PrimeJunta

Hey, you pretty much listed them. I'll add... engagement. Yeah I do like it. I started out liking it, then when I finally really got into the IE games and how to win them, started to shift towards not liking it, and now I'm back at liking it, but for different reasons. I like it because it adds transparency to the combat. It makes it clear to see who's free to move and who's not, and I've been successfully using it to get my strikers to strike with effect and impunity. I also enjoy the broad range of tools the game gives us to break it when one of those squishies does get engaged. My original reason for liking it -- that it provides a way to control the battlefield through positioning -- is now secondary and only applies to some fights. I did always dislike the way the IE games made it so you could only hold a chokepoint by putting two toons literally shoulder-to-shoulder in it, and then only when it's really narrow. Another thing I like is the removal of hard restrictions with regards to gear. It lets me experiment a lot more, even if I end up in more or less the same place (squishy wizards, tanky fighters).

@Awathorn What else would you have liked to see? They intentionally left out the printing press and all that entails. I can see why.

@Azradun Hm, if you're really on that tight a budget, why are you buying games so soon after release anyway? I'm not, and I buy almost all of them a couple of years later when they can be had for 5-15 euros or so. The only ones I buy on release are the ones I'm genuinely interested in. Besides which by then all the bugfixing, rebalancing, and other tweaking will have been done. Your computer will also be more likely to be able to run it well. Computer games are weird: you can actually get a better product for much less money simply by waiting.

@Longknife That would've been a really cool way to address it. A wee bit more work than changing the text on a memorial though.

(As own goals go, this wasn't quite up to the level of GG provoking Intel to invest $200M in a diversity program, but still pretty good as such things go. If only all the enemies of progress were as hopelessly inefficient. I was a lot more worried about gamer culture before, but since GG they've been pretty much doing our work for us.)

@Shake Appeal: Good post. Except I disagree, this was a skirmish on the front of the culture war. We won a resounding victory, and thanks to the rage of the GG contingent surely causing Obsidian and others to be more careful in the future, the entire gaming culture shifted a little. Observe, boys, girls, and others: this is how the culture changes.

@pipgrandpa Your proposed changes would still remove the strategic dimension of dungeon-crawling: restricting the use of your more powerful abilties so you have them available when you need them. And once more the old saw: if you find yourself needing to backtrack a lot, play better.

The nice thing is, though, that Obsidian and probably a good many other studios are going to be very careful not to let this kind of thing happen again. So, thank you, O Social Injustice Warriors, for the huge poopiestorm you raised over the changing of the limerick. That turned a barely-noticeable event into a great victory for the cause of better gaming culture. Keep up the work!

^ Yep. Plate mail has DR 15 against slash and pierce, 6 against shock, and 12 against everything else. Pallegina's is 13 against pierce, 9 against burn and freeze, 10 against everything else.

Guise, did it occur to you that maybe they had it changed because they didn't like it after someone pointed it out to them, regardless of her politics? Inconceivable, I know.

No it's fun. This place has been too much of an echo chamber, even with the grogs-vs-everyone-else split. It's highly entertaining to see that there really are people here raging over the lack of dumbed-down MMO mechanics. I was starting to think they're a phantom of the collective subconscious. You know, the "they" ruining it for everybody somewhere out there. But gadzooks, they're actually real. Now all we have to do is gently preach the gospel of Black Isle and His Church Obsidian to these heathens. Once they accept the Truth, the age of Incline will dawn for all. Then we can go back to eye-gouging over dirty limericks and the removal thereof.

LOL

Which is why they buffed his INT in 1.03.

Sabers aren't all that great because slashing only. The Ruffian group is super-attractive for some builds though because of the blunderbuss (and the pistol, not as good but available earlier).

As an aside, methinks people who are upset about nerfs to a single spell, weapon, ability, or item are over-reliant on that particular spell, weapon, ability, or item. Explore your party's capabilities and use more of them, you'll enjoy it more. Plus, you won't be as upset if something gets nerfed -- and you'll enjoy it more when something else gets a buff.

Trouble is Slicken worked nothing like Grease. Grease is not a particularly powerful spell. It mostly just imposes a movement penalty, with a relatively small chance of Prone (in the NWN games which implement that feature). Slicken was a near-guaranteed long-term group disable. To get something that effective you had to go to 8-9 level spells in the IE games. In particular, Slicken was superior in every way to Binding Web which is level 2. It was just ridiculous. They could have fixed it by keeping the duration and adjusting the numbers so that it'll only reliably knockdown very low-Reflex enemies. That however would still have made it superior to Binding Web, which would do more or less the same, minus the possibility to Knockdown. Which means they would have had to buff Binding Web somehow. I would've been perfectly OK with that approach too, but I don't think it's inherently better than what they did. The P:E spells aren't copies of DnD spells. Many are similar to them, but few work exactly the same.

I've seen uses for Might, Intellect, and Dexterity too.

The Internet is serious business.

Dunno about you but it's enough of a nuisance to keep me thinking strategically, and I haven't had to backtrack for supplies yet.

It is great. I'm enjoying it way more than I expected from the BB.

The game is pretty easy (not that this is bad, the IE games were easier), so you can really get away with anything. The reason people are upset is because Wizard is already worse than Cipher/Druid and this just widens the gap. No it doesn't. It just fixed two broken spells. The buffs more than make up for those. If you win games by finding the broken mechanics, then exploiting the bejeezus out of them, then moaning when they get fixed, you're denying yourself a lot of fun.

I agree, firearms don't need a nerf. They're devastating in an opening volley but the long reload time makes up for it. If you want to invest into Gunner and Sure-Handed Whoosis to make them viable again, that's fine -- there's a significant opportunity cost for that. Haven't used bows much so I don't know if they need a buff. Sagani and Itumaak seem to be doing fine with the hunting bow + Penetrating Shot though.

Nice rant. Per-rest abilities and spells that you have to ration strategically are a pretty crucial component of the IE-style experience though, rest-spam abusers notwithstanding. DA lost an entire dimension of strategic gameplay by having the party with all abilities available in every encounter. Try it out: use per-encounter abilities every encounter, spells strategically when needed, then start using them more liberally when you're starting to run low on health or getting fatigued, and really open up in boss battles. You might discover a whole new tension and dimension to the gameplay.

Yeah, well you are wrong too, because i never complained about DA:O which is the best of those series, BUT here is the thing fanboy, DA:O has NONE of this problems that POE has. There you are, P:E brings back game design from before DA:O. Before the games before DA:O, actually (NWN, NWN2). A lof of us felt that fantasy RPG design had gone on the wrong track with all the features you like -- no FF, aggro mechanics, cooldowns instead of per-rest spells etc. -- and wanted the old-school style games back. Fortunately for you, there are many cRPG's made with the mechanics you like so you have lots of choice for games to play. We would very much like to keep this little retro niche we've carved ourselves with Obsidian's help though. I believe that if you took a deep breath, studied the systems a bit, asked around about how the game is supposed to be played, and practiced a little, you too could learn to enjoy it though.

Don't be overly modest, Justin. I know good music when I hear it; I've been listening to classical since I was a kid, and my gold standard for epic sword-fighting dragon-killing music is Wagner's Ring. (To get to that level you, uh, still need a bit of practice.) What I think you do better than Shore in LotR is that you don't shove the music in our face. You're more sensitive to what it's for and what's going on. It's beautiful, present, and evocative without sounding like it wants to elbow out what else is going on. That's a crucial quality for film or game music which Shore didn't IMO entirely achieve in some fairly important points. Obsidian is very fortunate to have someone of your caliber on board! And yeah, I really really hope you'll be able to record the rest of the tracks live. They so deserve it. (I pick up a vibe of Shire theme from Od Nua by the way. Intentional or incidental?)