demeisen

​I recall my first grue encounter, circa 1980. I thought, "Grue? How bad can that be?" -> "go up." Turns out, pretty bad . ​ PoE2 should have an easter egg. If you explore a pitch black dungeon with a light source, all is well. If your light goes out for more than say 60 seconds, a grue shows up and eats your whole party... no matter how badass you believed, just moments ago, that you were. ​

I forgot to mention this before... this tactic doesn't help solo players, but for cases where just one or two of your party has been charmed, Grieving Mother can provide another counter-charm option. ​ ​Monsters: "That Eder chap? He's with us now." ​GM: "Not any more." ​ ​

Thanks - I'll chalk this up to a learning experience and remember for my next play through. I haven't had much luck using CC to prevent being charmed. Trouble is, on PoD enemies have a lot of endurance, they come in big packs, and it takes a while to kill them off. If there are many in the pack who can charm, it's difficult to have absolutely zero holes in my CC coverage to prevent one of them from firing off a charm or dominate. Also, some monsters are resistant to many types of CC. I've had better luck with Durance's anti-Treachery spell.

Thanks PugPug - I own it! ​

What's the prevailing opinion on building up those resistances? ​ ​In my first play through (V1, Hard) I remember those effects being a PITA, so for my second run (V3.01, PoD) I built up party resistances as much as I could. The whole party has taken the resistance feats, several have resist gear (e.g, Hand and Key = +15/+20, Tempered Helm = +25), and I have Kana chant the song that gives +20. But even with all of that, it seems like if I'm fighting anything that uses charm or dominated, it hits every time, period, and damn the resistances. ​ I end up using that Durance spell that gives your party immunity to charm/confused/dominated effects, and that works. But if I had to use that spell, I might as well not have taken the talents, used the chanter song, and equipped the resist gear. All that could be put to better use. ​ ​Have y'all found that these particular resistances matter much? ​ ​

​ Nice post Dewos. ​ ​Feeding into your note about everyone's experience being different: you note "hard early", but for me the difficulty started low and ramped up once I got to WM1. I'm going to guess this is partially down to the order in which each player tackles various zones; you can be under or over leveled, making it seem harder or easier than someone else's experience in the same place. On PoD with story NPCs I steamrolled the early game, but when I got to WM1 I found the fights much more challenging. I think I got to WM1 with a party of level 7 characters, and I was just barely able to do the first area. (Which is how I like things - challenge makes it fun!) I started WM2 around level 11 or 12 I think, with level scaling enabled, and there is challenge there too. ​ ​Anyway, agreed with you that PoD is a good level for much of the game. My first play in 2015 (pre-WM) was on Hard, and in hindsight I really wish I had picked PoD. As you say, hard makes the combat too easy outside of the difficulty spikes of boss fights. ​ ​Agreed about there being more money than you could dream of using. I don't even buy equipment from vendors since I find large amounts of high end (unique) equipment as I explore. I almost wish the game balance was tilted more towards high end equipment being rare, so it feels a bit special when you find it rather than "yawn... yet another unique item to add to my growing stack over in the corner". ​ ​

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The power of this 4 teraflop 128 SIMD core 8GB graphics card is insignificant compared to the power of language and your imagination." -- Darth Vader Speaking as someone who was playing computer games before computer graphics existed, when games printed text to paper, I do not buy into your equivalence between "game" and "visual medium". I love the PoE graphics as much as anyone, and it is a hugely important part of the game's experience. I am frequently in awe of how beautiful it looks, and it makes exploration of Eora a joy. Still, language gives game designers an expressive avenue to your imagination, which is more powerful than any graphics card could ever be. The beautiful artwork and the words, together, are richer than either one alone.

​I quickly learned to skip the grave markers, which I find to be immersion breaking. ​ There is very nice writing in PoE, and perhaps some that could be tightened up a bit. What I ​really don't want to see, though, is one of the few game franchises that doesn't pander to the attention-deficit crowd being dumbed down for people who find it onerous to read a paragraph of text. There are thousands upon thousands of games that demand little more than a gnat like literary attention span, delivering what little text they almost apologetically contain in small chunks digestible by the average grade school child. Please let those of us who enjoy rich textual descriptions and complex dialog have the paltry few games we still have left that haven't chased the ADHD demographic. ​ tl;dr = words good. ​ ​

​ ​ ​I believe you, but it's much longer than what I see on a slightly lower end system. No SSD, half the RAM, no RAID, similar CPU, and the longest load times I saw in late game were maybe half that on Ubuntu 15.10. ​ ​Anyway, does a few extra seconds really matter that much? I typically load the game once and then play for at least an hour, sometimes 2. The zone-to-zone loads seem pretty fast, just a few seconds, and then typically I explore the same zone for quite a while. 30-40 min seems typical. There's a few seconds of more frequent delays when popping about cities going in and out of buildings talking to people, but the buildings are smallish and those areas load quickly, usually from disk cache. ​ ​Maybe it's from having grown up with games loaded from 300 baud cassette which could take many minutes, and fail to load entirely one time in three because you set the volume wrong and over or under-loaded the A/D converter's sweet spot, but 5 seconds vs 15 seconds... meh. Luxury. ​

A lot of it probably has to do with how much you end up going to places you are under-leveled for. That can make it far more difficult. Some games are more inclined to sort of steer you into a path where you are always appropriately leveled. Others leave it a more open, but if you start getting rocked in location A, you can go to location B for a while, come back when your group has gained a level or two, and have another go. That can make a big difference to the perceived difficulty of the game, especially in early and middle levels where an extra level is a pretty big deal.

If you have the GOG edition, there's a link in your profile to download an mp4 file, 1.6 GB when I fetched it a while back. You can watch it with friends on any device you want.

Nod - that was roughly my experience too. It does get lot better on PoD, especially if you play along with the resting dynamic it guides you into. E.g, try to explore whole dungeons with just the 2 camps, so you end up fighting many groups in a row without resting. It becomes more about managing your total party resources to get as far as you can before resting. Fights are still quite doable, but it becomes more important to engage the weakness of the enemies you are fighting. E.g, are they unusually resistant to slash damage, but weak to acid? Etc. On Hard, you can sorta ignore all that and just stomp everything without any real consideration. Which you can sorta do on PoD too, but it'll make you less efficient, and thus you won't handle as many fights before needing to rest.

Interesting - first I'd heard of Tyranny. Here's another link about it on kotaku with a little more verbiage. I don't usually play evil chars, but it could be a fun change of pace. The level artwork in the proto-screenshots looks as yummy as PoE. I'll allow it . Well, provided they don't forget about PoE 2, 3, 4, and 5, which are going to be required.

I'm on my second run through now, on 3.01 + both expansions. I haven't run into anything very troublesome. No crashes, no major problems. The only bugs I've noticed I would qualify as "minor". Of course there is quite a lot to this game, and nobody sees everything, uses every item, exercises every dialog option, and so on, so experiences will vary from person to person. (Not to mention there's always a few folks who will call the game totally broken and unplayable if their Sword of Smiting Groundhogs +4 only has +3 to its Induce Indigestion in Wombats Aura rather than the +4 it's supposed to have). Point is, I'm sure there are things wrong still, but if you let yourself get into the experience, I believe you will be able to enjoy the game. It's a lot of fun! ​ ​One tip I wish I had known: on my first run I played on Hard, and really wished I had picked PoD. I'm playing PoD for my second (no minmaxing, using story NPCs, so not powergaming it in the slightest), and it's far more fun than Hard was. I recommend it if you want fun combat. The names of the difficulty levels over-state the case by about one level, IMHO: normal is easy, hard is normal, PoD is hard, etc, so select according to your preferences with that in mind. ​ Whatever you do, have fun! It's one of the best RPGs in ages, with amazing art wherever you look. ​ ​

In CRPGs of decades past, it was a common for there to be pitch black dungeon areas, where sans light you could not travel without being eaten by a grue. The idea of needing a light source to explore certain areas seems to have fallen by the wayside. Many argue that it's a useless mechanic: you get a light source or spell, and there you go. It "adds nothing", in a sense. Others argue that it does: there's a sense of foreboding and danger from diving into pitch black dungeons where the only light comes from your flickering torch that barely illuminates a few paces in front of you, wondering what dangers the shadows ahead may be hiding. It can make dungeons feel truly "lost", as if you're the first to discover them in eons. I don't remember any places in PoE1 that were dark - just dim. In many cases it doesn't make sense, such as a dungeon area in active use by humans, who would presumably illuminate it. Sometimes it might, such as one inhabited only by spirits and the undead. The underlying mechanic seems to exist: night and day have different illuminations, and light sources from spell and fire effects appear to be handled dynamically. What do you think? Would you like PoE2 to have underground areas with absolute darkness?

The wizard's grimoire appears to be carried by the wizard at all times, but is zero handed, so perhaps this balances out the wand...

Must be quite a different local culture... where I live there's little stigma around gaming like there was in the 1970-80's. You find all types from children to grandmothers, hardcore athletes to basement dwelling ah-the-light-it-burns-us types, dirt poor to millionaires. It seems roughly on par with saying, "I like movies". Anyway, some rural communities here in the states get a community project together to set up point to point wireless to under-networked areas. Normally 802.11 is short range because it's omni-directional, but if you get a highly directional antenna, a low power link can get you 8 to 10 km per hop. They split the bandwidth among local houses. It's not as good as fiber or coax say, and isn't a short term fix for you to d/l PoE... but it beats the hell out of smoke signals or RFC 1149 style IP over carrier pigeon.

A cool thing I discovered the other day (related to the WM music, but not about the compositions as such):

It is unfortunate for those without fast connections, but yeah, most games these days are digitally distributed through the likes of GOG or Steam. Is there any chance you could physically travel to a friend's place and borrow a faster connection for a bit? I'm not sure how Steam would work in that regard, but if you get it from GOG you can download the installer as a "plain old file", drop it on a USB stick or laptop's disk or whatever is easiest, and then install it when you get back home. No connection is ever needed after the initial download.

I played through the area in WM1 last night. Nice work there too: I like the tribal / drum ambiance it has got going. Is it all acoustic recording?

​​ ​ ​Certainly true - the AAA studios can get up into the low hundreds of people on a single game, and their budgets can match or exceed that of a major Hollywood blockbuster movie. Funnily enough though, I can't remember the last AAA-studio game I was really enthused about. They're all very impressive in the way blockbuster movies are impressive, and they're fun in the way mindless Hollywood explosion-fests are fun, but somehow they also manage to be ... bland and a bit unsatisfying. They too often feel soulless. (​I won't say there are no counterexamples in either direction, mind). All the games that have garnered my interest in recent years have been from small teams (1-2 people) up through mid sized (dozens). I'd wager this is partly because the AAA budget games are ​so mind bogglingly expensive to make that they can't afford to take chances or make any design decisions that might alienate any of their potential audience. If a publisher is shelling out hundreds of millions of US$ to make a game, they're gonna demand that you Hollywood the $#@! out of the thing. ​ ​And that, in turn, is why I'm keen to see Obsidian continue developing the IP that they own in-house now. They don't have to answer to anybody but themselves. That alone does not guarantee good results, but it seems like an important ingredient. Surely PoE1 is an auspicious start. ​

If it was indeed so few (even aside from peripheral contributors like voice actors and so on), it really is an impressive feat. There is a large amount of high quality artistic content in POE1. I'm impressed that could be done even if all 20 of those people had been artists, never mind that some must have been programmers, testers, writers, musicians, etc. Hopefully everyone involved didn't get totally burnt out, which can happen if projects are so intense that they demand very long hours over extended periods.

Quite often the game does give you some in-game hints about difficult upcoming battles. Sometimes it's in the dialog with NPCs, and sometimes in environmental cues. They are there to pick up on if you look. Also, upon detecting the first monster in a pack, you can often send a high-stealth character around to scout out the whole situation to know what you're getting into, if you suspect it might turn nasty. I hope this isn't my memory going bad, but I think they might have made the food and drug effects stronger than they were in the V1 game. I use them now for hard fights. You can get +2 food easily enough, often with a +10 endurance bonus. The +2 stat bonuses seem to stack with each other, so you can munch on both beefloaf anf pearlwood chicken, say. And they also stack with items giving +stat bonuses. I use the food because I play similar to the OP: non-minmaxed, using the story NPCs, on PoD. Most of the content is easy even on PoD, but sometimes there are some rough, barely-scrape-by battles, and every little bit helps. I haven't tried enchanting yet, but probably will.

It's kind of unimaginable that they would not do a PoE2. They might have to contend with legions of PoE1 players descending on their doorstep with pitchforks in hand, demanding to give them another Kickstarter's worth of seed money in exchange for a sequel. Much easier for all concerned to take our money voluntarily. But seriously, I think a key aspect of PoE was it being their own IP. They're not beholden to publishers or 3rd parties: they control it and can chose where it goes, not to mention it's always more satisfying to work on something you own in the end. Not a lot of game studios end up in that sort of position. It's hard to imagine them not taking advantage of it to build the franchise further, given the apparent success of the first one. Plus, it avoids the whole unpleasantness with money-bearing pitchfork-wielding hoards.

Cool, thanks Teioh_White. That's exactly the kind of info I was after: which one will be best later in the game. I did finish the game after PoE launched, but that was a while ago so I forgot a lot since then, not to mention on Hard (vs PoD now). Thanks! Slicken it will be.