PrimeJunta

I like that idea. Domination/Charm though is one of the less problematic ones as there are already a whole bunch of ways to counter it once applied: a similar spell of your own, a suitable Dispel, or in a pinch a Hold Person to get him to stay put. I think there would be room for, say, a Death Spell that took one round to take hold, and could be countered with one of a range of suitable spells in the interim. It would make it more interesting that just requiring you to have the counter up before it's cast.

True. What I'm sayin' is, it's not that "hard counters are bad and we should get rid of them" but more like "BG2 relies too heavily on hard counters and pre-counters." I'd like to add other options. My favorite "counterspelling" moment in IE games is still in IWD when I got lobbed with Dominations and Charms and countered them with Dominations of my own or, failing that, Hold Persons. Back and forth rather than pre-emptive counters. I would like more of that sort of thing plz.

I'll make it short, since I'm tempted to write a long rationale for each of these. (1) Too many "pre-counters," too few "reactive counters." Consider level drain, charm/domination/confusion, or insta-death effects like Imprisonment, Disintegrate, etc. The primary or often only way to counter these is to get the counter up before the spell goes off. This pushes you too much into pre-emptive strategies, including the dreaded pre-buffing. I would like it better if there were more and better ways to counter these effects once they're applied. For example, have a short time window during which the spell/attack takes effect, during which time you can counter it. (Note: I do not want to get rid of pre-counters; instead, I want to add possibilities to reactively counter effects.) (2) Too many dedicated counters Too many spells do nothing but counter things. I would prefer to have counter effects rolled into spells which also do something beneficial. For example, Haste could counter Paralysis, Slow (which it already does), and other movement-restricting spells; Negative Plane Protection could also Protect against Evil, and Emotion: Courage could also counter Fear and Charm. And so on. There are plenty of "natural" synergies like this to be found, and plenty of spells that could be designed this way, by asking "what beneficial effect could this counter have?" or "what negative effect could this beneficial effect counter?" And, again: I do not want to completely eliminate dedicated counters; just shift the balance. Put another way, I would prefer more spells to work like Lower Resistance or Greater Malison, and fewer to work like Negative Plane Protection or Feeblemind. (3) Too many complete immunities Some effects are naturally all-or-nothing. Others, not so much. Some complete immunities should be scaled. E.g. instead of having complete immunity to spell level lower than 6 or weapon enchantment lower then 4, have, say, spells have damage or duration of (level/10), or weapons do damage with a multiplier of (enchantment/5). Again: don't get rid of all the immunities, just replace some of them with resistances. (4) Too random utility in counters, with a few that just work best When drilling down into the specifics of particular counters, there's a lot of stuff there that IMO doesn't really work. For example there's a big bunch of spells that strip defenses from enemy casters, which do slightly different things, but some are just way more useful than others regardless of level. I won't get into that here -- except to say that in practice I'm just using Dispel Magic almost all the time, and Breach in a pinch. Both are general and powerful. With the limited number of spell slots, I'm not going to keep an arsenal of tightly-targeted ones (Secret Word, Spell Thrust and what have you) when the general ones get the job done too. This could be made more interesting if it was genuinely difficult to acquire those highly useful general-purpose counters. If, for example, you just couldn't get Dispel Magic or Breach without really working for them, and had to make do with the specific ones in the interim. But this isn't the case as you can easily get any of them at any time.

Third time's the charm, they say, and this is true at least for me and Baldur's Gate 2. I've finally found a way to play it in a way I dig, and boy am I digging it. This one won't be a Let's Play, though, but I thought I'd revisit the subject one more time: Dead threads detailing my trials and tribulations with it here: Round 1 Round 2 Status at this writing: I abandoned the playthrough in Round 2 because I just wasn't enjoying it, and set the game aside for a while (also took a break from these forums). During the latter phases of that Round I had, following some advice I got here, experimented with pure powergaming, and had built a kensai/thief. I picked up from there and started playing again. Now I'm through Chapter 2 and starting Chapter 3. Hardest fights were the Shadow Dragon and Firkraag, both of which took me several tries but not so much it tipped into frustration. Kangaxx was... a little anticlimactic actually, although it did take me a few tries as well to get the timing and positioning right and, of course, die-rest-and-rememorize to counter the demilich's special attack. At this point I have accumulated enough metagame knowledge to know what most of the big quests in Chapter 2 are and which order I ought (not) to tackle them, where some of the best items are, and what companions are available, where, and what they can do. I've also reverse-engineered some of the things that most annoyed me and found ways around them. And... this completely changed the experience. It totally pulled me in and I've been playing it every moment of free time I have. And I'm really digging the combat encounters now -- they're supremely varied in every way; the hard ones manage to be hard in different ways, and I have to keep thinking of new things to try to get through them. However, there are also "routine" tactics for the easier fights that aren't too tedious or resource-consuming to execute. The specific things that I changed to make this enjoyable: Backstab. I had been neglecting this mechanic in previous attempts. It makes all the difference in the tougher fights. When I got the speed boots it became ridiculously effective. Yet the fights remain interesting because they're very active -- PC is extremely fragile and I have to get her out of trouble really fast after the the backstab. The key, though, is that unlike, say, similarly powerful spells, backstabbing is resource-free: I get a lot less attrition and have to rest a lot less frequently, which means... ...I'm not swamped by "game time" events. I usually only rest when someone gets fatigued. The "content density" in Athkatla was driving me bonkers, and it was that way largely because I was resting so frequently that the events fired all the freakin' time. IMO the time/rest mechanics in BG2 are rather badly broken actually as they only really "feel" right at a particular rhythm; rest too frequently and it turns into a madhouse. Small party. I have PC, Keldorn, and Aerie, with Cernd tagging along for a while mostly hauling stuff and occasionally casting Insect Swarm which makes all the difference in those really tough fights. I complement this with a temp companion when the spirit moves me; did Korgan's, Nelia's, and Valygar's quests this way and had Mazzy tagging along for a while, for example. I level up faster, I find 3-4 characters get in each other's way a lot less, and having more actually wouldn't make that much of a difference in most fights (although I suspect the dragon fights would've been easier with another spellcaster). I am also utterly gobsmacked by the sheer amount of stuff there is to discover, especially in Athkatla. It's really, really detailed, and there's constantly new stuff there. But man did it take long to get to this point. Now, relevance to P:E. I don't think P:E is going to be "another BG2." I also kiiiinda hope it won't, I don't know if I'd be able to put up with the kind of frustration it took to get to this point. But: Some things I hope P:E will do similarly as BG2: Breadth and quantity of content. Athkatla felt "alive" simply due to the sheer amount of stuff in it. There were little encounters, mini-quests, and big quests to get into. If Eora is at all similar (and the BB seems pretty promising in this respect), that's awesome. Diversity of combat challenges. There's a huge palette of combat toys to play with, both in your party and with enemies. I loved Firkraag's dungeon. There were single tough enemies, groups of tough enemies, gauntlest to run, and a badass end boss. Golems were quite different to fight than a mix of vamps and mummies. And Firkraag's dungeon was just one among many. Going by the BB P:E seems moderately promising in this respect too. I only dipped a toe into BB480 so I don't know how they've evolved since I last played it, but in the last-before-one build the fights weren't quite as good IMO. But they're in the ballpark. Lived-in feel to the world. Athkatla again: it looks and feels like a lived-in city, with new and old, run-down and well-maintained, someone selling apples for a copper, and so on. Degree of openness. BG2 isn't an open-world game, but it feels almost like one, in Chapter 2 at least. While not everything is accessible to start with – and arguably rather too much is accessible at the very start – for a very, very long time there's an embarrassment of choice with things to do, and opening up new areas is really cool. I think BG2 got this part almost right: I would have liked it better if it had made me hunt a bit more for some of the "big" quests – especially the harder ones – rather than springing (almost) everything on me in the Copper Coronet at the start. The model itself is good though, even if it doesn't quite hit the mark in the execution. Some things I hope/think P:E will do differently/better than BG2: More choice and consequence and more variety in quest resolutions. Most of BG2's quests are entirely linear: you perform a series of steps to arrive at a conclusion. Very few of them involve choosing a path, determining the outcome, or have the possibility of failure (other than having a timer run out). Going by the BB, I have high hopes P:E will do better than BG2 here. This will also make a big difference to replayability! Better writing. I never was a fan of BG2 writing. I'm still not. I find it cheesy in the extreme. Some of Irenicus's monologues rise slightly above the rest, but other than that... yeah, I'm pretty sure P:E will give BG2 a sound thrashing in the writing department. Better mechanics for time. Many of my biggest frustrations with BG2 came from the way it tied events to in-game time. Companion quest timers would run down, quest timers would run down, and scripted events would pop up. At the same time, the healing/resting mechanics made it incredibly easy to spend a week doing nothing, with no "feel" of time passing for me, the player. The pace of the game only started to feel right when I really, really restricted my resting -- only rested when fatigued, and tried to minimize getting fatigued by traveling between areas as little as possible. A better "time mechanic" would have saved me a huge amount of frustration, and I'm quite sure it would not have detracted from the enjoyment of the hardcore grogs a whit. Yet time passing is a fairly important element in any game with story. I hope P:E will find a better, less broken way of handling this than BG2. More interesting character mechanics. AD&D character mechanics are rigid and IMO not all that interesting. There are lots of classes and kits, but once you've picked yours, advancement is more or less entirely on rails; even where there is a measure of choice (e.g. which thief skills to build), you end up in the same place (once you're at high-enough level to have all of them). I have a strong preference for P:E's more flexible builds you can shape with talents and class abilities. Many AD&D class features -- especially weapon proficiencies and armor restrictions -- are also kind of pointlessly restricting: rogues can't learn longbows just because. Better balance. BG2 is hard. It only becomes enjoyable with a quite a lot of practice. In my opinion, it would be better to have a set of difficulty levels, where Easy is, well, fairly easy but still requires you to work with the mechanics, and the really hard levels providing the challenge for those who want it. I've experimented a bit with BG2's difficulty levels, and Hard isn't actually all that much harder than Normal: once you've figured out Normal, the same tactics, more or less, work on Hard. I'm all for scaling up difficulty at harder levels, but it is IMO a bad idea to make Normal frustratingly hard for a first play-through -- and despite your inevitable howls of "filthy casual," I contend that BG2 is damn hard at Normal. Some areas in which I think P:E won't live up to BG2: The magic system. Despite its flaws BG2's magic system has incredibly enjoyable breadth and depth. In my opinion, P:E's should have attempted to create a magic system which reproduces BG2 magic's strengths while avoiding some of the ways in which it's broken, instead of just throwing out entire mechanics wholesale. This is in fact one area in which my thinking has changed: I still think there are many things wrong with the hard counters in the BG2 magic system, but I no longer think the problem is with hard counters qua hard counters, but rather the specifics about how they're set up. Size. In a game like BG2, more is more. A big part of Chapter 2's appeal comes from its sheer size. P:E will be big, but not this big. Perhaps... P:E2, though? Replayability. BG2 really comes into its own when replayed. Now that I've cracked it I'm pretty sure I'll be coming back to it with different classes and kits. Again: the sheer amount of stuff in it gives unprecedented room for different "strategic" approaches now that I know where everything is. P:E's replayability will probably come from the difficulty levels and different quest resolutions; I'll be surprised however if it will have BG2's appeal in replaying the same content. Also, yes I'm stoked. I mean, less than two weeks??? Go Obsidz!

In Soviet Russia, money works for you! No that would be in Capitalist America. Expropriate the expropriators! ☭

No.

Yeh as long as he doesn't name any publisher in particular, they'll all go LOL he's talking about the others.

No. Yes? Speaking as someone who works at a place that's had some dark times, sometimes the make-or-break thing is a morale boost. P:E's revenues alone did not save Obsidian, but it may well have been the thing that, well, kickstarted the recovery.

Apologies if this was already posted but I didn't see a thread here; mods please merge if so. Obsidian posted a preview of Road to Eternity, the "making of" documentary. It's seven minutes and starts on a pretty dark note. I didn't know Obsidian were in such dire straits back in 2012. I thought P:E was a side project but it sure sounds like we saved the damn studio. If so, hot-damn. That's way cooler than the game.

You can choose which one you want, Steam or GoG.

I dig. Especially the companion teasers. Very cool to have a druid that's avoids the usual "I <3 Trees, and For the Balance!" schtick.

I'd buy into that. I'd still take the FYSMD: Josh Sawyer's Dream RPG kickstarter over that one. Just to see what he'd do if let completely loose. Even better: Arcanum 2: The Wolves of Avellone.

I actually don't give a toot about the publishers. I have nothing against publishers. They provide a useful service. Publishing a game requires a whole different set of activities, skills, contacts, and what have you than developing one. I do of course have a whole range of beefs against specific publishers, but that's neither here nor there. I like Kickstarter because it lets developers throw things at the wall and see if they stick. A publisher has to take a best guess about whether something will sell enough to be worth publishing since it'll eat the loss if it doesn't. This means that pitching something new is going to be an uphill battle since it's inherently riskier. With Kickstarter, either the idea flies or it doesn't. We -- the people who will actually play the damn things -- get to decide, directly. I.e., the publisher can throw any damn-fool idea at us, and either we'll like it or we won't. This also makes for a much healthier power relationship. Instead of the developer being beholden to the publisher's best guesses about what sells and what doesn't, they, again, talk directly to us, their public. If a publisher is involved, there's going to be much less uncertainty about how well the product will do in the market, which means the developer is in a better negotiating position too. Less risk, better deal. And even the publisher likes it better, because, hey, less risk. If the dev chooses to bring a publisher on board at some point -- for marketing, distribution, and what have you -- I say by all means. I wouldn't even object if the publisher is in from the start. Some publishers are pretty damn cool actually, Paradox for example. If they were involved in a KS, I would not count that as a minus. Who said I have anything with any publisher at all? They're saying that, that's why they're going kickstarter. But this has to lower the price. They didn't do it so, I guess the no publisher blah blah was to hook more people into it. Shame This goes to several other companies out there, not only Obsidian, btw. Uh, Sedrefilos, you brought up publishers in the very post I'm quoting. As to the pricing argument, we've already gone over that several times, and I don't think there's much progress to be made there.

I actually don't give a toot about the publishers. I have nothing against publishers. They provide a useful service. Publishing a game requires a whole different set of activities, skills, contacts, and what have you than developing one. I do of course have a whole range of beefs against specific publishers, but that's neither here nor there. I like Kickstarter because it lets developers throw things at the wall and see if they stick. A publisher has to take a best guess about whether something will sell enough to be worth publishing since it'll eat the loss if it doesn't. This means that pitching something new is going to be an uphill battle since it's inherently riskier. With Kickstarter, either the idea flies or it doesn't. We -- the people who will actually play the damn things -- get to decide, directly. I.e., the publisher can throw any damn-fool idea at us, and either we'll like it or we won't. This also makes for a much healthier power relationship. Instead of the developer being beholden to the publisher's best guesses about what sells and what doesn't, they, again, talk directly to us, their public. If a publisher is involved, there's going to be much less uncertainty about how well the product will do in the market, which means the developer is in a better negotiating position too. Less risk, better deal. And even the publisher likes it better, because, hey, less risk. If the dev chooses to bring a publisher on board at some point -- for marketing, distribution, and what have you -- I say by all means. I wouldn't even object if the publisher is in from the start. Some publishers are pretty damn cool actually, Paradox for example. If they were involved in a KS, I would not count that as a minus.

No details. In the latest interview Josh said they've had a few discussions and made a few sketches but it's very early days yet. The sum total of what's been revealed to the public is... that there will be one, and that some features that won't make it into P:E they hope to implement in it and then back-port.

I agree. However I don't think pricing has any bearing on morality at all... when we're dealing with a luxury good rather than a necessity, at least. Obsidian should charge however much they believe the market can bear. They didn't promise us anything different -- as far as I can tell -- and nobody's going to die out of not being able to afford to buy a license. Whatever they're able to make from this, they will have earned. (I do think that pricing, say, life-saving medicines to market is immoral. Which is one reason I think the pharmaceutical industry should be socialized. But I digress.)

I apologize. I should have said "die Bundeskanzlerin und ihre Regierung," not "the Germans." (Same applies to the Finnish gov't for that matter. They have their collective head just as far up their colon, only Finland is so small it hardly counts.)

Things in Greece must suck right now. I hope the Germans come to their senses before it's too late. My sympathies. Nevertheless, I get a feeling you're shifting your argument. Earlier I got the impression that you were arguing that Obsidian's pricing was morally wrong; now you seem to be arguing that it's a poor business decision. That's a different argument, and one I have no opinion on as I have zero experience pricing games. That said: P:E is a niche game. I'm pretty sure it would not shift Skyrim-like units even if they set the price at one cent, or zero. The market for PC/Mac/Linux party-based isometric top-down RTwP RPG's is limited, and expanding it is uphill work. I have no idea how big it is -- a million consumers? two million? five million? -- but it's certainly smaller than the Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Angry Birds, or Skyrim market... or the T-shirt market, for that matter. That means that setting the launch price too low is potentially more dangerous than setting it too high, as that'll saturate the market at a lower price than you could have had, whereas you can always lower the price later -- indeed, you're expected to do so.

I won't. If your motives for making shirts are something other than profit, more power to you. Out of curiosity, how many people are working for you? Have you ever had to fire anyone because you can't afford to keep paying them? What I am saying is that it is unreasonable to expect a for-profit corporation operating in a competitive market to price their goods below market price.

@Sedrefilos Actually the games market is very kind on people with limited means. You can get almost any game for 15 euros or less, and often for much less than that. All you have to do is wait. I can't think of many other markets where this is true actually -- even, say, cars, which depreciate pretty quickly, you'll have to wait a quite a while before price drops by half, and by then the car will not be as good as it was new because of mileage.

Did they actually pitch it that way? To my recollection, it was more like "We've tried to pitch this to publishers but they wouldn't bite, so we're pitching it to you; fund it and we'll make it, plus backers will get it for less than launch price." FWIW I'd be happy to buy into another Obsidian Kickstarter. I like their stuff. The return on my "investment" is that the game gets made. And if it fails, hey, it happens; I'm not thrilled about that obviously but unless they actually grab the money and run I won't get mad or anything. (It's happened. These things are risky.)

@Sedrefilos I would expect the answer to be something along the lines of "because we believe that price point will maximize our profits." What do you think it is?

Wait, what? The European Commission makes a good proposal which is then sunk by national ministries, and... it's the EU's fault? Does not compute. (Not disputing the general statement of the EU caring more about corporations than people; this specific instance just seems more like ... the opposite.)

Hehe. If it's priced too high, it won't sell. The price will come down eventually anyway. Those who don't like the launch price can buy it later. Of course, if it's priced unreasonably high, more people will feel justified in pirating it. I don't think the announced price point puts it very deep in that territory though; it's in line with what these things generally cost. (To make it perfectly clear: in my opinion "it costs too much" does not constitute an ethical defense for "so I pirated it.")

They did not sell us the game for 26 euros. They sold us a promise of a game. That, Sedrefilos, is quite different.