My criticism (spoilers) (wall of text)

[watcher341]

English is not my first language so don't be too harsh

 

I  just finished it on hard difficulty of the version 1.0. Didnt patch because of the nerfs

-Plot

I don't know if im wrong but i think very little in the game makes sense at all.

So you were awaken by a memory of a past life after you see thaos turn on the machine. Watchers are souls who remember their past lives. If it just take something as simple as watching an act then wouldn't they be extremely common?

Also being a watcher means little in the game aside from being able to look at souls during the quests the game allows you too. Why couldn't you see inside the soul of every NPC? Why couldn't you manipulate them? You can delete memories/part of the souls as you did to Grieving Mother . Why couldn't it be a central pillar of the whole game like the curse was in MotB insted of just an small part on some quests? Your watcher ability doesn't ever affect how a quest ends per se, neither using watchers  abilities often affect you in any way.

The abilities the game gives you as a watcher are kinda underwhelimng, endurance leech, a self buffs where you recall previous lives despite the fact that this would make you go mad according to the games logic and an aoe paralize ability which you get near the end of the game.

 

In NWN2 mask of the betrayer you had to control your hunger, you could give life or feed to heal yourself or supress your hunger at the expense of HP or experience, change into spirit eater form and what you chose through the game improved or worsened your condition and the ending you could choose

The whole background of the game doesn't make at any sense at least to me. In my understanding the gods made a pact that forbids them from interfering with the "mortal" realm (don't remember the word they use)  yet Eothas manifests himself and goes into a crusade to wipe woedicas disciples as she  was plotting what is happening during the time we play the game  (or so the game seems to be infer) through questionable methods which eventually lead to his death  . Woedica long ago was defeated and weakened by the other gods, why would they sit back and do  nothing at  all when she broke the pact again and whats worse to become stronger than them all? How come they didn't find out or cared about Magran helping Woedica or at least causing Eothas death? if it was the decision of the gods to stop Eothas why wouldn't they do the same with Woedica? And how come it takes thousands of souls to empower a god but only parts of 12 to kill 1? . The best part of all is that Woedica is the godess of justice yet she breaks literally every law and if you side with her by the end of the game she is supposed to kill you for killing her disciples and chosen emissary and breaking whatever laws she had dictated

Most of the  quests in act 1 and 2 revolve animancy vs faith and weidwan's legacy, the problem with this is the fact that neither of them have anything to do with the hollowborn problem and you know this from the prologue as you saw it was the machine built but a civilization take the souls of the 2 mercernaries you were traveling with you and the 2 cultists. The conflict  between animancy (science) and religion is supposed to present a moral/ethic debate but it doesn't work because both sides base their arguments on nothing.

 

(one very offputting thing i noticed is that you can bring your companions to the ruins shows them the machine and none of them say anything not even durance or kana who is an scholar)

Another major problem with this is that  at no point of the game you see either faith or animancy acomplish anything , specially animancy which seems to be portrayed as something good as for example in the crucible knights end they restore order in the city with the help of animancy, theres also not even 1 religious institution that tries to take care of hollowborns, each god has a different ideology so they could have proposed different solutions to the problem, but they didn't do anything with it .  Every time you do an animancy quest you see the animancers conduct tortuous experiments on living people,  hollowborn or not,  that produce nothing   and their argument is always b-but it might work!. In fact they caused an undead uprising in Heritage hill and each one of their laboratories is full of undead.
 

You have no motivation to be part of any of the things that happen in the game, you are a random dude that came from another land and got awaken, all you care is to find Thaos and to try to revert the awakening so that you don't go insane, your character has no reason to involve himself with anything other than he is the protagonist.  

During the act 2, Thaos knows what you are doing the whole time but he doesn't go and kill Maerwald as soon as he finds out she is helping you instead he keeps sabotaging the sanitarium because he wants to blame animancy for the whole thing despite no one in the whole country has a clue about whats going on and that the souls would still be missing even if animancers were to be wiped out. Whats wrose is that in heritage hill a group of animancers studied and learned the truth about the machines but he didn;t go to kill them, at any time the duc could have send an army to combat the undead , they would have found the animancers who knew the truth and his plan would have been ruined. If he for some reason didn't know about Maelwalds collaboration he could have get you followed after you left the Sanitarium, after all you have no idea who Woedicas disciples are and Thaos can swap bodies at will.

 

Lets not even talk about how the duc dies, Thaos using someone's body enters through the front door to the hearing where the most important people in the city are in, which was supposed to be well guarded, and nobody sees him casting the spell or at least acting strange to normal people, before he transfers his soul

 

At act 3 where everything went from what to why. Once you do the quest to access the other districts of twin elms you talk to 2 adragans that know everything that has been happening and have some sort of relation with the gods, they for some reason didn't warn the elves about Thaos who comformtably used their  ferry to get to the island where all the souls are stored and the machine which is ready to empower woedica is located. After some quests and getting the blessing of the gods who could care less about what happens to the souls giving you a great incentive to help them, you get to the island where you meet the love interest of your past life and she tells you that gods don't exist despite you talked to them before going there, them granting you their favor so you could survive something you shouldn't have , them having vast supernatural powers, priests gaining powers through their worship and godlikes existence  On top of that she tells you that she has no proofs at all and that she found out by overhearing a conversation,  you are suppose to believe her because she was your love interest. . According to her the ancient civilization  created gods after finding out there weren't any. This doesn't make sense to you because 1 how could they possibly prove that and 2  the current "gods" are clearly  beings far above all the rest who seem to fullfil the requirements to qualify as a god,  man made or not. All your companions believe every last word and agree with her without putting any thought into it. The last dialogs with Thaos  is very offputting and gives a feel of being rushed you keep arguing  f people should know the truth or not which it makes less sense than the gods not existing  because 1 even if you don't help woedica im sure the other gods would oppose to the truth being revealed and 2 if people would have found out eventually they would probably will find out again not through animancy for some reason as according to Thaos he used it as an scapegoat and 3 who could possibly believe you? specially you who are a watcher people have prejudice towards to, it  comes out as nonesensical.

Finally after you kill him you can use the machine and pick one option which is based on what the gods told you to do. So the machine was ready to be used the entire time since who knows when, what the hell was Thaos waiting?

Also the game doesn't resolve you being a watcher, nothing is mentioned in the epilogue or if it did i missed it


Everything would have made more sense if  the gods weren't actually gods but the leaders of the ancient civilization  who had devoured countless souls including the ones from their entire kingdom through a higher form of animancy  to attain their current state and  proclaimed themselves as gods to manipulate everyone remaining in the world into obeying them and that they draw their strength from the purge that occurse during the cycle of souls or  whatever

The whole soul process thing isn't explained very well either. Once you die your souls leaves your body and when it enters a new one it forgets or seals everything?  If one were to return a soul to the body would it have new memories or does it require a new body? Swapping Adras and the hunter souls didn't really do anything
 

-Quests

They didnt really help the plot. Almost all quests and by almost all mean 99% lead to combat you can't talk your way out, by the end of the game i have killed 2800 npcs, thats right, 2800 .  Quests are not elaborated and developed enough and tend to not to be created from the lore, you could find most of them in a game from any other setting. Almost all of them consist in killing/fetching/finding something which is fair enough since thats pretty much the base of all quests in RPGs the problem is that they consist of only 1 objective, very few go beyond that and they don't contain a message or a theme, make you think  or anything they are just what they are. Quests in twin elims are the same but at least have something to do with the elves traditions. If there was something that reminiscent to game design in the combat encounters, not all of them being mobs charging at you or spamming aoes on you, then it might have been a bit more tolerable

A lot of things feel underwhelming. You do 3 menial tasks at gilded vale, 1 which no one knows you did, and the cousin of the lord of the land comes to you and ask you to kill the lord so that he can take over, you just arrived, you didn't prove yourself or anything and he asks you that in the middle of the forest in the path towards the lords keep to do something like that.

When you are doing the faction quests in Defiance's bay , you are locked the moment you do the first quest for one faction, in other rpgs you could keep swapping to see what they offered until certain point where you were forced to choose. To gain the allegiance of an organization you only do 1 initiation quests followed by  2 more and thats it. I did the crucible knights quests and I got attacked by other factions during them, killing a member from the order would probably lead to some sort of confrontation, i didn't really understand why would they do that.

In the keep theres an animancer that asks you to kill the priest, and the priest asks you to free an orphan he raised a long time ago from the animancers laboratory. If you free the child the animancer somehow knows , if you kill everyone on the floor the priest is in and then talk to him, he doesn't care at all.

And theres a bug where if you side with Raedericks he tells you he is going to stay in the keep trying to find a cure for the hollwoborns  (you already know he won't be able to rendering the whole situation meaningless) with the animancers even if you killed her.

Killing Raederick gives negative reputation with Defiance bay but once you go there nobody acknowledges or mentions what you actually did.

I found other examples like the sanitarium goes hostile if you kill the guy who they send you to investigate for breaking the rules even if he attacks you or the temple with the books going hostile if you steal their sacred document even if they had no idea you took it

The companion quests don't get better either, they all short underdeveloped and end in failure or in something bad for your companions except for grieving mother if getting some memories ereased can be considered good. It looked like they were being prepared for a sequel

 

The camp system made grieving mother and Durance and some main  quests a pain. You don't want to spend camp supplies because you can't replace them but you can't advance with the story if you don't sleep.

-World building

This is the pretty lacking too. theres not a defined tone or theme, it isn't philosophical as planescape/kotor, serious as motb, light hearted line NWN 2 vanilla, generic fantasy like BG 1 which is trying to emulate at least in game design, etc. All the areas in the game are basically the same, theres no difference between the 10 forest areas as enemies are basically the same creatures, theres only a few extra creature in twins eilms. There are barely any landmarks too. in BG 1 which is probably the closest game to PoE as archaic as it was you had one zone with a cult of mages that used magic attacks,  1 with a high levle ogre that used magic and physiiscal resistances , 3 zones interconnected where there were bandits which had high numbers and tried ambushes and their base, another zones with spiders and poisonous creatures, another with puzzles and a dungeon, other  of undead and shadows,etc. Theres no such a thing in PoE.

The archictecture and the design of the settlements is also a let down, theres nothing unique to anything that inspires or transmit anything, nothing unique to the factions  nothing that gives them an identity. Everything is very samey after gilded vale only exception being  Sun in shadow and.

Theres not enough representation of the lore too, you don't see any paladin's order HQs for example.   

Another thing is that you can comeback after the riots in defiance bay and everything is it was before the riots, if there wasn't time to finish that part , it should have remained inacessible, its the player's fault if they didn't finish the quests before that point.

 

The one and only thing I really hated (aside from the constant loading screens) are the backers NPCs, instead of adding NPCs related to the world , lore ,etc which help to create the atmospehre you get them who have all things unrelated to the world,  on top of that they have a colored name to remind you they shouldn't be there and a good chunk of them are godlikes who are suppose to be rare, if there was only 1 area entirely composed by backers NPCs it wouldn't have been a problem but they are everywhere. However I cannot decide whats worse if them or the plates with the backers name. You are exploring a dungeon, click on a plate and you see them, i really really hated it when I found one in the 10th+ floor inside the Endless paths

-Game mechanics

-Stats
This is by far the worst stat system i have evern seen in my life, its so homogenizing it makes you feel there are no classes but characters with a different set of abilities which would be fine if the game wanted to do that but it didn't.

-Might
increases damage and healing in general. , it literally makes no sense at all. Thanks to this theres no point in having physical only classes as you can have your casters deal near the same  physisical damage as them and still have  heals,CCs and dps magic

-Constitution
Endurance and HP

-Dexterity
casting/attacking speed plus reflexes

-Perception
very lackluster stat that gives interrupt which is pointless since theres plenty of spells and abilities that you can spam that interrupt, deflection and reflex

-int
The most worthless stat that gives extra aoe which is useless as in most of hte cases if the aoe of an spell is small , the difference is negligable and if its already big , you don't need it, same happens with the increased duration it gives, increasing the 20% of 10 seconds is nothing and increasing the 20% of 40 seconds is also pointless as it is already too long. It also gives will  which is chance of magic resistance

-resolve
Resistance against interruption, will and some deflection. Another worthless stat aside from the resistance against interruption.

Cloaks of protection give 15 to Deflection reflexes and will which is almost the same you get by dumping points int othe stats. You can also find gear that boost the stats , there are items that boost several stats at the same time except for constitution and might which have individual items, so again the game gives you more arguments not to spend points on anything that isnt con  might and to minor extent dex

The only compelling reason to level int perception and resolve is because of dialog options.

 

Does around 10-20 reflex/will/deflection make a big difference to justify losing extra damage HP and action speed?

and the worsts of them all:

Accuracy. Accuracy only increases as you level up , with higher quality weapons which have level requirement things that renders the entire thing moot (you are basically forced to use ranged weapons  as most unique grant accuracy to allies) , weapon feats and  buffs that lasts almost nothing. From 1 to lvl 9 you are going to miss almost all your attacks to everything and once you get past that you get hit far less and never miss again. except against the adra dragon and thaos himself. You literally can have 1k points into all the other stats and still miss every hit. This system is specially punishing at early levels where you are frail, weak and can only cast/use maybe 4-5 spells/abilities per rest,  to be able to land hits you usually have to use  debuffs which can miss or   buffs on yourself and then beg the RNG lets you land the 2 other abilities and autoattacks in the 10 second or whatever short duration. The early levels are pure suffering and in the later levels you die of boredom as you can 1-3 shot/stunlock/aoe to death everything and you can't die to anything except the adra dragon and thaos although mostly because of the AoE RNG bull**** abilities that can 1 shot most of your party

Endurance: its literally Halo like regenerating health, you could call it shields and it would be no difference. The biggest gripe with this is that it gives fight against bosses a timer, if you don't kill it fast enough you are going to lose the fight as your tank will end up dieng regardless of what you do.

-Skills

-Stealth
It makes no sense. The more points you put in it, the longer it takes for npcs to spot you, it doesn't make you harder to detect or reduces the distance from where they can see you or something actually benefical. Also you have to enter stealth mode in a place with no NPCs , else they can see you even if you aren't in their line of sight. At least there are little useful items you can't steal 

-Mechanics
Thanks to this  skill you have to go in scout mode everywhere as you might miss hidden secrets that can be anywhere. If it was only for traps the problem wouldn't be so be so bad as you know in which areas you might find them. Perception for some reason doesn't modify this stat or is requried in any way

Lore
It allows you to use magic scrolls. The only useful scroll which is broken as hell is the maelstrom scroll which deals and requires 10 lore and deals upwards 120 damage in an aoe stunning and slowing, it also has a huge casting range. the rest of the scrolls feel very underwhelming except for wall of fire to cheese the toughest bosses. All  i did to beat the final boss is send my Druid which i made a tank to hold off Thaos and Pallegina to hold off the Statues while Aloth and Kana spammed maelstroms on top of the 3. the fight took like 20 seconds

-Athletic
Reduces fatigue gain. Literally useless. It would be nice if it reduced the vitality drop during fights

-Survival:
Increases consumables duration.  if it increases all buffs duration it would actually have been useful. Its the same deal with intellect, if the potion lasts to little the bonus is negligible and if its too long the bonus is unnecessary


-Classes

I played a druid so i have no idea about monk/rogue/barbarian

-Druid: completely broken, it has the most damaging spells in the game, it has a lot of aoes that don't have friendly fire, for example it has one spell that deals 5-25 aoe damage to all enemies and has a chance of stuns which you can also use alongside its lower level version which deals 20-45 damage to a random enemy every round and stuns it. It also has a shock aura which can be used with the priest shock aura so you can permantly interrupt people forever and then it has other aoes that can also interrupt and debuff . It has a huge aoe that causes knockback so you can perma knockback enemies and a lot of other broken ****.

 

One thing that doesn't make sense is that his class talents revolve around giving elemental damage to his shapeshift form t which has fixed damage but in order for this to be remotely worthy you need the 12 elemental damage talents plus the peseant talent and you don't get that many although since you don't benefit from gear while using it so its kinda useless and it also lasts like 8 seconds. At least with catform you can cast faster

-Priest: buffs/debuffs and heals. The skillset is good except for the seals which are or were broken if they got nerfed. You can only place 1 trap from your inventory with any class but you can spam as many seals as you can cast which are basically better traps. You can stack the seals on top of each other and instagib anything except the adra dragon which doesn' trigger the DPS ones, the game even makes it easier for you to cheese like this as theres an small delay before the seals trigger, to top it off, the seal damage can't be resisted. The repulsion seal can knockdown any enemy in the game.

-Mage, it seems to be  a bad druid. The only good things it has are the poe's  magic missles   which druids have a better version (firebug) that deals far more damage, fireball for early levels although druids have better equivalent, danpen magic which removes enemies benefical spells although you get a ring that has it so you don't need the mage and the most stupidly broken spell in the game the aoe hex which has a  chance of paralizing, dazing or hobbling everything in the screen for 42 seconds, and you  can cast it 3 times per rest. Then he has a lot of self buffs which are kinda pointless as he is just going to stay back and cast or shoot from afar. Theres no reason to build a melee mage since guns do more damage

Chanter: the class is a nice concept but it is pretty weak outside of 3 abilities, the ranged aura which basically doubles your ranged DPS which i heard was nerfed, the fire weapon damage which grants 20 extra damage to everyone and the summon ogre spells which summons 2 really tanky ogres that have high knockdown chance, you can use once every 5 chants that take around 10+ seconds to complete+. To use chanter spells which are bad versions of other calsses spells you actually have to wait for 10+seconds, its ridiculous. The rest of the chants do things other classes do better

Ranger: completely useless, deals maybe double the damage other character with ranged weapons do but gets penalized when his companion dies thing it does all the time and has no abilities useful whatsoever.  second worst class in the game

Fighter: Literally the worst class in the game, theres no reason to have a fighter in your party. The gimmick of the class is that it regenrates endurance passively but the thing is that it deals no damage and the defensive talents and defensive auras dont really do much. You can have a paladin fill its role with any one handed weapon with lifeleech and a shield. Fighters deal as little as 3-8 damage a hit while you can have a paladin dealing 10-30 damage . Since you are supposed to level defensive abilities with him you don't improve the ones that give accuracy which means you can't use his abilities as they always miss. Paladins with the faith feat have the same defensive bonuses the fighters get without any of the penalties. He seriously needs aggro abilities and magic resistance calss feats

Paladin: a better fighter, it has an accuracy aura that also grants increased critical damage, some damage buffs and haste. Basically  bad but better than fighter in every conceivable way  

Cypher: All he can do the druid and priest can do better, the whole gimmick of the class is that she can cast unlimited spell as long as she has enough focus which is regained by dealing non magical damage. If you don't use a blunderbuss which deals 6 instances of damage per hit then the class would have the same problem the chanter have which is why pick it when other classes do better? The mindcontrol abilities are nice on paper but they last for too little and fail often. Since buffs don't stack most of her accuracy spells buffs are wasted. The really broken ability is amplified wave which deals a ****on of damage to enemies in the screen like 40-70, you can get enough focus to cast it after 1 shot, you can perma knock down any enemy. Recall agony is also nice although in bosses its not that reliable as they tend to resist a lot and the point of the spell is to be antiboss

-Feats:

In general feats are  too inflexible and most of them are not very useful specially the defensive and utility ones. If you have a caster you are going to get those which up the magic damage of your best spells, and those which provide ranged accuracy and damage. There aren't even, Spell accuracy Spell  penetration, casting speed, or  any kind of specialized talents except tank related talents. It seems they weren't really finished when the game got realeased  as theres the gunner talent which grants +20% reloading speed with guns while there are no bow or crowssbow talents that do any benefical to them specifically

-Itemization
This is an aspect that requires lot of rework 

-Melee weapons
1 handed : they deal no damage whatsoever aside from the spear you forge in the catacomb at stormwall gorge which i regret getting as that NPc might appear in future games, you only get them to use it with a shield for whoever tanks. Didnt try dual weild
2 handed,: Theres no difference between them as enemies aren't immune to damage types and the resistance to them are mostly the same, what matters is DR damage penetration and thats a bonus items can have, all guns have DR

-Ranged

-Bows:
literally useless as they deal no damage to armored units

-Crossbows:
bad guns with no armor penetration

-Guns:
They deal the most damage at the cost of reduced accuracy -5 which is negligible and 30% less crit damage which is also negligible

Pistols are worse archebus although the unique pistols you can find grant accuracy to everyone and one that reduces enemy DR so those are good
Archeobus: Worse blunderbuss, theres one unique that reduces enemy DR
Blunderbuss : it deals almost as  much damage as Archeobuses per bullet and it shoots 6 bullets per attack
Guns deal more damage than 2h melee weapons

-Armor:
Basically any class can use any type of armor, heavier armors slows your recuperation which results in longer time in between turns. i

Armor grants damage reduction which reduces incoming damage by a flat amount. Exceptional medium armor gives 8 DR+4DR while heavy armor 14+4DR, so the difference is very small and with light armor you can act 25% faster. It makes no sense at all. Later in the game you have +140-200 HP and enemies can deal 40+ bosses 100+ damage per hit. Whats the point of heavy armor? If the reduction isn't a % its pointless

You for some reason get every available type of armor if you kill everyone at Raederick's keep at the end of act 1.

-Bonuses:
This is the worst aspect of the itemization

Basically all items of the same kind have the exact same numbers for everything, IE all daggers hit for 9-13. The only different they might have are the bonuses, All the bonuses provide the exact same benefits  won't find an item that has a better version of the same bonus another item has

-Quality:
-armor
it grants damage reduction, up to 6 bonus which is kinda worthless although you can't make items of the max quality so the max you can get is 4. You can get the top materials by killing the master from below

-weapons

it grants accuracy up to 10 accuracy and +0.45% extra. Same deal as with armor the max bonus you can get is 8 and 0.3%. You can only upgrade to max level 2 weapons in total and only if you decide kill the skydragon

Helms/rings/boots/etc are all accessories that don't provide DR
 
You can't change the quality of non base quality items, if its fine you can get it to exceptional and from exceptional to superb same with weapons which is a huge deal because as a player you don't know if you will get something better to enchant or you have something really good and are waiting for the superb materials to drop somwhere.

I don't understand why would it be so hard to raise the quality of the items when its instrumental for your progress at early levels and not so important at later levels

The only enchantments you can give  an item through crafting are the quality , stat boost +might,dex,etc which is pointless since thats what accessories are for and the bonuses dont stack and bonus damage against a type of enemy which you always pick humanoids as the final boss is a humanoid and you'd rather be prepared for the final boss than some random zone.

 

In weapons you can also choose 25% elemental damage bonus which for some reason the game counts as phyisical damage i guess since monster don't really have immunities it might as well make the damage phyisical

You can't even enchant an staff or wand to deal increased magical damage

Since all the rest of the bonuses  such as DR reduction, lifeleech, counterattack,etc are only present in unique weapons and armors, crafting gear as a whole feels meaningless

Instead of making hard to get the superb items, the endless paths should have yield materials that would allow you to add 2 of the unique items bonuses to another item or something similar, the weapon on armor you made might be imbalanced but it would have been your reward for clearing the hardest part of the game. killing Adra and getting an item that gives only +2 armor reduction over an exceptional item that i can't even use on existing items is really frustrating. If you consider a single spell deals more damage   than 10 attacks combined you feel even worse, not to mention the spell might have benefical secondary properties.

 

-Potions/food crafting

-Food

I don't really see the point of it, I didn't use it so i don't know if it stacks with the resting bonus. I guess its useful if you want to meet the requirement for one skill check

 

-Potions

All but the healing potions and war paint are pretty bad  or not good enough specially given the fact you can buff yourself previous to the fights. You can't really be drinking in the middle of the fight so you have to pick whats most effective and what lasts the most, the most useful ones last for 20-30 seconds not to mention your other buffs also run out quickly so you can't waste time. There aren't even elemental resist potions although not that you would need it as there aren't zones composed of magic specific enemies

All is left is the stronghold, combat itself  specially the buffs and debuffs and the UI . ill continue later
 

[LadyCrimson]

 

 

There aren't even elemental resist potions although not that you would need it as there aren't zones composed of magic specific enemies

Not to cherry pick out of a nicely written posting, but there are potions of Bulwark Against the Elements, which I thought gave you some minor element resist, like the spell? But I'd agree you don't really need it....I don't think you even need food or healing pots at all, outside of PoTD difficulty where they can definitely be pretty handy at least in the early game (haven't done PotD very far, not sure if holds true all the way through).

[Manart]

You become a Watcher by having your soul torn from your body and put back in. When other animancers tried to do this manually, they created the undead. You on the other hand survived because your soul also Awakened at the same time from seeing Thaos and remembering your past life.The dwarven animancer's spirit told you as much.

 

I think Woedica's ascension was supposed to be a secret, kept by Thaos. Eothas found out about it, tried to stop it and was smote by the other gods for violating the non-interference rule. Magran at least knew some of it but was bribed with Eothas' followers and territory to keep quiet, hence when you finish Durance's quest he realized she tried to kill him to keep the truth hidden and vow to kill her in return.

 

Thaos did send his Leaden Key to kill and discredit the animancers who were working at Heritage Hill. When he realized they were close to finding out what the machine does he sent his acolyte in to activate the machine and turn everyone there into undeads. He did try to stop you from finding out his plan by sending his assassins after you, but couldn't discredit you entirely due to Lady Webb's own influence. He was able to get in the hearing due to being an extremely influential member of the nobles. Only you could see him using his soul jumping power, using your Watcher's power. As far as people know, a noble entered the hearing, then suddenly the animancer went crazy and killed the duc.

 

I'll try to answer some more of your questions tomorrow, keep on asking them if you feel there are parts you don't understand or were poorly explained.

[watcher341]

You become a Watcher by having your soul torn from your body and put back in. When other animancers tried to do this manually, they created the undead. You on the other hand survived because your soul also Awakened at the same time from seeing Thaos and remembering your past life.The dwarven animancer's spirit told you as much.

 

I think Woedica's ascension was supposed to be a secret, kept by Thaos. Eothas found out about it, tried to stop it and was smote by the other gods for violating the non-interference rule. Magran at least knew some of it but was bribed with Eothas' followers and territory to keep quiet, hence when you finish Durance's quest he realized she tried to kill him to keep the truth hidden and vow to kill her in return.

 

Thaos did send his Leaden Key to kill and discredit the animancers who were working at Heritage Hill. When he realized they were close to finding out what the machine does he sent his acolyte in to activate the machine and turn everyone there into undeads. He did try to stop you from finding out his plan by sending his assassins after you, but couldn't discredit you entirely due to Lady Webb's own influence. He was able to get in the hearing due to being an extremely influential member of the nobles. Only you could see him using his soul jumping power, using your Watcher's power. As far as people know, a noble entered the hearing, then suddenly the animancer went crazy and killed the duc.

 

I'll try to answer some more of your questions tomorrow, keep on asking them if you feel there are parts you don't understand or were poorly explained.

1 fair enough, although now we need a reason to why you survive

 

2 theres no way the gods wouldn't have interevened if they knew and there is no reason for them to not know,  Magran doesn't even have the excuse of being the goddess of war as Galawain told you if Woedica were to succeed there would be no more conflict in the world as she would rule all with static laws . Magran also helped to stop Woedica in the first place.  Woedica is also the godess of revenge it is very likely she doesn't fogive anyone. Theres also no way they ignored Eothas death and if they didn't believe him the hollowborns appearence would have proved him right

 

3 We don't know if he sent people and regardless if he did , one of  the animancers knew how it worked and how to turn it off before the whole thing happened. She could have reported back at any time prior to the incident and if the army did go she would have been found or at least what was left of her

 

4 One random noble enters the hearing where the most important people in the city are, he acts strangely  then something bad happens. He  somehow runs away through the front door eluding every guard somehow without using magic or anything. I don't think any amount of rationalizing will fix how far fetched the whole thing was

[Manart]

1. You survived because your soul Awakened and re-entered your body. If Thaos wasn't there, you would have been killed and your soul scattered due to the Bîaŵac. Which is why you can tell him at the end that he made you his enemy twice (once when he betrayed you in the past life, another when his sight made you Awakened).

 

2. The gods did find out about it, but too late. So their best bet was to do what Woedica did and empower a mortal agent i.e. you. Also, Magran is a fickle bitch, hence why she's okay with aligning herself with someone she burned centuries ago. Remember that despite being nigh-omnipotent beings, they are still constructed from ideals by the Engwithans and must follow their own internal directives, even to their own detriment. (Galawain and Abydon praised the work of animancers, despite knowing their secrets could be found out by animancy, due to it aligning with their own respective portfolios)

 

3. You find out about the Leaden Key's interference by reading about the apprentice's diary inside the tower, which showed him noticing "people with strange masks" entering the building before things go to hell. The Gul upstairs also confirm it if you ask him. The animancer at the north end is now a fampyr so I don't think people are going to trust her on anything. The duc's soldiers tried to go investigate but was enthralled by the Cean Gŵla inside the North East tomb.

 

4. Remember that the whole scene is supposed to be very chaotic with people yelling over each other constantly. Thaos could have entered the room without anybody noticing. And when some guards found out about that, he killed them before making his escape, as shown in the end of the act cutscene/voice-over. There was a dying guard outside who told you to get to Lady Webb even.

[Exyll]

Did I read somewhere in there the fighter is literally the worst class in the game? Anyway, there are many flaws in the OP, maybe play the game another time through.

 

The animancers didnt cause the outbreak at Heritage Hill. How could they when they couldnt even figure out how to operate it.

 

There are no Gods, there are the ideals that the Engwithians created via their machines

 

Obviously there isnt a giant pink beam coming out of the body when Thaos transfers vessels, thats for the player to understand what's happening, so I think it would be pretty hard for all the guards to instantly pounce on him 2 seconds after what appear to be an old man stretching his back

 

The rest of the post just boils down to a lot of generalizations on weapons and combat that I didnt agree with

(Soldiers being literally useless takes the cake) like

Bows being 'useless' cause 'they dont over come DR'

chanting being 'useless' cause something about one of the 3 enchants (which is pretty generous) you didnt like

chanting for human dmg is a no brainer...when most people have problems with shades...and would probably put that on immediately 

Edited April 22, 2015 by Exyll

[MReed]

During the act 2, Thaos knows what you are doing the whole time but he doesn't go and kill Maerwald as soon as he finds out she is helping you instead he keeps sabotaging the sanitarium because he wants to blame animancy for the whole thing despite no one in the whole country has a clue about whats going on and that the souls would still be missing even if animancers were to be wiped out. Whats wrose is that in heritage hill a group of animancers studied and learned the truth about the machines but he didn;t go to kill them, at any time the duc could have send an army to combat the undead , they would have found the animancers who knew the truth and his plan would have been ruined. If he for some reason didn't know about Maelwalds collaboration he could have get you followed after you left the Sanitarium, after all you have no idea who Woedicas disciples are and Thaos can swap bodies at will.

 

Thaos is actually running two, unrelated, plots at the same time:

* Sucking out massive number of souls to re-enpower Woedica -- as far as I can tell, the only motivation behind this is "She's my patron" rather than any particular support for Woedica's policies and the like.  This is the origin of the Hollowborn epidemic, and is what the player witnesses at the start of the game.

* Discrediting animancy.-- this is motivated by the desire to keep the origins / nature of the gods secret.  If animancy is allowed to advance far enough, the secret would inevitably by uncovered as the techniques that the animanciers are trying to uncover are the same techniques that the Ethosians (sp?) used to create the gods in the first place:  obviously, they have a long way to go, but Thaos is a very pro-active sort of person.

 

Note that the player is intended to draw a parallel between medicine in, say, the 1300-1400s (in Europe) and the current state of animancy:  during this period of time, medical "treatment" was as likely to hurt as it was to help, but that's the way science works -- you have to try stuff, collect data, and see what works and what doesn't.  While the game doesn't mention it, it seems highly likely that the LK is acting to ensure that the animancer's research is as harmful as possible in general.  For example, some animancer's (perhaps even most) might be in the employ of the LK (knowingly or unknowingly), which would make progress very difficult -- an honest animancer gets a positive result, but then "fake" animancer's report that they are unable to reproduce the results, discrediting him or her.

 

As has already been pointed out, the animancer's did /not/ activate the machine in Heritage Hills:  the LK did that, intending that the animancer's would be blamed.  The fact that souls were collected by this exercise is irrelevant (the souls, after all, still resided in the machine, as you could put them to use if you chose to do so).  If the machine had happened to simply be a weapon (or was a device that didn't have a harmful effect, but could be rigged to explode), then that would have suited the LK's purpose here just as well, which is to provide support for the "animancy is dangerous" position.

 

The Duc did send in soldiers (well, the Crucible Knights did) -- they all died.  That's why you were allowed in -- to find out what happened to the last group of CKs that entered.  Admittedly, it is a reasonable question to ask "Um, doesn't that mean that the CK kinda suck big time?", but...  That's a pretty standard troope in CRPGs, so I don't think blaming the game for this is reasonable.  If soldiers and police could actually do their jobs effectively then 85-95% of the side quests offered in a CRPG would no longer be viable.

[Rostere]

Fighters are not the worst class in the game Their extreme hardiness comes very much in handy when facing tough foes.

 

You seem to have completely missed which Wizard spells are worthwhile. Hint: Slicken and other status effect-inflicting spells.

[MReed]

...you get to the island where you meet the love interest of your past life and she tells you that gods don't exist despite you talked to them before going there, them granting you their favor so you could survive something you shouldn't have , them having vast supernatural powers, priests gaining powers through their worship and godlikes existence  On top of that she tells you that she has no proofs at all and that she found out by overhearing a conversation,  you are suppose to believe her because she was your love interest. . According to her the ancient civilization  created gods after finding out there weren't any. This doesn't make sense to you because 1 how could they possibly prove that and 2  the current "gods" are clearly  beings far above all the rest who seem to fulfill the requirements to qualify as a god,  man made or not. All your companions believe every last word and agree with her without putting any thought into it. The last dialogs with Thaos  is very off putting and gives a feel of being rushed you keep arguing  f people should know the truth or not which it makes less sense than the gods not existing  because 1 even if you don't help woedica im sure the other gods would oppose to the truth being revealed and 2 if people would have found out eventually they would probably will find out again not through animancy for some reason as according to Thaos he used it as an scapegoat and 3 who could possibly believe you? specially you who are a watcher people have prejudice towards to, it  comes out as nonsensical.

 

Iovara never says that the gods don't exist -- just that they aren't gods as she (and most people of the game world) would define gods.

 

I would say it is reasonable to assert that any being truly worthy of the designation of a god must, at the very least, not be the creation of those who are intended to worship it, and the dieties in this world don't meet that criteria.

 

It is impossible to prove that something doesn't exist, so that's obviously not what the Ethosian's did.  However, it is possible to prove that something cannot exist (is physically impossible) if one can establish laws that are both universal and comprehensive in nature.  Therefore, I assume, that what the Ethosian's actually did was prove both of the following:

 

1) It is impossible for the universe to be created -- the universe has a starting point, and no being could have existed before this point.

2) If something is possible to do, then any entity in the universe can perform that action (given, obviously, the right knowledge which leads to the creation of the right tools).

 

This isn't possible in the real world, because we can't rule out absolutely the possibility of an undetectable "spirit realm" that might influence the material world in some way, but...  In the game world, the Ethosian's proved that such a realm exists, measured its properties, and so forth -- armed with this information it might be possible to prove the above statements.  If both of these statements are true, then certainly none of the dieties that have been worshiped on Earth could exist (all religions include creation myths, all of which have the gods predating the universe, for example, and all religions grant deities powers that man cannot harness).

 

"Might" is the key word -- it is entirely possible that the Ethosian's were wrong in their belief that there are no gods -- but, regardless, they clearly believed that no gods existed, and they did create the gods that are worshiped today.

 

The dilemma posed at the end of the game is straightforward:  "Is it better for people to believe a lie that improves their quality of life, or know the truth and suffer the consequences?" 

 

To put this in much more concrete terms:  if you were an astronomer, and detected a "dinosaur killer" asteroid was going to hit the earth next week, would you tell anyone?  After all, Hollywood movies aside, a week's notice isn't enough time to do anything productive to mitigate or avoid the oncoming disaster, and the resulting panic from publicizing the news would simply ensure that people die sooner (in riots) rather than later (due to the consequences of the asteroid impact). 

 

Thaos has answered this question for himself -- you definitely shouldn't tell anyone, should actively work (up to and including murder -- after all, they are going die next week anyway) to prevent other astronomer's from realizing the problem, and might even consider suicide to totally eliminate any chance of the information being released.  Do you agree with his answer?  Personally, I don't -- I'd rather know then not know, but there is a wide diversity of opinions on this topic.

 

You are correct that, at some level, the player's answer to this question doesn't matter, as he/she will be unable to convince anyone of its truth (and, in any case, may not believe it for him/herself, although fairly strong evidence has been offered in its support).  However, like most philosophical questions, the goal is to encourage the player to question his or her beliefs and determine what is really more important -- "truth" or "comfort".

 

Unfortunately, the game implies that the machine reached "critical mass" (enough souls to re-empower Woedica) immediately after the final confrontation, which is obviously contrived.  However, you could stretch and contort a bit and argue that no, that's not what happened -- all you are doing is deciding what to do with the souls that are already gathered, which might be 1% of the total required to re-empower Woedica.  If you choose to assist Woedica, she gets a "boost", but not a sufficient boost to make her clearly superior to all the other gods.  The ending text doesn't contradict this perspective (but doesn't support it either).

 

And Woedica doesn't kill the PC if he/she supports her.

Edited April 22, 2015 by MReed

[watcher341]

Continued

 

Things I missed

 

-a self buffs where you recall previous lives despite the fact that this would make you go mad according to the games logic

 

Actually the whole point of the game is preventing this from happening. Theres seem to be a contradiction between the watchers nature and the path chosen to develop the story and your character in the game as it mostly advances through flashbacks/visions of your previous lives although convinently you only remember the one that knew Thaos and don't experience any personality disorders. This contradiction doesn't allow you to actually explore your past, in PT the whole point was to remember who you were while PoE's would be the opposite. This problem becomes very evident when you reach Breith Eaman as at this point you are supposed to already know your past and whether you decided being a woedicas inquistor or you agreed with Iovaras. I guess Iovaras was supposed to be someone like Deionarra but it could never have worked out for the aforementioned reasons. Also Iovoras doesn't seem to mind that you didn't step up for her when she was tortured , killed and had her soul imprisoned in the adra crystal nor the passage of time did anything to her, in planesape Deionarra had little sanity left and it was all bound to the love she had for you. During the game you meet her father, read her memories and experience her thoughts at the sensoirum, in PoE theres no such development

 

-Lets not even talk about how the duc dies, Thaos using someone's body enters through the front door to the hearing where the most important people in the city are in, which was supposed to be well guarded, and nobody sees him casting the spell or at least acting strange to normal people, before he transfers his soul

 

I realized that the biggest problem with this is that the guy who enters is a random nobody. If you had to do quests to gain the favors of several different nobles and it was one of them the one possesed it wouldn't have been a big deal.

 

-1 even if you don't help woedica im sure the other gods would oppose to the truth being revealed

and you actually need their help to come back alive, you wouldn't have survived your trip without their favor. They could have left you rot there.

 

 

-Video games Nature

This is going to be long, only the last parts will talk about PoE which will probably sound as cherrypicking

 

Now, this is something that can instantly make or break a video game and its something that i've never seen discussed or talked anywhere, its something integral to all video games not just PoE . This is my (pretentious) opinion in regard of this topic formed through things i observed and noticed as I played video games since I was a kid.

 

Each Video game is a self justified systemic set of rules based on abstractions of our own reality, a conjunction of ideas, and concessions between the player and them, essentially video game are its own separate universe with its own laws and logic that must be consistent. Video games are different from other mediums because they are interactive, to interact is to act upon something and that something must "exist" to be interacted with. To "exist" that something has to posses certain qualities determinated by the systemic set of rules which are determinated by our own reality to certain extent. If it doesn't posses those qualities or the qualities that posses aren't derivated from the set of rules then to the player that something doesn't "exist", even if its there , it becomes a foreign anomaly to that universe. The only way something that doesn't exist can gain existence is through concessions made by the player but they are derivated usually by things from outside the game like technical limitations

 

The more abstract and simplistic the set of rules are the more "arcadeish" the game is the more concise and complex the more "realistic" it is

 

When a player plays a game he is basically opening a dialog between his vision of reality and the reality presented by the video game, his set of imaginary rules interacting with that imaginary reality generating a world composed only by ideas, the visuals,sound, and others aspects come into play only after the relationship is established and are not necessary thats why you can have games be only text or just symbols and still have them being engaging and impactful. If this dialog fails the player instantly lose interest in the game, this can happen at any point of its duration even at the title screen. This makes video game a very personal experience far more personal than any movie/theater play/ book and one of the reasons people tend to be very vocal about them, in video games you do, you act while in the other mediums you are merely an observer.

 

So where am i going with this? Each genre has a base set of rules defined by its nature, shooters/rpgs/adventure/action/etc base gameplay (gameplay being the representation of an experience) is different and they approach to the problems of creating their universe and things within differently, to produce the same thing in a shooter and in an RPG they use different base rules and some shared rules.

 

For example to create a human soldier, there are attributes derived from our reality that must exists (the amount and quantification of the qualities depends on what the game is going for). To create a human soldier in a shooter that takes place in a relatively realistic setting , has to be human, carry a reasonable amount of weapons, not perform actions beyond human capabilities, die after taking a reasonable amount of damage, be limited (no infinite reaspawns), drop ammo or equipment depending on the game after death and so on, things that you would expect from a regular human. Once all of these plus whatever other qualities the context and complexity of the game determine that human soldier becomes a human soldiers. If one of these qualities is altered the player will perceive the soldier less human, not human or not even as a soldier.

 

If for example the soldier takes 3 magazines to die or jumps 5 feets in the air the player will stop considering the soldier human, it will just be a soldier, if it has infinite respawns then the player will stop considering it being a soldier it will become and be referred to as just "enemy", actually as moving turret, (in the case of infinite respawns a concession is usually made if the objective is to survive or escape or the games deviates from the normal gameplay). If the rules that were established are abirtrarily broken or the thing created doesn't follow them without giving any reason or explanation then the player will instantly becomes detached from the game or at least much less engaged only a player made concession like, the further you get into the game the tougher the enemies become can prevent this and only to certain extent, picking a higher difficulty also a valid reason.

 

If the setting wasn't going for realism and in it human soldiers could carry 10 weapons, jump extremely high, lift extremely heavy objects,etc things would be perfectly fine, there would be also no difference between this human soldier and the human soldier from the realistic setting in the eye of the player. In this case the only requrements for it to exist as a human soldier is that, it is human and that it belongs to some sort of military organization, how he acts, if he kills or not and how is up to whatever the game wants to do.

 

In order to create an experience the player can appreciate the gameplay and the sensorial representations have to be matched. If the gameplay doesn't inspire the player then the sensorial representations won't do anything but not vice versa. if you are playing a horror game and you have a vast amount of ammo you won't feel threatened, in adventure game if you have a map that indicates where to go or the area design are simplistic you won't get a feel of wonder and so on. In newer batman games for example the player doesn't get the feeling that he is actually fighting when he is facing enemies, as all you do is to press the same button over and over and each time a different animation plays, what the player perceives is that all enemies are part of the same entity and pressing the attack button diminihses that entity's HP, the enemies aren't even considered an it. Newer batman games are awful. Other example is in assassin's creed games. You hit a button which is also the run button and the main character auto climbs everything. Theres no difference in the player eyes between running and climbing, they are the same even if in the visual representation you see teh character is climbing a building, all the player sees in its mind is their character running upwards.

 

Interactivity also is the major argument to use against DLC, and the cinematic trend, casualization,etc that plague modern games

 

DLC

All and i mean all of the DLCs are extremely damaging to the integrity to the game, 1 because they are not part of the original game and they will never be (not to mention they are usually made so they can work independently from the game), the player will always perceive it as something foreign, 2 DLC has an inherent property the rest of the content in the game lacks, its monetary value, when you buy a game for $60 or whatever you are getting a whole that is not quantifiable, when you get a weapon for $x you know that that small thing costed that, you can't do the same with any other piece in the game, 3 you perceive that the only reason it was created is to generate some extra revenue, this without even taking into account it might actually be cut content. When a player plays a game he can feel the intentions love/hate work or lack of work put behind everything in it and all people can feel behind DLC is greed which devaluates the whole experience as the world cease to be a world of ideas to become a predesigned comercial product, the main premise where the rest of the set of the rules comes is that of making money , not the will of creating something great that as a result of its quality will generate money which is a completely different thought, the whole thing becomes a conflict of interests between the corporation and the player which generate passive violence and anger. The same thing goes for casualization, the cinematic trends, the pandering to certain specific groups,etc.

 

Have you ever noticed that when a game does well no one cares but when a game does badly you can see thousands of people mocking it all across the internet? well this is the reason

 

Cinematic trend

 

As i keep repeating in order for something to exist in the game it has to follow the set of rules the universe is, the people who seem to support this obviously don't play video games because this goes against their nature. All games establish that through the act of pressing a combinations of inputs the player can perform an specific act, when you perform the act in the game you see a graphical representation in the screen. Once this is established it becomes inmutable, if the specific button for the specific act isn't pressed the act didn't occur in the minds of the player

 

It doesn't matter if the graphical representation for picking an item , for example, is the same every time you press the button, the act itself is different every time to you, the place and the circumstances where you perform it are different, it doesn't even matter if the representation doesn't look real according to our world's logic, the act would have taken place regardless of it and what matters above all is the logic of the game.

 

When you add QTEs or unnecessary cutscenes to give a more "visceral feel" (or to make the game look better in promotional videos although this tends to repel people who paly games) you are actually hurting the game as in the players mind they didn't perform that action, it didn't take place, as to perform it , they would have had to use the designated button that they've been using through out the whole game, The act of pressing the button in real life equals the act that takes palce in the game .

 

A common example of this would be bossfights where if you can't land the last hit on a boss and instead you get a series of QTEs you feel like you never actually beat it because you didn't perform the action/s that according to the laws of the games universe that are required to beat enemies. Cinematics can only work through player made concession mostly before and after important events like bossfights introduction to levels to emphasize and ehance a moment,etc there has to be some sort of correleation that are unique to them which would allow them to have a place within the game rules.

 

Then theres modern motion cap and super detailed graphics that try to emulate reality , they utterly defiled and destroyed the artistic and theatrical tradition of video games . Since I don't have artistic knowledge to argue much about the specific although there obvious things anyone can point out, Im just going to say that we went from everything from characters to backgrounds being artistic representations of concepts ideas , emotions,etc which allowed unlimited possibilities and created compelling experiences to try to emulate a certain "aproximated reality" conceived by behavioural psychological, anthroplogic and marketing theories which leaves no possibilities. Since they replicate their reality in every game the rules become all the SAME with some minor variations so no matter even what game or genre you play you get the feeling you are still playing basically the same thing. Since all players perceive this, them being aware of not, we go back to the point 3 of DLC, its only there because whoever is in charge thinks its going to make him more money. Aside from this theres plenty more to talk about.

 

-Casualization

 

This is probably the most devastating of the three, its the voluntary circunvention of the game rules unmistakeably for the sole purpose of making money and this intention is extremely tangible . This is very self explenatory basically the destruction of a game's universe, the result of this is the total apathy of the player towards the game and hartred towards whoever made it, the only reason a game who suffered from this sells is solely the brand recognition and the fact that its competition is as terrible. Im don't even need to go into how difficulty is required or if you don't consider games "games" how it is what allows the player to qualify their achievements and the achievements of the characters

 

To illustrate the consequences of it we can cite the current situation of DOTA 2.

 

Dota 2 is a very famous game that comes from a W3 custom map called Defense of the Ancient valve bought , its around 10 year olds now. Since the adquisition Valve has done everything possible to monetize it knowing that the playerbase will put up with it, from crappy lore breaking sets that don't fit the artstyle that they don't even make, announcers from games that have nothing to do with dota which are basically free marketing, ads inside the games everywhere, Pay 2 win/play events or events where only organized groups can get the best which then they ll sell on the market which generates them revenue to rig the matchmaking so that bad players get matched with good players who are supposed to win them the game and entertain them like they were clowns making it very painful for the good player, not to mention their hat business model is the most dishonest and evil model ever conceived, it probably has factually proved (and this is not a joke) everything bad people have said and could come up in the future about capitalism and financial speculation . Lets not talk about the fact they promised to release all heroes 2 years ago and theres still 2 missing and on top of that, the lasts heroes they've released were released with an "arcana" cosmetic item which is basically a remodel which looks MUCH better than the base hero has better effects, more voice lines,etc, they've been releasing the hero half done and charging $35 for the full thing. Whats worse is that 1 arcana was released 2 weeks after the hero was released the 2 next arcanas were released the same day the heroes came out, then the following 2 could be preordered like 1 month prior to the release and they made events that revovled around them. In one if one play had an arcana and they won the game everyone in their team would get a random item , the hero got 99% pickrate according to one dota related statistic site across millions of games, and in the other whoever bought an arcana would get points to then have an advantage in the event that gave you 1 item if you won. Did i already mention they got 40 million dollars from their tournament compendiums? (a book people could upgrade that would give them special items that valve didn't make just added it to the game, their excuse was that it helped the players as 25% of the money went to the prizepool, how generous of them for only taking the 75%!) , after certain threshold of money they promised certain features which had no correlation whatsoever with the amount of money they asked for it. Its been almost 1 year since and some still haven't delivered all.

 

Despite all of this bull**** the playerbase kept growing until a recent patch which added a comeback mechanic.

 

Dota and mobas are popular because they have a bunch of "small puzzles" (all video games are in essence puzzles), last hit a creep to get gold, stack a jungle camp so there are more creeps to get gold at certain time, check runes that gives bonuses every 2 minutes, decide what items or abilities to get when facing certain hero composition, even you have to be careful what paths you choose to walk,etc and "big puzzles" at x time we get together and push this tower, at y time we take the creep that grants a second live and do this, what strategy do we employ to win,etc , the player has to keep resolving as the game progresses all while trying to anticipate what the enemy team is doing. Every action each player makes has a very impactful consequence in the game or at least used to so everything slowly keeps building up until one team had a lead and could keep gaining terrain until they eventaully won, it was very hard to make a comeback, not impossible but certainly hard. The work of everyone was always rewarded or penalized and it mattered.

 

All these low intensitity and low mechanical skill "puzzles" keep the player constantly entretained and using their brain, low skilled players could play the game regardless of their knowledge and skill and higher skilled players could take advantage of the mechanics and generate more complex puzzles for everyone else to solve, given the RNG and the vast amount of hereos and heroes combinations every match is pretty different

 

Now since the version 6.83 (i think) they added a comeback mechanic where if the total gold difference between teams was to big , kills granted a chunk of the difference, which means if a key hero from the enemy team got a kill (can't really prevent that from happening eventaully) he might get enough gold to finish an item from 0 which would boost him enough to be able to turn the game or to make it even despite the fact that they played terribly for 40 minutes and are totally undeserving. Now, the side that lost because of it its becomes extremely frustrated as they lost a game they shouldn't have and the team that won doesn't even care because they didn't win by their own merit. Even if the mechanic doesn't come into play everyone acknowledge its existence, the risk it generates and recognize that everything they do in the game became unimportant as 1 single event which is arbitrarly different from what would happen if the mechanic wasn't there has more impact that everything they've done till that point. Dota as a game got its "universe destroyed". As a result the game lost a lot of players for the first time in its entire history and people are complaining everywhere, Valve is now rushing the next version which comes out next week.

 

And now We finally reach PoE

 

PoE is an RPG as an RPG it has to have a very defined and vast set of rules for everything as its supposed to be centered around telling an story and developing characters thing that involves opening to themes theories idoelogies,etc taken from our own reality. PoE kinda fails in this aspect.

 

- stats.

The biggest gripe for them is that it totally damages the classes and characters feeling as you get the same stats for everything they are different only in name and they don't make mechanically different, theres a dichotomy between their definition concept , what the players expect acording to their previous experiences and what they actually do in game, you can be a drooling retard (low int) and still be the most powerful mage in the planet (high might) and the most educated person too (high lore) you can be a master scout (high mechanism) while being practically blind (low perception) in consequence you don't think the characters you control are "real" they are very close to being an "it" and its offputting .

 

" Wizards according to PoE's wiki, " Widely respected in most societies, wizards of Pillars of Eternity are men and women of high education and extreme mental discipline, if not always outright intelligence. Wizards are sometimes called navigators of the mortal soul, charting out and practicing the precise ways in which "ordinary" people can unlock the power inside of themselves. Using their knowledge to truly spectacular ends, wizards rely not only on ancient practices but also their own research to propel them forward".

 

This doesn't correlate to the gameplay in anway where your mage will have low intellect but high might, con and dex

 

-Reputation

So you can be aggresive and diplomatic, deceptive and honest, benevolent and cruel, etc all at the same time. In all previous games that had such a system (alingment) usually gaining one point in one substracted points in another. You can go to the assembly for example and tell everyone if you don't trust me go find someone who can call me a lier (or something similar), it only requires 2 points in honest, you could have 4 points in deceptive and still have gotten the same dialog option

 

-Stash

I know this was probably a necesisty given the huge amount of loot you get everywhere but again it feels out of place and makes the game feel more arcadeish, you could have added a quest where you got a bottomless stash or something similar. There has always to be a reason for things to exist

 

 

-Weapons and armors all being the same

I guess this is where the quality problem comes from as you basically get the best bases for crafting by the end of the act 1, getting to the end of the game and getting the exact same weapons you got at the beginning from much weaker enemies feels kinda bad. in older games the best armors tended to be extremely rare while the rest common even if it had the same values, theres no sense of progression, at least there are uniques tho.

 

-Ability to craft anywhere

This is another thing that makes the game feel arcadeish, i can forgive making scrolls and maybe potions but doing crafting gear in the middles of nowhere feels off. You can't have things like this and then have something limited camp supplies which represent the opposite of it.

 

-Combat gives limited experience

This would work if PoE focused on creating a context where this can exist, not to mention you get limited experience from combat but you can get unlimtied amounts from disarming traps and opening locks. This generates the same problem the stats do, theres no correlation between the lore and the representation in the gameplay. Never fighting a creature is equal to fighitng other so to you it doesn't make sense that it doesn't give experience, theres no justification for it, its just an arbitrary rule. This could be fixed if when you clicked on the dead creature/group of dead creatures theres an option to "study it/them" that would yield exp, that would stop granting it after a certain amount of itmes.

 

-Backer NPCs

I know without the backers there would be no PoE and they deserve to be in the game but as i explained before they don't fit among the rest of the content in the game, they are fundamentally different and their stories a lot of the times don't have anything to do with the place they are in, they should have gotten their own area

 

-UI

The UI is overall nicely done it looks good and it does its job except for 3 minor things.

 

1 The stats again. Trying to scroll down to see which stats are being buffed and by what is kinda hard, specially when you have several buffs as the lists aren't arrengaed in any order. I would suggest that instead of the current system, stats that are being modified had its number's color changed and when you hover your pointer over the number a list of the things modifying it appears.

 

2 the buffs and their durations. All the buffs from all the characters are small icons next to their portrait, its hard to keep track of everything they have, with my druid i usually had, the 2 storms, his shock, the priest shock, war paint, paladins haste, priest's champion buff, woodskin,etc its very hard to follow everything . I would suggest placing all the icons at the top right corner and the durations below

 

3 The stronghold log. The newest events are reported at the bottom so everytime you browsed it you had to scroll down a lot.

 

-Encyclopedia

 

1 The encyclopedia doesn't state what abilities the enemies have

1b I dont know if i missed some but I couldn't complete some of the entries like the giant spore one

 

 

-Stronghold

Its a real shame that a lot of the problem with it could have been fixed so easily.

 

1 really big main problem. The game gives you too little time to respond to the events, the trip from most parts to the keep is about 1 and half-2 days and it only gives you 1-3 days to respond in most of the cases, you have to drop everything and rush there if you want ot have a chance of making it in time

1b there are too many loading screens to make it worth it to rest inside the keep

 

2 You can't que upgrades to your keep. You currently have to select one, get loadingscreen leave, get loading screen, go to another area, get loading screen, go back, loading screen to finally finish 1, you had to do this for each and every single one since you most likely want to have them as soon as possible as you don't know how it works

2b The upgrades aren't affected or require anything from the outside world, in NWN2 you had to find quarries and metal veins, even if it was some rock in the middle of the forest it would have made a huge difference

 

3 The stronghold has no relation whatsoever with the rest of the game except for the quest that gets you there. Instead of random encounters every once in a while it would have interesting if your decisions in the game triggered events like, if you side with Raederick, his cousins group sends rebels to attack you and if you did the opposite its Raedericks men who want revenge, if you sided with a faction in Defiance bay mabe the others will try to sabotage or attack you, if you stole the wyrms eggs at dyford crossing maybe a pack of wyrms tracked you down and attacked you, if you pissed off animancers they might send an undead army at you and so on, not just random enemies popping up, but groups of enemies you cared about come at random times once unlocked. It could have been so much better without adding much.

 

 

4 Unlocking the upgrades give little to no benefit, something as simple as making different NPCs come based on what you built would have been so much better. Like a group of a religious order wants to stay at your church, you can let them be there and they would grant certain bonus and have certain penalties until you kicked them out, they wouldn't even need to say or do anything just be there , maybe you let a group of mercenaries or refugees in and then the group that was chasing them demans you to give them back, you couldn't even recruit NPCs from the world to come work at your keep except 1 prostitute and only as a hireling, why if i sided with the crucible knights don't get my own CK blacksmith merchant? in NWN2 almost everyone that was at your keep was recruited by you.

4b, every prisoner i ver had escaped from the dungeon and I never understood why

4c There also should have been upgrades like farm fields or something like that, it doesn't matter to the player if they can see them or not, there are plenty of popular browser based mmos where the player only sees a lists of his resources units and buildings and nothing else. Since the whole drywood is starving maybe you could have gotten the option to help them if you had this upgrade

 

5 Im not even sure about this but I think companions that are at the keep don't count to the total defense of the keep in case of an attack

 

6 theres little benefit from getting high prestige

 

7 I dont know if it was just me buy i only found out when i was nearly done with the game that you could hire visitors as hirelings as there wasn't anything in the event log which works for everything else

 

8 I almost forgot, the game lets you collect pets but theres no pet's room in the keep

 

 

-Companions

Im not going to go into each individual companion but the real problem with them is that they could have introduced you to the story of the game and could have given you a reason to become involved in the events that happen beyond your personal quest but since they were made to be optional this didn't happen. Eder and Grieving mother are the prime examples of this . Also in the game it is said that people've been killing every hollowborn but you never see even a graveyard.

Edited April 24, 2015 by watcher341

[watcher341]

Why is my post not here? I spent a lot of time writing it and put a lot of thought into it

[LadyCrimson]

Why is my post not here? I spent a lot of time writing it and put a lot of thought into it

Anti-spam measure for new accounts - the first several posts require mod approval.

[Sabin Stargem]

Um...post #10 utterly defines "wall of text".  Please fix it.

[watcher341]

Is there any way to edit posts

[watcher341]

continued 2

 

It seems the post was too long

 

-Combat

I don't know where to start. Well since RPGs are based on stats and turns pretty much all the game comes down to wether your stats are good enough and whether you are prepared be it by having the right abilities, class combination,equipment and items or not. The difficulty and the gameplaydesign revovles around the special properties of each enemy which is derived by the rulset that creates their nature of the game which is derived from our reality. If theres no strategy involved which is literally the only way you can make turn based combat compelling not to mention it is the whole reason to have turn based combat then the player will be utterly bored, see Dragon age 2 and DA:I

 

Most of the problems with combat comes from 2 sources, 1 the fact that classes are suppose to be good at several things due the stat system and 2 since the game had to be newcomer friendly or so it seems enemies don't present the player losing conditions based on their nature which in return creates no variety which in returns makes everything homogenized and it also breaks the games universe rules. IN BG if you didn't have acid or fire based attacks you wouldn't be able to kill trolls, if you didn't have an echanted weapon you of certain + you wouldn't be able to damage golems and so on

 

1 Enemies

Im not sure of what happened . Well the base strategy of every enemy is to charge at you or to cast something and then charge at you and the lack of control abilities in the game as well of all the rest of the problems become apparent here , specially right at the beginning at the temple of Eothas.

 

If enemies aren't interesting and push the player to adapt based on his own strengths then theres not much to be done no matter how well designed the classes and the rest of the mechanics are. Even if there might be some players that can't deal with immunities they should have been present in the harder difficulties, its not only hurts the game mechanics but the enemy "exist" less into the player eyes, for all we care they could all be a different colored version of the same creature.

 

-Im not going to go in detail about every immunity resistance and weakness but some that really bother me:

 

-Blight elementals aren't immune to their repsective elements and weak to the opposite element

-Undead are not immune to piercing and freezing damage

-Flying creatures including ghost and drakes can be affected and damaged by ground abilities like tanglefoot and calling the world's maw

-oozes aren't immune to blunt damage and corrosive damage

 

The only variations the enemy have that make a difference are

 

1 Shadows/Shades/specters/one of the bettles etc will teleport and kill your mages and priests and theres nothing you can do about it because there are no aggro mechanics nor the fighter has any kind of abiltiy that reduces the damage taken by allies so the only viable strategy at early levels is to send the fighter beg it survives till all of them teleport on him and then come in and spam aoes even if it kills your tank. Because they don't have any immunity to cold damage and their cold resistance wasn't high enough i was using winter wind which was cold based instead of the fire based as winter wind has much higher aoe and knockback. in later levels you don't even care about them because everyone in your party can tank them. It would have been much better in my opinion if the shadows were relatively weak but the shades were taught and all it did was to stand in place and spam more shadows and only confronted you when you attacked it

 

1b Caen Gwla: This type of enemy is fine she aoe paralyze, the only problem with this is that you can't buff yourself previous to the combat so you have no way of preventing it from teleporting next to you and paralizing your whole party as you try to get the preotection up. So your tactic again comes down to sending the tank and nuking

 

2 Spores/fampyr/wisps that can mind control: They are fine on paper but at the same time the places where you encounter them aren't designed around their abilities except that cave in the ruins at clianban rilag. Spores do nothing outside of the main control so no matter what youll end up beating them and Fampyrs are also not that unique because they use charm but after that they just attack there could have been some that used corrosive abilties

 

3 Corrupted druids who uses aoes, this is when you realize how broken the druid is. If a group of them decide to use Returning storm or relentless storm plus plague of insects your party will mostlikely get wiped without you being able to do much. The main problem with this is that you don't have a way of reliably interrupting casts

 

4 Adragans/xaurip priests who use aoes and can heal and buffs. It would have been so much better if Xaurip priestes spammed resurrect much like shamans in D2 so you would have to kill them or get swarmed to death

 

5 all the rest just attack you , some might cast an aoe spell once in a while and some other might use something to deal single target damage .

 

 

Despite all this none of them forces you to play much differently or make you chose certain ability or spell over another aside from an specific buff like charm resist. I wont go over each individual creature but a lot of simple things could have probably been done to improve everything greatly, in older games at some point you usually ended up becoming basically god and could 1/2 shot all enemies no problem but theres no reason that has to be the case here or at least it shouldn't be as easy as just reaching certian level.

 

Spells balance:

 

1 A lot of the spells classes have are either inferior versions of spells other classes have or inferior versions of spells they have themselves.

 

1b like firebug is a superior version of cyphers mind blades, and wizards chainlighting and bounding missles. Wizard has fireball, the druid gets worlds maw that also knocksback, they are higher tier, yes but thats all you are ever going to use

 

1c within the classes are spells that are so incredibly superior to other that you wonder why they are there, for example , druid has winter wind which deals 30-50 damage in a huge area and pushes enemies back and the alternatives at that level are talon's reach (20-40 damage in an aoe of less than half the size e ) sun beam (20-35 damage in an even smaller aoe) both of these abilities are suppose to compensate the lack fo damage by the first adding weakness and the second blind the problem is that even if you land those the duration of the debuffs is too little not to mention spells can miss, so you'd rather try to hit as hard and as many enemies as possible at early levels.

 

2 It all comes down to enemies not having the right resistaneces and weaknesses to things and the resistance itself being a flat damage reduction . Why would you use an spell an enemy has no protection to when you can use one that deals so much damage the difference doesnt matter not to mention the secondary effect might be better.

 

3 all spells can be casted in one turn, in DnD it would take several rounds to cast the most powerful ones while in PoE they take as much as an sword swing

 

-Buffs and debuffs

This is certainly the most confusing part of the entire game as you are not entirely sure what the hell each defense does how much is a good amount to have and so on.

 

-Buffs

Well you can't buff yourself previous to the fight except for a few like haste and this is such a big deal, you can't ever be prepared for anything , in order to do so you have to either spam the priests seals so that whatever tries to get close to you gets knocked down or sacrifice someone while you buff up and only the most essential buffs, you have to do it very quickly. in the fight with the adra dragon i had to send whoever was tanking and beg he didn't get 1 shot or mindcontrolled while i applied the auras and the protection against fear charm and stuns

 

Another problem with the buffs is that they are not categorized like for example like they were in DnD games. In DnD you had long general buffs, usually stat related that lasts up to 5 minutes or something, medium buffs that lasts x rounds+1 per level usually , defenses or general offensive buffs like blur and haste and so on and short situational high impact buffs that lasted a couple of roundl and all the buffs that were from different spells tended to stack with each other. If i remember correctly 1 round is equal to 6 seconds or 1 action. So if you reached level 10 that would mean the medium duration rounds were about 60+ and time was not wasted while walking as long as you performed the action within the 6 seconds , in total you would have 1 action per round which is very reliable . Also depnding on your build you could attack several times a round which his one round of the reasons PoEs melee classes are underwhelming and why the casters classes are OP (all the spells can be casted in one round).

 

In PoE buffs don't last rounds, they last seconds usually 20-30+, some last for 10 seconds and this is kinda a problem because its just to short, you lose a big chunk of the duration by using the buffs themselves and you can't replace them all once they run out in battle and you certainly can't have all your party be at the same spot which is suppose to be close to the tank as the priest who has most of the useful buffs is going to be in proximity of the tank who is right infront of the enemy who might use aoes that deal a large amount of damage. Intelligence was supposed to balance this but the increase is not good enough. Another thing is that buffs don't stack with each other even if they are from different spells, so classes like the cypher for example who has several accuracy enhancing abilities get very affected, the chanter too as the priest can do the same he does without any chants restriction.

 

I'm not saying that PoE should adopt DnD system but it clearly lacks structure as the Spell system lacks structure and the enemy design lacks structure

 

Debuffs

The most complicated and convoluted part of the game, there are too many of them and for the most part its not clear what they do and how they are benefical to you, the same could be said about a big part of the buffs tho.

 

The spells that add debuffs and the debuffs themselves are usually divided between target specific and aoes, the target aoes last longer and have a less potent effect than single target ones except for a few that are completely broken like the mages hex which has aoe and lasts for 42 seconds

 

You have for example blinded that reduces accuracy by 25 reflexes and deflection by 20 perception by 4, the mage spell lasts for 42 seconds, 4 perception lost equals to extra reflexes and deflection penalties but you are not sure of the amount without checking, which is 4 deflection 8 reflexes. Its not instantly evident to the player what losing an stat means and furthermore it is also not clear what lowering the defenses that is not damage reduction or accuracy that are straightforward means.

 

Then something like dazed and hobled that are kinda of superfluous one which reduces accuracy by 10 dexterity perception and intellect by 2 (which you have to check what it does) and movement speed by 2 and the other which reduces reflexes by 20, the main thing of both states is that they reduce the movement speed, for all the rest other afflictions like blinded and there are aoe blinds. Frightened suffers from the same problem

 

Petrified which allows you to attack the characters vitality directly, the problem with this is that when you check your characters vitality its something like 1k but endurance is 140-200 and if your endurance hits 0 your character "dies" so you don't know if its actually benefical to you that they are petrified, when you check the encyclopedia monsters' vitality isn't even listed

 

Well i think thats about it

Edited April 26, 2015 by watcher341

[b0rsuk]

As for surviving the biawac, the animancer hanging on the tree in Gilded Vale hints that some souls can't be picked up. Some souls are too heavy. Souls splinter and wear away over time (Rymgard), but some stay in good shape.

--------------------

 

Trolls... There are enemies which are pretty much immune to stuff. Skeletons are incredibly tough to piercing and slashing. Trolls resist blunt attacks very well. You can brute force your way through that, but it's painful and it's much more effective to use a vulnerable damage type. It works the other way too. I had a really big problem against boars in Magran's Fork. Nothing I tried seemed to work. Until I cast Woodskin, and they just fell apart.

 

 

 

-Undead are not immune to piercing and freezing damage

1. So ?

0. They are not truly undead. Their bodies are still alive, their organs can be pierced and they can be frozen.

 

 

 

-oozes aren't immune to blunt damage and corrosive damage

In real world, spiders aren't immune to venom. Neither are snakes. Honey badgers are not venomous, but they resist poison very well.

 

Banshees:

I'm a better player than you. I've found a way to counter them. I cast Prayer against Fear (ideally from a scroll, so Durance can cast Prayer against Paralysis or whatever it's called). In that time, Kana is singing a chant to add some willpower. Even if paralysis happens, it won't last long and banshees are cut to pieces in that time. Most spirits are also weak to mind attacks, and have poor fortitude. You need to exploit their weaknesses.

 

Corrupted Druids:

Death interrupts druids pretty well. Focus fire those who cast it. Potion of Bulwark against the Elements saves from shock damage. Seven Men blah blah, the Kana chant, grants mass resistance to shock. Woodskin grants resistance to shock. I had two druids in my party, Hiravias is in the same zone as corrupted druids. Knockdowns from Eder and Itumaak. You need to learn some new tactics. Honestly, I had more trouble with lions.

 

Comparing level2 Mindblades with level5 or 6 Firebug ? Really ?

 

"Rounds" is an artificial construct for tabletop gaming, to make it easy to calculate how long a spell should last. With a computer keeping track of that, they are no longer needed. Rounds also make it really hard to have slight increases in spell duration. Say you have some boots +1 to Intelligence or +2 to Intelligence. In a IE game this could mean +1 round every two stat points, or even every 4 stat points for more powerful spells. In PoE, you can have half a second extension with no problem.

 

It's not true all spells can be cast "in one round". There are fast, average, and probably some long spells.

 

I like short buffs, because it makes me think when to use each buff. There are situations where using a short-lived buff like Circle of Protection is still very good. I had a party with three spellcasters - two druids and one priest. Priest casts Circle, the other two some other buffs, and this gives me some breathing room before more long-lived buffs are up.

 

Buffs not stacking is nice, because it limits the amount of mindless buff stacking you do before or during combat. You just use stronger buffs in tougher fights, weaker or none at all in ordinary ones.

 

Stat reduction - you can bring up character screen and see what each stat does when it deviates from 10. You can also pause and check the in-game encyclopedia.

 

Overall, it seems you are experiencing a culture shock. Your post looks like a confused rant. It's all over the place and there's no rhyme or reason to it. You just don't like things being different.

[Alaric Eisenarm]

....

 

The dilemma posed at the end of the game is straightforward:  "Is it better for people to believe a lie that improves their quality of life, or know the truth and suffer the consequences?" 

 

....

Good posts. However here I have to disagree, the dilemma is not as easy as that. A further question raised is: Does knowing the truth have negative consequences? And even further: Will it have a positive effect?

[b0rsuk]

To construct a wall, you need to lay down bricks in a consistent, thought out way. Those posts are not WALLS of text. They're heaps of bricks and rubble.

[watcher341]

 

I  just finished it on hard difficulty of the version 1.0. Didnt patch because of the nerfs

I actually finished in PoTD

 

forgot that's what the hardest diff is called