Varana

I can already see the wailing and gnashing of teeth of all those who complain about the game being too easy. --- Yes, casting outside of combat doesn't necessarily mean pre-buffing; but it's a large part of it because it is the thing directly affecting combat, the most important activity in the game. I for one could certainly live with distinguishing between combat-spells and non-combat-spells, meaninjg that you can cast certain spells only in combat, the others only outside of it. But I suspect that that's not going so well with the realism faction here.

As much as I'd like to have ships of the line with blazing cannons and windjammers racing the blue seas, I think having actual naval combat like that is a bit much for PoE2. It is, after all, a roleplaying game, not Josh Sawyer's Pirates!. If they can pull off some sort of gameplay at sea that reinforces the roleplaying aspect, that would be better. Yes, I'm boring. Sea monster are cool, though. ;D

Yep.

Sure, you can call decisions like those "policy", as in "design policy" or terms like that. But that is not what the wording of that post implies. Without further specification, "a political view" will always be understood as a reference to real-life politics, and the out-of-the-blue reference to a buzzword like "SJW" strongly reinforces that. And it is the duty of the writer to make his intentions clear. Backpedalling to "technically, everything can be called political" is dishonest.

That call for "realism" is also usually pretty one-sided in that it rarely takes into account that realistically, NPCs should be able to do the same stuff, as well. (PnP suffers from that problem, too.) Scouting out an enemy party and then throwing fireballs at them from afar sounds fun. Walking down the road and then have half your party wiped from within the fog of war without the option to actually detect them, less so. I mean, as a player you kind of expect combat mode to start when combat starts - that's what it's for. Having combat begin after an enemy party immobilised your guys via spells from the shadows defeats the point, in a way. At least it's next to impossible to implement in a satisfying way without making that the central point of your gameplay, and then this becomes a very different game, with the focus on stealth and detection. Game rules are abstractions to serve a certain goal. You can come close to free-for-all with basically story-telling PnP games because that is more or less entirely created by human intelligence, and nothing we know beats the human brain. For everything else, it's a game that is supposed to create fun via decisions guided by rules. Those restrict by definition. And for CRPGs, that's even more so because in those, the large majority of things have to be pre-planned. There is no flexibility in video games. Some may create the illusion by giving you a certain amount of tools and then have the world react to those options, and we may come closer to spontaneous gameplay by advances in artificial intelligence, but in the end, it's all about pre-programming stuff into the game, and what you didn't plan for ahead, doesn't happen. Coming back to fireballs - the question is not whether I should realistically be able to throw fireballs at random but what does the specific game and ruleset require and which option helps the game more.

I really liked Witcher 1 and hated Witcher 2 to the point of never playing more than a quarter or a third of it. *hides* [/OT]

Not having 3D technology in itself. The ability to render more realistic environments and characters while keeping smooth gameplay at the same time. Also, the appeal of action-oriented gameplay was always there. Diablo was a milestone in that direction - creating a game that actually catered to that demand. Fast-paced action gameplay will always outsell slow-moving games that require lots of time investment, as a general rule. It's just a question of how good the games available at the moment are.

That is correct. You get injuries (i.e. some kind of debuff) in PoE1 when you get knocked out in combat, and when you fail some check in a scripted interaction (not every time, it's individually scripted for each check).

Just a little bit of feedback: It might be a good idea to check if the badges could be arranged differently, maybe in several columns or something like that. As it is now, if you've backed a lot of things, your posts get large enough to write a mid-sized novel before your text is longer than your avatar+badges. The amount of scrolling through unused screenspace is quite substantial.

Abel: But both BG and IWD also had character classes that were decidedly lower maintenance than PoE. In BG, there weren't many (or any) abilities you needed to trigger with your fighter, and no SFX that cluttered up the screen. Similarly with some other classes. Spellcasters, as a general rule, required a lot of micromanagement; others had a few things to click and after that, flew by autopilot. PoE tries to alleviate that difference a bit; not by taking away spells from spellcasters but by giving the others viable abilities to use, as well. That greater difficulty to understand what's going on at the screen is a direct consequence of that so it's no wonder that BG/IWD didn't have that issue to the same extent.

I really, really like the Witcher. I really, really dislike ASoIaF. As for lighthearted, I'd recommend the Heart of Stone expansion. Not all of it, but it has some positively hilarious stuff. And for not-as-depressing, Blood&Wine (more lighthearted, at the same time).

Not necessarily. Steam has regional pricing which means that for some countries, prices are wildly different than US pricing. (If you live in e.g. Malaysia, you get the same game for nearly half the price than in the EU or America.) If the Paradox Store doesn't have regional pricing (or not in the same way as Steam), and only offers to buy the game at US prices, you might pay a lot more than on Steam.

The Endurance system does offer additional value - that you can let a charcter go down in combat and still carry on. It has tangible effects on how you approach a battle, a dungeon, and exploration. It adds an additional layer of strategic resource management. (Sorry. ) Yes, you go into combat differently. It reduces the weight of individual battles and lets you explore in a more continuous way, instead of treating every encounter as an al-or-nothing boss fight. That is intentional. It actually leads to you playing the game differently - that is the point. You may disagree with the intention, but "people like it because Obsidian came up with the idea and it has absolutely no value beyond that" is ridiculous.

Constructing artificial languages is fun if you like grammar and words like "ergative-absolutive", "status constructus", or "polypersonalism". I do. (It's been a staple of fantasy since Tolkien did it - for several languages at once. Or Klingon, or Dothraki. Just like fantasy maps, only way more complicated and therefore rarely done in-depth. Or well.) Using real languages is not a good idea. Vailians may be inspired by Italians but they aren't. Using Italian doesn't do them justice.

Ah, didn't know that. I backed it but haven't touched it, yet. I don't play any Early Access games.

I mean, time limits can make sense if they are used very sparingly, in specific circumstances, and are clearly communicated. But for the main part of a game like PoE, I think they'd be a very bad idea. As for resting, I think that the system in TTON (only specific places where you can rest, and you have to pay money to do so) wasn't that bad, in theory. But that is specific to that particular game where you basically can't get stuck in a fight, and you need the same resources (your stat pools) not only for combat but also during dialogue and various interactions with the world, and you don't really die except in a few situations. (The idea basically defeated itself by introducing free resting in the more important areas, and the usual CRPG problem of having truckloads of money in the end, anyway.) It wouldn't really work for PoE.

And the reason for that is that I have to reload if Geralt loses. Or choose to reload if I screw up a quest. Like in every effing videogame ever.* * Exceptions prove the rule. Edit: I mean, I can understand that not everyone likes Geralt as a character. I'm not really into him, either, even though I think Witcher 3 is a milestone for CRPGs that won't be surpassed for a long time.

If there's regular trade, chances are high that there's a small colony of expats living in that trading hub. I can't remember whether there is regular trade with Aedyr, though. But Defiance Bay leaves the distinct impression that it's supposed to be a trading city. I'd certainly not restrict language knowledge and learning to one or two languages. Outside the modern nation-state, people can be surprisingly multilingual, esp. traders, aristocrats, mercenaries, and scholars of all sort. Having knowledge of your native language and a lingua franca or another regionally spoken language, wasn't that rare in many areas.

If you're comfortable with turn-based (which is way better suited to whole parties fighting against each other, anyway), Divinity:OS II might be worth a look. It has an arena mode with up to 4 characters per player.

PoE is real-time. Turn-based may have it a bit easier (but not "easy" in itself.) You need networking code that connects players, make it secure, introduce a matchmaking server and maintain it, you need to relay information on actions and possibly "predict" actions and movement, synchronise all that stuff, make sure it always applies the same results at all times on several connected computers at once, doesn't lag even with wildly different hardware, and so on. And you need people who have experience doing that stuff. You don't just tack that on cheaply in a patch. If they had the resources, sure - but I really doubt they have. Now, I really enjoyed using BG2 and IWD as a kind of interactive chat program with gameplay elements back in the day. But really, with "coop modes" like those in a modern game, you'll get slammed in the ground leaving a crater.

Not every game is made better by "strategic resource management". Not even games where strategic resource management is an important part of gameplay in other areas. You cannot just tack on systems and gameplay mechanics until you can't think of any anymore. If an elaborate resource management for resting takes away focus from where you want the focus of the game to be, it should be scrapped. Complicated resting mechanics are a core aspect of a survival game. PoE isn't one. In PoE, resting is a subsystem of encounter balance and dungeon design. Making it too time- and attention-consuming blurs the focus and hurts its purpose in the context of the game as a whole. Adding complexity doesn't necessarily add depth. Often, it just adds bloat. --- Crafting supplies yourself doesn't solve the problem in any way. If you want to make supplies worth the effort, you've got to tightly control distribution of the necessary resources, like they did with the components for highest tier crafting. Which means that there isn't much difference between being able to find supply crafting resources only in certain spots and in a certain amount, or just distributing the traders that sell camping supplies as you like it.

The Witcher series is, I think, a somewhat fitting example. The first game was a lot closer to PoE's genre - it was based on Neverwinter Night's engine, after all, and combat was still in the traditon of RTwP. They went full hack-n-slash only with the second game. But there, the paths begin to diverge already. CDProjekt used their first game as a stepping stone into a genre that was much more promising, commercially, while Obsidian is staying with an isometric 2.5D game. Now, I'd certainly not complain if PoE3 would propel Obsidian into an industry heavyweight. I wouldn't even complain about some "dumbing down" to do that. I just don't see it coming. Better be surprised by good news than bad ones.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind did that.

Have you played Tides of Numenera, yet? :D

Also, I find it quite questionable to just assume that the supposed "dumbing down" of Tyranny and TToNumenera would be responsible (even partly) for lower sales. That simply ignores that both PoE and D:OS are, compared to those two, pretty mainstream. PoE is a standard pseudo-medieval fantasy world with Elves and stuff and lots of combat; D:OS is colourful and fun and they're setting up multiplayer arena matches at their presentations. They won't sell Call of Duty levels, but as RPGs go, their appeal is pretty broad. Tyranny, OTOH, is a somewhat short game with a rather odd premise (or how many people really wanted to play mid-level North Korean government officials?) that wasn't promoted much, and TTON ... is a weird novel with some visual help where it's perfectly normal to not see any combat for at least a third of the time you play the game (and has some real issues). I suspect those might play a larger role in sales numbers.