Drowsy Emperor

Well that explains it. In that case, it's an acceptable 'feature' to ensure that PoE gets funded.

I'm still playing PoE, with a tenth level party. I guess I'm about 60% in, or a little more. I won't sing the game's praises here, because I assume that everyone has played it. It is easily one of the best RPG's since the Infinity engine games. Since I'm a negative nancy, I'll point out the things that are not so good: 1: Endless Paths dungeon. I'm at the 13th level, and while I'm enjoying dungeon crawling, the design is a bit monothematic (one level for the kobolds, one for the undead etc.), very combat heavy and very light on story. It feels like the simpler DnD modules, and, apart from the cool map, it could have been more complex and, well, more interesting. 2. The random soul reading. The pieces are not that good, and really serve no purpose other than as flavor, but since they're so disparate, they're more random and often pointless, rather than flavorful. 3. Low difficulty. I'm playing on Hard with Expert mode ticked. Even so, I can storm through at least 70% of encounters on auto-attack. But by far the biggest fault of the game as a whole, as well as a recurring Obsidian issue, is the lack of compelling content. Everything in the game is very good. The main story, side quests, characters and exploration. However, it lacks the spark of novelty and intrigue, the 'thing' that can set it apart and make it 'special'. Torment had its story and characters, Baldur's Gate 2 had a persistently great adventuring 'anything can happen' vibe and Icewind Dale 1 had the grandeur of its locations and music, a special kind of atmosphere. I don't know what it is. PoE is professionally done, through and through, polished to perfection.The interface in particular, with its popup tooltips is a remarkable achievement of displaying complex information in a simple way - I never grasped an RPG system quicker. But it still lacks a certain something, so far, that is particularly memorable - reminiscent of (but far superior to) Icewind Dale 2. You could even say the same thing about Baldur's Gate 1, if the sequel never appeared, and the series ended there - but that would be unfair, given that 19 years have passed since BG showed up and started the Infinity engine era. I will keep on playing, but I suspect there won't be radical changes of opinion up until the end. PS: Two thumbs up from me for the development team. You promised and you delivered.

Eventually we traded in the liches for bisexual minotaurs, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Aaaand, behind random door in a slum, meteor shower. /ragequit

That's what I enjoyed about Pillars the most I think. My biggest disappointment with BG2 was that I wasn't particularly fond of what later became the Bioware formula - its ditching of semi-open world for locations ties to quests and stories. Pillars just does what BG1 did, and in my opinion it does it quite a bit better. Not much of an achievement considering BG1's age, enough to make PoE my GOTY of 2015 tho. Don't forget that Might influence all damage and healing your character causes - it'll affect damage of directly damaging spells, healing strength of directly healing spells, but also damage caused by ranged weapons. Intellect 'only' makes abilities with time of effect last longer - making them more powerful in the process, yes. And some of the most powerful abilities Cipher has are duration-based, so it's still a tradeoff. Nonetheless, good thing to keep in mind. BGII had a semi-open world, it was just predominantly the Athkatla urban sprawl as opposed to wilderness. Of course, to make the city feel alive they it ate up a lot of the best quest content of the game. From the point of the developers I think it made sense at the time, as the story matured from a low-key DnD adventure to a high-power setting. Having high powered characters trudging through the meadows, and killing kobolds just wouldn't do. Also they could reuse the assets and focus on putting more story and quest content in the city, which was, on the whole, much more memorable than the wilderness of BG1. Anyway, I like both approaches, particularly since it's all part of a single,more or less continuous, narrative. If you look at it as a whole, you eventually get the best of everything.

I'm still playing PoE. I just got the stronghold. So far the story, quests and characters have been interesting, even if a bit on the mundane side. Regardless, the exploration is a lot of fun. It is really like Baldur's Gate 1 with some of the features of the sequel so far. I'm playing a cipher. So far he seems okay, it's possible that I just don't know how to build him well. If I want to use his abilities I need him to rack up the Focus points and the only way I found that to be viable is to give him a ranged weapon and initiate combat with the character (sneak attack crossbow bolt to the head). Otherwise I would hardly have the opportunity to use more than one or two spells per encounter. The problem is, if you favor the attributes that make his abilities better (Intelligence), he's far too squishy for close quarters combat, and if you make him a combat character, his abilities won't be as powerful, to say nothing of the fact that classes such as Fighter simply do it better. So I'm a bit confused as to how to play the class efficiently.

I don't dislike them, I was all for it, just advocating a different style, within the same type of 'comic' graphics - as in, not realistic. WoW and Torchlight is just one way of doing comic style graphics, even if it is tremendously successful.

I've finally gotten around to playing Pillars of Eternity. It reminds me so much of Baldur's Gate. So, needless to say, I'm enjoying it. One improvement for the future is definitely the color palette, and better solutions for rendering 3D objects in isometric view from larger distances. Environments have too many analogous colors. Characters tend to look like a jumble of details when you zoom out. That's the price of going for 'realism', which I don't think is easy to successfully combine with tiny models. I think the solution is to go for a stylized look from the outset. Just not the World of Warcraft/Torchlight/Orcs Must Die style because far too many games have used it. Don't get me wrong, PoE is pretty, but some of the imagery has a very pre-rendered environment look from the late 90's, which were, as a rule, drab. There has to be a more vibrant way of doing it.

Dunno, I wasn't around until yesterday. The proceeds are going to charity, so I guess that's how.

I found this through the rpgcodex. A book on CRPG's has recently been completed and published for free use: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/ However the download is currently not active because a publishing deal has been signed by the author. It looks to be a remarkable collection of almost all RPG's of note ever made. I

Sad really, it is becoming a practice that changes many things in the gameplay. 'Time saver'?...so the game is so bad you need to buy it and then pay some extra money to avoid playing it more than you should?! WOW!!! On the plus side, now I can rest easy, knowing that I'll be comfortably saving money for other games. Anybody playing the same Ubisoft game with a few spatters of new paint in 2018 has no respect for time as it is.

That does look intriguing. I played the first episode of Kentucky Route Zero, or the first and the second, I'm not sure at this point. I couldn't decide whether the game had substance or was 'faking depth' with mystifying plot threads and ideas that seemed to be going nowhere.

Playing Into the Breach, from the creators of FTL. So, in the days when video game development costs hundreds of millions of dollars, a team of two people makes two games in six years and both are smash hits of simplicity, playability and originality, while staying faithful to old genres and ideas. Are you watching video-game industry?

I long for the days when furry porn was confined to the darkest corners of the internet

Zor beat me to it but it's possibly the end of BioWare I don't doubt it will do decently well but who knows what EA is considering success Time to introduce 'Curse of EA' into high school physics textbooks, it's about as deterministic as Newton's laws at this point.

What the **** is this?

Couldn't get the damn thing to run. Crashes right after loading to start a new game. I briefly tried Cuphead. Remarkable game, its visual design and animation is among the best ever made. It doesn't hold my attention, but games rarely do these days. Subnautica runs poorly on my toaster but the premise and the beginning of the game are intriguing. After languishing in a dank corner of my hard-drive for ages, I started the "Torment that has nothing to do with that Torment", a.k.a Numenera. The introduction is still holding my attention, despite some unseemly signs of 'third world' development, such as character models that wouldn't look out of place in 2003.

Fond memories of being on a 2-Fort pub with a 35 killstreak; new player pops in with: "Nobody can get a 35 killstreak", and proceeds to vote me off the server. Good times.

They're quite similar. In the broadest sense, specifics can be rather different. That said Kotor 1 is much more playable as a game. I say that and I don't even like Star Wars. At all. Yet I played it 3 times. It doesn't have the floaty shooting, the driving sequences and the pacing is better. The locations tend to be much more believable because they weren't constrained by the tunnel like level design that was devised to make ME's pop shooter combat work. You just play it and enjoy the ride, even if much of it is on autopilot. Mass Effect has more bling, more cinematics - more everything, but the core "let's make a well designed fun game" is really noticeable in KOTOR whereas Mass Effect really requires you to buy into the story to suspend everything else (empty super streamlined locations, little diversity in character models and levels, clunky mechanics, endless "cinematic" dialogue etc. etc.). Its a great game to showcase but a rather mediocre one to actually play. ME2 polished up the story, pacing, some of the mechanics to give a good experience - but I still think the dialogue>tunnel>dialogue>tunnel>dialogue>tunnel structure of the game makes for an on the rails action game rather than good roleplaying.

Well... Terrain modifiers existed a long time before that, along with territory control system. Not sure about field upgrading. Not in that combination per se I suppose, but it never seemed like significant update considering it's essentially a streamlining of Blizzard's expansion model. All right, fair enough. Come on, Mass Effect slapped dialogue wheels on top of Generic Third Person Shooter, Dawn of War 2 actually seamlessly connected two genres that I could never see working together previously - and it was far from being a bad game, especially after refinements that Chaos Rising introduced. That's how you see it but the CoD crowd that wouldn't be caught dead with elves and dragons was successfully courted with galactic elves and space dragons because of it. I never enjoyed Mass Effect so I'm not about to defend it more than that. I fell the like the combat design was brainless and atrocious and was lukewarm on the story to the point that I uninstalled ME3 about 20 minutes into the game. I don't think DoW 2 was bad, but I don't think it was good either. The game was taxing to play for a scale that was tiny and unimpressive and felt like a step back in every way except graphics.

To be fair, Bioware hasn't really evolved ever since the release of KOTOR, they keep repeating the same formula ever since - whereas Relic has actually been actively experimenting with otherwise stale genre of RTS and say what you will, Company of Heroes was a stellar RTS experience with all the attention to detail Relic was famous for, and there's never been and probably never will be anything quite like Dawn of War 2 with its RTT/aRPG hybrid gameplay, regardless of how much do you personally do/do not enjoy it. It was really with THQ's financial issues since 2010 or so when Relic seemed to be reduced to a DLC churning machine, and I imagine that's also why many talented people left them. But aside from it being a stellar RTS, there wasn't really anything that interesting about the original DoW, whereas both Company of Heroes (to a lesser extent, granted) and Dawn of War II actually tried things that no other RTS games did before - which, to me, is Relic's main selling point. I'm also not entirely sure about RTS fans being wide eyed to hear about next Relic's project, considering they released 3 games before Dawn of War, one of which was a sequel that wasn't particularly well received to my knowledge What do you mean there wasn't anything interesting about the original DoW, it introduced the entire territory resource system, terrain modifiers, on field upgrades, squads, shift away from base building etc. that CoH replicated. CoH improved on the formula but the formula is wholly from DoW and credits to innovation go to that game. Anyway my phrasing is carefully worded. It says since the second expansion of DoW, which includes CoH and Dark Crusade which was definitly their last high point. DoW 2 experimented, but it was a case of: "the operation succeeded but the patient is no longer alive". I would say that both companies experimented but not radically so. Mass Effect switched gameplay to a different genre about as much as DoW 2 did for the original DoW. With varying degrees of success, but its been years since either produced a groundbreaking title.

Tbh, I got it free as a gift from a friend on Steam last year but your point still stands as I have bought other games based on appealing graphics/art styles. How do they go backwards? I don't understand how devs cause their games/franchises to devolve! Why try to change what the fans love so much??? Apparently it wasn't done by the core team. That aside, a company is just a name. The collection of people working there changes over time. Relic used to be a name that any RTS fan would wait wide eyed to hear about their new project. Now they're a WH40K mill that hasn't produced a good game since the second expansion of the first WH40K game. 11 years ago... IMO Bioware has lacked a fresh direction for years. They have an ingrained way of doing things that is outdated in many respects but works because their fan base was persistent enough to carry them through and the critics are kind because of their accumulated reputation (see average metacritic grade for the piece of **** that was DA2) but both of those wells have been slowly drying up. Also it helped that the competition was (and still often is) pathetic to nonexistent. If you wanted to play a high budget RPG it devolved into Bethesda (lol), Bioware and CDProjekt. If you wanted it to have a story as well you might as well rub the first one out, leaving you with a game every few years. Not much of a market. Bioware games are still mostly "good", aka passable, but that is damning with faint praise for a company that almost single handedly revolutionized the genre several times over. Its a normal process however. Even a world champion in any sport is only that for a while.

ME2 was one of the better looking games on release in some respects and that didn't stop you buying it then, no? IMO Andromeda never looked too pretty at any point. In fact, it looked decidedly dated (compared to heavy hitters like W3) all the way. But it was not graphics that made it look good or bad, it was that the spoiled gameplay looked boring and that seemingly transitioned to the final product.

Baldur's Gate 2 was made in less than 2 years. The irony of modern game development - down the same road as Hollywood in a fraction of the time.

Raise a glass for the company that brought us Baldur's Gate 2, because Bioware is dead. In terminal condition at least as of Dragon Age 2, the patient has finally kicked the bucket. Overdosed on the drug of mediocrity. Let's all take our hats off and have a moment of silence for our fallen friend.