally torn apart. I can see a third game being precisely about the repercussions of this system being put in check, and how one rebuilds it in light of everything that's happened and has been revealed and so on. Of course this is all really a big 'if' concerning what Obsidian eventually do with Pillars 3, but like many other great second parts in a trilogy I feel that it does tell of a particular shift and a particular arc within a greater narrative that, to my mind at least, is going somewhere, and towards a place that at this point in time feels rather exciting.

#JustSonicThings Not that I'm the biggest Hunt for the Red October fan but, y'know, that other movie does star Shaddup Buttwhat.

You haven't reached the pinnacle of cool until a cat plays drums to Magma's "De Futura".

Pretty much agree with this. With the exception of caring a bit more for Godzilla and not giving two ****s about Glass.

New Alfonso Cuarón film. Warning for spoilers.

My one disappointment with regards to the ending is that we couldn't see more of Ukaizo. It felt especially weird considering how so many other quests and questlines deliberately build on the mystery and 'reveal' of the place. All to, what, get a view of the city from afar as part of an out-of-focus parallax view? Beyond that, it is as it's been said here already: never expected to fight Eothas, found the ending rather satisfying myself.

Not just PoE either, Tyranny as well, which was a similar styled game, albeit with a different take. So 6 years, 3 games, all "party based fantasy RPG.". I would gather JS wants to work on something very different from that. Perhaps he is aching to work on something like First Person Fallout, Action-RPG, something singular character focused? Who knows but him. I would want a break too. Marcel Proust wrote his tasteless (sorry, I hate it wholeheartedly) In Search of Lost Time from 1913 till 1927. So it's not unusual for a writer to spend years on particular project. Marcel Proust is a bit of a statistical outlier considering the volume, intention and achievements of that particular work, but you are not wrong. Most filmmakers I've spoken to (as well as my personal experience thus far, I'll add) have stated that films tend to be a five-year endeavour from their conception and first draft to the actual end of production because of all the time spent working on the script, pitching the film to potential producers and investors, looking at credits and subsidies and so on, and of course the usual time it takes for a film from pre-production to its completion. If it's a franchise or, in TV's case, a series, you can imagine that work is even multiplied through the several films or seasons the same can take. Still it is well within reason to want a brief, however brief, break after any such endeavour.

BG2's problem was that there was no narrative urgency in Chapter 2. We're TOLD that we need to get out there and save Imoen, but in gameplay mechanics our time is unlimited. Gathering lots of gold to buy assistance to rescue her is a perfectly fine narrative hook and it even plays into CHARNAME encountering Firkraag (who offers undeniably the largest bounty for aiding him, whose behavior is quite obviously fishy... but if you're in a real hurry to raise funds to save your little sister, you wouldn't have time to run a fantasy background check on him, even if an adult red would be dumb enough to leave stuff like that in the open.) It only falls apart if the player drags their feet... and they have plenty of incentive to, with all kinds of fancy items and places to explore on offer and no clear indication that Imoen is going to die if they don't get there in X months. The game makes no assumption about you caring for Imoen at that stage though. The Shadow Thieves use both Imoen and Irenicus as bait to encourage you to help them out with their feud (assuming you care about getting even with Irenicus instead as another possible motivation), but to the best of my memory, to either of these motivations you can express indifference and go about your own way, at which point either faction will drop their prices once if you wait long enough, and *again* a second time if you continue to ignore them. I'd say they are pretty deliberately offering you this option because this is the point at which the game introduces its massive semi-open world to you and exploring it may well respond to the motivation of a character that is indifferent to Imoen/Irencus' fate. Otherwise, the bag of money you need to collect also offers a major incentive for the character to go out and get dragged into the many massive quests out to do in Amn if they *do* show concern about the plot. It does perhaps fall apart a little more if what you do instead is to leave all the exploration for chapter 6, and embark at that point into most of the side-content and so on, considering how urgent the soul-theft business is made to be.