demeisen

Empower? And that. I'd have to see how it plays, but on the surface it does sound like a significant watering-down of the idea of long term resource management. I even understand why they'd do that. Gaming tastes have changed over the decades, and while there are some who still want that experience, we're few. The more things like the stamina/health split (a nice idea, IMHO) or per-rest abilities are turned into per-encounter, the less I feel like my group is undertaking some significant feat of exploration into a dangerous place. There's no sense of journey, if you are almost as fresh at the end as the beginning, provided you survived each individual fight. This is probably my biggest point of fear for PoE2. It's critically important for some of us, because it's hard to inflict it on yourself if the game mechanic isn't there. In PoE1 I could avoid using most of the camping supplies scattered around, and thus pay the stamina/per-rest ability cost. If those things regen anyway even if I don't use camps, there isn't much to be done. It starts to feel too Diablo-esque. I suppose it depends on how this is balanced in the end. If everything except empowered abilities are significantly weak, then it might be tolerable (if weird and a bit hard to explain in the game world). If empower is only a modest increase, I don't think it'll go nearly far enough.

If we give them all the money, will they let us have a 6-member party? ​ ​*ducks* ​ ​

For a contrary point of view, I enjoyed most of the WM1/2 combat. ​ ​Crowd control is your friend. Tactical positioning is your friend, to keep monsters off of your more frail characters. And above all, it increases the importance of secondary character attributes. It makes sense for creatures to attack pure "glass cannons" first and take them out of the fight early. This makes defense something that's actually important, whether from spells, equipment, tactics, or attribute/stat allocations. ​ ​I won't say there's no room for improvement in PoE1 combat... but I also disagree with your perception of where the major points of potential improvement lie.​ The last thing I want is to see it end up as simplistic MMPORG-like "taunt mechanic" combat: a really stout tank or two "gains the aggro" and everybody else fires at will. ​

I'm not super attached to Vancian, other than that it's a means to an end. If they can come up with a better means, I'm fine with that too. My basic plea to Obsidian is: Please allow me the chance to fail. The important thing to me is that there is long term resource consideration. When most abilities are per fight, you never end up in a position where you've been exploring a dungeon for a little too long, everyone is ground down, you're getting low on resources, and an unexpected encounter forces you into pure panic survival mode. Can I live through it with what's left on my back? A wizard with 3 remaining spells he's never tried before, some weird potion, and a fighter who's utterly exhausted and doesn't have many fancy moves left in him? I already feel PoE went too far with so many per-encounter abilities, though I appreciate that it did have some measure of longer term resource management too. Also, the more that recharges between fights, the more devalued "trash fights" are. Rather than have to figure out how to beat the lesser groups with the absolute minimum resource expenditure so you can fight your way out of a crypt to see the light of day, you don't have to think at all. Just destroy them, and you know your abilities will regen before the next fight. The smaller encounters become pointless and tedious, when they are not part of a longer term journey through a dungeon where each small fight grinds my party down a little bit more. That's my only real plea to Obsidian for PoE2. Let me back myself into a corner, if I use my resources poorly trying to get through that dungeon or mountain pass. Please allow me to fail. That's why there are 35 year old games I think have better game-play than many brand new games. They were worse in most every detail, but you could back yourself into a seemingly impossible corner... and if you you found a brilliant way to get yourself out of it against all the odds, it was actually a rewarding experience. Modern games make sure players never get into those corners, and thus, deny them the rewards that go along with avoiding or escaping them. So please give me the freedom to fail. Even as a pre-game selectable option, if necessary due to market forces.

​ ​ Agreed - there is a wide range of desired challenge that people want, and different levels of knowledge about the combat system. ​I think almost everybody who wants an increase in the upper end difficulties still supports having the lower to middle ones available as well. I'm one of the folks who'd like to see Hard land about where PotD is now, and PotD move up by a comparable amount, but I absolutely don't want to deny anyone a level that suites their personal tastes (at least approximately, which is all you can really do with 5-6 options). The trouble is that right now, people who want easy to moderate modes have them, and people who want hard modes, don't. We can play with artificial restrictions such as just using one character instead of 6, but that isn't very satisfying. ​

I hope they don't change the art style. New and different things to see, sure, but PoE1's art direction was brilliant. One of the most beautiful games I've had the pleasure of playing, and that quality was maintained throughout the expansion. Very happy with that aspect of the game.

I agree with you that PotD badly needs a difficulty boost for POE2. After you learn the system, and particularly if you play many of the optional quests, you end up without much combat challenge. WM 1&2 made that somewhat better than the base game did, but still... we need a PotD worthy of its name, and which stays hard from start to end. PoE1 difficulty ramped down quickly after act 1. It's a tough thing, to balance a partly open game for a widely diverse set of play styles, class mixes, player abilities, and quest-completions. I never tried the lower end of the difficulty scale, but assuming people who wanted story mode were happy with where that landed (I haven't seen any complaints about it, anyway), then the overall difficulty scale range would be better stretched out. The lack of difficulty was the major thing keeping PoE1 out of 10/10 territory for me. I loved most everything else about it. One thing I did appreciate is that the harder ranges were not just "give the monsters 4X the HP so you're in for a long grinding fight". You got a different mix of monsters, some harder sub-species, and more of them. I liked Obsidian's approach better than what many games do. That, plus some kind of balance for players who do many side-quests so we don't end up over-leveled, and maybe some AI improvements, and I think it's all good.

I also liked the dual-mode system. There were times I felt it wasn't quite balanced well between classes, but that's a detail. The core of it is a good idea, and I had more fun with it than I'd have had without. ​ ​I won't try to claim it's the best possible system though, so if Ob can work out a better one, cool. The important concept to me is to have a mechanic requiring consideration of resources over significant time, rather than just per battle. (I hate insta-regen mechanics. Leave that to the Diablos of the RPG world). I want my party to get ground down in the process of exploring a dungeon, with few or no ways to regenerate or even escape early, so that before you can get home again, your backs are up against the wall and you need to fight tooth and nail to survive. The first part of WM1 was nice in that way, especially if you did it as soon as you could so you weren't over-leveled for it. I want a broader scope of resource consideration than a single fight. It's something that's gone missing from many modern RPGs in the endless push for simplified experiences, so I was glad to see at least a partial restoration of the idea in PoE1. ​ ​I'm not a huge fan of wound-based systems: "you broke your knee; sorry, all fights from here are with a broken knee ... but it's just fine after a night's sleep". It might work if wounds can be healed by some class and that ability comes out of a fixed resource pool that's depleted over the course of a dungeon area. Generally, I prefer a more resource based scheme: a fixed pool of spells, special melee abilities, perhaps consumables, whatever else, and I need to work out how to get out of this place alive with what's on my back. I need to be careful even with the "trash fights" to not over-spend resources, because I'll need those resources for the much harder fight I'm about to encounter. Of course that's hard to balance when people can encounter content at radically different levels. Not saying it's easy . ​ ​

I haven't read every post in this thread, just skimmed some of it, but I saw some talk about people not liking the mega-dungeon in PoE1. I wanted to chime in with an alternate opinion. ​ ​I enjoyed Od Nua, even while realizing it was only loosely tied into the main story of the game, and even if my brain insists to this day on reading it as "Old Nua". I found that sometimes I want to play to enjoy the story, with a lot of reading as I go, but sometimes I just wanted some semi-mindless dungeon delving, such as when I had 30 spare minutes here or there between real life things without sufficient time to get deeply into a play session. ​ So, ​I like the general idea of a semi-disconnected bit of dungeon exploration and combat. I felt it worked as a contrast to the main body of the game. Perfect, no... but still fun for me. I didn't do it all at once. I started at the earliest level I could get in there, did a few levels until I just couldn't go further, then came back a week later with a few more character levels to bring to bear. ​ ​That being said, I also agree with a previous poster than Durgan's Battery was extremely well done, as much as anything from an atmospheric perspective. It had the right background sounds, sights, echos, little puffs of dust upon opening long closed doors and such, to instill it with a sense of exploratory thrill. Really nice work on that, Obsidian. ​

​​I doubt it matters, but here's another voice that strongly preferred 6 to 5. I"ll still buy and play the game, and reserve final judgment until I see how it works out in reality, but I'm unhappy to hear of this choice. ​ ​I have a lot of respect for Obsidian's RPG design chops and their deep talent pool: they're one of only a few studios trying to do full-on RPGs anymore. However, I must respectfully disagree with Feargus when he says: ​ ​ ​ ​My problem with this is that the last 20 years of RPG development generally have not been for the better. Emulating the average mid-2010's "RPG" (purposeful quotes) is not something to aspire to, it's something to avoid! There has been an incessant and infuriating march towards excessive simplification and removal of complexity, difficulty, and choice, driven by the need to recoup extremely large development budgets, and to pander to the ADD "action" crowd. ​ ​One of my main hopes for the POE series was to avoid the pitfall of going after the mass market. Once you grow into the $100M budget category, you're forced into it, and I find those games universally dreadful. But at the more modest several-million-dollar dev budget level, I hoped the core audience who doesn't want too much simplification would constitute a sufficient market to sustain ongoing sequels. ​ ​Tyranny was a step in the wrong direction (removal of FF, smaller parties, ...), and I'll forgive it that because it's OK for different games to be different and go after different audiences. But I really hope Obsidian will try to leave PoE as a series that tries to please the harder core side of the RPG crowd who craves ​lots of spell choices, larger parties, many tactical interactions between classes, and not wanting autopilot-play. ​ ​Hopefully when we see it for real, 5 will not be too annoying in the end. But ... for PoE3, please don't make us take up pitchforks . ​ ​

I'm playing PotD and it feels harder to me than PoE was on PotD, but I suspect that's mostly because I don't know what I'm doing yet, and I'm playing spoiler-free. The challenge is just about right for me right now, which is nice, but I'm not sure that'll hold for repeated plays. Combat gets a little better as you go along and gain more abilities, but... it still feels like they oversimplified it. Maybe a mod to bring back FF and flanking would help here. I'm liking the setting, the writing, and the art. It's a well imagined world, and they did a nice job of capturing the "feel" of a world in this situation. Obsidian seems to do writing and art really well. Missing my other two party members

That's an aspect of CRPGs that has been fading for decades now. It used to be common, and I'm with you in enjoying it a lot, but I think there are a few reasons why it isn't common, and is only found in watered down forms: It's hard for game designers to balance well without alienating the player base. You risk backing players into a corner by requiring resources to complete a dungeon that they no longer have. If you give an alternate mechanism such as limitless rest, then players rest-spam every fight, so games like Pillars tried to walk a line of "limited rest resources" - but still, you have to balance it so you can always get more, or people will moan about getting stuck, so it's not really limited, which defeats the point of needing to carefully consider when to use your abilities to survive, which means you never have your back to the wall. Players despise it. Not everybody: I'm talking generalities, not absolutes. But gaming culture has changed: many people want to waltz into a room and obliterate everything in a godlike manner, then insta-regen back to 100% strength, and repeat. There's also the opposite camp who wants to be be pushed to the edge: to barely survive a dungeon by the skin of their teeth using every last resource remaining in creative ways, managing their party over a series of encounters rather than one encounter at a time. I believe the former camp is much larger than the latter camp, so there's market pressure away from needing to plan a whole "dungeon dive", and towards meeting each encounter at 100% strength. I've played older games that were brutal: you could spend 3 hours diving into a dungeon, your party being mercilessly ground down by every fight, with no ability to regen spells/abilities or save your game until you got back out. Sometimes you made it... and sometimes you didn't, and your 3 hours were for naught as you watched your last remaining fighter take one hit too many. You had a lot on the line, it could be tense: I'm down to these 4 spells, this weird-ass combat ability I've never used before, and three ham sandwiches. Everybody's torn up, nobody with more than 25% health left. I can't get back without two more fights. Am I going to make it? I'm not sure a game could succeed in the market balanced strongly around longer term resource consideration. There'd be howls of protest and terrible reviews. PoE was very weakly balanced around that, and I suspect that's about as far as a modern game can go (which is about 5% of the way to some classic CRPGs), and even at that, there was pushback. I do hope to see PoE2 move more towards per-dungeon consideration than per-encounter (which is were Tyranny went), but I'm not holding my breath .

I'm not nearly as far along as some folks, but here are my feelings so far. I like the world Tyranny imagines, and so far I feel more connected to the plot than I did in Pillars. Writing is good, and graphics, art, and music are top-notch. On the flip side, combat is inferior to PoE since it removes many interesting mechanics such as friendly fire and flanking, and adds some mechanics that more belong in an MMPORG than a CRPG. I feel they went too far in over-simplifying things and removing longer-term resource consideration, presumably to attract non-CRPG-geek players. ​ ​Difficulty wise, I'm finding it harder (so far) than Pillars, which is a positive thing in my view. I'm playing PotD, and there have been some quite challenging fights. It's hard to tell though if it really is harder, or if merely that I don't know the skills / abilities / tactics nearly as well yet, so it just feels harder. I'm sure my character choices have not been ideal. Also, Pillars was harder in the first few levels than later on, so that could be true here too. Will have to see how this unfolds over time. ​ ​I believe Tyranny is worth the money if you like this style of game, and also I'm all for supporting party-based CRPG so we get more variety of them in the future. It's not my perfect game or anything, but... it's still been enjoyable so far. No regrets in buying it. ​

​Nod - maybe it should be an option, the same way you can turn on or off the spell range indicators. Certainly not everyone enjoys that kind of mechanic. ​

+ Another thing I'm liking in Tyranny which I could see making an appearance in future PoE games is companion-specific skill trees. I'm not far enough along yet to know if they're really unique or are very similar to skills the PC could obtain, but at least the in-game description makes them sound custom to the companion characters. It's a nice idea: makes the companions feel unique, rather than like carbon copies of what you yourself could be with the right skill selection. ​ ​+ I think I might also like the time limited main quests, although I can certainly understand why some people might not. I'm also not far enough along to know how it balances out, but it gives some sense of urgency that I rarely felt in PoE where you could rest as many times as you wanted. Maybe in Story mode they could relax or remove the time restrictions so people who want an easier time of it don't have to be concerned with it, but I like the general idea of pressuring the player a little bit. ​ ​

​Yep, agreed - I was imagining something like an augmentation, rather than a replacement. Totally agreed that there is a risk of losing the personality and interest of PoE style spells if everything becomes a generic "bolt these N things together" scheme. ​ ​

Agreed: I wouldn't mind seeing that sort of spell creation scheme in a future Pillars game in some fashion. It's an interesting addition to a magic system. Just... please... do not bring along with it all the other combat simplifications that happened in Tyranny. The more I play the more I realize how much I dislike mindless cooldown clicking, and how much FF adds to the interest of a fight. One thing Pillars did better than Tyranny - by no means ideally, but better - is that if you don't cheese the rest system, you need to manage your party's health and per-rest abilities over time, especially in areas where resting is prohibited. Some old games like Bard's Tale (1985) had resources that could not be re-gened until you got back to an inn, so your "unit of consideration" was an entire dungeon dive. It had its problems, no doubt, but it was vastly preferable to action-game-style auto-regen. You had to think into the future, use your resources carefully, and it felt like an expedition rather than an exercise in waiting for cooldown timers to reset. I'd really like POE2 to move more in the direction where larger scoped resource consideration are relatively more important, rather than in Tyranny's direction of smaller units of consideration.

Good thread idea. I'm not too far into Tyranny yet, but so far: ​ ​Like ​+ The tone and feel of the game is great. It feels like a nicely fleshed out world. ​+ The art is at least as good as Pillars, if not better. ​+ Some of the combo moves are OK, although some seem kinda... cartoony. Good idea, but needs to be handled judiciously. ​+ Edit: Some initial areas feel more "alive" than PoE towns, with chars walking around doing stuff, etc. There's a nice sense of it being a living place. ​ ​Dislike ​- The cooldown timers for everything in combat. Ugh... it's too "action RPG", only without the action. I don't feel it's a good fit for CRPGs. ​- In general, combat feels "slow". ​- 4 chars. 6 is better. ​- Not 100% sure about this one yet, but I haven't seen any long-term health or spell resources. It seems like you totally regen after each fight? If so, again it's too "action RPG" style: there'd be no need to manage health and abilities over a unit any larger than a single fight. POE isn't perfect here, but it does try. ​ ​It definitely has the feel of a game that's going more for a mass market audience. Jury's still out for me. I'm sure I'll play through and enjoy it, but there are absolutely gonna be things where I think it's a step back from Pillars, and I hope those aspects don't creep into POE2. ​ ​

​ You watch cooldowns of everybody's abilities and then click those abilities. It's Dragon Age: Origins all over again, just without mana and far worse animated. ​I started a game and yeah, I agree about the cooldowns. Not my fav mechanic at all. Still, the game's good in other ways. The graphics and area designs are spectacular. ​ ​We'll see how it unfolds over time. I'm willing to give it a chance. I just hope the "cooldown" mechanic doesn't find its way into the Pillars series. ​

How would you compare the difficulty to Pillars? My first run of Pillars I played Hard and really wished I'd played PotD instead. I'm inclined to try PotD for my first Tyranny play, but I don't know how they compare. If it's about like PotD in PoE, I'll pick that.

​ ​I'm curious about your objections to it, since I've seen a few other folks say that too. ​My main issue with the crowdfunding for POE1 was the tombstones, which were silly, although easy enough to ignore. I wouldn't mind that going away, but it's not an intrinsic property of crowdfunding, so they could just avoid it for subsequent games. In other respects, I thought Kickstarter worked well enough, and probably enabled the game to exist at all. ​ ​

This is cool - I remember a while back there was speculation that Tyranny might not be available DRM-free on GOG. But looks like it is after all. ​ Bigtime ​kudos to whatever combination of Obsidian and Paradox made that call. (Of course, it wasn't the evil choice... but was pretty important to a lot of us, witness, a seriously huge thread on another forum about it). ​

​Removing text - posted to wrong thread. Not sure how to remove the whole post as I don't see a button for that. If a mod happens to notice this, and you have a magic button, maybe you could push it? ​ ​

Interestingly, I have seen M.A.R. working OK in some other situations now, like vs. ogre druid targeted spells. I don't quite understand the situation with the skeletal mages, but... in general the spell does appear to work. Maybe there is some other relevant factor with the skeltons that I'm not aware of. ​ ​

I read that there will be no combat friendly fire, which is probably my biggest disappointment about the game so far (even moreso than 4-char parties). Ah well. Still... Obsidian CRPG. Should be good in other ways. Maybe at some point someone will mod it.