RPGCodex Review #1 - Hŵrpa Dwrp

[gkathellar]

I think a lot of this review is just bulls*** grousing, and honestly, it's pretty clear that it's going to be from the start. The whining about character options being too "archetypal" and not original enough, the stuff about level-ups not having enough interaction ... it's clear that the reviewer is aware of some of the real problems with the game, but the fact that he's fixated on things that were always functions of the IE games makes it difficult for me to respect his opinion. Then he says things like, "so in other words not-saving-throws," I really get the impression that he is committed to finding things to be irritated about, and I lose any ability to take anything he says seriously.

 

Ultimately, I give this reviewer a 3/10 - good observational skills, but no awareness of what observations mean or the context that they occur in.

[Rostere]

 

40% of Codexers believe F:NV is Obsidian's best game, a more popular choice than MotB, KotOR 2

Older Obsidian games are in no way more "oldschool" than F:NV, only thing carrying them being their characters and stories.

 

The titles I mentioned are definitely more old-school as in not aping a popular modern genre of the lowest common denominator (FPSs) as much as Fallout 3/ New Vegas does.

[Jimmious]

I think the review serves its purpose well. It increases traffic to the Codex. Because that's the aim of this review, obviously. 
When you play PoE and end up saying that you had more fun with Dungeon Siege 3 there are two possibilities:
a) You do not like role playing games (which I doubt is true for any Codexer)
b) You are an attention-whore.

I will go with b) in this case

[Awathorn]

Review is one big, long rant. Review is also true.

 

While I think PoE is not PoS the reviewer thinks it to be, I agree it is a flawed mediocre game of uneven quality. Obs did a good act 1 and then made a 40 hour long filler.

 

A shame really.

[jools1980]

Vault Dweller and Grunker's review will be more positive. Vault Dweller hates Baldur's Gate and RTwP combat and his main priorities are C&C and reactivity, so as far as he's concerned pretty much anything is better than the BG games. He's also a developer so he's kinda bound by 'professional courtesy' as well. Grunker is a BG2 guy and I think he enjoyed the game but he thought that encounter design and itemization were absolutely terrible among other things. 

 

Dunno man, that's one of aspects I didn't quite like in PoE. C&C seem irrelevant, within 10 minutes of act3 I had the following happening ("translated" into spoiler-free speech):

 

1.

NPC: please do this horrible thing for me

Me (a holier-than-holy pally): No, I won't. [ending the dialogue]

Quest journal: "New Quest: Do the horrible thing"

 

2.

NPC: oh it's you, the guy who did what he did back in that time and place I can't spoil! We meet again! Oh btw everything you did got nullified because Obsidian decided so...

Me: D'uh, ok, I'll go back and fix it. Again.

 

Both examples came across as the game completely ignoring my choices and actions, and, more specifically, the game didn't even provide much of a reason (plot-wise) for it, other than "because we say so".

 

More in general, I never had the feeling that the world was really giving a rat's arse about my present/past actions. Even after some major events, there was not really much feedback from the game's world. I'm talking about "changed" convos, people addressing the player differently random chat bubbles from NPC, that kind of small, "flavour" touches that yet add so much to a game's atmosphere, maybe even a few minor side quests "spawned" in consequence of the player's influence over the world/region.

[Elerond]

 

Vault Dweller and Grunker's review will be more positive. Vault Dweller hates Baldur's Gate and RTwP combat and his main priorities are C&C and reactivity, so as far as he's concerned pretty much anything is better than the BG games. He's also a developer so he's kinda bound by 'professional courtesy' as well. Grunker is a BG2 guy and I think he enjoyed the game but he thought that encounter design and itemization were absolutely terrible among other things. 

 

Dunno man, that's one of aspects I didn't quite like in PoE. C&C seem irrelevant, within 10 minutes of act3 I had the following happening ("translated" into spoiler-free speech):

 

1.

NPC: please do this horrible thing for me

Me (a holier-than-holy pally): No, I won't. [ending the dialogue]

Quest journal: "New Quest: Do the horrible thing"

 

That don't actually has anything to do with C&C it may be poor way to mark quests that you don't want to do in your journal, but it don't anyway impact on your choices and their consequences. 

[Wintersong]

"I would also say that any sufficiently mediocre game is indistinguishable from a bad one"
  Ignorance! Ignorance!  

Seriously.

Also, DoW II portraits? Really? That broke my immersion of the review.

 

Worst game by Obsidian? Haha. To each his own, of course.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

The tone of the review is colorfully antagonistic

 

 

So that's how the cool kids spell "****" nowadays, eh?

 

 

 

That said, I could probably chat for a while about all the things I don't like about PoE, but all in all I think it is a great game, and I am having a lot of fun.  Could it be better?  Yup.  Is it Obsidian's worst game?  Um... no... My least favorite is DS3, but that is "like... my opinion, man."  

 

 

 

I think NWN2 was also definitely worse. I'd peg it as about on par with Alpha Protocol, which is a game I adore.

 

 

 

It's a perfect example of how cognitive dissonance creates a hill tribe of in-bred opinion. No, not opinion, dogma.

 

 

 

*blink* Cognitive dissonance? Care to elaborate?

 

 

 

He's right. The mega dungeon was the thing I was most looking forward to in this game and PoE totally let me down with it. I actually didn't mind the repetitiveness of the encounters that the reviewer whines about (Durlag's tower is just as guilty on that front). No. What got me was how 'shallow' and unemmersive that entire dungeon experience felt. There was hardly any story. There were hardly any puzzles. There were no Od-Nua-unique loot to be found (and no, that Bore-snore Esoc you can assemble isn't Unique) Also, We were promised gradual, level by level difficulty progression but we got nothing of the sort. We got 8 straight levels of same-same and then we got a spike in difficulty at about level 9 or 10 that remained until the end.

 

 

 

It ain't no Watcher's Keep, that's for sure.

 

Still, the first thing coming to my mind when thinking of it is "it's almost 4 times as long as Dragon's Eye, but it still feels like far less of a waste of time".

 

 

I find this review lacking objectivity, which just show how corrupt gaming media is these days. In my opinion we need much better journalistic standards and we should all boycott this media outlet until they fix their review standards...

 

 

It just goes on to show how corrupt and unfit for purpose the degenerate games media has become! Their condescending preaching shows the absolute contempt they're feeling their audience, millions of diverse gamers now labelled as untermensch! Oh wait...

Edited April 22, 2015 by aluminiumtrioxid

[dododad]

While I agree with the assessment that story as bland and uninspiring, same can be said about this 'review'. It's badly written, has mistaken information and is plain wrong at times.

 

 

QUOTE: Dexterity looks important at first because it gives you “action speed”, which governs the efficiency of actions (very useful for some mages and gunners) and the delay between them, but soon you realise that most of that is overshadowed by the armour recovery modifier anyway.

WRONG: In fact dexterity is THE most important attribute for casters, and vital also to anyone not into tanking

 

QUOTE: Perception is probably the least useful of the bunch, as it affects a character’s interrupt rate – interrupts are coin toss rolls that can delay an interrupted character’s action slightly.

WRONG: Probably? Oh, he didn't touch POTD, riiiiight. And he doesn't even know what it does to various wall spells. Anyway, complaining about dump stats is completely pointless, when all infinity games that he so loved, had bracelet's of dexterity and ogre might, making it possible to dump everything out of these two stats.

 

QUOTE: The druid is good at everything and overshadows all other casters, the priest would be good if buff spells didn’t suck and the endurance/health system wasn’t broken, and the wizard got terribly shafted. The druid can heal, do damage, buff everyone, debuff, drop some crowd control and summon elementals, he’s also decent in a fight due to shapeshifting. Compare that to the priest that melts in any melee, whose damage spells are lacklustre, and who can drop a few buffs before standing in a corner and being useless.

WRONG: I'm not even going into this one. It's actually Priest>Wizard>Druid, but don't tell him that.

 

QUOTE: There are four difficulty settings – easy, normal, hard, Path of the Damned. I can’t say I can recommend any of them. The differences between easy-hard are the amount of monsters you face. PotD, on the other hand, sums the monsters of all three difficulties and increases their stats by 50%. Granted, I only played hard, but I simply can’t see PotD being anything other than annoying as hell.

ASSUMPTION: So, we are ranting based on what we think?

 

QUOTE: This is literally the worst Obsidian game I’ve played to date.

ARROGANCE: You can't honesty be as arrogant to call it the worst Obsidian game, you can't.

 

And finally he goes into spent tirade about engagement system, the one that finally fixed old and broken "running around with boots of speed/hasted" from old engine. I'd quote it all, but don't want to spoil my whole post. It's too dirty, baseless and pathetic in scope.

Edited April 22, 2015 by dododad

[Rostere]

 

He's right. The mega dungeon was the thing I was most looking forward to in this game and PoE totally let me down with it. I actually didn't mind the repetitiveness of the encounters that the reviewer whines about (Durlag's tower is just as guilty on that front). No. What got me was how 'shallow' and unemmersive that entire dungeon experience felt. There was hardly any story. There were hardly any puzzles. There were no Od-Nua-unique loot to be found (and no, that Bore-snore Esoc you can assemble isn't Unique) Also, We were promised gradual, level by level difficulty progression but we got nothing of the sort. We got 8 straight levels of same-same and then we got a spike in difficulty at about level 9 or 10 that remained until the end.

 

 

It ain't no Watcher's Keep, that's for sure.

 

Ha ha. Very funny.

[Evange]

This thread is the #1 flame bait of the year...

[aluminiumtrioxid]

 

 

He's right. The mega dungeon was the thing I was most looking forward to in this game and PoE totally let me down with it. I actually didn't mind the repetitiveness of the encounters that the reviewer whines about (Durlag's tower is just as guilty on that front). No. What got me was how 'shallow' and unemmersive that entire dungeon experience felt. There was hardly any story. There were hardly any puzzles. There were no Od-Nua-unique loot to be found (and no, that Bore-snore Esoc you can assemble isn't Unique) Also, We were promised gradual, level by level difficulty progression but we got nothing of the sort. We got 8 straight levels of same-same and then we got a spike in difficulty at about level 9 or 10 that remained until the end.

 

 

It ain't no Watcher's Keep, that's for sure.

 

Ha ha. Very funny.

 

 

...No pun intended.

[gkathellar]

This thread is the #1 flame bait of the year...

 

Eh, I've seen better.

[Ineth]

QUOTE: The druid is good at everything and overshadows all other casters, the priest would be good if buff spells didn’t suck and the endurance/health system wasn’t broken, and the wizard got terribly shafted. The druid can heal, do damage, buff everyone, debuff, drop some crowd control and summon elementals, he’s also decent in a fight due to shapeshifting. Compare that to the priest that melts in any melee, whose damage spells are lacklustre, and who can drop a few buffs before standing in a corner and being useless.

WRONG: I'm not even going into this one. It's actually Priest>Wizard>Druid, but don't tell him that.

 

Nah, it's

Druid > Wizard > Cipher > Priest

even if you never use shapeshifting. Druids are very much OP spellcasters once you get the hang of them.

[gkathellar]

 

QUOTE: The druid is good at everything and overshadows all other casters, the priest would be good if buff spells didn’t suck and the endurance/health system wasn’t broken, and the wizard got terribly shafted. The druid can heal, do damage, buff everyone, debuff, drop some crowd control and summon elementals, he’s also decent in a fight due to shapeshifting. Compare that to the priest that melts in any melee, whose damage spells are lacklustre, and who can drop a few buffs before standing in a corner and being useless.

WRONG: I'm not even going into this one. It's actually Priest>Wizard>Druid, but don't tell him that.

 

Nah, it's

Druid > Wizard > Cipher > Priest

even if you never use shapeshifting. Druids are very much OP spellcasters once you get the hang of them.

 

 

Look, the spellcasting tiers are clearly debatable, but what I think we can all agree is truly atrocious is that the reviewer thinks spiritshift is good.

Edited April 22, 2015 by gkathellar

[jools1980]

 

 

Vault Dweller and Grunker's review will be more positive. Vault Dweller hates Baldur's Gate and RTwP combat and his main priorities are C&C and reactivity, so as far as he's concerned pretty much anything is better than the BG games. He's also a developer so he's kinda bound by 'professional courtesy' as well. Grunker is a BG2 guy and I think he enjoyed the game but he thought that encounter design and itemization were absolutely terrible among other things. 

 

Dunno man, that's one of aspects I didn't quite like in PoE. C&C seem irrelevant, within 10 minutes of act3 I had the following happening ("translated" into spoiler-free speech):

 

1.

NPC: please do this horrible thing for me

Me (a holier-than-holy pally): No, I won't. [ending the dialogue]

Quest journal: "New Quest: Do the horrible thing"

 

That don't actually has anything to do with C&C it may be poor way to mark quests that you don't want to do in your journal, but it don't anyway impact on your choices and their consequences. 

 

 

If I choose not to do a quest, surely I don't expect it to pop up as "active" in my journal. It feels like 4th wall breaking: "Hi player, we know your PC refused this quest, but we, the developers, want you to do it nonetheless, so here's the entry in your journal". That's just ignoring my choice, to be honest.

[Evange]

 

 

This thread is the #1 flame bait of the year...

Eh, I've seen better.

Ok #2 flame bait then.

[Antless]

I agree with basically all criticism raised in the review. The one thing that I found worthy to empathize was that particularly in Act 3, the slew of made-up words that was thrown at your head was absolutely cringeworthy and completely unnecessary. Why can't a soulstorm be a soulstorm and why does it need at least two special characters to spell it out?

 

That said, there is a baby somewhere in the bathwater. The game might be lacking in many areas, but to me it also shows that the concept can work and that this specific type of game is not just a obsolete dinosaur fueled by nostalgia and a lack of budget.

[dododad]

 

QUOTE: The druid is good at everything and overshadows all other casters, the priest would be good if buff spells didn’t suck and the endurance/health system wasn’t broken, and the wizard got terribly shafted. The druid can heal, do damage, buff everyone, debuff, drop some crowd control and summon elementals, he’s also decent in a fight due to shapeshifting. Compare that to the priest that melts in any melee, whose damage spells are lacklustre, and who can drop a few buffs before standing in a corner and being useless.

WRONG: I'm not even going into this one. It's actually Priest>Wizard>Druid, but don't tell him that.

 

Nah, it's

Druid > Wizard > Cipher > Priest

even if you never use shapeshifting. Druids are very much OP spellcasters once you get the hang of them.

 

 

Cipher is op at start, but he gets right on track by the end of the game on potd. With his charging mechanic, he simply can't hold ground with proper casters. In late middgame and endgame he actually gets thrown behind the other three. At about the same time druid losses any need for Shapeshifting, making his advantage void, Wizard gains his extremely useful teleport, and Priest should gain enough points in mechanic to make his traps deal crits to everyone. 

[communard]

I find it incredible this guy even finished the game while clearly not bothering to learn even the basics of the system.

[Ineth]

Some specific quotes from the review that I sort of agree with:

 

15 years ago when you killed a dragon in Baldur’s Gate 2, you could take its scale and craft yourself a bitchin’ suit of armour that would outshine most other ones in the game. In PoE, you can use the scale to add yourself a +2 damage reduction to your generic plate mail...

 

I hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah, I think that's not a bad parallel to exemplify the "everything is sort of samey, nothing truly unique" problem of PoE's item and crafting system.

 

For starters, there is no leeway whatsoever when it comes to movement while engaged, no equivalent of five-foot-step – your character does as much as move its foot and it eats a hit to the face. This punishes any sort of repositioning or manoeuvrability badly enough to turn every fight into the fantasy equivalent of trench warfare.

 

 

Yep. The engagement mechanic would probably be much better if engaged characters were allowed to move a little without breaking engagement, e.g. within a certain radius from the foe.

 

It wouldn't even need any fancy UI support - simply make the mouse cursor for move commands look different when clicking it would cause the character to break engagement.

 

When you see for the nth time the same mob of trolls, followed by the same mob of ooze repeated 5 times over during the course of one dungeon, you know you are in for a treat. And in PoE, this happens all the bloody time, with some particular offenders being, for example, the Temple of Skaen under Dyrford that has literally the same friggin’ cultist mob copypasted all over the place some twenty times.

 

Yep, Temple of Skaen is such a drag if you want to explore it fully. Definitely the least fun dungeon I've found so far in the game. In subsequent playthroughs I'll either skip it or sneak/lockpick around 95% of its content, since the loot you can get by exploring it all is not worth the pain.

 

Other dungeons also suffer from this problem to a lesser extent, though it's not quite as pervasive as the review claims.

 

There are also never any interesting scenarios like your party walking into an ambush, orc archers shooting you from behind walls, anything like this. Forget about having to look out for traps during a fight too because the game only lets you detect/remove traps when out of combat.

 

Yeah, I had hoped for more in that regard as well.

Edited April 22, 2015 by Ineth

[Eisenheinrich]

Guten Tag!

 

Pardon me, but what exactly is the "RPGCodex" and how is their opinion anymore valid than than anyone else's? I'm from Germany and never heartd 'bout this message board before and just judging by some threads I skimmed, this is just another place for elitist basement-wierdos with obvious no life and some distasteful memes. So, why the fuzz?

[Shadenuat]

The titles I mentioned are definitely more old-school as in not aping a popular modern genre of the lowest common denominator (FPSs) as much as Fallout 3/ New Vegas does.

So there can't be an oldschool FPS?

[Elerond]

 

 

 

Vault Dweller and Grunker's review will be more positive. Vault Dweller hates Baldur's Gate and RTwP combat and his main priorities are C&C and reactivity, so as far as he's concerned pretty much anything is better than the BG games. He's also a developer so he's kinda bound by 'professional courtesy' as well. Grunker is a BG2 guy and I think he enjoyed the game but he thought that encounter design and itemization were absolutely terrible among other things. 

 

Dunno man, that's one of aspects I didn't quite like in PoE. C&C seem irrelevant, within 10 minutes of act3 I had the following happening ("translated" into spoiler-free speech):

 

1.

NPC: please do this horrible thing for me

Me (a holier-than-holy pally): No, I won't. [ending the dialogue]

Quest journal: "New Quest: Do the horrible thing"

 

That don't actually has anything to do with C&C it may be poor way to mark quests that you don't want to do in your journal, but it don't anyway impact on your choices and their consequences. 

 

 

If I choose not to do a quest, surely I don't expect it to pop up as "active" in my journal. It feels like 4th wall breaking: "Hi player, we know your PC refused this quest, but we, the developers, want you to do it nonetheless, so here's the entry in your journal". That's just ignoring my choice, to be honest.

 

 

But it don't have anything to do with C&C, but how information about quest that you have refused to do are marked. Marking them up just show that your character knows that there are person in the game that is interested you to do something and you are free to ignore it, or change your mind or find way to go against that person. But if journal text don't match your refusal then there is problem in how quest is marked in the journal, but still it don't have anything to do with C&C, because it is not choice nor it is consequence it is just information that is marked up so that player has easier time to recollect information they have learned.

[Ineth]

Cipher is op at start

 

My working theory is that Ciphers are easier to play well than Druids & Wizards, and many people mistakenly think that means "more powerful" - especially at the beginning of the game when you haven't gotten the hang of how to play your particular Druid/Wizard build well yet.

 

You don't have to ration long-term limited resources with the Cipher, you can just keep spamming the powers worry-free, so there's not much difference between a naively played Cipher and a well-played one, whereas with the other caster classes that difference is huge.

 

That is to say:

 

well-played Druid/Wizard >> Cipher > naively or impatiently played Druid/Wizard

 

At about the same time druid losses any need for Shapeshifting, making his advantage void

 

Shapeshifting was never much of an advantage to begin with. The druid's spell selection and generous number-of-spells-per day is where the class shines. At mid-to-late game it starts getting level 1 spells as per-enounter instead of per-rest - like the wizard, but unlike the wizard it has foe-only AoE damage spells in that tier.

 

So at that point the druid can freely spam Dancing Bolts against trash mobs just like the Cipher would spam Mind Blades, except without having to regain focus in between. And with much more varied (and situation-specific useful) high-level spells available for thougher battles.