71 replies to this topic

[kreso]

Well. Being that PoEII is the second game I played and write feedback for, that alone says that I am (was, at least) quite impressed by this game

Good stuff:

- graphics are outright the best I've seen in isometric RPGs. I love BG style, hate 3D with all my heart and the moment I saw the first village in PoEII I was "wow-ed". Brilliant. Feels alive, looks great, made me fell in love with this game outright.

- character creation. Not only classes, but multis. And more - kits! Great diversity, great options.

- NPCs. Fully voiced (very important to me), interesting, diverse.

- overall feel of the game

- DLC content is nice and difficulty-wise far better than core game

- weapons. Nothing is hugely OP, and yet nothing is useless.

 

Not so good:

- combat. While it's not bad per se in early levels, later gets a bit odd.

To explain better:

I started to play this game at "normal" difficulty. Party pretty standard - Eder, Xoti, that mage dude, druid guy and PC Crusader (I always play tanks in RPGs...). My PC gets unkillable at lvl 5-6...

I start over, increase difficulty. Same thing, in some battles my whole party dies, yet Crusader lives on. It takes ages for him to kill anything, but he can't die.

I start over again on PotD. Ok, I can die even with maxed out Deflection build. Great.!

I finally create a custom party (not overly powergamed/min-maxed, just 2 scouts for ranged DPS, PC Crusader, some chanter guy and a 2handed paladin; who ended up being dead most of the time).

The game on PotD becomes a cakewalk. Ended the game w/o using a single healing potion. Food buffs? Only for spider boss...

So...my question to creators - can this game be made a bit "harder" w/o artificial nonsense such as upscaling (what's the point in leveling then). It's a great game, it's just that the difficulty doesn't really cut it.

- ship combat. Dear God.... what I do to avoid this nonsense is avoid it up to level 10-11, then start ramming into enemy ships and leave the AI do do it's job in hand-to-hand combat. Awful implementation, completely unneccecary. Sid Meier's Pirates! was better than this.

- area load times. Now, I uderstand you need SSD disk for it to be faster, but still.......T-down. I ended up avoiding quests with much in-out of building transitions since load times are unbearable.

 

All that said, PoEII is a *fantastic* game. It does need some ironing thou.

 

 

[xzar_monty]

The Pirates! comparison is not entirely fair, because Pirates! was built around naval combat, whereas it's just a small feature of Deadfire. However, it is true -- and as far as I know, generally agreed upon -- that the naval combat in Deadfire is pretty bad. I understand it was meant to be more extensive, but something happened along the way.

[Verde]

Magran's Fires.

Edited by Verde, 09 February 2019 - 05:41 AM.

[AlexDeLarge]

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

[Frak]

Vela cries "Protect me, avatar of Hylea!"

 

Skaen laughs in your face, as his effigy blinds you by gouging out your eyes

 

Rymrgand shows you the entropic decay of starvation

 

Wael obscures your knowledge as numbers fade into each other and becomes a cacophony of gibberish.

 

Berath calmly says: "Do you dare walk the Fires of Magran, little watcher?" as Ondra drags your crew down, their lives forgotten. Another nameless crew lost to the Kraken.

[MountainTiger]

I, too, complain about being overleveled and about the option for mitigating it.

[Verde]

Even for masochists I don't recommend Wael's challenge lol.

[kreso]

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. 

When a player with  almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. 

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway.

There were  two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party.  Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again...

The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat.

 

I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't.

[xzar_monty]

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

 

Please, read again. His tone is not one of complaint. He describes a perfectly legitimate progression. You start the game on normal difficulty, and it's impossible to lose. You raise the difficulty a bit, and again it's almost impossible not to win everything. Only when you crank the difficulty as high as it can go can you expect to be properly challenged. Can anyone deny this? I mean, this is how it is.

 

The game goes out of its way not to be difficult for you.

 

I've been playing CRPGs since they were around, which means something like the mid-1980s, and Deadfire is the easiest by some considerable distance.

 

I'm not complaining. I'm just describing.

Edited by xzar_monty, 09 February 2019 - 07:34 AM.

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

u can win every fight in that series by pre-buffing and auto-attacking everything to death. in BG1 u just give everyone bows. in BG2, u get keldorn to cast dispel magic occasionally.

like, i cant dispute there are builds that can solo the game with minimal input. there are peeps here that spend all their time trying to develop such, but i think its fair to say most of these strats arent immediately obvious to us normal saps.

Im unsure why u highlight the examples u do. The ciphers in sss can be dealt with using normal anti-caster strats + aegis of loyalty + intellect resistance. Theyre too squishy to be that hard a fight, nowhere near as annoying as splintered reef imo - those fampyrs take more of a beating. (Praise kyros for chill fog) u can interrupt anyone casting disintegration, and if one lands u can use barring deaths door/withdraw if ur regens not up to scratch. as for the soul mirror match, u alpha strike the back line, leave ur tank til last, debuff their defences and whittle them down. ai dont use the aggressive cheese strats available to a player or else something like bridge ablaze would be like pulling own fingernails out.

Like i also find it odd that u could prep enough to stat check everyone to death yet not figure out u could blast every ship to smithereens with double bronzers. like if u crush the ship fights u can proper clean up early game and take advantage of some powerful gear.

i dunno man, too much of what ur saying just dont jibe with my experience of game. I didnt feel ready to touch potd until id cleared the game veteran-upscaled and knew the craic.

like if ud said 'game too easy, herald kill everything with zero input on highest difficulty' that would have at least backed up what people have been saying elsewhere on this forum but eh...

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

I've been playing CRPGs since they were around, which means something like the mid-1980s, and Deadfire is the easiest by some considerable distance.

i must have dreamt all those infinity/aurora engine games i sleepwalked through. anyone else here have that dream about PS:T? man, that was good.

[Pus-in-Boots]

 

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. 

When a player with  almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. 

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway.

There were  two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party.  Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again...

The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat.

 

I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't.

 

 

You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play).

Edited by Pus-in-Boots, 09 February 2019 - 08:33 AM.

[MountainTiger]

My favorite part of BG 2 are the demiliches, which swing between "almost impossible" and "completely trivial" depending on whether you know how to get Imprisonment immunity or to use a Protection from Undead scroll. Really emblematic of the game's approach to difficulty.

[Pus-in-Boots]

My favorite part of BG 2 are the demiliches, which swing between "almost impossible" and "completely trivial" depending on whether you know how to get Imprisonment immunity or to use a Protection from Undead scroll. Really emblematic of the game's approach to difficulty.

 

Yeah, BG(2) combat is extremely gimmicky. Once you know what you need, previously hard encounters turn to being trivial.

[xzar_monty]

 

 

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. 

When a player with  almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. 

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway.

There were  two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party.  Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again...

The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat.

 

I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't.

 

 

You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play).

 

 

Firkraag, for instance, is a lot more difficult than anything I've seen in Deadfire, or anything I saw in PoE.

 

I know that there are techniques, but I had to come up with some of them myself. That's one interesting thing: I had to discover a way to beat the dragon. There has been no such necessity in these two games (which are very good, don't get me wrong).

[Pus-in-Boots]

 

 

 

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. 

When a player with  almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. 

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway.

There were  two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party.  Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again...

The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat.

 

I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't.

 

 

You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play).

 

 

Firkraag, for instance, is a lot more difficult than anything I've seen in Deadfire, or anything I saw in PoE.

 

I know that there are techniques, but I had to come up with some of them myself. That's one interesting thing: I had to discover a way to beat the dragon. There has been no such necessity in these two games (which are very good, don't get me wrong).

 

 

I disagree. I needed multiple attempts for every dragon present in PoE (I only talked to those encountered in the Deadfire) just as was the case in BG2.

[rjshae]

Agree that the level loading and ship combat need to improve. Ship combat though is mostly avoidable, so level loading should be the priority. Not sure whether they can fix it though without choosing a different build engine.

[AlexDeLarge]

 

 

 

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. 

When a player with  almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. 

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway.

There were  two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party.  Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again...

The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat.

 

I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't.

 

 

You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play).

 

 

Firkraag, for instance, is a lot more difficult than anything I've seen in Deadfire, or anything I saw in PoE.

 

I know that there are techniques, but I had to come up with some of them myself. That's one interesting thing: I had to discover a way to beat the dragon. There has been no such necessity in these two games (which are very good, don't get me wrong).

 

BG2 is quite easy without SCS, what are we talking about here? You can literally AFK spam Cloudkill Wand on Firkraag and he dies without you ever seeing him on the screen. Also, the fact that you've been playing cRPG's for over 3 decades probably gave you a lot of expertise on the genre, so of course you will be good at beating Deadfire by default. Thing is, imo, POTD is not even close to the highest difficulty you can achieve in this game. Add full upscale, Ironman + Expert + a few challenges and it becomes brutal to beat. Add all the challenges combined and it becomes almost impossible.

Edited by AlexDeLarge, 09 February 2019 - 09:20 AM.

[kreso]

 

Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98).

u can win every fight in that series by pre-buffing and auto-attacking everything to death. in BG1 u just give everyone bows. in BG2, u get keldorn to cast dispel magic occasionally.

like, i cant dispute there are builds that can solo the game with minimal input. there are peeps here that spend all their time trying to develop such, but i think its fair to say most of these strats arent immediately obvious to us normal saps.

Im unsure why u highlight the examples u do. The ciphers in sss can be dealt with using normal anti-caster strats + aegis of loyalty + intellect resistance. Theyre too squishy to be that hard a fight, nowhere near as annoying as splintered reef imo - those fampyrs take more of a beating. (Praise kyros for chill fog) u can interrupt anyone casting disintegration, and if one lands u can use barring deaths door/withdraw if ur regens not up to scratch. as for the soul mirror match, u alpha strike the back line, leave ur tank til last, debuff their defences and whittle them down. ai dont use the aggressive cheese strats available to a player or else something like bridge ablaze would be like pulling own fingernails out.

Like i also find it odd that u could prep enough to stat check everyone to death yet not figure out u could blast every ship to smithereens with double bronzers. like if u crush the ship fights u can proper clean up early game and take advantage of some powerful gear.

i dunno man, too much of what ur saying just dont jibe with my experience of game. I didnt feel ready to touch potd until id cleared the game veteran-upscaled and knew the craic.

like if ud said 'game too easy, herald kill everything with zero input on highest difficulty' that would have at least backed up what people have been saying elsewhere on this forum but eh...

 

Ah, should have made myself clear. BG1/2 are both easy once you get to know them... but don't tell me you never got

a) one-shot critted by gibberling/hobgoblin/random encounter bandit archers spawn in BG1

b) instakilled by Rayic Gethras' Finger of Death in BG2

c) imprisonmented by Kangaxx

d) level-drained to death

e) petrified by Beholders

f) had brain eaten by Mindflayers

g) died in Cloakwood spider webs

h) blasted to chunks by Thaxy dragon's level drain breath

j) paralyzed by Ghasts

k) ghasted by Aec'Laetec

....

.....

.....

 

This never, ever happens in Deadfire.  Not even remotely close. It's easy even if you don't know squat  about it other than stacking Deflection is apperantly equal to God mode, which kind of sums up my knowledge of the game.

I didn't have much trouble with Reef, maybe because I went there rather late (only 1 white skull). I don't know any anti caster strats for ciphers, or anything else for that matter (super-bosses aside, and w/o these forum I doubt I'd ever do Spider battle).

I only used brute force on everything - which proves my point - the game is so easy that there's just no need to. The whole "strategy" if you wanna call it that was that my PC with Casita Legacy + ugly green shield gets in combat first. From there on, its just counting frames and seeing icy arrows turning enemies into mush...

 

 

You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play).

BG on hardest difficulty settings means you take double damage if you take any. Since virtually all damage can be negated in BG2, provided you know the game, difficulty can be irrelevant.

I don't want to go into "which game is better" here (both BG1 and BG2 suffer from being extremely cheesable, serious class disbalance, silly OP equipment etc. but that's not the point. Given that I've modded BG2 I'm well aware of it's quirks.)

Saying Deadfire is harder than either BG1 or BG2 (provided you never played either BG or Deadfire) is not something I can agree on, quite the opposite.

PoEI I didn't like much for some reason, can't comment on difficulty.

I don't play BG w/o mods such as SCS, and I only play No-Reloads.

Honestly, if it weren't for mods, BG2 would be long dead by now. It's a great game, but it's life wasn't prolonged by it's quality; but by modders' ingenuity.

 

P.S.

On topic of dragons-

BG2 - meet Thaxy first time  -  whole party dead in less than 20 seconds, dragon uninjured. Difficulty level - normal (easier than "core")

Deadfire - meet the Watershaper dragon  - 60% of party dead, 40% half health, dragon dead in cca 30 secons. Difficulty - PotD. Non-upscaled.

[kreso]

BG2 is quite easy without SCS, what are we talking about here? You can literally AFK spam Cloudkill Wand on Firkraag and he dies without you ever seeing him on the screen. Also, the fact that you've been playing cRPG's for over 3 decades probably gave you a lot of expertise on the genre, so of course you will be good at beating Deadfire by default. Thing is, imo, POTD is not even close to the highest difficulty you can achieve in this game. Add full upscale, Ironman + Expert + a few challenges and it becomes brutal to beat. Add all the challenges combined and it becomes almost impossible.

BG2 is easy, once you know it (hell, you can grab Staff of Magi with a bit of metagaming as first weapon in the game and waltz through the game invisible, if that's ur game). Deadfire is easy even if you don't know it, that's my whole point.

Believe it or not; I don't play cRPGs other than BG. Deadfire is the only one I could "get into", hence the post, since it really impressed me. Seeing Port Maje for the first time?! I felt like I was 16 again, exploring freakin Beregost! No RPG I played had this effect on me after BG.

Hated Dragon Age, hated Witcher, hated Divinity:OS, hated everything First-Person ever made, I didn't even like Torment or IWD games much.  Blasphemy, I know.  

Tyranny is quite good, thou. At least I die sometimes prior to level 7 or so. And Fallout1-2 is nice.