Sensuki

Nope, doing so would mean re-writing the entire UI code in Unity 4.6 UI instead of NGUI, and all without access to the Unity GUI editor. Years of work, no one is going to do it.

NGUI (the UI package used for the game) uses bitmap fonts and has a crappy scaling algorithm. I don't think that this issue will ever be fixed for Pillars of Eternity. If they migrate to Unity 5 or Unreal 4, then the problem likely will not appear in the sequel.

Casting that spell is no different from auto-attacking with a Morningstar however, only in that it is an active ability and for the most part consumes a per-rest resource. If you want to interrupt an enemy action - knock them prone instead, much more effective.

I think because there really wasn't anything else they could use to spread across six attributes since at the time they were not planning to have any defenses or action speed governed by the attributes. I remember a time when Might (then Strength) governed Health and Inventory slots. Interrupt and Concentration were added because people did not receive the original layout of attributes very well. If Interrupt and Concentration were dropped from the Attributes, I don't think it would make that much (if any) difference to what people picked, now that they have Action Speed and Deflection (when at the time, they did not). Not saying they should do that or that it would be better, though. Just that it would not affect the majority of players.

Written in October, 2014. The most important part of that statement IMO is "although the interrupt mechanic isn't complicated in theory, the task of evaluating how helpful any given Interrupt or Concentration score is in combat is very difficult". There's your problem right there. It's very hard to gauge how helpful interrupt is, have fun coming up with a scientific method to try and measure the efficacy of it In the future, I think a simpler interrupt system would be better for this reason (and I in fact preferred the way it was in BG/IWD). Systemfans and Buildfans may disagree.

People who do this on the Bethesda forums get banned. You're not allowed to post negative things about a Bethesda game on the Bethesda forums. Sound like a nice place?

Swing and a miss there, mate. You can control AI targeting in Pillars of Edernity exactly the same as you can in the IE games through movement and positioning. Engagement only punishes the instances where your characters are engaged. You put more emphasis on controlling the targeting before characters enter melee, and since many enemies prioritize targets by their DR, you can manipulate it through changing armors. Tried and failed to do what exactly? I've been a poster on this forum since the day the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter launched. On Something Awful, anyone can pay money to give someone an avatar and a tag. Previously a user named Furism bought me a photo of the Flagellation of Christ coupled with some rough latin words "hater of fun" or something like that. I got my current avatar and tag because of my criticism of Pillars of Eternity after the game launched, someone paid money to give it to me. I could pay money to remove it if I wanted to, but I don't care - it's funny to think that someone was triggered so hard that they spent $10 usd to do that to me (twice) and there are multiple people who posted that they thought it was unjust (it was nerd rage, nothing more). I do not forum jump, I have posted on all three forums since 2012. My Codex cuck tag is for (quote, paraphrase - DarkUnderlord) making a post stating I had permission from "The Management" to do something I didn't have permission to do. It doesn't have anything to do with my opinions on Pillars of Eternity. Infinitron thinks it's poetical though. You will also find that most people who are good at games think about games from a "how something works" perspective. If you know what causes enemy AI to do certain things, why should you not take advantage of it? In Josh Sawyer's most recent podcast interview he talked about the AI for Hitman: Blood Money and said that because the AI is very consistent, he can do all sorts of fun things in the game that give it a lot of replayability. By your definition, he would be "exploiting enemy AI" as well. Yet he thinks that it's awesome and fun and helps make Blood Money one of his favourite games ... In DotA2, enemy AI is deterministic and behaves a certain way, and you can do various things to manipulate what the computer AI does, whether it's pulling creeps, not auto-attacking, auto-attacking and pulling waves a certain way - it's part of the gameplay. Just as manipulating enemy targeting in any game is part of the gameplay. You could also say it's a part of player skill. In your post here from this thread, you talk about enemy AI: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/82874-disengaging-a-tank-is-so-simple/?view=findpost&p=1744944 AI Targeting / Aggro is not damage-based in the Infinity Engine games or Pillars of Edernity, it is handled differently. What you are doing in your statement here where you 'hold aggro' is manipulating enemy AI targeting because you know how it works. It is exactly the same as what I do, so don't you think you're being a bit hypocritical here? I doubt that. One thing I have noticed is that my posting strikes a nerve with quite a few people, such as yourself, and if anything it's reassurance that I'm doing something right . Despite the fact that my views anger some people, there are quite a number of people that agree with what I say. You only started targeting my posts because you got pissed off that I called you out for being an **** to Gairnulf, and ever since you've been going on an anti-sensuki rampage. I must admit it's fun to inspire such reactions from people

No no, people who simply recruit a new NPC when one dies. There are people that do that. I do it in BG1 sometimes haha, especially with Khalid

My bad, I meant role-playing "true death", some people get a new character when one dies.

Well I think the IE games gave you a choice in how you handled death - you could reload, you could role-play it or you could use the available resurrection resources (or a mix of both) - there's nothing wrong with that/you don't have to make players conform to the "one true way of playing".

I do reload if a character goes down because to me that is poor performance, and in the Infinity Engine games, characters died when they go down. I prefer those mechanics to the pissant mechanics that Pillars of Eternity has in place of it that gives people a massive amount of room for error, and thus I still play by them. Save scumming implies that you reload to get an optimal dice roll on a check/luck your way through something, reloading to simply do something better/different is not save scumming. Do you ever see me doing that in any of my videos ? I doubt it. There are a few instances in BG1 where I openly admit I save scum - and those are all for pickpocketing. There isn't really anything worth pickpocketing in BG2.

That's because it is literally terrible. You're not alone friend.

What ideas? Your argument would be less stupid (but no less untrue) if you actually had some idea of what you're talking about.

So if over up to 18 years of playing a game where reactions to actions become like muscle memory then that nullifies decision making to the point where it's no longer fun ? What about driving a car? Now that you no longer have to stress over managing what you should be paying attention to at which particular time - speed, rear vision mirrors, the road, the gears ... does that making driving no longer fun? What you seem to be saying is that because actions in the Infinity Engine games have become second nature, you no longer find them enjoyable but because you don't exactly know the optimal solution to combat problems in Pillars of Eternity, you are finding that enjoyable. That is exactly what I was saying the other week where the game is more fun when you don't know the perfect response to every action. You've also mentioned that you don't consider yourself to be that great at the game IIRC (and there's nothing wrong with that, and good on you for being able to admit it). When I played Pillars of Eternity retail, I had been playing the beta for 7 months. The time of discovery had long past. Well, I suppose they're not *THAT* different from BG but IMO Mages in BG have better protection from normal damage - Mirror Image, Invisibility/Dimension Door and Protection from Normal Missiles make them tougher than any Pillars of Eternity Wizard. BG2 ... completely different ball game. To be honest I understand why people might prefer Pillars of Eternity combat to Baldur's Gate 1 combat especially if your penchant is strategy and preparation. BG has the simplest form of IE combat. What I am saying is that despite the fact that PE combat requires strategy and preparation I don't think it's very tactical or reactive, and it has a high player input across the board that does not correspond to an increase in decision making or problem solving by the player, which is the opposite of fun for me.

I have no idea what you're talking about here lol, you're just making stuff up.

You are in error, let's unwrap your selective quoting. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83171-white-march-part-2-officially-announced-coming-january/?p=1750506 The part you omitted was the part where I re-iterated what I said in the first quote. Find me a quote where I say that Pillars of Eternity should be more like Baldur's Gate. I only recall saying that Pillars of Eternity is not like Baldur's Gate, you seem to agree with that as well. You're talking about stuff that you have no idea about either. I would tell you go to read some old forum threads from the beta but you're not interested in anything other than hilarious white knighting. Yes. Exactly. The player actually has to process the information, realize they have to make a decision and perform an action in reaction to something the enemy does. It's great. Magic Missile is a per-rest spell. You only have a certain number of casts per day. Particularly at very low levels you don't have many spell casts per day and if you don't create a Mage, you can't actually get a Mage NPC that can learn Magic Missile until you pick up Edwin or Dynaheir, because IIRC Xzar can't learn it, but he can use the scrolls. You may also choose to play without a Mage. They're not a necessary party member in BG1. I don't actually use Magic Missile to counter Mirror Image because I think that's overkill (most of the time) but even still, it is a spell that illicits a reaction from the player. The spells of the same nature in Pillars of Eternity illicit NO reaction from the player. Who cares about Arcane Veil or any of those similar spells? You just go LOLSUP and enemy Mages die straight away to whatever offensive abilities you use on them. It's pathetic. Stuns, Stuck, Paralyze and other durations in Pillars of Eternity are usually of a somewhat short duration, for balance reasons. If you get paralyzed for 3-4 seconds, big deal. A ghoul or a ghast holding your primary damage dealer (who is often also your 'tanking character') in a BG1 is a bigger deal than any of the similar effects in Pillars of Eternity. The only characters that have a disable in BG1 are spellcasters and those spells have a per-rest limit, there is opportunity cost to use of those spells, and you need to have them memorized. In Pillars, most classes have disables, so one character getting held/paralyzed or whatever in the frontline is almost never a big deal as you're pounding the enemy lines with a stack of crowd control anyway. I recall there being maybe two instances in what I played of the vanilla game where a character getting disabled required a specific response to that particular affliction, one of those was in Od Nua where you are set upon by multiple groups of those Kobold-thingies. Forget their name and they have those champions that paralyze on hit. Are you trying to say that the times when one of your characters in Pillars of Eternity get confused/charmed and score disengagement attacks on your party members next to them milliseconds later as soon as they move a single pixel on the map is good design? I know what I would do if my friend was trying to attack me but the effect would wear off soon, I would run away. It is actually the most natural response. Your problem seems to be that the effect does not end when combat ends or you kill the caster like it does in Pillars of Eternity, another thing that makes the game easier. It involves the player actively realizing they need to respond to a dilemma and take the appropriate action. Such decision making is the very core of decision making in real-time combat, and it's easiest to eschew those decisions from the player with 'hard counter' situations. The Infinity Engine games actually have more decision making involved when using spells such as Free Action, or whatever. Should you cast the spell before combat, or wait to see if you actually need it? I actually like pre-buffing. I don't agree with the removal of it in Pillars of Eternity but it's also not something I care too much about as it really only affects strategical gameplay, of which the game already has enough stacking of. Unfortunately it's less tactical and a lot less reactive. I don't believe I do. Video speaks for itself. Most of the time when I pause it is so I can perform an action with as little loss of game time as possible, I rarely pause to think. I make most of my decisions very quickly. That fight is using the Harder Belhifet mod which makes him immune to more things and have a higher magic resistance. He can hit multiple enemies at once and inflicts poison on hit. The fight requires reaction to his damage, targeting and afflictions, among other things. In contrast, in something like a dragon fight in Pillars of Eternity (say, Cail the Silent) I just stood where I was and dealt damage and disables, and won. It was not very reactive. I also did not use Slicken or Warding Seal. Cant EDIT: Don't call each other names please.

Beta testers complained about spiders unlimited casts of their binding web. Not about the accuracy IIRC.

I think this honestly depends on what topic you are talking about. While you may not mention any names, I often lump the IE games together when discussing combat mechanics because the bread and butter of each BG and IWD game is the same (I disregard PS:T when talking about combat). Baldur's Gate has the most primitive form of combat out of the four titles I talk about, large in part due to the fact that there are a lot of trash encounters in every map that require not much more than an auto-attack. Combat in Baldur's Gate does not require too much player input and most characters are fairly passive. The combat in BG is reactive though when you come up against things like Poison, Hold, Charm/Confusion, general damage, enemy spell casting, certain spell effects and things like that. You must remove poison. Being held is usually VERY bad and either requires a significant tactical reaction or a dispell. You must heal yourself in and out of combat. You can disrupt enemy spells if you attack them and deal damage, spells like Mirror Image require you to focus fire the caster to be able to hit them. In contrast, you ignore the vast majority of afflictions in Pillars of Eternity because they are either not worth worrying about or despite being bad, you can't actually remove the effect. On PotD you have more inclination to deal with afflictions because you're facing enemies with 50% stat boosts but that is still poor design IMO. Rarely do you reactively heal in combat and you can't dispell anything. You can suspend the effects of spells, but at least on Hard difficulty or lower, the instances where this is necessary are very few. I find that the vast majority of enemy actions are inconsequential as long as you optimally use every per-encounter active ability at your disposal in encounters, don't suffer disengagement attacks and control enemy targeting. Pillars combat is most similar to IWD2 in overall feel, large in part due to the encounter design in that game where you usually face larger numbers of mundane enemies the majority of the time, and at least in my experience, most 'boss battles' just required mostly straight damage. It still feels quite different because Pillars combat involves a lot of pre-encounter setup and then high amounts of player input performing active abilities. IWD2 doesn't require much if any pre-encounter setup, but it does require in combat management of positioning, movement and targeting like all the IE games do. The inability to really do this in Pillars completely changes the gameplay feel where instead of actively responding to enemy actions in combat you mostly just spam your active abilities inconsequentially, if anything it loosely reminds me of Dragon Age Origins despite the fact that the control scheme for both games is radically different. I honestly don't think that Pillars of Eternity is very similar to Baldur's Gate 1. The structure of the way the player moves through the game reminds me more of the Icewind Dale games with a little bit more freedom. This is actually something I expected as Obsidian's games that I have played have all had fairly stringent progression through the game. Chapter 2 of the game felt a bit more like a smaller BG2 chapter 2 but less well executed/with less locations to visit. There really isn't much in the game that reminds me of BG1, it's more a mix of the IWD games, BG2 and NWN2 Obsidian. The most BG1 the game gets is the area Magran's Fork.

Speaking of this, Josh just touched on this in an interview. http://www.ragequit.gr/specials/item/josh-sawyer-obsidian-interview-ragequit

I dunno, I think efficacy does play a part in whether a character is likable or not, but it's a different likable to "I like this character's personality" and it's more "I use this person in my party because they're useful".

Imoen is the best Thief in BG1 though, she has the best stats

Oh we did help test combat difficulty but it was only relevant to the encounters in the beta. Some encounters were modified based on feedback, and creatures in the beta were tuned due to feedback but it was only relevant to creatures that appeared in the beta (which was not many). Not really. The dialogue responses regarding this give you two options - you want to get Imoen back or you just want to find Irenicus. One of the chapter screens does explicitly mention finding Imoen though, but throughout dialogue you are pretty consistently (if not outright consistently) given the option to choose what your reason is out of those two. I didn't think so. A thing happens to you and you see ghost people on the first wilderness area, you have the same 'dream' play every time you rest and when you get fatigued the screen goes blurry. The apparent 'compulsion' to follow the story thread is a blatant rip off of the NWN2: MotB spirit eater mechanic (which is not surprising given Eric Fenstermaker, but a little disappointing) but with the gameplay affecting stuff removed. You have about zero reason to care about the antagonist for at least half of the game, and the gameplay only provides benefits for being the watcher/awakened combo - which is the exact opposite of what probably should happen. The game tells you that you need to cure yourself but aside from the say-so of one Madman who you meet at the end of Chapter 1, there is little evidence AND it is not reinforced by the gameplay - particularly because the Soul detective stuff is super useful and fun.

Sure, I just don't know whether the combat would be much better (more tactical/reactive), or whether I would enjoy it.

As long as the game isn't designed around story mode as the default then I don't really see the problem. Moreover I really don't see why it would be based around story mode. Story mode seems to be about making combat very easy (perhaps even trivial) in order to allow a player who either doesn't enjoy the combat or finds it too difficult to experience the story. As such story mode doesn't need to be particularly well balanced for play: if in doubt err on the side of easier and you're good. It makes a lot more sense to balance the game around normal and/or hard mode then scale from there. Add to that the fact that PoE is supposed to be a spiritual successor of the IE games and you've got a substantial portion PoE2's existing potential market being fans who want a game that isn't too easy. Unless Obsidian are incredibly confident they can gain enough new customers to at least offset any loss of existing customers they'd be foolish to make the change you suggest. As previously stated the inclusion of Story Mode does not bother me. One of the reasons I'm skeptical about difficulty is apparently Obsidian don't have too many people on the staff that can play the game on Hard or PotD. Originally the game was going to actually be balanced for Hard, but they ended up changing that to Normal instead (unfortunately IMO) - which I suppose makes sense because if you don't have many people that can beat encounters on Hard then well you have a small testing pool. I'm more concerned about whether combat is fun to play, rather than whether it is difficult. BG2 gives the player less choice in how they proceed through the story and it might not be very original or very complex, but the story, plot and player motivation are all pretty darn tight. I think the chapter interludes [where you witness an event that your characters are not privvy to] make a BIG difference there, and also the dream sequences. There is constant reinforcement as to why you are following the story. One thing I think makes a difference is the widespread availability of combat videos for Pillars of Eternity. A lot of people played the IE games in an age where information was not so widespread and simple things like how to control enemy AI targeting and whatnot are skills that the majority of players probably don't have. I would be interested in knowing what you didn't like about the IE combat or why you think Pillars combat is better.

Depends on what your definition of quality is, or what counts as an increase in quality or where the increase of quality arises from - I've already stated which areas I think will be focused on. A larger fanbase is good for Obsidian, but not good for the people who enjoyed Infinity Engine combat, IMO. Once again, positive for Obsidian, not necessarily a positive thing for some groups of players. Particularly people who enjoyed the Infinity Engine combat.