kanisatha

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.

Regardless of licensing issues, I very much doubt Beamdog has any interest in a NwN2:EE. The reason they're doing NwN:EE is because Beamdog CEO Trent Oster has a personal love for that game and sees it as "his baby" from his time at Bioware. By contrast he has openly stated he fundamentally disagreed with the direction that Obsidian took with NwN2 and sees NwN2 as an inferior game to NwN. So NwN:EE is very personal to Oster.

I suspect your tastes are actually in line with a great many gamers out there who will make up the vast majority of PoE2 buyers. There are many very smart people on these forums, and as such it surprises me to no end that everyone on these forums sees themselves as being representative of people who will be playing PoE2. Forumites (the few dozen people who regularly post on these forums) are not even representative of the tens of thousands of backers, let alone the hundreds of thousands of people who will buy PoE2. I myself don't personally care for the ship-to-ship combat mini-game, but as long as it is optional I really don't at all mind it being included because I recognize that it will serve to attract a lot of people to this game who otherwise would not be attracted to a game of this nature.

Nice to see I'm not the only one who does this. I go with variety for weapons and weapon types as well, and gladly sell off "better" weapons and armor to retain variety across my party. Being optimal is mind-numbingly tedious and boring.

This thread gets to the very nub of my great excitement for PoE2. I love pretty much everything about PoE1 except for one major thing: no multi-classing. I hate spellcaster classes and spellcasting as a mechanic in games going back to Baldur's Gate, and always only took spellcasters along with me in my party if I could dual/multi-class them with some warrior class. That PoE1 forced me to devote entire party slots to the priest/wizard/druid classes or else go without the aid of priest/wizard/druid spells in critical situations always bugged me, but in PoE2 I won't have to make that choice anymore. My "priest" will now always be a melee warrior first, and my "wizard" will always be a ranged warrior.

I am so psyched to hear this, and desperately hope nothing will be nerfed too much. Fighters are my all-time favorite class to play and I really hate that high-fantasy RPGs (including PoE1) tend to make fighters boring and/or weak and/or generic as a PC class.

Does "focus on deduction, deception and conversation" mean "noir"? I ask in all seriousness because I am still learning the definitions of various video game genres. If this is so, then I guess I too am a "noir" fan (and I never knew it). Combat is easily my least liked part of an RPG.

Well, personally, I think that if it were me I would want to go do something else before getting into a PoE3 since I would be pretty burned out with Pillars at this point. And yes, they will continue to work on patches and DLCs for PoE2, obviously, but Project Indiana, Tyranny and Pathfinder all have their own teams so the PoE2 team will definitely transition to a new game, I think.

Now that PoE2 has a release date, is it too early to begin speculating about what comes next for the Sawyer team within Obsidian? Since the Cain-Boyarsky team is very likely working in the post-apocalyptic genre for their new IP, I wonder if Sawyer has been given the green light on his desire to do a historic RPG. There are not that many quality RPGs in the historic genre out there, and I for one would very much welcome a game with neither magic nor advanced technology.

Nothing's more aggravating than trying to unlock that super-powerful dagger. I don't bother even picking it up anymore. Just not worth the ridiculous hassle. Seems useful only if you're a dagger-wielding solo player.

Yep, this is exactly what I feared would end up happening. This way they can still make it look like the fighter talent tree has lots of options. As you say, why indeed would I want to take these abilities from my fighter talent pool? So they will remain in the fighter talent pool to falsely inflate that pool and the fighter class gets screwed. How typical.

You are right. But it goes further than that. From the many threads in which this topic has come up it is quite clear that for many in these forums there is an implicit anti-fighter bias. It's been said even in this thread that fighters being a boring class is not a bad thing. Well, going all the way back to the PoE1 Kickstarter, Josh was very clear that a goal of PoE would be to ensure all classes were roughly equally viable as PC classes, and for me at least, being "viable" means being interesting and fun to play. The image that I have in my head of my watcher is a fighter with a few levels of ranger mixed in, and I expect my character conception to be just as interesting and fun to play as any other character conception in PoE2. I don't at all think I am being unreasonable having this expectation.

Same - Eder was a staple in my party. But I'd never make my Watcher a Fighter, and I don't spend much time on my Fighters in combat. This isn't necessarily bad... it means I can focus more on making my Rogue and Wizard do cool stuff! Fighters don't do cool stuff currently. They are reliable and low maintenance. But this is exactly the problem, at least for me. I want my watcher to be a fighter, and I want him to do cool stuff just like the wizard or the rogue or the monk or any other class. Why shouldn't I be able to have that? I hate playing spell caster or rogue classes, and I shouldn't have to do so in order to be able to do "cool stuff."

As someone who considers the fighter class to be the most interesting class of all and the class I like playing the most, and yes that's with Eder always in my party as well, I was very unhappy with the relative inferiority of the class in PoE1 and really excited about what had been done to the class in PoE2. Now, with the proposed new changes, I'm getting concerned again that the fighter class (along with ranger and maybe even barbarian) will once more become the screwed-over class. However, I'm all for taking the weapon style passives and making them general talents and then replacing those abilities with new fighter-exclusive abilities that make those weapon style abilities look laughably pathetic by comparison. It would be hilarious to hear the sure-to-follow complaining about how wrong it is that those new abilities are fighter-exclusive and how those need to also be made general abilities available to all classes because - you know - otherwise people couldn't make a real paladin ... or something.

This is SO awesome! Thanks for testing this. I really hope when all is said and done, that a party of no casters except possibly a healer can kick ass in PoE2, including taking down every boss and overcoming every challenge in the game, because then that's all I would ever want to use in my games.

I always play fighters (or something closely related) because for me they are the most interesting by far. And I utterly reject the notion that fighters should not be equivalent to wizards in power. For me, the only truly satisfying way to take down enemies, especially bosses including powerful spell-casters and even dragons, is to put cold steel to their face and without resorting to any spells.

Yes, the nature of the enemy doesn't matter to me, only that whomever it is I should be able to take down through brute force without having to resort to spells. And the truth is that BG2 did not make this possible. A party without a powerful wizard would get its ass handed to it against the really powerful wizards in that game unless the player was highly experienced and did a near-perfect job of buffing and debuffing.

But why the special consideration for spell casting? I find spell casting to be a tedious chore, and that's exactly why BG2 is not so awesome for me, compared with BG1 which I love. Seems rather unfair to have content that one group of players will love and others will hate. If there's going to be spell duels/battles, then maybe there should also be similar content where only martial combat will work and all spell casting/usage is somehow blocked.

Unfortunately I didn't take the beta access (don't have much free time). Just wondering, are there any fighter, barbarian or ranger builds (without multi-class) possible that are really powerful? And by really powerful I mean equivalent to the power builds in other classes.

A point of clarification: nowhere in my big post a couple of pages ago did I even mention the word "talent." The purpose of that post was to try and move our debate (and it has been an awesome debate so far) away from just narrowly discussing talents to what I consider to be the underlying real issue: that warrior classes cannot fill the roles of caster classes in the same way that caster classes can fill the roles of warrior classes. My take is that Sawyer was trying to fix this, but I can accept that taking away general talents may not be the best approach to fixing this problem (though I still personally believe losing general talents was not that big of a deal). So, I'm very much interested in your thoughts on how the warrior classes can be fixed so that they can effectively fill caster roles in parties, going beyond just changing up a few talents. Tell me how a party with no spellcasters can do just fine in PoE2?

Exactly! By the way those "talents" I called for have never been very powerful in the first place. It's just nice to put some flavor onto your melee single class wizard (specialized on summoned weapons), your defensive druid - whatever. I'm totally all in when it comes to more and better abilites for the martial classes instead of making weak stuff like Two Handed Style their "own thing". How I praised Charge when it came out because it was/is a nice, interesting and also powerful ability for a fighter. Not Two Handed Style or Weapon and Shield Style - pah! Yeah and I don't want to multiclass into fighter just because I want the weapon style to expand my play style. You mean the weapon style bonus, because the weapon style itself was very much available to you.

I disagree the reason casters were so much better was because they each had a combination of area cc, damage, and buff that out classed most of the martial classes abilities to do the same and could be cast at greater rates later in the game. It had near nothing to do with caster ability to be build like a warrior. Those abilities just allowed you to change the traditional role a caster is suppose to occupy enough to make for interesting builds. Let's say for argument that you're correct. It still means, by your very own words, that the caster classes were built to be able to do everything whereas the warrior classes were not. So my point still stands. I think a lot of us disagree because your point was "new people searched for powerful classes and the answer was casters because of flexibility to do what martial classes do," and that rings false to us. As in, yes the answer was casters, but not because of flexibility. A new player searching for powerful classes is looking for a class that is powerful out of the box (with easy to use, powerful spells), not looking to build mages who are good at melee (which is a niche thing that takes knowledge of the systems to pull off, not something a new player would have any interest in doing). That's not true. I was deliberately abstract in my post in not specifying the exact things identifiable with warrior classes vice caster classes. My point was that the caster classes could take on the roles/functions of warrior classes in a party, however those roles/functions may be defined, but the reverse was not possible. Or put another way, one could have a party of entirely casters and successfully win all battles whereas a party of entirely warriors could not do so (at least not for someone like me where I've admitted I am not a hardcore player).

Items have no bearing on this discussion. They're largely available for everyone. And pulling the old "you lack knowledge and experience" card is beneath you, Boeroer. I always respected you and thought you to be better than that.