demeisen

I have to agree with the note of thanks to all the developers: artists, programmers, story writers, character creators, musicians, and whoever else. I liked the game a lot on my first play-through just after release. I'm on my second now that WM is out, and it's just a brilliant game with all the balance and other improvements. I don't feel it's an exaggeration to call it the best RPG since BG2. I've been recommending it to every gamer I know. In fact, in certain ways it even surpasses BG2, I think. Is it perfect? Nah. No such thing. But it takes a good honest swing at addressing some of the issues with prior CRPGs, and at the moment I feel this is as good as it gets. Anything else Obsidian does on the PoE engine or any future version thereof, and it's a no-brainer buy for me. I think we're finally out of the "RPG Dark Ages". There's been PoE, and from other studios, WL2, D:OS, LoG2, Avadon, and the upcoming BT4 and Torment:ToN. Just when I was thinking the RPG genre was taking its last breaths, it comes roaring back.

FWIW, I just installed the 3.01 patch from GOG and everything seems fine. (Linux version, new game started just a few days ago, if that matters).

I've had the very same thought. I hope they might do something like that in whatever the follow-on to PoE is. It might be easier to get there while balancing a brand new environment with that in mind from the start. My dream here is another PoE-ish game set in the same universe, with similar lore, etc, starting again with L1 characters, using the PoE engine + all the refinements there have been since V1. Adding some new stuff for the new story and world, and new places to explore, but not "jump the shark" type stuff. Keep it solid, don't throw out all the goodness of PoE1. I've been out of touch with PoE since I finished it after 1st release, so there are probably rumors I'm not up to speed on. Anyway, Obsidian: if you're listening, you have a bunch of guaranteed buyers for more awesomeness where PoE came from. Please, let me throw more money at you

I played through the whole game on release, and am playing again now that White March is out: First play: v1, PC=Wiz, Hard, finished Current play: v3, PC=Wiz, PoD, act 1 so far I'm really liking the feel of the game now. I mean, I liked it the first time too, but more for the story, atmosphere, and awesome artwork than the combat. I'm pleasantly surprised: combat feels nicer now. In V1, it felt very static for most enemy types: enemies would beat on Eder, who was effectively invulnerable, and nothing moved much past the first few seconds of battle. Now, Eder can actually be hurt by stuff, and enemies seem more willing to break engagement and move around, so you have to react in a more dynamic way as the battles progress. It's harder to get away with pure glass cannons now - I find myself wanting some real defence for my casters. It's easy to get wrapped up in debating the minutia of this or that wee little tweak, and I haven't really kept up at that level. But stepping back: I feel it's a superior game now. I'm not cheesing it by trekking back to an inn each fight, but playing in a way it seems to guide you into, and it's really fun. Each fight wears you down some. It rewards scouting: what's in that next room? Can I survive that fight with only 3 spells left in the wizard, 2 for the priest, and half health on the fighter? It also rewards using the minimum spells/consumables you need to win each fight. RPGs are at their best (IMHO) when you can't just start each fight at 100%, spell-spam, and repeat. Even on PoD, you can get quite a ways into each dungeon with 2 camps by careful use of your resources. There's usually enough warning of big boss fights to rest up for those. I haven't gotten to the White March content yet, but looking forward to that. My wish for future expansions is to have them be a little more accessible. I installed WM and it wasn't obvious that it was hooked into the game mid way through. So I either had to find an old save, and remember what was up with my party, or start over. I decided to start over, but I sorta hope future games on this engine are more standalone. Now that the engine is made and a bunch of art assets are created for monsters, I'd gladly shell out for anything else based on the PoE engine.

I backed the game on KS, played it as soon as it released (v1 I guess?), and now I'm back for another play through w/ WM. IMHO, the game is much better balanced and more fun now than it was then. I think the balance changes have been a net positive - it's too bad they couldn't be included in the original game, but I'm sure they had budget and time constraints, and anyway you sort of have to see what happens once the game is exposed to the whole wide world. I'm glad they've made them, anyway. Most of my peeves about the original play dynamics seem fixed now. So kudos to Obsidian for refining this over time. I hope they'll take the engine, and the refinements, and keep building new stuff with it. Other standalone games. I'm down to back whatever else they do on this engine.

I don't know what videos you are looking at, but I consider PoE to be THE best looking computer game I can think of. You probably won't like it. It's not for everybody. If you don't like to read, give it a pass. But graphically, at least speaking about the areas more than the character models, I don't think there's anything nicer looking on the market. Oh, you can find other games with more lens flare. No doubt about that. But more beautiful? I can't think of a single one.

I watched it on eternity.obsidian.net since it isn't up on GOG yet. Very cool - I loved the lobby music recording! I hadn't realized that track was made with random folks pulled from the development team. I hope future installments in the series can be made without burning the dev team out by working them 16 hour days! Now that Obsidian has created its own IP, and isn't beholden to publishers insisting on mass market appeal, hopefully they will find a good balance of delivering more top notch RPGs like PoE while still letting people go home sometimes :D.

BG, NWN, and DA:O are new games, not old ones! The oldest is what, 1998? Anyway, NWN is a really mixed bag to compare, because of add-on modules, some of which were really great. If you ignore that angle and just consider the original game itself, my preference order from best to worst would be: BG2 > POE > NWN > DA:O > DS. If you include the best NWN modules, then swap NWN and POE. You don't have to pause POE if you don't want: there's a slow combat mode where you can try it in real time. On some of the harder fights you might want to though.

I think you're probably right about that, which makes for a conundrum for gaming companies. There's a large contingent of players who want to "feel powerful", and don't care if that makes the game not as challenging. Then there's another contingent, maybe not quite as large but still sizeable, who wants the game to be challenging at the expense of feeling powerful. These are contradictory desires, so you see some folks saying, "Class XYZ isn't powerful enough... here's how to spruce it up!" while others reply, "woah, woah, woah, the game is already way too easy. Making players even more OP will make it much less fun." To some extent, each group can each be catered to via difficulty levels or other such mechanics, but that only goes so far. In a way, these two groups almost want to be playing different kinds of games. It's hard to make them both happy.

Fair enough.. but there were 10's in there too, and it's somewhat down to how important I felt each thing was, no? Also, sometimes the "at its worst" scores didn't happen very often, so weighting matters. Anyway, consider it subjective. I enjoyed the game as a whole more than as the sum of its parts, even though some of those parts had flaws considered by themselves. I liked the way they meshed together. <shrug> *Edit* typos.

Maybe it's useful to temporarily revive the priest who can then revive some other folks in the few moments he's got left :D. But yeah, seems like % based would work out better.

Just finished my first play through. I don't know if the PoE devs ever see these customer reviews, but I hope so; a lot of us are glad you made this. The game has a kind of flawed brilliance, and I'm eagerly hoping this is the foundation for a PoE2 and 3 set in this world. Details: Started on release version (1.0?), finished on 1.0.4.0540, GOG version Hard mode, non-Iron, non-Expert, PC = Wizard class, story NPC companions. One has a feeling that this game was lovingly crafted, and it shows in many ways. Lots of nice little touches I won't belabor. Not everything works as well as it could, but the flaws are shallow ones, not deep ones. This is the most fun I've had in a CRPG for quite some time. I'll mention what I think worked well, and what I think could use improvement. on a 10 point scale, with a range for "at its worst" and "at its best", such as "7-10". So here we go: Art and graphics: 9-10. Incredibly nice work here. It's probably one of if not the most beautiful computer games I've encountered, and it keeps being beautiful from start to finish. It never hits that "DA:O" stage where I felt this area was a carbon copy of the last. Sometimes I found myself wandering around just to get another look at it all. Give your art & gfx programming teams a raise :D. Music: 7-10. At its best, it's wonderful. I was especially fond of some of the melancholy pieces that appear at certain points in the game. My only reason for a 7 on the low end is tha I found one or two songs derivative of the LoTR movie music. Otherwise, it's nice, and fits the mood and tone of the game without drawing so much attention to itself that it breaks immersion. Nicely done. Story: 7-9. I liked the start and the end quite a bit, but felt I lost the plot a little in the middle. I particularly enjoyed the game's ending, especially the philosophical themes explored with a certain female NPC's ghost. Didn't feel shallow like some RPG plots. That part worked at the "9/10" level. Sub-quests: 5-9. A few felt a little generic, but some were great too. E.g, a certain lad starting with a 'D' in O.G. - that story was poignant and well written, and it worked really well even with a simple mechanic behind it. Writing: 8-10. Please don't listen to the folks who've become so accustomed to modern dumbed down games they've forgotten that reading is fun . I thought the writing ranged from very good to brilliant. I didn't find it too verbose, though I did avoid the memorials. Voice acting: 7-10. In particular I really liked the work on Eder, Durance, Iovara, the cut-scene narrator, and some others I've forgotten. A few of the more minor characters (not companions) I thought were weaker, more in the 7 range, but still not "bad" per se. Title cards: 9. I loved these! The line drawings are wonderful, a bit reminiscent of title cards from old silent movies, and I liked the stat choices. Major style points here. Combat: 4-8. This was one of the weaker parts of the game, but I think it has the potential to hang with the best, given some tuning. At its best, there were some really fun, tough, tactical fights (8/10). Still, too many "autoattack" fights (4/10) not requiring thought or tactics, especially in the mid-game where I felt really OP. Also there wasn't much variety: tank + ranged DPS worked most of the time. Regardless, I think there's underlying strength to this system, and it could really shine with more variety, better enemy AI, and maybe more enemy diversity in tactics used, resistances, abilities, and so on. Maybe fights could become a bit less static too: right now they tend to get positionally locked down. Some stickiness is good, of course, to avoid 100% chaos. But a wee bit of chaos is good! Excellent potential and a good underlying system though. Spells: 7: Some good, but I felt like I wanted more variety. Even, say, a basic light spell + dungeons that are totally dark without a spell or a torch. More RP kinds of spells. Health/Endurance/Camping mechanic: 8. I liked this and feel it's a real improvement to BG2 style systems. It isn't perfect, sure, but I did appreciate the attempt to push towards a less "rest-spam" play style, and I went with that flow rather than march back to town every other fight. I'd like to see an even stronger push in this direction in the future, like dungeons you get trapped in combined with an inability to rest anywhere near enemies. I want to wonder not just "will I survive this fight?", but "will I survive to leave this dungeon?" No pre-combat buffing 8: I like this too. Matter of taste of course, but I feel it makes buffing more tactical and less "well of course you cast these 10 spells before each combat..." It'd be even more so with specific resistance buffs, like an anti-fire spell combined with some fireball chucking enemies. Summary: I'm giving this game a solid 9/10 overall, with strong potential to get even better with some enhancements in expansions and sequels. It was really nice to play a good party combat CRPG again - not for nostalgia, but because they're seriously good fun! I hope you'll continue and won't dumb down the experience as certain other franchises have. Us PoE-type buyers may not be as legion as the Call of Duty folks, but we're loyal and will stick with you if you keep turning out high quality stuff like this.

My load times near the end of the game (> 90% completion) are around 3 seconds, on a Core I7 920 (bout 5 years old), Ubuntu Linux 14.10, from hard disk (not an SSD), game version 1.04. Before the latest patch there was some delay on entering the game before I could click the continue button, but they seem to have fixed that, and it's there immediately now. So it's only a few seconds from launching the game to playing, including time to click past the initial logo. Weird that they're so long for some folks and not others.

Are you saying you truly don't have the bug described here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/71809-ui-scaling-blurry-font/ ? Hi Waywocket - I just looked as closely as I can, and maybe I actually do have it. I think maybe I didn't notice at first due to the distance I sit from the monitor. It's always hard to use screenshots to show what it looks like because jpeg artifacting can also make things look fuzzy :-/.

Well, for me it happens when I've stayed up until 4 in the morning playing PoE. Just one more area, and then I'll hit the hay...

I voted 4, but I'd give it 4.5 if I could, with the potential to be a pure 5 for PoE2 with some adjustments to a few things, most specifically combat. But there are solid 5 aspects in PoE1 too. The artwork is brilliant. The writing is mostly great. Much of the music is fantastic. Voice acting ranges from good to great. So there's a really solid foundation here, just needs some adjustments to a few areas. Even with its warts, I can't think of a better RPG that's come out in the last 10 years. Imperfect it surely is, but it still beats anything else that's semi-recent.

No scaling problems here either: 2560x1600 monitor. Text is perfectly crisp and plenty big enough to read. Running the Linux version, not sure if that matters to how text is rendered.

I'd like to see some level of respawn at least in dungeons/caves/etc. Not necessarily because I'd want to do the combat again, per se, but because it makes those places more legitimately dangerous to explore, and thus makes the game more strategic. Right now, there's a "free run" back out, so the sense of danger is greatly diminished. Also if I decide to leave after doing half the dungeon, there's no real reason not to overnuke the last fight. It's not like I'll need the spells for anything after that, so why not? Contrast this with some oldschool games where you had to carefully manage your party's resources, because you were likely to run into a few nasties on your way back out. You'd never just unload everything you had after deciding to leave after the next fight, because you had to survive the trip back to the surface, which might mean encountering some wandering creatures. I don't think it'd need to be a respawn back to the original population, but to, say, 20%. Enough that you'd want to be careful.

No significant problems here either, and I'm maybe 90 play hours in. I've had a few very minor warts, like the resetting of the view position to the lower left corner of maps on map transition, but that (a) isn't game breaking, and (b) has a workaround. Otherwise... it's been rock solid, not a single crash in all those hours. Given the state of many AAA studio games when they ship, I thought they did a great job with PoE. Any piece of software this complex will have issues a few people hit. But I'd say give it a shot, and don't worry about all the people saying, "OMG, my two handed sword of kickassitude had a +4 modifier to awesomeness instead of the +5 it was supposed to have! Didn't they even TEST this game???? I'm never buying another game from this studio!!!" PoE is great. Go play.

Ah. It helps to consider them as first person shooters, which by play mechanics, they essentially are. One character instead of a party, first person perspective, you move around with the mouse and aim at things and press a button to fire. Shooters. Then you don't have to consider them the bane of the RPG genre, of which they are not a member. Helps for me, anyway.

Hmm.... I think I'd have to disagree they've never been hard. Exhibit A: Nethack. My opinion is that the trend over time has been towards making CRPGs easier, more hand-holdy, and requiring less and less thinking. Or consider Bard's Tale - the 1985 original. It's nowhere near as hardcore as Nethack, but you couldn't "save all the time" because there was no way to. You could only save at the Guild, and often surviving to get back there was dicey. Dungeons would trap you inside, with no map, no idea how to get back out, and intentional features to screw up your own mapping like invisible teleporters and rotators. Unlike PoE you couldn't easily turn and run back out if the going got rough. Auto-spawn monsters to block your exit, or you'd be teleported deep into something with no clue where you were. You needed to carefully manage your party over time to survive. (Think: zero camping supplies, not the 2 PoE gives you that people complain isn't enough, plus no way to simply run back to an Inn). Sometimes getting one character back alive was a huge relief. Back to exhibit A: NH. Permadeath only. Die = start entirely over, and dying is really, really, really easy to do. I'd say NH is on the order of a hundred times harder than PoE. I've never completed NH - I've always died, in dozens of tries, but I've no doubt I can do an Iron run PoE. I think I've got a decent shot for my second play through. My second... not still failing after 60+. Modern games have to be soft and hand-holdy, because they are expensive to make and need to sell in mass numbers. And that's probably okay - no reason CRPGs should remain niche. I love modern games like BG2 or PoE every bit as much as the old games, but for different reasons. I do think there has been a reduction in difficulty over time. Witness Oblivion/Skyrim: zero thinking, it shows you where to go with a little arrow, and doesn't let you fail. It's the anti-Nethack, a game that finds great delight in making you fail, badly, and repeatedly.

1. Graphics 2. Multiplayer 3. Amount of reading. Lots of people don't like reading. Interesting - to me, PoE has better graphics than D:OS does. Sure, there's the 3D vs 2.5D aspect, but that's a minor detail. I find there to be much more richness, variety, and sheer artistic beauty in the PoE world. Not that I didn't like D:OS. I did like it, but I don't consider it to quite match up to the calibre of game that PoE is. I do see why D:OS might sell more copies since it's tilted a little more towards mass market tastes, but ... carry that even further, and Candy Crush Saga sells literally hundreds of millions of copies, and I couldn't possibly be any less interested even if it was the only computer game in the entire world.

Well, I'd certainly agree with you that every little fight shouldn't involve repeated party wipe outs and reloading to get through it! But I think there's a happy medium to find, where such fights are well short of full-on boss fights, but still involve a little bit of challenge. Some of what makes the world feel real and dangerous is if going into a foreboding looking cave actually is dangerous and foreboding. Right now, at least on the main plot line, and most of the secondary plots as well, you blow through the fights with such ease that there's no risk for your party, hence no need to play carefully or cautiously. I remember playing CRPGs in the mid 80's where exploring dangerous places really felt dangerous, because in the game's world, it most certainly was! There wasn't the "we'll hold your hand and make sure you can't fail and aren't required to think and can walk back out of any area with no risk at all if you're low on resources" angle that modern gamers expect. That's why I want the ceiling left alone but the floor raised on fight difficulty. I don't need every single fight to be a desperate struggle to survive using everything I've got. I do want to feel genuine nervousness when entering the Temple of We Warned you To Stay The Hell Out. I want to have to scrape together everything I've got - not to beat each separate fight, but to survive to get back out again! I want to get trapped in that temple by the entrance collapsing and I have to carefully manage my party's resources to fight my way to an alternate exit, and I want the game to let me fail if I don't do that well enough. That feeling is mostly missing now in PoE, although they have all the right ingredients for it.

I just did a bunch of those tonight, and I agree, they are a lot of fun! I considered a number of them to be legitimately hard on hard mode, and I had to use careful tactics and wise use of my party's abilities to survive. What I'd really love to play is a Trial of Iron run where "normal" fights were somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 as hard as the harder bounties - e.g, involving some modest risk, with the boss and bounty fights left about as hard as they are now. That would rock. When you find an appropriate level of fight, the combat system is pretty nice. Sure it's not perfect: it could use AI improvements, some changes to how abilities work, some more spell diversity, more difference in resistances between different creatures, etc. But notwithstanding those things, at its best it's still good fun. I believe those are all things that can be tuned for PoE expansions without much trouble.

Completely agreed. I suppose there was ToEE, which had a pretty good CRPG combat system based on D&D rules. But the past aside, I'm hoping PoE turns into a franchise, with improvements coming in the future as they see what works well, and what didn't work as well. Since they aren't beholden to D&D rules, they have the freedom to tune and improve the system as they wish. I'll be plenty happy just to get more games like PoE from Obsidian, as long as they keep trying their best rather than "phoning it in" for future instalments because they focused all their resources on a contracted AAA title. Honestly I enjoy PoE more than any CRPG I can recall in the past 10 years. The big budget games mostly went the dumbed-down route to sell into the mass market to recoup the $100 million development costs. I'm a lot happier with what Obsidian did with $4 million! IMHO they beat the crap out of the AAA titles.