demeisen

​+1. I just added the beta to my pledge (GOG), but it only offers downloads for Windows and OSX, neither of which I can use.​ ​ ​Hopefully we'll see a Linux version soon. Looks nice in the teaser video! ​ ​Edit: typos

[deleted - adding to existing discussion in other forum]

I haven't been following this topic (or even poe2) too closely. I did notice in the last gameplay video there was no split health/stamina , though I hope Obsidian might still come 'round. I'm not arguing it was perfect, or wouldn't benefit from changes, just that it a lot of ways it worked. ​ ​However that decision goes, whether 1 or 2 stats, more than anything I hope there is some form of non-auto-regenerating health system. A whole lot of us don't want a Diablo style game with a HP bar that goes "whooop!" back up after every combat. "Serious" RPGs even back to pen and paper games don't do that, for reasons well described by others in this and similar threads, and I don't see wounds as being a suitable substitute. Maybe an augmenting mechanic, at best. ​ I consider POE1 to be the top dog among RPGs of the last decade or more. The world building and general "feel" Obsidian created is second to nothing in recent times. I'd be really sad if we start seeing aspects simplified down towards action style mechanics. Already I lost interest in Tyranny because of its push towards excessive simplification. Hoping I won't for the POE series... ​ ​

​ ​You don't, because that's up to the player. I played through POE1 and ignored 95% of the camping supplies scattered around, and didn't backtrack to inns. It was more fun not to do those things. But if the game is going to regen everybody's health and spells after each fight, there's nothing the player can easily do about it. ​

​ ​Cough Lagufaeth Cough ​ ​

I thought Durance was well done. ​ ​He was not likable, but not all characters need to be. He made the game more interesting that it'd have been without him along. ​ ​I didn't like him. I liked not liking him. ​ ​

​ ​Perhaps it does, but I prefer those problems to the excessively simplistic world of per-fight regen. And much of what people argue are "problems" are really just things that make you consider beyond the single fight you happen to be having at the moment. ​ ​There's a long tradition in CRPGs of extremely limited resting, going back to BT1 and perhaps even earlier. Once you set foot outside the inn, you weren't going to be resting until you got back in again. You had better think about how to deal with that. Yes, it's less predictable. Yes, it makes you think about things you don't have to worry about in auto-regen games. It becomes less about individual encounters, and more about how you handle yourself when your party is ground down to virtually nothing by the accumulated weight of them, and you are still half a gameplay hour from safety. ​ ​I understand why it's a dying dynamic in CRPGs though. Most players want to nuke enemy group A into ashes, move to the next room, and repeat on group B with a fresh set of health and spells and abilities, until they finish the area, comfortably assured that they'll never start a fight at less than full strength. You're never more than one fight from safety, if the game gives back everything you use each time, Diablo style. You never have to think about how to beat a group efficiently: use whatever you want! Everything will pop right back up again for the next fight. What could be more convenient? ​ Now, it doesn't sound like POE2 is going 100% hard over to that side, but it does sound like it's moving in that direction. It probably makes good business sense for them. For every person like me alienated by it, perhaps they pick up 5 others who prefer auto-regen. ​ ​

Fortunately, Pontius Pirate already appeared in Divinity: Original Sin.

I think we've got to have to some trust in this team, Pillars was a great first effort and these dudes are really smart and knowledgeable about design Agreed. It's a good point. They did do justice to the genre with PoE1. Talking about things that sound troubling though isn't such a bad thing; they do take player opinions into account when designing the game. That of course has to stop short of "design by committee", but still, it matters. I am usually on the minority side for the desired future direction of almost any game I play, so maybe I'm grumpier than I should be . Not many games even do as well as POE1 did, so I'm leery of it wandering back over to mass market dynamics.

Trebuchet.

​ ​ ​ ​You and me both then. Melancholy toast... I think we're in a small minority, hence every game under the sun moving to insta-regen mechanics. ​We're not anybody's target market . ​ ​Much of the fun of RPGs to me, whether P&P or C, is in the journey. If I have a health bar that auto-fills after combat and spells that pop back up after use, it's much too Diablo-esque for my tastes. It's enough to negate any interest I have in a game, and it makes lesser fights irrelevant because I'm just going to recoup everything I used to beat them, so they have no real impact on whether I can survive an area. I'd much prefer going the other way: little to no regeneration of anything, and much more limited access to rest, so you really have to play well to get through a dungeon, instead of overkilling and totally free ability selection + regen + lather + rinse + repeat. The resting part you can do yourself just by not resting, but regen is hard to avoid if the game is doing it automatically and is balanced around it. ​ ​Sometimes I wonder how 1980's CPRGs mechanics would go over today, often having (1) no saving outside a very few areas, (2) no regen of anything outside a few safe places you may not encounter for hours at a time, (3) no protection against getting places you have no prayer of surviving, and (4) random encounters, so you had to fight your way out of whatever you fought you way into. Oh, and no auto-mapping. You could easily fail to get back, and lose hours of play. But... limping back with everybody torn to shreds and making it when you thought you couldn't was exhilarating. That's something I don't get from most recent games, and I miss it. Pillars 1 you could get a little of it by avoiding all the camps and playing a party heavy on per-rest abilities. ​​ ​We'll have to see how they balance things with the empower mechanics I guess. I still backed the game (for 3X what I backed POE1 for), and am happy to toss some $ to a studio doing "real" RPGs with the care that went into Pillars, but what I've been hearing about party sizes, regen mechanics, and removal of the health/stamina split has me kinda down about it. I'll probably still dig the world and love the artwork, so that's something. ​ ​

​​ ​It's a very Ursula K Le Guin sort of name. ​ ​(Which is not a bad thing). ​

I wonder if that would actually be for the better. Often huge budgets are to a project's detriment. You need enough ... but not too much.

​ ​It should really have been a target of 32768. ​

I'm liking the recent open-world info and the new ship goals. $3.75M seems inevitable, which is the goal I most care about of all so far. Maybe there's a good chance at 4.0 too? ​ ​

Seems to me that when PoE1 allowed 6, both camps were happy, because you could play just fine with 5 if you liked that better. ​

That's about how I figured it too. No clue what it is, but hey, $20, more Obsidian RPG stuff. I like the odds.

I don't have a problem with needing to avoid hitting allied NPCs - it makes some sense. It would, however, be nice if they would avoid charging headlong into an existing AOE DOT field. There have been times I've been very careful to avoid hitting them with anything, but then they seem to think it's a good plan to walk into a DOT area, start taking damage, and get angry. ​ ​Oh - editing here to add that sometimes it happens even after a battle is over. I used AOE DOTs because no allied NPCs are there. Last enemy goes down, battle finishes, and some allied NPCs appear and walk over (I didn't know they would), run over into the still-running DOTs, and get mad at me. ​

​​​​ Am I the only one who enjoys killing trash mobs if the gameplay mechanics are designed in a fun way? The way most posters and Obsidian devs talk about trash mobs, you'd think the best option would be to just remove them altogether because of how "unfun" they apparently are to most people. ​You're not the only one, no. I enjoy most of the fights, but I want to feel like they matter in some way. I'm not overly attached to Vancian as such, so I won't argue strongly for it, but I am attached to some form of longer term resource management that is significant. It gives value to the trash fights, because each one costs me in some way, and is a part of wearing my party down as they journey through an area. The point isn't to survive the trash encounter - I know damned well I'm going to win - the point is to survive the whole dungeon full of trash encounters... plus the non-trash ones. The trash encounters are much less fun if they have no risk or cost of any sort. ​ ​Some old CRPGs circa 1980's were tuned such that there was no regen of any sort outside a few safe places to sleep. That provided a palpable sense of being on a journey. At the end of a long trip into a dungeon, those weak little creatures you could normally beat without thinking twice were legitimately dangerous to your ground-down battle-weary, exhausted party. You didn't meet every encounter fresh as a daisy, and it meant you needed to actually think about how to best handle the easy fights, because each and every one was part of that grinding-down process. It was about having a journey, not having a bunch of mostly-disconnected little encounters. ​ ​PoE1 was tuned to be very easy outside of boss fights, which means you could beat any encounter with nothing more than per-encounter resources - at least after the early game. One saving grace was the split health/stamina system, which was a good idea. Still, I'd really like to see PoE2 go further in the direction of longer term resource management, whatever the mechanism behind it. I feel the lack of it really cheapens games, and that cheapening has become almost inescapable in modern games where everybody wants their hands held. You never have to think much beyond the single fight you're currently in, which you will always meet at or near full strength. You never have to worry about being backed into a corner, because everything you had in the last fight will be there in the next one too. A whole dimension of gameplay gets eviscerated. Now, that dimension can and often is done poorly, but I feel the right answer is to improve it, not to eliminate it. ​

Does it ever not? I've never seen consolification do anything good to RPGs.

Yeah, that's the thing. At the end of the day there's a fixed pool of resources, and the Pillars1 team wasn't very large to begin with. (I'm rather impressed at what they pulled off with a few dozens - PoE1 was a lot of game for a mid/small team to crank out). They have to consider how to spend those developer resources, given the talents of different people. While I wouldn't mind seeing "better gore" either, I can think of plenty of things I'd rather those developer resources went into.

​I noticed the most recent update email was phrased like so: ​ ​ ​The word "current" seems deliberate. Maybe I'm reading more into it than is really meant - my own wishful thinking - but it gives me a tiny, dimly flickering yet tantalizing glimmer of hope that this is not yet cast in stone. ​ ​

PoE is one of the few games that more or less got crafting right... or at least, not completely wrong. ​

Here's hoping they keep it, maybe with some tweaks or changes. The essence of it is a decent idea, and it even makes some rough sense if you imagine it as "adrenaline fueled burst energy" vs "longer term stamina". ​ ​

​ ​ ​Who knows how representative the poll results are, but I'm not so sure you're in a minority at all. There's an awful lot of preference for 6 member parties out there. ​