mumbogumshoe

I'm tremendously upset on this TBH. I don't think this is the real issue. I mean if BG2 don't have such issues, it shouldn't have with PoE2. If it does it probably means the rule system is kinda simplified or shallow. Shrinking it to 5 will never resembles the nostalgic feeling of old cRPG games for me personally. BG2 has multi-class too so i don't think that's the issue at all. I think they wanted 4 just like Tyranny. But this will even make people more upset so they up it to 5. The only logical reason i can think of.. could it be difficult make it works for controllers? I think mostly with the controllers you probably be just playing with 1 character and the rest with customisable AI? You only need to pause only on very tough battles. Basically in Dragon Age Inquisition, you can play a party based character without even pause. Just hack, hack, hack and spam spell/abilities with just focusing with 1 character. Also it could be a hassle to switch to more characters with limited buttons on a controller?. And if that's not the case then with more party characters i think it'll take up space too on the screen if playing with a big TV. So having less characters could actually help on big screen, IMO. I don't think the analogy with BG2 is a very good one. If you look at how combat plays out in BG2 and in PoE, it's strikingly different. The main reason for this is that so much less was going on in BG2, you had so much fewer options. That's because with everyone except for magic users, the orders you could give basically boiled down to 'walk over there, whack that thing'. You can still build a fighter more or less that way in PoE, but even there you most likely will have knockdown or some other ability, and two or more stances that require some micro-management. Every other character requires just so much more micro-management compared to BG2, its often really hard not to lose control (or you have to be really patient, pausing and issuing orders more or less every second which really impedes the flow of combat). I think that's what they're trying to address by the party size reduction. I'm not very happy about it either tbh but I kinda get it, it's an issue that needs to be addressed. There are a few other things that they could do and seem to want to do. Better AI that allows for more detailed customized scripting is one thing, and I'm happy that they made it a stretch goal. An ability to queue up actions would be another thing I'd like to see. But at the end of the day, one thing they have to be doing, I think, is to reduce the sheer number of things that are going on at the same time in combat. There really are only two options for that as far as I can see. Reduce party size (and with it numbers of enemies) or reduce options of things each character can do, make some character much more passive. Out of those two, I think reducing party size by one is the better option.

I really disagree with that. They have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to companion customizability by the player. They gave us the option to create our own fully customized adventurers, which is great, but the companions are something different. They're fully realized characters with unique personalities, and their stats should reflect that in a sense. Yes they're not optimized. They shouldn't be. Characters have their shortcomings, that's fine. People act as if they were completely unplayable but they weren't. Forced you to think out of the box a bit sometimes, maybe play a class differently to how you play them normally. That's good in my opinion. Overcoming adversary is fun. It wasn't that PotD was impossible with the companions, it was just a good deal harder than with fully customized adventurers. That's good too, it's supposed to be hard.

No I'm not worried at all. Look how all the other large scale video game crowdfunding campaigns have played out and you can guess that this will be very similar. There's an initial huge spike in pledges, raking in about a quarter of the end result within the first 24 hours or so, then a rapid drop off over the next 2 or 3 days. Then there's a slow drip over the majority of the campaign with very occasional (small) spikes when there's some media attention. Towards the end there's another rallying and donations increase again during the last week or so with another spike on the last day. That's more or less how all the big, very successful campaigns (Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, Torment, and I guess also the recent Wasteland 3 and Psychonauts 2 campaigns... even though I haven't followed them very closely, so I'm not sure) have played out and I bet this one will play out like this as well. So my prediction is we will end up with something between 4 and 5 million and will obliterate quite a few more stretch goals on the way.

I don't think there will be romances. First, many of Obsidian's most loyal fans are strictly opposed to them. There seems to be a bit of tribalism going on there as in rallying against Bioware that has made romance something like their calling card. Second, Obsidian writers and designers don't seem to really want doing them. Avellone was on record saying something disparaging about the idea, iirc. He's gone now but it seems to me his opinion is largely shared by the rest of Obsidian. I understand why, I myself am very ambivalent about the idea. I don't oppose romances in principle. In every other medium, some sort of love story is an integral, indispensable part of any epic. You can't have a great novel, movie, whatever without it (or lets say, it's very rare). So I used to say, being able to integrate romances effectively into its stories would be a sign of video game writing truly growing up. I still kinda think that way. But video game writing is pretty unique compared to other kinds of writing because you have the player who's gonna interfere with your narrative. To write a good romance it all has to be emotionally coherent and believable and I think that's very hard to do while also giving the player their agency. I don't think video game writers have really figured out how best to do it yet. Almost all of the romances I've played in video games have been more or less cringeworthy, even though that's entirely subjective of course. They have been getting better though, so there's that. Second problem with romances is that it's a bloody mine field. It seems whatever you do you gonna create outrage and alienate a lot of people. Don't know if that's worth it. All that is purely academic anyway. I'm almost certain that there won't be any romance beyond perhaps some flirting and a bit of innuendo. Totally fine with that.

I loved Pirates!Gold in the 90s. One of the first games that I ever really loved. Having those two types of game combined seems like a fantastic idea to me. The only problem I see is the one I've already mentioned above, that I don't know if it would mesh so well with a story focused rpg. If it's done well it's really fun to just explore the seas, capture ships and booty, upgrade your ship, hire crew... All this might really distract from what the game is really about, doing quests, advance the story, build your character. But whether it works well together or not, something like this would be a huge part of the game that's totally different from the IE games. Not sure if most people would want that.

Oh yes, haven't even thought of scripted interactions. That could work very well, especially for something like boarding another ship, swinging through the rigging, doing some crazy acrobatics. I'd love that!

I think it was three in NWN2, for memory, but I could be wrong. Though to be fair, I think that's pretty reasonable. The most outlanding builds i've seen in practical 3.x play only hit about four total (Rogue/Ninja/Invisible Blade/Swordwage or Fighter/Ranger/Deepwood Sniper/Crusader) - same player - and I think maybe one one other, but I can't remember which ones it was other tha cleric and blackguard.) I'm pretty sure that I played a Bard/Fighter/Frenzied Berserker/Red Dragon Deciple in NWN2 at one point... could be that I used mods to uncap the multiclass restrictions though...

That's actually a really interesting question... How is this going to work with re-rolling a character, will that be back as a possibility? Makes me wonder how multiclassing is actually going to work in the end, if you can just chose another class on level-up or if you're locked into a particular multi-class combination from the start... Do you know this? Makes sense to me but I haven't come across information on how multiclassing is going to work exactly...

I hope you are not forgetting 3 of them are returning ones. If 7 are all new excluding Eder, Aloth and Pallegina.. i'm all good. But i don't think that's the case. I'm not forgetting that. I'm ok with it as well. I liked the companions from PoE for the most part and I'm ok with seeing them again. It's gonna be a new story, new developments but I'm happy that it's a continualtion of PoE not a completely new one. I know some people don't like that so much but I do, and as I want to see how my choices in PoE play out I want to see what goes on with my old companions. Don't forget we only had one of each class after 2 expansions. We may well get another companion as a later stretch goal, then there are as many as we had in vanilla PoE. If they don't introduce new classes (which I'd find interesting) we may well end up with one of each class again.

I'm ok with the number of companions so far. I'm guessing we'll see at least one more as a stretch goal during the campaign, then we have 8 which is as many as we had in vanilla PoE. Given that the party size has been reduced to 5, I'm totally fine with that (even if they leave it at 7). Fewer but deeper companions sounds good to me too, even though I found the PoE companions to be deep enough. They could give them more extensive and interesting personal quests though, that'd be cool. I like that they're raising the level cap but what I'd really like them to do is make the levelling process itself a bit slower. One of the more annoying things for me in PoE was hitting the level cap well before the end of the game. That always takes the wind out of my sails in an RPG. I don't just want to advance the story, I want to get stronger!

There are fewer people pledging this time around but the average amount pledged seems to be higher. Also we have the investors who make up nearly 50% of the total at the moment. In terms of money, this campaign is slightly ahead of the PoE1 campaign. If the pattern established in all the other large scale kickstarts campaigns holds, we'll see a huge initial influx of funds on the 1st day (which we have seen), a rapid drop of new pledges in days 2-3 (which we are seeing right now), then it will flatline on a low level, somewhere around 10.000-30.000 a day for about 3 weeks, and then we'll have a rush towards the end with another spike not as large as on the 1st but close on the last day. Nothing I've seen so far makes me think that this time it'll be different so I'm guessing based in the somewhat higher first day influx that the whole campaign will raise a bit more money than the first one but not by a lot. Maybe we'll see about 5m this time around.

I agree that open world gameplay even in the form a la Pirates! is probably outside the scope of this game. That's part of the reason why I started the topic, because I was wondering how they would or could implement something like this. I disagree that it's unlikely that we see anything of the sort. Of course it's all speculation at this point but if there really is a ship as a stronghold, of which there have been hints, not to have this ship freely move around somehow and engage in some form of combat would seem strange. Also, when you decide on a setting like this, archipelago, ships, piracy, sea monsters, you have to be aware what a strong trope this whole piracy and sea exploration thing is. How many people, including me, like this sort of stuff. It would be a very strange decision then to send the player into a world like this, give them a ship, and then just use the whole piracy thing as a backdrop and not let the player engage in it themselves. Bound to disappoint a lot of people. Anyway, Stom of Zehir style overland map doesn't seem unlikely to me. They did it before in a game that harkens back to the Infinity Engine games. It wouldn't take too many resources, not distract too much from the main focus of the game and also seems pleasingly retro, like IE-style gameplay itself (to me at least). We'll see.

Not against turn based but I think if you do this you could go rtwp as well, stay consistent with the rest of the game. Good point about the money sink, will be much more fun to outfit the ship with bigger cannons, copper plating, whatever than to build up the chapel or the hedge maze in the courtyard... much more impact on gameplay

Never played Warcraft 2... what was it like? Sorry for double post... that's because I have to wait for moderator approval. Saw the new reply before my other post was approved and just answered straight away.

I think a Storm of Zehir like solution, an overland map with random encounters could work and there's also precedent for it in quite a few rpg's. It's a bit retro but, hey, that whole isometric rtwp thing is a bit retro... Pirates! and Pirates! Gold was also the first thing that came to my mind. Actually I used to always want a game that has this sort of gameplay but where you could also explore detailed islands... So I wouldn't mind if it's well integrated.

Yes, I was also thinking of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, only I don't know if they can do something like that... I mean there's the perspective for one thing (even though that's not that important) and the whole open world thing... I don't think that that's within the scope and tbh, I don't want it to go there. Open world is fine but it distracts a lot from a focused story driven game. Maybe it's just me but I almost never finish an open world game. I tend to mess about with exploration, killing things and doing the odd quest until I lose interest and stop playing. Haven't ever played an open world game where the story really gripped me. Anyway, yes boarding would be mandatory!

So, this game is set in the Deadfire Archipelago, which means there will be a lot of Sea between all those islands, a pirate theme and, it seems likely, we'll get a ship as our stronghold. All of that I find awesome. Question is though, how will that aspect of the game be implemented. Of course we could just get a map like we did of the Dyrwood, only most of it will be water. Travel between the islands consists of just clicking on an island. You're instantly transported there, the game tells you how much time has passed, you (maybe) see your ship anchored in a harbor or a bay and you start exploring the map of the island. That would totally work but imo, it would waste the potential of a setting like this. If I'm playing a game set in an archipelago with pirates and if I'm the captain of a ship, I want to explore the ocean, discover new islands and engage in a bit of piracy myself! So how could this be done without being weird and taking too much away from good old-fashioned story driven rpg-ing which I definitely want to be the main focus of the game. I mean drawing a little ship around the ocean map a la Pirates! could work I guess but also seems a strange addition to a game like this and to make it work well and not be boring may well be out of the scope of the game. How could you make naval combat fun. In reality it seems to me to have mostly been a rather tedious affair with ships trying to outrun each other trying to get into a good position and then raking them with a broadside (or more likely, one striking their colors when that seems to be inevitable). There's a tactical element to it but I think it could get boring fast if you'd have to do it a lot - and it only makes only sense to implement something like this if it's used throughout the game. What do other people think? Would you want something like this? Naval battles, ocean exploration, freebooting? Or would you rather they stick with the core mechanics of isometric rtwp rpg combat and not add new stuff like this. If you'd like to see something like this, how would you implement it?