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Althernai

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Everything posted by Althernai

  1. That sounds glorious! Actually, it sounds... strangely familiar . The Sword Coast Legends game sounds interesting. I don't think I'll pre-order it, but I might give it a try when it comes out.
  2. Nor do they generate big budgets. The largest video game Kickstarters (PoE, Torment: Numenera, Might No. 9., etc). have all made on the order of $4M which is much less than the budget of a modern AAA game. The one example of a crowdfunded game with an AAA budget that I can think of is Star Citizen, but its model is relatively unique and not easily replicated by other games.
  3. There is nothing wrong with it in principle, but large budgets tend to come with strings attached which tend to limit the options of developers no matter how passionate they are.
  4. Finished Broken Age yesterday. It's a cute game, although some of the puzzles in the second half were beyond me and I had to look things up online. The ending doesn't make much sense though. I'm either going to replay Pillars of Eternity (probably with a Barbarian this time) or try Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition (I'd have done it already, but it's kind of expensive for a slightly revised remake of a 17 year old game).
  5. Nice documentary. I particularly liked the creation of the music for the trailer -- to my ear, the trailer sounded professionally made.
  6. Wait a little longer and try exiting and re-entering the area. I don't remember the threshold time, but it should be fine once the area is in daylight (remember, it's a 27 hour day so 9 o'clock is not quite what it means in our world). You should be able to enter the water at several points where the wooden planks you are walking on slope downwards.
  7. Since boss fights are pretty much the only fights in this game that have any difficulty for somebody who has learned the rules, that would make a long list of spells basically worthless. It would also make the fights a lot less interesting as your only meaningful tactic is brute force.
  8. Wait till you find what Confusion and Domination do... The original version of Gaze of the Adragan was indeed very powerful (it was like a spell that somehow snuck in from BG2 and casters in PoE are generally much weaker) so I understand why it was nerfed. However, it sounds like you are fundamentally against status effects in general and I don't agree with you. The combat would not be very interesting if the only way to defeat the most challenging enemies was brute force.
  9. The base duration is now 10 seconds rather than 20 seconds. If you just want to make enemies unable to act and easy to hit, Paralysis has exactly the same impact and is at a much lower level.
  10. The patch notes are incomplete. It's not just the damage bonus that has been cut in half, it's also the duration.
  11. It got severely nerfed in 1.05. You're probably better off using the Druid version now (Embrace of the Earth Talon or something of the sort; it's 5th level).
  12. OK, but by that definition, PoE does have an "aggro system" -- it's just nothing like the one used by most MMOs or games with combat based on MMOs such as Dragon Age: Origins. Enemies prioritize targets in a fairly rational way (except if they can't get to them in which case they're not very smart, but ranged enemies are OK) and there do exists abilities and spells which force the enemies to engage a tank. They're not called taunting, but the effect is the same.
  13. There is going to be at least one expansion. It was promised as part of the Kickstarter and many people already paid for it so they have to do it (particularly since the original game sold pretty well). I agree with much of what you say and I'm neutral towards most of the rest, but there is one thing that I really have to object to: The AI in PoE is far from great and the Engagement mechanics could have also been better. However, this is still orders of magnitude better than the concept of aggro which literally means that the AI is deliberately programmed to do the stupidest thing possible. Have you ever even considered attacking the most armored and defended enemies while squishy damage-dealers attack you and squishy healers restore the durable critters you're attacking? This is literally the opposite of how anything even marginally intelligent would act. Even children playing games like these quickly learn to take out the squishy enemies first. Why cripple the AI like that?
  14. You don't need Petrify, although it's certainly the easiest way. Most parties do need some sort of status effect -- Paralyze, Confusion, Prone... it doesn't really matter which one as long as you keep it from using that breath against you. The dragon is basically a one-trick pony.
  15. You don't need to be level 12, but it certainly helps if you're going to finish the final level the hard way. That battle is definitely the hardest in the game bar none... but it's optional. If you're willing to make a... sacrifice, the quest can be done without it. The sword parts are hidden throughout the 15 levels -- a character with high mechanics is useful.
  16. I wanted to see what people's opinions of the various game components created as Kickstarter rewards or stretch goals were. I don't mean things like the Almanac or documentary, but stuff that appears within the actual game. They're still listed on the original Kickstarter page. Here are mine: Backer rewards: $20+: Kickstarter achievement, item and pet. Pets are cosmetic in PoE, but I think this pet was well done (Eder and Sagani have amusing interactions with it). The item was OK: it's slightly useful without actually being powerful. The achievement is great for measuring the fraction of Steam players who bought the game after the Kickstarter, but there's a thread where some people are upset because they can't get it (weird). $100+: Name in credits. A nice way to reward people without actually impacting anyone. $500+: A memorial stone. It sounded harmless, but these would work better in a game like BG2 (which routinely broke the fourth wall) or if they carefully vetted to be appropriate to the setting. And of course there was the infamous poem controversy... maybe it's better not to offer such things in future Kickstarters. $1000+: Design an NPC. This would have been fine if there were 5 of them and not 100+ and if they were not so obviously extraneous. $1000+: Design a high level item. I can't tell which items were from backers and which were not so I think this worked out well. $3000+: Design a portrait. Again, the backer stuff doesn't stand out so this is fine. $5000+: Design an inn. I thought the inns in this game were pretty good as far as fantasy RPG inns go. This is the best-implemented of the backer rewards. $5000+: Design a party-of-six encounter. I guess these were used for some of the bounties? Once again, I couldn't tell the developer-made ones from the custom ones so this was a good reward. Stretch goals: $1.4M and $1.8M: New race, class and companion. I think the number of these is pretty reasonable in the finished game so these were worthwhile. Not very controversial. $1.6M: Mac and Linux support, more story. Again, relatively non-controversial. $2.0M: Player house. Not bad, but not great. Once you repair it, the design and art for it is quite nice. However, it suffers from being rather far away from almost everything, the resting bonuses aren't worthwhile relative to the inns and it doesn't feel alive (a house that size would probably have some servants). $2.2M: New region and faction plus French, German and Spanish translations. Also non-controversial. $2.3M: Expert, Trial of Iron and PoTD modes plus Godlike race. I haven't tried the modes yet and I doubt that I will do it -- I did the solo + Insane + difficulty mods thing in BG2, but I don't have that much time these days and PoE does not inspire such dedication. However, they're nice for people who are still into that sort of thing. The Godlike are a good concept and Pallegina is an interesting NPC. Ironically, the main problem with them is that so many of the backer NPCs are of this race. $2.4M: Crafting and Enchanting. These features are decent -- again, good, but not great. $2.5M and 2.7M: Barbarian and Cipher, then Paladin and Chanter. The mechanics and balance of the game as whole are debatable, but the classes themselves are a welcome addition. $2.6M: Adventurer's Hall with full party creation. I don't see the point of playing this kind of game without the companions that have personalities, but a lot of people like it and it probably didn't take much work given that the building was there for different reasons. On the other hand, it makes any attempt of balancing a non-solo run impossible since you can't simultaneously make it challenging for those who use the pre-made companions and for those who run six min-maxed characters from classes with synergies. $3.0M: Stronghold. I think it was OK and doesn't quite deserve the level of criticism that it got in some threads, but yeah, it could've been a lot better. It has the same problems as the house, but scaled up: there's basically nobody there, with the exception of the initial stuff (i.e. Maerwald and the Master Below quest), the quests and events associated with it are not very interesting and not very well connected and in general the place feels like it didn't get the final level of polish and detail. Would it have been that difficult to add a few Builder NPCs and the like? $3.5M: Big City 2 (presumably Twin Elms). It's not bad, but it's clearly not of the same order as Defiance Bay. $4.0M: Enhance the whole game, live instrumentation and developer commentary. The music is good so that worked out well. I haven't heard the commentary yet, but I'm going to enable it on my next playthrough. The Endless Paths. The idea here was 1 dungeon level for every 5k backers. With ~77k backers, this works out to 15 levels which they technically implemented, but honestly, this would have been much better off as a 7 or even 5 level dungeon. The puzzles and dialog are spread too thin, there are way too many plot-less encounters (doubly not fun because of the XP mechanics) and much of it does not feel anything like the great IE dungeons (e.g. Watcher's Keep).
  17. I've seen this before and it appears to be limited to these specific archers in the Skaen temple and only happens when they use their special abilities. Still rather annoying though.
  18. The limit is not on a per-encounter basis, it's on a per-spell basis. Clerics and Druids get all of their spells on leveling up while Wizards only get a few per level for free and the rest must be transcribed from other grimoires. When you first play the game, choosing the right spells is hard because the documentation is lousy (e.g. nowhere does it say which spells are cast with zero recovery and this is far from the only critical omission). If you chose spells which are not very useful, you need to wait until you find a grimoire that has the ones you want (or use the pure cheese that is creating a Wizard at the adventure hall purely for the sake of copying his spells) and pay the substantial costs to copy them. Of course, once you know exactly what you are doing, you realize that, just as with the other classes, there are very few spells which are worth casting in most situations and you can just pick those, but Wizards are a much less newbie-friendly class. EDIT: I forgot to mention: I rather like the mechanic of spells becoming per-encounter. It kicks in just as the gameplay is becoming rather stale and changes things up a bit. It's just that combining it with the already very strange buffing mechanics results in the latter more or less coming around full circle.
  19. Perhaps not Vital Essense (although you could if you think that the Wizard is likely to get hurt), but certainly Eldritch Aim (+15 to Accuracy) and Merciless Gaze (+15 to Crit chance). During my Wizard playthrough, I didn't actually do this except in boss battles as I thought the buffs were worthless precisely because the first seconds are critical and the buffs are not worth the time. However, after somebody pointed out on the forums just how quicky the buffs were cast, I tested it and I was impressed. Give it a try -- if you pause quickly enough, it's literally something like half a second per buff.
  20. Given all of the improvements to buffs in patch 1.05, I decided to think about having Aloth use them in my next playthrough and this led me to an insight about the irony of buffs in PoE. If you've played the Infinity Engine games, the PoE buff mechanics were one of the biggest differences. In the IE games, the buffs lasted a long time so you would generally cast them after rest and even if you did not, definitely before any sort of serious battle. They were pretty powerful too (almost universally more powerful than their PoE counterparts) so the decision of whether to use them or not was a pretty easy one. At first glance, the PoE buffs look completely different: they don't last very long and you can't even cast them outside of combat. However, it turns out that many of them can be cast almost instantaneously and without the usual "recovery" (i.e. you can rattle off a bunch of them in a couple of seconds even in plate armor). If you think about it, it pretty much has to be this way -- PoE combat is really fast so in any other case, they would be completely and utterly worthless (as I first thought they were). Finally, consider the end-game where 1st and 2nd level spells become per-encounter rather than per-rest. In that scenario, there is absolutely no reason not to cast the better 1st and 2nd level buffs literally every non-trivial fight. I thought this was very ironic and more than a little funny: in an effort to get away from the system where casting the same buffs after every rest was a no-brainer, PoE has arrived at a system where casting the same buffs in every encounter is a no-brainer.
  21. This is a bit of a spoiler, but... Not if you want the solo achievement. A party with 6 player created characters is potentially a lot more deadly than anything you can construct with the companions who have personalities.
  22. Steam and GOG use different philosophies when it comes to patching. It's true that Steam patches come out a day or two earlier, but this is because they do a straight-up replacement of all affected files which means that patches are rather large. GOG actually packages the patches so you only download the differences. For example, Patch 1.03 of PoE was around 10 times smaller on GOG than on Steam. Also, unless you disable updates, Steam will automatically update your game whereas with GOG you have the choice to update or not as you see fit, but you need to download the update yourself. Therefore, it is not exactly the same, but nor is Steam unequivocally superior. They make different tradeoffs.
  23. This is a dangerous misconception. The people who pre-order are making a legal purchase: if for some reason the game never comes out (which is very unlikely since games don't become available for pre-order until they are nearly finished), they are entitled to get their money back. The backers are taking all of the risks of an investor without the possibility of larger rewards that investors get when a venture does better than expected. If the developer spends all of the money and realizes that the product still cannot be finished, the backers have no recourse. In cases like PoE, where the project is successfully delivered (albeit later than initially advertised), Kickstarter backing is indeed equivalent to a very long term pre-order, but you cannot know this when you back a project and in fact Kickstarter goes to considerable lengths to inform would-be backers that it is not a store and that projects can and do fail.
  24. Better AI would certainly be good, but this is much easier said than done. Hopefully in the expansion or at least in PoE 2. Escape is already possible now and generally not that hard -- just throw some summons to the wolves and run.
  25. The achievement is actually quite useful: it allows somebody without access to sales statistics to estimate the number of PoE sales to non-backers as well as the number of sales in general. For example, if you trust SteamSpy's estimate of 347k sales on Steam, the fact that 14.8% have that achievement means that only 51.4k of those sales are backers and the other 296k are normal sales. If you don't trust SteamSpy, you can make your own estimate since you know the number of backers (and, if you really want, can even estimate the number of copies per backer).
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