kanisatha

I know, right? The walk down memory lane has been so incredible for me. I've absolutely loved these articles and been pouring over and savoring every word. The article on the death of Black Isle choked me up real bad. Back then, Sawyer used to actually post on the Black Isle forums, and I still vividly remember checking that forum multiple times a day between my grad school classes and working on my research to see if he'd posted anything at all on the prospective BG3 and IwD2. And then came the announcement that BG3 had been canceled. It was so devastating. And then there was that long train of all those amazing individuals leaving Black Isle. When Feargus quit Black Isle, my brain told me this was the beginning of the end, but my heart still clung to a shred of hope. When Sawyer finally quit, that was when all hope ended. But then again, the lesson of Obsidian is never give up hope.

Very interesting discussion. For me there's no contest because I hate turn-based. I did buy DoS1 on steam just because it was on a very good sale price, but have not yet played it at all and probably never will. I've checked several gameplay videos on Youtube and really hate how combat works in that game. Plus, even when you're not in combat there's no pause function. Really hate that.

Yeah I liked Sagani (and her fox) a lot too. My personal favorites from PoE1 are Eder, Aloth and Sagani, so getting 2/3 ain't bad.

Do you mean like Battle Brothers? Iron Oath sounds like it could be. Thanks. I checked these out, but they're both heavily about tactical combat as the focus of the game. I'm looking for something that is about party management as the point of the game, sort of a "party/character builder" game along the lines of 'empire builder' or 'city builder' games.

I'm also on the side favoring six and am extremely unhappy with the decision to drop to five, but for me it has nothing to do with gameplay or combat or "covering roles." The single most enjoyable aspect of playing these games for me is evolving my party over time as a group, expanding their stats, skills, feats, etc. in a complimentary way with each level-up, and distributing weapons and armor and items across my team again in a complimentary optimal way. As such, by definition, the smaller the party size the less my enjoyment of the game, even exponentially less so. This is why I truly hate non-party based/solo games and don't care to play them. And furthermore, in a party based game, I will always max out my party size at the earliest opportunity, which is why I dislike the early part of PoE for not having enough companions to max out my party (tavern-rolled NPCs don't count). So for me: 6 > 5 >> 4 >>> 3 >>>> 2 >>>>> 1 On a related side-note, does anyone have recommendations for RPG/adventure games that are largely about party management?

Yeah, that seems a bit silly, would be cool if the other companions hung out on the ship doing random (sometimes productive) things or chatting with others when it's just the ship and no combat going on. This would be cool so long as there was still some way to simultaneously access the inventories of all companions while on the ship so that it is easy to (re)distribute items across everyone.

YES! I've been wanting this feature. I rarely used item switching for anything other than melee vs range because this wasn't available. Agreed. But because I too use my weapon set slots for switching between ranged and melee, this would be useful only if we got three slots standard for all characters.

The Kickstarter for Pathfinder: Kingmaker is live: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-kingmaker

I find this news very interesting because I'm a big fan of the Pathfinder world as well as 3.5 edition D&D, but I do wonder about the reputation (or lack thereof) of the developer. And I do think Obsidian is making a big mistake by walking away from doing a Pathfinder cRPG themselves, though I applaud them for not standing in the way of Paizo going to someone else. As for the game being "generic," yeah maybe so except for one thing. The press release makes a big point of emphasizing the game as being not just a standard isometric party-based cRPG but also equally a "kingdom-builder" game. This is the aspect of the game that I am most attracted to as I LOVE kingdom/empire-builder games in high-fantasy/medieval settings. This aspect of this game does give it a unique/different dimension and separates it from the crowd. I'm keeping my expectations contained, but I'm also vigorously rooting for its success.

Indeed, numbers naturally tend to imply a linear scale where you clearly want to be able to represent a nonlinear yet rank-ordered scale. Or, per my research methods background, an ordinal scale but not an interval or ratio scale. Very nice! I wonder if my students would find it easier to understand this concept if I used shapes. Hmmm. I need to try this.

Replayability! ) True enough. But for me, as an older gamer with a busy real-life, I don't get much time for gaming. And there are a lot of good games out there that I want to play. And I'm a chronic re-starter. So the net result is that I don't get to re-play games too often.

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.