aiqidar

Well, I can only state some of the obvious suggestions. E.g., the patch should: 1 - Fix the various broken quests 2 - Fix the stealth system 3 - Uninstall Pillars of Eternity and install Planescape: Torment on your computer 4 - Fix the Eder defense bug (I may be joking about one of those)

Where would be the fun in watching the game play itself? What the "appropriate spell" is at any given time (and where exactly to target it) depends heavily on the situation at hand, and on how you (as the player) want to play your characters. For me, it's not so much that I want to watch the game play itself, but rather, the fact that it's inconsistent with the basic feeling the game wants to project. The whole point is that you have one central character who's "you", and that these companions have minds of their own. That's certainly the case for social interactions (I don't get to choose what Eder or Aloth will or won't say) and it should ideally be true for combat as well. Now if it was a game like Icewind Dale I'm perfectly happy micromanaging things like that because the understanding is that "I" am my entire party rather than just a single character. I.e I fully control every character, I get to choose who they talk to and what they say, I choose their race and class and their entire levelling scheme. So it feels natural to have the same level of control over combat.

The guns in this game are decent, but they need to add sniper rifles and light machine guns if they really want to make things interesting. I have a "go big or go home" philosophy when it comes to adding firearms to video games.

I love Fan of Flames. One of my favourite tactics is to get the attention of a group of enemies with a sneak-attack crossbow hit from my rogue, and draw them around a corner or through a door. I have Aloth waiting nearby, and as soon as they're streaming in, all bunched up, I FoF them. Considering what's guaranteed to happen next, it's essentially a suicide bombing. But I've tried using "legit" tactics with Aloth and he rarely if ever manages to contribute as much through the entire combat as he does with that one hit, assuming I've timed it right. Yes, I know it's an absurd thing to do, but the combat system here (as it is in any fantasy RPG) is pretty absurd to begin with, so it doesn't bother me much.

I don't know how it works in the enhanced editions, but with the originals, the ideal way would be to beat BG1, then import that character into BG2, rather than playing BG1 and BG2 separately. There are a few nice touches that you can avail yourself of if you import. Edit: Though I would also agree with the above poster that BG2 is ultimately the better game so if you're strapped for time and only want one game, you might want to just go for that. And I'm sure there are mods that allow you to unlock the little perks/changes you would've had by importing anyway.

I went for GOG over Steam for practical reasons. I know the achievements are there on Steam but I was wondering of there was a way to view them in the game itself rather than having to do it through Steam or some other client? You know, kind of like in Diablo 3 and Dragon Age. It's not a huge deal obviously and it's not as though I'll stop playing if I can't see achievements, but I just wanted to check to make sure whether or not there was some option to see them that I've somehow overlooked.

There's something to be said fo realism though. The concept of a sudden instant kill might seem overpowered, but that's something that happens in real-life too. If a guy takes a crossbow bolt to the head from a hidden opponent, he's not going to be getting up. Of course, in games like Icewind Dale it could occasionally get silly with you sneaking right up to the guy and stabbing him with a dagger, but the way to fix that would have been to tweak detection ranges, not to completely break stealth by making it a group thing.

Well... I mean... I'm fairly certain it was a deliberate design choice under the circumstances. I don't think they accidentally ended up with group stealth. But, I don't think it was their ideal choice. I think that was how far they developed a stealth system before having to move on to other stuff or let the game suffer in other areas. Here's what I think happened. Party scouting actually makes perfect sense, and is in fact a great convenience feature too. When I'm looking around for secrets, it's much more efficient to have everybody looking at once. You can send them to different places, cover ground more quickly than if you had just one. It's realistic too. But then at some point they decided to consolidate scouting and stealth into the same action. Which itself was a mistake, and by itself would have been a small mistake. But in conjunction with the party acting all at once, it results in something that catastrophically undermines the entire tactical aspect of the game's stealth system.

Also for the "why walk" crowd, I suggest watching this video, particlarly the part where he talks about always closing the doors behind him while playiing Half-Life 2, even though he knows it makes no gameplay difference. I personally prefer to walk rather than run in games for the same reason I prefer to walk in real-life: unless there's some urgent thing I need to be at right away, running around is just weird. Now, the people who just run everywhere because it saves time probably just don't care about physical immersion. I.e. maybe they just care about being immersed in the storyline and dialogues, not so much the moving and fighting. Someone brought up Baldur's Gate earlier. That's actually an instructive example. When I played, I did want to be fully immersed at all levels, so I had to put a great deal of effort into essentially running everything I saw on-sceen through a mental filter where I re-imagined it happening in an actual visual sense (which is kind of what we had to do anyway when playing roguelikes and text-based games back in the day). Obviously games have come a long way since then and the burden that players have to carry in terms of immersion has reduced. And Obsidian has the chance to make things even easier by putting in a simple thing like walking.

There are people who actually think the stealth mechanic was some design choice that had serious thought put into it? Group stealth is one of the most obvious mistakes in the game, and I doubt even the people who made this game would disagree at this point. The only question is whether this clearly broken mechanic is going to be fixed in a patch or an expansion. I said before in another thread, I'm amazed that that something like this ever got through beta to begin with.

The answer to "Why not just make every single encounter involve a single creature" is a pretty obvious one. The creatures are part of the setting, and so if you found only one creature in an area where there clearly should be more, that would be pretty strange and disorienting. As to your question about making resource limitations matter, I would happily endorse that if PoE had a system where that felt rewarding in a meaningful sense, the way it does in Jagged Alliance. Or like it did, to some extent, in Fallout and Fallout 2. As it stands though, making me agonize over "resources" just accentuates the fact that the combat here basically functions like it would in a mediocre ARPG. That in and of itsef isn't really a complaint - the combat in Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate was mindless fun, filler between the parts of the game that actually mattered, but it didn't stop them from being two of the greatest games ever made. Now I get that the PoE crew wanted to make combat a "thing" rather than just filler, but the way to do that would have been to completely overhaul the combat mechanics and make it a true tactical combat system. Rather than just keeping the old (and fundamentally very silly) system and making it more time-consuming. Now, I get that some people actually enjoy this combat system. I can't figure out how or why, but more power to them if it adds to their enjoyment of the game. Me though, I play the game for a completely different reason, and the combat here feels much the same as it did in Torment - it's the stuff that's there between the parts of the game that actually matter to me.

The problem isn't so much that these combats can't be done without resting, it's that for many people, the combat system just isn't immersive enough to justify that level of deep thought and micromanagement while still keeping the game fun (as I tried to explain perhaps a bit too laboriously in my previous post). It actually hasn't been that difficult for me to clear areas even without resting - my main reason for doing so was paranoia, thinking that if I spend 3 months clearing out a single dungeon I might run out the clock on some invisible timer and fail some quest that I haven't gotten yet. But I didn't actually get any satisfaction from doing so, because like you said, you've got to do some pretty silly immersion-breaking things to make that a possibility, and that's on top of what was already a fairly silly and unrealistic system.

Thanks for the replies guys. I don't really care about the achievements (doubt I'll start doing "achievement runs" before beating the game proper at least a few times). And I don't plan on doing this on maps unless I've cleared them first, so hopefully I won't be spoiling any secrets of myself. But if it turns out that the final boss of the game was hiding the whole time in that tiny 1 sq. meter unexplored area in the southwest corner of Valewood, boy will there be egg on my face.

Nothing preventing you from that - In fact it's made even more "realistic" (or at least closer to the pen and paper counterparts) since you flank them now instead of doing "magical undetectable damage from the shadows" "Magical undetectable damage from the shadows" happens in real life. Snipers for instance. The equivalent here would be a crossbow, I suppose. It'd be harder to do that with a melee weapon, but it can still very much done especially if one party member is conspicuously grabbing everyone's attention while the other is waiting around a corner or something. The main point is that this wasn't done for realism purposes. I briefly thought it might be one of those "This perfectly logical aspect of the game is too easy, so let's make things more difficult in an arbitrary and completely senseless way" things, but in the end it seems that it was just a simple mistake on the part of the developers. I believe one of them was quoted in another similar thread where they said they hope to fix this in one of the patches.

I agree with this and would like to see this feature as well. As for "abusing" traps - that's something that happens in the real world as well. I think it might've been on BBC that I saw some guy from the Pakistani military talking about how terrorists in a certain area had put IEDs everywhere - on the roads, in the houses and even in the trees. So it's a legitimate tactic that you should be able to employ, assuming you have the resources.

Thems the breaks. To be honest, the wurm is cute, but not really worth $30! Chances are, in some future patch it'll end up getting unlocked for everyone anyway. Like the Blessed of Waukeen thing from NWN 2.

Warning: Long Post Coming Up I think the best way to explain my thoughts on the resting issue would be to compare it to another one of my all-time favourite games (and one that I'm replaying again on the side, probably for the tenth time or so): Jagged Alliance 2. Now, in that game you actually had to do what a lot of people are suggesting here. You'd enter a combat zone with whatever limited supplies you had, and it was up to you to decide how much risk you wanted to expose your squad to, what was the most efficient way to use the two grenades you brought along, how best to use the one guy in your squad who actually has a sniper rife etc. The result was that in order to play authentically (without save scumming etc.) you had to put a lot of thought into what to do. It wouldn't be uncommon to spend 45 minutes to an hour on a single encounter zone, especially if it was something like the military base in Alma where you first had to secure an entry point and then go room-to-room clearing enemies. There also wasn't any "resting" like there is here, and that makes perfect sense. If you set up a campsite in the middle of an active combat zone, the only result will be you getting murdered in your sleep by the remaining enemies you haven't killed yet. The only recovery you got between firefights was basic stamina regeneration, and having a medic treat your wounds for blood loss. This all added to the difficulty obviously, but it didn't make the game frustrating. On the contrary, it was one of the best things about the game. That was because it had a sophisticated combat system that you could really immerse yourself in. There was a proper stealth system. There was proper use of cover and concealement, and light and darkness. The enemy AI was also better - if you shot at a guy and weren't able to kill him instantly, or if you used a very loud weapon, the other enemies would actually get alerted, rather than waiting in pre-set areas for you to "aggro" them. When engaging enemies, you (or they) could be standing, crouched or prone. You (or they) could shoot from the ground, or from rooftops. You could shoot at the enemy's head or legs, or you could just aim for center mass. Two headshots from a good rifle (and often, just one headshot from a sniper rifle) will just straight up kill an enemy dead, no matter how badass a soldier they were. And if they somehow did survive, they'd be pretty much useless for the remainder of the fight, taking severe penalties to combat statistics (as opposed to a "debuff" that goes away after six seconds). The reason I mention all this stuff is: Pillars of Eternity has none of this. Sure, there's a nominal amount of "how do I position my guys" or "what items should I use", but compared to games with a properly dedicated tactical combat system, you're pretty much going through the same repetitive motions. Mind you, I'm not saying that this makes the combat system bad - I'm just saying that it would be closer to Diablo than Jagged Alliance. And a Diablo-esque system should be situated in a Diablo-esque framework, with quick and complete recovery between encounters enabling you to keep things moving at a decent pace. The combat is never going to be as immersive or fulfilling as something like Jagged Alliance 2, so there's no reason to artificially make it more burdensome. The entire concept of "resting" itself - whether it's at a campsite or you leaving the dungeon to go to an inn - is a complete absurdity, but it's one we live with because it makes games like these bearable. Now I do acknowledge the existence of the "this is too easy" crowd. They like the fact that they can clear out an entire dungeon level without camping, and for whatever reason, they would be personally wounded by the mere existence of an unlimted rest option. I thik a good compromise for people like this would be to have achievements for clearing out entire dungeons while only resting a certain number of times. That way they have an incentive to keep optimizing their builds and micromanaging combat (and indeed would even get recognition for their exploits), while the rest of us can just get on with things.

While the tactical combat system here is no doubt a great improvement upon games like BG and NWN, it's still by far the least interesting aspect of this game (aside from the special encounters). Making it more of a burden than it needs to be doesn't really make sense. I play on hard mode because, as I understand it, the difficulty mode actually determines which monsters spawn and playing on easy would mean that I might not get to see certain creatures, or I'd see them later than normal. And I want to see as much of the game's content as I can.

This was one of my biggest issues with all the IE games as well. They draw these beautiful environments, then cover them all with an ugly black shroud which you have to remove by manually moving your character around. And inevitably there are places your character can't get to, which means there are annoying black spots that never go away. Ideally I'd just like them to stop making you "explore" the map like this. Maybe have a system where the map is divided into sections, and each of them gets revealed completely the moment you step into it. I mean, some very talented artists put time and effort into drawing that corner of the map, and it just seems like a waste for the game to prevent me from seeing for no real reason. This bothers me enough that I'm willing to "cheat" to fix it. Is there a console command for fully exploring the map?

I thought NWN 2 handled it perfectly - it removed an annoyance that didn't really add anything to the game. The real problem with NWN wasn't that you could rest anywhere; it was that the enemies were too easy. The "realistic camping" arguments being put forward here would make a lot of sense for a proper survival game. Which Pillars of Eternity very clearly isn't.

I agree, it's a complete no-brainer. It completely undermines what is probably the most important tactical aspect of having a rogue in the party in the first place. Honestly, it's such an obvious mistake that I'm amazed it ever got through beta.

I find min-maxing boring myself. In the old D&D-style role-playing games, I would always make sure my characters had a plausible level of Charisma, Intelligence, Wisdom etc. even if they were combat characters that didn't use those abilities at all. And I enjoyed playing like that, even though it made things slightly tougher. However, that's not the main reason that people respec, or use console commands. 90% of the time it'll be because they made a mistake, like a skill that didn't do what they thought it would. This is especially the case for games where a new system has been created. I know this happened in Dragon Age: Origins a lot, and if I recall correcctly they eventually introduced a respec option there as well.

The option to respec should be included for the simple reason that the patches will invariably include balance changes, and the build that I have right now won't be the same as the same as after the patch. And not getting the patch isn't really an option since I'll need it to fix important stuff like broken quests etc. That's what Path of Exile did (I haven't played it for a while so I'm not sure if it still happens, but it did back when I was still playing). If they altered the skills etc. in any way, they gave the player the option for a full respec. I know the console is an option, but using it is always a pain since I've got to keep track of stuff to make sure I don't give myself too much or too little. Plus, it's immersion-breaking.

EDIT: Whoops, posted in wrong thread.

The description says that it helps fill out Bestiary entries, but I'm not sure how it works. There were a couple combats where I noticed that there were fewer kills recorded in the Bestiary than in the combat log, e.g. I kill 4 phantoms but the Bestiary only records 3 kills (and I only get credit for 3 kills in terms of the Bestiary xp), but then I reloaded, did the combat again, and got credit for all 4. Is that how it's supposed to work? And if so, would a higher lore skill make a difference?