Why is PoE2 not successful ?

[Boeroer]

It is true that it's a lot easier to plan and design encounters, balance classes etc. if the party always starts fights with the same resources (consumables and trinkets etc. aside). But in my opinion that's the only real benefit.

I like a more tactical approach better, especially when it comes to "dungeon crawling". I like to manage my resources and finding a way how to spend them best over the course of a certain passage. Only using resources if I must. The risk of frustration is higher but so is the feeling of accomplishment, especially if the challenge was hard and it's your clever use of resources that let you win.

As I said earlier: you'd have to design the whole game around non-replenishable resources then. If you simply offer resting supplies which you can buy anywhere then the main reason why I like per-rest resources is taken away - since per-rest turns into per-encounter - if you rest after every encounter. This doesn't only mean spells and other abilites but also the loss of health.  Maybe especially health. 

The whole implementation would be a lot more challenging for sure. But I wouldn't call the desire for a rewarding resource management (be it per-rest or however you want to do it) stupid or ridiculous. 

Because it's more challenging I said I would design smaller areas between rests. 

If it would be stupid to like those things then all the successful tactical roguelite or roguelike games which are all about resource management and investing your resources wisely (often health) would only get developed and played by stupid or ridiculous people and I don't think that's the case. 

But maybe a big CRPG such as Deadfire isn't the best game to try this in the first place. If you want to focus on telling a story, roleplaying, immersion, factions, companions, exploration and so on and not really on combat (as long as it's enjoyable and good enough) then maybe the better approach indeed is to make it all per-encounter and have and easier time to balance and design that.  

Edited November 25, 2019 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

13 hours ago, Gromnir said:

ridiculous.

It is not ridiculous, it is simply a different preference from yours. Like you have a distinctly different preference to the way you use language, and I am inclined to think there might be some people likely to call it various unpleasant names.

Like Boeroer already said, it's a question of resource management, and I happen to prefer games where that is a relevant concern. In Deadfire, it most decidedly is not. In PoE it still was, to a certain extent (with Health).

Resource management gives you a sense of accomplishment, the feeling that you've been able to work well within your constraints. This does not exist in Deadfire. It doesn't ruin the game, of course, but to me it is a drawback.

Edited November 25, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Gromnir]

4 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

It is not ridiculous, it is simply a different preference from yours. Like you have a distinctly different preference to the way you use language, and I am inclined to think there might be some people likely to call it various unpleasant names.

Like Boeroer already said, it's a question of resource management, and I happen to prefer games where that is a relevant concern. In Deadfire, it most decidedly is not. In PoE it still was, to a certain extent (with Health).

Resource management gives you a sense of accomplishment, the feeling that you've been able to work well within your constraints. This does not exist in Deadfire. It doesn't ruin the game, of course, but to me it is a drawback.

still being ridiculous. resource management is not inherent linked to per-rest abilities. infact, try and think o' games beyond niche fantasy/d&d analogues which rely heavy on per-rest. the only games where folks make this bass ackwards argument is games inspired by vancian d&d.  after all, if were such a fantabulous feature, we would see requested in others, but that ain't the case. no x-com or fallouts or whatever. is any number o' games with resource management elements but no per rest, so what makes niche fantasy special? nothing.

oh, and poe gets rid o' old resource staples such as weighty gold and limited ammo and eat-or-die mechanics from oldie games.

applause.

try and get rid o' vancian, which is used nowhere but niche fantasy crpgs, and we nevertheless have resistance.

weird.

is a silly anachronism. folks don't realize how silly is their request for perpetuation o' per-rest 'cause is somehow part o' the feels o' a d&d inspired game. just... weird.

HA! Good Fun!

[xzar_monty]

It's still difficult to take your line of reasoning seriously, as it's a matter of opinion. Like: in PoE, resource management related to rest / health was still there, and in Deadfire, it was no longer there. I preferred the former. You may deem it ridiculous all you want, but I think that's being slightly obnoxious, since we're just talking preferences. Also, I never said we were talking about a fantabulous feature (or any linguistic permutation thereof), simply a feature.

Definitely no need to take this any further, so let's just stop now, right?

[Boeroer]

I don't care about D&D and what it inspired. I simply like it more to plan over the course of several encounters instead to view every one as an isolated event. Basically you can say that i'd like to see a reasonably sized dungeon (or other areas) as one big encounter or challenge - and not every fight as a singular one. 

It doesn't necessarily mean that there have to be per-rest abilites. It can also mean something else like PoE-health.

I played a lot of The Dark Eye P&P when I was young and health as well as "mana" or other resource pools only replenished a bit during sleep. I mean if you drained yourself or got severely wounded it would have taken weeks (in game time) to be back to 100%. In case of priests you couldn't even go to sleep but had to properly meditate or visit a church or speak with a brother. Stuff like that. So you couldn't just enter a dungeon like a buch of drunk spring breakers and try to roflstomp its residents. I always liked that. 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Boeroer

[thelee]

On 11/23/2019 at 12:21 PM, Boeroer said:

I liked PoE's endurance/health mechanic a lot more than Deadfire's injuries. It made it so that even filler fights mattered. Meaning that if you were careless in those fights it had an impact on your next fight (if you didn't rest in between) but at the same time it didn't lower your figthing ability so you didn't feel the need to rest immidiately after losing some health - like you do when catching an injury.  

 

On 11/24/2019 at 12:15 AM, xzar_monty said:

Agreed. PoE's mechanic was better and for exactly the reason you describe. Deadfire trivializes encounters because everything gets back to square one immediately afterward.

hard disagree. i have to imagine it's some form of stockholm syndrome, absent imagining better alternatives. endurance/health was one of the worst, most unintuitive aspects of PoE1. it was an immense source of confusion to new players and it led to extremely bizarre outcomes and incentives in-game. (I have literally let characters get knocked out instead of healing them, because it meant the difference between unconscious-and-ignored-by-enemies vs permadeath. in certain setups, consecrated ground or other persistent regeneration is your own worst enemy for squishier characters. in addition, you could grind out fights you had no business winning simply because enemy health would slowly go down over time despite potentially infinite healing either in-combat or from deaggro-out-of-combat-regen; not gonna lie my poe1 ultimate won some fights like this.) of all elements of poe1, i would consider endurance/health the biggest design flaw.

the only thing i would tweak about deadfire's wound management is to make it more like tyranny's, where simply getting low health would trigger a wound (iirc you had a higher wound limit and a knockout yielded more than one wound so it was still worse than falling low health). This would solve the "don't be careless" aspect better than returning to endurance/health. in practice in poe1 when you're high enough level, your health pools are so large that chip damage is ignorable, so i don't see how endurance/health solves this any better.

edit - i would also make the change to make "wound" a less common-type of injury. it is by far the most punishing injury since it actively reduces the effectiveness of heals on top of a minor max health reduction and might lead to a desire to rest as soon as one gets an injur. iirc, tyranny's wounds all had the same effect that simply stacked, so it was less "jeez i should rest right now" and more ad-hoc decision-making about how much of a penalty you wanted to accumulate. i think there's virtue in having a diversity of wound types even if it is a bit murky (it's not like you really have a choice on how your character gets knocked out), so i wouldn't go all the way to tyranny style, just that there exists a happy medium between the two approaches.

Edited November 25, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

Wow! Very interesting. Thanks for that. It never caused any confusion for me. As far as I can remember, I also never (or practically never) used consecrated ground or any other persistent regeneration spells, so I didn't notice any of those effects. Obviously I am not denying anything you say, simply pointing out that my experience was very different indeed.

Edited November 25, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Gromnir]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

 

It doesn't necessarily mean that there have to be per-rest abilites. It can also mean something else like PoE-health.

 

talk 'bout increasing resource management all you want, but ignore fact that the ONLY games we ever see praise o' per rest abilities is d&d inspired crpgs should be be meaningful to you. why not other games if is such a fantabulous feature? brush such a reality aside is kinda obtuse, no?

boeroer wants more resource management? fine. talk resource management. 'course we noted how poe developers quite consciously removed many aspects o' resource management from their game, and in doing so only a small number o' folks complained. again, ignore this reality leads us to same conclusion.

also please recognize how resource management does not happen sole outside o' combat and only in games with per-rest. unlike vancian casting, which near inevitable results in ability bloat at high levels, with poe, and especial with deadfire, one cannot expend abilities w/o consideration o' the much more limited number o' uses you will be getting compared to per rest following a rest. encounters is designed in deadfire with recognition a player will have full access to all abilities, so a more appropriate resource management calculus is worked into every encounter.

which brings us back to recognition per rest in any significant form functional major changes party or player power based on an unknowable such as temporal proximity to most recent rest. this fact makes intelligent design o' encounters more problematic for developers. shouldn't need repeat whole o' the argument again, but such a consideration is, and should be, a pretty freaking compelling reason to avoid. 

HA! Good Fun!

[Gfted1]

On 11/22/2019 at 1:34 PM, algroth said:

You should give the games another go if the first game's beta is the last you'd tried of it. I think most here would agree that the game's gone through a lot of fine-tuning and changes all the way up to a rather polished and enjoyable state at patch 3.0.

Maybe some day in a distant, and bored, future. Its really not even an indictment of Obsidian. Ive got an entire library of games I haven't finished for one reason or another (they suck, bugs) or never installed (BattleTech). The only games I seems to finish nowadays are aRPG's so a large part is probably my tastes have changed.

Although I am going to buy the hell out of BG3 even though I do not like Larian offerings.

[GamerSerg]

I have to say I'm just as baffled as Josh on why Deadfire did not sell well.  Maybe it's because games like Deadfire are right in my wheelhouse.  I greatly enjoyed all of the games he referenced, PoE1, PoE2, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Divinity, etc.  Both turn based and RTwP can be great if done well so I don't think one is inherently better than the other.  RTwP worked great for Deadfire in my opinion.  I tried the turn based update and hated it.  Turn based worked well for Divinity but even DnD computer games tend to use RtwP.  Honestly, of all these games Divinity was my least favorite but not because it was  turn based.  It was good and I liked it but I can't understand why it sold so much better than PoE unless I am just in the minority.  

I think for me the depth of the character creation with so many ways to build characters and each one still being unique plus all the added options of subclasses and multiclassing is what I love most.  This is something that Divinity lacked.   Each class in Divinity has a few active abilities at any one time and you quickly learn which ones are the best and you rarely have reason to deviate.   Also, the AI script system was something I really enjoyed in Deadfire and is great for RtwP.

As for resource management, I also prefer limited resting and long term resource management.  Maybe it is just more realistic to me to not be camping in a dungeon or wilderness full of hostile monsters after every fight or watching your HP shoot back up to full as soon as the battle ends.  A dungeon should be a test of endurance.  I've always liked how 5e DnD has the concept of the short rest and long rest.  They generally recommend only allowing two short rests per day which partially restore some health and resources (but not all) before you have to take a long rest which would require returning to town to sleep at an Inn or your stronghold / ship.  When you return to town with your team exhausted of all spells, out of arrows, beat up and down to your last few hit points, carrying empty potion bottles and hard won loot, you feel like you have truly been through an ordeal that challenged you to use every last resource at your disposal and barely survived to tell the tale.

I've actually been thinking of re-installing Deadfire as I wait for any news on BG3 just because I need something to scratch that character building itch.  I don't know if anyone from Obsidian would read this but I want them to know that I loved Deadfire and I really hope the "poor" sales do not result in the end of PoE games.  Thank you for creating one of my all time favorite games, from someone who has been playing computer RPG since Ultima IV!

[Wormerine]

8 hours ago, thelee said:

the only thing i would tweak about deadfire's wound management is to make it more like tyranny's, where simply getting low health would trigger a wound (iirc you had a higher wound limit and a knockout yielded more than one wound so it was still worse than falling low health). This would solve the "don't be careless" aspect better than returning to endurance/health. in practice in poe1 when you're high enough level, your health pools are so large that chip damage is ignorable, so i don't see how endurance/health solves this any better.

Uh, I think this is “let’s agree to disagree” situation, as I found Tyranny injury system to be awful, unenjoyable and intuitive. Giving you health-pool and then punishing when you utilise it, was just annoying. 

Endurance, on the other hand, have damage through multiple encounters some meaning (not deep meaning, but similar to per-rest casting - in PotD I found I run out of spells about at the same time my tanks were running low on health), and it elegantly made it impossibly to infinitely heal my tanks during tricky encounters. Never run into issues you mentioned, though it might be due to me comprehending the idea quite quickly - I found it to be a clever middle ground between BG2 and respawning-after-knockout KOTOR. Deadfire injuries are just kinda pointless. It’s rare to gain one (unless one runs into a trap) and removing them is just a matter of a button press. Though that’s a problem those game struggle with. Yhh, now thanks to @Boeroer I will dream of PoE/DarkSoul hybrid. 

[Boeroer]

I also found Tyranny's use of health/wounds very annoying. 

Together with those abysmal cooldown mechanics (I mean the idea of cooldowns in general, not that this implementation was particularly bad) and the rather unbalanced ability trees it destroyed my desire to replay the game. I tried but cancelled.

The argument that if resource management mechanics were so popular gamers would ask for them: well they are. Rogielites and roguelikes and also games with survival aspects who nearly all work with restricted resources from "resting point" to resting point (in many different ways) sell better than most party based CRPGs. Darkest Dungeon sold very well for example. Over one million copies I read the other day. That's a lot more than Deadfire.... One of the rare mixes of RPG with strong emphasis on survival and resource management. So if such an approach is ridiculous or stupid: why does it sell so well?

The way I see it: If you use more per-encounter mechanics you drift a bit towards action RPG, if you incorporate more resource management it feels a bit more like a survival RPG. Whether you like the one or the other is just a matter of taste and how well the whole game incorporates certain mechanics. No need to call one side or the other ridiculous or stupid or whatever one would call tastes that don't align with one's own.

I have problems with Deadfire's health mechanic and favor PoE's because healing becomes too powerful. As we can see with the omnipresent Herald who has unlimited healing over time capabilities: you're essentially giving the whole party infinite health as long as you can make the fight slow. Infinity is never a good thing with game mechanics. Also see Gouging Strike, Brand Enemy, True Love's Kiss and such. It's so easy to abuse it and render most other approaches inferior.

The argument with the PoE-character who should get knocked out and stay knocked out rather than die: there were potions and talents that would have prevented this. You could also have rested earlier. If you chose not to use those options that's a decision you took but not the basic fault of the mechanics. You deemed Wound Binding etc. worthless and so didn't take them. But then you get frustrated in situations where they would have helped you. I don't know if that's such a good argument against PoE's endurance/health mechanics. It's a reason why you didn't like it but not a point that proves that those mechanics were bad. One simply option to fix this situation would have been to introduce a "feign death" option that everybody gets 1/encounter. Small change that would have solved your problem while not changing the underlying mechanic (which I think is superior to Deadfire's).

Was it "confusing"? Maybe. But it would have not been if it would have been explained better in a tutorial. Because if you can't understand the mechanic itself you shouldn't be able to understand most of the PoE mechanics and especially Deadfire mechanics (hello PEN/AR with double inversion and stuff) anyways. So this is also not a good argument against it. 

 

 

[Gromnir]

bg and bg2 also had per-rest and sold quite well.  to attribute success o' such games to per-rest might be a stretch, eh? use same argument for other games is silly. ridiculous.

again, 'cause some folks ain't listening, is only d&d inspired games which has folks requests for per-rest mechanic. gonna claim darkest dungeon doesn't fall into such a category? HA! if were actual a broad popular or desirable mechanic, then why is only d&d inspired games?  is a unique mechanic and folks is being inexplicable myopic 'bout a legacy feature which finds approval nowhere outside d&d legacy games-- squad-based tactical fantasy crpgs and the like. 

per-rest is hardly the alpha and omega o' resource management. nevertheless, the d&d folks is inexplicable enamored o' a single aspect o' resource management which finds no love outside o' those fantasy combat games inspired by d&d.

is weird. is head-scratching weird.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Gromnir said:

 to attribute success o' such games to per-rest might be a stretch, eh? use same argument for other games is silly. ridiculous.

 

If I remember correctly you asked why players don't ask for such mechanics if they were so popular. On the other hand you stated on multiple occasions (and correct me if I'm wrong) that fans don't know what they want anyways and that developers shouldn't listen too much to the suggestions of fans.

So basically you were saying that fans don't know what they want and what's good - but if resource management would be such a good feature why don't fans demand such features more often?

Duplicity of that aside: looking at the sales numbers seems like a reasonable and logical way to determine how much certain games were received and liked. My example of the Darkest Dungeon (which is an RPG and which heavily emphasizes on resource management, per-rest mechanics and survival aspects so I think it's a good example) shows that a lot of players actually want this stuff. They show it not by crying for such a game beforehand (since they don't know what they really like until they get it, right?) but by buying the game about one million times.  

Now where exactly is my argument that sales numbers show what players like, that an RPG with heavy emphasis on resource management sold tremendously well - which shows that such mechanics are well-liked if implemented well - ridiculous? 

What I said was never about D&D or if some grognards only want per-rest mechanics because of nostalgia. I personally don't care about D&D and also not about IE games and what they did and why. I think D&D rules in general are awful and so much worse than what Deadfire does.
Still I'm trying to explain why I think that certain limitations of resources over the course of a whole dungeon or area (instead of refreshing everything after each encounter) can make an RPG better IF the players like resource management and survival elements. At the same time I never said that per-rest is the "alpha and omega of resource management". It can be a part of it, but D&D and also PoE show that's it's not so easy: simply adding camping supplies and reducing their number on higher difficulties doesn't work well. You have to add more in order to make per-rest mechanics enjoyable.
So I'm fine with Deadfire's per-encounter approach when it comes to abilites. As we determined it's easier to balance and it's easier to plan encounters then. It's easier to get it right compared to a resource management/survivalish approach - which might turn out bad if you don't get everything right. I already said that in another post above.

What I actually emphasized on was PoE's endurance/health system compared to Deadfire's. PoE's health mechanics where easy enough (seriously who thinks they are complicated as soon as sombody told you what's it about?) but still allowed encounters to have an impact on each other. Was it perfect: nah, far from it. Was it better than Deadfire's instant wolverine-ish regeneration with also added access to unlimited healing? I think PoE is better in that regard because of the reasons I stated above. Others might like the Deadfire approach better. They might love that a Herald can just heal the whole party endlessly as long as nobody gets one-shotted. I find that boring but that's only me.

It's a matter of taste really - same as Powergaming vs. "proper" Roleplaying - but I hope I can make some people understand why other people (including me) might like PoE's approach better - at least the health part. Nothing ridiculous or stupid about that as far as I can tell. 

Edited November 26, 2019 by Boeroer

[Gromnir]

1 minute ago, Boeroer said:

If I remember correctly you asked why players don't ask for such mechanics if they were so popular. On the other hand you stated on multiple occasions (and correct me if I'm wrong) that fans don't know what they want anyways and that developers shouldn't listen too much to the suggestions of fans.

 

"talk 'bout increasing resource management all you want, but ignore fact that the ONLY games we ever see praise o' per rest abilities is d&d inspired crpgs should be be meaningful to you. why not other games if is such a fantabulous feature? brush such a reality aside is kinda obtuse, no?"

...

you are not helping dispel our suggestion o' obtuseness.

and yeah, am saying folks don't know what they want. if you can't explain away the disparity, then am gonna continue to question the validity. am thinking folks conflate like o' game with like o' specific mechanics, just as they does with such stuff as "exploration." even if you like resource management, the notion such is wedded to per-rest is questionable, particular given the total absence o' such a mechanic in games other than an extreme limited niche. axiomatic it is that fans, taken as a whole, is often baffling and self-refuting. regardless, is all manner o' resource management possible beyond per-rest abilities, per-rest, which once again, only finds traction in d&d inspired games-- squad-based tactical combat fantasy games. why is only the weird niche which has fans clamoring for per-rest? 

*sigh*

might as well be having this discussion with elmo, but yeah, from very start you misrepresent our question. pretty clear we were pointing out the absolute absence o' games other than d&d inspired crpgs where fans were clamoring for per-rest. 

HA! Good Fun!

[Boeroer]

I can give you his phone number...?

[Boeroer]

17 hours ago, thelee said:

i have to imagine it's some form of stockholm syndrome, absent imagining better alternatives.

Eh - you are better than this. 

[Lord_Mord]

Quote

why is only the weird niche which has fans clamoring for per-rest? 

I don't know about others, but I have two reasons: First I just like the concept (You know the idea of learning a spell, than forgetting it after you spoke it. Gives magic meaning). Second Resource Management. I know the system is flawed, but on the other hand ... It's your fault, if you rest-spam.

[Gromnir]

12 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Eh - you are better than this. 
 

quite the compliment, 'cause we thought it were a good line to drive home a valid observation. if he is even better than this, then am indeed impressed. am not sure if we would agree endurance/health was poe's worst mechanic, but is a short list o' similar (un)worthy contenders, so such a quibble is almost pointless. regardless, if thelee is better than the stockholm syndrome bit, then am awaiting his next post with some anticipation.

HA! Good Fun!

[Boeroer]

Well I mean it's thelee after all.

[uuuhhii]

deadfire clearly have better story and atmosphere

especially in main story motivation

awaken and watcher thing in poe1 just doesn't work at all

but bleak medieval of poe1 are what most player wanted or expected

colonial tropical archipelago with pirate are not

pirate themed rpg have many failure before

deadfire seems to be the only some what competent one

[Boeroer]

Riveted by that  of reasoning.

[bugarup]

27 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

pirate themed rpg 

These have their own name, you know -- arrpg. 

[daven]

1 hour ago, bugarup said:

These have their own name, you know -- arrpg. 

I have to say well done, thanks for lightening up this topic.

[Boeroer]