Ohioastro

Played an IE game before? For better or worse, there are no attacks of opportunity in those games. And for the record, many people in the discussion enjoy the idea of engagement but think it needs to be tweaked before it really shines. Even though D&D is irrelevant to this discussion, you were allowed to move within a certain number of feet without triggering free attacks or use a withdraw action iirc, which you can not even do in POE unless the opponent is disabled. My main issue with POE's engagement is that every movement action is an assumption that you are fleeing, so I can't even side-step without triggering a free attack with increased accuracy. Regarding AI, I have to wonder how difficult it would be to make a priority script where the AI always targets units with the lowest defenses or DR, only engaging the tanks when forced to due to engagement. Is it due to the fear of increasing the challenge across the board? Better to have players feel like gods instead of mere mortals? And the lack of attacks of opportunity makes the IE games poor simulations. They have a completely artificial set of rules that have been put on a pedestal to be worshiped uncritically. I'm playing parallel games of IWD2 (hard) and PoE (PoTD). They're both fun. The IE pathfinding is truly awful - as in, send critical party members or opponents completely the wrong way awful. PoE is light years better. If you fight opponents in an open room, as opposed to blocking them in a doorway, they *do* target backfield players. Archers target wizards. Fampyrs target backfield players. If I have a critique on the engagement system, it's that the AI should be able to use tools to break it. Things like this would do a *lot* more to up the difficulty of the game than amateur game redesigning and fussing with the experience level curve.

Look over the achievements; they amount to setting arbitrary limits on what you can do, and the only difference between them and house rules is that they're sanctioned. What else is a solo run in a game designed for a party of six other than "depriving yourself of an element of the game". Maybe I want to do a run with no spellcasters or no tanks; that's not depriving myself of game elements, it is a choice. Now there are some areas where I think balance is appropriate - for example, if one spell at a given level is overwhelmingly better than all of the others, or some are so weak that no one uses them, then you're losing actual choice. But campaigning to have, say, entire classes crippled because they're "too powerful" in a single player game? What that really amounts to is some players who want to dictate the game experience of other people, and that's rarely going to end well.

There was a joke running around in D&D circles: A DM intones "you see a party of click-clacks coming around the corner; the players huddle in a corner, look at a book, and yell "November". The DM sighs and says "the click-clacks fall dead..." The IE games were basically like that - if you had memorized exactly what everything did and what hurt it the game was straightforward; but you had no way of knowing, really, outside of meta-gaming. Similarly, a lot of the big fights relied on people standing outside of anonymous doors, buffing like the dickens, and running in casting very specific sequences of spells and actions. Again, this is meta-gaming run rampant. I find this aspect far, far less prevalent here than in the D&D games. IE games also permitted absurd gaming of the AI through things like kiting; which at least the PoE system discourages.

Dragon Age 2 used the same environments over and over and over and over. Positioning was useless because enemies parachuted from the sky on top of you. Normal mode was designed so that you could auto-attack with companions and perhaps click an occasional button with your main. Hard mode left the enemies as stupid as on normal mode, but gave them ungodly hit point totals so that battles took forever without being challenging. You could side with the Nazis or the demons, but you couldn't kill both, sadly. Fortunately, it didn't actually matter - because you had to fight exactly the same encounters either way. It had the aesthetic of a fighting game with big flashy explodey things all over the place. The Quinari in Act 2 were the only interesting concept in the whole mess. Did I mention that the city was empty and didn't change? God I hated that game. Enough so that I didn't buy Mass Effect 3 or the Dragon Age sequel. And I'm usually remarkably tolerant of RPGs and try hard to take them in the spirit that they're intended. DA2 was sloppy, lazy design by a studio that knew better.

That sucks. Sensuki was the dude who spent a ****load of time betaing PoE and if he walked away that doesn't look too good, Or it looks like he would never have been happy with the game from the start. I've been lurking the forums since the beta was released and while I think he did a great job finding bugs, I rarely agreed with the changes he pushed for mechanic-wise. That he doesn't even give the game a chance before modding the **** out of it and then leaves it completely out of frustration only tells me he made his mind up a long time ago. It became pretty clear to me in reading his comments that he wanted a clone of Baldurs Gate, right down to the details, and simply wouldn't be happy with anything else. I can't think of any differences between PoE and BG that he appeared to favor. If I felt that way I'd go too - certainly appreciate the effort that he put into debugging, but I rarely agreed on design in the videos I watched / posts that I read.

Why is the setting relevant in this regard? The moral choices you make, would hopefully make you think, whether you're deciding whether kill a guy names Xanzitorp, who happens to be a wizard, or some guy names Joe, who drives a taxi? Are you unfamiliar with the genre? You kill people (lots, and lots of people) to take their stuff and gain power. The moral dimension is pretty much not present at all, and you specifically don't turn fantasy game 'morality' on random taxi drivers named Joe. That gets you arrested for murder. If you were to take the main 'moral lessons' of this game to heart, it would be that feral (badly behaved) children (soulless children with animal souls) should be killed out of hand rather than taught to behave, and religious people should be murdered on sight, because they (exemplified in Waedwen, Durance and Thaos) cause nothing but suffering. So really, I'd caution Fearghus and the developers of this game to avoid morality discussions at all, and treat the game for what it is: casual entertainment. I honestly doubt you would question whether a backer of this game is familiar with the genre. So I can only interpret the first sentence as a an expression of mild hostility. Please refrain from doing that in the future. On point: The fact that certain issues in the game are treated fairly callously, or forces you to make choices which are morally controversial, does not mean that the game and the developers, aren't trying to make you think about these issues and choices. In some cases they want you to consider: "hey, was that guy really a bad dude", or they want you to go "WTF" when seeing how certain norms are almost universally accepted in the world. The themes in the end game about the gods and religion and souls are pretty far from "pure fantasy concepts", at least for a lot of people. In the end, I think that there are some people, for whatever reason, who have developed a real dislike for the game. They then translate that overall hostility into a dislike of all aspects, including story and dialog.

In classic D&D you could eventually cast 9/level for a total of something like ~80 spells at higher levels. If the limit is going to be artificially low (like 4), then per encounter is actually fine; the alternative should be many more "per day".

Yes, that's reasonable - the game clearly has the hooks to go deeper, and I'd view not doing so as a function of budget. I'd like that as well - maybe even have some members unwilling to continue with some choices.

I don't understand this. Right now you can choose, at any time, to walk back to an inn and get nice stat bonuses, resting at will, You can delay this a bit with cheap camping supplies. In fact, you should do this - ideally you're resting when you've used your resources. Slightly faster clearing of trash encounters is really the only difference.

I think that balance for trash mob encounters is a chimera; for a variety of reasons, boss encounters should be the gatekeepers for difficulty. There are many reasons: 1) They can be balanced assuming that the players will throw everything that they have into the encounter; so per rest vs. per encounter is not relevant. 2) Terrain can be controlled, avoiding a huge player advantage. Given that you can rest basically at will (if willing to run back to the inn), the per encounter vs. per rest is simply a matter of convenience. And it really does speed up the generic mob encounters at high level; given that you're supposed to be powerful at that point, I don't see this as a fatal issue. On the flipside, I want the boss encounters to be truly challenging and require you to use all of the tools at your disposal. Reluctantly, I'd even like to see them level scaled at PoTD.

Clearly Mark Twain also didn't understand storytelling. After all, the Duke and Dauphin run into Huckleberry Finn and Jim, and they have no connection to the main story. Clearly every single character has to have their motives written in all caps, and anything else is just an "exposition dump."

You're basically flattening all of the nuance in the delivery and the situation. If you asked Eder whether his problem was 'answered' or whether he was given a full 'closure', his lines throughout his entire quest say the opposite. Eder didn't set out to say, "did my brother fight for X or did he fight for Y?" He wanted to know why, he wanted to know what drove his brother, and so on. Your interpretation is basically like saying "you cheated on me, now I want to know whether you kissed him 3 times or 4 times." Similarly, you find with Sagani that Persoq was the white deer and so on. But again, focusing on that is completely missing the point. Everything Sagani says from the start shows quite clearly that she begins with unquestioned certainty about this ritual practice / journey and she is looking forward to just finding the guy and getting it done, but as time goes by, she begins to wonder what this journey means at all, what it means to Persoq, what it means to her, what it means to her tribe, and whether finding Persoq will really solve anything or answer anything, and what finding Persoq would be able to give to her at all. We find, from all of her lines at that last encounter, that indeed, finding Persoq could give her no answers on what mattered most. The only answer she did get is the answer that matters the least - that Persoq was a white deer. Of course, if a reader hypothetically went through those quests and thought, "OK we were trying to find out who Eder's bro fought for and who the hell Persoq was, done and done, their stupid problems are solved", then I'm sure the whole thing will feel rather pointless. I would say that's an extremely impoverished reading that ignores most of the nuance in the writing - and under such an impoverished reading, the only type of plot that would feel satisfactory is a highly melodramatic and explicit "here we are saving the world, here look you see this person die right now, can you save her?" and so on. Sure, everything I said here is my interpretation, but I found that the themes were weaved quite indirectly and I enjoyed that 'non-epic' approach. Yea -some of the peopel here clearly hate the game and vent about it repeatedly. It helps to take games on their own terms. I found the characters to be wonderfully tied into the deeper themes of the story, with interesting meditations on religion and science (through animancy). Some of these criticisms come across as coming from people with no ability to understand subtlety. The idea that what you do doesn't matter is hogwash, for instance - you just don't have people bowing and scraping to you as the hero.

Min-maxing has risks. Assigning 2 18 stats is free, while the third involves reducing other stats. This can bite you hard in things like saves and durability (glass cannons shatter if the enemy reaches the backfield.) In fact, I'd view 18x3 characters as objectively weaker in many cases than ones that don't reduce saves or hit points.

The exp curve doesn't solve the fundamental difference between controlled linear environment like IWD and open world games like PoE. The changed curve could well be better, but there is just a structural issue if I can do something at level 4 or level 10.

which has approximately nothing to do with that shirt, which has no naked anything as far as I can tell. Attacking that guy with a twitter firestorm was grossly inappropriate. I sympathize with your point on the silly PoE controversy, but if you're defending flooding the guy with thousands of hate messages for the shirt that he wore I lose a *ton* of respect for you.

From looking over the quest logs, the structure of the game is You arrive in Defiance Bay at relatively low level (or you can); There are a lot of open choices and quests, not level scaled, that take up the bulk of the game; There are a few quests in Act II once the events in Defiance Bay play out. All of this talk about "too much exp" misses the point: how do you balance things that can be encountered by a party anywhere from level 4 to level 10 without level scaling? "balanced encounters" don't match with "open world exploration and no level scaling". Period. Everything else is a sideshow, and since I like both the open world aspect and the no level scaling aspect I think that searching for balance in trash mob encounters is missing the point. By contrast, you can control the environment in boss encounters; and you could level scale them for PoTD. And that would do a great deal more for the challenge level than sideshows like fiddling around with the experience levels.

Never had any of those problems. Have you tried troubleshooting hardware issues in the bugs subforum?

I was level 10 when I hit act 3; without bounties I'd have been level 9. There actually aren't that many quests in Act III - far fewer in twin oaks than in defiance bay. About half of the companion quests finish in act 3. I checked my last save: Main line quests: 3 Act 3; 5 Act 2; 5 Act 1 and Prologue. Quests: 7 Act 3; 13 Act 2; 3 Act 1 (excluding companion quests and stronghold ones) Tasks: 2 Act 3; 7 Act 2; 4 Act 1. So, no, players shouldn't start Act 3 2/3 of the way through, because the vast majority of the quests are in Act 2. And if you do a lot of side quests in Act 2 you'll be higher level than not - especially when you add in the 12 bounties, stronghold quests, and the 8 companion quests. Again - numbers are actually useful for this discussion. We have a lot of touchy-feely complaints about over-leveling without hard data and with a lot of unsupported assertions.

I think that actually knowing how much exp is available is relevant when designing an exp system.

What's missing from this discussion is actual data, and the answer is knowable. If you want the game changed document how much exp there is, rather than simply asserting that there is too much. I think that this won't do anything for the people who find the game too easy, because that's a product of deeper factors. (Speaking of which...I'm also not seeing any objective target for what acceptable difficulty is.

I think that this is completely a matter of groupthink. You have a bunch of people beating their chests about how good they are and how easy the game is. And this is the current shiny object that is trotted out as an excuse. If this was slashed I *guarantee you* that it will take less than a day for the same people to be back here complaining about the same thing with a different target. There's just no end to it. The basic reason is simple: this is an open world game (which allows you to control what level you do things at). You can take advantage of terrain, which is a huge edge. And you have both a ton of "burst" capacity in the form of per rest spells /abilities and health vs/ endurance - remember that in BG every "unconscious" player would be a dead player. You can also create imbalanced parties and characters, which is basically impossible to avoid in a complex game like this. And you can withdraw and rest (no respawning monsters). None of these things are impacted, at all, by experience gain. The bottom line is that experienced players will always be able to trivialize normal encounters; if you want more dificulty the only place to get it is in boss encounters where you can balance them around the players throwing everything at the wall and you can control terrain. Any "fix" should be restricted to the highest difficulty level (and possibily target bounties, which really do seem to have too rich of an exp reward for their level. Conversely, I'd pump up the gold rewards - as, after all, they are bounties, and the fights are tough. And, no, you can't buy "every magic item in the game", or even close to it, with the cash available!)

The entire issue around experience strikes me as forum groupthink. There is one set of things - bounties - with very high experience rewards. Leave those aside and there is no issue with experience, period. The people complaining about experience would not be satisfied - at all - if it was changed; they'd just move seamlessly to yet another complaint that the game is easy mode. And it's extremely selfish for vets to demand changes to the base game (easy / normal / hard) that will have a really negative impact on inexperience players. These players *need* to be over-leveled to complete content. And. more to the point, there is a dedicated difficult level (PoTD) where it's completely reasonable to ask for different rules, such as reduced experience rewards. But they absolutely should not be part of the base game. If you want some statistics, if you go to the Steam stats 2.2% of all players have won the game. 0.1% of all players have won the game on PoTD. We don't have an easy vs normal vs hard breakdown, but I'd wager that a large majority of the wins are easy / normal. The people who think that the game is too easy are a small minority of the users. Now, they deserve their game too - which is what PoTD is for. But they absolutely should not be dictating what the game rules are like for the average player.

Stealth also lets you steal things in town without getting the reputation hit for being a thief.

Here is an example: If you set autopause to "seeing enemies" you don't need to use stealth running at all. It will stop you before they see you; you can then cancel movement with the x button, enter stealth, and prep. It is very rare to have hidden treasures outside of very logical areas (e.g. they are not at random spots in hallways; they're in cluttered rooms, temples, and so forth.) The exception is when you're going through dungeon corridors that have traps...which is, well, a staple of games like this since about forever. So when I see claims like this I just have to scratch my head - because there is a very easy way, within the current game system, to avoid precisely the problem that's being claimed. And instead of talking to people about how to get around this problem it gets asserted as fact that you have to play in a certain way - a fact that just isn't so.

Game players are amazingly conservative. That really hit me when I saw posts here complaining...about being able to get loot from multiple corpses at once instead of clicking on every.single.one. A large fraction of the complaint posts here amount to people being upset that this game isn't an exact copy of Baldur's Gate, or that it violates their longstanding habits of how games work (how dare they make Might increase spellpower, or have it be sensible to have intelligent barbarians! Everyone knows that barbarians are stupid and mages are weak!) Not all criticism is equal. It's valuable to have people who put the effort into understanding a system so that they can provide an intelligent critique (e.g. I think that they intended X, but they achieved Y instead...) But many of the posts along these lines are objectively misinformed - as an example, I've seen some claiming that trash clearing is required everywhere, in a game where there is no combat exp and where a large fraction of encounters can be avoided completely. There is also such as thing as destructive criticism. When it is personal, relentless, and hostile it's no longer serving any positive purpose. And, to be truthful, if something like a game makes you angry - I think that you're best off just stepping away and letting it go.