archangel979

So you disapprove of all BG2 instant death spells as well?

I seem to have a knack for running into random dragons that one-shot my party-members. Behold the great combat mechanic of the century, it have one shot kill enemies.... In BG2, if you used community mods that made game enemies smarter and harder, Dragons also one shot weaker party members.

Mild agreement, and one of the problems of the IWDs and ToEE. However I have done custom parties before for both BGs and they do offer something. Perhaps a fairer test would've been fighter/thief PC, Korgan, Keldorn, Mazzy, Anomen, Minsc, but with the non-magic party already being at a severe disadvantage, the idea of taking that bunch is just a bridge too far. Challenge not currently accepted. Not everyone enjoys that gameplay but with a mostly melee/martial party you will do all fights much much faster.

No. For bioware BG1 was their first real game. They were a team of newbie developers.

It is also not fair to compare it with vanilla BG1 as that was first such game for Interplay/Bioware and OE has experience from making such games now. It is not fair to compare PoE with BG2 size or AI complexity but it is fair to compare to features BG2 had like big spells lists, lots of classes and kits and so on. Putting stronghold into PoE tells you even OE rather compare with BG2 than BG1. Putting in a stronghold doesn't tell you much really. The first game in a series always has less resources since they actually have to create the mechanics. This was true of BG1, and it is true of poe. BG2 was only able to be so epic because there was more time/resources spent improving the game mechanics since the basic structure was already done. The primary factor isn't experience; it resources. Unless the new game has a huge budget; comparing any new rpg series' first installment to BG2 is unfair. But you are wrong here. While resources are always important I read so many times how devs would say that with a good team that works well together everything goes faster and better. I would expect OE to have such teams.

It is also not fair to compare it with vanilla BG1 as that was first such game for Interplay/Bioware and OE has experience from making such games now. It is not fair to compare PoE with BG2 size or AI complexity but it is fair to compare to features BG2 had like big spells lists, lots of classes and kits and so on. Putting stronghold into PoE tells you even OE rather compare with BG2 than BG1.

I don't remember any of those options. Maybe they came in a later patch?

Not true for BG2. You are not only Bhaalspawn. You don't need to close anything. Your goal is to stop a madman or become God, nothing to do with saving everyone. Only same is that you start as prisoner and that you seek power (seeking power is in all RPG games).

It does not matter now. The Overlord has spoken and told us it is not going to be in PoE but they still want it for future games. So lets leave it at that.

Yea, I would rather have better AI than artificial gameplay elements like engagement.

Can you spoiler me about Hawke and what is he/she doing after DA2?

But can a Giant hit you so hard you fly super high into the air? :D

I agree with this generally, but I think there are exceptions. I think it's important for your main character (in a game like BG/BG2 and PoE) to feel solid from beginning to end. The games are built around parties, but people pretty much always want their MC to feel strong. In BG1, magic users were extremely weak at low levels -- especially before adding party members -- and it was frustrating for a lot of people. Before kits, I'd say that pure thieves and bards felt pretty bad most of the time in in BG, especially with another thief (albeit multiclassed) in the party very early on. I am not really concerned about things like a 20% power/efficiency difference between classes, more with players picking a class, getting 5 minutes in or 50 hours in and thinking, "This sucks." Perfect balance is not required to solve this problem, but we do have to pay attention to balance in broad strokes. From what I read PoE will not let people play just with MC and let party member do their thing (like khm some other recently released game does). That would mean players will play with all character as a party RPG should be played and they will get attached to them all. I feel you are overestimating the importance of MC in a team RPG. Yes for story purposes MC should get all the cool toys, but I would urge you to balance the game around the balanced party and let those players that want something special (to be special snowflakes) figure out themselves how to accomplish this. This is how IE games worked, they counted on you to have a proper party and then players on second play through or third experimented with different classes that might not have been balanced well against each other but worked very well together.

You realize this game has a stealth system as well, one that is far superior to that of the IE games? It is more realistic but I don't know if it is superior.

not true, one who starting combat is one who is attacking. Manual combat was quite fun even tho i think there is place for improvements. Designing your own ships was my favourite part of the game Yes, and I made sure I always attacked in combat that was important. Manual combat took forever and became boring after a while. It didn't help that you could craft your ships that in first turn would wipe more than half of enemy ships, and the fight was just cleaning up after that. Otherwise it was a cool game but not as good as BotF. In BotF you could not design ships but each of the 5 factions played much differently and using spies and sabotage was a legal way to get an advantage. I have yet to see a 4x game that had such a good spy system.

MoO2 had way too much manual combat and you always started first. As a result it was too easy. Only thing it had over Birth of the Federation was ability to make custom ships which I personally never cared about (and also considered it a bad part of Elemental games - and I seen Sorcerer King removed that).

Best 4x fantasy game I played is Master of Magic. Best 4x space game I played is Birth of the Federation. I bought Elemental War of Magic because it marketed itself to be like Master of Magic. It wasn't, not even close. So they gave me Fallen Enchantress and Legendary Heroes for free to make up for it (they gave that to all early buyers of Elemental: WoM). Both games were still not good enough to be a successor to Master of Magic. This Sorcerer King does not look to be one as well. I might buy it in some 75% off sale for 10$ at one time, I don't trust Stardock anymore. What I want to play is Worlds of Magic, a real Master of Magic successor. It will have most things like MoM but in modern engine and graphics, better UI and d20 OGL as base ruleset for combat. As I loved Master of Orion 2 and Birth of the Federation I looked for new good space 4x games. I found Endless Space last winter sale and enjoyed good 40 - 50 h of playing it. It is first space 4x that has space combat similar to Birth of the Federation which is awesome. It is done by Order cards. Combat has rounds where both sides fight at same time for 10-15s. The player gives certain orders to whole squadron which are good vs some type of ships and their weapon as well as enemy orders but bad vs others. Birth of the Federation was bit more complex than this but Endless Space is good enough. Combat goes fast, you still mostly win by having better ships but how you set up your 3 combat rounds does make a difference depending on your ships and which Order cards you give them each combat round. As for Endless Legend, I would like to try it. Hopefully I can get it on a sale as I am too poor to buy games at full price :D From what I seen it looks better than what Stardock has been giving us.

No it is not WL2 fault. Same patches from GoG are much smaller.

I actually hold a different opinion, from watching people play it live on streams movement during combat is only good thing about the game that is normally about mashing autoattack like some diablo game and rotating CC spell cooldowns. If you are also required to stand still while doing so, it would be so much worse.

Bug fixes for quests for work backwards in WL2. Once quest triggers have misfired they cannot fix it. You need to load an earlier save (probably outside the current area). As for balance fixes, they planned to make them in next patch but some critical problems arose and they wanted to fix that first. We can expect balance changes for the next planned patch.

That is Steam problem, they need double space as they first backup everything before applying new patches and then later remove the backup.

After this game, I am beginning to look at PoE in a more positive light, even with all its problems it just seem to be a proper RPG when compare to DAI.

I does feel like it often but I was told someone for dev team or QA team goes through here and writes down all proper feedback and suggestions. I just don't know if that is true and how much of it do they really write down. Most importantly, we don't know how much they value beta player feedback. Is it more used to evaluate their own ideas or do they actually think about how to incorporate our ideas and wants before rejecting them.

I'm sorry, but if the thing that makes someone not buy the game (or, on the other hand, TO buy the game) is whether or not it has moving immaculately-hand-crafted backgrounds or just static ones, I don't think they should be playing this game. That's kind of like saying "If the football players on the field all wear neon green jerseys, that'll get rid of a lot of people who don't like neon green." No one's gonna say "Wait, they put environment animations in? Well, I wasn't interested in that game at all, but NOW I'M STOKED! 8D!" Maybe not, but it might push them over the ledge. Also with your argument we can remove or add any one feature and claim nobody is going to buy or not buy due to just that one feature. Where is the limit?

I am not sure. I am just doing an all mage run in BG1EE and the least spells I will be using are damage spells. Sleep, Charm Person, Color Spray, Horror, Web, Stinking Cloud and Invisibility to scout are bread and butter of low level mages. Then we get to Fireball that works well to soften or kill weaker enemies. Agranazar's Scorcher is a very interesting spell that promotes good positioning (which would be killed in PoE due to engagement). Invisibility 10" is a very nice support spell, Haste makes all your warriors 2x better. Weapon Enchant (lvl 4) is very useful buff spell and so is Improved Invisibility. Fire shield + Stoneskin is something that makes melee wizards interesting. And so on and on