Just bought it!

[xzar_monty]

53 minutes ago, thelee said:

though given the achivement rate for deadfire (and even poe1), most players barely play through just the crit path.

Wow. That's very interesting -- and slightly puzzling, too. I'm thorough, but I only tend to play a game once. BG2 is the great exception.

[thelee]

4 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Wow. That's very interesting -- and slightly puzzling, too. I'm thorough, but I only tend to play a game once. BG2 is the great exception.

yeah that's the reason why they have berath's blessing the way they do, because most people just tend to play or replay the start of the game. which is... odd! so they wanted a new game+ method without actually requiring players to beat the game first.

i mean, i kinda get it, the first time I had Baldur's Gate in the 90s I probably played candlekeep and the first part of chapter 1 over and over again re-rolling different characters. didn't actually beat the game until coming back to it years later. but i thought i was a weirdo, guess this is actually more typical than i thought.

edit - in hindsight, i also did this with Fallouts 1 and 2 and Icewind Dale. I think it took around BG2 before I settled into my current playstyle.

Edited October 30, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

In one sense, I do get it, as the start tends to be a lot more interesting than the end, but it's still a bit odd. Beginnings contain an awful lot of possibilities, ends (quite naturally) much less so.

In PnP, I find that the most interesting levels are somewhere between 5 and 15, and it's pretty much the same in cRPGs. Very early on, you're likely to die if someone sneezes or goes Boo, whereas by level 20 you're equipped to knock gods off their perches (sometimes that even happens to be your job), which is not as interesting as genuine challenges.

[MedicineDan]

Yeah, devs have been complaining about putting time and effort into content that never gets seen for years.  Really an issue with an RPG where folks want at least some notion of choice and exploration, however illusory, and don't want to feel railroaded into a strict path.  So side quests get created that the majority of users never see.  On the other hand, from looking at Steam stats, it's amazing to me how many people don't finish games of any genre.

Meanwhile, it's really too bad that Deadfire allegedly had poor sales.  I didn't follow the game much at all.  I pledged to it, got it, installed it, and played probably fifteen minutes before I put it on the shelf.  I had some extra time and started playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and played quite a bit of it before I just lost all interest.  I decided to try Deadfire and was amazed at how great it is.

As for you, Wormerine, I think I may agree with you more than you realize.  It's just that I'm trying not to say anything even spoilerish because the OP just started playing the game.

[Boeroer]

About finishing/replaying a game: there might be different factors at play:

- time available: you want to finish but time is scarce so you push through the crit path.

- hook: you can like a game but it doesn't hook you like other games do or did. My best examples: Into the Breach and Druidstone. I like both games but didn't really finish - while I played the heck out of FTL and stuff like PoE or even Blackguards (which might be a better comparison to Druidstone - it's a worse game but it still kept me playing).

- personal taste: sometimes even the graphics style pits me off - although I try to overlook that. This works well in some games (Slay the Spire, Avernum) while I can't get over it with others (Fell Seal or D:OS).

- "vibe": I mean some games are just so weirdly mesmerizing that you can't stop (Hotline Miami) even if you don't like the genre in the first place. Probably also has something to do with the music.

- age: don't know why, just have a feeling that it might be a thing, right?

[daven]

I never played Numenera or Wasteland 2, however the Shadowrun games are quite good. Particularly Dragonfall.

I've only heard negative things about Numenera. 

[Blunderboss]

I too have severe case of restartitis.

For me it’s mostly because games gets too easy/boring past the mid game there are no real “difficulties” in unmoded games these days. Developers usually use an excuse that “hur dur not everyone makes op characters and we want everyone to be able to complete the game blah blah and so on”  well that’s why games have different difficulties.

I think at least the hardest difficulty should be really challenging and get even more challlenging towards the end game but it doesn’t. Yeh that’s why I finish  1 out of 10 Deadfire playtroughs I start. Past certain point you just know that this is not gonna get anymore interesting with current party and finishing the game would be a huge chore. Also it does not help that “solo” is a huge factor in PoE games, but if the game is balanced that solo characters can finish it then there is no way it can actually be challenging with a party. 

[MedicineDan]

5 hours ago, daven said:

I never played Numenera or Wasteland 2, however the Shadowrun games are quite good. Particularly Dragonfall.

I've only heard negative things about Numenera. 

I enjoyed the hell out of Wasteland 2.  Numenera was extremely disappointing.  I personally felt as if it were trying to capture the weirdness of Planescape:  Torment by throwing weird at the wall and seeing what stuck.  Then repeating the whole game.  There were parts that showed promise, but eventually it got to be a little confusing for me and I abandoned it fairly early.  Too bad, because I was really looking forward to it.  I'd even pledge.  I still have the game, but I haven't opened it for some time.  I have a whopping 15 hours played, and some of that would be paused while I took care of other things.  I guess that's the problem with trying to recreate a quirky title like PS:T.

[thelee]

5 hours ago, Blunderboss said:

Yeh that’s why I finish  1 out of 10 Deadfire playtroughs I start. Past certain point you just know that this is not gonna get anymore interesting with current party and finishing the game would be a huge chore. Also it does not help that “solo” is a huge factor in PoE games, but if the game is balanced that solo characters can finish it then there is no way it can actually be challenging with a party. 

With 5.0, I do appreciate--to an extent-- that they buff up the Ukaizo boss depending on how many megabosses you have killed. It doesn't change the fact that you can roflstomp the adds, but it does make the actual fight a bit more of a challenge. Also, in this respect I feel like Deadfire strongly exceeds expectations, because they have kept amping up difficulty and adding new late game challenges for the .1% of the already small player base that is into that. But I think it is a sorry state of the current field of games that even here Deadfire still suffers from the "I have tons of money and power at end" problem, especially considering how well they had actually balanced the game economy at first: you were never really flush with cash and there were always money sinks - now after a couple DLCs you can have literally hundreds of G and nothing to spend it on. Even in my Ultimate run, which involved doing as little content as possible, after doing FS I literally had more than 100k gold, whereas before that I only had less than 9k.

 

RE: solo, I would not compare solo to party-based gameplay. A lot of solo essentially results in bending game interactions, and there are some solo tricks that only work because you're solo (the biggest one being invisibility/untargetability = de-aggroing, which doesn't work in party unless everyone has invisibility/untargetability). I consider PoE1 and Deadfire essentially two different games, one for solo, and one for party. I think that's part of why there were was backlash about making solo an achievement in PoE1 - you could love PoE1 to death but solo play could be (and was) extremely banal and uninteresting. Whereas I venture to say there are some forum regulars who prefer to play solo.

Edited October 31, 2019 by thelee

[Morrydwen]

Such a shame that such a great game was not appreciated that much in the end. The only negative for me was the ship combat but in the end it was serviceable.

It is painful to watch Sawyer desperately trying to find reasons why the sales flopped. It is def not because OBsidian made a bad game. Sawyer is way too much focused on Divinity Original Sin. (I hope he isn't too harsh on himself).

 

Guess most people didn't like the setting. And also keep in mind that there is a huge majority of players just playing 'rpgs' for the story. Gameplay can be **** and all; they don't seem to care. If the story doesn't engage them, they are out.

[Slack83er]

Omg.. I started a fire! Ha ha

[kanisatha]

I only have positive things to say about PoE2, with the exception of a few minor things here and there. In fact, my biggest complaint is that they didn't provide a way to access all your companions simultaneously so you can easily distribute equipment to everyone. It just really irritates me to have to swap out companions who are not in my active party four at a time to upgrade their equipment and even to level them up.

I guess I am one of the very few people that liked T:ToN. I suppose a big part of that was precisely that you can play that game without having to engage in much combat at all. I also thought the story was interesting. Not amazing, but interesting enough. But most of all, I think the reason that game was fine for me is because I have never seen PsT as a particularly good game, and as such was not comparing T:ToN to something many others seem to identify as one of the greatest RPGs ever made.

[xzar_monty]

13 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

In fact, my biggest complaint is that they didn't provide a way to access all your companions simultaneously so you can easily distribute equipment to everyone.

To an extent, I understand this, but I don't think it's ultimately reasonable to expect this to be any different from what it is. The fact that they decided to go for a five-man party pretty much set this one in stone.

[kanisatha]

10 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

To an extent, I understand this, but I don't think it's ultimately reasonable to expect this to be any different from what it is. The fact that they decided to go for a five-man party pretty much set this one in stone.

Why? It's not like I'm saying we should have access too all the companions all the time. I'm just saying there should've been a specific situation, for example being on your ship, where you can bring up a UI that includes everyone. In fact, it is Obsidian that did exactly this, in NwN2, where within your stronghold you can access all your companions at the same time.

[Boeroer]

That would have been neat indeed.

[Wormerine]

1 minute ago, kanisatha said:

Why? It's not like I'm saying we should have access too all the companions all the time.

Yeah. Outer Worlds gives you access to all companions equipment while in the ship. I don’t think Deadfire suffers too much (it’s easy enough to swap companions and equip them while one the ship) but it could have been more convenient. 

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, kanisatha said:

Why? It's not like I'm saying we should have access too all the companions all the time. I'm just saying there should've been a specific situation, for example being on your ship, where you can bring up a UI that includes everyone. In fact, it is Obsidian that did exactly this, in NwN2, where within your stronghold you can access all your companions at the same time.

Ok. I hold my hand up and stand corrected, then. (I found NWN2 so poor that I never even got into it.)

[MedicineDan]

I agree with the idea of making it easier to swap around gear.  For a long time, the only thing people out of party carried were weapons.  We'd get embroiled in ship battles and my joinable NPCs would be running around naked fighting people.  Eventually, I went through everyone's gear and settled on armor and weapons for everyone.

PS:T has been my gold standard for years, but I've often wondered if I would feel the same way if I played it for the first time today.  Kind of a useless endeavor. Counterfactual history presumes being able to extrapolate from one changed event, which isn't how life works.  Anyhow, PS:T has real genius and helped shape my view of RPGs.  However, it was undisciplined and had serious text bloat.  Deadfire, in my opinion, is simply better constructed.

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, MedicineDan said:

PS:T has been my gold standard for years, but I've often wondered if I would feel the same way if I played it for the first time today.  Kind of a useless endeavor.

Indeed. But for the record, in case it interests you, I can say that I never even knew about the game when it first came out. Eventually I learned about its reputation, and I decided to give it a try approximately six months before the EE came out (not knowing it was going to come out). It was not interesting. I found it dated, ugly and simply dull. I very quickly gave up trying to get into it.

Now, my gold standard has been BG2. I haven't wondered about what you've wondered, but it's definitely a valid question -- to which there is no answer, as you yourself insinuated.

[thelee]

2 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

It was not interesting. I found it dated, ugly and simply dull. I very quickly gave up trying to get into it.

I didn't play PsT when it first came, I came around to it a few years after wards.

It think it has incredibly awful gameplay (which is weird, because it's based on the same infinity engine as everyone else, which means they had to actively make it worse). I thought the numerous custom spells suffered from Final Fantasy-itis, having none of the nice complexity of normal D&D: virtually all the high-level spells I remember just being pure damage and high-level ones having annoyingly long "cinematic" qualities, hence I kept thinking that they were trying to be like FF7 somehow. On top of that the UI was extremely clunky, the color palette was dull, and the CGI portraits aged very poorly compared to the stylized art/watercolor of BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2.

All that being said, I thought the game's saving grace was the writing, and the fact that if I wanted to (and I did), I could simply avoid most of all the annoying combat and gameplay by just sticking to pacifist options (and you were aggressively awarded for investing in the "soft" stats of wisdom, intelligence, and charisma which in other IE games were only situationally not dump stats). It was basically a point-and-click adventure game at that point, and a pretty well-written one IMO. If I were to revisit it now, I imagine I might find it a bit too floral or dense, but it would still likely be remarkable for how much was invested in the writing. I'm pretty sure the gameplay still sucks though. So if I were to recommend PsT to anyone, it would solely be on the virtue of the writing and I would be actively warning them about everything else.

Edited November 2, 2019 by thelee

[kanisatha]

Same for me with Ps:T. I actually had bought a CD copy of it many years ago, though not when it first came out, but just never bothered to load it up. Then, when the EE came out, based on all I'd heard about the game for years, I bought it and played it. I did finish the game, but everything @thelee says about it is exactly how I found it as well though for me even the writing was good but not amazing (never been very enamored of Avellone's writing).

So when I went into T:ToN, I did not at all do so with Ps:T as my point of reference or comparison. I think unfortunately for T;ToN, many people who were huge fans of Ps:T went into it with Ps:T as their frame of reference, and this badly hurt the game's reception. Not that there aren't legitimate things about T:ToN that can be criticized, but many people I feel never gave the game a fair chance.

[Boeroer]

And now I trample in and say: "I didn't play both! Ahahahaha!"

 

 

[Wormerine]

22 hours ago, MedicineDan said:

PS:T has been my gold standard for years, but I've often wondered if I would feel the same way if I played it for the first time today.  Kind of a useless endeavor. Counterfactual history presumes being able to extrapolate from one changed event, which isn't how life works.  Anyhow, PS:T has real genius and helped shape my view of RPGs.  However, it was undisciplined and had serious text bloat.  Deadfire, in my opinion, is simply better constructed.

I don't think I have much nostalgia toward PS:T. It took me a while to get to it, and I found it brilliant. Replayed it couple years ago, and still found it really good.

I don't put all isometric RPG into same category. Planescape, Fallout1&2, Baldur's Gate1&2, Icewind Dale are to me distinctive categories, and only the last two have a significant overlap due to using same combat system, but different focus. 

Combat in Planescape is bad, but I treat dialogue as gameplay too - it's mechanics are simple but it is trying to do something Bgs didn't attempt - your character built having an influence on the dialogue. In addition overal story and writing are more mature and poignant than what was offered in other titles. It's one of those inspired but flawed game - My personal biggest complain is the latter part of the game, where combat becomes more common, and high Charisma, Intelligent, Wise character being THE way to play.

Disco Elysium is the game which gave me genuine Planescape vibes, and it take the ideas and mechanics to the new level. Unfortunately, I DE didn't stick the landing when it comes to the story (nor did it keep the depth of interaction throughout the title).

I felt, Pillars series really elegantly combined all elements of Infinity Games - with overall pace and construction of BGs, pretty combat heavy areas of IDs, and a more ponderous story, with our character build having an affect on your dialogue options of Planescape. It even tries to make quests more open-ended, alla Fallouts. Good stuff. I want moar. I kinda feel like replaying PoE1 at some point. White March is just too good. 

[xzar_monty]

3 hours ago, kanisatha said:

even the writing was good but not amazing (never been very enamored of Avellone's writing).

I'm not that familiar with Avellone's writing as a whole, but the two major examples I know, the Grieving Mother in PoE1 and Nok-Nok in P:K are nothing special, in my opinion. The Grieving Mother is over-elaborate (if memory serves, there was a particular overabundance of adjectives, which is very rarely a good sign), and Nok-Nok is just cheesy, like nearly all writing in P:K. I'm not saying either of those two is bad as such, but clearly there's nothing there that would set them apart as examples of particularly good cRPG writing.

 

@Wormerine: White March is great. But heck, at least 50% of the fights are just fillers. That was an astonishingly bad call from the developers. There's an awful lot of fighting, but you don't get XP and you don't get loot worth mentioning and there's nothing to spend that extra money on. That just royally sucks. Luckily this was fixed for Deadfire.

Edited November 3, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

 

@Wormerine: White March is great. But heck, at least 50% of the fights are just fillers. That was an astonishingly bad call from the developers. There's an awful lot of fighting, but you don't get XP and you don't get loot worth mentioning and there's nothing to spend that extra money on. That just royally sucks. Luckily this was fixed for Deadfire.

I found filler fights to be a problem in base game - I rarely felt that way about WM (perhaps two to many ghost fights in the Battery). For Real Time combat it felt very good to me.

I think Chris A. best work is the bigger picture stuff, rather then individual written lines. He can take something campy, subvert it and bring something narratively interesting out of it. I found games in which he was a lead or designed overarching story to have a unity, cohesion and focus.

His writing can be descriptive and wordy which clashes with pacing of a game. Say what you want about amount of reading required for Grieving Mother quest, but he story thematically foreshadowed the "reveal" beautifully, potentially making you question morality of what Thaos is doing, depending on whenever you decided that what GM did was right or wrong. This is what I liked about his work, and this is what makes Planescape so excellent.