Wormerine

That is also how interaction with the world is. When I think of systemic games I think of Fallout1&2 and Arcanum. If doors are locked you can lockpick them. Or pickpocket/kill owner and take his key. Or use a disguise. Or talk your way through. Or blood the doors with an explosive. Deadfire moved slightly toward this direction, but it is very picky when you can use your skills. if I were a betting man I would bet that BG3 will be turn based. But we have no confirmation one way or another.

Well, under 2K to be precise for OW1. Third Person View and Mod support is something that was stated to be not supported for OW1 due to financial limitations, with hope to expand the scope of the game for the potential sequel. Modders can’t be given access to tools Obs is using, and creating mod support is an undertaking which seems unlikely. I don’t know how much a committed modded can do. According to Long War folk, quite a bit.

If PoE were to move to single character control system it would fundamentally change what kind of game it is. If Fallout1&2 you controlled only one character. PoE is group tactics game and those simply don’t work well without top down view. FPS fallout has still potential to be a fallout game, but PoE - not so. its not like top down games don’t sell. XCOMs were doing well. divinities did well. Disco Elysium seems to be doing. PoE1 did well. For some reason PoE2 didn’t.

I have managed to upgrade to lvl 35 all science weapons and my plasmanrifle (the last one costed me a fortune). Once your each science 100 paying 200 for an upgrade isn't much as long as you sell extra weapons, armor and mods.

Always target the weakest link. Good try.

Ah! Finally beat that one not so long ago. I must say, I didn't enjoy this one much. Hopefully DS3 will be better.

Beat Disco Elysium and Outer Worlds in a short time, one after another. Will be seriously slowing down now, before Phoenix Point releases in December. Meantime I finally installed Hollow Knight. Didnt' spend too much time with it, but I am liking it more then I expected. Metroidvania isn't always my thing, but I am really enjoying this one. It learned some good lessons from Dark Souls and has couple neat ideas of its own. And an excellent art style.

I don't know if you really want the game to be hard - there just isn't enough to it. I can see it become frustrating very easily if difficulty is tuned too high. The combat doesn't have enough depth to become interesting on harder settings.

That sounds like a really silly idea. I liked Mario Galaxy, in an RPG, running around a small planet sounds silly.

What @Boeroer said is very likely. Another thing might be, that Josh might simply not be telling all the truth. PoE3 hasn't been announced, and no individual will break the news before official announcement was made. Remember how Swen denied working on Baldur's Gate3, while someone pointed a finger at him? Turns out he wasn't truthful.

After completing Forgotten Sanctum you can ask Llengrath about joining the Circle, and she sais that you proved yourself and should would endorse you. So yes, maybe, sometime in the future.

I am curious as to what parts are deemed to be so challenging by OP. At level 20 outside megabosses, he shouldn't encounter much resistance, especialy on normal. If he refers to megabosses - then sure. Those are encounters that only people most interested in challenge should take on - they are purely optional. DLC certainly raise the difficulty as well, though not to a degree were one would need to specialise. Though considering how undertuned most encounters in the base game were on hard and POTD, I can assume one can sleepwalk through them on normal. DLCs do raise things to the level that one needs to pay attention to what is happening. I remember other people complaining about it as well, as some players never learned to deal with concentration and armor. One specific complaint sounds like it may refer to dragon fight in Beast of Winter - though most of the time I wasn't able to interupt her either, and it was fine. The difference between BG and Deadfire was that BG was really easy to cheese. That is how I beat the game in my first attempts when I was a teen. Deadfire still has cheese, though it is far harder to figure it out.

:-) no worries. I just have been following BG3 closely and so far I haven’t seen any details, only speculation.

Source requested.

After wrapping up my first playthrough of Outer Worlds I wanted to share my thoughts, and hopes for the sequel. Overall, I quite liked it. I was prepared for a smaller RPG, and that’s what I got. It reminded me a lot of earlier Bioware titles, like KOTOR or Jade Empire. Maps were more open then I was expecting, so that was nice surprise. Emerald Vale and Monarch were easily m favorite parts of the game. I liked the story and tone, character were well realized with personality and clear motivations. I didn’t fall in love with any of the companions, but I found them all alright. I was happy to see them responding to other NPCs in conversations. I found choices and consequences to my actions a bit too… safe? At no point did I have a doubt regarding what I should do, and in most conflicts there seemed to be 3rd, “everyone gets along!”, option. I was struggling to think in terms what my character would do, but I felt I was encourage to “solve” problem for an optimal outcome. The overwhelmingly positive ending slides, did feel disingenuous. That said, while Outer Worlds was good, I don’t think it will stay with me for long. And the sequel will need to show something interesting to make me excited for it. Combat was fine. I think it is improvement over Fallout: NV, in terms of controls. I think basics framework is good, but it would need some kind of decision making to make things engaging. As it is pretty much every encounter felt the same to me. I never found a benefit to targeting various body parts. Aiming at head would usually do the job. I never found the game to use combat for story telling – most fights felt same in terms of difficulty and none of them force me to change tactics(?). Or rather none of them forced to adapt any tactics. Just click on heads. I played on hard difficulty BTW. I felt that content Byzantium-forward was the weakest. There was not much to do in this major city and I felt like most of the quest I had left required me to hop back and forth between planets. That meant a lot of loading screens and running, just to kill a thing, or talk to a person. That was the part I really felt the negative impact of the budget quest design. Overall, I felt quests rarely took an interesting turn. It might be me knowing the dance a bit too well by now, but in this game I could predict plot-twists a bit too often. What’s worse, due to simple quest design, I wasn’t too involved in playing through individual quests. I never felt like I am interacting with the world using skills of my character. My single favorite moment in the game was when I bribed someone to let me through, and then used my newly acquired “pickpocket” skills to steal money back. Unfortunately, this consistency seemed to be an exception to the rule. This lack of ability to take charge of how the quest can progress meant a rather passive approach to the game from my part, following objectives and waiting for the game to tell me I have a choice to make, rather than looking for ways to progress which would make sense to my character. In character creation, I liked how every 20 points we got a perk from raising the skill. In Skyrim I felt like I was getting worse, rather than better, as with each level skills there were fewer skills and weapons that I could use effectively. Those skill “perks” allow communicating progress, even if other skills fall behind. I think it could be nice, if in future games we have a choice of a skill perk – a bit more way to customize my character. As it is, I don’t expect my next playthrough to feel much different than the one I just finished. I wasn’t impressed by actual perks and flaws – I couldn’t tell you which ones I picked. None of them seemed to leave an impression. I thought that lockpicking and hacking was a wasted opportunity. They somewhat reminded me of the way original Deus Ex handles those features – you could always pick any lock and hack any computer, however, level of your skill compared to level of the object you lockpick/hack would decide how much resources it would take to lockpick/hack said object. It was limiting characters without specialization in those skills to still access containers/door/computers but they were more limited by resources. In OW, you get so many items that resource management is a non issue. Locking containers behind binary skill check isn’t very interesting, especially as those doors and containers only consisted of more stuff I didn’t need. Speaking of resources – it’s way too forgiving. Too much ammo, too much hacking equipment, too many mods, too much money. At the end I was rolling with thousands of ammo and over a hundred lockpicks. They are everywhere. Literally: boxes with ammo lying in every encounter room, in every corner of the street. Exploring stopped being exciting – I would just find more of what I have in abundance. If I could make a request for the sequel, it would be adding a bit of Immersive Sim into the design. I think mechanics work fine – stealth, disguise, pickpocketing, lockpicking, talking – but I would like to see more consistent world and those being used as a way to interact with the world. It is somewhat disappointing to see such a standard experience, when compared to Fallout1&2, Arcanum, Bloodlines. What I loved about those games, was the feeling of interacting consistent world. I would rather break into someone’s backroom, than open yet another container with ammo, lying in the corner of the street. Items should be a more valuable resource. Now I am aware, that OW aims to be more mainstream. After all, it’s not like Troika closed down due to overwhelming popularity. But I think that for the most part mechanics are there. I “just” wish for a more sophisticated quest and area design and more consistent systemic approach to interact with. I would also prefer if the next game had a different protagonist. I think it worked really well for Fallout2 and most of older Obsidian sequels. Conflict in OW has been solved, and issues teased for the sequel can easily be tackled by a new hero. Isn’t it easier to come up with new story hook, rather than try to drag the old hero into another adventure?

Why? It's a woke roleplaying game. What if you want to be a cheating space bastard?

So the answer could be that people wanted a D&D game, rather then PoE2? Which would make sense but would be unfortunate.

@dava4444 I would rather if those fantasies remained in your private OW session, and weren’t to appear in mine. Sounds a bit too much like ME3 romance between Joker and EDI. What started as a cute and clever idea in ME2, turned into embarrassing fanfic ship-of-love farse. I certainly wouldn’t want to see “romance with a computer” forced upon players. It is roleplaying game, and if you find it would fit for your captain to get physically and emotionally attached to his ship, then fine, but there is no one defined “Captain”. This is something I will touch on more, in another thread once I gather my thoughts, but my hope is that with OW2 we will get Fallout2 route: current generation will pass and we will play a new character. slides at to the end are rather final. Nothing about this game screams like it needs a direct sequel.

I have written more extensively about in another thread. It is not about simply having/not having VO. It is about writing and presenting PCs in certain way. Mass Effect/Witcher’s/Gothic didn’t just add VO - their characters are prewritten and predefined characters which you nudge into certain direction but can’t change who they are. A bug chunk of roleplaying is done for you. If that is what you enjoy, it’s fine, I all games that I listed. But this is different kind of game, and it would be better if it stayed that way as Obsidian is great in doing those, and we don’t get many alternatives these days.

Aaaaand new Jericho

To me the bigger roadblock that tinkering through multiple levels isn't viable until you reach 80 and then 100 science. I didn't "rush" science, therefore at the time of writing OP they were heavily behind other weapons. Indeed, they did become viable, though after a bit of fooling around with them, I came back to basic weapons. One shooting enemies with plasma rifles is simply quicker. The shocking granade thingy was useful in the end game fight though.

I think they might/might not like it. It depends what they exactly didn't they like.

I will give you that. It did expect to receive a sidequest when I talked to ADA about her modifications. Considering Obsidian ikes to leave hooks in the game for later DLC it is not outside bounds of possibility.

And gets corrected by Ada if I remember well. either way it doesn’t matter. You roleplay the way you want to roleplay. If “Her” is your jam, then go for it.

We can't have romances, because romances take time and manpower, and companions are on basic side as it is. ADA isn't a conscious being. That's been stated multiple times. She emulates personality but she is a computer. Previous captain developed her personality so it's a bit as if you were to program Ciri on how she interacts with you. She just continues her behaviour. If you want to roleplay a character who takes it as a serious relationship, then knock yourself out.