sibakruom

In a vacuum, yes, BG2EE is worth its 20€ price on Steam. But the vanilla BG2+ToB compilation is available on GOG for 8€. To be fair, I just realised I completely forgot to mention the EE also adds another campaign, separate from the Bhaalspawn saga. I don't plan to try it anytime soon, so I can't comment on how good or how long it is. I think it's much more combat focused, about fighting in an arena, and we must create the whole party like in IWD.

Playing it right now. It's not bad - I mean, it's still BG2 - but it's probably not worth the price tag. Aside from the bugfixes and widescreen, there's a slightly improved AI for boss battles - all of which can be modded in BG2 AFAIK. The only real difference are the four new companions and their personal quests. Those quests are quite a bit longer than the personal quests of the original companions, and they also continue in ToB. However, their recruitement quests are a lot shorter (no equivalent to the Planar Sphere or De'Arnise Keep, for example).

Let's be realistic here. Neither the Guarded Compound nor the Crooked Crane Inn are appropriate for low level parties. Of course, they're feasible (what isn't?), but on a blind playthrough they will take several die-and-try-again.

I said "efficiently handle." When they created mage battles, I'd wager BioWare didn't have in mind players standing outside the enemy mage's field of vision, sending one summon at a time to get killed, making the mage waste their powerful offensive spells on sacrifices while their defensive spells slowly wore off, before eventually summoning a Fire Elemental to finish the fight. That was abuse of the AI, not clever design.

Neither BG1 nor Irenicus dungeon teach how to efficiently handle a mage hiding behind several layers of defensive buffs, and lowering the difficulty barely helps on that point. While the manual does give all the info needed, it's just buried in the huge spell list. Whatever works. I half remember my first completed BG2 playthrough more than ten years ago, when I never cast buffs or status effect, brute-forced enemy mages' defensive buffs or waited for them to wear off on their own. Replaying now, with all my fancy Stoneskin, Chaos, True Sight, Breach and Pierce Magic, I wonder how I managed to finish it back then. I think that was thanks to spell books filled to the brim with summoning spells, a tactic I borrowed from my previous BG1 playthrough.

And a Fallout character with abyssmal Intelligence can use complex combat tactics because the players themselves know about those. What makes the non-abstraction of skills like aiming or reflex poor RPG design but the non-abstraction of skills like tactic or planning perfectly normal? Stats should cover the latter as well. In the end, as soon as we allow player input at any level we're making the corresponding stats that less relevant. Since we want to include player input (we want to play the game, not watch the game plays itself), which skills are or are not abstracted is not genre-defining, it's just a matter of personal preference.

After reading the FAQ concerning the Obsidian-Paradox partnership*, I'd say Paradox has actually invested money in PoE, in marketing and distribution. It's not money directly invested into game development, but it's still money that Obsidian would have needed to take out of the Kickstarter funding otherwise. * FAQ: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65751-pillars-of-eternity-%E2%80%93-partnership-faq-for-backers/

That's kind of unfair. There isn't exactly a flood of those. You are conflating lots of aspects in a single sentence here. A game can be accessible (rules and mechanics are simple to understand even for new players) while still having depth (those rules and mechanics combine to create varied strategies and counter-strategies), be as easy or challenging as we wish it to (thanks to the difficulty slider), with little to no "handholding" (whatever that means - I assume quest markers are an example of what you have in mind). Accessibiliy is good thing to have no matter the game, and very much something Obsidian was aiming for. While PoE is rather good on that point by old-school RPGs standards, it's still a lot to handle right off the bat for someone completely new to the genre.

It wasn't advertised as more than cosmetic during the Kickstarter, so I would be surprised if it was anything else. In Obsidian's own words: "The pet is optional and will not have any in-game function besides being a quiet companion that will never leave your side."

I'm all for the highlight key. As I see it, there are two things to weight against each other: the annoyance and waste of time of searching each screen for containers versus the reward for finding said containers. Since in general most containers have nothing interesting, it seems heavily stacked in favor of the highlight key. And while it may feel too gamey, PoE is a game. I'm happy to sacrifice realism or 'feel' for quality-of-life features like this one. As for having two kinds of containers, a generic that highlights and a hidden that don't, I'm not a fan either. Hidden containers are only hidden until you find them. In each subsequent playthrough you already know where they are, and they're just free bonuses from then on (BG's hidden rings and Ankheg armor are perfect examples of that).

Honestly, it's hard to do skill checks right in a party-based game. If you implement only a few skills (say, less than 10), each of them can show up a lot during gameplay and be frequently relevant, but at the same time you can specialise each of your 6 party members to cover everything. And if you implement more skills so that the party won't be able to cover everything, it will dilute the usefulness of each skill, resulting in all of them being less relevant. There are workarounds, as already proposed in this thread - making some skill checks only available for the player character like in NWN2 (which was annoying and/or nonsensical at times), or double skill checks (either checking for two skills or for the same skill on two characters). But the fact the system needs a workaround to be satisfying isn't a point in its favour.

As someone who knows very little about MOBA (your example is all Greek to me), I can't say if it applies in this case, but the removal of a feature does not necessarily lessen the complexity of a game, and can in fact increase it. Let's consider a game where a given situation shows up relatively frequently, and in this situation we're offered 4 options - A, B, C and D - each with a different outcome. The outcome for options A, B and C are roughly equivalent in how good/bad they are to take, and their respective worth can only be measured on a case-by-case basis, depending on other external factors. However, the outcome for option D is clearly superior to the previous ones, barring rare corner cases. In this case, removing option D would change the skill involved from "identifying situation -> picking option D" to "identifying situation -> analysing external factors -> picking suitable option", which would indeed make it more strategically complex. So if a given feature is responsible for lots of options D in several different situations while not bringing enough to the game otherwise, cutting it might be a good decision.

Mechanical complexity is pretty much meaningless in itself, what matters is strategic complexity during gameplay. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that complex mechanics is just another manifestation of the bells and whistles mindset, same as pretty graphics, just for a different audience. That is, it looks nice and lovely on paper, but how does it actually behave during gameplay? Ideally, games should be aiming for simple mechanics leading to complex strategies, but it's easier said than done.

I haven't really followed the latest developments, but during the Kickstarter Obsidian said that the only physical releases planned were the backers rewards. Has it changed after the partnership with Paradox, or is it still the case? Back in the days, developers didn't wait to have a 'as good as we can make it' version to release their game either, they released it in its buggy and imbalanced state. And the reason for that is and has always been the same: if developers/studios don't meet their dealines, they're going to run out of money sooner than later. At least nowadays the developers can use the month or so between the press and distribution of the physical version and the official release to iron out a few kinks, instead of sitting and waiting.

Pointless and sometimes tedious. It was just 'remember to go in the menu and repair your weapon after each fight.' It got more annoying if a character didn't have points in Blacksmithing, because you'd be forced to transfer the weapon to someone who had for repair and then back again to equip it.

You can save anywhere and anytime you want, you just have to quit the game to do so. The problem is that there's only one save file per character, and it's overwritten all the time outside the player's control. And the cause for that is the same as why there's no pause option: online mode. Which makes Dark Souls a good example of a dual offline/online game where the offline mode is made a worse experience by the requirements of the online mode.

There were no general or conversation skills in the IE games either (barring IW2, I think), and it was already clear back then that Thieves needed something more. There's a reason there was no single-class Thief companion available past the mid-game in BG2.

Are you sure you're not confusing something here? The only thing I see at 15€ on GOG is an upgrade from the Classic Edition (the 40€ one) to the Deluxe Edition (I don' see it on Steam however). I don't see any 'game-only, no other stuffs' Edition for sale anywhere. Also, just to be sure I understand things correctly: PoE backers get the special 'game-only, no other stuffs' Edition on GOG, right? Is it the same on Steam?

It bears repeating: Obsidian stated PoE would be combat-focused. With that in mind, it wouldn't surprise me if Obsidian decided to encourage fighting over sneaking during the exploration segments of the game. After all, they never said sneaking would be a viable way to play the whole game, quite the contrary. I expect sneaking to offer alternate (and viable) solutions during specific parts of the game, same as every other skills, but nothing more. And even by fighting every encounter in the wilderness, we would still be "playing as our class", since in PoE that mainly means different flavour of fighting (all classes are combat-focused). I still expect lots of situations/quests/segments of the game/etc where we'll have several solutions with equivalent rewards, but exploring the wilderness isn't one of these. That being said, the problem of "hunt down every single enemy to get the XP" in my example is a real one. But I believe this problem can be reduced by tweaking the objective a bit, instead of just throwing it away. As for the question: why not just use kill-XP if you want the players to engage in combat? Personally, I believe an "ojective-XP only" system and a "kill-XP + objective-XP" system can be made to work in exactly the same way, encouraging or discouraging the same approaches, and that there's no mechanical reason to choose one over the other. The only reason I prefer "ojective-XP only" is that I feel it's cleaner, in particular for all these situations where you do want the players to try something else.

Sure - it'd save time vs. individual enemy kill-xp - but it's still kill-xp vs. nothing for sneaking/other solutions. Again, I'd be happy for that to apply to a quest of ridding the area of a certain creature type (Like the zombie-farmland quest in BG) but if it's for every area then you're removing the design goal that was the reason for objective xp in the first place. Not really. The reasoning behind objective-XP is that if an objective has several different appoaches, then they'll all award the same XP. It does not imply that all objectives will have several approaches. As someone on the "ojective-XP only" side, I'd be perfectly fine if every wilderness area had an implicit objective "clear the map of aggressive wildlife." In fact, based on previous comments by Obsidian that PoE is combat-focused and that we're not expected to be able to sneak/talk our way through all of it, I'd say something along this line is likely.

What does "casuals" even means, and why wouldn't they be interested in PoE? The average RPG player probably hasn't changed much in the last 15 years or so, it's the games that changed. Give a "casual RPG player" a good RPG and they will enjoy it as much as an "old school RPG player" would.

I'm not sure I can agree with this. There has to be some incentive for doing anything in a game (otherwise its an option that will never be used and its inclusion is pointless). As I've been trying to say, this is only true if there is another option. This is why I half expect most of the combats in PoE to be a mix of: - unavoidable (most of the filler encounters). - avoidable, but there is a tangible reward for fighting (during exploration of wilderness segments - yes, the reward can include XP, and no, it's not contradictory in my mind). - avoidable, but it's during a specific segment (like infiltrating a building). - avoidable, but it's (one of) the decisive encounter of the quest-line. The question then becomes what I've already asked: does it really matter if you get XP for each little steps, or in bigger chunks once you reach a milestone? Personally, I answer no, but others have clearly answered yes. Whch is why, as Zansatsu pointed out, we aren't going to convince each others.

MOBAs are mostly free to play. It's easy to get people to give a game a look if that doesn't cost them anything, but it's another story if they have to pay. And as been noted multiple times already, MOBAs are a mix of competition-cooperation with other players, which PoE lacks. That's a huge divide between the two genre. At the end of the day, the best way to have a bigger audience is to make a good game and give it adequate exposure over the whole gaming sphere. People want to play good games, nothing more, nothing less.

It's not necessary to reward combat to make a game combat-focused. If you want players to participate in combat instead of just sneaking around, no need to be subtle about it: force them to fight (like Shadowrun Returns did, if I understand PrimeJunta correctly). Then "combat" becomes just "normal gameplay," and if this is not a gameplay I enjoy in itself, then yes, I'm probably playing the wrong game. That being said, even an objective-XP system could favour combat without forcing it. Honestly, it wouldn't shock me if, while exploring a map, we encounter a particularly tough group of wild animals, and killing the whole group results in the message: "XP granted for killing <wild animals>: 500." No quest associated with them or anything. They're just sitting there and killing them earns XP. "Objective" can mean a lot of things, and is not limited to explicit quests (which would be a mistake).

You can't lose out on XP that you can't get. Further more, exploration is a reward on its own, and "filler" mobs is the risk you take for exploring. In return, you find new quests that you can get XP from, and you find new items to equip your characters with, and you find out more about the world. I think Stun's fear in this case is: - clear a map, kill a particular monster and get no XP for it. - later, find a quest in town that asks you to kill this particular monster. - you directly get the XP for completing the objective "report its death," but miss the XP for completing the objective "kill the monster" (because you skipped it by doing stuffs out of order). That would indeed be a problem if it could happen.