Crucis

AL, In POE2, you're there because Berath wants you to discover what Eothas is doing, and then later to stop him from destroying The Wheel. How you get from the start of the story to its end is entirely up to the player. What would be more boring to me would be a game where the story was nothing more than a straight line from start to end, sort of like the IWD games. Anyways, I think that a problem that games like this have is that if the designers make the storyline too obvious it gets boring fast. And OTOH, if they bury it in mystery too deeply, some players may get confused easily and not know what to do next to progress the story. And I don't think that there's any easy answer here.

Voice talent is extremely expensive, which is why I'm not a fan of it, except on a very limited scale. Now, if most of the companion dialogs were text based, that'd be fine by me.

Responses. 1) 5 vs 6 person party. I can life with it either way. I find 6 person parties more fun because it's easier to build a party for the long haul. With 6person parties, I like to have a core of 5: a couple of front line tanks, a priest, a spellcaster (cipher or wizard), and a ranged weapon specialist, while leaving the 6th slot for either a jack of all trades character, or as a character I'm using for a specific purpose in a specific battle (like someone built to help the part deal with fampyrs). But with a 5 person party, it gets a good deal trickier, and I tend to lose the jack of all trades character. 2) Persistent level cap. Yes and no. I think that the problem with the DLCs is that the game is balanced for how it was released. And when the "normal" PoE1&2 DLCs are added, you end up with characters who could be might be much more powerful by the time you're making your stretch run for the final battle. I wish that the DLCs were more like the BG2 Throne of Baal expansion which was appended to the core game, AFTER the final battle of BG2 was fought. This way, you don't really have to worry about screwing up the core game with DLCs and a raised level cap. The expansion would have a higher level cap, and you couldn't reach it until after completing the main story line. 3) Nature of the Gods: Personally, I'd rather see a PoE3 ignore the Gods completely. I'm quite bored with the Eoran gods being central to the story. 4) skipped 5) Purple prose: Honestly, it never bothered me. 6) More companions, less open world. These should be two items. More companions, definitely. Less open world, I described how I'd like to see this accomplished in a post elsewhere. What I don't want to see is the game being like IWD1 or 2 where the storyline OBVIOUSLY forced the player down a super narrow path. This was super boring after a while. What would work much better is having a number of larger strategic level maps that covered, perhaps, different countries. And so long as that part of the story stayed in that country, it was open. But at some point, the main storyline would require you to go from country A to country B. And once in country B, you couldn't return to country A. You stayed in country B's open world working the storyline and whatever side quests existed, until it was time to move onward to country C. Rinse and repeat as necessary. 7) More companion banter and dialog, etc. Meh, I don't really care for this, because I foresee it eating up a lot of the budget due to voiceovers, which IMO should be cut wayyyyyy back. To me, voice overs are a waste of money that would be better spent on actual content, rather than pandering to people to lazy to read. Moving on to "Things I thought that were massive improvements from POE that I do not want to see replaced or removed:" 1. Spells and abilities being per encounter rather than per rest. Personally, I don't think that this was an improvement at all. Honestly, I didn't like this entire part of the new PoE2 combat system. I think that magic is vastly more fun when its use is limited and the player has to manage his limited uses of those things. 2. HP recovery and rest, etc. I kind of feel the same about this as I do about point #1. I like having to manage limited resources. However, regarding resting, thinking back to PoE1, I'm not really sure what "resting supplies" really are? Campfire wood? You can rest without a fire or even a fire to cool. There's plenty of food that can be eaten cold, and probably would be if you were in a dangerous area where lighting a fire could attract dangerous creatures. Blankets? While having a blanket would be nice, I don't see it as a consumable supply. Blankets seem more like something any experienced traveler would have as part of his travel "kit". As for where one could rest in the wild, it seems to me that resting in an area that hasn't been completely cleared would either not be allowed or come with the risk of being attacked by wandering monsters local to that area. On the other hand, say that you were on the 3rd level of a dungeon, but you'd cleared the 2nd level, I'd think that you should be able to rest safely on the 2nd level. Side note: It annoyed me that the party could be on the PC's ship and be making a long voyage, but not be considered rested. Seriously, you'd think that your party could be resting most of such a journey, barring moving through a storm. My thinking was that if you'd been at sea for at least 1 day uninterrupted, the party should have been considered fully rested. /side note 3. Romances: They could remove romances as far as I'm concerned. 4. Unique magical items: I think that greater effort should be put into making certain that there are at least 4 different weapons, shields, and armor for each type. 4a. Generic magical weapons/armor: Honestly, it annoyed me that there was so damned many +3 or higher magical weapons (I don't remember the proper adjectives for the different levels of enhancement) and armor. It seems to me that anything that's (probably) +2 or higher is extremely costly to make, and really is far too good for regular troops. Now, I suppose that the Devs may have seen these generic super enhanced armors and weapons as substitutes for other things like jewels or coins as a way to provide rewards. Personally, I'd rather just get the jewels and currency, though there may be other ways to do this. In the game Pathfinder, I think that they have a system where you can find valuable relics. Now these relics can be sold at a regular merchant, but for much below their proper value. What you apparently needed to do is find some sort of special merchant who deals in such relics and would give you top dollar for them. This could be an interesting mechanic. 5. Companions helping pass dialog checks: I agree 100000%. 6+7: Agree on these two as well.

I completely agree with you on this, Ontarah. I greatly prefer the nice flowing style of battle that RTWP provides. Every time I watch a video about turn based combat, it looks so damned slow. So much stop start, stop start, stop start. Now, admittedly, if one wants to pause a LOT, you can also get a lot of the same stop start, stop start thing. But you can also just let the battle flow and issue your orders while everything continues all around you, if that floats your boat. EDIT: Meant to include this point in this post. I have no problem, I suppose, with the game having the option for turn based. But the game should be designed with RTWP as the primary combat mode. Honestly, I don't know what the appeal of turn based is over RTWP. I really don't. Turn based looks so damned boring to me.

Boeroer, this is modern reasoning, not the sort of reasoning one should expect out of civilizations from around the 1400's to 1700's.

To me, the primary reason certain weapon types are underutilized is that there just aren't enough of the unique ones in the game.

Another problem that I have with pierce-only weapons is that if your character is using a pierce-only ranged weapon, the way I see it, the last thing you want for a melee weapon is another pierce only weapon.

Favorite characters/companions aren't only about liking the personality of the character in question. Sometimes, unlikeable characters are good characters/companions. Also, not everyone responds to the personalities of other people (or companions in a game) in the same way. Let me give you a little example that I literally just read last night. In the 1960's movie, The Sound of Music, the lead actor, Christopher Plummer, didn't like lead actress, Julie Andrews. Why? Apparently, he didn't like that JA was so incredibly nice and cheery all the time, saying that she was like a Valentine's Day card all the time and it really grated on his nerves. Now, I think that lots of people would really like that sort of person, but CP didn't. Anyways, I personally think that you're taking this entirely too far. I take all companions and sidekicks into my overall group, though I don't use them all. I like having them in the larger group because it allows me to have a ship's crew with more firepower than just the core party of 5. But I also tend to rotate certain companions/sidekicks into the main party, to deal with situations I feel my current party isn't well suited to face. For example, if I'm not using Pallegina in my regular core party but I'm heading to a place I know is infested with fampyrs, I tend to rotate her in and someone else out, because I just like what Pallegina brings in battles against famps (mostly the Aegis of Loyalty ability). But that's just me.

Pallegina was my favorite companion, in large part because I love her accent. OTOH, GM was one of my least favorite companions in PoE1 because I seriously disliked her text only "quest".

For what it's worth, Aeons, is that if sidekicks did comment and were part of the main story, then they wouldn't BE sidekicks. They'd be companions. I imagine that Obsidian didn't have enough money in the budget to pay for more companions. Heck, as I remember reading, the sidekick Ydwin was supposed to be a companion but the kickstarter campaign fell short of the goal that would have provided the funds to pay for the work. Also, I think that part of the problem from my perspective is that they spent too much money on voice acting. I prefer more content over voice acting as much of a game as possible. Oh, sure, if it's a game company with a giant wallet, fine. But if the game company is operating on a limited budget, I'd prefer content over excessive amounts of voice acting every damn time.

One way to isolate different areas within the plot like in PoE1 could be (for example) to have part 1 of the story be in Rauitai, then have part 2 in Valia, and finally have part 3 of the story in the Living Lands. You'd have to make a long journey to get from part 1's area to part 2's area, perhaps by ship (but without any of PoE2's ship issues, just a simple passenger ship journey without incident). A problem I had with PoE2 was that on most of the smaller islands, the combat areas (buildings, caves, dungeons, whatever) felt far too small. PoE1's areas were significantly larger and more involved.

I have no doubt that if the designers wanted to go for (I don't even know what term to use) semi-railroad/semi-open world model, they could have the side quests all tied to certain events happening that would only be available after certain other events had been completed. But if they weren't careful, it could end up seeming too much of a railroaded plot and not enough open world, if you were literally forced to do the side quests in only a single order. I don't think that your Berath's Blessings idea would go over very well. There are a lot of players who only want to play the game to completion once, and might feel cheated if additional content was locked behind how many times you'd completed the game. This makes me think that this idea would go over like a lead balloon.

Like I said earlier , sometimes it's next to impossible to not have some negatives. Like the Devoted subclass. But others could be worked around. I'm not particularly fond of how they did wizards myself. I don't like the old "schools" system, because it's so damned old and stale. I wish that they could develop some wizard subclasses that completely dumped the school system. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the open world approach. I'm not familiar with those other games, so they don't help to explain open world to me. I don't think that I'd like a single large dungeon as the entire game. I guess that I like moving from place to place above ground and exploring. Also, if I compared BG2 with IWD1or2 (ignoring companions), I think that BG2 has more replay-ability because you aren't forced down a fixed path of going from place A to B to C …. all the way to the final location. I think that it's more interesting to choose your own path. BTW, regarding paladins, a problem that I have with them is that they're so damned similar. They each have their one unique difference between pally subclasses. One! It seems to me that they ought to at least have one special ability every level or 2 that they gain to create more differentiation between the subclasses of paladin, similar to how priests get different subclass specific spells every level. Regarding "the animist thing", the idea would be that the true base class would never really be seen/used by the players. And the generalist subclass would have its own special subclass benefits. But those benefits would be tailored to be as generalist for the class as possible. Another thing I'd like to see is a more even distribution of unique magic weapons and armor/shields by type. It's sad that there are so many sabers and so few of other types of weapons. One other thing, I think that the game needs to make a better effort to make single class characters more desirable to play. Right now, only a handful of classes are desirable to play as single class, largely due to how strong their level 8 and 9 abilities (usually spells) are. But some classes have such weak seeming level 8 and 9 abilities that it's not worth it, particularly when you consider how you get nearly as many ability points and all those additional class resource points for multiclass characters. I kind of think that many single class characters would need a greater number of resource points as well as better upper level abilities to make them worth playing (outside of the few classes that already are worth it as single class). But would that make the already pretty good single class character classes overpowered? I don't know.

Good post, Clim. * I didn't mind the PoE2 armor/pen system myself. * While I mostly like the underlying mechanic of how multiclassing was handled, I'm not really a fan of most of the subclasses. I would like to see the generic "no subclass" option sort of removed and replaced with a subclass that represents the generalist (generic) version of the class. Check out the Druid class where the Animist subclass does exactly this. Another change to MC that I'd love to see is the removal of the negatives as much as possible, along with the removal of the "no subclass" option. (Tie them together...) Then make the generalist subclass have some additional benefits that the other subclasses wouldn't get, just as the generalist wouldn't get the benefits that are linked to the more specialist subclasses. Now to be fair, I think that certain subclasses probably can't exist without certain negatives (or at least it would be difficult to make the specialist subclass work without the negs). Like the Devoted subclass. It'd be hard for the Devoted subclass to work if the character could have more than one weapon proficiency. OTOH, some negatives seem rather unnecessary to the subclass unless required for balance. Another thing is that I'm not sure that all subclasses' unique benefits currently scale very well as the characters level up. Honestly, I could go on and on about subclasses and issues I have with them, but I'll move on. * Endurance system from PoE1: I agree, I liked it as well. As for Vancian casters, I also agree. But I think that the issue here is that some people just want to take their wizards and never have to worry about running out of castings, etc. But one of the most enjoyable things in my first PoE1 run through in the huge dungeon was falling the 3 (?) levels and having to fight my way back up. I was running low on resting supplies so I had to be VERY cautious with my spell castings and not just spam castings every battle. It was a blast having to work hard to survive to get back up to safety with limited supplies and thus limited rests and limited spell castings. I had to try to avoid fights and sneak through levels as best I could, and only fight when there was no other option. It was a LOT more fun than just blasting through all the enemies in every room without worrying about anything other than perhaps dying. Resting is tricky though. I don't know what pathfinder's resting system is like, but if you'd like to describe it, that'd be cool. But as far as PoE1 vs PoE2 (and the old infinity games) go, the problem I see with unlimited resting is that if the system has Vancian spell casters, players are too tempted to just spam rests after every battle. OTOH, you'll have some players (whom I consider lazy … hey, I'm entitled to my opinion) who will just return to a town to rest or pick up resting supplies so that they can spam rests as much as possible, because they're the ones who want to spam their spells as often as possible. I personally like the challenge of trying to go as far as possible before resting, and only returning to town if things get critical. That said, it did seem to me like the number of resting supplies that a party could carry seemed rather low (3, I think). If I'd had my druthers, I think that I'd have set it at around 5 or 6. All in all, I don't know if there's a perfect answer to this. Different people have different tastes. * Prebuffing. I agree completely. If there was one thing that I loathed in BG2 (less so in the other Infinity engine games) was pre-buffing. Pre-buffing is boring and tedious as all hell. Regarding location, in past comments, I've said that I'd love to see a PoE3 that continues the Watcher's story go to the land where Rekke's from. (I forget the name.) But I've changed my mind, in large part because I think that I read that it was mostly desert. Yawn. Now, I'm leaning towards the Living Lands because of the great variety of environments from valley to valley. I'd rather avoid The White That Wends, because after IWD1+2, as well as PoE1's WM1+2, and PoE2's BoW, I think that I've hard enough of arctic settings. I'm not sure what I think about a PoE3 that's set in the future with a totally different set of companions and a new main character. Would it even be a Watcher? Or maybe be just some random adventurer? One thing I would hope for is another BIG dungeon. It might be nice to encounter a previously unencountered sub-race or possibly a new race entirely. Maybe have a part of the story be about some underground "world" where this new race lives. Part of me would love for it to be underground dwelling elves, but not "dark" elves as such. But if not regular elves or pale elves, what would an underground version of elves be? I don't know. I'd like to see some new, fresh ideas, not merely PoE1 moved to a different place on Eora with a different cast of characters. This is kind of why I think that a new sub-race of elves might be interesting, if done right. I'd also like less interaction with the gods of Eora, and have the story be more about the heroes dealing with more mortal problems. Well, that's all I have for now.

A big problem with the PoE games is that a large portion of the loyal fanbase are vocal veteran powergaming players for whom the game seems ridiculously easy and would constantly complain thusly. Personally, I'm not one of these power gamers. I prefer a more role playing play style and usually play on the "Normal" difficulty setting. This makes balancing the game incredibly difficult because there are also players who are new to this style of game who have a difficult time handling the toughest fights. And honestly, I don't know how they can satisfy both ends of that spectrum.