[Color Palette and saturation]

Holy **** someone actually responded to that. I googled 'the outer world color' and it brought back the same post.

I've played all the damn games from the 'Golden Era' etc like I'm sure you all have, and it takes some real mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the recent spate of neon saturated games is some sort of coincidence with the license to print money that is Fortnite. So much so it's going to establish for Epic a storefront, much as Valve did with HL2, and set them up for a decade.

I just can't imagine what sort of immense foolishness, or doll playing fantasy, you'd require to believe that. Or perhaps I can, and I know what a waste of time responding to this garbage is.

The difference of course is that the Fornite art style is self-consistent and works in the world they've created. Every other game just takes their existing design (art deco in this case) and splashes neon everywhere. It's crazy and looks awful. Art deco plus fluorescence, good grief, the poor old art director must be chafing under the 'make it neon' directive they received.

You don't need to be a 'design expert' champ to open your bloody eyelids and look at it. Maybe you're colour blind and don't know it, I don't know. 

Ben, yes it has become almost a cliche now. Rage 2 was probably the funniest one with the purple mohawks in the desert.

Like everything it had a predecessor. Clearly I did not say Fortnite pioneered a brand new art style, I said every major dev studio feels pressured to imitate it's art style in order to appeal to some of the ~200 million people who have played it. The result is a mostly pretty Goddamned ugly mish mash of art styles.

 

[Color Palette and saturation]

It's a very poor design decision. Both in terms of the bright neon art style meshing well with the games themes, and in terms of the clearly stupid idea that imitating fortnite will somehow broaden their market for this type of game.

 

They would have been better of doing some different and interesting, and letting that sell it.

[Critique nr. two. Short dungeons.]

Obsidian has become institutionally incompetent when they've got to the point that making a BG2 clone without dungeons somehow seems a good idea.

 

It's absurd, and the studio has lost it's core competence.

[Selected Character highlight]

Not to be a knob or anything, but I don't think threads where the last post was from over two years ago really need to be posted in. The simple fact is most people who originally posted won't be around anymore, and beyond that two years ago Pillars was quite radically different to what it's like today (there was no White March, the classes went through several iterations of changes, etc.), so you're not going to get the discussion you're looking for.

 

It's better if you have something to talk about to make a new thread about it so we can have a discussion about it, rather than post in a thread that has become largely irrelevant due to time. I'm not trying to mini-mod here or anything like that, just pointing out that you're going to have to be lucky to get discussion in threads from when the game was released, so it would be more worth your time to make a new topic.

 

 

Sigh... the issue is unchanged since 2 years ago, so the old thread is the relevant one. I can understand that perhaps you'd prefer to not have it raised. It doesn't matter if the original posters are gone, new ones will replace them if there is an interest.

 

I was amazed when I realised this game had terrible pathing issues... then I sort of laughed and realised it is some sort of ultimate meta-homage to the Infinity engine games! 20 years later!

 

Someone with a bit of knowledge could do an interesting opinion piece on the pathing. It must be an issue of having specialised knowledge to design an algorithm for a small party, as the computing power has increased by decades. It is probably very easy to make believable pathing AI for large crowds using simple rules, but becomes non-trivial as you approach the limiting case of two people.

 

It's got some UI quirks that I'm not even sure are in BG2, eg. selected targets do not update when the game is paused. I never had any trouble knowing who I had highlighted, but now the selection highlight is just a hard to make out lighter green.  and my God, the still prominent role of the combat log... 

 

I think Obsidian were sort of desperately trying to keep their studio afloat when they pitched the first title. They were in a bit of trouble. Hopefully they can leverage it and make some further improvements now that they are on a stronger footing.

 

Something like the inventory system, I'm sure people complained about it, but it is an undoubted improvement if selling gear is to be a mechanic. You can make these changes without altering the signature real time with pause clustef*** mechanic.

 

The more they draw the players attention to the main action on screen, the more they will widen their audience. I'm sure that hasn't escaped their attention with the console releases.

 

Tyranny indicated that they're aware of these issues, as they fixed a lot of them. Fiddling Rebalancing in patches is relatively painless, but making UI changes perhaps requires a diversion of resources. I backed post Fig, so I haven't tried the sequel beta.

 

Anyway, good games.

[Character Damage Bubble]

Perhaps this was a better post to bump as it specifies the issue more clearly (to you, dear editor)

 

In gameplay terms, reading the combat log was not a strong point of BG, and having a health bar divided into 20% dot increments renders it useless for feedback.

[[UI] Health bars]

The real difficulty is that they are bubbles and not bars, so no there is no indication of incoming damage.

 

Floating damage received numbers would be just as suitable. It must have got lost once the dev team and beta testers became familiar with the game. It no sense whatsoever to have floating numbers for damage outgoing, health received - and leave out damage received.

 

You end up spending 90% of your time staring at the combat log and character portraits. Old school, but not very gratifying.

 

They fixed the inventory system for similar reasons. Perhaps they'll provide an option in the sequel for the bars they used on the console release.

 

Anyway, I've found all of 5 posts related to this, so I guess no one is fussed. But heck, these are the guys who had text scaling all nailed down, then didn't implement a decent solution for Tyranny. Go figure.

 

*squints at combat log*