kanisatha

Ohhhh, so that explains why you're not liking her too much. 😀 Yeah she's definitely not melee/frontline material. She is best for shooting from the back. There's even a specific build for her you can find in this forum that makes it possible for her to one-shot powerful enemies later in the game.

If you set her up right, including her equipment and tanking up her fox, she becomes quite deadly as an archer later on.

BBC America is doing a complete run of ST:DS9, something like 18 episodes each Monday and Tuesday beginning 6 am tomorrow. I've got my DVR set to record, though I'm concerned I won't have the time to watch them before I run out of recording space.

LOL. Me too. I just love P:K and am looking forward to backing this one with a good amount of cash. 😀 P:K is easily the funnest cRPG I've played since playing BG1 for the first time when it came out.

No you are blatantly wrong about this. Reviews are essentially anecdotal, and having a whole lot of them makes no difference whatsoever. The sample was not randomly selected, and as such provides zero validity. No respectable journal would publish a study based on online reviews. And yes, a biased sample *is* worse than no sample at all. Nope, you guys are the ones directing blatant and unfounded arrogance at me. You three are part of a very small clique of posters here who think the forum belongs to you, that you are superior to everyone else in the forum and get to play at being gatekeepers of the forum, and everyone else must bow down to your "knowledge" and "wisdom." And its not just this thread but every thread in the forum in which you post. You constantly denigrate and put down any poster who dares to disagree with you or refuses to go along with your line on things, and in the process drive away any and all other posters from the thread so that you can monopolize the thread with your inane posts. The best threads in this forum are those where you are not involved, where thoughtful, civil and inclusive discussions take place. The moment any of you decide to jump into a thread it goes downhill very quickly thereafter, which is exactly what happened to this thread from where it first began. So I'm done with trying to discuss anything with you. Feel free to continue on with your silly little echo chamber "discussion."

I did point out a flaw in your argument, a very fundamental flaw at that. Your entire argument, including your rationale for playing down my theory, is based on considering user reviews (as you put it). But user reviews completely miss two very major segments of the overall population: (1) those people who did not buy the game and never had any intention of buying the game, and (2) those people who bought the game, did not like it, but were not sufficiently motivated to write a review. I would estimate these two groups make up the overwhelming majority of the population. As such, user reviews are not only a non-representative sample of the population, they are a biased sample. So, for me, user reviews are not "known data." They are not data at all. Thus, when you use user reviews as your rationale for any argument that you make, for me that argument is completely unreasonable. I would not accept any inference drawn from user reviews (or even critics' reviews for that matter) as being reasonable/logical/factual.

There was a news article late last year interviewing the devs and they said the game had made enough money for it to have been sufficiently profitable for them (relative to their budget I would guess). I tried Googling the article but cannot seem to find it now.

This resonates with me. I think you have something here that makes sense (to me).

Ok. This is a fair-minded take and one I can accept, so long as we agree this works both ways, which is to say I also am not convinced by the personal opinions of certain others.

But where's the science? I don't see any science anywhere in this thread. You are being dismissive of my posts because they are my personal opinions even while yourself only offering personal opinions too but somehow spinning your personal opinions as "science" and "reason." This entire thread is nothing but personal opinions and unsubstantiated theories, and your personal opinions and theories are no better than mine.

"Exhaustive critical scrutiny"? Yeah right. Basically your entire post boils down to: We who know what's what were having a wonderful discussion involving patting each other on the back about how incredible our insights are, and you who don't belong here barged into our discussion with an alternative view that we disagree with and reject. So we don't like you and you need to go away. Whatever. I'm not interested in this any further. The best thing Obsidian can do to make their next game popular is to completely disregard any and all "discussions" in this forum. It's no wonder Sawyer prefers to interact with every other forum except this one.

This is exactly it for me as well. Doesn't make me sick, but it is very uncomfortable, constricted, and extremely frustrating and exasperating.

Huh? Where did I do anything of the sort?

Ok, and my theory is the same. It is very reasonable, and it does not conflict with any known data. That's my point. Everything in this discussion is theory and conjecture. So why the piling on?

On the basis of my personal intuition which is based on my more general observations of society as a social/behavioral scientist.

And yet quite a number of other people out there somewhere apparently loved the game, right? That's exactly my point. You and I and others on this forum are not even in the tiniest bit a representative sample of gamers generally. So if we're not representative of the general gamer population, the things we liked/disliked about the game are also not going to be representative of that general population. That is why, instead of thinking about the things I personally liked/disliked about PoE, I am trying to think about factors that are more generic and thus likely to be factors affecting that general population. Yes I like everyone else here don't have any data of my own. But that's not preventing anyone else here from offering their opinions and speculations, which is the entirety of this discussion on all the multiple threads on this question in this forum. So why are my observations and speculations different and subject to a different standard? I am a scientist and I understand how inference works quite well.

What percentage of gamers write reviews? My guess would be an extremely small percentage. I've been playing video games since the late eighties and have never once written a review even though there many games I've played that I ended up disliking or even hating (D:OS1 for example). Furthermore, going by Steam reviews, a lot of reviews tend to be generic and superficial and nonspecific. I don't think player reviews can provide a good picture. Achievements also are not particularly useful because they won't capture the person who played the game a little bit, got exasperated, and walked away.

I flat out refused to play TOW because of the first-person thing. I just can't.

I do have several friends for whom things were this way, but I wasn't going to use that as my argument because that is clearly anecdotal. Btw, I also was/am fine with the PoE1/2 combat system, as are many on this forum obviously. But out there in the gaming real world, I am convinced views are quite different. And also again note, the D:OS combat system is so very simplistic and easy to figure out. This is indisputable in my view, and as such how can one ignore this when making comparisons of sales between the two games? For me it is glaringly obvious. My personal model of this issue is as follows: D20 combat system => Easy; PoE1/2 combat system => Hard TB combat => Easy; RTwP combat => Hard Classless system with limited character creation choices => Easy; Class-based system with many classes, subclasses, and multiclassing => Hard Etc. The more the game combines 'Easy' over 'Hard,' the more popular it will be.

Sorry, disagree. First, not at all the point but ... at least in the US the numbers are very clear that an ever smaller percentage of people are extremely math/science literate while an ever larger percentage on the other side are totally incompetent. An extreme bimodal distribution. Two, P:K did well because it uses the D20 system, which a good number of even casual RPG gamers are quite familiar with. Three, RTwP has nothing to do with this issue. There are plenty of RT/RTwP games out there that are very successful. But in the tiny niche genre of old-school classic RPGs yes we're currently going through a phase where TB is the fad for many within that niche. But again even that only reinforces my point, because TB by its very nature is a simplification of the combat system. Developers are going TB precisely because more casual gamers find it *easier* to handle than RTwP.

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.