Sky_walker

Related thread: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66572-the-official-romance-thread/

I PM'd you the transcript btw. Feel free to post it on forum, I'm sure other people would appriciate it too

Fair enough. I just would argue that a text form is better for multiple reasons BY FAR quicker to read through - you learn more is less time BY FAR easier to find one information you are looking for Easier to find it (google / forum seach) Easier to correct (just hit edit button and everyone always will be able to see correct content, even on a mobile devices) Easier to make any comparasions (you can embed screenshots, images with tables, etc) No need to split it in a parts - you can just write one mega-post containing all of what you want and expand when needed It's less of an effort to skim through the text than watching half an hour video.

Direct link for those who cannot see it loading like I can't. BTW: half an hour video... jeez... Any chance to get that in a proper form? You know... text that I can read in 5 minutes instead of wasting over 30 minutes of my life for the video?

Interesting point of view considering that every respectable website and magazine I seen qualifies IWD as an RPG, not H&S. But still it's only your personal point of view. H&S *are* RPG's; Hack&Slash is a specific subset of RPG, actually the *oldest* form of RPG. The term itself actually comes out of Dragon magazine. You missed the point. Vast majority (if not all) of respectable magazines and websites do not label IWD as H&S.

Interesting point of view considering that every respectable website and magazine I seen qualifies IWD as an RPG, not H&S. But still it's only your personal point of view. And IMHO there's really no point discoussing about personal preferences like that. It's just a waste of time. Equally well I can consider mentioned Minecraft to be an FPS and argue about it for a few days. Totally pointless effort.

SW:TOR was a MMO so we are talking orders of magnitude greater amounts of content and variables. I don't think much can be directly mapped between the two genres. FYI: Bugs in SW:TOR were mostly related to quests / dungeons / scripted events - all of which are heavily used in PoE. And it's MMORPG, so quite relevant genre. I was thinking more about interviews in large gaming-related websites / banners / gameplay videos / some new pre-release trailer / etc. Spening money on TV ads for PoE would be, IMHO, waste of money.

I don't know about the game being bug-free. I'm afriad it will repeat the mistakes of SW:TOR - at the release every single bit of end-game content was bugged because public tests never allowed people to get into these stages of a game. PoE does something similar - allowing people to access only tiny bit of a game more to test the gameplay and generic mechanics than testing... you know... the game itself. It obviously got a huge disadvantages, such as that we don't have any sagnificant spoilers, but it also can cause tons of problems with bugs in the storyline and quests. The other thing is that the majority of gamers these days nver touched any of the Infinity Engine games and those that did and really missed them - most likely already backed either PE or T:ToN, so they're out of the scope for this discoussion ("bunch of non-backers buying this"). The fact that this game is in many ways made to be user-unfriendly doesn't really help, and for that one we can blame the community that's criticising almost every poster suggesting improvements to the GUI or dismissing them as trying to "consolize" / "dumb down" the game, which is a total and utter nonsense. But yea, lack of marketing is rather disturbing. I recall Wasteland 2 got far more active advertisnment campagin and promotion from magazines to various gaming-related websites. Meanwhile we have a release this week and I haven't seen anything mentioning PoE in any of the gaming-releated sites that I read. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Divinity Original Sin had a similar underwhelming campagin before the release? If so then this gives some hope for the future of PoE

They kind of relate. Selling to non-backers means having a broader appeal (which means including features like companion AI, currently absent), but the sort of people who loathe ME3 tend to sneer at that. All I can see is people insulting eachother and arguing whatever one ME-series game is better or the other one. None of which is related to PoE sales nor said in a context of PoE sales.

Is this topic still "We need a bunch of non-backers buying this" or suddenly migrated into "Oh my god I love ME3" / "Oh my god I hate ME3"?

I cringe every time someone says that making UI more usable means "dumbing down" or "consolizing" PoE.

By all means it looks like it will be. That's great. You have any link to share?

First of all - graphics ARE bleeding edge. Just bleeding edge 2D - but after Bastion I think people are ready to appriciate 2D graphics just as well as 3D. And PoE actually looks much better than either Bastion or pretty much every other 2D game released in last 5 years or so. Wasteland 2 averaged 82 because it was an OKish game, but only that. I actually find 82 to be very generous score for Wasteland 2. It's more of a ~70 score game. Hardly a "very good" one. I even wrote a topic on what Pillars Of Eternity can learn from Wasteland 2. And 87% metacritic score for Divinity is not "bias against indie games" - with that score it makes it to top-200 games of all time & all genres. I hardly consider it to be in any bias against this game. It's actually one of these few cases where score from the users is pretty much identical to the score from magazines. You might consider it flawless, but this game actually does have several flaws including one that's lethal to RPGs - linearity. Also: 2 million copies is rather unrealistic goal. That would make it comparable to The Witcher 2 which had huge advertisnment campagin and was much more accessible game than PoE is. I'd be very happy if PoE would sell over 700 000 copies. But I have no idea what is the goal for Obsidian. At a very least they got 74 000 copies sold through kickstarter .

Read my post again, only this time carefully. I'm not talking for everyone. Majority of people never even seen this thread to begin with.

I don't know what's the plan, but that screen desperately needs some way of filtering out the results. Be it a tree, tabs, filters, advanced search, whatever, but one very long list of talents you need to carefully read one by one, narrowing your way through otherwise very long and impressive list towards that what you'd actually want to use isn't being helpful.

Or at least duplicated if not moved. Yes. That's one of the most annoying things - that to get the full picture of your character status you need to jump between two different locations - your character and his portrait. ToEE uses higher camera angle than PoE and doesn't have as detailed terrain (especially in the amount of details on the ground itself) making characters stand out more easily. Also in ToEE you had less things to take care of and classes that were less unique (in terms of combat strategies) than it is in PoE, as a result making battles noticeably easier to manage. And the issues I have with combat got nothing to deal with it being real-time - I'm all for real-time with pause combat, love it, I'd be totally disappointed to have the game turn into turn-based like it already happened with the new Torment. But the speed of the events combined with the high damage characters receive (which are very heavily affected by RNG) make it very unforgiving and feel more disconnected (chaotic / random) than it did in, say, Baldur's Gate 2. (also: this)

No. YOU and a few other guys want pencil sketches. That's all. Stop talking for everyone.

I'm yet to see an isometric game where they'd change a camera angle between the base game and an expansion pack. I wouldn't get my hopes high for that one. PoE 2 is more realistic, if at all.

Yea, good luck with chaning the camera angle. You might just as well wish for a completly new game. All of the back-drops would have to be re-done to make that happen. And spacing of the characters migrates problem cause you see far less overlapping between them as well as between them and the enemies. It got nothing to deal with characters being obscured by arches or stuff like that, but let's face it - this happened in old Infinity Engine games too and they somewhat-solved it by allowing you to see through stuff but it was still far from perfect. It's just the nature of isometric games.

What? What's wrong with camera angle? You know it's an isometric game, and that's how isometric games look like, right? Some do, but it is at a lower angle than IE games and as such characters hide each other more than in IE games. Fair enough. Though to be honest I never had a problem with camera angle. It always felt natural to me, like in a proper isometric RPG. As Gladiuss pointed out - there's a problem with spacing of the characters - and that IMHO is more important matter and something that if fixed would also solve this concern.

What? What's wrong with camera angle? You know it's an isometric game, and that's how isometric games look like, right?

I have no idea what are you talking about. Nothing I suggested here got anything to deal with combat difficulty. And if you're saying that speding your time on digging through menus is a good thing than I respectfully disagree. No dobut about it. That's why GUI should allow you to focus on a storyline and the game itself. Not on clicking through several lists to finally dig out this one thing that you need. You must be talking about a different game, cause the one I played already has all of this: +7 Damage Treshold Scale Armor is not something I made up, it's right there in the game. That 7 Damage Threshold isn't the same thing as a +2 Sword. Scale armor base DT is always 7. All scale armors will provide a base DT of 7, the only thing that can improve that value is a quality enchantment (remembering that Fine < Exceptional < Superb is not that hard) or a damage type specific DT increase, but that's mostly useful to fill a weakness (and it might not stack with the quality enchantment anyway). Yea, that's why this information should be clearly seved to the user instead of being hidden under toolips forcing you to jump from one item to another in order to compare all of the stats and all the informations you mentioned here. As I said - I'm perfectly cool with making that optional. But I'm not cool with forcing users to dig through the menus to get basic informations. I don't want any "+2 sword" - all I want is better presentation of what already is in the game. But ok, now that we've discoussed this one (if you'll push it - two) point on my list - there's 28 other ideas remaining.

Yes... you got a point with these two. First of all visuals and GUI are not as helpful as they could be And secondly high damage from each hit makes enounters last really short in a real time. I seen some people posting on how they're dissatisified with the fact that Perception and Might are - basically - two ultimate skills, cause one "miss" RNG throw can easily make a difference between winning and loosing. Having lower damage per hit would lower the importance of RNG and put more pressure on a strategy and your tactical management of abilities, spells and items.

Animations quality. There were few posts about it already. But I doubt we will see that improved before the release. Thoug I'd love to have this polished to feel natural - IMHO high quality of animations is something that's universally good for the game, sadly PoE doesn't excel in that departnment, though overall it's not as bad as in some other isometric RPGs... I guess I can live with current stuff... but yes, you are right, it is off..

100 times this. Sketches are nice and all, but there's many more important things that would actually help making game feel less repetitive and increase the level of immersion. 2D portraits being one of most obvious things (to begin with: every head of every godlike should have corresponding avatar cause these are so unique that they really break immersion if you see godlike with a completly different avatar), and smiliarly other races should have faces with at least corresponding hair colors. Same with the icons - the more unique icons we have and less repetitive they are the better. Adding drawings only adds to the problem of re-using one image to tons of different items. It's already bad enough with icons, I don't want to see it made even worse. I could keep going with other stuff, but I hope you get the picture by now. And as mentioned - lack of pencil drawings in games like Planescape: Torment never really felt like there's something missing. While reusing of the same avatars, icons and graphics really does feel like developers run short on a budget - obvious example here being Shadowrun: Returns. That said though - if drawings would be limited only to the unique items - I wouldn't mind them. But adding drawings all over the place is a waste of resources that could be put into something preventing these moments when immersion is breaking up.