kanisatha

Yes. With PoE1 they bought it because of the nostalgia effect and the pitch that it was a successor to the IE games. They then hated the combat system, because whereas they could understand a D20 based system intuitively having played D&D for years, they just couldn't wrap their head around this new system that also happened to be rather complex. So they never bothered with PoE2.

Sorry but I think you all are continuing to over-think and over-analyze this question. The numerical complexity and sophistication of the PoE1/2 combat system is what throws off many casual gamers (meaning people who are NOT posting in this forum). We now have an entire generation of gamers who spent kindergarten to college avoiding anything to do with numbers. You can play through PoE2 entirely and still come away not having a solid understanding of how any of the combat mechanics of the game actually worked. As such even playing the game for just an hour can leave people very frustrated, frustrated enough to give up and refund their game. But it doesn't even have to get to that. Simply viewing a short combat gameplay video on YouTube or Twitch is sufficient for many to become frustrated. By contrast, just a few minutes playing D:OS is all it takes to gain a very good understanding of how the combat mechanics works and perhaps even to master those mechanics, because its mechanics are extremely simplistic, easy to figure out, and easy to use. That's all there is to it.

I check the Owlcat forum almost daily. P:K is my most favorite cRPG coming out of the recent RPG reawakening, even slightly edging out the PoE games. I didn't put a lot of money into the P:K KS because Owlcat didn't yet have a reputation. But for a WotR KS I look forward to investing quite a bit. In addition to the PoE games and P:K, I also invested in the KS campaigns of Black Geyser, T:ToN, Realms Beyond, and Solasta. I supported the TB games mainly because they are classic old-school RPGs borrowing heavily from D&D. But RB, for example, even though TB, has included some interesting mechanics to alleviate the usual complaints from RTwP fans like us. You can remove the action animations of enemies so that their actions happen instantaneously. You also can have the AI handle the entire battle, in the cases of any trash fights that you find boring, for example.

Btw @Jill7894, as a RTwP fan you should also keep your eyes on two games that will/may be releasing in 2020: The Dark Eye: Book of Heroes; and, Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness.

Exactly! In a battle things are supposed to be chaotic and confusing, and outcomes should be sub-optimal. When TB fans say that TB allows them to plan out every move and every action get everything exactly right, to me that is both mind-numbingly boring and completely immersion-breaking, and I cannot at all understand why someone would want their battles to happen that way. I want things to be a mess and to go all wrong and for crazy things to happen in my battles. That's the only way battles in RPGs are even tolerable.

The criticism of the game was largely about the DM/coop side of the game and that it deviated significantly from D&D rules despite supposedly being D&D 5e. If you play the game single-player, and don't get too caught up in whether or not it is "truly D&D," it is actually a pretty good and fun game. You definitely should also check out Tower of Time. It has RTwP combat that it somewhat challenging.

I seem to recall in an interview the producer of the show saying that even though she personally would like to highlight the Yen and Ciri characters she understands that the show by its very title needs to have Geralt front and center, and so Geralt will be the main focus.

How about Tower of Time? And there's always also Dragon Age: Origins.

Well people can take a stand against this nonsense and just insist on calling it Xbox 2. On forums, social media, reviews, news stories, in stores, even on MS's own forum, if people insist on calling it Xbox 2, there's nothing MS can do about it. This is exactly like how Windows versions used to be named back in the '90s and I hated that so much.

But a person can say it is best for me, and there's nothing wrong with that. And, I think when people say "best" in these kinds of contexts, they almost always do mean "best for me" even if this isn't explicitly stated.

I would strongly recommend you also give Pathfinder: Kingmaker a try. Feel free to set the kingdom management side-game part of it on 'auto' if that's not your thing.

This was my take on this game too. And the terraforming stuff late game doesn't help because it takes so very long to get it going that it does not alleviate the boredom. It's a very fun game in the early stages but eventually I just quit and restart on a different map. So I never get all the way through to the end in any of my play-throughs. Thankfully there are a ton of different maps to play on.

For me what matters is if the game will have an option to turn on that removes the "extermination" X from 4X. I love playing Civ as a civ builder only, without the going to war with each other part. And even when this is not inherently built into the game, someone always creates a mod for it, as is the case with Civ 5 which is what I currently play.

Oh I see. Yeah I did read that part but I (also) interpreted it as not really a return of "kingdom management" but rather that some sort of management element would be included, like you say perhaps "managing" your crusade.

Huh? Confused. There's no kingdom management style anything in the new game. What am I missing?

And Beregost in BG1.

Yes I think something like this could've mitigated a lot of player angst. But at the same time, I have gone to some of the PoE wikis out there where the combat mechanics are explained in numerical detail, and have to say some of how those numbers work just makes you want to throw up your hands in frustrated resignation.

I only presented D:OS as a possible comparison because it sold well. But any comparison with a relatively similar game that sold well would be ok. I just feel that a big problem the PoE games had was that their combat mechanics were not intuitively understandable or relatable to a lot of people (and this beyond just that they were not well explained within the game). Even such basic elements as attack and damage and armor were not simple and straightforward and easily understood as to how they worked. By contrast, in D:OS, you didn't even need to have them explained to you to be able to (easily) understand how these mechanics worked.

I am really loving this discussion about the comparative pros and cons of combat mechanics and gameplay between PoE1 and 2. The depth of some of the analyses presented here is truly incredible for someone like me who loves to play games with complex mechanics but without myself getting too caught up in the details. But to the point of the thread, would it not make more sense that instead of comparing PoE1 to PoE2 we should be comparing the PoE games (either one or both of them) to, say, the D:OS games? Very much unlike the PoE games, the D:OS games had (for me) very simplistic, superficial and easy to figure out combat mechanics: no classes; every character has the same set of abilities; all abilities have cooldowns; a standard resource pool for using abilities where that pool is regenerated not just every encounter but every round within an encounter. Seems to me, very sadly on a personal level, those who like and want complex and sophisticated mechanics are a very small group that is concentrated here in this forum, whereas most gamers - and even classic RPG gamers - very strongly prefer simple and easily understood mechanics such as those used in the D:OS games. So, if they want to sell well, is this what all future cRPGs should aspire to wrt combat mechanics? Please share your thoughts as I am truly curious about this question.

I actually see overlap between what @Wormerine and @Boeroer are saying. I agree that it is very nice to have a nice bustling hub with shops and taverns and temples and smiths, and yes also some place - not necessarily a stronghold, just a hole in the wall place will do - to dump your stuff and know it'll all be safe. But I agree I don't like for so many of the quests to begin and end in that one place. It's always nice to have a range of different places to visit, and to have meaningful reasons to visit those places.

I too am in the camp of PoE mechanics being way better than D&D, and agree on not wanting to return to D&D, especially because to me D&D 5e is a dumbing-down and oversimplification of the D&D mechanics to broaden D&D's appeal. But with respect to settings, the Forgotten Realms will always be the fantasy game setting I love the most. As such, I would be quite happy to see a NwN3 from Obsidian, which I think would be far better received than IwD3.

Which may be the long-rumored AAA open world RPG project, which some have associated with Parker but maybe not so. Hmmm. Very interesting. Grounded being "Maine" threw me off as well, though yes I also think it's likely this game came together as a real project very suddenly at the last minute. And as a side-note, thanks a lot for sharing this kind of information because I for one love playing around with these puzzles in my head.

Aww man! Too bad. But it's to be expected some of these projects will not work out. And I suspect that at least one and maybe more of "Mississippi", "Illinois", and "Alabama" are indeed canceled projects because projects like Parker's, for example, seem to have been launched much more recently and as such may have a codename that comes after "Missouri".

So while we are in speculation mode about current projects underway at Obsidian, what do you all think of the prospect that one of those very-early exploratory projects could be NwN3? I mean, even though apparently Obsidian also sought it, the BG license eventually went to Larian. So why not the NwN license possibly going to Obsidian?

Thanks! And we know from that same Eurogamer(?) story that Parker's project is currently active.