demeisen

So much this. To me, a core element of the RPG experience is lost when that "grind you down" dynamic is severely weakened. A key emotional impact was the sense of being on a journey, where everything you do comes at a cost... a sense which is destroyed by auto-refilling health bars, per-encounter things, and limitless resources. The best 1980's CRPGs did it well. They were not about surviving a single fight, but about surviving a whole dungeon. Even the easy fights took their toll, and were part of that grinding down process. You wanted to play them well even when winning was not in doubt, so that you could survive the rest of the dungeon, because the game wasn't going to hold your hand and make sure you did. POE1 had an echo of that dynamic still, but I worry POE2 will lose it almost entirely. (If I didn't love the series and believe Obsidian does the best world-building of any studio out there, I'd be less sad about it...) But clearly it's a passionate topic for people on both sides of that debate . The only "solution" I see is a game mode checkbox for whether you want "combat grinds my party down" or "please refresh them after each fight"... which implies more testing and balancing, which might be more than Obsidian wants to pay for. I suspect it's not as easy as a permadeath checkbox.

Of course it's one of the best combat encounters in the whole game, the combat system finally makes sense then. That's the whole point of limited resources and that's what I'm talking about. People like Katarack will always bitch about any kind of challenge and try to demagogue their way out of it with empty and manipulative phrases like "it doesn't give meaningful choice!" ... instead of rising up to conquer said challenge, Admittedly I haven't read every single post, so might be missing some subtleties, but... I sort of feel like I agree with both you and Katarack21, at once. I didn't interpret Katarack21's main complaint as being about the absolute difficulty, but more about the granularity of the injury system. (Apologies if not the case - there's a lot of posters, and I might have things mixed up). I agree with what I think he's arguing: I'm not a fan of it either, in present form. On the other hand, I also agree with you that RPGs are more fun if you have to contend with limited resources, no auto-regen, and meaningful challenge, and we have the difficulty slider for a reason. Those concepts don't seem mutually exclusive to me. :shrug: Maybe I missed something

​ ​Only one way, except for the other way, which is to have real rest limits. POE1 didn't: you could effectively rest as much as you wanted, either by backtracking to an inn, or even on PotD there were more camp supplies than you could use anyway. In effect there was no limit. ​ ​If there would be a real limit, then there can be no rest spamming, per-rest spells can be powerful but balanced by not having very many, and having to consider when to use them. There's still plenty for casters to do even when not using those spells. POE1 had some ability to turn low level spells into per-encounter. ​ Or, as LampStaple suggested, have two subclasses. Weak spells & per encounter, and strong spells & per rest. Then you can pick what suits your style. ​

​​ ​After (sadly) discovering the POE2 beta won't be available for my OS, I sat down to listen to the POE1 standalone soundtrack instead, which came along with my POE2 backer kit stuff. ​ ​It's an interesting experience, and I recommend it if you enjoy music. Of course I had heard all the tracks before as part of the game itself, but that has a very different sense to it, because you are hearing them behind combat sound effects, voice acting, environmental sounds, and so on. In the soundtrack they stand alone, but retain their familiarity from the game and evoke some of the sensations of the areas you heard them in. I started out doing this on my gaming rig with little bookshelf speakers, but the music was nice enough that I moved the collection over to my HTPC which has higher end speakers. ​ ​There's some good stuff in there. I was particularly fond of "07 Skean", "08 Oldsong", "17 Twin Elms", and a bunch of the Durgan's Battery related tracks.​ ​ ​Definitely was worth the extra pledge $ I added to snag the soundtrack. ​

​ ​But the point I'm making isn't about how many spells you know, it's about the combinatorics. In POE1, I can select the combinations in interesting and novel ways according to the expected threat and the tactics I want to meet it with. In POE2, you (mostly) cannot, since you cannot edit the grimoires, nor learn spells from them. The combinations are static, which removes an entire strategic dimension. That's the problem: I'm now restricted to a small set of combinations the game decides I should be using, as dictated by the grimoires it supplies to me, plus a small selection I can learn at level up which is likely to overlap with the grimoires anyway. ​ ​I don't think they're comparable situations at all. And if they ARE comparable, then there's no reason to have this restriction, so might as well let people edit the grimoires. I think that'd work well as a low level character ability. ​

​​ Traditionally (not POE1 per se), with per-rest systems and truly limited resting, wizards/druids/etc are limited in how many times they can cast spells. A fighter can swing his sword 1000 times over the day, and is free to switch at any time to any kind of weapon as is best for each foe. A wizard gets maybe 1-6 casts between rests per character level from a small subset of the whole catalog she had to select in advance, and cannot change until the next time she can rest. Thus, they have to act in a measured way. If they blow through everything on a weak initial foe, they're left useless for the rest of the dungeon. ​ ​This is why there should be meaningful rest limitations, and spells should be per rest, not per encounter. This, however, required gamers to adopt a longer term mindset and consider a larger scope than a single fight. Instead of doing just enough to tilt the balance of the fight in your favor - and that might sometimes be "nothing at all" - people wanted to blow through the whole spell inventory each fight to "feel powerful", and game designers catered to that crowd with unlimited resting.​ ​I'd prefer to see a return to longer term planning as an option. Clearly many people don't want it, but many also do. ​

That's in a sense how Stalwart Village worked at the start of WM1. You were thrust into a combat situation, quickly discovered you couldn't rest, and would need to defeat multiple groups with what you brought with you. That also IMO made it one of the most fun combat situations in the entire game, especially if you got there at an early level. There was an initial sense of panic: "ruh roh...", and then planning out how best to scramble to survive. I remember finishing several characters barely alive, and finding creative uses for lesser known spells I typically never thought about. It was brilliant game design. It's also lost, the more and more auto-regen there is. I'd love to see more of that "slam the door" dynamic, but realistically, most gamers don't like or want it, which is why games are moving away from it. It's down to different preferences: many people prefer effectively unlimited resources. I believe a reasonable solution is to provide both styles, keyed on either difficulty level, or an orthogonal new-game-screen switch. Then you and I can have our "lock us in the dungeon with no spell or health regeneration, slam the door, and wish us luck..." mode, and people who hate that can have their style of fun too. Unfortunately, it's more testing and balancing burden for the game developers, in an already niche genre.

I think I'd agree if you could edit the contents of the grimoires in POE2. Could be I'm missing something important, but I thought that in POE1 I could pick any combination of spells to have at the ready (since I can learn them from grimoires, and also edit grimoires), whereas in 2, since you can't edit grimoires and can't learn spells from them either, you have a lot less flexibility over which to have ready simultaneously. E.g, say there are spells A through Z. In POE1 I could have literally any combination (within the max number to have at once). In 2, I can only have the ones I've learned at level up, plus the fixed set from the grimoires. Maybe I find a grimoire with [AGMX] and another with [bCFQ], but what i really want at the moment is [AGFQ]. I can't get that no matter how I swap around the grimoires, if I didn't pick those at level up. No? Certainly I'd love to be wrong...

​ ​I see the point you're making, and I more or less agree with it. There isn't enough granularity, so there isn't a great deal of real choice involved. ​ ​Personally I'm in favor of a finer grained system, so there would be more meaningful choice. In fact, perhaps it could be a number, and they could call it something like... I dunno... maybe "health", and have it restored only by resting. There could be another one called something like... just making stuff up here - "endurance", which regenerated and could be healed by spells and potions, and damage to endurance would also hurt the long term health pool. Then injuries could hurt your stats for a while until they were healed. ​ ​Then they could have significant limitations on rest so the game didn't turn into "fight + rest + fight + rest", and you were incentivized to keep going. ​ ​Something like that. ​

That's not the point. You are restricted to the mix of spells in the grimoires you find, plus the static set you learned at level up which is likely to overlap somewhat. You cannot select the specific spells you want. It is vanishingly unlikely there will be a grimoire having the set of spells I want to use. Just because you can switch grimoires, it does not alleviate that problem. This is much more restrictive than POE1, and for no good reason. It was not broken before, and does not need to be fixed.

​​ You don't have static spells. A wizard still has more flexibility in choosing and changing their spells throughout the game and even in the middle of combat by switching Grimoires. ​But you can't select what's in the grimoire, so you can't select your own spell loadout - only pick from what's given to you. Maybe it should better be called "semi-static", but anyway, it removes a key tactical dynamic of the class, which was being able to select my own spell set according to what I expected to encounter, and the tactics I wished to use. Of all the grimoires I found in POE1, there was never one which was set up anything close to what I wanted, even if coupled with a small pool known by the character (and you don't really know without meta-gaming which you should best learn, since you don't know what will be in grimoires you encounter). ​ ​I don't think it's a good change. ​ ​Edit - hah, zeee just pipped me in saying the same thing

​ ​This something I really hope is addressed by the final version. Tuning spell loadouts to best fit the expected upcoming combats is a key element of wizard strategy. Removing it negates a major strategic dimension of the class: now I have to play how the game decided I should, rather than invent my own ideas based on my party's abilities and how I plan for combat to unfold. ​ ​I wouldn't mind, though, if the ability to do so was a learnable skill, but not too late in the game, or it wouldn't matter for much of the game's content. ​

​I haven't been able to compare difficulty between the beta and POE1, but I feel strongly that POE1 needed a boost to the upper tier difficulties. In the whole second half of the game, PotD was quite easy, which meant the game didn't have as much replayability as I'd like. So independent of how injury / rest / etc systems will work, I really hope they make PotD legitimately difficult this time around. I hope that PotD will be too hard for me to handle in my first play. If it's not, then my second play is going to be unchallenging. As Christliar said above, players should be aware there are multiple difficulty settings, and if the game seems too hard, you can lower it. ​ ​That's not to take away from all the good points around specific systems and balancing. ​

​ I think that's what falls out of the move away from long term resources in CRPGs. Once you add more and more ability auto-regen after every fight, smaller fights stop mattering, because they have no lasting cost to your party. They aren't even interesting fights any more, because you can unload your ability inventory in a blaze of overkill (a problem POE1 had to some extent, especially later in the game). That leads game designers towards removing smaller fights entirely, because they don't matter any more, and aren't fun. ​ ​Contrast with long term dynamics, where you have to think carefully about how to handle small fights efficiently, and a series of small fights has a major impact on whether you make it out of a dungeon alive, because nothing is given back to you. That however implies it's possible to become backed into a resource starvation corner, if you were too inefficient. Most players seem to prefer the more short term style, so I understand why Ob and other studios are backing away from the alternatives. I suspect it is the best choice from a business perspective. I don't like it at all though :sad:. ​

​ ​I feel ya - I didn't see the limits either when I ordered the beta (on Linux here). FYI, one of the Obsidian reps offered a refund for the beta cost to people who can't run it, although I'm personally inclined to chalk it up as it a donation to support one the best CRPG series in decades, given how absurdly awesome POE1+WM was. ​ ​(Really hoping they'll rethink a couple of the POE2 changes though...) ​

​Unfortunately my ability to comment about balance is limited since the beta is Windows-only on the PC, but from watching other people play my first impressions are: ​ ​Good: ​ ​+ Generally a positive impression of the character creation and leveling related UI changes. The skill trees are easier to visually understand, etc. It seems a bit nicer. ​ ​+ Even without the final lighting effects, the art direction is, like POE1, very nice. Looking forward to exploring more of this world. I like the more "alive" feel, e.g, boats bobbing around on water, etc. ​ ​+ The environmental effects are nice. I'd like it if they had some minor in-game impact, such as rain lowering detection distances (since you can't see as far) and raising stealth (since it's harder to hear things approaching). ​ ​+ I like the overworld map and more open-world feel. I hope it'll be possible to go places you aren't prepared for, with appropriate in-game hints to that effect. Let me explore, and it's up to me to tackle things I can handle.​ ​ ​+ Writing seems good, but might be hard to tell from the beta. I like dialog and reading, but there were some excessive lore-dumps in POE1 here and there. ​ ​Bad: ​ ​- Not happy about many of the changes to the spell casting system. Discussions abound in other threads. ​ ​- Not too happy with the injury system as a replacement for a long duration health stat. ​ ​

​ Nod - that's certainly better than nothing, but still means you can't easily select a custom spell loadout to make your own interesting tactical combinations. You're restricted to what the game gives you, plus the most essential things you learn at level up. ​

I generally hold with that sentiment as well. PoE1 was a fundamentally good, if slightly flawed system. It's not radically broken, so doesn't need to be radically fixed. IMHO it would be better served with more minor alterations to its core.

​​ ​Hmm, that's unfortunate. It'll remove a lot of flexibility and tactical variety for mixing and matching to create interesting spell combinations, especially since grimoires are not changeable. One of the interesting things about casters was always the variety. ​ ​Not a fan of that choice. ​

​​ ​ ​Yes, agreed, but therein lied the problem: resting was far too easy to come by, and effectively unlimited. I don't want to see the baby thrown out with the bathwater. ​ ​The answer is to have meaningful rest limitations, coupled with per-rest abilities, so that small fights become meaningful, require thought around how many resources to expend to beat them in the most efficient manner, and there are long term considerations. Yep, that means I can get in over my head, and it means I have to push myself to continue when my group has been ground down to the bone, exhausted, running on sheer grit and a single wizard CC plus two remaining cleric buffs, lest I fail entirely because I couldn't make it to the next place to rest. But that's how I want it. It want it to be punishing and brutal for my party, not hold its hand and give it everything back after each fight so everything is carefully curated to ensure my success. If the game is designed so that I cannot fail, it also denies me the satisfaction of succeeding. ​ ​I realize that dynamic is out of vogue, which is why I argue for a new-game checkbox to switch off automatic spell and health regen. Then the people who want regeneration after each fight can have it, and those of us who want a punishing game of frantic clawing for survival deep in a crypt of undead things can have it too. ​

​Agreed with thread originator. I feel a core differentiation of caster class gameplay mechanics is being sacrificed and replaced with a dynamic too similar to other classes. ​ Casters should be "limited, but powerful". They usually have a few weak abilities they can use a lot, and some powerful ones which are very use-limited and need to be used carefully. ​ ​There's a real risk here of losing important class diversity. ​

That's what I mean, yes - sorry for the ambiguity. I meant no out-of-fight Diablo-style instant regen after fights. Explicit in-fight healing such as via cleric spells, paladin lay-on-hands, chanters, etc, are fine. ​ ​Editing to add: the checkbox should also make wiz/cleric/etc spells per rest, rather than per-encounter. The point is to bring back long term resource considerations.

I'd like to argue make an impassioned plea for a new-game screen checkbox. ​ ​My preferences in order from best to worst: ​ ​1. A POE1-like split with one regenerating and one non-generating resource. ​2. A single health resource which does not regenerate. .​.. insert every other possible system here which isn't... ​n. Auto-regeneration of health (and most abilities) after fights. ​ A key aspect of the RPG experience since pen and paper D&D in the 70's is managing your party over the course of a whole dungeon delve. It was supposed to feel like a journey. ​ ​POE1 is at the top of the CRPG pack for me because it improved UI quality of life, without over-simplifying game dynamics to chase mass market appeal. My plea to Obsidian is: I can live with an un-split pool, but please at least give us an option to disable auto-regen, akin to how POE1 has a permadeath checkbox? There are many of us for who "action RPG" style regeneration ruins RPGs. I love Obsidian and POE1 to death - it's seriously about the best imagined CRPG world there's been - but insta-regen drives a nail in the series coffin for some of us. ​ Please allow us a checkbox in the new-game screen? If we grovel, would it help? Or get Josh Pan-Galactic-Gargle-Blaster level drunk, and then grovel? ​

​ ​​ ​Thanks for the update, Sking. One suggestion: I think the language above might be part of the confusion. Linux is a PC operating system (as opposed to say for game consoles or what have you), and runs on the same PC hardware Windows does. I might have read "supported on PC" in the past, and knowing that the POE1 release supported Linux, assumed that the POE2 beta would as well. ​ ​I'd suggest something more like, "... Beta supported on Windows only, available on Steam and GOG..." That removes the ambiguity about which PC OS's are supported. ​ ​Anyway, I'll probably leave my pledge alone, just so I can chime in on the discussion after watching youtube videos or whatever about the beta. Also, I'm willing to toss some extra $ to Ob for making more games in the POE universe. Still... grumble. ​

​Here's hoping this one will be . I'd not have sprung for it if I wouldn't be able to run it. (Already backed PoE2 at, in the words of another player, "an irresponsible level", so I was stretching a little to provide early input). ​ ​OTOH, I didn't see the backer portal mention any platform limitations when I ordered the beta, so I'm keeping my hopes up for the moment. Maybe Obsidian will chime in and let us know either way. ​