The game looks and feels abysmal in every way

[Malignacious]

Why is moderator not deleting these derailing, borderline-stalking posts?

 

I'm not the subject of this discussion.

[Ink Blot]

Border-line stalking? Get over yourself. The mods are probably not deleting posts for the same reason they're not deleting a not-so-subtle troll thread.

[forgottenlor]

 

Why is moderator not deleting these derailing, borderline-stalking posts?

 

Sorry if you feel stalked. I hope you are aware that anyone can click on any user and see their past posts and backer status. The site makes such "stalking" a matter of two or three clicks. I am guilty of stalking Josh Sawyer as well. If I see he has posted recently, I just click on his profile to see what he has written in different threads, rather than trying to read my way through all the threads, which I must admit would be too much for me. But just so you are comfortable, I promise not to post anymore in your thread. Farewell.

[Malignacious]

 for the same reason they're not deleting a not-so-subtle troll thread.

 

Well, I'm glad you've found a reason to distract yourself from blatantly crappy combat, visuals, and animations. 

The backing itself must be causing some cognitive dissonance by now too...

Edited September 25, 2014 by Malignacious

[Matt516]

Lol. Dat lack of ragdoll physics.

[NWN_babaYaga]

chooson malignicious ninja gamer will not admit he is just a clown. To be a chooson means to be a chooson for ever. They comply to the rules of greg park the korean ninjojo emperor of the chooson dynasty who brought ninja gaming to the world. And he now brought one of his other chooson nuts with him, dont fight the chooson´s just ignore them. They need attention to grow. Attention is their power!

 

Hail the chooson gamer nuts, please go now and play ninjajojo in the central park with your chooson master! You have made yourself the clown of today and yesterday and we all know you have problems...

Edited September 25, 2014 by NWN_babaYaga

[Althernai]

It's really funny that this "such a great game" cannot be defended against criticism on it's own values but instead the defenders need to attack the critic personally.

This is distasteful, but it mostly occurs because the criticism doesn't make much sense -- every point (except the one which is downright bizarre) is something you would expect to see in a beta, not something to cancel the game over. Summarizing the original post:

 

1) Colors need improvement -- already pointed out by people participating in the beta and will be improved.

2) Animations need improvement (repeated 4 times in various contexts) -- again, it's a beta, they are working on it.

3) Sounds need improvement -- beta, working on it.

4) No voice acting -- of course there isn't: not only is the voice acting done close to the end (it's orders of magnitude more difficult to change than just changing a line of text), but it's also reserved to important characters which means it's not likely to be seen in the beta as they don't want to spoil too much.

5) And then there is the bizarre ragdoll physics thing which basically comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with PoE (defeated enemies vanishing is obviously another thing that will be fixed).

 

It's criticism of the beta, but not very constructive criticism.

[Ink Blot]

It's really funny that this "such a great game" cannot be defended against criticism on it's own values but instead the defenders need to attack the critic personally.

As Althernai says, there's not much to 'defend' against. Almost everything the OP is complaining about is beta-specific (which I believe has been pointed out several times in this thread). As I already stated, until more beta updates occur, there's really no point in basing your criticism on things that will likely be changed in future updates.

[rjshae]

It's really funny that this "such a great game" cannot be defended against criticism on it's own values but instead the defenders need to attack the critic personally.

 

We've debated ragdoll physics on this forum before, so this is a bit of a rehash in the form of a troll. Not sure there's that much new that can be added to the discussion at this point.

[Darth Trethon]

 

It's really funny that this "such a great game" cannot be defended against criticism on it's own values but instead the defenders need to attack the critic personally.

 

We've debated ragdoll physics on this forum before, so this is a bit of a rehash in the form of a troll. Not sure there's that much new that can be added to the discussion at this point.

 

Pretty much this^^ 

 

The fact it's a beta accounts for most of the shortcomings and likewise most of these issues will be resolved before the full release.....now what's left? Oh yeah.....boo-hoo voice-overs will be limited and there won't be rag-doll physics now go cry about it somewhere it's relevant because that place sure isn't here.

Edited September 25, 2014 by Darth Trethon

[rheingold]

Don't know about anyone else, but when I decided to back POE, first and foremost I was looking for something along the lines of IWD2.

A good story, well written dialogue, maybe a narrator instead of voiced characters which would really bring back some memories.... What I wasn't looking for was rag doll physics and exploding enemas... I mean enemies. Otherwise I could just just play DA2.

[Ieo]

Eh, I duck in here only for the update announcements these days, but I see little has changed in the way of periodic Illiterate Trolls Whining About Things Unrelated to a Game They Didn't Back.

 

Rag doll physics indeed, hur hur hur! Incomplete voice-acting where full VA was laid to rest, when, 2012? Man, kids these days. Git off our lawn.

[Lephys]

We really could do without the personal attacks to Malignacious himself. You can riposte his argument all day long without attacking him a single time.

 

There's no reason to make fun of someone for simply liking game physics. That's not part of explaining, objectively, why this game is fine without them.

[Ieo]

Leyphs, that approach MIGHT make sense for someone who just stumbled upon this forum and English isn't his first language, but this is incredibly basic: You read. You search for information because it's all out there. You read the Kickstarter page and all its updates. You put two and two together and figure out WHAT this crowdsourced project is supposed to be about. And if you decide to start multiple threads over multiple months trying to bring up the same idiotic complaints but not taking any of the counters to heart ever, the fault is not in the rest of us who did back the KS.

 

It boils down to arguing about game genre and graphical subjective preferences as a qualitative assessment of what makes a "better" game. What is possibly objective about that approach?

[Malignacious]

LOL, the whole ragdoll physics thing was tangential, which is obvious to anyone who is honest and has a basic reading comprehension skill, not to mention that I had already explicitly explained on the very first page why it's not about it per se.

 

This incoherent latching onto something stated in passing is a typical tactic of desperate people with cognitive dissonance.

[Ink Blot]

Hardly tangential when you state in your first post that it's one of the reasons combat feels flat, then go on in a subsequent post to state it's a 'desired standard'.  This 'discussion' however, is going nowhere. So I'll just be content to be a 'fanboy' and continue playing the beta so I can offer suggestions to Obisidian on what i feel could be improved and report what bugs I find. If you think the game is so terrible, feel free to not buy or play it. The rest of us will probably enjoy the hell out of it.

[frapillo80]

Just add Aerosmith to the game soundtrack, that should get the rag-dolls covered...

Edited September 25, 2014 by frapillo80

[nipsen]

 

 

Wow. It looks like forum for teenage girls when someone criticize their favorite boysband. To much fanboyism guys. Beta is a shot (arrow?) in the knee for Obsidian and its a fact. Right now nobody that isn't a harcore Obsidian fan says anything optimistic about PoE.

Really? It's just a freakin' beta. I'm not sure how you're seeing so much doom and gloom for the game based on the beta at present. There are actually a lot of positive things in it. Sure, there are plenty of things that need addressing, but very few (if any) that I'd put into a major overhaul category. Fanboy or not, I just don't see the 'shot in the knee' here.

 

 

I have to say I have never heard somebody say 'sure it gets great reviews now but it SUCKED in beta.  Don't buy it'

 

Well.. I've heard plenty of people condemn a beta as a failed product that never should have been made, and shouldn't be shown to the public. The product then is released, and the detractors continue to insist that the game is ****e. It gets 9/10 on IGN. But the detractors still insist that the game is broken beyond a playable state. It sells over a million discs over the first few months, and detractors insist the game is broken. Etc., etc.

 

In those cases, the people who "criticize" the game have decided that they will not like the game. And they make it their mission to make sure they make an as big splash as possible with their "legitimate feedback". In the three examples of big tests I was part of that ended up like this, a very small group created a feedback loop online that ended up in a preview at IGN at one point, somehow legitimizing that this "view" was representative of all the players, etc. And it also ended up swaying the community managers at the publisher of those titles. They read this feedback, from this weirdly tireless bunch of folks, and they convinced themselves that the only thing they could do was to insist to the devs that they would spend the 6 months of contractual post-release support on patching the games apart.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of us just played the game until it became unplayable, and we left.

 

In the case of this beta, the lack of constructive criticism has - ...and I warned you of that ahead of the beta - ensured that we have lost the opportunity to communicate with the devs in a reasonably normal way. And it looks like a couple of suggestions from people who have convinced themselves that a particular system is broken, etc., is going to be pushed through (see #2 about the inevitable report of a broken system). Or at the very least it has drowned out more broad feedback.

 

But when it comes to that - I've also been part of betas where everyone were 100% convinced the game was incredible, everyone were positive, and they all loved it. And the game bombed. That's much worse, or at least as bad as the "selective VIP group will now save the beta, the developer, and the genre the game represents with their superior games-development expertise".

 

------

 

Anyway. Yeah, I really hope they work on the animations and how they're used in the game/incorporated with game logic, as well. They really have a long way to go before the game is going to come off as polished, there's no doubt about that. I also definitely wish that they could have used some of the animation tech used in DS3 to create location dependent deflection animation, better control over how the spells are cast, and how the movement correspond with the actual magic that's cast (this is already fairly well done, but needs to be tweaked). And also that melee stances and combat animation would have loops with small variations on each cycle, and things of that sort (this is possible because the animations are from 3d models, not 2d sprites - and it is a disappointment that this is apparently not a focus).

 

That's definitely a good point - it doesn't look as good as it could, and at the moment, there are so many small things with the beta that it does seem difficult for even a fairly large team to be able to sort this out before December.

 

I do, however, think that some of you are being much too willing to stretch the rubber-band incredibly far when it comes to finding substantial things about the beta to criticize. And I think it's because you are convinced that if only a substantial/meaningful part of the game is changed according to "community feedback", then this will somehow wipe all criticism of the game away.

 

That's never going to happen. And it's especially never going to happen with a game that Obsidian makes. You know this on beforehand. Really, how long did it take before someone turned up and complained about how the default character selection was female? Three minutes after the update? What about the guys who blow a fuse if their moral sensibilities are even slightly tested? You've all seen these people on the forum, and you know that this kind of bs discussion has dominated the test. 

 

And you know why it does that? It's because no one dares to criticize dumb people's feedback and demand that they will explain what they actually mean. So we can understand the context of their opinions, and figure out if there is indeed something there that can be translated into actual feedback. Instead, we refuse to do so, and simply assume that their subjective feeling of negativity is immaculate, and yet utterly meaningful - so that it's the developers' mission to somehow find a way to appease people like that. To make their faith in the game grow and rise. On the pain of releasing a broken product that "no one likes", and so on.

 

I mean.. Look. I've seen that exact same thing in several betas. Not one or two - more than 10. It's the same every time. People who otherwise would have interesting feedback shuts up about it. And the vast bulk of the feedback becomes: "I feel the colours are too bland. Also, the colours are too bright. And too dark. And too fuzzy". The developers can't use any of this. And more importantly, there's no way a developer would want to engage with someone who so obviously is just fishing for attention, or a group that validates people in this way.

 

If the ones around here who aren't idiots - or shamelessly lazy - respected that, this beta could have been a treasure trove for the devs. But it's probably not going to be that now. Instead it seems we're gearing up towards another one of those weird popularity contests where an epic battle is fought over the colours of the underside of a beetle's shell, or something like that. While someone who has the developers' ears manage to ruin something amazingly creative before anyone else got to try it or give real feedback on it.

 

While the problems and annoyances that could be sorted out - that only random people not used to working around the problems see - are lost (imagine that all the devs have played through the entire campaign of the game 100s of times by now - while others are repeatedly focused on specific scenarios, clicking through the same dialogue over and over again, etc. They're going to miss obvious things, but take care of prepared and listed reports). So actual reports don't get any attention. Which tends to lead developers to think that no one noticed, or that it wasn't very important. 

 

And it could very well be that when the game finally is released, that you are proven right. That the game isn't all that great.

 

I do however insist that if this happens, it will be because Josh didn't have enough faith in the original design, and ended up changing it. And because small visual problems (height maps and occlusion) and animation problems (stances) weren't sorted out. While the nasty problems with references for objects and short-cut scripts that eventually cause issues with items and resources - that won't turn up on a "quickest path", standard equipment playthrough - are not really sorted out.

 

It sure as hell won't be because the game isn't remade with "proper turns" and a more NWN-style "turnbased combat". Or that the game doesn't have ragdoll physics. Or that the freaking attribute system isn't remade from scratch so it resembles, say, Planescape Torment without tattoos. Or Kotor 2, where the max-min difference is basically a 2 points bonus. Or, for example, that the game isn't made with a "proper protagonist", rather than that it focuses on roleplaying something you make up yourself.

[nipsen]

Hardly tangential when you state in your first post that it's one of the reasons combat feels flat, then go on in a subsequent post to state it's a 'desired standard'.  This 'discussion' however, is going nowhere. So I'll just be content to be a 'fanboy' and continue playing the beta so I can offer suggestions to Obisidian on what i feel could be improved and report what bugs I find. If you think the game is so terrible, feel free to not buy or play it. The rest of us will probably enjoy the hell out of it.

Well, what he actually said was that he couldn't believe someone who made a game with as lively physics and animation as DS3 were putting out a game like what PoE looks like right now. 

 

And I think that's a good point. The animation and the feel of it is very raw. And to add to the above post - I'm sure you understand why the devs were apprehensive about releasing the beta now. That even if most of these things can be sorted out (animation in particular - this isn't set in stone by any means), it's going to cause this incredible disappointment in the knee-jerk section (read: all sections) of the forums and elsewhere.

Edited September 25, 2014 by nipsen

[Ink Blot]

Well, what he actually said was that he couldn't believe someone who made a game with as lively physics and animation as DS3 were putting out a game like what PoE looks like right now. 

That's only part of what he said, but yes I concede that point. Although I'm not sure it's a 'good point' on the OP's part. For one thing, he's comparing a completed and released product to a - once again - beta. For another thing, the design goals, development focus, and style of this game are different than DS3.

 

As for the disappointment, that's going to happen anyway once the game is released. This isn't, as the saying goes, my first rodeo. I've been around for plenty of game releases from various devs and there are always a contingent of very vocal detractors when a game is finally released. From the "This isn't what I expected at all - you've let me down" crowd, to the bat**** crazy "You're dead to me now and I'll never buy another one of your games again because this game sucks so hard" bunch.

[Lephys]

It boils down to arguing about game genre and graphical subjective preferences as a qualitative assessment of what makes a "better" game. What is possibly objective about that approach?

I don't agree that that's what it boils down to.

 

See, if he just came in and said "This, this, and this make me dislike this game," then our response would just be "That's unfortunate, buddy," OR a bunch of useless subjective argument. But, when someone starts claiming that something is problematic, and describing reasons beyond "I simply don't like it, personally," that's when you can get objective about it.

 

Really, you can be objective about it from the get-go. And people have been. You can say "Oh, that sucks that you hate these things, but, realistically, those things probably are not going to change, so you'll quite possibly wish to avoid playing this game so as to circumvent a bunch of disappointment."

 

Anywho, if you think he's being ridiculous, then just stop responding. Or report him to mods, depending on the level of ridiculousness. But, people personally attacking the guy isn't really getting anyone anywhere. Personal attacks are no more productive than subjective arguments are.

 

Just pointing that out, is all. We're all human, and we all get the urge to do it, but it accomplishes nothing in a forum environment.

[Namutree]

For the OP:

 

Hopefully the animations will be good at release. They probably will be passable by the end.

Ragdoll physics were not in the IE games and thus not desirable. This game is meant to be nostalgic. Not to mention ragdoll physics tend to glitch.

I can tell you like DS3 & Titan Quest, but poe is meant to be like an IE game. Play them to get an idea of what Obsidian is going for. 

[Matt516]

Little tip, Magnalicious - if you want people to take you seriously (especially as a non-backer, since we can't assume you've any prior knowledge of the game and what it's about), don't title your post with the ludicrously hyperbolic "The game looks and feels abysmal in every way". It starts you off from a position of ridiculousness and puts the burden of proof on you to change that. If you actually care about having your concerns addressed and not dismissed, take a more measured tone.

[Gromnir]

LOL, the whole ragdoll physics thing was tangential, which is obvious to anyone who is honest and has a basic reading comprehension skill, not to mention that I had already explicitly explained on the very first page why it's not about it per se.

 

This incoherent latching onto something stated in passing is a typical tactic of desperate people with cognitive dissonance.

am believing you are misunderstanding the criticism.

 

perhaps a visual aide?

 

 

PoE is being sold to fans o' the ie games. the whole concept is reactionary rather than progressive.  yeah, the tech is 2014, but obsidian's fanbase is old timey crpg fans, many of whom still rage at the biowarian ninja-pounce enemies dragon age 2 added to their franchise.  if obsidan had added rag doll physics or matrix animations, there woulda' been a collective howl o' nerd rage that woulda' been a crpg equivalent o' ben afflek being chosen to play batman. a desire for rag doll physics were making it clear to a few that you are unclear on the entire concept o' PoE.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Elerond]

Ragdoll physics is procedural way to produce death animations for characters, which helps death animations look more realistic when character dies on uneven surface.  As PoE has only flat surfaces (in sense how physic algorithms see things), as it uses pre-rendered backgrounds that is made look for human eye as 3d surface by using an axonometric projection. So using ragdoll physics instead of static death animations (that can have procedural variations in them to prevent all character's to die same way)  would only be beneficial for the game if character's bodies are thrown air same way as they are for example in Titan Quest, as then ragdoll physics will make each body fly in different way, because otherwise other ways to produce death animations will produce better quality and more believable death animations.