Stun

Some fights were heavily based on meta-gaming, yes. (never heard of anyone beating Kangaxx the first time through without already knowing what has to be done to beat him. And there are a couple other encounters like that). But BG2 is a massive game with an unusually vast bestiary. To claim that this is any sort of norm is dishonest and false. There is a learning curve. So what? Does it mean that Devs must eliminate this curve for fear of the UNACCEPTABLE, TRAGIC, APOCOLYPSE KNOWN AS RELOADING? I'm not a kid. I don't want my hand held when I'm playing an RPG. Let me fail until I learn. Nonsense. And BG2's loot system made sure such a thing can never happen. Accidently built yourself a Fighter with 9 strength and then learned you can't wear any heavy armor or use your sword because you're too weak? No problem. In the very first shop you see when you exit the prologue, you will find a belt that boosts your strength to 19. Ditto with Intelligence. Did you accidently create a Tank with 3 intelligence and are now discovering that Mind flayer fights are unwinnable? No problem. Simply start drinking the 2 dozen potions of Genius (or Mind focusing) the game's been tossing at you. Problem friggin solved.

No, I'm arguing that BG2 allows for sub optimal builds (as well as average ones, and overpowered ones), based on BG2's specific mechanics, BG2's specific game world and BG2's specific combat encounter designs. I'm arguing that I like the fact that the game allowed you to practically fail, Or, ridiculously succeed if you didn't use your head or if you shamelessly powergamed. And this is as it should be.

Well, because there's two different issues being discussed here. The first one is the frustration/oppression from a system that presents itself as overly tedious or cumbersome. Which was indeed a common complaint of the IE games from first-time players who were unfamiliar with AD&D rules. But the second one (having fun with bad builds) is something totally different. When you've already done 20 playthroughs of a game, there is no more frustration. No more difficulty. At that point, you pretty much have to intentionally handicap yourself if you want a challenge. BG2 allowed this. Try soloing a poorly built Beastmaster. it can be done, but it's really difficult, especially early on. I did that once. It breathed new life into the game. After that, I began actually trying to make wholly sub-optimal builds just to see how it would go. Ok, I'm trying to Conceptualize what you're describing here. let me use 3e monks as an example and ask you a question. Monks in 3e D&D are unique in that there's 3 very *different* ways to build them based on their stats alone. You can build a STR-based monk who's front-line destroyer prowess can rival any Fighter's. Or you can build a Dex-based monk, and he'll be a will-o-wisp type. Really hard to hit, can dodge/evade blows better than a rogue. Or you can build a Wisdom-based monk, and he'll be a jack of all trades type... his stunning bows will be harder to defend against. As will his quivering palm. But he won't be as defensive as a dex-based monk, or as offensive as a str-based monk. And each of these three builds is given 3 different sets of abilities based on which stat he chose to focus on. Question: is this the basic philosophy behind what you guys are trying to do with the classes in POE? Or am I way off?

I don't recall anyone arguing that we should have to buff for every encounter. I know I didn't, and I know Sawyer (who started this part of the discussion) didn't cite such a thing as a common frustration of the IE games. Moreover, I most certainly wouldn't limit my definition of "buffing" to just spells cast by spellcasters. Buffing includes potions, magic castable from devices that NON-casters can use, protection scrolls (that anyone can use) and of course, sustained abilities from non-casters, which technically aren't even magic. Yes. This is a good point. But probably not in the way you think. The fact that many buffs have short durations is an inherent, and deliberate limitation placed on pre-buffing. It makes it so that if you DO decide to "spend 5 or 6 rounds" pre-buffing, as Sawyer says, then you will be faced with diminishing returns. This is as it should be. it's yet another layer to the tactical game. Of course, some of the best buffs in the IE games have durations that are not measured in rounds. Stoneskin lasts 8 hours. Invisibility lasts 24 hours etc. Stop pretending that it's me vs. the masses when it's nothing of the sort. if Sawyer or any other dev went to the Announcement forum and started a thread entitled: Pre-buffing is tedious, so we're not having it in POE., you'll see 1000 posters come out of the woodwork and voice the same arguments I've been making on this thread. Contrary to the hyperbole spouted here, the IE games you guys have been condemning for several pages now Allowed you to solve encounters without pre-buffing. Imagine that. Games that let you pre-buff or not pre-buff.

Ok, Can we just stick to criticizing the IE games implementation of (A)D&D, instead of making ignorantly false statements about the AD&D system itself which you apparently know very little about?

Not a bore-snore, at all. Just a faster BG2, What do you mean by this, exactly? If your mindset is "lets hurry up and get through this", then the game in question (and specifically its combat) has already failed. Eliminating the buffing session won't help. For obvious logical reasons (one of which is that often times, buffing makes fights shorter, not longer.) Isn't that kinda an exaggeration? Aside from PS:T, the IE games were all combat primary, with story being secondary. You do not enrich the experience of such games by eliminating major parts of the primary. As for during-combat skills... why replace anything? a good game should have lots of All Three. 1)pre-combat planning; 2) buffing during combat 3) post combat replenishment.

That's not true at all. (and hasn't someone already given us examples on this thread?). If you enter an old abandoned crypt, common sense, not meta-gaming, will see smart players buffing themselves up with anti-undead buffs the moment they walk in the door. If you see a swarm of fire elementals in the distance, it's common sense, not reloading, that will make smart players ready their protection from fire/outsiders buffs. If a game is any good, the player will get hints from the environment, or from NPCs on what's in store for him if he enters a certain area. Buffing choices should come from THAT. Additionally, some buffs are just common-sense UNIVERSAL. if you know that you're going to be engaging in combat soon, then why not cast haste, or stoneskin, or invisibility, or protection from evil, or bless, or all of the above? You'd be *stupid* not to. You'd literally be a lousy player and the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer a soulless dumbed down game just because some casual gamers find it too complicated or 'tiresome' to have to engage in the BASIC practice of planning ahead. Good god, people. What kind of a garbage bore-snore would BG2 have been without the buffing element?

Totally disagree. The game achieves its role-playing brilliance because of the way every stat is constantly represented. You're at the pillar of skulls. High Charisma and Wisdom will allow you to negotiate with it without having to make a serious sacrifice. But if you've got high Dex, you can give them Morte, get your information, then pull Morte back off. In Curst Prison, you will get your ass kicked by Cassius in battle.... unless you're a really good fighter (high str, con), or unless you talk or pickpocket your way to victory (Cha, Dex). Lenny in the lower ward. Charisma will allow you to negotiate information from him. Dexterity will allow you to out maneuver him. Strength will allow you to knock him down when he tries to run. And then there's Vhailor. You can *will* your way to success (Wis). Lie your way to success (cha). Bully your way to rewards (str), or outsmart him (int) Btw, intelligence in PS:T actually has the lowest threshold (the highest intelligence check in the game is only 19). Compare that with Wisdom (24 required to merge with TTO) or Charisma (23 required for the final Nordom upgrade), or Dexterity (23 required to pull Morte off the Pillar, or Strength (22 required to force open Luis's drawer) Nope. There's no problem, and PS:T doesn't make the pump stats the opposite of what they are in pen and paper. I don't know how mentally challenged your DM was (or if you ever even played pen and paper AD&D), but my DM never allowed our warriors to just ignore the value of Wisdom and Intelligence. Ever. In *our* gaming sessions, My DM flat out made our schemes backfire if we failed our Intelligence/Wisdom checks. We'd come up with a brilliant solution to a problem, then our DM would roll the dice, then say: "nope, sorry, none of you are smart enough to pull this off!". That's called true role-playing enforcement. Sadly absent in computer games. But PS:T probably came the closest to capturing it.

How, specifically, would you accomplish that? It's not hard. It's also not new. Planescape Torment pulled it off. Is there a dump stat in PS:T? Nope. Each one of the Player's stats is checked, over and over, from the beginning to the end. Doesn't mean you can ever fail to beat the game if you build your TNO wrong, but you'll suffer immensely if you choose to dump, say, Wisdom on your warrior.

Bah. This is the Great Myth being perpetuated.... again. There are no dump stats in D&D, there are only crap DMs who don't bother making use of all of a character's stats. And of course there are D&D based video games who's developers are too lazy to hold characters accountable for all their stats. In True (A)D&D, all stats are important to all classes. Otherwise they'd have been eliminated in subsequent editions. For example, Charisma is vital to any fighter who wishes to own a stronghold and gather men-at-arms to his banner. Charisma is also vital if this fighter wishes to tame and ride an exotic mount like a Pegasus, or a Hippogriff, or a Nightmare. Or if the Fighter happens to find himself on one side of a nation's political conflict and must rally allies. Again, a lot of DMs are simple-minded and can't be bothered to put any of this 'complex' stuff into their gaming sessions. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it isn't actually listed in the players handbook or the DM's guide. Because it most certainly IS.

Well, if that actually IS his argument then it's a false claim he's making about the IE games. You cannot make a completely dead end build in the IE games. Even aside from the liberal loot dispensing (which alone will insure you can survive any battle, on any difficulty) there's the D&D rules themselves, which have built-in safeguards against such a thing (fighters automatically get at least 9 str; Rogues automatically get 9 dex etc.) Hell, BG1 can be beat, with a solo level 1 rogue, without leveling up.

This is something I'm having a hard time with too. In order to make sure bad builds can't be made wouldn't you have to severely curtail freedom in character creation and thus eliminate the possibility for creative builds? Yes. For one thing, You won't be able to multi-class/dual-class in POE. But there is still a way, potentially. If POE is going to have a system where you purchase perks/skills upon leveling up then the "solution" is to 1) have a giant pool of different skills/perks for every class to choose from and 2) make these skills/perks you've picked become increasingly more powerful as you level up. For example, lets say you're an idiot and you choose to give your Warrior infravision as a skill at level 1. Hey, don't despair, because once he hits 10th level, that infavision skill turns into True Seeing, allowing your warrior to see magically concealed creatures and rogues who are hiding in the shadows. Still, unless the game is going to flood each character class with dozens of these different skills to choose from *and* all these skills become more powerful as you level, you won't see that much diversity. One player's fighter will not be that much different than another player's fighter. Whereas in the IE games, My fighter could also be a mage, while yours can be a rogue.

It's true that you can easily make horrible builds in all the IE games... and even worse: You often times won't realize you've built a poor character/party until you're more than halfway through the game.... then you're screwed. LOLOL But for god sakes. That's half the fun! And what's the alternative? a system that makes it impossible to make a bad build? where every build choice is forgiving and powerful? How...dull. Why even discuss builds for such a system? It would be pointless. And what ever happened to roleplaying? What if I *want* to roleplay a character who's fatal flaw is combat and who's beverage of choice is potions of invisibility to get him past encounters he cannot win?

Wow, this is a really good question - One that I don't have an answer to since it's been more than a decade since my first play-through of each of the IE games. I simply don't remember the time before my "adaption" process began. Couldn't have been that bad though, since I ended up re-playing those games.... over and over and over....for more than a decade. In any event.... <gulp> um.... I really, really, *really* see many of these things as humongous qualities, and not detriments at all, but since I'm not a developer who's making a game for 10s of thousands of different people, my only advice here, if you're dead set on "fixing" these things, is to approach them with a scalpel instead of a hacksaw and with the goal of "tweaking", rather than outright eliminating. For example, the pyrrhic victories one. I see nothing wrong with the concept of winning a battle but suffering some casualties. Sure, basilisk/Vampire battles are cheese, and can be silly since there's no way to do them without hard counters, but do we have to eliminate the threat outright? Can't we have a middle ground? How about a punishing effect that forces the player to actually expend a valuable (and limited) consumable after the fight to reverse the effects? Another example: pre-buffing. I'm sorry, but I expect it in my fantasy RPGs. And I expect major changes in difficulty if I spend time and effort and resources engaging in a long buffing session. In fact, a game where Prebuffing is trivial = a game not worth playing more than once. example: Dungeon Siege 1. You don't need to pre-buff in that game. And the consequence is that combat got boring (difficult or not). Therefore I played the game once then deleted it from my hard drive and never looked back.

I totally get the gripe here, but the mask fragments and the Bronze Sphere are terrible examples of the phenomenon. PS:T's Bronze Sphere is not "pixel-hunting". It's the first chapter's main quest, so it's not like you're ever going to miss it. Instead, it suffers from a different problem: The player isn't told of the true value of keeping it after chapter 1. And the mask fragments... there's no hunting at all. no hitting "alt" (or Z in MoTB's case) to highlight and search the map. The fragments are given to you in dialogue. Now, one could complain that they're not handed to you during the main quest (although Bishop's fragment is) and therefore, you could miss them. But I think that's kinda the point. They're supposed to be a reward for someone who walked through all the dreams. and in MoTB, that means exploring everywhere. And this brings us to the underlying question: In an RPG, Shouldn't the player be specially rewarded for all the exploration he/she took the time to engage in?

Well, aside from some of the things people have been discussing since page 1 or so, I'd say: 1) Enemy cheese: Stuff like getting finger-of-deathed by a mages when you're only 11th level, or getting imprisoned (looking at you, BG2) 2) Sitting around watching your 1st and 2nd level characters miss, and miss, and miss (hello BG1) 3) Getting your rest interrupted 5 times in a row (Icewind Dale 1 & 2) 4) Inventory management mini-game extraordinaire (BG1, especially with TotSC) Personally, none of these things seem all that oppressive or frustrating for me, but then, I've played the IE games so many dozens of times each that I've instinctively learned to deal with all of the above and now I love them for the raw, old-school goodness they've come to represent. But for a new player, yes, I imagine these things would be seen as.... frustrating or whatever.

Planescape torment was a double facepalm, because the majority of your party was melee-only in that game, thus most combat encounters saw a real clusterf**k happening in combat... like Fall-From-Grace getting ripped apart by an Abishai because she can't get out of the way, because everyone else is blocking her exit path, and in the meantime, Morte can't engage an enemy because Grace is blocking him. LOL Thankfully, BG2 did a modest job of addressing this. Companions "bumped" each other out of the way. It was crude but it worked. The other problem is that those old games often had wonky narrow terrains in their interior and exterior maps (try navigating a party of 6 through the different rooms in the Black Raven monastery in IWD2. Damn that was a pain!) Unless you chose the single file party formation, and then took short movements, pathfinding in all the IE games is going to be a headache. We haven't seen too many maps for POE, but the ones we've seen have been big and spacious, so maybe they're taking that route to address the issue.

I wouldn't worry too much about this. We're talking about technology flaws that existed 15 years ago. And even back then, we saw improvements in each successive game. (icewind dale 2, for example, had better path finding than bg1). Me, though, I'm still concerned about the AI proper. Of the enemies and your own party. I wonder how much improved it's going to be from the IE games.

I sure hope so. In the IE games you didn't want to see enemies getting chunked by a dungeon's traps because it meant you got screwed out of exp for the kill. But since you won't be getting exp for killing things in Eternity, I wouldn't mind at all if you got the chance to draw an enemy into a situation where they trigger a dungeon's traps and get fried for it.

^You're not really rebutting anything here. Obsidian is working on more than one project. Developer salaries and studio overhead are drawn from the whole, not just the $4 million they got to make PoE.

I'm not sure how relevant Developer salaries are here. Unless Obsidian contracts all their devs on a 'per project' basis, their salaries will be the same whether they're assigned to work on Eternity or South Park, or any other game Obsidian is working on. In other words, money to pay their wages will be drawn from all Obsidian projects in general ie. Obsidian's total revenue, not just from what PoE's kickstarter generated. However, there are some people working on PoE that ARE contracted specifically to work on the project. I imagine the costs to pay these people will come directly from the the $4 million they've raised to develop the game. (this might explain why they made George Zeits a stretch goal, for example.) Also there is some outsourcing going on. Those companies/studios will get paid from the $4 million as well. As far as technology, It's not just engine. I'm talking about Software that allows 1 dev to do in 20 minutes today, what used to take 3 devs a day to do 15 years ago. That kind of technology allows a studio to really cut labor costs. There was a Project eternity Update discussing this a while back. I'll see if I can find it later.

The technology has advanced dramatically. The tools that Developers have to work with today are far more efficient and can do a lot more in a lot less time than what Bioware and Black Isle had to work with in 1999-2001. This leads to less man hours for every task, as well as less tasks outright. There's also the experience factor, and the fact that there's zero middle men to pay off (no publisher, no D&D licensing, no WotC licencing.) etc. Adjusting for the cost of inflation is, obviously, a factor, but a mitigated one due to much of the above.

Oh yes. This is what made Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil's dungeons (the Moat House and the Temple) so wonderfully dynamic, so engaging, and so... ominous. There were multiple entrance points, multiple ways up and down, and even more: Entrance points that didn't even begin at level one. For example, The Temple had a secret outdoor well that took you directly to level 3! So basically you could begin the dungeon experience at the center of the dungeon complex. So right at the outset you were presented with an utterly non linear situation. This is a lost art in dungeon design. Developers simply do not do this kind of thing anymore. But the good news is that Josh Sawyer has said a few times that he's a big fan of multiple dungeon entrance points. The Megadungeon probably won't offer quite the level of open-endedness as the Temple in TOEE, But it will probably be more open-ended and non linear than the standard dungeons we see in today's RPGs. This is a plus.

Well, there was nothing in Diablo comparable to, say, the Severed Hand, or Lower Dorns Deep, as both of those dungeons had whole levels of totally non-hostile content. But yes, the two games shared similar Philosophies (and in fact, IWD1 and Diablo 2 were released on the same day and the intention WAS for them to compete with one another for the hack & slash lover's attention) I think Icewind Dale was designed to hit that sweet spot in between Baldur's gate and Diablo. And it succeeded. I doubt, though, that this will be the intent with Eternity. I think Obsidian is trying to be more Baldurs Gatish.

Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is a "BBEG"? Ugh... No. I don't want that. Padlocking dungeon advancement until "X is killed" Or "Y gives you a revelation" is a bad idea for a few reasons. 1) it's an excessive, and even arbitrary, limit to player freedom, all in the name of a plot's deus ex machina (ie. The door or stairs down is forever locked until the Boss is killed. Then it just magically opens once his heart stops beating!) I see this as no different from the modern day developer practice of not allowing a boss fight to occur until the obligatory cut scene has triggered. 2)imposing such a rule for every single level will get really old.... really fast. it'll feel gamey and soullessly mechanical.... the opposite of organic and natural. 3) Contrary to the notion that getting lost in a dungeon is a bad thing, I like seeing stairs, wings, forks and other elements of choice in my dungeon delving. It IS called the Endless paths of Od Nua, after all, not: "The singular path of Od Nua." I would hope that it lives up to its name, and that each level has multiple ways up, down and out. The alternative is to just promote linearity. And the idea of a linear 15 level dungeon nauseates me.