Why has PoE2 been sold so badly?

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Desmodeus said:

Ship combat was not optional once? Oh man, that must have been so damn annoying. Ship stuff just doesn't interact with main part of game in any way.

Agreed. And not only that: it positively interrupts the sense of group adventuring (possibly even solo adventuring, for those who prefer that), because once you start a ship battle, both you and your adventurers basically disappear. This does not hold for boarding fights -- which is the way I did my naval fighting -- because your group is there and you command a substantial portion of it.

Luckily, it was possible to simply ignore this side of the game, so I did, and I had an awful lot of fun playing the game.

Towards the end, I noticed that I had huge amounts of money and I could have spent it on ship improvements, but I didn't see any reason to do so, because nothing in my game would have changed. If I wanted to flee from other ships, even that was always possible without any improvements at all. So why get a better ship? It isn't needed.

Here's another thing that I think is true but I'm not entirely sure about: if you want to sail to Ukaizo on your own ship, there are a number of improvements that you need. You can buy some of them (like -- I think -- the dragonwing sails), but there's no way you can buy all of them. So money is not enough: you can't buy the hull. Correct me if I'm wrong. You need to build the hull, and for that you need adventuring, not money. (I found some of the blackwood logs, but not all of them, and I have no idea where the rest of them were.)

[Boeroer]

You can buy the hull and sails you need and it's not that expensive compared to buying a bigger ship and equipping it with the good stuff etc. That way you don't need to side with a faction that would provide other means of reaching Ukaizo (like submarine or ghost ship). Of course getting one of those costs nothing (I mean money).

It's true that you don't need to do ship combat and therefore don't need to buy anything for your ship if you want to resolve every ship encounter with boarding. Ship to ship combat just gives you the advantage to be able to take on overleveled ships a lot sooner because sailor/captain XP is independent from level. That way you can win ship fights and get the better loot (and even some uniques) a lot sooner as you would be able to if you chose boarding. And it's not even expensive. You only need some decent cannons and two master cannoneers. Also when you go solo ship combat is a lot easier than boarding fights imo. But yes: not mandatory at all. 

 

Edited January 13, 2021 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

27 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

You can buy the hull and sails you need and it's not that expensive compared to buying a bigger ship and equipping it with the good stuff etc. That way you don't need to side with a faction that would provide other means of reaching Ukaizo (like submarine or ghost ship). Of course getting one of those costs nothing (I mean money).

Wow, that's interesting. Where do you buy the hull? I got the impression that the Blackwood Hull is only available if you build it yourself. I also seem to remember that this is a change that was made in a patch, i.e. it used to be possible to buy the hull, but it's not anymore. Again, I may be wrong here.

I didn't want to side with any of the factions (heck, Obsidian games are too much into these factions and they should just ditch the idea for a while), and I chose the route where you need to perform a ritual at sea and then win yourself a fairly unusual ship, I'm sure you know what I mean...

Btw, I'm sure you're absolutely right that if you play solo, ship combat is a lot easier than boarding fights!

[Boeroer]

Ah sorry, I completely forgot that you can no longer buy the Blackwood hull but must collect the logs it nowadays. That was indeed changed in a patch. Dragonwing Sails you can still buy. On one hand it's less expensive I guess - but of course that takes a lot more time to hunt for the logs. 

It's a little bit meh that you can't sail to Ukaizo with the Red Dream Hull nd/or Gulskin Sails - since both are twice as strong as Blackwood Hull/Dragonwing Sails - they just make you a bit slower - but sturdy as hell. 
 

[frostling]

On 1/10/2021 at 11:48 AM, Boeroer said:

I can close the circle then and ask:

If that was a problem for the majority of PoE players and a reason of disappointment so big they decided to not buy Deadfire: why isn't that reflected in the user reviews of PoE - which are very positive and don't talk about the mechanics a lot?

I'm not sure whether it was so for the majority of players, but speaking for myself, I rarely leave reviews (which is not limited to games, just in general). I'd say it was pathfinding that was the biggest issue for me in PoE, to the point where I've found combat a chore. And there was a lot of combat in that game. Which is why I didn't pay much attention to the franchise and only got PoE2 recently (currently on my first playthrough). And I find combat a lot more enjoyable in turn based mode.

I think if the advertising was more visible (especially that it has tb combat) when PoE2 came out, I'd have probably gotten it sooner, because it was a bit of a random winter sale buy.

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, frostling said:

I'd say it was pathfinding that was the biggest issue for me in PoE, to the point where I've found combat a chore.

It was, indeed, a huge issue. No monster in the game was even close to being as dangerous as bad pathfinding was in combat. I was extremely impressed by how well -- how totally, almost -- it was fixed for Deadfire.

I found combat to be a chore for other reasons, though. Combat gave you a very limited amount of XP points: most monsters in most combats gave you nothing in terms of XP. This is why I thought it was completely baffling that there were filler encounters all over the place. You got no XP, you got no loot to speak of, all you got was a huge waste of time. That was some bad planning right there. And, again: I was impressed by how well this was fixed for Deadfire. It could have been even better, but it was fixed well.

[thelee]

6 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

I was extremely impressed by how well -- how totally, almost -- it was fixed for Deadfire.

Probably not many players have played Deadfire nearly as much as me, but IME Deadfire has its pathfinding problems as well. In fact, the worst "clever" thing that Deadfire does is that it doesn't re-calculate your path if you click to move in roughly the same area, even if circumstances have changed (e.g. new obstacles); they just try to stick to their path and just do minor adjustments around the obstacles. This can lead to mind-numbingly bad/dumb outcomes (such as constantly running into an enemy and only slightly trying to move around them). I have to consciously press the "stop command" key (x by default) and then click to move, and that will cause the character to re-calculate their path.

That being said, Deadfire is much more forgiving of bad pathing. Engagement is not nearly as ubiquitous as in PoE, and you are now allowed to move around (so long as it's in melee range) without breaking engagement. In PoE, one bad step and you suddenly got engaged by a bajillion beetles and then one more wrong step and then you suddenly get hit with a bajillion engagement attacks.

Edited January 19, 2021 by thelee

[Boeroer]

Pathing still has issues. Try to go around any character that crosses your way and bumps into you: you two might end up walking side by side like a couple holding hands until eternity.

But the shoving motions alone made it so much better than before.

Also that the attack roll actually checks if you are still in range is way better. In PoE you could hit anybody who WAS in melee range at the time you initiated attack but then moved away. It was weird. I would have the Long Stride + Boots of Speed and run half a screen away from a Lurker only to get hit by a its slap it started to execute what felt like an hour ago. 

[NotDumbEnough]

IMO the worst part of pathing is that characters will refuse to cast a long range spell if they can't literally walk to the target area. Yes, there's someone in the way 4m away from the target area, but your spell has 6m range.

 

I actually somewhat dislike the "out of range" feature for melee, as it allows for minor cheesing against enemies that can't hold engagement. And sometimes enemies will break engagement and run away from you, but for some reason you can't catch up and re-engage them (the chasing character will stand right next to the enemy and make stuttering steps), and if you try to swing at them you're guaranteed to miss. The enemy that is trying to run away is literally invulnerable to melee attacks until it stops moving, and this can be abused by the player too (if you're willing to take a disengagement attack, you can often run away even if you're hobbled)/

[xzar_monty]

15 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Also that the attack roll actually checks if you are still in range is way better. In PoE you could hit anybody who WAS in melee range at the time you initiated attack but then moved away. It was weird. I would have the Long Stride + Boots of Speed and run half a screen away from a Lurker only to get hit by a its slap it started to execute what felt like an hour ago.

Ahh, this was a classic in Baldur's Gate II as well. An enemy mage casts a spell with a range of 30 feet. You are within range, moving swiftly away with boots of speed on. The spell ends up hitting you approximately 150 feet away from where it was cast.

Deadfire also had an equivalent of sorts, but with traps. I saw it happen to me in the Undercity, twice. One of your characters triggers a trap when you're very close to exiting that particular map. There is no time for anything to happen. You return to the same map an hour, a week or three months later, and one of your characters is immediately hit by a necrotic lance or whatever it was in that trap.

These things are more funny than annoying in my book. (The lurker situation is annoying, though.)

[Boeroer]

Hah - never experienced that with a trap. That's indeed funny.

[thelee]

23 hours ago, NotDumbEnough said:

I actually somewhat dislike the "out of range" feature for melee, as it allows for minor cheesing against enemies that can't hold engagement.

i actually consider this a feature, not a cheese. it makes real-time combat a lot more satisfyingly tactical (and makes me feel like an RTS e-sports player with the benefit of pausing to execute such precise actions). it would be extremely bad if enemy AI could abuse it as bad as you could, sure, but i get a nice blast of endorphins every time i manage to dodge an Engwithan Digsite boar's "gore" attack that would have one-hit-knocked-out a level 3 hireling just by stepping out of the way.

[NotDumbEnough]

17 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Ahh, this was a classic in Baldur's Gate II as well. An enemy mage casts a spell with a range of 30 feet. You are within range, moving swiftly away with boots of speed on. The spell ends up hitting you approximately 150 feet away from where it was cast.

Deadfire also had an equivalent of sorts, but with traps. I saw it happen to me in the Undercity, twice. One of your characters triggers a trap when you're very close to exiting that particular map. There is no time for anything to happen. You return to the same map an hour, a week or three months later, and one of your characters is immediately hit by a necrotic lance or whatever it was in that trap.

These things are more funny than annoying in my book. (The lurker situation is annoying, though.)

The necrotic lance is a bug. You can never detect the trap and it will never fire when you first trigger it. Instead it fires if you load a save within the area after you trigger it.

[xzar_monty]

Really? Interesting. Thanks for that.

As I said, the trap also fires if you return to the area after triggering it and leaving.