kanisatha

It's not about stripping companions of their gear. Quite the opposite, it's about optimally distributing new-found gear across all companions and not just the ones in your current party.

Thanks, OP, for this thread. So great and so on point. I find myself in agreement with pretty much everything that's been brought up here. I was (and still am) one of those who was very disappointed with the decision to drop party size, and yet because pretty much every aspect of this game - large and small - is just so incredibly awesome and well done I find myself not caring that much about my party size issue. And that says a LOT!! This game truly is a gem.

Same here. For me PoE1 beats DOS1 by a wide mile. Really loved PoE1 even as I'm having to really push myself to finish DOS1. And it's not just one thing but many major issues I have with DOS1. So I can't even begin to understand how DOS2 could be better than PoE2. I highly doubt I'll even bother to buy DOS2. My personal take is that fans of TB combat are hyper-passionate with their preference whereas fans of RTwP combat are not. As such, TB fans go out of their way to hype the DOS games regardless of any shortcomings because ... TB!!

Yeah that last possibility is what's got me concerned.

It's interesting that Sawyer is stepping down as creative director of Deadfire so that he can pursue other projects. I wonder if he's been given the green light on his long-cherished idea of doing an historical RPG. And if so, I wonder what new directions he'll choose to take for the game given his recent comments on the state of RPG game development across the industry.

Yeah this was something I've brought up so many times. I even brought up the exact same suggestion of having access to the inventories of all companions to make it easier to manage everyone's equipment during the crowdfunding campaign, and Sawyer noted it and responded that it was a good idea worth considering. I mean it's not like it would be a difficult thing to implement at all given that Obsidian implemented a very similar party management system in NwN2!!

Chaos Chronicles died years ago, and I haven't seen any information about any revival of that project. Do you have some new information? Oh, you are in for a treat: https://www.realms-beyond.com/ This is the original CC developers, now able to develop and finish the game without interference from the morons who temporarily seized the unfinished assets and released it as shovelware to make a quick buck. This is the real deal. Thanks! That is awesome. I was so very disappointed when CC died, especially because of the utterly ridiculous reasons why it died. I checked out your link and it sure looks really nice, including that they're actually using the D&D 3.5e OGL. That way they don't have to waste resources on developing systems and can focus on the story and the world and the characters.

Chaos Chronicles died years ago, and I haven't seen any information about any revival of that project. Do you have some new information?

From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU OBSIDIAN!! Don't ever stop making amazing RPGs like this. I will gladly pay multiple times retail value for games like Deadfire.

It's always a melee warrior class for me because I like my PC to be front and center in the action in combat. In the IE games I always go with some fighter-thief combo, but in PoE1 I liked the barbarian class a lot. Adding multiclassing is for me the awesomest improvement in PoE2 over 1. I really like what's been done in PoE2 to make the fighter class a truly interesting class to play, and I am really looking forward to playing fighter-barbarian/paladin/ranger combos. I know a fighter-ranger melee character will not be particularly optimal but I really don't care. Having a fuzzy furry pet to take along with me more than makes up for mechanical shortcomings. I'm like my bro Eder that way.

Or those for whom having companions to take along with you on your adventures is a huge part of their enjoyment of the game and now they have one less of those companions to take along. Enough with the straw man of people being unhappy over things being different.

Should include Tower of Time because it only just released a couple of weeks ago. @LittleRose, would you be so kind as to tell me which of those games on your list would qualify as part of the "fantasy" genre, be it high or low? I have very limited gaming time and so limit myself to fantasy genre games because that's my personal favorite. Thanks in advance!

Eh, I doubt anyone is going to be losing their job as a result of Avellone's comments on the Codex of all places. I meant his comments might be reason for lost sales. We had already one person in this thread to cancel his pledge. I am wondering how many more people could do the same... Even 1000 people cancelling, means about 50000 USD to be paid back. And that is basically money for 1 person contracted for 1 year... Or maybe that 1 person is just one person. Or maybe that one person represents 10 percent, which is still just a handful of people. Honestly the idea that 1000 people are going to cancel over this is fairly absurd. Single digits seems a better bet. Yeah, not to mention then maybe I, as someone totally in Obsidian's corner and who can't stand CA's whiny, passive-aggressive narcissism, should pull my support of 'Pathfinder: Kingmaker' because he is involved with that project? It would never even occur to me to do something like that. The only think about this whole thread that blows my mind is that there actually exist people for whom something as utterly stupid and meaningless and laughable as this story evokes such a passionate emotional response in them. I choose to reserve my passionate emotional responses to stories about children being gassed to death in Syria.

Avellone doesn't have any credibility with me. None of this drama nonsense changes my (very positive) views of Obsidian.

The KS campaign just launched for Black Geyser. They're not asking for much at all. Apparently a lot of the game is already done and they have some private financial investors. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grapeocean/black-geyser-couriers-of-darkness/

Do you like more when you have companions, or when you make the party yourself? I personality prefer to have a party set up for me, since the ones you make yourself you can't interact with... Yeah me too. The point of having those companions with you is to be able to interact with them and to know that they have their own preferences and agendas.

Agree with a lot of what's been said already, especially deep and expansive character development (incl. skills, talents, etc.). Being story-rich, lore-rich, and reactivity-rich are also important. Bust most of all, must be party-based. Not having a party is a deal-breaker for me.

I agree with most of what's been said here except for one situation. I would like to have simultaneous access to all of my companions' inventories and paperdolls while in the stronghold (out of combat) so that I can more easily manage the (re)distribution of equipment and items across everyone. It would also be nice to have this access to everyone when interacting with a vendor to make it easier for me to decide what I want/need to buy.

Your loss Lesbos and its city Mytilene are very beautiful and summer is coming Spartan lapdogs the lot of them. HA! Athens deserved every dagger in its back. Sparta tearing down Athens' fabled walls was the best thing ever to happen in the Peloponnese!

I for one will be holding Sawyer to that commitment of not reducing party size any further in any future game.

Surprised that Obsidian hasn't sent them a C&D. Why, does Obsidian hold a copyright for isometric RTwP RPGs? I'm pretty sure lots of companies have made those. Granted, it does look pretty similar graphically, but that's bound to happen when you go for a realistic art style rather than going stylized. Speaking of stylized isometric RTwP RPGs, Tower of Time comes out of early access on the 12th. I've read some good things about it and I may well scoop it up once fully released (it helps that it's nice and cheap). Re. the Blackgeyser game, I also had signed up for its newsletter and just got an email about its upcoming KS. It's not groundbreaking in any way, but I can never get enough of party-based single-player RTwP cRPGs in high fantasy settings. Re. Tower of Time, I have it on my Steam wishlist, and was going to post here asking if anyone had any feedback on it based on having played the early access. I've read the various pro previews, but was curious about what actual RPG gamers thought of it.

Not really. Not with the MMORPG Neverwinter. Don't be mistaken. The MMORPG Neverwinter is nothing like NWN or NWN2 at all. And if you love them, then you'll probably hate the MMORPG. But the fact is that the MMORPG tells the story of Neverwinter and Icewind Dale in the current age of the Forgotten Realms. So if you would like to know what happens in Icewind Dale and Neverwinter in the current timeline, that's what the MMORPG tells you. An NWN3 or IWD3 would be more or less redundant so long as the MMOPRG is running. At least if they were set in the same time. I agree. That's why I said successor, not sequel, as in a game of the same type as NwN but having nothing to do with the NwN games. Beamdog has very strongly hinted at a brand new IP. But I agree with @Bartimaeus's sentiments that a NwN successor does fill a void whereas a BG successor would be competing with PoE and the new Pathfinder cRPG. I personally would be disappointed, but many other people would be happy so good for them.

Relatedly, you may have heard that former Bioware BG2 and DA writer Dave Gaider quit Beamdog recently after only about a year working there as their creative director and lead writer. Well, my personal take is that this was because Beamdog's orientation for their new-IP 5th edition D&D game they've been working on for over two years recently changed. Originally, the game was to have been a 5e successor to the BG games, and Gaider was hired specifically to lead this project. This was very clear and obvious from the many posts Gaider made on the Beamdog forums. But then, very suddenly, Oster managed to get his hands on the NwN license which he had been passionately seeking for a long time but previously had been refused. Once this happened, Oster's calculus immediately changed, along with the orientation he wanted for Beamdog's new original game - a 5e successor to NwN rather than to the BG games. But this was not what Gaider was interested in working on, so he walked away. Many have been unhappy with me pushing this view over on the Beamdog forums, but I'm rather confident I'll be proven right in due course (though I wish I turn out to be wrong).

Was he the person who wanted NWN to ship without an official campaign at all? I seem to recall that issue raised a serious rift between Black Isle/Interplay and Bioware at the time. When development on NWN started it was said that it would have a a deep single player game you could port your BG character to to continue their story and also have a DM kit that'd allow you to do all these wonderful co-op things. Then they didn't talk about the single player campaign for a long time. Eventually there was some talk of there being no official campaign at all, which upset a lot of people and when released the one we got seemed like it was created as an afterthought. I don't know but it's entirely possible. He was the lead dev on NwN. I myself walked away from NwN very early on in its development and did not follow anything about it because I was so very invested in the BG and IwD games (and so very pissed at the death of BIS). I only very grudgingly bought the NwN diamond edition many years later at a time period (late-00s) when I didn't have any games I liked available to play. Man, that was a very depressing period in my life!

I would really like to know in which way he disagrees with Obsidian, NwN2 certainly had its problems but I'm pretty sure that anyone consider it a better game than the first one. In my experience people usually view the campaign as better but the editor as worse (I don't know if this applies to a majority but it has applied to a majority of the opinions I've read/heard/seen). I guess it could be argued that Neverwinter Nights 2 placed more emphasis on the campaign over the editor and that could be a fundamental disagreement he could have with regards to the original. All the same I agree that Neverwinter Nights 2 is much, much better. Oh absolutely. I also agree NwN2 is waaaaay better than NwN. I think the main thing for him is that NwN was a non-party-based game where the emphasis was on multiplayer/co-op gaming. Emphasis also on people playing in a persistent world setting. It's these gaming elements Oster really loves. He agrees that NwN's OC was not particularly good, but he doesn't care, because players playing in a co-op way in fan-created modules in a persistent world is what he loves because he considers it to be the truest experience to a table-top gaming experience. You can google Trent Oster and NwN and several interviews and articles will pop up where he talks about all this stuff including about his days at Bioware developing NwN. But these elements are exactly what I hate personally, and the party-based single-player experience is the one non-negotiable thing I want in my RPGs.