kanisatha

Eder and Aloth have to be in my party which is why I was kinda' bummed they reduced party size to five, because now I only have two slots left for any of the new companions. Also why I wasn't particularly interested in PoE2 having a large number of new companions available.

There was an old SPI wargame based on the early part of the Korean war, called "Korea". I played it a few times when I was younger. The rugged terrain and shape of the peninsula made for a pretty uninteresting game though. It's somewhat reminiscent of the Italian peninsula campaign during WW II -- only the sea landings made it at all interesting. Otherwise it's an endless slugfest. IIRC the tutorial scenario of The Operational Art of War was the Korean War- and that about exhausts the Korean War scenarios I can remember. Up until fairly recently there were very few Vietnam games as well. And it just so happens that TOAW 4 has recently begun beta-testing. Will be getting it as soon as it's released.

A small group of disgruntled backers have been review bombing the game on Steam and GoG, and since people who are angry about something tend to post at a much higher rate than people who like something, the game has "mixed" reviews on those sites. Pro reviews of the game have been almost entirely superlative.

Mine arrived today via UPS. They sent me an email last week that did have a tracking number.

To be honest, I don't understand a lot of the hate that Beamdog has gotten. At worst I'd describe their changed in BGEE to be innocuous and their worst change in BG2EE (which I've not played a lot of) seems to be a somewhat ugly UI. As to not being able to buy the original editions, I'm sure we can all think of loads of 10-15 year-old games that no longer are available for purchase. Not to mention won't run on modern machines or will run but only after some work. I don't think anyone ever expected game titles to be evergreen - always purchasable, always playable and ever unchanged. Not to mention that it is WotC and not Beamdog that keeps the original games from being available for sale because they have officially stated that the EEs are their current official versions of the game. But the bottom line is that the EEs as well as the BG expansion game have all sold quite well per Beamdog's released sales numbers, so the haters can hate all they want. The hate doesn't make a damn bit of difference to a great many of us.

Meh, Planescape'll remain what it's always been, more people will just be able to play it. And perhaps they'll have the good sense to make reading text in that game a wee bit easier. They probably won't. Eh, one can always hope. Yep. Quite so. Really getting tired of the "I don't want/like it, so nobody else should have it" attitude of some people. Beamdog is doing awesome work, and I'll keep giving them lots of my money.

+1 Been beating the drums pretty hard for this myself.

Yup, they've sold around 800k-900k copies of the 1st game since it's release + the games they sold during the KS campaign. That's a truckload of profit for them right there. Enough to fund Pillars 2 and other projects as well (unless they were heavily in debt and paid that off). Yeah Feargus confirms in the GameBanshee interview that PoE1 sales post-release are over 900,000 units and that including the KS campaign sales the total is over 1 million. Surely PoE2 will sell even more. Btw, Feargus also confirms in this interview that PoE3 will happen.

^This. And I'll go even further and say that for me AD&D 2e is a horrible system in every way. D&D 3e, 5e and other similar systems such as PoE1 and PoE2 are superior to 2e in every way. Thank God WotC won't allow the use of 2e in any future games.

Yeah I'll join @213374U in defending the Beamdog EEs. To each their own. For me, finding and using mods is stupid and I don't have any interest in doing it, so having the EEs run flawlessly on my very new machine is awesome. And views on the new UI are entirely subjective. I consider the new UI to be awesome and a huge improvement over the ridiculous "classic" UI. And the new content (both quests and characters) is indeed hit and miss, just like the original games which also had their share of crappy content in them. Nostalgia is ok, but clinging to the past for its own same is not for me, which is something I've also stated with respect to the IE purists who attack PoE for not being IE-ish enough.

Seems like the perfect opportunity to bring together Paizo and Paradox (or some other big-name publisher) and create a Pathfinder cRPG!

Yes! Eder's the best. Always have him in my parties and never swap him out for someone else.

At least one fan of the IE games disagrees with you, and I suspect I am far from alone. What I wanted was a return to the isometric PoV with beautiful individually designed maps, to tactical real time with pause combat, and to a deep story. These were the things the made IE games great to me, not the individual mechanical elements ported over from tabletop AD&D, and certainly not the arbitrary party size limit. Hear hear! I'm really getting tired of the "Only I get to say what qualifies as a true successor to the IE games" crowd. So maybe some of these sentiments will make some heads explode: PoE was an awesome successor to the IE games; PoE2 is shaping up to be even more awesome; BG2 was not all that it's cracked up to be.

This transcript actually has a lot of interesting information. I was particularly happy to see that something I posted for in the Fig forum is now on Josh's radar: having a UI screen in our stronghold where we can simultaneously access the inventories of all our companions and not just the ones in our party.

Yes, if it will give me a Baldur's Gate ONE style open wilderness exploration map.

+1 Eder is my favorite companion of all and he is always in my parties as well.

Will you make this available as a YouTube video? Sometimes the Twitch recordings don't have close-captioning which I need. Thanks!

Great thread and awesome list, OP! One thing I'd really love to have is a UI screen (perhaps in our stronghold) where I can access the paperdolls and inventories of my PC and all my companions simultaneously. I really love managing the equipment of my companions including even those I don't take with me as a part of my regular party.

I strongly support 6, but I agree with those here saying this is a done deal. We're stuck with 5 whether you like it or not because changing it back to 6 would require way too much new work to replace work already done on the game. But what confuses me is that there are some people who like and support the reduction in party size yet who also keep insisting we need 8+ companions in the game because "that's how many there were in the first game." Seems inconsistent. If the party size is now smaller, I don't see any point whatsoever for anything more than 7 companions, and even that is a wastefully high number for me. Many people who've played through PoE1 are naturally going to gravitate towards taking along the 3 companions returning from the first game. So, for many, they're only going to have one party slot available for any and all new companions.

My unhappiness with this could be assuaged if they make it so that any "required" NPC that has to be taken along for a quest will not take up one of the five party slots.

@Infinitron, thank you for digging up the story. I knew I remembered it correctly!

Not reporting rumors. It was in a mainstream gaming news site (but can't remember who right now), and they were citing the information as coming from an email sent to them by Feargus himself in which he says they've wanted to shrink party size for tactical combat reasons but from their Tyranny experience decided that four was too small so they settled for five.

Already brought this up in another thread, but party size would be my big issue. I read in one of the online news stories that they've decided to reduce party size to five. My big wish would be for them to reconsider that design choice. But party size is fundamental to the whole game so if those accounts are true I doubt they'll be open to changing it at this point. Very unfortunate and very unnecessary. Really unhappy about it.

Backed it at the $45 level. Had intended to also invest a few thousand in the game but holding off for now after reading in one of the online news stories that PoE2 party size has been dropped to five. If true, that's something that really pisses me off.

Don't see why it needs to be either/or. Obs is a reasonably large company and they've often said they can do three major projects roughly at the same time. Me thinks the JES team will first do PoE2 and thereafter Sawyer's historical RPG project (which btw I'm excited by as well). The Cain/Boyarsky team I would guess is working on a vampire/werewolf game set in contemporary times. And then there's the Armored Warfare team which can transition to a Pathfinder cRPG. The smaller Tyranny and Pathfinder card game teams will continue to do follow-on work on those games. They can potentially do it all.