Akka

TBH, this bug has been ubiquitous since the beginning, has been especially rampant on Xoti, and despite having been "looked at" for more than a year, it's still popping exactly as much as the day of release. In fact, I even checked if I didn't install the game with an old file (from GOG) because I am constantly pretty often such sort of glitches that were supposedly "looked at" or "fixed" for months and month. I'm pretty tolerant of buggy release, but FFS we're one whole year and three DLC later, at patch 4.0, and it's not acceptable anymore.

Josh says it is players feedback that made him re-examine AR/DR system in an attempt to make it less "mushy".Here are a few related links: - one - two - three - four Oh gawd... The whole accusation of "mushiness" doesn't make any sense to me - I mean that literally, I don't understand what it refers to. As for this reaction to the feedback, it's pretty, well, between /facepalm and depressing. It seems to, again, focus entirely on the mechanist aspect while ignoring the immersion/simulationist and not realizing that maybe these complaints weren't actually valid... The entire idea that all damage should be reduced the same is just idiotic, and a reason why I hate penetration... Small strikes SHOULD be much affected by armors, large strike SHOULD be less affected. That's logical, and that's precisely a mechanical difference allowing for variety instead of everything being the same, duh.

Not even the damage inflation, but the imbalance between damage inflation and DR inflation. Damage was going to inflate from higher level, more damaging spells after all, and weapon attack damage needed modifiers to keep up. There just weren't any ways to keep up on the DR side, and the few options were all flat +1 DR bonuses, never percentage bonuses - unlike damage bonuses, which were always percentage based. Replace that with percentage armor bonuses, and a variety of outside armor sources that at least smelled like the variety of offensive boosts, and you'd have a perfectly functional straight DR system. It is more difficult to tune and balance than their PoE2 system though. Mathematically, you're right. But as I said in my post, immersion/simulationist-wise it's just absurd to get to deal ten times more damage on a hit by piling up bonuses. It's more a sign that you can get to extremes which break the game (and such extremes should not be possible) than a sign that the fundamentals are broken. I DESPISE the penetration system. It's single-handedly the biggest reason which gave me a hard time to start the game, simply because it made the entire concept of "armor" nonsensical, incomprehensible and completely disjointed from the game world. I don't get this satisfaction of "well, now I'm shedding X points of each hit I take", because it's all about reaching a treshold and everything below that treshold simply doesn't exists. And it's not about blunting progressively the damage, but jumping from treshold to treshold until you get to the completely arbitrary "70 %/30 %/whatever" final step. It's intensely dissatisfying. I don't get why they broke the system, replacing a perfectly logical and immersive one with an absurd and obscure other, to keep the broken situations manageables, instead of actually repairing the broken situations. Gah.

Seems to me that the actual real problem was the damage inflation and not the flat DR. In fact, even from an immersive/simulationist point of view, being able to increases that much your base damage feels absurd. So instead of ruining a perfectly good, logical and immersive system, they should simply have toned down the damage bonus.

Still no answer about this ?

I hope they release it on GoG. I absolutely refuse to use Steam, and they already used GoG successfully for PoE, haven't they ? Well, anyway if it's on GoG, I'll buy it for sure, if it's not, I WON'T buy it for sure. Up to them to consider if there is enough people like me to release it on GoG or not. On the other hand, it's a game about exploring their dark side and serving an evil overlord, so sadly it tends to fit with a Steam-only release

Meh. I was glued to my screen by AP, despite several flaws that were EXTREMELY irritating. I found it to be a "flawed jewel", with lots of awesomeness tainted by lots of bad design desicision, but still a very enjoyable game. I ALSO was glued to my screen by ME2, I found that the bad parts blended in the background and were not that much annoying, I liked a lot the character interactions and the cinematic story. In the end, I liked AP and I liked even more ME2. AP was deeper and more complex, ME2 was more visceral and epic. ME2 is not the benchmark of bad RPG, despite what some would say, and it's far to be the worst choice for the "RPG of the year" title.

Though I think DAO was better graphically, I think the most important difference is more than anything in the animations. Animations can make or break a game. Even extremely dated graphics can look "all right" if the design is good and the animations compensate (case in point : World of Warcraft, which should look abysmally bad with its 3-or-so-polygons-models, but somehow manage to not be visually jarring (if you don't mind the comic book design of course).

Well, thanks for the advice. I applied this concept ("pretending there is no save"), and it manage to salvage the game (beat it a few minutes ago, hard with recruit background, specializes in stealth... the boss battles drove me purely insane, let me tell you...). I still wanted to strangle the design team half the time, but at least I could enjoy the good part of the game. But oh boy, oh the reviews are right : a jewel hidden in a huge pile of crap. This game badly need a patch of humongous size.

Let the player be adult and not quickload everytime something goes awry. If you're REALLY intent on forcing the hand of the player... Well, prevent to be able to save more than once every 5 minutes. Sure, if the player REALLY wants to, he'll wait five minutes between every obstacle, but I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of people won't bother with that and just follow the flow.

Well, my point is that the save system MAKE ME metagame. I don't metagame so much when I know I can save after a particularly tedious/hard part and not be forced to redo it later if I die before the "next point". I want to be able to play "naturally" and not feel pushed to rush to the next save point. And the problem is : no I just can't live with this idiotic save system. I tried. I banged my head against the wall. And I've put the game on the shelf for now. And I'm waiting for a patch/crack/cheat code/whatever that will allow me to play like I feel it and not endure the frustration of a stupid system. I may accept my mistakes. I can not accept "mistakes" caused by clunky interface/hard-drive loading lag and the like. In such case, I feel I have been cheated. If I miss a line of dialogue for whatever reason, I don't want to have to redo 10 mn of gaming session to be able to read what was said and I missed. I understand, respect and acclaim the idea of "making the player takes responsabilities". I just can't accept the "checkpoint" method - and I'm not convinced that it's truly a conscious design choice and not a simple case of lazyness. It's just bad design. Player should be able to save when they want and not be artificially constrained.

When you want to actually play the infiltrator, taking a LOT of time to avoid detection, even a short part can take a large amount of time. Especially if you wish to explore every corner of a place. Having to do it again because you died before reaching the "next checkpoint" means UNGODLY amount of irritation and annoyance. And not the "good irritation" of challenge, just the totally negative irritation of "bad design".

The problem is when the flawed mechanic is making the game irritating to play from the start. I really don't feel like dealing with an alarm which starts because the fugly controls of the hacking minigame for example (seriously, what's up with the mouse-controlled number serie ? It seems to randomly move on-screen on its own, without bothering too much about the actual mouse input I gives it). I HATE to have spent a good 10 minutes slowly bypassing/neutralizing guards, only to be discovered because of the sudden choppiness of the control, too. Add the insanely idiotic bug where you checkpoint has you standing right in front of a guard, meaning you're discovered before even being able to input any command to your character - I can't believe such an obvious bug could pass the QA department, I mean it happens on the VERY FIRST checkpoint on the VERY FIRST mission... - which means that if you want to have a fair go at the mission, you have to sit through all the previous briefing and introductory scene - and you've got a wallbanger. And more than anything : as I answered (with one year late...) to Sawyer, knowing that I can't save and that I'm liable to lose every progress since the last checkpoint, tends to creep up on me and push me to only care about "the next checkpoint", which puts MUCH more meta-gaming than simply being able to save/load whenever I want. I really, really, really LOATHE to feel constrained by this artificial funneling. If the point of removing quicksave and only allowing checkpoint was to prevent meta-gaming and allow a more natural flow of the game, it had UTTERLY failed and had the exact opposite effect. When you know you can lose the last 15 minutes of gameplay, you tend NOT to let if all flow naturaly, and just want to "validate" all what you've done before - hence the checkpoint-hopping, which is the very definition of meta-gaming.

God, sorry, no I feel particularly dumb about it as I tend to HATE digging up old thread. I even was careful to look at the date of the message I answered to check if it was old or recent. Saw the day, the month, and thought "hey, cool, it's barely few days old". And failed to look up the actual YEAR... /hide in shame My only excuse is the amount of irritation and frustration that the lack of quicksave have built in me. I basically abandonned playing after banging my head on the wall. Must have had some bad consequences on my brain.

The problem is, save point also ENCOURAGE much more irritating meta-gaming, as in "rushing toward the next save point without bothering to actually do something in-between, because after hacking a computer and disabling three guards, you really would be annoyed to get a nasty surprise while exploring and as such prefer to play safe". Seriously, save points are a wart on the face of gaming. My AP game has come full-stop because of the unability to save and precisely how "out of the game" it put me to be constantly more worried about "the next save point" than about what actually happens in the game. It also makes stealth a pain to play.