Wormerine

Ok, there is so much wrong with this post: arbitrary political view of the "there should not be bad builds" and "every build is equal" Since when game design means politics? They want to give you more freedom of roleplaying and opening the way of building your character. The problem with D&D is that there is a good way of building character and a bad way. Class define what will you do, and certain classes require certain stats. Therefore, no you don't have a choice. You cant build a wizard with low intelligence. If there is a one good way of building character and all other are bad, then why to have a choice at all? Josh mentioned he isn't a fan of class based system at all, and maybe it is why. In something like fallout&fallout2, you build character and then decide what he will become. In here you choose a class and then give him stats which allow him to do, what he does best. To open up roleplaying possibilities they decided spread importance of stats to be similar for every class. Yes, it does create new problems. No, it is not a political statement. pathetic ideas that revolve around "communicating with the players to see what they want" and "working together to come up ideas" and "respecting every point of view as equals" have resulted in a steady stream of extremely uninspired and uninspiring games. I guess you never worked in creative field. There is no weakness in listening to feedback. Yes, you need to respect your artistic vision and keep in sight a goal you want to achieve. However, listening to feedback is not the same as betraying your artistic vision. No matter if you are a film director, game developer, musician, painter you always create for someone, for audience. It might be a narrow audience, but it is still someone. You always serve. If you want to see what masterpieces you get when you shut down all criticism and do what you believe is good just look up "games" by Digital Homocide Studios. Believe me, there is no thing more difficult than throwing out an idea you are attatched to, or one you worked on for a long time.

Great post. I certainly don't think that your complains are invalid, and there are quite with which I agree with. I did have a hard time making my way through PoE even though I enjoyed it every time I played it. I felt it was underdeveloped. The thing is, my complains for the game are usual for the first game in the series and bear some signes of a game funded by kickstarter. My biggest complain was that the game felt underdeveloped. Quest weren't as elaborate and reactive as I expected from Obsidian RPG. It was a big game, but shallow - lots of areas were farily empty with no significant importance. The game seemed big for big sake. It was also fairly conservative, while I always like about Obsidian that they did try new and cool things, rather than following set formula. I was disappointed with the scripted interactions (story books segments.) When I saw them for the first time, I imagined a creative and versitile way they could be used. They never reached their potential. For the most part they were interactions you could simply win by having one of the one-use item like hook and rope or crawbar. The story is the interesting thing. I wasn't a big fan of it as it was going on. I wasn't engaged by it. It was clever. Using old and tired tropes and reimagining in an interisting way. However, I got very Dragon Age vibe from it. Being dark, broody and vague without having the point. Now, the ending is what changed it for me. It is a shame, you didn't push through, as I strongly believe that the ending pays off for a lot of the problems the game had. Storylines reveal common themes, the small sidequests bring you the knowledge of the world to understand games main point and it all very nicely ties together. From dull but solid became one of the most thought provoking games I played in a while. Now, the good ending doesn't invalit previous concerns. A lot of story telling is done by plain writing and I believe the problem is in lack of reactivity/weak quest design. You talk a lot, and learn a lot but rarely influence or are part of anything important. Even when you do (finale of second act) it is all the smoke screen, invalidating choices you made just after you made them. It is all bad, but it also very smells like the first game in the series. Building engine, figuring world, themes and mechanics and not enough time to flesh out what was built. Here is me hoping that sequel will fix those problems. Also stronghold. It was weak, and felt like kickstarter promise fulfilled rather than sensible addition to the game. and so did Caed Nua dungeon. It was a lengthy and visually cool but lacked interesting content. Enemies you fought were just enemies you would fight outside, with no twist. Later stages felt especially added for the sake of floor length rather than meaningful contet. Adra dragon was cool though. I found expansions to be the best part of the game, with more interesting quests, better designed locals, and better told story. Scripted interactions were much better utilized. If Deadfire will be on the level of White March I will be happy with it, and I still hope they will do better!

And that is why you carry a limited amount of camping supplies. You can replenish all your spells, all your health and remove all your injuries up to two times per dungeon without finding more, or backtracking to buy more. This way you are encouraged to play smart without roadblocking your way. It is there to make you engage with the game mechanics without breaking your balls whenever you make bad decision. I really don't get your reasoning. That way you can complain on anything. Why do we have combat at all when we reload? I imagine devs decided that just killing off your favourite companions and your character and forcing you to restart is not something they want to do. Allowing you to fall constantly in battle and have no effect what so ever is not something they want either. I don't think you can do much else without redesigning entire genre. It is not darkest dungeon where all your adventurers are expandable.

Ok, I can't agree that injury + endurance/health system has no consequnce. It is a soft consequnce - we are not playing iron-man xcom campaign. We are playing a story driven game with a very finite amount of written companions. Naturally loosing them so easily means loosing an important chunk of the game. I don't mind reloading, if I fail. However, loosing a combat because my main character had a bad rool on a spell and died pretty much instantly (not so much in PoE but VERY common in BG) was stupid. Same with loosing a companion. The benefit of injuries in PoE: you played carelessly, you will start the next battle with disadvantage. It might be an unimportant debuff (like a debuff to constitution for my mage) or it might lower and important stat. Failure had different stages, and different punishments. Full party wipe was the most extreme, but if I got careless and got my DPS and spellcaster down, they would get weaker. That would be especially noticable, if a character was "revived" multiple times in one battle. Everytime, he would come back weaker. I don't like Tyranny injury system, because I get punished without really knowing what I could do to avoid it. Getting a health debuff in the first encouter even though I wipe them out completely was annoying.

I disagree. I found IE games to encourage a lot of quickloading. Having a perma death, and one healthpool means you can dies within seconds. That means either adding option to resurect (which is a pain - either making death pointless, or annoying if you have to backtrack.) For me PoE found a sweet spot. Being knocked out mattered (injury upon being knocked out,) but even if a companion or two fell during the combat I could still continue on, but with a consequence of having an injury penalty, which I could remove but spending camping supplies. Also, endurance meant that in longer engagements you could just heal your tanks' endurance infinitely, as they would run out of health eventually. Overall, I thought it was an elegant solution. Tyranny mechanic though felt weird to me. When I got injury in PoE I knew why, and I knew how I could have avoided it. In Tyranny you would just get them. It felt very artificial for me, and a bit annoying. I just don't see an advantage of using Tyranny's injury system.

I like injuries the way they were implimented into PoE1 - penelty for being kocked out. This way being knocked out had consequences but still didn't make a big deal out of it. I thought that health/indurence system was the best fix to the problem Infinity Style games had for a while. In IE games being knocked out usually required a quickload (or resurect which was just annoying.) On they other hand games like KOTOR has no consequnces of being kocked out. PoE found a sweet middle ground for me. I would suggest better explaning the mechanics in the intro of PoE2 rather than changing the system too much (not a fan of injury system of Tyranny.)

Yeah, witcher is more marketable. All things said and done... would Obsidian even want to go AAA? That would mean working in much much bigger team, tailoring game to appeal to much bigger audience, spending obscene amount of money on marketing, making deals with publishers.

If it was historical medieval RPG Josh is dreaming about than sure. I prefer my fantasy to be fantasy. What would you do if you would play in Italian and spoke to Vailian? Have it in chinese? )

Illigal immigrants?

Yes, all single player story driven games, like any other stories end. That is the nature of things. You can return to them (in case of games even have slightly different experience!), but when all is said and done, yeah games end. I don't see how adding an arena would make anyone play PoE "again and again with the same zeal." Geez, I play Starcraft and Overwatch and I don't play those with the same zeal anymore. Things end, or get boring. The strength of PoE is writing, setting, stories. Those can't be generated. I don't believe adding multiplayer arena would expand life of the game. I doubt there would be enough people caring to show their "superiority" in a competitively unbalanced game to keep it going.

I might get referenced, maybe put you at odds with one NPC, but I doubt you will get even one dedicated quest. I mean that would be awesome. But I doubt it will make things much different for you.

Wonderful idea, which would take a lot of time to implement and which I would never ever use. :-D

I love Witcher series to death... I just don't get comparison. PoE from definition is not mainstream. It is not a hipster thing, it is just trying to be a thing which will never sell THAT well. Why? Presentation. Let me first explain what I want from PoE and its continuation. Good story of course but most of all - reactivity. Being able to pick your race, background. Making choice and see consequences happen. When the budget comes I am not interested in shinier graphics or more voiceacting or moving to full 3D... those things can be nice, but I want the world and character I can interact in more meaningful ways. The problem with moving mainstream is that you have to look shiny. Have full voiceacting. More voiceacting means less dialogue choice, less reactivity. I would rather have plain text, than stilted animation and chopped dilivery of bioware games. You do spectacle or you do depth. Witcher is an odd RPG series as it allows you to play not only as one class but as one specific character. It is good in allowing you to roleplay Geralt, but it is limiting. My take on the situation is this: different games get better thanks to different things. Throwing more money into presentation won't make your RPG good. Isometric, text heavy structure does the job. The interactions make the game work. Does it HAVE to be isometric? No, as long as the game gets deeper not shallower. However, as bioware showed, putting more money into game creates the need to explain why things you do don't matter rather than showing why they do.

Arena mod can't hurt anybody. Moreover I would pay for it. All they have to do is character transition like in BG2 and some instance for 2+ players. There could be no pause system - in this case intelligent AI scripts could be handy (like in DA:O) Now here is the problem - why would you want to funds and manpower away from single player game to add a shallow multiplayer component? I really don't believe in tacked on modes - whenever it is throwout singleplayer campaign in multiplayer game, a broken net code mess added to singleplayer strategy (XCOM why why why), or just awkward "you can join your friend as coop partner in a single player designed game" thing. Now it wouldn't be bad if those things could just appear. Choice is always welcome, as long as I can't avoid it. But they take a lot of work and money. From what I understand writing a working mutiplayer component for a game takes a lot of time. And PoE engine has not been build for it. As for me - I like my games specialized. Do one thing and do it well. PoE is single player party based RPG and it is good at that. Divinity is great coop RPG. Both games are designed to be what they are. PoE wouldn't be better if someone played it with me, and Divinity doesn't work for me singleplayer.

Well, I didn't mean to suggest that languages should be a skill you can choose. Rather it could be tied to your background - so one language + commontongue per character. The idea is, that the language would come in play only in certain situations. In the example I gave in my first post: you aproach two Vailian merchants talking. You don't know language, so you don't understand them. They notice you, and you start conversation with you in commontongue. However, if you do know the language, you do pass the skill check, and can understand what they are talking about. Something you can reference when talking to them, or what might be helpful to you in some way (quest related, item related, just flavour text) etc. Naturally it would be silly, if longer conversations would be written in made up language with a translation in the tooltip.

I did like how PoE handled resting. I thought it made sense, was thematically appropriate, and well... worked. There is one good thing, which comes from rests - there is an element of resource management. I do remember sleep scumming when I played BG back in the day. With pillars I found balance quite well done. I never run out of supplies (even though I never played below hard/PotD), however limitation on rests allowed did force me to think more carefully about what I am doing. Not overcasting if I don't need to. I liked it. It wasn't an issue, but it did encourage thinking, befoe activating limited use abilities. More involved mechanic might be welcome, but not necessary needed in my humble opinion.

Here is a crazy idea I wanted to share: I remember in one of the twitch-streams Josh mentioning that the annotaion system from Tyranny is being moved to PoE2: Deadfire. It will provide not only lore but also translation of foreign languages. Now I assume it is nothing big, just couple words, or phrases here and there. BUT WHAT IF: There are many factions from different regions. They speak different languages. WHAT IF you could only understand languages you know as a character - for example in PoE1 I played as an Orlan from Old Vailia. That would mean my character understands Vailian. The game would provide translation of Valian phrases but not Aedyrian or language of native Deadfire tribes. On the other hand, I might have Aloth in a party and he might act as a translatior for the Aedyrian. It might give your character and party a better sense of belonging and origin. Now, WHAT IF the foreign conversations weren't just small phrases. WHAT IF when walking up to a couple of Vailians talking you would be able to overhear a bit of their conversation. It would be a gibberish if you don't know the language, but you would learn something more, if you do. Some flavour text, get insight into their motivations, extra details about quest etc. Now if that would be implemented into quest design it could get interesting - Opening new ways, hints about possible ways to resolve situations, extra loot stashes. What is more, as a character you might get drawn to the faction which speaks your native language, as your interactions with them would be more... complete so to speak. I think it would be a nice and fluid way of connecting character with his background and the world around him/her. Naturally, the idea isn't simple at all, as it would require dedicated writing and quest design. But hey, just throwing it out there.

Yeah, that is right, I am not a fan of cooldown based combat (Dragon Age, Tyranny.) Not that the cooldowns are bad themselves. Just the way they were implimented in DA and Tyranny was poor. It took a lot of choice out of the combat. Infinity Engine combat was based on choice - how to buff, how to debuff. It is not perfect and a more intuitive combat system would be appreciated. In Tyranny there is no choice. You have abilities which you spam whenever they are available. It is a mindless system and one which gets dull after a longer period of time. I like Tyranny and KOTOR as they were short RPGs and didn't have time to get bored with combat (and were very storydriven). DA:O on the other hand? oh gosh, most of the game was combat with an unengaging system. So yeah, some of the things they mention do worry me though I will wait with my judgement until the game is out. PoE combat can be improved, and I hope it is what they are doing.