Monte Carlo

I think the OP might be a fairly skilful troll. If he is, bravo.

Mind you, I pre-ordered the CoH2 collector's edition shortly before Sega bought Relic and THQ tanked. Man, we were royally shafted. Like, without lube. So atm I'm holding my counsel. Paradox don't seem to have really shown any sense of urgency in keeping customers in any sort of loop, though.

Games like PoE can talk above and beyond mainstream reviews. Seriously. If they couldn't, 77000 people wouldn't have pre-ordered the bloody thing. Metro reviewing PoE (reviewer will be twentysomething internee console lover) is like the National Enquirer doing a piece on foreign policy. Who gives a toss?

* shrugs * It's selling crazily well. Who cares?

The Metro is a free newspaper for commuters. It's a throwaway rag. The idea that anyone but the most casual of gamers would give it the scantest regard is laughable.

They put blizzards in Company of Heroes 2. Hold on, this is sort of relevant. Blizzards were designed to make battles more tactical - your pioneer units need to build bonfires to stop other units freezing to death. Air support doesn't work in blizzards. Your units movement is hobbled. In short, and on paper, they are a sound mechanic for making the battle more tactical and micro-intensive, stuff RTS players love. Guess what? A sizeable chunk of CoH2 players hate blizzards. For a lot of people they over-complicate or get in the way of the battle. Many players just camp by the nearest bonfire and have a truce until it's over. Unsupported armour rumbles about and hits mines / AT guns. Basically, great idea that smashed into reality and faltered. Now some folks love blizzards in CoH2. More power to their arm, but it's a competitive RTS and a lot of folks just check against winter maps in team games. The camping system, I submit, is similar in this game. A mechanism to stop excessive resting? Sure. But this feels onerous. Not fun. Punishing, even. It should be on a sliding scale of the number of rests you are allowed, and where, from punishing to E-Z mode. It's a single-player game, people. It just doesn't matter. Personally, I'd like three rest periods on hard with some zones likely to incur wandering monsters if you rest there. That's just me. Some people will prefer punishing iron man style zero rest, some rest on demand. That's all cool. It's a single player game. People need to relax about how other people interact with this game. It's their business, not yours.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There were no RPGs like Eternity from circa 2004 until now. Publishers weren't interested as they are interested in volume. I'm not blaming them, I'm simply saying they don't change. Admittedly, my experience is in books rather than games, but the Big Five are like bloated rabbits transfixed in the [digital] headlights, pumping out even more YA titles while the behemoth bears down on them. This argument makes no sense. You say they're against creativity, then bash them for not continuing to make games in what was once a well-established style/genre (isometric party-based RPG). I mean, man what? It seems more like what actually happened is that the "next generation" of these games - primarily BG3 and FO3, failed to happen, for complicated reasons, and NWN didn't spark imaginations as it might have, and this took the genre with it. I also kind of wonder if the massive revitalization of pen & paper D&D which happened with 3E helped drag people away. I would be MMORPGs were involved, too. I know people who were huge BG fans, who certainly turned into even bigger EQ fans. So yeah, pretty sure it's not "hatred of creativity" that killed this genre/style. Anyway, it's back now, and I doubt it's going anywhere. Try reading TFP.

And here we go. "How dare one company send another a gift!" joke [johk] noun 1. something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote, or a prankish act: He tells very funny jokes. She played a joke on him. 2. something that is amusing or ridiculous, especially because of being ludicrously inadequate or a sham; a thing, situation, or person laughed at rather than taken seriously; farce: Their pretense of generosity is a joke. An officer with no ability to command is a joke. 3. a matter that need not be taken very seriously; trifling matter: The loss was no joke. 4. something that does not present the expected challenge; something very easy: The test was a joke for the whole class. 5. practical joke. verb (used without object), joked, joking. 6. to speak or act in a playful or merry way: He was always joking with us. 7. to say something in fun or teasing rather than in earnest; be facetious: He didn't really mean it, he was only joking. verb (used with object), joked, joking. 8. to subject to jokes; make fun of; tease. 9. to obtain by joking: The comedian joked coins from the audience. Origin Latin 1660-1670 1660-70; < Latin jocus jest Related forms jokeless, adjective jokingly, adverb half-joking, adjective half-jokingly, adverb unjoking, adjective Synonyms 1. wisecrack, gag, jape, prank, quip, quirk, sally, raillery. Joke, jest refer to something said (or done) in sport, or to cause amusement. A joke is something said or done for the sake of exciting laughter; it may be raillery, a witty remark, or a prank or trick: to tell a joke. Jest, today a more formal word, nearly always refers to joking language and is more suggestive of scoffing or ridicule than is joke : to speak in jest. Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2015.

Yes, they could have. But as a business decision the physical distribution model also makes sense (for starters, it puts boosters under the Kickstarter). Maybe one day Obz will share some of their decision-making processes with us because they could have gone either way. They've been in this game a long time so I'm sure they made a carefully calculated decision, one that made the most sense from a profit perspective. Maybe a digital only 'Pillars' wouldn't, to their mind, be have impactive long-term as one with physical copies and merch.

I'm finding it hard, then again I'm playing on Hard. I think the completionist gene is strong in RPGers. I, OTOH, am happy to leave an encounter and come back later. That bloody bear, for starters. And the temple in the village, which drove me nuts.

Publishers publish and developers develop. An indie publishing model with physical goods would have made the whole enterprise a waste of time - it would simply cost too much. You choose the least worst publisher because there's never a perfect one. And they *always* get a healthy cut. It's just the way the business works. Paradox seemed a reasonable fit, and hindsight is a wondrous thing. Obsidian has never done this before. Not many studios like them have. So, as relative neophytes to indie development and distro and crowd-funding I'd say they'd done incredibly well. I'm impressed for one.

Given the industry works on quarterlies, week one stats are a drop in the ocean. The game will be financially successful. Success is magnetic and good things will come of it, perhaps from trad publishers too. Glass *way* over half-full.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There were no RPGs like Eternity from circa 2004 until now. Publishers weren't interested as they are interested in volume. I'm not blaming them, I'm simply saying they don't change. Admittedly, my experience is in books rather than games, but the Big Five are like bloated rabbits transfixed in the [digital] headlights, pumping out even more YA titles while the behemoth bears down on them.

What did you expect? It isn't Fallout 1.

@ EurhetemecDude I know what a homebrew is and I'm sorry if I don't automatically genuflect to professionals.

Dear Mister Sengira. 1. Of course we are interested in the game. This is the gnarliest lair of fans of said product. 2. You have two whole posts. Both are pimping your Twitch Channel. Not very classy, TBH. 3. I wish you every luck and thanks for supporting the game.

I'm still at the beginning of my PoE journey compared to many. What will make me reevaluate some of my views will be the viability of non-spellcaster parties in PoE versus BG2. A very, very valid criticism of BG2 is without high-level spellcasters you are toast in the late game (and, TBH, the mid-late game). Will PoE let you break that mold? Can six melee characters viably complete the game? Or are spellcasters mandatory in your party?

Amen brother, you speaketh much wisdom.

^ Ha ha ha ha !!!

Have already done that. I take my hat off to Obsidian's success.

^ We had a similar conversation here, where we imagined modular CRPGs with a base game plus DLC (before it was known as DLC). This was when IE games were officially dead and pre-NWN2 MotB. They were grim, grim days for (fantasy) CRPGs. But, yes, KS was the missing variable. KS rocks.

Nobody (and I repeat nobody) ever learned anything from adulation.

Eternity is fascinating from a publishing POV cuz of the crowd-funding element. Many of us posited the possibility of a cottage industry for CRPGs (a la Spiderweb) but with turbo-chargers as a result of new distribution models and development tools. But a full-on IE style game was always going to be a massive challenge because of the sheer quantity of content (especially hand-painted backgrounds, writing etc). So a perfect storm of (a) a big company like Obz and (b) the new models I described above collided. Obz always knew the appetite was there. But not big enough to turn on a big publisher. So they Kick-started and reaped the rewards of their audacity. I hope this is the start of a renaissance in lots of different genres. Am really looking forward to more Unity CRPGs plus maybe even some RTS games. It's all good.

He's a method actor. He'd need to actually move to Dyrwood and live as a priest for six months before even uttering a word. So I doubt it.

Has anyone made a portrait pack yet? I am one of those people who struggles to find one that fits (for example, Vailian male fighter-types... only two possibles).