[The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [2015]]

I was being polite

Bull Sh*t.

 

There's nothing Polite about putting crap words in other people's mouths just so you can dismiss them away as haters.

 

<Gag>

[The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [2015]]

that crafting was tedious

I didn't say that.

 

or combat was bad

And I didn't say that.

 

seems you didn't like the game anyway

And I didn't say that!

 

You are severely Hallucinating. Your Toxicity meter past Full.

 

or most the other things that you disliked about Witcher 2.

And by "most other things", you'd be talking about Just the UI, and just Geralt's dodging mechanic (which they've replaced, btw), and Just the overly constrictive maps. (which they've also replaced) Because those are the only 3 things I said I disliked from Witcher 2.

 

Best not to go down that path,

I would never go down an imaginary path created in another poster's head.

[The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [2015]]

Awfully cynical outlook there. I got no idea why you'd be so sure they'll mess those things up without seeing them in action. Looks like everything is improved from Witcher 2, especially the fighting system. I'd say the UI looks much better too.

Well, for one thing, I don't think I'd call those things "messed up". I'd call them what they are: "standard faults". Or "the status quo". But semantics aside, We've *seen* PC gameplay in action. there's no mystery here (at least not with the UI). It's still using the same radial menu that Witcher 2 used...which I found quite cumbersome....and a bad fit for a game with twitch-based, real time combat. The only real improvement I've seen with the UI is the inventory (it's grid based now instead of list based) Kudos for that.

 

As for the combat, I want to know what exactly leads you to believe it's 'especially better'. Is it the fact that Geralt no longer does those tiresome, nearly uncontrollable summersaults whenever he dodges? Because that's about it. I've seen no other combat changes, have you?

 

 

I'm looking forward to TW3 as much as the next guy, but when someone comes on here and discusses perfection, its only logical to remind him that, just like all other AAA titles today, the PC version will be flawed by default because a Keyboard and Mouse is NOT what the game is designed for.

[PoE Sales?]

And let's face it cRPGs could never boast a terribly wide audience, so the fact that PoE wouldn't sell a million copies shouldn't come as a great surprise to anyone, let alone Obsidian themselves.

But 1 million in sales is not a wide audience, in the case of PoE it's a reasonable expectation. I know people are getting tired of having D:OS getting thrown in their face in this discussion but it *must*. D:OS is PoE's true Peer. It's a kickstarted game, it's a PC exclusive, it's an RPG, and its development costs was ~$4 million.

 

It sold ~ 1 million copies. Therefore, PoE SHOULD do the same. If it doesn't, then there will be legitimate questions to ask. The main one being: WHY NOT?

[Struggling to finish]

 

And introduced new degenerative gameplay that the IE games didn't have.

 

Precisely. My irony-meter exploded.

 

Or as someone so brilliantly put it on another forum, The operation was a success, but the patient still died.

[Struggling to finish]

A.  That's ridiculous.  You can't complain about the game being tank and spank and then say that you should let your tank die as quickly as possible.  So, the ideal strategy is to have a tank, kill him as quickly as possible and then win?

Never once have I complained about this game being tank and spank. In fact, I would never advocate building a tank in this game in the first place because tanking is completely suboptimal in PoE.

 

B.  The system punishes you for taking damage, like it should.

It punishes you for healing that damage too.

 

C.  The knock out itself drops health pretty substantially.

Not really, And I don't think you understand the system. You get knocked out when your endurance reaches Zero. The problem is that If your endurance never reaches zero, you never get knocked out. But since you take damage to both endurance and health at about a 4:1 Ratio (or 5:1, depending on your class) this results in massive health loss for those who artificially maintain their endurance pools during a fight.

 

In other words, Healing can kill you. What an absurd system.

 

D.  The total health damage to the party can be significantly greater if the wrong people get knocked out.

The...wrong people? Such as....

 

E.  You're comparing two suboptimal modes of play, and saying the game is broken because it encourages neither, but it temporarily numerically disencourages one less than the other.

Assigning a designated healer to heal people's wounds during battle is not supposed to be a suboptimal mode of play. The fact that it IS in this game is my point.

[Struggling to finish]

^And....I didn't want to bring this up because for some inexplicable reason, people here seem to love the endurance/health mechanic, but.... the system in place actually PUNISHES you for staying alive. Healing spells heal just your endurance. This means that assigning your priest to the role constantly healing everyone during a fight typically results in everyone's endurance staying close to 100%, while their health bar goes red..

 

Rule of thumb: when letting your party members get Ko'ed as quickly as possible becomes the Ideal thing to do to keep yourself from having to rest after every other fight, then it's time to go back to the drawing board. Because your system sucks monkey balls.

[Struggling to finish]

I hereby promote you to Expert Veteran.  Go ahead and set the game to Path of the Damned and turn on Trial of Iron, then report your progress here.

I wish people would stop spouting this ridiculous straw man.

 

Game difficulty (or lack of it) Is. Not. The. Problem.

[Struggling to finish]

The exploration element is interesting, but where are the battles like the Drow bridge in IWD or the goblin siege from IWD2?

Or the Chess match battle from Durlag's tower. Or the Holy Avenger battle in Icewind Dale 2. Or the crazy group of Sarevok's acolytes on the 5th floor of the Iron Throne Building. Or the Aec'letec battle. Or the Drizzt fight. Or the fight with the group of mercenaries that guard the Cloakwood mines.

 

 

People are blaming the Engagement mechanic and the crap enemy AI. But really, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is much more comprehensive and wide spread. There's no dispel magic in this game; The protection buffs are too weak. (and for that matter, enemy afflictions are so short and trivial that protection buffs aren't needed anyway); There's no real incentive to use the various potions in this game because their use is limited to in-combat only.

 

There's no real invisibility gameplay element in this game. There's no immunities or hard counters (for you or the enemy) in this game. Combat ends too quickly to really warrant any deep thinking or strategy. Everything is on a *quick* wavelength. It's like they deliberately designed this game for people with short attention spans.

 

 

I suppose we could put a positive spin on all this and just say: "well Ok, there's tremendous opportunities here for Obsidian to improve combat and related Gameplay." But those words ring hollow. The problems here are fundamental. They're the flawed core design and ruleset. Game patches won't be fixing stuff like that.

[The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [2015]]

It's been reduced? It was a 40 gig download just a few weeks ago.

[No buffing outside of combat, why?]

I hate buffing in IE games with passion. Probably my main gripe against the combat system in these games.

I'm so glad it's gone.

Except Buffing is not gone. It's a humongous part of PoE. Roughly 50% of the Priest class's spell list is buffing spells. The Paladin class is designed around them being a battery of Buffing. The Most powerful skill set a chanter has is Buffing. Half the potions in this game are buffs, as are half the scrolls and ALL the food. etc.

 

What you mean to say is that you hate pre-buffing, even though the only difference between prebuffing and buffing is that you do the former a bit earlier than the latter. But hey, enough of the pedantics. Lets just embrace the Absurdity: We "hate" a system that gives you a choice when you can buff, and we "love" a system that f*cking doesn't.

 

You people blow my mind.

[The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [2015]]

I know, and i agree about The Witcher 2. But this just looks like the RPG to end all RPGs. And that just can't be true. There's gotta be something wrong with it.

I'm sure it will have the standard faults. PC gamers will still grind their teeth in frustration as they wrestle with a dreadful unintuitive UI that is not designed for a keyboard and mouse. Combat will again be overly twitch based and not particularly tactical, despite the hours of developer-narrated gameplay footage we've seen where they try really *really* hard to sell us, once again, on how complex and *deep* 5 signs + a sword is (but hey, we got crossbows now! Just like throwing daggers in TW2, but better!). Crafting will probably, again, be an uninspired chore. And my gut is telling me that "Horse management" will probably be more tedious than they're leading us to believe.

 

But that all said, my biggest gripe with Witcher 2 was how small and constrictive the world space felt (Loc Muinne still gives me clusterphobia nightmares. ugh), and they've obviously addressed that in Witcher 3, and in such a mind-blowing epic way too. So I'll probably fall madly in love with this game and spend the majority of my summer inside, in front of my computer, playing it.

[How do you guys bring yourself to read?]

I could not finish Divinity Original Sin due to all that god damn reading.

Wow. The generation gap is bigger than I originally imagined, I guess. D:OS wasn't a particularly text-heavy game. That is to say, Unlike PoE, when you're talking to someone (or something) in D:OS, the game simply does dialogue. It doesn't, for example, spend 3 or 4 lines of text describing what the person looks like, or halt the dialogue every other sentence to give you an overly verbose description of their facial expression changes.

 

PoE's a different beast. It occasionally DOES cross that line that separates gloriously wordy from unnecessary rambling. But NO, contrary to the whines of the casuals, the solution is NOT to friggin put more voice acting and cinematics in the game. The solution is maybe to...you know....get to the point quicker. And more efficiently.

 

And weren't you people warned that this game wouldn't be for you? I seem to remember... Oh yes, here it is. A direct warning from the developers: Don't play this game if you dislike reading.

[Is the Honeymoon Stage Over?]

You must have missed launch day. "Game is too hard!" "Game is too easy!" "Game is too buggy!" "Game won't let me rest!" "Game won't let me walk slowly!" "Game has backer NPCs!" "Game is too confusing!" It looks a lot less nutty now.

 

People complain, all the time. The question is what substantial criticisms there are (and there certainly are some, e.g. the encounter design).

Yep. If anything we've stabilized.

 

Personally, the vibe I'm getting is...IDK.... Mixed? Or maybe slightly to the positive side overall? If you want to see *authentic* negativity, go visit BSN's archives for the days and weeks following Dragon Age 2's release. Or, better yet, Mass Effect 3's release.

[So is this game actually good?]

While I am a bit disappointed with how Pillars turned out, I don't regret a cent I spent to back PE. Moreover I would certainly do it in the future if Obsidian decides to crowdfund again.

It's interesting, because there's two very different issues going on here. The game itself, and the Game's model.

 

PoE could have been a complete piece of unfinished, broken crap, and I'd still 1) not regret funding it, 2) eagerly fund the next game like it.

 

I like the Infinity Engine style games. The whole party-based, RTwP, Iso-view, hand drawn 2d backgrounds, with several classes and races and strong emphasis on classic gameplay is a GOOD Formula for an RPG. And the Genre itself can only benefit if more of these types of games were made. So at this point, whether I loved PoE or not is completely irrelevant. Because my only wish now is for PoE to sell so well that it makes other gaming studios want to copy cat.

[How long to beat the game? (Poll)]

Why even bother buying more than 1 game in your life then? It's gonna stay fresh forever.

That's... a good point.

 

I'm not quite as extreme as BruceVC here w/regards to how slow I play games, but I'm still in the "takes-longer-than-almost-everyone-else-to-finish-games" camp. And, consequently, I find myself not buying many games. One or 2 per year....max.

 

An Elder Scrolls game (if I enjoy it) will typically keep me from buying another game for a whole year or more. I bought Skyrim, for example, in 2011. But between its gigantic DLCs and its Modding toolset, I found myself not wanting to browse Steam's store for something new until about midway into 2013!

 

Lately though, I've been a little more ADD. I bought D:OS last September. Then PoE a couple weeks ago, and right now I'm craving Witcher 3. So perhaps I'm finally beginning to behave like a regular gamer. Bad news for my bank account. lol

[No immunities]

^The typical tradeoff is magic is more powerful but has limited uses (ie I can swing my sword more times than you can lob your fireball)

Yep. Along with all the other things that people always take for granted

 

1) Fighters, Barbarians and Rangers have a lot more health than Wizards, Priests, Ciphers and Chanters

2) Sometimes you'll find equipment that the melee classes can wear that grant castable spells. And those are a lot more common than, for example, equipment that spell casters can wear that grant them melee talents, like knockdown, backstab, carnage etc.

3) In the IE games, you often had to deal with creatures who were immune to magic outright. And of course, in those situations, the "magic can do it, force of arms can't" scenario was literally reversed.

4) This is a party based game. Lets think about that for a moment...... this is a party based game. does it matter if some people in your party are less effective on occasion than others?

[No immunities]

Your rationales for why the restrictions should exist pretty much sucked and pointed directly to "Magic can do it, force of arms can't". That's a bad position from a game design perspective. Only if the Fighter/Rogue/Ranger abilities were made VASTLY more effective would this "let's limit it!" stuff make sense.

Not sure how we arrived at the notion that this is a magic can do it but force of arms can't situation (Blindness, Prone and Fire damage are afflictions that both Spell casters and a melee specialists can inflict) But I disagree with the entire argument anyway.

 

There is no reason why Fighter/Rogue/Ranger abilities have to be vastly more effective to compensate for any "magic can do it, force of arms can't" design. The balance (whether obsidian intended it or not) is already there. Fighters are designed to be better survivors than Wizards. Rogues are designed to be bigger damage dealers than priests etc. Plus, all classes have the ability to use magic scrolls. Obsidian could easily put more scrolls in this game if they really thought that making some creatures immune to knockdown and Blindness was too harsh on melee classes (or whatever the gripe is)

 

But who cares anyway if magic is more powerful than force of arms? It SHOULD be.

[No immunities]

^you're joking, but we've seen at least 2 other posters on this thread putting that up as an actual explanation.

 

Which means everyone in this game practices Animancy. (including all level 1 fighters who use their per-encounter knockdown to manipulate souls) Which means the lore, and the game's main plot, doesn't make a lick of sense.

[[SPOILER] Master Below down in 3 seconds - no cheese]

Did the 4 adragans that should have shown up by that moment and dominated half of your party present a problem?

I can answer this one, because it happened in my game. The Dragon's breath attack can friendly fire those Adragons. And if they're even remotely close to each other when it occurs, they will all get one-shotted by it.

[No buffing outside of combat, why?]

Yes so taking screen shots above about recovey speed etc. Know that +3% is better than -3%, by a full 6%! It means exactly that.

Not really. Because "better" doesn't answer the question. If Eder is attacking with an Arbalest, and Durance is attacking with a mace, Eder's recovery speed will be slower, despite the fact that his recovery speed is 6% better.

[No buffing outside of combat, why?]

^the vagueness of PoE's rule system was something absolutely, and plainly, and obviously and repeatedly pointed out to the developers for 6 straight months of the Beta process.

 

But they did not address it. They did not alter it. They did not even acknowledge it as a problem. in fact, they did the Opposite. People like Josh Sawyer bragged about how, Unlike the IE games, PoE would have an easier, more intuitive learning curve.

 

It does NOT. At all. Instead, PoE skirts the learning curve issue outright by making so that learning is optional. You don't NEED to know what a "+.5 critical multiplier" means, for example, because it's not relevant to success or failure. Combat is designed to be totally resolvable without combat knowledge. Ie. it's dumb-dumb centric. PoE can be completed...casually.

[No immunities]

But there's literally no difference between magic that affects a target's soul and magic that affects a target's soul.

You mean, magic that affects a targets soul vs. magic that affects a target's physical body?

 

Oh yes there is. Especially in this game. In PoE, magic that affects a target's soul has its own specific and defined classification: Animancy. It would RUIN what little uniqueness this game world's lore has if every Wizard, Chanter, Priest, Druid, Rogue and Fighter was a friggin Animancer simply because their basic class skills see them blinding things, proning things, slickening things, sickening things, petrifying things, hobbling things, confusing things, frightening things, burning things etc.

 

Enough already with this ridiculous attempt to explain away the indefensible.

[No buffing outside of combat, why?]

A Priest, a Chanter and a Paladin in your group will massively increase your effectiveness. Even just one will provide substantial group bonuses. This feels very different from IE-era stuff to me. (That's a good thing.) Buffs may be far shorter and you can't pre-buff, but those buffs are REALLY useful during actual combat.

Say what?

 

Are we playing different games? We must be. There is not a SINGLE buff in PoE that bestows anything more than a minor adjustment to a party's stats. This is Josh Sawyer's baby, lest we've forgotten. Sawyer is a disciple of the power-via-10,000-baby-steps school of game design. There are no hard counters in this game. None. Instead, the system in place is designed to allow for infinite bonus stacking. And good players can eventually stack enough minor bonuses upon themselves to make a noticeable difference. I see the appeal of such a design, but I see it for what it IS. It's the spreadsheet nerd's Ideal. But Lets not pretend that any individual buff is REALLY powerful in capital letters.

 

...Or that it even comes close to the IE games in terms of being game changing.

 

-In BG1, your 5th level Mage can cast Haste, which doubles the number of attacks everyone in your party (including your summons) get per round....for an extended period of time. While in PoE, your 5th level Wizard's Haste spell (deleterious alacrity of motion) lasts about 15 seconds and simply reduces the action recovery time by a couple of seconds.... OF ONE PERSON.

 

-In the IE games, your Cleric can cast Chaotic Commands, which makes its recipient IMMUNE to all mind effecting spells, like domination, fear charm, confusion, stun, paralysis etc...for minutes at a time. While in PoE your priest can.... not? There is no all-encompassing mind protection spell in PoE. Instead, once your priest reaches about 11th friggin level, he gets access to a spell that reduces the duration of charm and domination effects by a couple of seconds and gives you a +something bonus to save against such spells.

 

-In the IE games, Your mage can cast a single spell that makes him IMMUNE to the first 5 physical attacks that hit him. In PoE your Wizard can, at best, cast a spell that gives him a deflection bonus that expires the first time someone scores a hit on him.

 

-in the IE games, you've got Mass invisibility. A spell that makes everyone in your party totally invisible. Totally undetectable. In PoE, there's no such buff. Not even partially.

 

-In the IE games, there's a 1st level cleric spell that makes your entire party (and your summons) IMMUNE to fear, for an extended period of time. In PoE, I think there might 5th level priest spell that bestows a moderate bonus to your saves against fear... to everyone in a 2 meter radius.

[No buffing outside of combat, why?]

You can't pre-buff => You have to cast buffs during battle => You have limited amount of buffs to choose from in a given time => Your choice in buffs affects the outcome of the battle 

 

vs

 

You can pre-buff => You don't have to cast your (same) buffs during battle => You have no pressure to chose/cast buffs during battle => Your choice of buffs during battle has less impact

Both of these statements are false and don't take into consideration things that actually happen in a fight.

 

The first one is just a meaningless non-distinction. Whether you're buffing during a fight or pre-buffing before it, your buffs will Always affect the outcome of a battle. Otherwise the Buffs themselves are useless and shouldn't be in the game in the first place. Likewise, you will always have a limited amount of buffs to choose from in a given time. Casting buffs before a battle still counts towards your per-day casting limitations, doesn't it. And if you buff during a battle, you have to take into account the fact that you're giving your enemy more time to kill you.

 

And the second one is just flat out ridiculous hyperbole. Unless you're fighting nothing but trash mobs (and why are you wasting your buffs on trash mob encounters?) you will always be under pressure to adjust the situation and react accordingly in combat (just because your Priest cast dire blessing on everyone before the fight, doesn't mean he suddenly doesn't have to react to what the enemy does....or you know.... not feel the need to recast those buffs when they expire in the middle of a battle.

 

 

IMO, the only thing that the elimination of prebuffing brings to the equation is that it removes the element of planning/preparation, and makes combat feel a bit too action-y for my tastes. This is a significant departure from the IE game feel. A bad one. And thus I condemn it.