[What's the current state of high-reoslution text?]

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.

[What's the current state of high-reoslution text?]

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.

[Interrupts - do you use them?]

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.

[Interrupts - do you use them?]

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.

[Interrupts - do you use them?]

 

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.

[PoE sells 500K units]

But why, by Woedica's grace, do people who hate a game constantly post vitriol on forums who are by design intended for fans of the game?

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?

[A query on combat gameplay]

If anyone pays close enough attention, it becomes clear as to why you complain about certain things. eg, you hate disengagement in PoE because it means you can't exploit combat AI the way you did in BG.

 

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.

 

You tried and failed on Something Awful (over 1,00 posts there), you tried and failed on RPGCodex (over 8,000 posts there), so you reload your redundant postings here (over 9,000 posts on Obsidian). Goodness! SA gave you the "Autistic Aspergers" logo, and RPGCodex gave you the Cucker logo; you really should take a hint already. Some one-time good intention advice: stick to posting about games that you actually enjoy, because your attempts to ridicule games you dislike falls flat due to your inherent nature to inadvertently reveal your personal gaming tactics which end up being a hundred times worse than the thing you're trying to ridicule. Forum jumping won't help because you know... the Internet.

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

 

From my experience in RPG games, I simply refer to his as Aggro. Holding Aggro traditionally comes from doing enough damage to hold the mobs attention. Therefore, a good way to pull aggro away from your Tank is to either out-damage the Tank too quickly, or cast a powerful Heal spell (which is treated as out-damaging the Tank).

 

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?

 

Your attempts to ridicule games you dislike falls flat due to your inherent nature to inadvertently reveal your personal gaming tactics which end up being a hundred times worse than the thing you're trying to ridicule.

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

[A query on combat gameplay]

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

[A query on combat gameplay]

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

[A query on combat gameplay]

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".

[A query on combat gameplay]

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.

[Fampyrs, Engagement, and frustration]

Completely unrelated, I hate engagement. I absolutely hate it.

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

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

It's painfully clear that the real reason you don't enjoy the game is because the developers felt your ideas were bad.

What ideas?

 

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

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

At this point I have automated such processes to an extent that these effects might as well not be there. Most of the time there's nothing restricting my movement so it's not like I have to care about my positioning or even think about using these spells, I just use them, the only annoyance is that I can't hotkey them. You're right that the gameplay is reactive, but the reactivity is so narrow that I never have to come up with creative solutions to situations which arose, I just do what I always do and carry on. The more of Baldur's Gate I play the more I dislike the fact that there's a counter to every affliction as it just becomes a case of having all counters memorized and then applying correct counter to the correct affliction as opposed to improvising and playing around the afflictions, which is something Pillars forces you to do quite a bit.

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.

 

When I encountered a mage in Pillars, he became priority target and I used a spell/ability to knock him out of the combat. Not much different from how I handle them in BG. Pillars, however, forced a lot more reactionary behavior and improvisation out of me precisely due to engagements and afflictions which I can't just make go away.

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.

 

Edit: Simply put, I find the combat in Baldur's Gate objectively worse than combat in Pillars of Eternity. It makes me think a lot less about how you approach situations you find yourself in, vast majority of my characters can do next to nothing but autoattack during combat, there's no planning or preparation needed and I actually do only rest in inns and do my best to explore an entire map without resting each time I enter one (I believe I didn't succeed and needed to return back to town once.) There's next to no resource management as most of the time I have plenty of everything I need to survive. I guess it would be different on higher difficulty (playing on Normal), but I can't see the game evolving past me having to return to town more often as without healing spells you quite simply can not carry on - there's just not enough options.

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.

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

Thanks for the screenshot but all you did was prove my point: you started with one excuse as to how your combat feedback was ignored, and then follow-up with another fictitious scenario about how your combat feedback just didn't get built in time. Nothing you quoted saves you from the contradiction.

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

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

So first you say your combat concerns were dismissed but then you try to make it seem like your combat concerns were considered but oh no it was too late to turn PoE in to SoE (Sensuki of Eternity). All you're doing is playing rock-paper-scissors with responses, and consistency is clearly optional.

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.

 

The biggest point you seem to be able to make this past month is that, PoE should be more like Baldur's Gate. Hooray.

 

PoE should never have been a one-for-one clone of BG, and luckily the information we've seen about future PoE updates continue to take us down a unique and much appreciated path. For those of us who still enjoy playing the game.

 

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.

 

Click appropriate button -> remove effect

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.

 

Click magic missiles and prioritize the mage. Of course, you prioritize the mage anyway, so that's actually all tactical decisionmaking there is to it (it's a bit more interesting when two mages are around, then you have to tell both your mages to use magic missiles.)

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.

 

If "by significant tactical reaction" you mean "kill the dudes before they kill your dude", then yes, it does :-P That's actually what you have to do in Pillars of Eternity tho, in BG you just click a button and make it go away.

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.

 

You're right that I was in a huge tactically challenging situation when all of my charm persons were gone and my cleric was the one charmed. I have then had to tactically run around in circles while Benny Hill music was playing and wait until the affliction went away. Of course if only engagement system was present, that would change the situation quite a bit as most people don't want to be stuck in melee with my cleric. Alas, it's not, so mindlessly running around works perfectly.

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. 

 

See, clicking a button is not a tactical decision as casting of spells removing afflictions usually takes very little time. Choosing the right spell to remove an affliction is not a tactical decision, it's just a matter of associating the right affliction with the right spell. Of course if you could not buff outside of combat, well that would add a whole bunch of tactical decisions as you'd have to commit to how do you wish to use your priest at any given point in time, but... You can. So you do that and then auto-attack. And occasionally click a button.

 

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.

 

You really make it seem like one would spend hours in pause mode, thinking of his next move in Baldur's Gate, where in fact pretty much all problematic situations can be removed by clicking a button and then the combat goes back to auto attacking. Pillars of Eternity quite simply doesn't allow you to do that, so you need to play around afflictions of your characters as opposed to just removing them

 

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.

[Binding Web -5 Accuracy explained!]

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

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

I haven't participated in the thread because I don't want to appear to take sides in all the troll accusations flying around, but the one thing that strikes me as being unreasonable is for folks to lump all of the IE together for comparisons.

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.

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

In PoE the player is suddenly struck by a strange affliction which, for all they know, might be terminal, and I think the desire to learn more about this is harder motivation to deny than SoA

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.

Speaking of this, Josh just touched on this in an interview.

 

http://www.ragequit.gr/specials/item/josh-sawyer-obsidian-interview-ragequit

 

In the early game, it was very difficult to communicate all of the ideas that form the hook for your character's motivation. I think trying to communicate more cleanly or focusing more on the difficult concepts (in particular, the negative aspects of being a Watcher) would have drawn people in more easily.

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

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".

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

What about option three: fudge Imoen and fudge* Irenicus? For a lot of characters this would seem a reasonable response. The only reason the Bhaalspawn is supposed to care about Imoen is because of some rose tinted spectacles about her character in BG1, but I played BG1 and I know that she was a pain in the ass.

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

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

It seems strange that Obsidian wouldn't get the community involved in testing combat difficulty.

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).

 

That's interesting, I actually think parts of SoA are motivated less well than PoE. The first part of the game involves trying to rescue Imoen which makes the assumption that the player actually cares about Imoen.

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.

 

In PoE the player is suddenly struck by a strange affliction which, for all they know, might be terminal, and I think the desire to learn more about this is harder motivation to deny than SoA

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.

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

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

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

 

To make the ROI that Obsidian needs on the sequel, they will need a wider audience and to get that audience they will most likely need to make the game more accessible, easier and aim a bit more for the lowest common denominator - at least that is the 'safest' way of getting such an audience. The Story Time mode is one example of this, this is a mode that will allow people who are very, very bad at RTWP combat to get through the game without getting so frustrated that they might return the game on Steam. A slower combat speed is also another thing that will make the combat more manageable for such people. Game journalists will be laughing as they demolish everything in their path when playing for review, if the default settings are Story Time and the default combat speed is slow. "9.5/10 great gaem, finished it in three days and now I've got two days off!!".

 

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.

 

(I really like it but I acknowledge some of the criticism of it, and let's not put SoA's story on too high a pedestal)

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.

 

I really like the combat, and think it is better than that of the old IE games, though to be fair it has been a little over two years since I last played one.

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.

[White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January]

Isn't a broadening of the fan base a good thing? Yes it can be detrimental but if also can be positive. Having a larger fanbase brings in more resources, it doesn't necessarily mean a drop in quality. I guess it all depends though, if you trust the devs or not...

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.

 

Regarding the majority people on the forums - that's pretty irrelevant to the discussion. So what if they are not backers? Again, surely that's a positive thing?

Once again, positive for Obsidian, not necessarily a positive thing for some groups of players. Particularly people who enjoyed the Infinity Engine combat.