What would you like for an hypotetical PoE3?

[juanval]

I'm trying to finish my first campaign (140 hours at the moment) and the plot is very interesting but it seems to me TOOOOOOOO epic and too lore dense.

 

The casual player can be overwelmed by all the amount of lore and text this game has.

 

For PoE3 it would be interesting to explore a new region of Eora with a new level1 character, and try to solve a more mundane and less epic plot

[daven]

Perhaps they could let the Watcher disappear for some mysterious reason and return in a new body without previous memories. Players can decide whether to bring his/her old self back or not. Everyone's happy this way.

 

Creating a new protagonist and fight the Watcher as a boss sounds cool too.

 

In Dragon Age: Awakening you could either carry on with your main character or make a new guy who had a different backstory from another part of the world or something.

 

Something along that vein perhaps?

 

From what I recall they do react differently to you if you're not playing as the hero of Fereldan.

Edited January 30, 2019 by daven

[Nssheepster]

I'm trying to finish my first campaign (140 hours at the moment) and the plot is very interesting but it seems to me TOOOOOOOO epic and too lore dense.

 

The casual player can be overwelmed by all the amount of lore and text this game has.

 

For PoE3 it would be interesting to explore a new region of Eora with a new level1 character, and try to solve a more mundane and less epic plot

You're not wrong, some people would be overwhelmed. The thing is, though... Lore heavy, epic fantasy... Is kinda the niche POE 1 and 2 both fit into. Now, granted, I don't know of any games that are mechanically similar to this, that aren't epic fantasy. There is pretty clearly an opening for something like what you're asking for, and it'd be interesting to see Obsidian try their hand at such a thing.... but it wouldn't be POE 3 at that point. It wouldn't really... Fit, with the rest of the series. You ever played the Dragon Age games? 1 doesn't play like 2, and 3 doesn't play like 1 either. The lore carries on, but the games themselves don't feel all that similar. They're a series, but also kinda not, because the kind of player that's attracted to 3 isn't the same kind of player that's looking for 1.

 

I'd be all for something less epic, less dramatic, with a similar gameplay style.... But not for POE, because it wouldn't really match.

 

 

Come to think of it, though.... Sci-Fi settings really don't lend themselves well to this kind of gaming do they? After all, all the unique weapons we have in POE... It's because of magic. In a Sci-Fi setting, what excuse do you have? A better material? So you're not getting anything unique then, just upgrading to something more expensive. It would totally remove the gearing system from relevance.  Can't really justify too many magic power equivalents either. Mass Effect pulled the 'Biotics' card and managed to make that sort out, but that was still very limited in scope compared to the vast variety of magical powers and things that POE offers. 

Shrug. You might just be stuck with Epic Fantasy just to justify the systems that give POE all its replayability.

[Eelectrica]

An ending that makes sense.

Cut the gods nonsense, just a good story, we solve whatever the problem is in a way that best fits our character.

Should probably deal with the aftermath, whatever that is, it's not really clear actually. Story should probably not be time sensitive so allowing for exploration, which I do anyway, but some people apparently don't like to keep big bad waiting. So far as I'm concerned big bag can take up a hobby until I'm good and ready to reach the end.

 

I'd start with a new character and retire the watcher, he's got a castle to rebuild apparently which could take a while.

[Saito Hikari]

I had a pretty crazy idea where a hypothetical PoE3 actually had a dual protagonist setup. The Watcher themselves in the present time, and a distant past life, both having their own classes/skills, stats, party members and problems to deal with. A lot of choices made by the 'past life' would affect the present, although said past life not being a Watcher him/herself has to rely on intuition and instinct. (In certain cases, the past life could end up leaving items or even a very unique party member that could be recruited by either party in places for the Watcher's party to find in the present time.) Switching between parties would be done via the rest interface.

 

(I also subscribe to a crackpot idea that the Living Lands is the way it is because it has 'adra portals' of sorts that are somehow connected to every other major region of the world. Over time, the environments from said regions could have bled into the Living Lands and masked said portals. With even more passage of time, the original environments could have changed drastically, while the Living Lands would contain a more pristine version of them.

 

I have zero proof of this, it's just a crackpot thought about why the setting might be the way it is.)

Edited January 31, 2019 by Saito Hikari

[Frog Man]

I had a pretty crazy idea where a hypothetical PoE3 actually had a dual protagonist setup. The Watcher themselves in the present time, and a distant past life, both having their own classes/skills, stats, party members and problems to deal with. A lot of choices made by the 'past life' would affect the present, although said past life not being a Watcher him/herself has to rely on intuition and instinct. (In certain cases, the past life could end up leaving items or even a very unique party member that could be recruited by either party in places for the Watcher's party to find in the present time.) Switching between parties would be done via the rest interface.

 

(I also subscribe to a crackpot idea that the Living Lands is the way it is because it has 'adra portals' of sorts that are somehow connected to every other major region of the world. Over time, the environments from said regions could have bled into the Living Lands and masked said portals. With even more passage of time, the original environments could have changed drastically, while the Living Lands would contain a more pristine version of them.

 

I have zero proof of this, it's just a crackpot thought about why the setting might be the way it is.)

I don’t think I would buy your weird ass game

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

amusing as concept may be, game like that would have to be very linear or the amount of reactivity would shortern its length to that of a mayfly.

 

u could play shadow of memories, life is strange, radiant historia or chrono trigger - hell, even FFXIII-2 or assassins creed - to see the different ways that idea pans out. I dont feel any of them would translate well to the western crpg framework, which already has too many moving parts to accommodate.

 

If anyone were to have a crack, i think theyd be better off starting from the streamlined experience of something like dragonfall rather than poe.

[Nssheepster]

Reactivity IS indeed both a boon and a harsh limiter. They can only add so many options, and so many differences IN those options, before things are just plain untenable, logistically. Deadfire honestly gets away with a bit more player choice than most, because of its particular ending being unavoidable regardless of the path you choose. Being able to go for Solo, Huana, Rautai, or VTC, is already four paths, that's usually around the limit of what you can pull off for main story options. Even with all the reactivity of Deadfire... You notice how people don't react to your other accomplishments? You clear out a cursed isle... Nobody says anything. Murder a undead dragon? There's one mention of it. Kill a dragon beneath the biggest city in the region? Only one reacter. There's hard limits to just how much you can pull off. If a triple A game studio put its all into a game with reactivity, they can push it a bit further simply because they've got the money to throw at having more voice lines, more development hours, and what not.... But even they'd still be limited by sheer file size, after a while your game just gets TOO big to be reasonable.

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

And tbh, I find most exhaustive AAA experiences cold af. ME3 and DA:I were both numbing, and ive never been slightly interested in assassins creed. most of these games marshall a surplus of skill, talent and gear so i feel theres something fundamentally crook about the approach.

 

If a sculptor doesnt exclude anything, theyre just left with a big featureless rock. peeps might be able to see exactly what they want in it, but i suspect the experience wont be all that compelling.

[Verde]

Reactivity IS indeed both a boon and a harsh limiter. They can only add so many options, and so many differences IN those options, before things are just plain untenable, logistically. Deadfire honestly gets away with a bit more player choice than most, because of its particular ending being unavoidable regardless of the path you choose. Being able to go for Solo, Huana, Rautai, or VTC, is already four paths, that's usually around the limit of what you can pull off for main story options. Even with all the reactivity of Deadfire... You notice how people don't react to your other accomplishments? You clear out a cursed isle... Nobody says anything. Murder a undead dragon? There's one mention of it. Kill a dragon beneath the biggest city in the region? Only one reacter. There's hard limits to just how much you can pull off. If a triple A game studio put its all into a game with reactivity, they can push it a bit further simply because they've got the money to throw at having more voice lines, more development hours, and what not.... But even they'd still be limited by sheer file size, after a while your game just gets TOO big to be reasonable.

Would you agree that Deadfire has some serious reactivity problems tho?

[Cartoons Plural]

 

 

Oh, I'm all for canonizing a single ending. Pick a "good" ending and go with that. And if there are people who complain about it, tough cookies. The devs are the authors of the "official" story, not the players.

 

Regardless, I still say that it's B.S. that they can't go forward with the Eora setting.

 

.... Yeah, people who want to actually make MONEY, they don't get to go 'Tough cookies, IDC if my customers don't like it.' That's... yeah no, you don't get to do that, especially not in a competitve industry. Maybe if you were the only donut shop for fifty miles or something, but Obsidian sure as hell doesn't get to do that.

yeah it's really a shame nobody in games has any creative freedom. also odd how many fans of games are completely fine with this yet still want people to take it seriously as art Edited February 1, 2019 by Cartoons Plural

[hollerer]

Now that I finished the game I could write a review. I'll start with the actual feel of the game and it's settings. In first game it was cool and interesting to chase the mystery about the watcher, thaos, engwithans and gods. But after the first game everything was too clear: we're in a fabricated world, gods are fabrications, humans can't die but they are always reborn, there's this ominous feeling that the world will soon end. This causes carelessness towards pretty much everything lore-wise and you can actually see it in the dialogs too. It's like everyone somehow felt that way. I simply didn't care about hardly anything I met in the game because I knew the universe so well. The only achievements that felt worth achieving were weapon upgrades and some big money sinks. That was challenging. But maybe it was what devs wanted, if they wanted a world where the player knows all this and watches the human factions bicker over things that are in the end meaningless, they succeeded.

 

So for me, the first game had much better feel to it. It's gritty, unforgiving, there's mysteries and secrets, human tragedies too. Combat was more punishing because of the camping and health system. So the second game was a joyride compared to the first. But if the second game was supposed to be a sandbox, or more like a water-box, it succeeded in that.

 

So what I'd like to see in the next game is at least lore-overhaul, which we probably will get. How about the watcher loses his ghostbusting abilities and has to talk to people like normal people do. Leave the souls alone! How about we don't know what happens after death. How about more mysteries about engwithans... ah well I bet we're getting this anyway.

 

Another thing is more demanding and rewarding resource-management. I hardly ever used potions. I hardly ever used traps. And hardly ever used explosives. Those need to be more effective and actually have an impact in combat. Depending on difficulty, they are either useless because the enemies are so hard or useless because enemies are so easy. Potions are pretty good but the latter 2 are not. With potions the problem was that most of them were useless, because their durations were so low or because their use is so specific that you don't get to prepare them in your fast items. I never drank a potion apart healing, that had less than 20sec benefit time. The reason was that my characters were always buffed by something else that had timer. So while drinking the potion the other buff is lost and I would have been more effective just fighting casually. Low duration items in general were not worth the micromanagement.

 

Longer fights and deeper dungeons. What I mean with longer fights are fights which keep you in combat mode longer. I don't mean that there's more mobs that rush at you right away but that you would have to explore an entire level in combat mode without access to rest or inventory. This forces resource management. In both games combats were too brief, you got thrown bunch of enemies and combat was over pretty fast, unless you ran around the entire map, triggering everyone.

Dungeons got to be deeper, so that you prepare for them and get in trouble when really deep down in there. This forces the player to consume a lot of resources and manage them. In both games I ended up with abundance of support resources, because I hardly ever was forced to use them. How about we get lasting effects that you have to remove with either resting or with potions. Let's say after fighting bunch of nasty ghosts, you end up scared until you remove it with a potion of resolve or resting.

 

Summons are OP. Srsly, I beat every single difficult combat just by spamming chanter summons. It should take a bit more thought to create a powerful party than creating a team of summoners.

 

Other than that, I don't have much bad things to say about the game. The devs are quite creative and have many things working well.

Edited February 2, 2019 by hollerer

[Nssheepster]

 

Would you agree that Deadfire has some serious reactivity problems tho?

 

I wouldn't call them problems, simply because that implies Obsidian should fix them. It'd be NICE if this was changed, but I don't blame Obsidian for not doing it. Deadfire is IMO significantly above what I expected for reactivity TBH. I would LIKE more vocal acknowledgement of 'OMG, it's X person who did Y amazing thing', but I can also see why it has to be rather limited, so that people who haven't played just 2 and not 1 don't feel left out.... Also money.

 

 

 

As for the above post.... Not just Chanter Summons, I've used Figurines to cheese my way into places I shouldn't be getting into, just to get the gear piece I wanted for my build. I personally love the first game... Except for the per-rest stuff. Wizards felt basically useless, to the point that I don't think I finished Aloth's quest, or even took him, more than a handful of times. Potions, aside from healing, I agree on. Not just potions, but buffs. Many of them, even with significant INT scaling, are such a small duration it doesn't feel worthwhile. Those that are worthwhile and actually have a decent base duration are immediately seen as amazing just because they can actually be USED reasonably.  And I would definitely have loved something like the Endless Paths for 2. AFAIK it was VERY well recieved from 1, so I'm not sure why it wasn't included here. Maybe SSS was meant to replace it? Not sure.

[Verde]

Chiefly, I want the combat to remain the same but some minor tweaks, and more of the focus on branching dialogue and quest resolution. More options. I wanna give Beza's notes to the ranga but he doesn't seem interested in why I destroyed the adra.

 

Also the disposition system is good in theory but could be much better in execution. I'm sure it's very difficult to code in all those reactions, so maybe keep it quality over quantity and add more reactivity. When I helped resolve the Family Fued peacefully I could not believe Pelle didn't say a damn thing, not even thank you!

Edited February 2, 2019 by Verde

[Nssheepster]

Chiefly, I want the combat to remain the same but some minor tweaks, and more of the focus on branching dialogue and quest resolution. More options. I wanna give Beza's notes to the ranga but he doesn't seem interested in why I destroyed the adra.

 

Also the disposition system is good in theory but could be much better in execution. I'm sure it's very difficult to code in all those reactions, so maybe keep it quality over quantity and add more reactivity. When I helped resolve the Family Fued peacefully I could not believe Pelle didn't say a damn thing, not even thank you!

Part of it I think is the party based system. If you stripped all the party based systems and mechanics from the game, that'd take a LOT of weight out, and allow more time and space for reactivity. There are a lot of interactions and mechanics that are quietly only there to either balance the game with parties around, or only exist for parties to use. OFC, it IS a party based game, so I doubt that's liable to happen, but it'd certainly be possible.

[Tnecniw]

Some things I would really enjoy personally to be added to PoE 3 if such a game were to be made

1: More class options for character creation, more classes, more specializations. Maybe allow some more "darker" classes if possible? Like maybe adding a class to the game that is by default a bit more sinister even compared to a wizard or the like.

2: More options for godlikes. More head types, more "fantastical" looks. Like a godlike of ondra that litterally has skin of water for example.
More actual types of godlikes, maybe 2 godlikes for each god. (concidering that Ondra has two different ones, being the Moon and the aquatic godlike).

3: Perhaps visiting very  extreme locations, like the White that Wends? Or The Living lands, as those sound extremely interesting.

4: More returning companions. :) Eder is an obvious one. But I would love to maybe have Vela as a companion? (if you saved her in the first game and everything) being your defactor daughter, and would honestly result in some really interesting interactions, with you being her father / mother and everything.  And maybe Ydwin? I dunno why but I really liked her in the second game and have her continue to be with you as a companion would be really enjoyable. :) Romance option? :3

 

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Tnecniw said:

1: More class options for character creation, more classes, more specializations. Maybe allow some more "darker" classes if possible? Like maybe adding a class to the game that is by default a bit more sinister even compared to a wizard or the like.

You mean more sinister than an Assassin, a Priest of Skaen, Rhymrgand or Woedica, a Paladin of the Steel Garrote or a Bleak Walker, a Shattered Pillar or even a Corpse Eater? What's on your mind? Rogue subclass Serial Killer?

1 hour ago, Tnecniw said:

2: More options for godlikes.

 That would be nice. First of all they should introduce the rest of the "basic" godlikes though in my opinion. I would like to see Godlikes touched by Eothas, Galawain, Abydon etc.

 

[uuuhhii]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

You mean more sinister than an Assassin, a Priest of Skaen, Rhymrgand or Woedica, a Paladin of the Steel Garrote or a Bleak Walker, a Shattered Pillar or even a Corpse Eater? What's on your mind? Rogue subclass Serial Killer?

 That would be nice. First of all they should introduce the rest of the "basic" godlikes though in my opinion. I would like to see Godlikes touched by Eothas, Galawain, Abydon etc.

 

berserker maybe even darker then corpse eater

since corpse eater just eat some dead body but berserker will attack their friend while raging

[Boeroer]

I did that all the time when playing basketball and wouldn't consider myself sinister.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Blood Mage seems like a more sinister Wizard. I guess Chanters can be considered creepy with some of their summons, and Ciphers have powers that would be considered cruel.

Personally I'd like a game with a new protagonist set in a new area and in the equivalent of the industrial revolution with no mechanical funny business like inversion, no minigames, and exploration better integrated into the game.

[Skazz]

You guys aren't thinking exotic enough.

Be brave. Like this:

ACTUAL DWARVEN COMPANION.

[Boeroer]

That's pretty sinister alright.

[Elric Galad]

7 hours ago, Tnecniw said:

Some things I would really enjoy personally to be added to PoE 3 if such a game were to be made

1: More class options for character creation, more classes, more specializations. Maybe allow some more "darker" classes if possible? Like maybe adding a class to the game that is by default a bit more sinister even compared to a wizard or the like.

2: More options for godlikes. More head types, more "fantastical" looks. Like a godlike of ondra that litterally has skin of water for example.
More actual types of godlikes, maybe 2 godlikes for each god. (concidering that Ondra has two different ones, being the Moon and the aquatic godlike).
 

Arguably, the only classes/races that should be added are priest of each deity and indeed godlikes too (but probably not more than 1 type, or it would be too much).

I like the concept of Cipher/Corpse Eater :
"First, I'll feed my power with your soul. Then I'll devour your body."

[Kampel]

5 hours ago, Boeroer said:

You mean more sinister than an Assassin, a Priest of Skaen, Rhymrgand or Woedica, a Paladin of the Steel Garrote or a Bleak Walker, a Shattered Pillar or even a Corpse Eater? What's on your mind? Rogue subclass Serial Killer?

 That would be nice. First of all they should introduce the rest of the "basic" godlikes though in my opinion. I would like to see Godlikes touched by Eothas, Galawain, Abydon etc.

 

Sentient Animat as a race or as Eothas godlike would be fun (golem, animat or animated armor lookalike)

 

For a PoE3 i would like a more neutral starting setting (instead of starting Pirate setting) and you can develope your story from there.

[Tnecniw]

5 hours ago, Boeroer said:

You mean more sinister than an Assassin, a Priest of Skaen, Rhymrgand or Woedica, a Paladin of the Steel Garrote or a Bleak Walker, a Shattered Pillar or even a Corpse Eater? What's on your mind? Rogue subclass Serial Killer?

 That would be nice. First of all they should introduce the rest of the "basic" godlikes though in my opinion. I would like to see Godlikes touched by Eothas, Galawain, Abydon etc.

 

Okay I should rephrase xD
I more meant... that classes (and subclasses) come with a certain level of disposition to start with.
If you are an assassin for example (and people know it) will people treat or talk to you as if you have the untrustworthy trait to begin with.
YOu catch my drift?
Or if you are a righteous paladin might you get more trust outright.
That kind of thing.