Ohioastro

AS the previous poster said, you don't have to stay in Gilded Vale. At all. The main quest line goes through it, and does not stay in it. There are quests available there, but if your roleplaying urge is to get out of dodge, go for it. I found the main plot line completely logical, just as I found it sensible as to why the companions would want to be with you. If you're looking to have a bad time in a game you will. Rather than spending tons of time comparing this game with others, just play this game. You'll enjoy it more and you might even find things that you actually prefer.

This game has of order a hundred hours of things to do, which by modern gaming standards is fantastic and well worth the cost. Typical modern AAA games run in the 20 hour range. This is certainly competitive with a lot of the older games; it doesn't get to the Morrowind level of a few hundred hours, but nothing else does either. There are enough different approaches that the replay value is clearly going to be high for me. So, no, I don't get complaints about there not being enough to do.

If I had as cramped, sour, and negative a view of a game as some of the people here I certainly wouldn't be wasting my time on message boards trying to convince people that my aesthetic judgments are better than theirs. And no, telling other people that their taste in writing stinks, and that you are the only one who sees how terrible the thing that they like is, manages the neat trick of being both insulting and unconvincing.

Why is the setting more interesting? Soul stuff is quite cool and meaningful, but beside that, this world is so boring, flat and one-dimensional. Same goes for nearly all companions. Just a bunch of your average regular dudes doin' their thing. And some will say that is more realistic and whatnot, which may be true (you are more likely to run into plain farmer/soldier then into half-mad ranger who talks with hamster), but it is just not fun. Especially if those realistic characters have little impact on story and serve as a talking-fighting version of (not so interesting BTW) books you read. Not once it feels important to help your companion (Aloth), not once you develop some kind of relationship. If not for Durance and Grieving mother, to some extent, talking to them would be 100% chore. And there is 8 companions. Just 8. You, and a lot of other people, seem to be confusing "things I prefer" with "things that are objectively true". PoE has a much richer dialog system that has much more subtle consequences than the old games. That's a fact, not an opinion; I can talk my way around many things in this game, and things that I do early on can have surprising consequences later. In terms of the writing, I think that the basic difference is between "book people" and "movie people". This game uses writing, rather than cinematics, to tell the story. If there is a recent analog, it's Morrowind, not Skyrim. If you prefer not to read a lot and to have the story told with voice acting and cut scenes you'll skip the background reading and dialog, and will probably then find it boring. But to claim that the story itself is boring? There are the intricate politics in Defiance Bay (and in other locales); there is the whole matter of souls and animancy; there are actually some surprisingly deep things about religion, and some huge plot twists at the end game. Calling the companions average dudes doing their thing? This is the no spoiler forum but my God - if you actually click the dialog buttons and talk to the companions they have remarkably rich backgrounds and motivations. At this point I think that the people calling the companions and world flat simply aren't doing any optional reading at all.

I'm fine with the difficulty on hard. The low camp limit adds tedium, not difficulty, since you can always go to an inn from anywhere. Given that design decision, I don't see the logic in the low cap.

In fairness, the ones that they made cheaper don't actually do anything.

A good mix of spells is powerful; druids don't have the same utility spells that wizards do (e.g. confuse, sleep, etc.)

Beloved Spirits adds 0.4 Endurance to Ancient Memory instead of 2.... ---------------------------------------------------- Which makes it pretty much useless, no? ---------------------------------------------------- In general, it seems to me that they over-compensate. I would like to see more per encounter spells (slicken is actually still a solid spell; it's just no longer strictly better than everything else at level. I'd like to see the damage-dealing spells pumped up some - they're pretty weak overall.

Come on. It's also a substantial boost to defences (especially with daughter picks).

First off, if you're hitting refresh and monopolizing a discussion with dozens and dozens of posts, you're usually doing no one a favor. There is a lot of that going on here. Context matters. It's certainly true that you could imagine offensive content that should be omitted. But there really are people who are looking for fights - looking to see if there are ways that they can twist and distort words to put them in a negative light, so that they can start a bandwagon. This is frequently explicit, if you look through twitter threads. So, no, you are not obligated to take their word for it - you're allowed to read things yourself. This particular limerick is a tempest in a teapot. The guy who runs off and kills himself is the butt of the joke, not the person who he slept with; you can try and use Nazi analogies all you want, but they rarely shed light. It's not required reading to progress in the game at all - you have to dig through multiple layers of buttons to even reach these. And *all* are from backers. So, no, you don't give people looking for excuses to get angry veto power over what you include and what you don't. You do use reasonable standards to judge what is acceptable and what is not. And the fact that there are hundreds, and there is precisely one (marginal) complaint, suggests that any problem is pretty much on the margins.

It's amusing to me that there are people posting here who refuse to believe that others aren't having these awful terrible problems. I see this in every newly released game; my basic conclusion is that there are people who would just plain be happier if they bought games a few months after release. Because I can tell the difference between software that just doesn't work (which is my definition of "broken"), software that crashes for a lot of people a lot of the time (hello Fallout New Vegas!), and software like PoE that's basically very stable, with a couple of minor glitches that will be forgotten in a couple of weeks. I think that the people who scream and yell about bugs are the ones without perspective. If you see a bug, report it as clearly as you can so that it can get fixed. Games where a lot of people have problems are games where the forums light up like a Christmas tree. The fact that this forum *isn't* doing that is a pretty clear sign that the bugs aren't nearly as big of a deal as people are claiming in this thread.

I've run the game on hard into Act III. Basically, the premade characters are, for the most part, absolutely fine to use. The fighter can tank well; the druid, wizard, cipher, priest are also very solid in their respective roles. In my view, that's because some of the most important spells are crowd control (pin, prone, stun, confuse), and the stats don't matter much for those. It is true that a true chanter / tank - which is my PC, and a ton of fun - requires a very different build from a dps chanter, and no pre-made one will do both well. My chanter tank is 8/10/8/18/14/18 and never gets hit with a sword and board approach. I find the paladin and ranger less effective, but that may simply be the way that I play - or it may reflect the need for a different stat build for them. If there is a lack, it's that there is really only one NPC who does well in a front-line role; this is an argument either for the ability to change NPC stats or an argument for rebuilding the paladin and chanter to be more tank-like, and for tanks there really is an impact from proper stat allocation. But for dps / crowd control, which is most of the NPCs, I think that this is frankly a non-issue; if complete control is what you really need, you can always roll up the adventurers.

People with no tolerance for minor software glitches should not play newly released games. Seriously, If it bothers you that much, wait three months and they'll be largely dealt with. And the glitches in this game are quite minor, at least for most players.

People argue on complaint threads, which therefore stay on the front page much longer than compliment threads.

People rate games that they enjoy highly. You don't need conspiracy theories. The professional reviews were also uniformly positive; so you now have a game enjoyed by both critics and players. "Bad" games, or buggy ones, usually get hammered in user rating in forums like metacritic. Basically, there is a minority who want an exact copy of Baldurs Gate and hate any deviations. They are exactly that - a small minority - and there is nothing wrong with having tastes in games that differ from other people. But people like me, who enjoy this game a lot, are also entitled to our opinions. Your complaints: 1) too few NPCs - disagree. You can roll your own here, unlike BG, and you didn't have 25 companions *in Baldurs Gate 1". You're comparing a series to the first entry; invalid. 2) Long loading screens - I'm not seeing this; how can I agree with a criticism that isn't true for me? 3) Vague claims that it isn't as good as BG. Well, great: you liked another game better. BG1, in particular, is the game that you should be comparing to: this game does not reach the same character levels that BG2 did, and it isn't a sequel. Areas where this game is either comparable or a big step forward: Shedding tedious micromanagement tasks that added no difficulty, only lots of mouse clicks, to the older games. This is huge to me. Pathing is better (if not perfect); I don't spend tons of time clicking on individual corpses, nor do I have to shuffle junk from A to B, nor do I have to move piles of arrows around. I don't have to spam rest, and the tedious and mandatory pre-buffing dance (which my party magically knows to do before it opens Random Door, because I know what's behind it!) is gone. Much more subtle and interlocked dialog options; many more chances to avoid battles or solve problems in other ways. From a design point of view this is a big step forward. Interesting lore and world-building; the soul aspect is, to me, far deeper and more interesting than the extremely by-the-numbers fantasy world and lore of Baldurs Gate. Others may disagree, and that's fine. I find the writing to be consistently strong and enjoyable (again, there are people with other tastes, and I know that.) Good encounter design - you hit nice tactical puzzles and there is a good difficulty curve. Both games are strong here, and this was not easy to replicate. Interesting class and stat system - I started playing D&D in the first edition (3 little books), and know D&D well; but there are some genuinely creative classes here (chanter, cipher) and nice takes on classics like rogue, fighter, wizard, priest. The battle system in BG was chaotic and I never did trust the scripting much, so in technical terms the two are on par for me in the battle. I really like the dungeon crawl and the stronghold is a nice concept which could be extended into something very interesting (you could tie a lot of story lines into being a landholder...) ------------------------------ I also liked D:OS, and it's a different (not better) but fine game in my book. Bottom line: people have reasons to disagree with you; it's not irrational; and it's just fine if you preferred the older games.

It's because some people can't get over anything that's different in any way from Baldurs Gate, as far as I can tell. It's the same handful of people complaining about dozens of picky little things that "ruin their immersion".

The stories are fun, it's totally optional, and the degree of over-the-top entitlement by some players of this game is truly absurd. "It breaks my immersion to see NPCs standing there with different-colored nameplates". Good God, if your immersion is that fragile, how do you stand using a mouse and staring at a computer screen?

I did it with 6 characters at level 6 and it was a real fight for me; I did trigger it out of position, which didn't help. This is the sort of fight where you don't hold back - throw everything at it and rest after. Crowd control spells and debuffs are really important, as is taking the undead down asap.

I did it at level 6, and it was difficult (but doable.) It works better if you send one character forward and set up at the base of the stairs (this helps a lot with getting swarmed), and it's also essential to quickly kill the casters and priests. Otherwise the archmages will slaughter you.

For what it is worth, difficulty is also very much a function of the level that you are for the encounter. If you are under-leveled fights are tough; and you'll need to rest a lot. Go at an appropriate level and it'll be less; go at a higher level and you'll need little. This is tricky in this game because many potential encounters are actually tough if you run into them "at level". This starts from the very beginning (bear cave; temple where Eder is; Hold; etc.) So, as much as anything else, you want to time encounters properly. Try to bulldoze everything the first time you see it and you'll be struggling all of the time.

Pre-bufffing was tedious and overpowered in Baldurs Gate. I'm very glad that it's gone; it basically represented a completely artificial edge for players in encounters, which in turn forced design choices that made parties without pre-buffing grossly underpowered. Not having to stop and do a bunch of mandatory mouse clicks before encounters is an improvement in my book: you can buff in combat, and that is an actual tactical choice (as opposed to a required mechanical task.) The combat in this game *is* really tactical and challenging. Having to weigh resting against using all of the spells is a tactical choice. Positioning matters. Weapon choice matters. If you just want to play Baldurs Gate over and over again, it's still around. I'm really enjoying this game, and it's getting rave reviews from users and critics for good reasons.

People who get all angry about minor bugs should not play games on release. Relative to dozens of other games this release has been remarkably smooth, especially for a Kickstarter game with a low budget. This is something that everybody knows or should know. I waited months to buy Fallout New Vegas because of reports of numerous bugs, for example. For the record: zero bugs here, and the design choices listed in the OP don't bother me in the slightest. An aside: what is it with the entitled people who write critical public posts on a forum and then get angry when people respond? Is the Internet new to them?

Chanter actually makes a great tank. Their songs are passive; and if you stack deflection (important, e.g. use a shield) and wear heavy armor (also important for durability) then you can be very hard to hit.

"This game isn't a carbon copy of all other previous games that I've played" isn't a particularly compelling argument. In no particular order, inventory and arrow management is a nuisance that was removed for cause; you actually can pass time for free by resting in the starter town inn or the stronghold, so you can pass time; stealth = opinion asserted as fact; requiring one of a few skills to pick locks is a design choice, not "broken", especially since ANY CLASS CAN PICK LOCKs; and as far as walking, there is half speed if so moved. So - a mix of falsehoods and opinions does not make an "unfinished game".

Here's the thing: Min/maxers will *always* find stat combinations that are the best for any given situation. Period. In AD&D with a point buy systems (as opposed to the BG "roll over and over and over until your stats are perfect") you maxxed specific stats relevant to your class, or stats that you needed to multiclass. Con was useful for hit points, dex for AC (light armor only); there were some attempts to balance stats out, such as tying skills to Int, but again those tended to be very situational. Having three optimal stats sets is scarcely different from having a setup like: Tank: Might + Con, maybe Dex; Cleric - Wis + Con Wizard - Int + maybe Dex, maybe Con; Rogue - Dex, some Con, some Str; There is another huge consideration: for better or worse, this game *is* released and people *have* built characters around it. A patch that changes what stats do could utterly trash games in progress and it will make a large fraction of the player base furious.