Ohioastro

This would make sense if the game wasn't released to the public, but... It is. Surely, given a released product one can reasonably pass judgement on it -- understanding, of course, that others might disagree. If X has released products A, B, and C to widespread acclaim (and possibly to your own acclaim), and has now released product D that doesn't receive widespread acclaim (and/or your personal evaluation is that it is inferior), then it is flatly absurd to argue (as you seem to be arguing here) that "D must be as good as A, B, and C: the defect is in your perception of the product." I don't like the PoE mechanics for various reasons (far beyond "That's not the way it was in the Infinity Engine games"): those perceptions are valid regardless of whether or not Sawyer (or anyone else, for that matter) agrees with me. If enough people agree with me, then Sawyer will have to take these ideas into account or risk the financial success of his future products -- if more people agree with Sawyer than myself, then he will best receive success by ignoring my criticisms. "Past performance is not an indicator of future results", basically. You should rate a game on how good it is, agreed. I was reacting purely to the personal (ad hominum) attacks on Sawyer, to the effect that everything he does is crap, that several people in this thread have repeatedly made. Whenever I see basically anonymous internet people making personal attacks like that it just makes me discount whatever they're saying. It's the old lawyer joke: "When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When they aren't, pound the table." I am interested in games with engaging environments, interesting character development, and game play challenges / puzzles that make me think. A game that captures those ingredients from the old IE games is a good one in my book, regardless of rule system. In general I'm a lot more interested in a new system (like PoE) than in a rehash of old systems, largely because there is so *&()) much baggage with the old games - people will flip out if you make the most trivial changes in the formula. It can actually be better to just hit "reset" on mechanics and focus on capturing the spirit of fun - which frequently has nothing to do with the particular things that veteran players obsess about.

I've certainly enjoyed games with the traditional D&D format. Missing from that list, however, is a sense of what the per rest design achieves. Basically, am I enjoying them because of the per rest system or despite it? What am I gaining, other than people being used to it, from the x spells a day system? The basic fault is that you "hold back" because you might need your spells, potions, scrolls etc. for a rainy day, and end up not using them at all (because the tank got beat up and you ran out of healing before you ran out of damage spells.) It's both too few at low level and far too many at high level. If someone mis-times spell use, do you force them to reload and repeat a half-dozen trash fights until they get them all right? Do you save after each one? Because that's the practical consequence of trying to meter out resting. If your system forces people to repeat long sequences without saving they will hate it. If it rewards do a bit - save - do a bit - save etc. play then, again, it's not optimal. As a counterexample, I genuinely like the health-endurance system. It's such a nuisance to raise dead low level characters that losing one is usually a reload in IE games. But if you can bounce back then you can see if you can recover - and I can do that in the PoE system, which is great. I end up with a lot fewer reloads and a lot more experimentation. Ironically, a cooldown system actually ends up being more organic - you are limited in your casting rate (e.g. magic is slow), so that you're not tossing around a dozen fireballs a minute, but the individual spells can be powerful ones. The defect with the WoW style stuff is that you have way too many buttons to push, turning gameplay into a set of macros. I'd prefer a system of powerful, slow magic, but without per rest restrictions because it makes for a more dynamic game. There aren't many examples, unfortunately.

Let's see: Sawyer was lead designer on Icewind Dale 2 and Fallout New Vegas. His bitter critics here don't appear to have designed much of anything, and the stuff that they are so angry about ranges from 'don't care' to 'flatly disagree' to 'perhaps, but fixable' in my book. I'll give the guy behind Door#1 the benefit of the doubt.

I think that it's much more that the issue is that the D&D spells-per-rest system just has some fairly basic flaws, just as the MMO cooldown style does. Pick your poison, but don't pretend that either is perfect.

I guess that I prefer that the designers focus on interesting puzzles, and that the trash encounters between bosses are rarely interesting. The very fact that people argue so much about "rest abuse" or the like is actually a pretty powerful indication that the D&D per rest system has some structural flaws. Basically, I can win every single trash encounter by throwing everything at it. The cost is that I rest between, which is entirely permitted by the rule set. Perhaps if I conserve resources I can rest every few times, or even occasionally; the cost of the latter is that I basically don't use the core abilties of my caster classes, which makes for repetitive and dull game play. So I personally go for the middle option: basically, I use spells at a rate that matches how banged up my health bars get, so that both run out at about the same time. But I'd actually prefer a structure where the trash encounters didn't play such a role at all. You do want a couple of "training wheel" encounters where you see new mechanics for the first time. But do you really, really need to do very similar encounters many times? I'd much rather see the trash encounters lowered in number and ramped up in difficulty - so that it didn't matter whether you rested or not. If you want to test resource conservation, for example, do it by having to deal with waves of enemies, or ones who come in from different directions. Do it directly, rather than spoon feeding me a handful of opponents over and over again. Don't go the IWD route: Here is a battle with hook horrors. It's so much fun that let's have another one. And another one. And another one. Fight a dragon outside of a cave? Cool, now walk inside the cave and do exactly the same thing again... This can also tie into role-playing: you can either sneak through or bring the entire fortress down on you. Not as in "they become hostile": as in "they swarm you from all sides until either you die or all of them do." It could also work to tie these things to difficulty setting, to make the games doable for non-vets.

Yea, I feel as if I'm walking into the middle of a conversation too. In general, expansions don't change rule sets - although new versions can. So, in practice, people should focus on making existing systems more enjoyable (e.g encounter design and AI, perhaps tweaks) rather than deep rules designs. Tweaks to engagement are certainly possible.

NWN2 is objectively better. And I am not talking about the campaigns, even when I believe that MOtB and SoZ>>>>> PoE. NWN2 simply has better mechanics, which when used judiciously can give us amazing modules like the Conan Saga. As I see it, PoE is totally hampered by its combat design where the attributes have little to insignificant effects and the entire engagement mechanics. Add to that the inability to multiclass and you have a repetitive and shallow gameplay. <blinks>. The AI is wretched in NWN, the graphics are painful, the camera controls are awful. The flavor of D&D is one that I like, but that is very far down on my list of reasons to enjoy or not enjoy a game. I actually managed to finish PoE, and I could never force myself to do so yet for NWN2...

I respect the fact that other people play games in different ways than I do. I want new people to enjoy hobbies that I do, and I want the design to be flexible enough to support a critical mass of players. Its not all about me and my preference. I also think that the focus on overleveling content in open world games is misguided. If you really want to force a consistent game experience you gate or level scale. Otherwise you tend to end up with games that are, by my standards, too easy to be interesting. I loved Morrowind, but none of the ES games are challenges to me because of this. IWD2 is the game with the most consistent and satisfying curve for me, and it is completely on rails...

Inexperienced players rely on overlevelling content to beat it. Removing that option really impacts their game play. More to the point, the whole experience issue is generic to open world games. If Chapter 2 isn't scaled to character level and runs from 4 to 9 you'll always be able to either get frustrated or to trivialize things.

Not so much the quests as the bounties.

I agree that saying that it's perfect isn't helpful. But, honest to God, just running it down without noticing anything positive about the design achieves absolutely nothing. And the game would not have been so well received by so many people, reviewers and vets, if there was nothing positive about it. I want it to be its own thing, and I don't want it to be mechanically the same as BG2. I would like the epic feel and some aspects of how BG2 played.

Why is it so incomprehensible to you that some people find the game just average, and other people find it terrible? Kind of like, oh let me just pick some random game out of thin air here... how about Baldur's Gate? Or Icewind Dale? Yeah, there are people that don't like some of the classics on which this game draws its inspiration. Is it really, honestly so hard to grasp that some people find flaws in this game - more than they feel can be fixed to make it a great game? What are those people doing in these forums ? Trolling ? The forums are for people who (more or less) like the game, care about its future, want to see improvements and discuss about all that. Even if you've paid 25 or more bucks to back the game, bitching in the forums will not get you anywhere or make you a better person. Oh give me a break! Customer feedback is what these forums are for unless they want to be totally useless. If that feedback is negative the problem lies with the game, not with the unsatisfied customers. Nonsense. There is a brand of toxic people whose entire purpose is to run things down. They hate every aspect of a game, they mock and attack anyone who likes it, and they flood boards with walls of negativity. Not all criticism is constructive or right. And whenever they're called on their approach they resort to some BS claim about how they're just trying to make the game better. The people who obviously hate this game so much want it to fail, they want to shut down anyone who disagrees with them, and the negative feedback can be nothing more than misguided sour grapes.

You're not understanding what they mean. There is a difference between King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Game of Thrones. In that sense PoE is low fantasy, meaning that there are gritty undertones, as opposed to cotton candy like the Faerun world setting. And asserting that something has failed doesn't make it so. The boards were flooded with complaints about how weak wizards are; a lot of the usual suspects complain about priests; and a lot of the usual suspects claim that rogues are God mode. That isn't the D&D mold at all. It would help the credibility of the relentless critics if they could at least keep their attacks on the game straight.

It's become clear to me that there is a cohort that is utterly irrational on the subject of Baldurs Gate. It can do no wrong at all. It's surreal.

Come on. They invented an entire gaming world, with cultures and background. Baldurs Gate had an utterly forgettable and generic background world. You may prefer it - some people really do like Bud Light too - but a lot of us find this a major acheivement and it counts. The character backgrounds (region etc.) are also greatly improved - and they feed into the dialogs. Dialogs are far, far more sophisticated than in the old games. You can roleplay. You can have conversations that aren't just for advancing some quest, and the "right" answers couldn't always be guessed by an eight year old. The reputation system is interesting and new. Some of these things are only developed to a limited degree, but there is a lot of potential built into these things. I honestly don't understand how anyone can claim that the PoE companions are weak - few of the BG companions made any real impression on me at all (Yoshimo, for instance, was done well; so was the Drow elf woman whose name I forget at the moment; Jaheira too.) Many had no real personality at all, or they were simply running jokes (Minsc) or very thin. Not all PoE ones are strong - but Eder, Durance, Kana, Grieving Mother and Aloth, all in their own way, are characters that I'll remember (the ranger also had an interesting story to me). That's a far longer list. Eder comes across as a real person. Now, these things might not be to your taste, and they might not be fully developed - but they still exist and matter to enough people that they really enjoyed the game. There are also the cutscene options (e.g. toss a rope across a chasm) and there are many opportunities to avoid fights when resolving problems - again, either not present or not common in the BG series, where you benefited from fighting pretty much everything. The old games did have some clever extras (drums summoning support in IWD), so it's not as one sided. In technical terms the UI and mechanics are hugely improved. I don't have to click down multiple layers and slowly scroll through long lists to extract potions, scrolls, etc., and I spend far less time sorting stuff around. Again, if nostalgia is your thing, you'd find the absence of the old stuff "dumbed down", but I didn't find it to be particularly special to have to hunt down a good set of barrels to stuff my surplus arrows, bolts, bullets, darts, potions, scrolls....into some sort of logical order. You don't have to drill down into sub-menus to get to abilities, using items is technically easier, and so on. This is the sort of thing that reflects technical limitations in the older games for the most part. As you noted, there are more interesting abilities that are more easily accessed for melee fighters. These things might not appeal to you or be important to you, but they explain a lot of what made the game so enjoyable to others.

Figurines are, first of all, completely optional to use. I also understand that they are pretty important for solo runs, so crippling them in the name of balance is odd. It would be nice if there was an achievement, for those so moved, for wins that didn't use them at all.

IE fans don't, in general, view the existence of dump stats, a complex character building system that lends itself to power gaming, exploitable mechanics, and limited inventory as negatives -- at least, not pure negatives. Obsidian does, and they designed POE to try to eliminate them. Thus, IE fans end up talking about them, largely in the context of "POE sacrificed standard, traditional, statistics in an attempt to eliminate dump stats, and they didn't even manage to achieve their goal" (example only, although a statement that I personally agree with). The argument that the IE fans are making is that POE sacrifices far too much to try (& fail) to eliminate something, and thus makes the game worse. Tastes obvious vary -- some people obviously do view a limited inventory as a pure negative thing with no redeeming value, for example -- but arguing that "Well, I don't see any value in limited inventory, therefore anyone who claims otherwise are looking for some 'dreamy ideal'". They, and I, simply have different ideas of what is important in game design, and the folks that "lost" (whose ideals are not expressed in POE) are, unsurprisingly, not happy with Obsidian implementation priorities. As I indicated in my full post, different games excel at different things - so of course I agree that some people will see value in different aspects, and that's great. What seems to be missing, on the other side, is mutual respect. Quite simply, the harshest and most prolific critics here seem to honestly think that their preferences are objectively superior to those of others, and they seem to honestly think that PoE is objectively terrible. When you add this to an unwillingness to admit that people who disagree with you have any valid points, and juvenile "butthurt" crowing, you don't have constructive and meaningful criticism. And, no, relentlessly running something down doesn't improve it.

We're getting this accusation from you? You? The same person who, just a few minutes ago decided to 'inform' us that the only reason we love the IE games more than PoE is because we've grown to "accept" their faults? Grow up, already. ............ ok. The funny thing is that if you point out obvious problems with the older games they will write forty point rebuttals on why they're not a big deal. So the ridiculous juggling of piles of things into various containers - which took up a very substantial fraction of my game time in the classics - is somehow "immersive." Game systems that are incredibly convoluted - like the dual classing of Baldurs Gate, the 2,198 prestige classes of NWN - are not a problem. Stat systems like IWD where you can set every one that matters for your character to 18 by setting stats that are utterly irrelevant to 3 - well, you get false "dump stat" equivalencies in PoE. AI that you can defeat by kiting is not a problem. Now, I can also say - at the same time - that I do enjoy these games a lot if I take them as what they are, not as some dreamy ideal. Icewind Dale is a series of tactical battles - puzzles, really - and it's terrific at that. They're designed around my all-18 fighters and munchkin designs, so as long as I play that way I do fine. Baldurs Gate has a nice epic feel to it, and I happily role-play through it and do the various dances that I need to do to progress through it. Planescape:Torment is a really well-done story embedded in a terrible, primitive combat system. I pretty much ignore the latter to play the former. And - gasp - playing something like the Elder Scrolls game as a sneaky thief is *great*, blowing things up in Divinity Original Sin is a hoot, and Wasteland 2 has real consequence down cold. Fallout: New Vegas has surprisingly deep game play. But we're not seeing clear-eyed and balanced critiques; we're seeing people angry that the designers didn't obey them lashing out.

I enjoyed Baldurs Gate at release, but it certainly wasn't something that I loved so much that I played it over and over again. Morrowind was probably the game that I spent the most time on. I love the way that they do stealth and thieves in the Elder Scrolls games. The house quests and the guild quests in Morrowind just really drew me in, along with the alien landscape. In general for RPGs I will get them, play them through for a while, and then eventually put them down once I crack them. There aren't many with stories interesting enough to repeat for their own sake. The 4X games (Civilization / GalCiv / Total War / Europa Universalis etc.) have far more repeatability for me. But the fact that I didn't spend hundreds of hours on BG but did on Morrowind (but less on Oblviion or Skyrim) doesn't make one game better or worse, and I don't worry about ranking them. I just want something new that I like. And I like PoE.

Will try that, thanks - the default one is driving me nuts. I'm trying to get into it for the first time, but the camera is annoying as the devil.

Most people play these games and run out of steam at some point; only a minority of players finish them. For example, I lost interest in Divinity: Original Sin after I left Cyseal. I keep meaning to go back...but I'm more interested in PoE and some of the other older games at the moment. I never did get around to NWN2, for instance, and I'm starting the main campaign for the first time. I've heard that there are expansions and mods that make it worth it. I may not, however, be able to tolerate the bizarre camera controls.

You only need one to place the (good) traps in advance of a major battle. It can put the enemy in a world of hurt if you pull them across a nasty trap with an archer scout.

Explaining something that other people are doing is not the same thing as feeling it yourself. Good God, does every form of disagreement somehow translate to being butthurt for people old enough to drink?

It's driven by a group of posters claiming that PoE, a game that most of us really like, is terrible. The backlash against BG is inspired by the fact that a lot of the people trashing PoE happen to worship BG. So it's just retaliation in kind. I like both of them and enjoyed both a lot on release. Crazy, I know, yet possible.

The user reviews flag games that had significant issues at release. That's actually valuable and useful. If there are bugs that actually matter to a lot of players the users will complain; the usual couple of people with problems won't impact scores. If the game just isn't fun for a lot of players it will show up. To understand Metacritic, look at Steam achievements. They are really revealing about what the typical game player actually does. For PoE: Completed Act I - 44.3% Completed Act II - 16.5% Won the game - 5.7% Won the game at PoTD - 0.2% I really doubt that these sorts of numbers would have been any different in the era of Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale. Most people play games for 10 or 20 hours, and are happy doing it. So Metacritic measures first impressions and polish, and it is very good at doing so. If I look over games that got low user scores I see either bugs (Total War Rome 2) or design flaws (Dragon Age 2) as the culprit. Sometimes the issues get fixed later (Civ 4 and TW Rome 2 are much more stable than on release, and Civ 4 was my favorite of the series); other times not - there is still no proper PC interface for Dragon Age Inquisition, and it still has a lot of MMO fetch quests.