Wormerine

So how about replacing "flawless" with "system-which-fulfills-its-intended-role-well" All of the negative sides of scaling can be present, and will be present for some people, therefore the choice - do you find the need for an even challenge more important than game breaking its rules? Some people will prefer to disable scaling, some people won't - therefore the beauty of customizable experience. I disagree strongly with your "universal design" especially in single player game. Ban the mods then? Erase difficulty settings? The problem is that if Obsidian would do that you would probably complain because it wouldn't be THE rule set and setting you personally would enjoy.

Sure, but games aren't designed to satisfy mathematical equations, but to give satisfationary experience to consumers. Psychology is an important part of the experience, and, for example, not giving or giving very little XP for side content for many people (probably me too) will feel weak. The conflict we run into in this case is how to properly satisfy groups of consumers, who enjoy their games in different ways - those who want to experience the main story, and aren't as interested in sidestories/fleshin out the world, the completionists and completionists interested in well balanced challenge. For me, personally, the best solution would be to balance the game around completionist apprach. Have critical path be difficult and force you to do side content before moving forward with main stuff. However, as Obsidian wants their game to appeal to as wide audience as possible, they try to make it work for both groups - the ideal result is: 1) critical path is scaled for a straight through run, meaning someone who only wants main story is satisfied. 2) People enjoy growing overpowered throughout the game, so they do sidequest and roll through end game content. 3) People who want constant challange and do sidequest enable content scaling, which adjusts later stages of the game to their level. A "flawless" system, would be one which would fully satisfy all of those groups, but thats much more difficult to pull off, than adjusting numbers. For me, for example, its less about gameplay, but more about storytelling. If enemy who is hyped as a big challange is easily defeated it bothers me. Similarly it bothered me that after using content scaling for 3rd act of PoE the shades in Sun in Shadow were way more powerful than shades I fought before, because game had to rebalance for two expansions worth of experience.

Maybe not difficult but it is not a flawless solution. i was looking through old streams as I am pretty sure Josh address little xp/no xp for sidequests solution, and why it didn’t feel well. The problem is that beyond an act of completing sidequests players want to be rewarded as well - be it cool item or a lvl up. You remove that and players will feel like game doesn’t reward them enough for putting the effort in.

Not necessarly. If you don't get to utilize your skills per encounter then sure - something is off. For me thats not the case. Longer encounters would mean just staring at people hitting each other for longer, as I would be out of resources anyway. BG combat was very brief as well. You kill enemy or they kill you.

I don't know, I want those higher level abilities. As I like creating very narrow focused characters I will be mostly interested in single classes. There are some really fun multiclasses you can come up with in beta, but without having access to full skill tree its difficult to say what we are losing. Right now muliclassing feels way better as we don't really get a feel of how will they scale on higher levels. I think multiclassing is very cleverly implimented in Deadfire. Clear, easy to understand and plan out. How it is balance wise - no idea.

During combat my rogue's health reached 0. Soon before he "died" i gave him an order to use escape[/] ability. He reached 0 before using it, however, he used it anyway. Then run back exactly to the place he died and froze there in standing position. After the combat ended my rogue was still with 0HP, couldn't select it, and couldn't save the game (it recognized the game to be in combat). However, I was able to rest, bringing him back to normal state. After combat "freeze" is shown here:

And what if balancing is thinking about the player? I feel like lots of you are better players than I am, because I have to problems with casting majority of my spells. I am yet to encounter 9s spell. With changes to melee speed the whole casting feels much better IMO. I could use a faster casting time on magic weapons. Playing with strengh based wizard, and he performs really well after initial couple seconds of buffing.

I am not sure I follow. I rather depends how much side content you have - especially when you can't gain too much XP by farming enemies the quest XP and exploration become biggest XP boosts. Which would mean either have way more critical path vs optional quests, or diminish rewarded XP you get by doing sidequests. Probably the fact that "endgame content" (high lvl bounties, legendary enemies) are the most tricky part of the game you will be completeting just before finale makes the big finish feel a bit underwhelming. Could we just make the most challenging content THE finale? Its not like many people get to the end anyway...

Most everyone hates or rather dislikes very specific parts(which aren't the same for everyone) of the beta and its their chance to give feedback now, when its more easier to change stuff in the game for the devs so ofc people will give more feedback on what they want changed. You're just escalating things to whole another 567890 levels. There is a reason why broadly described "artists" are archetypically known for "you can't see it - IT'S NOT FINISHED!" behaviour. It is difficult for anyone not deeply involved in process of production to assess quality of an unfinished product. That is why AAAs feed general audience with prerendered cutscenes and faked demos, with early builds being shown behind closed doors to (hopefully) more educated journalists. It is second time Obsidian does this open development thing, and they must know what they are dealing with. As far as current supposed negative reception is concerned it is really unimportant. When the game will come out the word of mouth and positive reviews will have much more of a sway than some early beta video made by unknown youtuber. Of course, everyone wants to influence game to better fit their taste. That's the appeal of early backer beta.

If you think DA:O went too far, I wonder what you think of inquisition xD I didn't play it. As it requires Origin I probably won't.

Uhm. Using bulverism followed by appeal to shame doesn't look really efficient in making a point. Ninjamestari constantly tries to pass an intimidation check. Licensing is one issue, the other is that tabletop design is different than cRPG design. It seems like Obsidian tried to create their own system, inspired by D&D, but one that would better support structure and design of IE games. In many ways they succeeded. Some aspects still could use improvement. The simpler the better, as long as its as complex as it needs to be. DA:O in my book is a great example of a game which went way too far, making gameplay flat, uninteresting and samey.

Of course, it is a mess of a system right now. It is not ready. Purpose of the beta is for bunch of people get their dirty hands on it and break it. In the last stream Josh openly admited they are undertuning many things as they have learned people react badly to nerfs so they prefer to keep things down and tune it up rather than having to tune things down. They best understand how far it is from final product. Negative feedback can be demotivating, but those are professionals and hopefully can work past it. I didn't see any of those videos. If someone does actual analysis I would be grateful for a link. Playthrough with snarky commentary is not really something I care much about as I can make my own with access to beta.

So far my impression is that the most important stat of any weapon is penetration. Most enemies have around 10 AR making weapons with low penetration situational. I wish firearms did crush damage, as it seems ranged characters don't really have a way to effectively apprach an enemy with high piercing resistance.

Frankly what is the point of praising it at that point? Point of the beta is to provide criticism, which even if done calmly will still sound negative.

I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Obsidian must know what they are going for and they are seeing how people react and use what they already implimented. Data gathered from beta might be more useful than what we say. They certainly shouldn’t blindly follow people requests 1:1. Some of the best “early access” developers were able to take a feedback and fix the problem in ways you wouldn’t expect. It’s up to us to express our feelings and thought on the game, and for guys in Obsidian to sift through it and decide what is constuctive feedback, what is a good idea, what asks for a different game all together and to identify what really is a problem.

I can’t wait for the PoE3, hundreds years into the future when we will have six shooters.

This. That's the whole point of power progression, if you wan't scaled content, you might as well just remove leveling altogether, as the effects are the same. The power curve alone doesn't matter, what matters is the power curve relative to the monster power, and if that is a curve as well, then you might just as well flatten out the monster power and adjust the character power curve accordingly. This is just a mathematical fact: scaling monsters doesn't achieve anything. Sure, that’s why I don’t like scaling. Having kobots become just as powerful as you isn’t very fun as it negates your raise in power. At the same time I find it problematic if halfway through combat becomes a snooze fest, except one or two “epic” fights. You get to the finale to face your super-duper god infused enemy and than you kill him within seconds, not even using your full potential, because this legendary enemy was ready to be defeated 5 lvls ago, is weak as well.

Many things I disagree with but I will give you that: PoE attributes only mostly combat. Overall, PoE systems seem to support a very seperate combat/exploration/interaction design with different “aspects” of you character interacting with one of those branches, but rarely with multiple. That is a flaw of the design making those branches of gameplay feel more seperate. Probably comes from following IE games design which barely utilised your character beyond combat (with exception of Torment using stats in conversations and Icewind Dale 2). PoE expands on that design rather than remaking it.

Where did this 450 hit come from? I can't see it in combat log. Flames of Devotion were supposed to do 60DMG according to combat log.

Ambitious, not foolish. An idea that your choice of attributes should change the way your class plays rather than making it unplayable is a good one. If picking a class forces you to choose certain attributes, than there is no point of an attribute system as class already defined it. Later D&D edition made the system better, but frankly the whole thing is extremely convoluted. Never played PnP D&D but as much as I love IE games and NWN2 the system doesn't really translated well into real time cRPG. Searching for new way of doing things (even if it creates new problems) is the only way forward I can think of.

Because players like to have a well rounded party? Because seeing failure messages is demotivating in a game? Because players want to properly roleplay such popular archetypes as rogue or silvertongue? Right now we can't have either. Either you pick some skills you want and make your whole party invest only into them to pass all the difficult checks, or spread out thin and fail all of them. So basically, if you want to have a proper rogue, your whole party have to work for said rogue when it comes to skills, without investing into any skills that may be more appropriate for their class. and you can do both things. Its been a while since I played BG but even though rogues got exclusive access to pickpocket, move silently, walk in shadows, find&disarm traps, openlocs, you wouldn't be able to be good in all of those. So you create a rogue and choose utility rogue (mechanics, sligh of hand, stealth) and boom, you have your rogue. Focuse more on one of those three depending what you want to be super good at. Silvertongue - dyplomacy + maybe insight? Boom. Maybe because I am playing with unavailable options off, but without super specializing (every character usualy picks 3 skills, 2 at least) but I am passing bunch of stat checks. Usually they are around 3points, with extreme ones going up to 6 or 7 with party assist. Seems reasonable. ... and why would we made these arbitrary changes to perfectly functional system?

Why to have skill point at all, if we were to pass all the checks on all the skills? You pick two or three per character and focus on them. None of these are mandatory, but rather open new paths, just like high diplomacy or metaphysics skill. Tying skills point just to inteligence seems like a terrible idea, as int is already a strong stat. Trying them to stats seem bad anyway. The way of getting ahead is already there, and its done via character backgrounds.

Sorry but won’t happen. It is still very much IE style game - combat is very much a focus and stats like intelligence or perception are still crucial for combat. There is no “skill based” way to play as it was in Fallout1&2. In fact, Deadfire even made a special effort to separate “interaction skills” with “utility skills” to not have a clash between gameplay and role play. Skills points are fine as they are, though as person who gravitates toward “skill based” characters in other types of RPGs as well, I understand the frustration. For Deadfire it works as it is, though.

Fair enough. Post apocalyptic setting often present people settlements as tribal, therefore similarities in structure and society. However, this is colonisation era tech, so no automated weaponary. Every weapon needs to be manually reloaded. I am sure you can buy blundrebuss somewhere. In PoE2 we have access to same guns, + granades, but weapons have unique modals giving them a bit more character.

As we haven’t seen crafting system yet, it’s very much a speculation, but I think it would be cool if one could craft customised grimoires. Those wouldn’t be cheap to make possibly requiring high level alchemy and a copy of each scroll spell you want to integrate + cost would increase with amount and lvls of spells you would want to include. More of a late game optimisation idea for wizards, rather than early game “make ideal grimoire” thing.