nipsen

You're not the first one to make that observation. And my endless stream-of-conscious rants isn't really helping either.. I find it funny you're going off on personal attacks and insults, while insulting and attacking. Sawyer is a big guy, he can take the heat. That.. sort of didn't stop the weird attention and entitlement cult from monopolizing the beta feedback. That then actually ended up scuttling Obsidian's initial draft. I mean - I've been in betas where AAA developers stepped right into this before. Making massive (and in the end very unpopular) changes to the mechanics of a game, right after release, based on "fresh user feedback". But the PoE variant was just.. strange.

If you're not going to read what people write, maybe you shouldn't randomly throw out things you make up. The whole of the problem is that the tweaks that have been suggested and inserted, based on a bit short-sighted opinion and "design adjustment", has limited the ways you can play the game. It wasn't simply enough that people who game the system could continue to do so - the rules had to be simplified and streamlined along the way, by people who have no interest in role-playing mechanics. The engagement system changes, the character attribute wreck to the point where the attributes have little to do with the narrative explanation, simplified character creation - not doing that would not have stopped players from being able to play like you describe you do. And making the changes would also not limit your style of play. A successful rpg ruleset is dynamic and allows role-playing, it doesn't specify details from top to bottom. But making those changes removed the depth of the ruleset and the game. Which removed things that matter to a part of the audience Obsidian has at least had. That you don't see this, and apparently have no interest in that type of gameplay(or even see that it exists), that isn't going to change much about that.

Well, the problem turned up when that style of play was enforced for all people who want to play the game. When the availability of actual coffee isn't there any longer. While certain people march around on the tables quaffing frappucino. Else I really couldn't have cared less.

Sure. But they're still bastards, just so we're clear on that. The idea Josh.. explained on a youtube vid(? ..maybe was one of the backer updates), was to have a fight where you could place your spellcaster in the rear, the fighters in front, near a choke-point for example, and have the mobs actually need to fight the fighters to avoid serious extra risk. In d&d or most pnp games, this happens and works reasonably well because of the interrupt mechanic. Since if you decide to move past the fighter, you first have to decide to take a gamble (even though the risk isn't really that huge - you have to decide on your own to take that risk, so that alone effectively stops you from disengaging an enemy and moving towards the back of the ranks). And any GM will add things like.. "oh, well, now that your back is turned against the enemy, he's getting a critical on every hit", etc. You don't want to have either players or mobs simply run past the fighters and maul the spellcasters through a formation without penalty. In a video-game, you have an AI that immediately figures out how fake this basic system is - shoot a magic missile at a beetle, and it streams past the fighter and bites your wizard to death, almost invariably. Add behavior that it's supposed to not take risks at all when the health is lower than 50%, for example - and it still will go for the wizard's throat, because one interrupt is so weak. And the only time the AI won't kill the wizard is when you engage the AI with the fighter first, and don't have a routine that insists the beetle should switch targets to what it determines is the biggest threat. Or, you just let it attack the last and nearest attacker since the last few seconds. "Kiting" - it's a thing. So in a real-time context, and in reality also in pnp d&d rules, there's really very little risk involved by running past a formation and killing the archers or the wizards first. And the engagement system was an attempt to get around that. Let the fighters be able to "engage" several nearby enemies, and potentially gain bonuses against them, while creating penalties for the engaged enemies when they move away far enough to disengage. Or, instead of just adding one jab each turn to a nearby enemy that pass by, you might end up with a fighter that strikes a virtually 100% certain critical and injuring attack against an enemy that turn their back on them, or ignore them in combat. So in the first draft, there were variables for an engagement limit, radius (I think), the perks that increase the engagement limit number, and an ability score (perception) that affected the probability of a fighter throwing out an interrupt against the engaged enemies. Basically, if you had a fighter with high perception, you could: 1. use a modal ability to increase defense and the engagement limit at the cost of accuracy, and potentially slice and interrupt more ability triggers and spells for nearby enemies. Or 2. increase attack and expose yourself, but focus on fewer enemies. Either would be one click for the ability, and another click for placement - and that was all you needed from the fighter for the rest of the battle, unless something crazy happened. And if you ignored perception as a variable, you were really creating a specialist offensive striker, or a purely defensive character that could take a beating while slowly attacking one target. And you would also lose the ability to interrupt spells, if your attack rate was low enough to not hit the enemy wizard before the spell was cast. Since the interrupts would also have different rules for defense, you might lose bonuses towards knocking out the spell or ability. And touch-spells that normally would only deal out a few attacks before expiring would torch the entire place if you had high perception and fought against ability-triggering classes (rogues, casters, creatures with frequent abilities, etc). So potentially, and I created a few characters like that, you could have a fairly weak attacker (the blind priest with a nasty gnarly stick, for example), but one that would have supernatural "perception", and actually be able to strike the enemy at every single ability trigger, at the worst possible time for the enemy. And since the interrupts would go against bow reloads, all ability triggers, all spells, it was suddenly very risky to do anything at all around this priest. He would still be vulnerable without support against direct damage, and not very strong in a duel - but he would practically always disrupt spells and abilities. And buffed, that character would be all kinds of pain for the enemy - damage resistance and temporary buff to attack, and Eothas would be back in Dyrwood, and so on. In reverse, there were a few mob encounters in the beta that had touch-attacks with poison, or very hard-hitting normal attacks (with low hit-rate). And here comes the Might/Con maxed party (with no res or perception), and every single spell or ability this group triggers is interrupted if there's an attacker nearby - while this doesn't work the other way around. While the beetles mill around the party at will, and maul the wizard, and so on. Instant party-wipe. People cried a lot about that. In the game now, perception doesn't exist in the same way (it's replaced by a different stat altogether), and the engagement limit, the rate for interrupts, etc., is placed in the class variables. So they can't be buffed indirectly - they can't be affected in a very big way at all. So in practice, you just have a semi-reliable way to cause interrupts against enemies, that is fairly high, but not 100%. Or, you have an interrupt chance against the nearby enemies that are actually attacking you, but you can't rely on the modal ability of the fighter to always interrupt the spell-caster, etc. It's still an improvement over just having one interrupt against the nearest spell - interrupts are thrown against abilities and spells, as well as breaking engagement, so more of those are thrown, but they're not as consistent. Against enemies, this punishes the AI a little bit if they move around too much or ignore the frontline, but of course won't stop them at all. Basically, the changes to the AI is likely what makes the fights more predictable and easier. So the engagement system something a few people still dislike a great deal - because it breaks their "cheat the interrupt and push through the frontline" style of play that works so well in the IE games. And the interrupt attacks can't be relied on to interrupt spellcasters, even if they're "engaged" in a fight with the strongest fighter. While most people likely won't notice it's there - you just get a few more attacks once in a while, and the fighter seems pretty strong. So to sum up - on the first draft, it opened up for deeply strategic play with very few clicks. If you could place a fighter in range of the spellcaster, you could still fight with the stronger threat, but disable the wizard. Now, it's a few extra attacks that typically miss when you really need them to hit, for all characters, and specially the non-fighter types. Making the current version of the system pretty pointless in practice if you compare it to for example BG2. While it's doing nothing like what was intended. Of course, this is related to the entire character ability discussion. And the way every character in the game now is essentially a normalized standard version of it's class, with very small variations even when you max out the abilities. Like explained, you could also have modded perception to 100, created a flat engagement limit of 2 (or increased it to infinity and removed ability trigger interrputs), and had virtually the identical behaviour compared to the IE games. Of course, nothing like that happened, and we ended up with an either/or alternative that isn't really worth much.

I don't care at all about how others play their games, or if Obs created the bestest code ever known to mankind, or nipsen's sad tale of loss and woe. I only care about how I receive a game. Aside, my psychological and sociological outlook have improved immensely since you've been able to condense the walls-o-whining into easily parsable chunks. I suppose you could condense it into that opinions people feel are genuinely their own as well as informed by all kinds of information, often are made within a very narrow context. And that it's easy to believe you're actually making a much more significant choice when the options are narrowed down for you on beforehand, specially when you're not aware of how limited the choice is. While people who make choices in a broader scope often happen to be less decisive, more moderate, and more uncertain. Wall of text follows: (That study up there is kind of a special case of that, when you have a limited choice on beforehand, and one group is asked to study the details carefully before making a choice. While the other should go with gut-instinct. And you end up with people who are asked to make gut-instinct type choices on average agreeing more with informed expert opinions, as well as being much more bombastic about which choice to make, than the ones who are asked to take their time and think carefully about multiple criteria. So both groups make choices inside the same context. But you can easily be led to believe that the most decisive opinions are actually not just more audacious, but also better informed than the more complicated and moderate decisions. Even though that holds true only within a very narrow context where most of the variables and considerations really are taken out of the equation. When writing policy-papers, for example, you often guard yourself well from suggesting it's all a very complicated problem that you're presenting a very tiny slice of. Instead, people typically describe what they're presenting as being broader than what it is. And you often create an artificial binary choice between extreme positions, for example, and describe criteria that would lead you towards one or the other end of the scale, to make people grow into one or the other. Then you vainly caveat it with suggestions for alternative positions outside the scope of the first two choices, but illustrated in relation to the binary choice context. And the problem (in some people's view, mine for example) you run into afterwards is that the strongest and most loudly stated opinions are formed by people who made a decision early, and who considered the fewest criteria. While the ones who read the entire paper don't know what to think at all. So you end up with a thoughtful and considered group without any strong opinions, at least initially. While the short, compact opinions - that thanks to your angle in the paper now sound informed as well as fall within an acceptable and typical context the discussion revolves around - tend to be not just strong and decisive, and fit with your "expert" opinion on the face of it. But people who make these decisions feel their decisions are more meaningful as well. Or, put in a different way - the stronger and more decisive opinions people have, the less thought they've normally put into them. And you've enabled that by trying to inform them. So you perhaps spend some effort trying to fish for and include the more thoughtful opinions. But, and this has happened to me several times, that effort will often be sabotaged by people who elevate the clear and quick first decisions. Because these opinions are easy to understand and you don't need much debate to decide whatever it was you were discussing afterwards. These people also don't complain - they genuinely feel that their opinions are important and made on a solid foundation. It doesn't need to be done maliciously either, even if that's the case fairly often in marketing (..or politics) -- that you exploit the fact that you can get people to commit very strongly to a predictable opinion. But it's well-known that you get immediate and strong opinions early, and that these opinions will be extremely difficult to change afterwards. That's an unnecessary long and convoluted way of saying that the strongest opinions tend to be the least informed. But it's often useful to be aware of that the first and strongest opinion, even though it sounds considered in all kinds of ways, can be a very flimsy and ill-considered opinion, that only is decisive because very few criteria were actually though about. So no, I'm not a huge fan of people who come up with very strong opinions and no explanations for them. And even less of a fan of people who see discussions as pointless, because they genuinely believe that the less "influenced" their opinions are, the more genuine and "true" and unfiltered those opinions will be. That the brain includes all kinds of criteria anyway subconsciously, perhaps. And that without thinking too much, the opinions might actually be more neutral. Perhaps you're only leveraging people's experience on beforehand, and think you're adding valuable informed opinion that way, and simply trust that the opinions must be considered and careful. Since, from experience, you might believe that thinking too much about something doesn't lead to a solution anyway, that it isn't worth it. And that a decision will be made anyway, that typically will be good enough. Perhaps better than a compromise no one is happy with? But what they don't consider is that you're simply favoring quick and easy opinions formed inside an artificial context, towards very set and narrow choices. Do you prefer this brand of coffee or that brand of coffee? Quick taste-testing shows that as long as both brands are pretty tasty, opinions differ, but on average they predictably tend towards fitting with judgements based on any range of criteria experts would assume could be used. It's a feedback loop, but it holds true in practice for long enough. So those opinions are useful when figuring out how to market the winning brand - what type of people tend to like our brand: target them. You could add questions at the end: do you normally drink coffee in the evening by itself, or do you drink it with cookies along with it? You could attempt to add depth to it by asking whether people prefer to normally drink coffee black, or if they have sugar and milk in it. And attempt to differentiate the opinion that way (some people prefer a sharp and strong blend, because they use it for a dessert - others prefer a smoother blend, because they drink more of it and more often). While if you wanted to figure out which coffee actually tastes better, according to different people, without the label or the cream, ice, location, and so on -- or whether to change the blend to get something deeper, or sharper. Perhaps if you wanted to create different new blends, one for after a solid dinner, one for dessert, another for evening comfort, or whatever. Then those immediate opinions really are completely pointless, no matter how "unfiltered" or "objective" they are - because you know on beforehand that the opinions people have, specially the immediate and strong ones, really don't take your criteria into account. So you've shaped and prepared your focus-group very badly, and ended up with feedback that - even though it's fairly decisive feedback - doesn't actually answer the question you wanted an answer to. Not just did you fail to take into account that people might prefer both smooth and sharp blends, at different times. But you've also committed yourself to selling a very narrow product, while believing it actually has the most appeal to everyone, that the best single brand and blend won in the end, and that it's objectively better than anything else. While in reality you've just haphazardly ended up with picking one blend of somewhat tasty coffee, that you're now going to have to sell with different ice and chocolate topping for customer choices, to a fairly narrow audience who prefers that over the taste of actual coffee. If that was what you wanted, there's no problem. But if it's not, you simply don't have the data you need to decide the appeal of the product, and you decided on narrowing your audience by simply asking the wrong questions, without considering the context.)

Who cares about two lines in a box somewhere, good grief. They deployed a completely different ruleset very early on. The one Josh presented in the serial posts here and on the kickstarter page. Then someone, somehow, turned a couple of insane complaints about it on the internet into a reason to simplify the ruleset to the point where you don't have very much left of it. What we have now is something that looks and plays pretty much identically to the d&d conventions as they were (hastily) interpreted in BG2. Which of course fits with the idea that Obsidian responded when a set of core fans were threatening to go ballistic over how PoE differed too much from BG2 to be a "true heir"(not my expression) to the Infinity Engine games, as the Kickstarter Pitch apparently said. The thing is that when you press the people who were coming up with fairly specific suggestions, that then made it into the game, they claim they never spoke with anyone at Obsidian - and put everything at the feet of Obsidian Q&A internal testing - and say they also didn't get very much of what they wanted. Then when you press anyone at Obsidian, they say they made all the changes for the fans (which makes sense - why else would they change something that seemed close to final?). So either Obsidian has a Q&A team filled with smug, lying princesses to such a degree that it rivals even the community team at Sony (where they literally invent opinions and push changes to the devs that the devs then believe is real - not joking, or stretching anything here). Or else someone at Obsidian happened to agree a lot with some of the suggestions, maybe even thought they were obligated to make them, and pushed these changes to the design table very early on after the beta launched in September, in the belief that they were doing something absolutely necessary for the game. Or else some sort of combination. I mean, I won't quote any messages I got from Obsidian folks, but it occurs to me that there was a pretty serious discussion at Obsidian about this very quickly after the beta launched. And that the changes were made very consciously by the design folks, at least up to a point. And that not everyone were entirely happy about how this developed. In either case, the flat character creation system in the game now more or less only cosmetically resembles what Josh presented. (While a lot of the details, the horde of feats you're given early on, etc., seems to have been just thrown in there without any planning). And that's a shame, to put it mildly. Because that first ruleset was extremely well made. Basically, the IE games were hamstrung in many ways by the Wizards' license, over the d&d ruleset. Because that ruleset doesn't really fit well with a PC game, even though it's all right for a pnp game. So perhaps a talented developer, without limitations like that, would be able to figure out a better way to do it? Incorporating the kind of game-master expertise they have, and translating that successfully to a video-game? And Obsidian, or Josh Sawyer, I guess, did it. But practically no one got to see that system before it was thrown out.

So how does that agnostic attitude mesh with how the community team as a whole prefers short categorical statements that are easy to type down? I mean, you understand that I'm coming to this with a little bit of background when it comes to presenting condensed "product feedback" from focus groups? And that when I'm saying it's not a good idea to interpret opinions without context, that I'm not saying this to be tricky, underhanded, or difficult?

...because the combat system is optional, extra content? I guess it would be analogous if they had the stronghold in the game, you spent a lot of time with it, and built it really high, with moats and crocodiles and bits of knight-armor for a hedge. But someone hates the idea of the Stronghold, so Obsidian cuts it out of the game, after they've implemented it, so an insane guy on the internet won't be angry. You suggest the guy should simply not go to the Stronghold, but sadly, the idea of Stronghold is evil! He must go there, and it's got to go from the game or it's terrible! There is no argument to be had, and the paths to the stronghold in the game will be cut out. And in fact the devs delete it from their master branch permanently. But the devs accept this solution, because they know you, unlike the Stronghold hating guy, won't actually stalk them and kill them if they do something you don't like. They've got your money already, and you're too lazy to pester them all day, so let's just go with the crazy guy who spams multiple forums all day with the same message, while answering his own messages. Actually, it's even worse - it's like they replaced the stronghold with a permanent backpack you have to carry around with you all the time. Except it doesn't function as a stronghold any longer. So it's worse than having an optional stronghold, it doesn't serve any of the stronghold features, and it's an eyesore and it's dead weight. Anyway - in this case, with the engagement mechanic, it really was possible to please everyone. And then the ruleset was essentially destroyed, to narrow down the target audience as much as possible, down to the fans of the entire "99% chance for interrupt mod" folks. And I can't mod that out of the game. It's not doable. Even if I got a little bit on the way there, it's not going to be possible for me to balance back the entire game, reverse the way the variables work (in practice I'd just be adding attacks, making the character more powerful), or randomly undo scripts that I don't have access to, while recompiling code on the low level for individual routines for code-snippets that may or may not be related. It's not technically possible to do it, even if you invested the kind of effort that would involve a team the size of Obsidian, 4 million dollars, and two years. It'd be easier to simply start over. Because I don't sit on the toolchain. Someone does, but sadly - they're apparently not the kind of people you go to when you need something technical done. So do you perhaps grasp a tiny little bit of my frustration with the idea that Sensuki and Matt will have their forced Might-build/no accuracy/perception is evil idiocy modded permanently into the game, when I can't mod it out again? (Or even more fantastically, that Sensuki likely would have been able to mod it in with extremely little effort and a little help from the devs? Hell, the devs could have implemented it with a switch in the menu!) Or understand both my technical and non-technical disappointment when Obsidian would actually commit to making permanent and limiting changes like this? It's so dumb to do it that it's just baffling that an experienced dev would do it. I mean, who in their right mind - without any development experience - would do something like this? And the argument that was made - you're wrong there as well. The argument that was made was, from the very beginning, that making these changes were in order to increase the popularity of the game. It wasn't to make it popular with a specific audience - it was insisted, over and over again, that stupidly limiting the game so it would be less dynamic, and more like Diablo3, or whatever -- would make it more popular. There was no attempt to placate "both sides" here. The argument itself that was adopted was: if you limit the game, if you limit the design and make it simplistic and stupid --- then more people will love the game. If you disagree you're insane and should be dismissed, there is no 77k kickstarter backer audience for more thoughtful games out there: everyone wants WoW and D3, because those haven't been made before. That was the argument, and as we can all see: destroying the game made it super-popular, and all the "negative feedback" on the internet from irate crazies suddenly became fawning admiration... right? Right? I mean, you can all read these on twitter right now: "I got Obsidian to ruin the game to my specification, and I love Obsidian for doing that! Exactly what I wanted! Thank you Josh Sawyer, bestest game-designer ever". See, like, 5 million of these every day. #thankyousawyer is trending, like five days a week. Or maybe that's not actually happening, and what Obsidian really did was ruin the game so 5 guys on a forum on the internet who doesn't know how to program, who doesn't know how to play rpgs, could feel important about themselves for once in their life. But hey - brilliant way to ruin a company and spend 4 million dollars if you ask me. So mission accomplished.

Sure. But take the engagement system as an example. Right now, it only exists on paper. You don't have to think about it, it doesn't really make a difference in combat, and even if you pick all the perks and max out whatever class stat controls the interrupt frequency, you're talking about the difference between two and four potential simultaneous strikes. Halfway into the game, and I haven't seen more than one instance where I got two interrupts on any character in the same "turn". Would it have made much difference to keep it in the game now? Absolutely none. Would people who wanted to ignore the mechanic completely have been able to play the game in the way they are, if the system was implemented as it was intended initially? Definitely. It would have acted similarly to what is currently there, and in the same way as in BG2 after the d&d "interrupt" convention. And if people had dealt with this in a clever way, they would have talked to the devs through whatever channel was there, and asked about the specifics of the mechanic - and would have been able to mod the stat that at the time controlled the engagement mechanic (perception) - put it to "99" for all characters, and had a d&d convention interrupt mechanic. Instead, we've had someone run around with a hacksaw trying to trim the uneven edges, and ended up with removing significant parts of the ruleset - to placate people who, for whatever reason, despise the engagement mechanic. That is to say, the same concept that got all kinds of positive feedback when it was first presented. The idea of actually using fighters in the way you conceptually is supposed to do it in d&d, but really can't because of how cumbersome the mechanic is, seemed to be a good idea. Having fighters level up and become increasingly dangerous to trigger abilities around also seemed to be a brilliant idea, that would fit in all kinds of neat ways with how that class was supposed to be played. And yet - it's apparently evil and must be purged. Because reasons. Even though, as said - you could have potentially modded this to specification with a simple tweak, for those very special people this would appeal to. Instead - everyone has to play the game now with the engagement mechanic tweaked to act identically to d&d ruleset convention, instead of just acting largely like it in practice. I'm just making the point that 1. it wasn't necessary. 2. the tweaks have limited the game in a way that forces everyone to play the game in a specific way. And 3. it's now definitely not possible to mod the game back with a simple tweak. In other words, the overall point is that you likely could have modded the game in a limited way and gotten that behaviour, given that people had allied themselves with the devs.. for example by not calling for the project designer's head on a plate, that sort of thing. And it's usually not doable to mod a game the other way around. Adding a completely new ruleset is not a "modding task". Changing specific small snippets of code that typically are exposed, but not documented, is.

That's like.. the fifth poster on this forum. This imagination thing is taking off, isn't it?

^The thing is that you can always tweak the game so it will allow players to play the game the way they want to. Within the rules you establish. And avoid tweaking to lock out different ways to play. But what we have with this game are a number of tweaks that narrow down the scope of the ruleset, one after the other. Mods as well work within the rules set out by the game. Most popular Skyrim mods change resources in the game, adjust progress rates, or adjust variables, some scripts you can separate out, that sort of thing. And you don't in fact see many mods that simplify the ruleset, remove classes, and make the entire game more linear. And even if that was possible to do, that the source was exposed to that degree, that mod would perhaps not be very popular? Wasn't that hard, was it. Thank you. Just describe the situation you run into more carefully the next time, and how you imagine your personal experience, from your point of view, would be better. Everyone wins. Given that the Obsidian community team knew how to sit down the right way on a toilet, I mean.

I'm sure you've said you'd block me, and punish me cruelly with the lack of your royal attendance, Sensuki. So by all means, punish me more.

"Oh I'm definitely a "completionist," whether there's loot or XP to be had or not. I didn't leave a single stone unturned after reaching the cap in PoE, and the lack of additional XP didn't make it more boring for me at all." Sorry, you're a bit above just being a completionist. Yeah, I understand the argument, and that it's syntactically consistent. What I'm saying is that a random player will not either play all the additional side-quests, or otherwise no optional side-quests at all. So while your argument is logical as it is presented, the presumption that only completionists will play side-quests is obviously not correct. In other words, if you really, really have to rake the entire game for xp, and feel that the game is pointless when you hit the level-cap more than one fight before the last boss - then that's your personal problem. Because there's no way to tweak for this without making the payoff too small for players who pick some side-quests once in a while. In addition, you eventually make the side-quests too difficult to complete for people who don't overlevel. And therefore remove the purpose of side-quests in the town-areas: "I'm not entirely comfortable with my questing party or the background lore yet, so I'll look a bit around, and try to figure it out before I travel to the next major quest". And blowing that part of the game up shouldn't be worth it to placate a specific concern like this. But luckily for you, Obsidian has a great track-record of doing exactly these kinds of tweaks for fans, so you may yet be fortunate - at the cost of everyone else (who paid the bill for the game, and don't scream their heads off about their entitlement on the internet all day like complete fools with too much time on their hands). I mean, try to imagine how you'd program an algorithm that does what you're asking for here. We're going to put in a scale for xp for side-quests that drops off around... 1/4th of the way? Because then we're going to assume that if you've completed the sidequests up to that point, you're likely going to end up doing everything. So at a specific amount of quests completed, we're flagging "completionist" in the character card, and dropping off the subsequent rewards - in expectation that the "needed" amount of xp for this player to get to max level is lower than for other characters. And so achieving supreme perfection for the level-cap timing towards the end of the game, no matter what else it might affect. And you'd have to do that for no other reason than that these specific players /feel/ that hitting the level cap at a particular point is more significant than actually completing quests, getting the optimal gear, and so on. And you're also going to have to balance for the fact that these "completionists" will only ever have a party made up of the original character party, and will never switch out or make new characters along the way. Simple! It's done in a real hurry, with magic, and I can't possibly think of any other parts of the game that could do with that attention at all! Off the top of my head, really, couldn't name... 100 other specific examples. Not at all. So I say, screw the game for all other people - random casual players as well as the more experienced and less methodical gamers - than the super-completionists, to placate a very, very insistent claim someone makes on the internet. Because what could possibly go wrong with just "doing what fans want"? Really, you would clearly have to be a genius, or a huge pessimist(!) of some sort to see any problems with implementing this suggestion. That being said, though - I apologize for being so crass. But this kind of thing is what we've been seeing around here for almost a year now. Before Obsidian has someone actually collect this invaluable feedback "from fans", and have someone implement it in the game, believing that it will hardly affect anything at all. So the practical joke at my expense, in several different meanings of the term, is wearing a bit thin.

..There is now, I guess. There's also the typecasted shopkeeper guy with the permanently bored voice. I'm sure he's an ok person in real life, but I really hate that voice - and it's the most common line in the game. Or, the same jaunty quip every time you select one of the characters, over and over again. Etc. Could be the best voice-actor in the world, but it would still be grating. I mean, there's a good reason why Planescape Torment worked so well. It had few distracting repetitive voice tracks (...outside Morte's "hey, you're back again", which probably was intentional). It didn't pester you with an epic story-teller voice. And the voice-acting that was there was simply put in to present the type of character you're seeing. Ignus' voice (almost just sfx) probably stands out to me, because it's so otherwordly. And the voice-acting strengthens that impression with.. just a few lines, in a way that text alone wouldn't allow. But which a full voice-over would sabotage. The cutscenes as well actually don't have talking, even though they have sound effects. It's the same with the parchment scrap scenes - if they had a voice-over, the focus would be the voice, not the actual event. So having those with sound effects and silence actually is a better choice than having a full voice-treatment. And if you think it would be a good thing to have the entire game read out as a radio-play or an audio book, on every possible quest, with the same total engagement, every time. Every villager you run into engages you in a huge tale of epic proportions, etc. If you really think that's a good idea - then I have this test for you: Go and listen to.. I don't know.. f'ing Coehlo reading his own trilogy about pilgrimage to ego-heaven on an audio-book. Or better yet, go and listen to Jasper Ffforde reading his own fording books. Do that. Listen to every single line, and how passionate and meaningful all of the single words are. And how clever they are. And how enjoyable they are. How colourful and magnificent - like a sequence of letters placed on the sky, and the rainbow underlining them - over bloody Freudian slip County. And it doesn't drag on at all, I promise you. Oh, no, it never drags on. And if your brain hasn't actually spontaneously died at some point during the trial, come back and tell me, honestly, that you want Durance to voice ALL his lines in the game. Well, maybe at least some people should bloody learn to have humble opinions? And some tact, you berk!

How would that affect a non-completionist, then? Would they pick and choose a side-quest that might come along, that seems connected to the story. And then find that they need to advance the story a bit more to be able to clear the next sidequest? Do you think that's a remote possibility? See, here's the thing in a nutshell: you're suggesting tweaks exclusively from a power-gamer perspective. And whoever keeps implementing these things is making the game unplayable for everyone else.

Imo, his biggest problem is that he thinks too highly of people, and overestimate how much thought they put into forming their opinions. And that he still has some respect for "the community", after sacrificing his design, following the initial wave of "criticism", and after offering the backers the opportunity to invent content and abilities to add to the game (although few took it) - that's the kind of generosity you rarely come across. Frankly, if it was me I would have snapped, done my own project, cut the backers off with a saw, and smeared your noses in it at every opportunity I'd have.

Well, it is easy to mistake the game's encounters for being balanced against an "optimal" and well-equipped party Specially if you don't play the game in a way that exploits the AI and the mechanics in general. But I'm afraid that what we're seeing is just a very badly set up scaling system (if there even is one) for the mob spawns, that doesn't really fit with the typical party make-ups that aren't min-maxed. And it basically hates you if you rely on the current version of per-rest spells. But I think it's important to realize that adding gradually more difficult encounters in between the normal mobs, on an alternate path, or in the bottom end of the dungeon, etc. That could be a way to avoid scaling for an average, and to always have a player (on any level) find something challenging eventually. And the first draft of PoE basically dared you to go ahead and try clearing the difficult encounters like this, to hunt for new gear, but also because the game in itself begged you to do it: you've created a party make-up like this, you slay the troll and the priest without problems using strategic placement and very few buff-spells or ranged gambles. You know the likely weaknesses of the druids, and you have prepared the right weapons, etc. So can you do it? There's no reward other than maybe some gear - but that's what I spent the most time on. Making the party better, rearranging the gear to get the right damage types to the right characters, figuring out whether to go for damage treshold or to increase dodge, figuring out how to make the engagement system work against the enemy, etc. Hire another henchman to figure out a new build to compensate for a weakness in the current party - the game encouraged you to do that, and rewarded you with more and more interesting fights. Now, we have a completely uninteresting metagame, and it really is reduced to "why is camping supplies the only significant resource in the game". But it could have been done... it was done... differently. There's no such thing as "either we get Baldur's Gate 2+, or we get an action-rpg". And Josh proved that. So it's very sad that an initial knee-jerk reaction from a forum-community (made up of less than a hundredth of a percent of the backers) scuttled that. Because I think that system would have been very satisfying to play for people who.. you know.. backed PoE rather than spam 100s of hours into D3 and WoW type games, and then presumably wanted something else. Um.. I suppose it's more that we got a sort of random distribution for several isolated points between extreme opposite opinions, on an internet forum. And then some kid drew a crayon through the middle of all the points, grinned because it looked so orderly and correct, and that was what they ended up with.

^haha. Yeah, some have really short memories... There's no reason to doubt you're very fond of stating your opinions. I'm pointing out that you don't seem willing to try to understand any of the typical GM concerns when playing an rpg. And don't see the obvious implications your suggestions have for the game's design. You're also flatly dismissing anything that doesn't agree with your always unexplained point of view. So I can deduce that your "basics" are different from the basics a game-master would think of when conducting a role-playing game. But other than that, we can only guess. That you think this is conductive for any debate about game-mechanics would be fairly comical, if it wasn't for how you're a moderator on the board, and like some of the other mods and community folks, seem delighted to often and at the most idiotic moments, set the standard as low as possible. Which is a shame, since we initially had a lot of people here with different points of views, ability to explain them well, and who were willing to spend time discussing their views with the devs. So for example when Josh said they're going away from taking any community feedback in. After Obsidian responded very directly to the initial beta feedback. And right after, as I said would happen at the time, continued to get negative feedback, even from the specific people who got exactly what they requested. Then that's not "pithy" - it's a description of how the community team as a whole is worse than incompetent. I really shouldn't need to point out either that it's not my design suggestions that are being criticized on the board now that the final game is out. What I said was that the suggestions made on a forum should not be used to make changes to the existing design, and that the feedback should be requested for specific and limited areas of the game-mechanics. While you, and others on the community team, have argued from the start that sweeping forum-opinion about what "doesn't work" and "it's broken" should be taken as more valuable than anything Josh could come up with. So be my guest, G1fted - go ahead and explain how helpful it is to have a community team with that attitude on your back.

I'm not technically a backer either. I donated the pledge money away to an autism foundation on Obsidian's behalf. The thing is that people like Gift3d over there would argue that if 9/10 forumers would instinctively recoil at a mechanic, however well argued it was, or how well the intention with the mechanic came through in practice - then this would reflect the opinion of all players of the game, and the mechanic became "objectively bad". Arguments would be like this: "if I don't instinctively understand how it works, without playing the game, or trying to understand the mechanic, it's unlikely that anyone else will understand it either". And: "when you need to explain it in so many words, it's obviously difficult to understand". Like explaining how eyesight works, before you can be allowed to see anything at all, I guess. Things went off the rails from there. Documenting how it ended up isn't very easy, though. For example, Matt and ..Sensuki, who posted a 50-page paper arguing for an attack-roll distribution that approached a system very much like flipping a coin -- this is now not possible to download. The forum-posts are still here, where they explain unspecifically what they wanted, and how everyone else in the world wants it as well. Hooking in on the "dissatisfaction" of "everyone", that was then answered in this one suggestion. But the actual paper is gone. Whether that is because dropbox started to purge links, or if it's because they deleted it, who knows. They also both alternate between denying they wanted what they described, criticising the way their suggestions were taken on board, and between claiming they didn't want what the game ended up with. Which makes sense to a certain extent - like I've said before, the only thing the "hostility" to the first PoE draft seems to have proved to Obsidian and at least Paradox was that anything that wasn't as simplistic and linear as what the community expected, was a hard sell. Paradox has for example based their business around creating games specifically for niche-audiences, based on direct feedback. And if you took the feedback seriously, it's natural for them to find that inventing anything new at all - which is what Josh did with the initial draft, and he was obviously not pitching this as a small adjustment to the IE games formula, but something new altogether - is more risky than going with something that is perceived as being more established. It's ironic that this would be the conclusion, though -- that a kickstarter and and effort to sidestep the usual publisher shortcut theories about popular appeal, would end up being tied by the same limitations in the end. And that players and gamers would then end up supporting it as a concept - getting the least creative design, bound very obviously by the licensed d&d conventions from the IE games -- when you have talent like what Obsidian has pitching something new and imaginative. Because like Gromnir explained, a lot of the new mechanics, however well argued, were not received well on the forums. Afterwards, they were taken out. Josh talked about Grognards and the difficulty of selling new mechanics to blood-fans, so I can't imagine they didn't notice or discuss this. And even though some of the mechanics are kept cosmetically in the game right now -- the accuracy mechanic where an accurate character will score easy critical hits (and convert grazes to normal hits) if the opponent has low dodge... basically, a huge knight in massive triple-plate armor will have a damage treshold, but his weaknesses against an opponent able to strike weak points is obvious -- it's not possible to exploit it very easily in the game. In that all the character bonuses have been put into class variables, and toned down until they don't make much difference. Like Josh insisted, it's still more dynamic than the IE games, but I would argue that all of the opportunities given by the ruleset have been toned down so far eventually that they're practically not there any more. Might was the same thing - a lot of ... very harsh criticism turned up against it. For all kinds of long and well-argued rationalisations having to do with intuitive design, narrative flow, and whatnot. But when you got into the specifics, it turned out that the only problem was that pumping might to max didn't automatically translate into increased damage. When these very loud people expected that this would be the case. I'd like to say "some of us argued", but it was just me, who said that, well, you know, there's so many ability points here that you can max a second stat. That there's these "pairs" of abilities that make up the traditional d&d character abilities. Maxing Might+Dex could be similar to maxing Strength. Resistance+Constitution could be similar to CON. That's not completely correct, the ruleset went beyond that, and opened up character ability pairs you don't have in D&D, like a specialist fighter with high perception and high dexterity. Which used to mean, in the game, a nimble character able to interrupt ability and spell-casts really easily, and who would score critical hits very easily. You could alter that concept into a... two-handed long-sword wielding striker, for example, with less hit-points, but more skills and resilience enough to wear light armor. It was really fun figuring out builds like that. Lots of wizzard builds that could be made with it as well - the weak super-illusion specialist, who can cast a cantrip on an entire village area, if they're weak-minded enough. Or on the other end, a wizard who can create a fireball with the diameter and impact radius of a bullet, but who will destroy that one target in one hit, if he hits, etc. But the character ability pairs explain how they were thinking when they created the system. And that wasn't good enough, apparently because random folks on a forum didn't want to understand it. It got a bit comical, when the first patch essentially doubled the character ability points, to let people max even more stats. To avoid "trap builds", as sensuki called the might only builds that dropped all the stats except might and con, presumably because they simply weren't as strong as was expected (even though the builds did exactly what was advertised: ability to deal out and take immense amounts of damage, but be very weak against interrupts and status attacks/contact spells that bypass armor). Removing Res as well, or finding that perception was a dump-stat -- it made the characters vulnerable against the touch-attacks, and made it necessary to win the battle on range, before any engagement. So it forced a specific type of specialisation, that had strengths, but also weaknesses if the entire company was made up that way. Accepting this wasn't good enough, though - and adding twice the amount of points, to just allow everyone to build characters with no weaknesses wasn't good enough (because you could still remove stats that potentially created a weakness) - and eventually they dropped the percentage score/1-100 distribution, and went back to a 3d6 scale instead. So people could, I don't know, do things you never do on pnp, like drop stats to 1 and max the stats you like, to game the system, etc. And then things were great, apparently. And in the end they took that seriously, and normalised the significant stats so you couldn't make a character with any weaknesses - and moved the rest to class-abilities. Making the entire character creation essentially cosmetic, and the stats only really significant in dialogues. So we get what we ended up with - very few character abilities that really matter, an engagement system that.. has no real import, and is indistinguishable from what you have in BG2, where it really only harms the player characters when they try to place themselves, along with the AI when it breaks. And with spells that function mostly as a way to wear down the HP of the targets before they get close enough to wear down yours. And we're forced to play the game in a very specific way, that mimics a style of play that follow extremely closely how some die-hard BG fans play that game (and which the rest of us invented our own rules to avoid at all cost, because it's boring as heck to play that way). So when I play the game now, I've ran into several situations where I either run into "overpowered mobs", because I've skipped past areas I'm apparently supposed to rake for xp first. And mini-bosses that launch a scripted sequence of initial spells that break the rules you have to obey. And that's where the challenge is in the game now - in gaining levels and new abilities+spells, while using your eventually comically overpowered spells to deal with mini-bosses that have super-abilities that go way beyond the rules elsewhere. Until you run out of fizz and need to spend log-resources or go back to a town to survive. Like I said, you can very easily see where that design comes from, and why people prefer a less restrictive approach to the simplistic d&d license implementation that were the IE games. Gf1t3d describes it as "D3", other people compare it to MMO-type action games. And that's fine. Go and play WOW and D3 until your brain bleeds, I don't care. But there was a different design for PoE that aimed for strategic play of the kind that the IE games promised in spirit, so to speak, and that pnp role-playing gamers don't need a long tale to understand the draw to. And in the final game, that type of play isn't possible to even imagine along the way. PoE is more BG2 than BG2 ever was, in other words. It's more about making some of the wizard spells that disobey the limitations of the other soul magic need more preparation, while the casts should be rarer. It's narrative flow on one hand, and a game-balance mechanic on the other. If I GMed a game where wizards have access to offensive spells with massive range, that can target specific targets on a distance, conjure up fireballs, create fire out of thin air, etc. (as opposed to druid magic or cipher magic that draws on souls of particular targets, mold elements and nature spirits, or can channel strength from the character itself, and so on -- I think cipher magic is still limited that way in the game, btw, that it can't target areas without a target to explode from) -- then I would not allow magic like that to be intuitively remembered or cast. Because it isn't narratively pleasing - a wizard is supposed to be powerful, but at great cost and mental discipline excluding everything else. They sacrifice something to gain mastery of a type of magic no one else has access to. But it's also problematic in that if you allow magic like that to be cast as often and as easily as per-encounter type spells, then you need to tone the magic down, and change how spells are created and memorized. So to avoid making wizards and everything else a sub-class of ..sorcerer, to allow these insane artificial pyres that no one else can cast to be more common, you have to invent limitations to it. Without those, you would either need to make everything the same, or end up with making the magic too powerful and too common. PoE has some sort of weird compromise between the two approaches in the end - magic in general is very powerful compared to everything else, but you basically need to use it in every encounter to get through the mobs without taking too much damage. And we run into the "adventure day problem" again - where a player that's presented with the current spell-lineup feels, for good reason, that magic should not be limited in the way it is. After all, it's not strong enough to be uniquely useful in specific situations, and you need to use it to get past certain bosses and powerful creatures. Making you very vulnerable when the spells are spent, forcing you to rest. So you notice right away that it is fair, and won't really disrupt the flow of the game, to have almost all the spells as cool-down abilities. Since the game is balanced now against spamming spells in every encounter, and this is forcing you to play the log-collection mini-game to keep going in a dungeon, which isn't very satisfying. You could say that. But the idea, it seems, was to give the wizards low-level casts that were quick and uninterruptable (which used to be incredibly powerful), along with a standard ability type "book slam", and the staff bolt cast. And then let the high-level spells take more preparation - that again might make the wizard vulnerable during the cast. So you end up with an opportunity for keeping the usefulness of low-level spells far into the game (unlike in d&d, without some GM creativity that breaks the game-rules), while making high-level spells a sort of event - you defend the wizard while they're preparing the spell, and might end up in danger if the area cast isn't planned well. And having some genuine output for the effort that's unlike all the other magic in the game. The same was the case with the enemy spell-casters - powerful spells would take a long time to cast, and potentially be worth the risk in rushing them, or making it possible to interrupt with a low-level immediate cast. And now it suddenly makes sense to save that spell for the right occasion, no? To justify having a separate and sometimes cumbersome spell-system for wizards that is unique from the other types of casts.

That could be a version of the end to the tale, but there's a preface to that story. Before we had access to the beta, Obsidian let on that they were discussing how to do away with rest-spamming, or if they should get rid of it. And if so, how that would have to be done. I'm assuming there were things involved such as whether to respawn mobs, or make it possible to become ambushed, that sort of thing instead. It was discussed a bit on this forum, and elsewhere as well. It's also something you kind of discuss a bit with your players when GMing - you don't want some clever player to keep casting their spells all at once, and camp on every tree-stump. So you invent a time-limit, or you require people to hold watch for monsters and spies, that sort of thing. And this solves itself with imaginative players: you pressure them lightly to make sure they keep moving as far as possible before resting, and reward them gently for driving the adventuring. And in a dungeon, when you have limited supplies, you want to force the players to pick and choose the loot they need, to make choices. While making it all interesting enough to make them press on to see what happens next. You also want to create some tension - when do they actually have to retreat? - to tie a spectre of failure to their backpack somehow. This means you add an element of planning to the quest, and allow players to think ahead. This seems so basic, but it's what transforms a dungeon trek into an adventure, right..? Can you possibly replicate that in a game? Have people rush into a dungeon, overextend themselves, and force the player party to retreat? Or to have them carefully plan how to ration their resources and spells? Would it be possible to let the party wear down their fighters, only use buffs and smaller spells sparingly, in expectation of the really big fight later on, in a game? In most adventure role-playing games, you have to imagine that part and essentially create your own rules along the way. And that can work. Parts of BG2, and several of the sequences of fights in IWD2 lets you do that extremely easily. But in the end the spell-system and the spawn groups were created in such a way that you had to turn the difficulty down to normal at least, and create fairly specific types of spellcasters to get that feeling of completing a dungeon by hauling yourself out by the fingertips. And you could always just.. go back and rest and try again, or reload. And you would run into situations later on when a specific spell would be able to kill a troll easily, and that you couldn't really predict that all the time. So saving spells would just be the same as exposing yourself to danger, and essentially either forcing you to stock up on healing potions, or to memorize more healing spells. In IWD2 you could convert normal spells to healing spells with the clerics, though - that worked really well. So that you could not just compensate by blowing some low-level spells. But that you also could decide whether to use smaller indirect spells to help shift the battle, or to just heal with them afterwards. That's the kind of thing that makes you look for opportunities to use spells more cleverly. And allows that questing I described through a dungeon, because it extends the time you can use spells before resting, and to actually use all the spells you have before deciding you're spent. As opposed to having three useful but situational spells, and then being useless afterwards and forcing you to rest. Same with that one single ability the fighting type classes have. So the spell system in PoE extends on that, with the levels having a set number of casts for all memorized spells, and allowing you to choose more strategically. As well as with the per-encounter abilities, that you might accept that a type of class might have. It makes sense, and does away with the problem that you can never really use your class-specific abilities. That - of course - makes perfect sense in a pnp game, since you run into maybe two fights before each adventure day ends. In a game, you run into more, and suddenly gaining that one blinding strike per rest doesn't make sense. So having these as per-encounter makes all kinds of sense. The way health is dealt with in PoE comes from that as well - a way to extend the adventuring day, and make the players feel that they're running ragged, instead of just ending up with "oh, I guess I'm out of spells now - resting time, or else I'm going to lose too many hp in the next fight". The experience point model as well, with no battle xp and only quest xp comes from this - you want people to quest ahead, not rake the dungeon for every single mob to make sure you're strong enough for the next one. Those mechanics are silly, and if possible should be done away with. This is the kind of thing a developer of games like this, just like a GM for pnp games, will think a lot about. Not because you want to make the game more difficult, but because you want to make the game easier to understand and easier to play for people who don't obsess over numbers and damage popups. Because believe it or not, this is how you get relatively normal people to play a game. So doing this for a developer of a game that is supposed to appeal to people, is not only a good idea from a gameplay perspective, it makes sense economically as well. You want to make the game accessible, but not simplified an unsatisfying. What remains then is to make sure the spells and abilities are actually useful if you use them strategically. That the skills and character strengths and weaknesses actually matter. That it feels rewarding to use them well, and to use them to your advantage. And as I'm fond of telling people, the first draft for PoE actually did that. It wasn't perfect, but it focused so well on how you would place your troops and use the then relatively meager and situational spells to shape the battle, to for example exploit the fighters well, or to compensate for the strengths of the enemies, or the weaknesses of your own troops. And because those encounters varied so much, and the scale was the same for your own characters as for the enemies (massive strength, usually weak dexterity, etc.), that meant you could for example hold back a heavy fighter with a nimble one, while moving in from the flank with the heavy hitters, and so on. Or use slow type spells to avoid masses of weak enemies. Or cast the sustained spells to neutralise poison damage, etc. And end up with interesting ways to decide battles with just a few strategic spells. So you could create specialisations like that and have groups with very few attacks they would be completely defenseless against. And then end up with completing the dyrwood dungeon if you were thinking ahead, and completing it and feeling as if you did really well. Or, that you ended up in the final battle and you were simply so weak that you would feel compelled to compromise with the boss. Did you launch into a battle with everything you see and use up too many spells and wear your party down, instead of sneaking past the dragon-kin in the sidecave? Well, that's too bad. You made a mistake, and now you're paying for it. Retreat and find a safe place to rest, or take a chance. That sort of thing would not open up with a more linear approach, where you decide on having a predictable party, predictable number of enemies, and requiring you to go through all of them on the way to the goal, while allowing you to rest with no risk. Basically, you preclude all of it with a few design-decisions right there. So what happens after that, after the invaluable feedback from the endless fount of wisdom that is this forum and Obsidian's omipresent community team, is that all the character-classes in PoE were normalised to lose all the specialisation options. While the way you engage in battles become more and more dependent on direct damage and simple HP tug-o-wars. Until you get what is there in the final game, which - for all the cosmetic differences - is an identical system to what you had in BG2. Where you have super-abilities you ration out, while expending spells like candy. Because since the direct damage spells are so significant, and the best way to avoid taking damage. Or, since the mobs have very few weakness and strength specialisations, like the player characters, it's the ranged spells and the abilities that make a difference. So you preempt damage and extend the adventuring day, like in BG2, by casting spells and avoiding actually engaging in battles. Once the spells are done, you're wearing down the health. And you end up having to rest when the spells are spent. Ration the spells, and you take damage. It's pretty much mechanical. Use damage dealing spells and survive, try to engage and it's about luck. And we end up at this point, where people are kind of unhappy with how you're forced to play an rts-type logistics minigame, where getting camping supplies is basically the one thing you need to take care of before going into a dungeon. Have too few logs for a campfire - well, go back to the nearest town. That's the kind of situation that any GM or game-designer would see as a complete defeat. That they're forcing the player to obey some mechanic that fells narratively invalid. It's the result of the idiocy organised by a couple of very active people in the community, and I'm assuming some of Obsidian's testers. Against the design Josh had put up, while dismissing that any of the objections to it. But that's the way things work at Obsidian apparently. But fear not - the same people now have the solution: make all the abilities cool-down abilities, and all is solved! Just make the game into Diablo 3, and everyone will love it! Presumably we're getting closer to what "the community" allegedly wanted when they funded the PoE kickstarter, according to Obsidian's community folks. And how much bs the kickstarter pitch turned out to be, in spite of Obsidian initially making good on it. Like I said, it's still amusing to see this in practice. I feel very sorry for game-designers who had their game literally screwed over by people who should know better. And that not more people stall when seeing what became of the game is a bit strange - reading the reviews is like reading a hundred different ways to avoid pointing out how the limitations in the licensed d&d design for crpgs still is as hopelessly simplistic and unsatisfying to play as ever. But it's still hilarious to read the total surprise in the reactions from people around here when people point out that they might not be entirely satisfied with a battle-system that essentially is exclusively reduced to stalling you from reading the next set of dialogue. All tension is gone from that part of the game, and it's very obvious that it's the case. And I guess trolls will fly before anyone of the supremes admit that this result was not just predictable, but specifically predicted for you in detail ahead of time.

And I could add that although it may not seem that way, at all - in actual reality, Gft1ed is in fact making that statement with an acute and total awareness of the narrative flow in a dungeon, intricate knowledge of how this would affect the mechanics in the game on every level, and also in fact knowledge of what all people who want to play the game really wants. Unbelievers and apostates may perhaps feel the need to ask: "But Gifted1 - how dost thou know these wondrous things about how all things fit together?". But it is not necessary to question, because he simply knows such things.

It takes the same mental effort of pushing boxes, one at a time, from one end of the floor to the other. It's boring and pointless. I don't want to do this for entertainment. Mhm. That's what the game plays like. Increasing the difficulty simply extends the waiting time and extra trips back and forth. The challenge lies in how long you can stand repeating the same task over and over. Other than that, I'm just going to note that - as always - we've had two diametrically opposite solutions to the "problem" here, the first as extreme as the next one. The first insists that there should in effect be no difficulty of any kind. Which makes sense, when the difficulty simply doesn't make you think about the usage of spells and abilities, but of camping supplies. Why would anyone want that (other than whoever decides these things at Obsidian)? The second insists that the difficulty in navigating artificial obstacles on the way to the next set of dialogue should be a grueling trial by very, very slow burning fire. While a compromise between the two manage the best of the two options: a linear game that isn't challenging in any way, even though it is still grueling in it's infinite exploration of boredom. And you're arguing between these two opposites as if getting either one of them is a good idea. And that no other approach works. I have to admit, it is still fascinating to watch this stuff.

Then it's a good thing we all wanted to play an rts. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a post by a moderator. Keeping it classy and setting the high bar for the rest of us to follow. Alas, I fear I can't summon forth an inner douchbag which quite matches that response, but it's nice to know where the moderators of the forum stand. Basically RPGCodex level infantile responses. Oh, no, this is above the usual level, since it's an attempt to be both witty and since it is in a specific sense also is internally consistent. But being unaware of the context of your own argument, and arguing for allegedly minor details "everybody" wants to be implemented, while pretending this has no implications for anything else. When it in reality changes the entire ruleset from the bottom up. That is the normal mode around here, and incidentally also how PoE became a game that forces everyone to play the game, from second to second, exactly like a vast majority of 5 specific people on the forums played BG2.

Or you mean, if the game was based around strategic use of situational powers to shift the battleflow, instead of being constantly about wearing down the hp of the enemies before your own hps run out? Dear me, Iuzarius, only a "mentally unstable" person, and the guy who designed the first ruleset draft for PoE, would suggest such a thing, according to the forum-sages around here.

It's not harsh at all. People just argue that since the game doesn't instantly dazzle them in the way Baldur's Gate did, in their memory, the writing is "objectively bad". That's kind of endearing - reminds me of grandpa's ranting. But then when you point out something specific about henchmen with hamsters and tattoos, ready for the mental ward, and how 90% of the lines describing him is gibberish, then things start to become difficult. When you highlight how other more conspicuous writing no one specifically remember, such as the lengthy parentheses, was really what set the tone, that's when things start to become problematic. Because now certain people start insisting that it was the gibberish that made the rest of the writing in the game great. They create fairly elaborate rationalisations for it as well - because if the gibberish that stands out in their mind is not objectively amazing, then their memory of the game is failing. And their opinions would not be objective, but be based on very light subjective impressions they can't even describe properly. So clearly, the rationalisations insist, it was the gibberish that was the core of the Baldur's Gate series. Without gibberish, the game would simply be ordinary. After all, to them it was the gibberish that stands out. You have people on the project writing this who were good writers at the time, who are even better now, and have had time to put more thought into the presentation. I mean, try to understand that what Obsidian is doing here is allowing us to play stories from world-class GMs, that they've been able to share with a larger audience through the games. The systems made here are created by people who know GMing well, who understand what the challenges are when conducting a game for players. And these games were a unique stab at that, even if they weren't "ideal". But they did work to tell good immersive stories. But that doesn't matter to these people. Because from their perspective, it's all been written out hastily in the editor as a wrapper for the combat, and it all happens to be incredible by chance. Therefore, there's a simple and easy explanation for why it's impressive. If you've heard of Dunning and Kruger, they have a theory on things like this. It could be summarized as saying that unless you have some level of understanding for the skill involved in performing a task well, you don't actually appreciate how skilled someone are, and see it as some magical talent, or just a cheap trick. Such as that someone doesn't really understand how much effort and technique is involved in running a marathon, until they've actually tried running for a few hours without pause themselves. So we end up with relatively intelligent people making their own translation of what made the game work, and creating a rationalisation for it from a player's point of view. Much like a couch-sitter would comment on what makes an athlete a good one. It's not wrong as such, or not made from observation. It's just not based on knowledge about what it takes to actually train and run yourself. I mean, this isn't exactly controversial - the way many people seem to be experts on game-development from playing lots of games, or that they are experts on writing fantasy novels after reading lots of books, or believe themselves brilliant directors from watching lots of film on TV -- this isn't an unknown concept. And of course when the result of that is a theory about game-design based on superficial hooks, and you get a game developed only around that -- then you see where it falls apart right away. Someone trying to run a marathon without having trained properly understands the problem, and someone trying to develop a game by tossing on some writing at the end start to see the problem as well. It could be a gateway, obviously, lots of modders for NWN used the tools to write very solid stories. But you have a different understanding of what it takes to create a good narrative once you've tried it yourself. But where things become harsh is when you combine the superficial perspectives on "what works" with actual development background. When you let, say, a community manager with no development background define what the game should be like, and have developers who know how to implement it all create the game. Then you get something like this: a marathon-runner in a fancy outfit completing the 42km run in 6 hours, who is driven in a car on the distances where there's no audience, who stops the timer when he has to take a break. And who has a fake audience to cheer when he passes the finish line in lone majesty. It's a fake run, conducted by people who know what a run should look like, but not how to actually pull it off. With skilled runners adding "advice" along the way, putting all their skill into making the run appear authentic. And actually saying, then, that this is more impressive than a real run, knowing that it's fake, and how much effort it really takes to complete a real run -- that is harsh. It's disrespectful. You end up sitting in a cult dedicated to upholding the illusion that the fake runner actually won the race. As if the whole run was truly made up of only the highlights shown on TV. Because you can hear the argument being made already, right? That if you can fake the experience for a selected audience, and they truly believe it's a record-breaking run -- then it's better than the real thing. Meanwhile, anyone objecting simply are destructive, or they have the wrong idea, or they are too critical, and have too high standards. When pointing out that certain people's understanding of what will impress "a new audience" in the same way they remember themselves being impressed, are simply being very, very, superficial. When what you're pointing out is that their perspective wouldn't have impressed them either at the time. And that thinking it would is simply incredibly arrogant.