JerekKruger

Yeah, I assume it's to avoid the rather arbitrary anti-stacking rules of PoE (which were, in turn, inherited from older IE games and, presumably, AD&D). Instead of having a rule that says "two items with the same bonus can't stack", you allow stacking then make sure there are very few opportunities for it to actually happen.

How is there any difference between the game giving you a randomized percentage value, and the game "rolling" a pair of d10s to generate a number between 1 and 100? I really don't see how that's true. Determining hit chances in PoE is as simple 50% - Defender's Defence% + Attacker's Accuracy%. Most people can add two digit numbers without any real difficulty. Meanwhile a percentile system gives much more precision. In a system based around d6s each increment is about 16%, which is incredibly coarse. I can't represent a 60% chance of something in a d6 system, I have to either have it be a 50% chance or a 67% chance.

When they don't enjoy their work yes. People who are genuinely enthusiastic about what they do don't have this, in fact they often suffer from the opposite problem. It's also a fact that Tyranny was not praised for its gameplay mechanics. As for added complexity, what do you mean? Do you mean it will be very hard to ensure that each encounter is balanced in difficulty for every possible combination of multi-classes? If so then obviously that's the case, and Obsidian would be foolish to imagine they could ever make it not be the case even with simplified encounters. They would also be foolish, in my opinion, if they decided to simplify encounter design since this is something that many of their fans wouldn't be happy about. As for budget, they don't know their budget yet and we have even less of a clue (since we've no idea how much money from PoE's huge success they've put back into Deadfire development). This isn't necessarily targeted at you, but I find the accusations of PoE having overcomplicated mechanics bizarre when it comes from people who also hold up BG2 as the pinnacle of CRPGs. AD&D is a hot mess of a system and is completely unintuitive. Many mechanics in PoE don't work in quite the way you'd assume they would, but they do do what you expect (+20% attack speed doesn't increase your attack speed by 20%, but it does increase your attack speed).

Not when you realise that the bonus damage from crits is additive with other damage bonuses (including the damage bonus from things like "exceptional" weapons), not multiplicative. By the late game, when you're wielding superb weapons and have various talents and abilities that add percentage damage crits become much less important.

You miss the good old days of simple, intuitive AD&D?

Bloody hell, what is it with this thread and unfounded conspiracy theories. A major complaint about combat in PoE was that it was hard to follow what was going on. Characters were lost behind visual effects, the combat log moved at approximately a billion miles per hour and it was next to impossible to determine who was engaging whom. On top of that, a lot of encounters were bloated with trash mobs. In BG2 most dragon fights had no adds at all, in PoE there's only one addless dragon fight. Given all that, the most likely explanation for the reduction is that Obsidian found that it solved, or at least helped, a lot of those problems: with fewer characters there are fewer spell effects flying around, the combat log will move slower, and a single dragon can once again pose a threat by itself. Your theory could, of course, be true, but let's think about it for a moment: everything I ever see from the Obsidian development team is enthusiasm for making RPGs. This could all be a front of course, but I doubt that Obsidian are paying people to coach Josh to hide the fact he hates RPGs, and I hope Obsidian aren't lying when they say a large proportion of their staff play tabletop RPGs. I am sure that, as the release date draws closer, Obsidian will have to make compromises over various aspects of the game to make sure it releases in a reasonable amount of time; but I find it hard to believe that, right now, fairly early on in development, they have gone "oh dear, multiclassing is complicated, oh well let's just put less effort into encounters instead".

Well Lanyon has all but said exactly that. He's criticised changes from the only IE games, waxed lyrical about how amazing BG2 was and used the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" at least once.

Whilst I agree with you anameforobsidian, I do hope that Obsidian will find interesting ways to achieve these distinctions. For example, the Black Jacket Fighter subclass fits your "melee DPS" idea, but it does so in an unusual way. I think it would be a shame if the other Fighter subclass was called, say, a Shieldbearer and simply got extra deflection when using a shield.

Actually, I think for romances to be realistically represented in these sort of games this is an important factor. Perhaps one of the things I dislike about romances in so many CRPGs is that you only have the option of initiating a romance with one of the romancable NPCs, and that so long as you select the right dialogue options they will reciprocate. Meanwhile, in the real world, I've been attracted to lots of people who never felt the same way towards me and vice versa. In fact if a romance system is going to represent real life relationships, at the start of each game a random, hidden roll should be made determining which NPCs can be attracted to the main character, what sort of approach they find attractive and what sort of relationship they are looking for. Your female Watcher fancies Aloth? Too bad, the random roll determined him to be gay this time round. You want a deep committed relationship with Eder? Too bad, he's just looking for something casual.

That complexity is one of the features that makes PoE fun for me. Deadfire doesn't need to be more complicated, but I'd be disappointed if it were less so. You're almost certainly missing several factors, or assuming certain weapon properties work in ways that they don't since they rarely work in the way you'd think they do. For example +20% attack speed doesn't make you attack 20% faster, and +50% crit damage doesn't make your crits do 50% more damage, and there are many more counter intuitive things like that. But the thing is you don't need to know which weapons the most damage. Most the time, early in the game you'll pick a weapon focus so you'll only be using weapons from that group. Then as you find new weapons in that group it will usually be fairly clear whether they're an upgrade, and if it's not clear then it probably won't make much difference anyway so you might as well go with whichever looks nicer. Now perhaps you're the sort of person who absolutely needs to optimise, and know how everything works. If that's the case then I'd recommend heading over the the strategy subforum of the PoE1 forums because, like I said, the way mechanics work in PoE1 are fairly counter intuitive and you're likely never going to work them out yourself without digging around in the source code and doing in game experiments. But if you're not this sort of person then I'd urge you to let go and not worry since it really doesn't matter.

Yep, I think the best one can hope for is that the weakest class combinations are still fun and powerful enough to be able to play on the hardest difficulty, and that the most powerful class combinations aren't ridiculously overpowered in ways that make the game trivial. Perfect balance is impossible to achieve in competitive multiplayer games where the developers have the benefit of a constant revenue stream from microtransactions to keep working on balance, so the idea that it could ever been achieved in a game like Deadfire is wishful thinking.

So don't multiclass in PoE2. Seems simple enough.

If PoE2 is like PoE, your character is never going to really rely on any attribute, so you'll be fine.

I wouldn't want to see the sketches replaced by 3D models. If 3D models are included, it should be as an extra.

I can understand this concern definitely, and I do hope that there'll be an easy base of operations where we can regularly go and have a chat with our companions, including those we don't bring adventuring with us. Of course, we'll still miss out on any banter they might have had whilst travelling with us, but short of having exactly the same number of companions as party slots this will always be something of a problem, and seven companions to four slots is a better ratio than PoE's eleven companions to five slots and a lot better than BG2's 17:5 and BG1's ~a billion:5.

So long as it can be done with relatively little effort by the dev team, I agree with the "why not" sentiment.

The fatigue system was overhauled in one of the later patches. You no longer gain fatigue from travelling or from battles, instead fatigue is one of several injuries a character can pick up when they are knocked out.

As I understand it, per rest abilities are being done away with altogether. They are being replaced by per rest "empower" points, each of which can be used to boost the power of your per encounter powers.

There'll still be the option of not multiclassing or not taking subclasses, so I don't see the problem with the system being complicated and I can say with some confidence that complication will be a feature for a small subset of players.

I think it's safe to say a lot of characters and abilities will need significant reworking, as it's not hard to come up with broken multiclass combinations with the current PoE classes. For example, a Barbarian/Wizard using Citzal's Spirit Lance could, depending on exactly how carnage and the lance interact, result in one shots of big, difficult encounters and/or crash the game.

Well, they've mentioned that they're extending the reputation system from PoE to include companions' opinions of the Watcher and of each other, and that the way they act towards the Watcher, and each other, will vary based on this. Obviously we won't know the true extent of this until we get a more in depth look at it, but it's a step in the right direction to my mind. It always felt odd that a character like Eder didn't bat an eyelid at the Watcher leading a group of prisoners to the deaths in order to gain personal power, and hopefully this new system will change that sort of thing.

Oh that's a shame, I quite like the idea of having something like Sanctifier (vessel slayer) as a Paladin subclass, then being able to choose an order on top of that.

Do we know for certain that a Paladin's order and a Priest's deities will be their subclass? If not, then I actually doubt that's the route Obsidian will go.

I very much doubt that this will be how it works since, as you go on to say, it's kinda broken. At a guess: every character will start with the same base accuracy (20 perhaps) but different classes will get different accuracy bonuses per level (a fighter might get +5 whilst a mage might only get +3 say).

I suspect that if any class gets a summoner subclass it'll be the Chanter, given that they are the main summoner in PoE. That said, I'd definitely like to see a few more summons on classes other than Chanters, but that's because I am fond of summons.