Sarex

I'm not, but combat is the major (biggest) part of it. Those aren't statistics. Ask any developer would he even look at those polls and take anything they say to heart. Those numbers are ridiculously small and as for those political polls you mention, I trust them even less. - No, I'm pretty sure they are just loud. Oh, and Sarex, check this link. http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?5156-Games-You-Liked-Got-Great-Reviews-Yet-No-One-Played&p=117970&viewfull=1#post117970 Who is Scott Warner and what was the profit? If the game had sold as good as he claims the publisher wouldn't have kept quiet while the press reported bad numbers. Seems fishy to me. That post was also made 4 years after the game released. In may 2000 these where the numbers for IE and some other games: Baldur's Gate (all formats) 500,000 BG expansion pack 156,000 Fallout 144,000 Fallout 2 123,000 Diablo 1,300,000 Revenant 37,000 Darkstone 75,000 Ultima IX: Ascension 73,000 Planescape: Torment 73,000

IWD 2 improved on BG combat, so in my opinion it outshines BG gameplay. BG series was a great melting pot and over all it was the best. Torment had a great story and narrative and nothing else. I hope you get 0 xp for it, and I will take my loot down with me.

Tomorrow at dawn, beneath the clock tower. You may chose your weapon, potatoes or carrots.

Then what was the point in saying "Torment has critical acclaim(more than BG)"? Please link me a source for IWD2 being a failure, this is the first time I heard of it. Only thing I could find on IWD2 after a short skim is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icewind_Dale_II#Reception

Wait, where did I say "that among backers IWD fans are as numerous as Torments". Did you mean to say BG? I never believed there are more IWD fans here. As for the polls, 77k in KS versus 200-300 voters in the polls is not worth considering in my opinion. Also when I say that Torment fans are the loudest, I mean that in the way, that in any discussion they will always make it know that P:E is the best game ever made. You are clueless. If he meant it as a separate series, then it is my fault, as I misunderstood. Said by the people who made IE games.

Don't be daft. So the game cost 1 million dollars to make, but it made 1 million 10 thousand dollars, so hey it's a success because it made a profit. It's not just about getting out of black the numbers need to be big enough to make an impact. (Disclaimer: the numbers used in this explanation are made up and used strictly for educational purposes and as such do not represent the actual sales numbers of P:T). When I say BG, I mean Baldur's Gate as a series, not just part 1&2. Baldur's Gate is the best game over all, Torment had the best narrative experience, IWD had the best gameplay, this is all widely accepted.

Sales talk http://www.rpgwatch.com/show/article?articleid=55 Chris Avellone explicitly states that Torment made a profit, albeit a small one. Suggests marketing is responsible for this less successful performance. Critical Acclaim (noting that Malekith explicitly stated that its acclaim, amongst IE games, trailed behind BG2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-greatest-games-of-all-time-planescape-torment/1100-6135401/ Gamespot thinks it's a pretty good game. http://www.gamespy.com/articles/540/540546p1.html Gamespy too. http://au.top100.ign.com/2007/ign_top_game_71.html IGN thought it was pretty good. BG2 came 43, BTW. No other IE games - IWD included - on this particular list. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/194593/features/pc-gamers-top-100-part-4/ PC Gamer called it the ninth best game ever. (Didn't check all 100 but no other IE games are in the top 25.) Seriously, doesn't take a whole lot of link hunting off of the main Wikipedia page to find that critics really liked it. No one said it made no profit, I only said it was a commercial failure. He said torment was rated better then BG, which as can be seen from you links it is not and in the one it is, this is the comment on it "It's still a fantastic narrative experience.", no mention of gameplay, only that it is not a cliche story. In fact all the reviews go in the same line of though, that it was "A fantastic narrative experience". Also no where did I say that the critics didn't like it. Please read trough my post before replaying. -I remember it because it was a great fight, but I would have remembered it even more if I didn't get xp for killing him, I would would have been royally pissed. Luck shouldn't be punished, if it happens to you great, but I think the chances of this happening are so low it's not even worth considering. -First time I used the scroll, because I couldn't beat him. Second time I decided to give it my all because I had played the game much better and tbh I would have felt cheated if I didn't at least get more xp (because he didn't give any items). -How many people voted in that poll, and how many people were in the kickstarter, as I said Torment fans are, in my experience, the loudest.

That is just gaming the system, which can easily be patched out. I am not hating on Torment, but to be honest I don't want it's gameplay being mixed in to P:E. Story telling wise there are great stuff that could be added in but game play wise it sucked so much.

Not one thing you said is true. It failed to reach the numbers that where set for it, so yes it was a commercial failure. Not only was it not overblown but it barely covered it's production cost. As for having critical acclaim, I don't think one site put it above the BG series. Where are you coming up with this information, the argument still stands, that it sells now in small numbers and cheap on GoG does in no way benefit Infinity Ward which as we all know is gone. Most of the games ever made continue to sell, but the companies look to make back the money they spent and make a healthy profit in the year after the games release, all the sales after that are minute and are not counted towards the commercial success of the game. As for the success of the Torment kickstarter, well they worked off of the hype that P:E and Wastelands so the numbers it made where bigger, which is not to say that Torment didn't have it's fans. IWD series was the culmination of IE gamplay, the place where it lacked was story and linearity, so no I don't think it was a weak link. In torrment you could have removed the gameplay and just made a visual novel and it would have still worked.

Torment was a commercial failure, so going by the sales it wasn't that popular and just because the Torment fans are one of the loudest I met doesn't mean half the people on kickstater liked it. I guess we will see when the game comes out, just how many of you Torment fans there really were.

@jethro The Firkraag story with the finger of death is probably a stroke of luck(or he is lying), as for the other stories here they only happened at a high character level (near the end of the game) or they just used a guide. Now why do I say that, lower magic resist is a level 6 spell that costs 10000 gp and can be bought at only one place (early game) and drops only once later in the game. On my first playthrough, many winters ago, I fought him the first time I met him (I thought that the quest was set up so that you either fight him or **** out and move on(can't come back)) now my whole party was low level and the best tactic I came up with was to summon the maximum amount of beast as cannon fodder and rotate my characters to beat him to death. That was hard as balls and took me a "few" reloads to make it work. I needed to figure out how to position my casters, where to put my archer and how long can my paladin, fighter, and cleric tank him and not to mention the per-buffing of the party. So yeah you could make it easy, I know I did on my later playthroughs, but for me it's that first fight that I remember when I think about Firkraag. Another good example for on kill xp, is the Beholder layer in the underdark. First playthrough I cast mass invisibility, ran through the whole dungeon and killed the 3 beholders I had to. Missed a boat load of xp, but that was the only way I could beat them. Later playthroughs? I bought the Baldurians shield, and summoned high level elementals and steamed through it.(I finished all the the quests before the underdark and was a much higher level then on my first playthrough) But maybe the best example that I can think of that demonstrates my point, is the hardest enemy in the game (except for the undead lich) the imprisoned one. You had 2 options, you could kill him which was hard to do, or you could read helms scroll and just imprison him again. Killing him gave 100k xp per character, reading the scroll gave you 80k xp per character plus 25k global xp. Would you argue that reading a scroll is the hard thing to do? I don't know, a lot of people here think that Obsidian is going to make other options for playing through a quest smart and complex, but I fell that they are going to be simple fetch quests that will put you out of your way for a short while and some dialog option that you need to pick, which for anyone who reads the text is easy to figure out and of course let's not forget sneaking by. The sad thing is that, this kind of a game is already being made (Torment), which to me (and lots of other people) was the worst of all the IE games (had a great story line, but the gameplay was atrocious). Why force this game in to the mold of Torment, instead of focusing on what made the rest of the IE games great.

I really am not devaluing them, they have their place in the game and in the instance where they prove to be harder (need more effort) to accomplish then the other paths, ie. combat, it should be rewarded accordingly. What is wrong with the gameplay we had in IE games where specking your character with diplomacy, sneaking, lock-picking, etc. used to unlock additional quest, more dialogues (which gave more xp) and other things.

You are funny. The funniest thing I read in your post is that you think that picking a dialog option makes you smart. Those "smart" ways of solving a quest are no where near as complicated as you make them out to be and to be honest they are plain boring/easy as they end up being a scavenger hunt (there are some instances where they were fun). You dude have too high of an opinion of your self, good luck with that. How could 99% of people not find him when he is an end to a large quest, there is even a quest to kill him if you are a paladin, that seem very strange to me. I am ok with letting a player chose his kind of playthrough, but I am against the game encouraging easy gameplay.

You are getting cheeky with me, you and I both know that there is a difference betwen gaming a flaw in the system (that can be patched out) and wrong game design at the core of the game. So it is good practice to encourage the player to take the easiest route and reward him the same as for the hard route. Then what is the point of the hard route? From the 6 characters you have one will most likely have the skill set for the easiest solution in any quest. As for you killing Firkraag on your first try, well you either went to him with end game character levels or you got lucky, 99% of the people didn't get lucky.

What you are describing would need to be extremely convoluted to require the same amount of effort and I really doubt it that they have the time to give every quest that treatment. Also if those things are more difficult to accomplish then fighting, you should get more xp for the harder action. I am not a proponent of fighting, but that more difficult actions should garner more xp. And what did you prove with that video? That you can game the system, you could also type in cheat codes and do it like that. Anyones first playthrough of that fight was hard as balls (of course if you didn't google how to beat him before hand). Same as above, also you couldn't use Feeblemind on it's own, you needed to lower his magic resist by a **** ton before that would work. This is also a how to guide you can find on google. I always max out diplomacy on my main character(Paladin), and I don't think that fighting is the end all be all of IE games, but I consider it to be a much lager part of IE games then people here seem to think. - Point taken. I hope it at least turns out like that. I really didn't like Dark Souls and didn't finish it (the controls where just to clunky for me and I think that is what made the game hard) so I can't attest to what the game is like in it's entirety.

But then no one would see the point in reloading the game an x amount of time in order to figure out how to finish a very hard battle, if they can just click through some dialog and end up with the same result, that is just poor game design.

Was waiting for someone to mention the items, yeah that would be a loss too but I still think that the xp should not be equal, also that would again be bribing the player, so we can't even expect that if we are to agree with Saywers philosophy.

Again I will go back to Firkraag, you can let him live and that is the easier option, or you can (I'm gonna go full role playing mode here) kill him and stop him from committing any other evil acts. Another example is Dark Souls, do you think that people enjoy the multitude of death and repetitions they experience in the game because they like the fighting, no they enjoy the moments where they defeat the impossible boss, get a huge reward and make progress through the game, that is the same reason why people like impossible fights in IE games. Encourage the easy options, and the game will fail to reach IE standard let alone surpass it. As for Sawyer, why reward the player at all then, remove gold and xp altogether and just make checkpoints where the player gets levels and items. He will get to prove his philosophy with this game I guess, but I wish it was not so. I fell that if Obsidian fail in this game, that will be the end of any true IE successor.

Then I will just laugh my ass off and move on.

Again, like you don't even read my post, what I said is that collapsing the cave or sneaking past it or talking or running away is easier than a hard fight. What you seem to forget is that this is a game and not the real world. Gameplay wise, all those things take less effort then a hard fight. Also, why are you talking about rewarding a computer character with xp, it is the player who is ultimately being rewarded, and removing that reward is removing the incentive from the player to do anything that requires effort in the game. So no, those things are not anything less in the realm of the mighty hero doing them, but seeing as you are not that hero but a lowly player of a game, then there should be a differentiation for rewarding you in doing something easy and something hard. To finish of, so there isn't any misunderstanding again, it is not about the act of killing or the hero learning or any of the other ridiculous stuff I keep hearing, it is simply about rewarding the player for doing something that is hard to do vs. him taking the easy way out. We are, in the end, not doing a visual novel but a hard core (XD) RPG game.

Killing Firkraag was an objective in a quest and that was not my point, my point was that in P:E you could hire a dwarf to collapse the cave and kill him and that would give you the same xp as going in your self and pulling up you sleeves. That is not what the developers said.

You didn't have to kill Firkraag(the dragon in BG2), it was optional. As for the items, well that is the reason why we want to kill them, also that is purely a balancing issue.

Reality?!? What? Anyways, those impossible fights are so sweet when you figure out how to win them, I would argue that they where a big (if not the biggest) part of the IE games. I still remember the Chimera fight at the ice temple in IWD2, or my first dragon in BG2. To tie in on this, why would you get the same amount of xp for doing something that is hard in this example a "hard fight" and for sneaking past the enemy. In my opinion that is just encouraging people to quit from those impossible fights, and go for an easier route.

Well at least wizard/sorceress can go full bikini mode.

I said that no one is forcing the player to exploit the system, you can play the game just how it was "designed" to be played. Why does it diminish the game for you that someone exploits it, play it how you want it, you have the freedom to do so. As for those badly designed parts of IE games, well I guess we will see if they where truly bad when P:E comes out.