Christliar

Injuries have to matter and have to be punishing, if you can't continue on with 2 injuries then that means it's working, you also forget the fact that you do have a choice to continue after 2 injuries, you just don't want to. What if getting knocked out once meant the character is dead, like it was in the IE games? The injury system is a compromise, not a substitute for resource management like you think it is. There is no resource management in P2, don't delude yourself. You are not supposed to shake off injuries and continue on like nothing has happened. The only thing this system accounts for is how well you play, nothing else. Is it a step back? Kind of, resting wasn't prohibitive enough in P1 to matter much, so eh. I'm pretty sure Josh is at the point of designing the game with the assumption that everyone will rest after every fight, so whatever.

I already suggested doing that. But people will be either resting after every fight with the current balance or spamming health potions and healing spells instead of resting... No easy solutions. The solution is limiting resting to a minimum. Both the IE games style Vancian system and PoE's Health/Endurance would work in that context. The problem is the players, not the system. People will scream and bitch, and moan, and cry that the game is too hard, seemingly oblivious to the fact there are 5 difficulties.

It's about identifying where the problem actually lies. "The game doesn't give me a meaningful choice when I can't even keep up with its demands!" is demagoguery to the highest degree. The infinite resting is a chance the game gives you, it's not a choice and seeking such in an obviously "everyone gets a medal for participating" system is dishonest. It doesn't matter whether you can or can't continue with 2 or even 3 injuries, it doesn't mean anything for it to be meaningful. It simply informs you that you aren't keeping up and for that it gets the job done, how's that for a meaning? The Vancian spellcasting alleviates this problem somewhat, not fully, of course, using your resources to their fullest potential has a gameplay aspect to it, but that's not what we are dealing with here. If you couldn't rest anywhere and at any point, maybe then can we talk about choices and the meaning thereof.

You assume that this is somehow a meaningful choice and that the game bars you from it, it is not. Whether you can or can't continue is based on your skill level, like it has always been. Especially when the only negative is 50% less health and you can rest after every single injury anyway. The resting is there to be used, it isn't restricted enough to not be. Maybe that is what the problem actually is, too free resting, it needs to be restricted more. What other problems you might have, like feeling like a bad player if you rest spam too much, is on your head. Play better and you might not feel the need to rest after 2 injuries or even get those injuries in the first place.

While it is a thread for identifying problems in a broad sense, it still shouldn't be bogged down with non-issues like the injury system. We have to be able to differentiate between problems of the game itself and problems at the other end of the keyboard.

If you are getting knocked out too much, then the game is telling you to switch to a lower difficulty, you obviously can't keep up with its demands. The infinite resting is a crutch. Or git gud, that works, too. If the system doesn't permit playing to such a level that you can't possibly prevent getting knocked out too much, then that's cause for concern.

Wound system is fine, git gud.

Just a friendly reminder - D&D 3/3.5E had a much more complicated multi-classing system, being able to pick up to 4 classes at any level while also having universal feats anyone can pick up. Yeah, it was much easier to munchkin and a lot of classes were downright useless while others were literally god-mode and could do anything, but NWN1 and 2 proved that you could prune the more insane abilities and make the classes somewhat balanced, even though spellcasters were still a notch overpowered compared to martial classes, but that's because they had many more tools to work with. My point is that multi-classing and general feats don't contradict each other.

Or, or, hear me out here, this may get tricky - everyone has a lot of options? It's not like you don't gain anything by going single-class, you gain the most powerful abilities of that class. Why does something have to cater to new players? The game is Pillars of Eternity 2, not Pacifier Simulator. It's expected that a sequel will require a bit of knowledge from the previous game.

They had to add more general talents (along with trying to differentiate the classes more), a lot of those in P1 were either no-brainers, extremely situational or entirely useless. One of the, if not the only, (almost) not controversial aspects of PoE was the character building, removing options so they can streamline it is a shot in the foot. Had they added more class specific talents, then I can see the justification for removing general ones, but they didn't, making the single-classed characters simply limited.

The classes in PoE1 didn't feel same-y due to the general talents, they were same-y even from a design standpoint. If they only removed general talents nobody will see a difference between the class design of P1 and 2. The classes need more creative and different ideas to make them stand out, the meager ones they had in P1 aren't enough.

It's a catch-22 basically. The main argument is that important, meaningful content shouldn't be gated behind a stronghold. They do have a point though, because a stronghold is somewhat different gameplay and veers towards other genres. That's why the stronghold should be optional. Josh argues that it's nearly impossible to create meaningful and coherent with everything else content, but also to be optional.

It wasn't amazing in a mind blowing way, but it is the best stronghold in an RPG I've come across. All others feel either pointless or simply menu navigation in a pretty dress (in PoE it is literally menu navigation). We simply don't have better made strongholds to compare the one in NWN2 to. I was very surprised when I came across the quote from Josh saying that many people hated the stronghold, because I've never encountered such hate myself.

I'm the person the OP is referring to, so I feel obliged to comment Admitedly, for me, the stronghold is the least of PoE's problems, but I don't think it's anything malicious. I think it's either a) they thought they would attract more backers with a stronghold stretchgoal or b) it was a miscommunication somewhere and they couldn't back out later. I'm purely speculating though. It does seem bizarre that they'd make it a stretchgoal with the knowledge JS shared about the NWN2 SH and then make it as pointless and boring as possible. Though if they could rectify it in the expansion and think it's worth it, then go ahead.

Chris Avellone has said that they didn't use a lot of his writing for Durance and Grieving Mother. That's why it tapers off to nothingness and the whole character (Durance) feels like an allegory for our consumption which is just plain weird. The whole game feels inconsequential in the writing department, it's nowhere near KotOR2 which I regard as a masterpiece and still think about years after I played it. It's nowhere near Mask of the Betrayer or any of the Troika games either (since most of the writers from Troika wrote for PoE too (to my knowledge)). I opened a thread about the companions a while ago - http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75911-the-disconnection-between-companions-and-the-overall-story/ if you want to read through it. I just don't want to repeat myself constantly.

That just sounds cheap to me tbh. Besides, we already know the answer to the question "What if it's impossible to know anything for sure?" - Descartes posed the very same question and came to the (quite wrong) conclusion Cogito ergo sum. Well it's not really a conclusion, more like a statement that he can jump off from, but still.

The PC's character is whatever you want it to be. Which means, quite the opposite of your statement, that it is possible to be anything. Which is preferable to it being predetermined. They did an ok job at making this matter which the reputation system, though it could definitely have been better (I really hope they expand on this in DLC and sequels). It's also true that the whole going mad thing is way underplayed, which made the drive to pursue Thaos pretty weak. I do wish the companions interacted with the world outside of their quest a bit more beyond a quick little chiming-in here and there. I could see Hiravius getting the party into trouble in an inn somewhere. One of them, perhaps Durance, could be up to no good if not recruited or left to rot in your keep for too long. Even just some interesting conversations with non companion NPCs would have been nice. I don't feel that they need to be terribly involved with the main plot, but it is a good point that some of them don't have much reason to stick around past their own quest getting finished. I explained what I meant in exactly the next sentence. It means that your character's personality and motivations can not be in any way tied to the main plot; that would be schizophrenic and a nightmare to write and develop. That is why we are forced into the role of the Watcher, regardless of the PC's personality. That's *fine* to some extent, the bad part is that the role of the Watcher just isn't interesting.

Oh, I wouldn't be too worried about that. First, it doesn't work that way. If it did, then Bioware wouldn't have changed the DA:O formula, because IT was the Biggest selling Bioware game when it came out. But we know what did happen, don't we. DA:O sold so unexpectedly well that they decided to.....reboot the franchise and give us something utterly different. (a 180, to quote Mike Laidlaw). Second, DA:I is NOT Bioware's biggest selling game. Not Yet at least. The only information EA has released was that DA:I was Bioware's most successful LAUNCH. This is double-speak, designed for stockholder consumption. Translated to English, what EA is saying here that DA:I had the most pre-orders of any Bioware game, and it had the biggest week 1 sales of any Bioware game. But most gamers know what that really means: Nothing. DA2 had a much better launch than DA:O, but ended up only selling half as many copies in the end. In order to be Bioware's biggest selling game, DA:I would have to break 6 million. Because that's what Mass Effect 2 did. And I'm pretty sure it's not there yet. Huh, I didn't know this. Then why did they change the DA:O formula in the first place? Seems counter-intuitive. Its story and companions were boring, repetitive and average, but otherwise it was OK. I do hope that they don't make something like DA:I ever again, but hope is a cruel mistress.

Regarding DA2 - It's actually the best Bioware game in term of narrative. It was completely by accident, I know this because of their track record, but it was basically OK. It didn't have the usual bioware-isms to weigh the game down. Cue the Bioware cliche chart. The Arishok worked as an antagonist, because he had coherent motivations and we had a battle of ideologies. Meredith kind of worked too (barring the ending she got), she was a great example of how vigilance can turn into excessive vigilance and excessive vigilance can turn into paranoia and witch hunts. Both of these things were completely by accident, as I said, since Bioware don't have good writers. Or it wasn't by accident, but we are so bogged down with the same-y crap they release on a regular basis that we don't have any evidence to suggest it wasn't by accident. The lack of overarching narrative was also a strength which allowed the characters to be more important than some random plot about saving such and such. Also Hawke, as influential as he was, couldn't simply declare his opinion and end the mage/templar thing. This is good, because it makes the world feel natural instead of a playground for the overpowered PC. DA:I is **** on every level imaginable - don't play it. I wanted to end my post there, but I realized something horrible. This is Bioware's best selling game... which means they are going to make more games just like it. It is a cursed situation from the very beginning, because DA2 sucked according to popular opinion -> both the popular opinion, Bioware and EA totally missed the point of why it sucked -> EA decided to whip them into writing the same ****ing bull**** they always do -> Hyped DA:I to oblivion to ensure good sales -> Good sales happened despite the game being utterly drab and **** -> They are going to continue making the same ****ing game with the same ****ing MMOish gameplay, with the same ****ing storyline -> I figuratively slit my wrists.

Except if you played the game and read that book on Wael, you do know the context. By the way, one of possible answers you can give to Iovara states exactly that: the questions pose more meaning than their answers. It can be further elaborated by one of the companions (namely Hiravias) as well.But as I already said, that's just what I saw in the plot. The main question of the game was left terribly vague. Or, rather, there is a whole bunch of questions, but they are all underdeveloped, so everyone sees what they want. If you know the context of an answer then you know the question. An answer is only an answer if it has a question to go with it. That's the entire point. Everything else is just random statements. I was literally answering the question "What is an answer without a question?".

An out-of-context statement and linguistical nonsense.

I think the problem is more that the player doesn't have any reason to have any emotional investment in those meanings. Oh, dear, video game gods are fake. The horrors. On the other hand, even in within the setting, the gods are presented as fairly awful, just vehicles/excuses for bigotry, torture and genocide. Finding out they are false should be a relief, and people can get on with their own lives, building better lives through science. Like the supposed insomnia you're character has because of 'watcher issues,' the story just isn't convincing in any regard about any conceivable meaning. Mostly you just hunt down and murder a man because he mildly inconvenienced you at the beginning of the game. Luckily, he was a jerk, so... it was ok to stab him in the face at the end. And rip out his soul. As for NPC closure- the characters I actually cared about (the well written ones- Eder, Sagani, Kana) turned out fine and did well. Тhe PC having no reason to be in the story is just a drop in the bucket of problems with the main plot, as you well know. The plot fails on so many levels and everything is already said, so I don't know what more we can discuss. We can entertain some vaguely argumented hope that the sequel will do better since it's Obsidian, but that's it.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/74672-so-the-plot/page-3 Read through here and through this thread, it will dispel your confusion ;p See Planescape: torment. None of the companions were mandatory and they all play into the main plot. Yes, of course. I gave many examples of this in this thread and I'm tired of repeating myself.

Not only that - you should have conversations with them. Not the ones that dispense exposition or alignment/disposition points. Obsidian atm have the best writers in the industry and I'm not entirely sure what happened. Both the main plot and the companions are severely lacking, with the main plot totally going bonkers at the second half of act 3. Thaos being stupid and making no sense. Iovara coming out of nowhere. Companions with who you just go through a list of questions that occasionally you can select a cookie-cutter response to to dispense disposition. I don't think that's tied to budget at all.

I agree, most of the dungeons were well done. I felt some of them lean too heavily towards the fighting kind though. Some of them felt same-y too, like ALL the Engwithan themed ones, they were also the ones on the combat-heavy side. I don't dislike combat, quite the contrary - I play games (mostly) for the challenges combat can present. Endless Paths had some meh levels with nothing happening in them. The level with the elementals spring to mind. The second to last was just a room with Dank Spores etc. I liked the overall atmosphere of it, some unknown horror lurking down below, though I was disappointed that it was just a dragon and not a very interesting one. Was hoping for some Eldritch abomination or something but eh, you win some, you lose some ;p Skaen Temple was creepy, I agree, but mostly with nothing happening besides the end. Raedric's was awesome, many ways to finish it, interesting NPCs to talk to inside etc. Temple of Eothas - very good early level dungeon with some good loot, loved it. It remained fresh because of the notes you find and history to uncover, and it wasn't overly long to bore you. Shadows were cheap enemies, but I liked them because they added flavor. I'll list the ones I didn't like: Catacombs in Copperlane - pointless and just one long corridor. Mostly all the Engwithan ones - felt same-y and the architecture was just boring. ...that's about it. All my other criticisms still stand though.