demeisen

If it's any consolation, Tinderbox, I found Hard indeed pretty hard before I picked up Eder, and I wonder if I have a stat inflation bug. I'm running with a wizard PC using the story NPCs, not custom ones. I think the real issue for me is that my L5 Eder has, I dunno, over 100 deflection I think, with his "Defender" skill enabled, in Fine Breastplate, with a +16def shield and a minor ring of deflection. I've heard some talk about a bug making stats too strong... I wonder if I've got that, though I'm not sure how to tell. Anyway, he alone makes most encounters easy for me. I just wade him into the middle of almost anything semi-level appropriate for my group, and I believe I could go AFK and if the fight was still going 10 minutes later, he'd still be around 100%, with his endurance regen making up for what tiny damage he might take. Now the other group members feel better balanced. The Paladin Pallegina feels about right for how I think a tank should be. She can go up against nasty things, but not in the carefree way Eden does. She'll get hit and take damage, which means I have to think about tactics over and above "let Eder tank everything while others plink from range." Of course someone could say, "just take the shield away from Eder and don't use his abilities!", but I don't like that kind of artificial difficulty so much. Now having said all that, there have been exceptions. Like the teleporting shade guys - those encounters feel "hard" to me, because they like to teleport over and beat on the weaker wizard. Takes good tactics and creative use of abilities. Anyway Eder feels so imbalanced that I wonder if I've got the stat inflation bug, because it sounds like it isn't like that for folks like Tinderbox. What did all your Eder chars have for deflection at L5? I just looked: Mine is 111, with the above equipment and Defender mode.

Holy smokes! I believe you but..... on my 6 year old computer (Core7 920 2.6 GHz), from a hard disk (not an SSD), my area loading times are usually around 3 seconds. That's on Ubuntu Linux 14.10, 8 GB RAM, with the GOG version of PoE. I wonder if everybody having really slow load times is running off Steam maybe? Or could be a Windows thing too, Windows is rubbish at disk IO compared to Linux from what I've seen in other games.

That's just about exactly what I think too. Sure, I can find stuff I'd like to see tweaked, but step back a pace or two, and it's the best CRPG I've seen in ages. I can't think of any other CRPG in the last decade that can stand toe to toe with PoE. There have been others I've liked a lot, mind, but they weren't as strong overall with as much potential. On a scale of 100, I give this about a 90 as of release day, with strong potential to move up to 95 over time as they improve it. And 95 is about as good as any game ever gets, for me. There's no perfection.

Trying to be spoiler free here: I just noticed that the town criers will report news from in-game events. My party did, uh, "something", and later on when walking around in one of the big cities, there's a town crier going on about the big news from afar. Caught me off guard, in a good way. It's the sort of little detail that adds a lot of immersion, and could easily have been left out in a lesser game. Nice world they've built.

Agreed with you about the "true con" system. If it's something that simple and perfect, it doesn't feel right. I was thinking more abstract and imperfect. Also agreed that it's not practical for PoE at this point, but maybe for future games on the same engine. I don't like the "reload" option much though, because I like the idea of ironman mode. I'm not playing ironman now on my first play through, but that's largely because I don't have any way to determine if I'm going to get destroyed by something.

Totally agreed. I remember after backing the KS there were some initial estimated release dates, but they slipped a few times. And I was cool with that: I wanted to play of course, but even more than that, I figured, "Take your time and make it something good, rather than rush and cut corners to meet a release date". And they did just that: they knocked it out of the park. So yeah, it's not a perfect game. There bugs and balance things to fix. No game this complex can ever release without issues; it's essentially impossible. But given what they've delivered so far, I'm willing to trust them to release patches when appropriate. I check on GOG every couple of days, and when it's there, it's there.

So, one of the things I absolutely love about PoE is that it doesn't auto-scale monsters, and also (ok, two things I absolutely love...) that you can easily get into places where you're gonna get beat down, so maybe you need to come back later when you're more experienced. I'd almost like to see even more of that dynamic in future games on this engine, like way dangerous places even in the early zones, but maybe there's one thing missing. At least on my first play through, I don't know how tough any of the monsters are. "OK I scouted and found two Spiders of Whatever". Are Spiders of Whatever tough? Dunno. In a way, that's maybe good to a degree, because it adds some sense of risk. But you could also argue it'd be nice to have at least a very rough idea what you're up against. Like in real life, I see an ant and I'm pretty sure I can kick its #(@ if i want. But a tiger can have me for lunch. I can at least sorta know how tough it might be just by eyeballing it. I wouldn't mind an approximation, tied to some in-game survival or similar ability. Or maybe even just in-world hints, like villagers you can talk to who might say, "Sure, the woods east of town are a little dangerous, but you look capable of handling the local wolves. But we sent 5 other guys kinda equipped like you into that cave behind the waterfall last summer, and they never came out. We don't know what's in there, but I'd stay out if I were you." If you come back in 5 levels, they might change their tune to, "You look a lot tougher than the last bunch who went in that cave. Maybe you'll fare better than they did." I'm thinking that'd be a good dynamic combined with ironman mode. What do y'all think? *Edit for typos*

So, a tip: if you get your wizard off to the side of the front line, rather than behind the tank(s), you can often get an oblique FoF off that misses friendlies, but nails quite a few enemies. It's a very powerful spell (won't be hard to convince me it's actually overpowered at low levels), but it requires a little finesse. You can't just lob it around. Well, you can, I guess, but maybe not such a great idea :D.

Agreed; anybody (me included) can find stuff to pick at, plus you'll always have the crowd who thinks RPG means "shooter with stat points". But step back and look at the big picture: this is the best RPG that's come out in a looong time. I'd almost say it revived a dead genre, except that the last year or two have seen a small resurgence, with Wasteland 2 and D:OS (though I believe PoE is better than either of those). So to Azienco: PoE is great, especially if you liked BG. Real similar feel.

Ditto here. I think the overall system is really pretty nice - I hope it succeeds wildly and they make lots of great sequels, because I'm seriously digging this game. Best RPG in years and years! It needs a few tweaks currently, but that's inevitable for a brand new RPG system. Even on launch day it was still great fun. Over time I think they'll adjust things here and there to improve balance. Balance is hard to get right, and "right" is always in the eye of the beholder. My early game suggestions (I'm only L4 so far) would be: make fighters a little easier to hit, maybe nerf the Wizard's L1 CC a little (just less chance to hit, maybe?), and a few others small things. Nothing drastic. Then leave easy and normal alone so the more casual players can still enjoy the game, and give hard a modest monster buff. I can't switch to POD in mid game, so dunno about that, but they could add something between hard and POD you could switch to if hard was too easy. If it really gets much easier past L4, as folks up above have said, maybe that needs improvement. Buff mid level monsters maybe?

I'm playing a wizard as my PC (on Hard), and I'm pretty happy with how they work in POE. I mean I can always nitpick on stuff, sure, but there's a lot more good than bad here. I like the dynamic that you have to use your "big guns" strategically, rather than spam-cast them in every fight. When you're diving deeply into a dungeon, it makes you think a bit. The only thing I'd like better would be if there was a low level of respawns, so you might have to fight your way back out too. I don't feel my wizard lacks for offensive power or CC. He'll go down in 1 or 2 hits (with robes), sure, but he's supposed to be frail. In many small fights, he's got the two per-combat mininukes to use, plus the party friendly wand blast, so he does decent, constant damage. Bigger fights, well, you start busting out the more serious stuff... I like him. I could wish for some more utility spells, maybe. I'd like more of a "it's eaten-by-a-Grue dark and you need a light spell" dynamic + a light spell, for instance. But he's fun to play even as things are now.

I'm playing Hard, L4 so far, and I'd agree Eder is too good at shrugging off essentially all damage that comes his way. You can walk him into the middle of pretty much anything and he's like, "Meh... that's all ya got?" I'm okay with most of the other stock NPCs I have found so far. They can all go down if hit (maybe because I'm running them with medium or light armor). Especially the wizard in robes, who can get one-shotted by a lot of stuff if he isn't careful. Personally, I think fighters should be good tanks, but not invulnerable tanks. It doesn't leave much for the priest to do! I'm mostly happy with the "hard" difficulty, and I do realize balancing is a hard thing, because everybody plays differently, goes through the game in a different order, etc. Still, a couple small tweaks might improve the balance a little.

That's what I was thinking must have happened, too, if only because any given random sampling of a few hundred people from the internet won't write that consistently well. I agree with someone up above: 80%+ of them are well written, and I only saw one minor typo in the dozens I've read so far. I kind of like them. It's an interesting thing to do between bouts of fighting and doing quests. I can't say I'm a fan of the memorials though, which are a bit immersion breaking, so I've learned not to click on those.

GOG for me. There are certain conviences to Steam, no doubt about it. I get why people like it. Personally though, I care a lot about the long term PC gaming picture. I believe it's best for PC gaming that DRM-free models like GOG's succeed financially, and game companies see financial incentives to create and sell games that way. As a computer gamer since the days of paper teletypes in the 70's, I've seen former powerhouse game companies "that would always be here" disappear, activation servers go offline when no longer profitable, forced upates that revoke content, etc. I don't want to see a future where everyone is beholden to a few huge companies like that. Props to Obsidian for allowing DRM free sales on GOG. No matter how good Steam might be, GOG gets my gaming dollars, because that's the model I want to see win out, at least for single player games.

Just wanted say: I'm perhaps 15 hrs into the game (though just L4 - I play slow!), and so far, this is feeling like the best RPG of the last decade. Not that there weren't some others I liked too, but everything just fits so very well together in PoE. Perfect it's not, of course, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to all the games we've had to suffer through in the last decade and a half billing themselves as RPGs when they were really first person shooters. Enormous thanks to Obsidian for making a native Linux version. Very nice, since I haven't owned a Windows machine for a long time now. Wine is okay, but native is vastly better. Also thanks for having GOG as an option. If it had been Steam-only, I would not have backed it on KS, nor bought it in any other way, and that would have sucked, given how good it is. Great stuff. I'll happily buy any other sequels, expansions, or other games you make on the same engine. There are always potential improvements to any system, and I think this could shape up to be the CRPG system for the next half decade or more.