PrimeJunta

@Bazy Pillars was not designed to be played blind, solo, and Trial of Iron. If it was, then yes, that would qualify as a sucker punch. But, it wasn't. It was designed to be played with a party. That means that a lot -- a LOT -- of combat challenges that are fair but tough assuming you have a competently built and played full party will kill you dead fast if you go into them solo. Not the same thing.

You will be restarting many, many times if you're playing solo/trial of iron at any difficulty and don't know the game inside-out. That's just the way it's built. If you don't like it, don't play it that way.

Friar Tuck is a monk you heretic

I prefer the "Nature's Fury" party: 5 rangers and a druid. The druid is handy for CC...

Any of you tried playing with oddball gimmick parties? I made one: Sir Robin and his bards. Here's the portrait I'm using: PC is a Kind Wayfarer Paladin, Noble background, Knight weapon focus, with Resolve as the dump stat. There's Kana, and four hired bards, with chants like Brave Sir Robin, He Was Not Afraid To Die, and He Bravely Turned His Tail And Fled. The favored strategy is to run away until the five bards have reached three phrases, at which point they summon Phantoms who proceed to obliterate the opposition. It works quite well actually thank you for asking, even if it's a little monotonous. Any others?

I also want to have my cake and eat it too.

Also the Kickstarter was put together hastily, and everything from the pitch forward was improvised on the fly. I'm kinda surprised the end result turned out as close to the campaign as it did.

Comes from "cuckold," which means a man whose wife has been unfaithful. It's considered shameful in cultures which consider women as property.

Level 16 Chanter at work.

Lots of arguments can be made. From where I'm at, you can make a case for structural forces at work -- market forces, for example -- if there's a broad, deep, and sustained trend in some direction. It's never perfectly clearcut, of course -- there will always be exceptions, backwashes, and eddies in the stream. While I hope you're right and we are seeing a lasting change, for the time being inXile, Pillars, Larian etc still look more like exceptions than a significant and lasting counter-trend; the movement is too small IMO to argue that any structural changes are at play here. Time will tell.

Nah, actually, I think the 10 year dry spell was market forces at work.

Yeah, and the market self-regulated so that serious RPG's were only done by lone developers laboring away in their basements, like Spiderweb. The limited cRPG renaissance we're seeing now owes more to happenstance than any self-regulating properties the computer game market may have, and if inXile, Obsidian, HBS, and Larian go under, decide to do something else, get bought out, or go after the mass market, I don't see any guarantee that we won't have to wait another ten years – or more – to see anyone take their place.

Are you suggesting that these RPGs are the mainstream now? Pillars, D:OS, and SRR qualify as mainstream IMO, yes, "in a small, limited way." They also qualify as hard, serious RPG's IMO, also "in a small, limited way."

Then how come there was, like, 10 years in which hard, serious cRPG's effectively disappeared from the mainstream? And are only coming back now, in a small, limited way, in fits and starts?

I don't think a story mode would detract from the game at all. It's dead easy to implement -- just nerf all enemy defenses, attacks, and damage by some percentage. The hidden danger is that if it turns out that 80% of the players play in easy mode, they won't bother with a hard mode anymore, or they'll do hard mode by buffing all enemy defenses, attacks, and damge by some percentage. That's what happened to most mainstream games -- hard mode is just a grindy, tedious version of easy mode. So it's a real danger. But, if they continue to design the game for hard mode and then produce a story mode by nerfing the numbers, that's perfectly fine. I'd like a difficulty with PotD stats but Hard or even Normal enemies. In PotD as it is, too many of the fights are against too big mobs, which makes it all about crowd control, and gets tedious and repetitive. There should be mob fights, but not every fight should be one. The difficulty level OTOH feels about right.

There are some world-class writers who only have one book in them. It could be MCA is one of them. That would be a shame.

Poor MCA. I really wish he gets another chance to do what he does so uniquely well. It's difficult, though -- he has a unique writer's voice which only meshes well with a very few others' (George Ziets springs to mind), he's a design contrarian (wants to go at right angles to everything), and... categorically refuses to be the project lead. That's a difficult circle to square. I honestly don't know what I'd want to do in his place. Write a bunch of fiction and shove it at a team going "Here, make a game from this and ask me if you can't figure out something?"

ToB is laughably, sleep-inducingly easy with certain builds. Haven't played the Souls games though. I think the "inverse difficulty curve" is inherent to cRPG's which feature significant character-building choices and optional content. The only alternative, really, is to level scale everything to Oblivion (pun intended). Either automatically or with hand-crafted difficulty settings that boost higher-level enemies more than lower-level ones, thereby pulling the endgame difficulty up. Reason being, if you balance the endgame for competent completionists who have maxed out optional content (=are at the level cap, have all the best loot, and have a powerful party and know how to use it), it'll be impossibly hard for the great majority of players. So, they balance it for the "average playtester" who is probably actually not all that good at playing the game. I'm not a fan of level scaling. I'm not a fan of dead-easy endgames either, which is one reason I often don't bother with them at all, once I've finished a game once.

Storm of Zehir did that and it worked really well. But then Storm of Zehir was a very different kind of game.

Have a wiz, druid, cipher, and priest in the party. March at enemy. Druid and cipher cast large-area debuffs, priests casts suitable buff, when they bite, wiz casts AoE damage targeting debuffed defence. Mop up with fighter and paladin, cipher's ranged attacks, and more AoE damage. Faster than holding a choke point (although that's necessary sometimes too).

Rogues are completely optional. All they bring to the table is a couple of points higher Mechanics, which is purely convenience. Wizards are also nice but optional. I've also played casterless parties (no priest, no wiz, no druid, no cipher) on PotD and it's perfectly doable; I just find it a bit tedious as fights tend to drag on since you have limited crowd control and almost no AoE damage. (High-magic parties are more efficient if you're able to make use of the synergies though. I'm currently playing Wiz-Druid-Priest-Cipher-Fighter-Paladin and they make things pretty easy.)

It also adds a mega-load of tension. I like it. Not on PotD though, Hard is tense enough for Ironman for my blood... and even then I'd probably not go wake up the dragon before punching it in the snout.

True but Josh and other devs have been speaking pretty freely about it on podcasts and elsewhere, even if they occasionally remember to add some qualifiers. Pillars was successful and it's Obsidian's own property. Barring disasters like the studio going under all of a sudden, I'm sure there will be a sequel.

The bandit standing watch by the campfire where the cook is kept prisoner. It was also my first ever attempt at Pillars in any mode. Someone here started a thread on release day, daring people to do just that and then telling how far they got. After all, you only ever get to play a game the first time once.

I think the big issue with Pillars combat pathfinding is that the toons can't shove each other out of the way. It's probably because this would mess with engagement, but I can't believe it wouldn't be possible to work around it: just allow them to move inside the engagement radius without breaking it.