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The best option would probably be turn-based combat and fewer enemies so it's not a slog, but as Ropekid pointed out, not his personal dream RPG, etc. The Codex dude is welcome to hate the game for whatever reasons he wants, really. I mean, it's got a 90% rating on Metacritic (Universal Acclaim!), so obviously he's in the minority. The fact that this particular game could do so well is a testament to the creators; it's in a weird spot where it's not a high-budget game, but has just enough of a budget that it sometimes gets judged by AAA standards. I really do want to see a sequel with the foundation this game laid, a pre-existing engine, and at least twice the budget. That'd be a hell of a thing.
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Apr 23, 2015 15:47
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sassassin posted:This isn't a contradiction. When people want an IE-like game they want something like BG2. Making a game like BG1 is an unnecessary step back. I don't know, making it more like BG2 would still make it just as derivative and non-risk taking as any other IE game.
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Apr 23, 2015 15:55
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idonotlikepeas posted:The Codex dude is welcome to hate the game for whatever reasons he wants, really. I mean, it's got a 90% rating on Metacritic (Universal Acclaim!), so obviously he's in the minority. I like the game, but this is a pretty terrible argument, not going to lie. As a pro-tip, never, ever respond to pointed criticism with "he's in a minority". While technically true, it really doesn't add anything of value. Speaking of the review, which is as Codex as it can get, I.. must be in the minority that doesn't think the game's encounter design is *that* bad. Yes, at times it can be a little repetitive because it doesn't make use of the game's layout and height variation to a meaningful degree, and it obviously lacks scripted encounters of a certain complexity (something that Rope Kid had actually talked about during an interview on, you guessed it, the Codex: they might do stuff like that in the future, but they were just setting up things for PoE so they couldn't afford it), but there are enough enemies that fight differently and they are mixed in such a way that I always needed to think of how to prioritize my targets and move my characters around. If there's anything I dislike about the current iteration of the combat system it would be how powerful classes with disabling abilities can feel. Cipher would feel a lot more balanced if there were more enemies with a high Will defense around, for example.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:00
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The encounter design in Icewind Dale wasn't much different than in PoE at all. Mostly trash that you just clicked "everyone attack" on, the occasional spellcaster you have to make sure to disrupt, etc. BG2 had outright terrible encounter design, especially when fighting wizards. And don't get me started on the Sahaguin City, a bunch of completely non-threatening dudes and an area that was pure filler in every way. I suspect that a lot of people, when they reminisce fondly about BG2, forget how much it kind of falls apart after you leave the city.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:18
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Carew posted:I don't know, making it more like BG2 would still make it just as derivative and non-risk taking as any other IE game. I'm not sure they could have made it that much more like BG2. A big part of what made BG2 possible is the fact that they'd made the underlying engine, and were free to just create ungodly amounts of content for it, while drawing upon an already well-established ruleset and world. BG2 is the sort of game that only could have been a sequel.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:24
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:I like the game, but this is a pretty terrible argument, not going to lie. As a pro-tip, never, ever respond to pointed criticism with "he's in a minority". While technically true, it really doesn't add anything of value. Ehhhhh. With art, there are no objective standards of quality that mean a drat thing. In general, "a lot of people think this art is pretty good" is the best you're going to be able to do. The only better thing you're going to find is "this person whose tastes agree with mine has an opinion on the thing". So, for instance, if you happen to have the same mindset as the dude that wrote that review (which I have so far been unable to get all the way through despite several tries), it's actually going to be incredibly useful to you. You can't generally tell that from one review, though, which is why it's useful to keep track of reviews you agree with and watch that particular reviewer's future work. In the absence of something like that, looking at a review and saying "well, that's cool and all but the game you gave a zero to has an average of ninety, so your opinion is probably not gonna help me that much" is pretty okay in my opinion.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:42
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idonotlikepeas posted:Ehhhhh. With art, there are no objective standards of quality that mean a drat thing. In general, "a lot of people think this art is pretty good" is the best you're going to be able to do. In all forms of media, there will always be "critics" who believe they like/dislike things for the right reasons and that the mindless sheeple who like [pop music/blockbuster movie/hit game] are simply liking things wrong. It's always baffled me. I've generally been of the opinion that most of what I like is fringe or artsy or whatever because I'm a bit mad, not because I have some special insight.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:49
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idonotlikepeas posted:Ehhhhh. With art, there are no objective standards of quality that mean a drat thing. In general, "a lot of people think this art is pretty good" is the best you're going to be able to do. Hyperbole, yes, but appealing to popularity is demonstrably fallacial, and also extremely gay. It's certainly not going to convince anyone of anything ever if they don't already agree with you. Why bother? Lunchmeat Larry fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 16:54
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precision posted:The encounter design in Icewind Dale wasn't much different than in PoE at all. Mostly trash that you just clicked "everyone attack" on, the occasional spellcaster you have to make sure to disrupt, etc. The IE games had some cool setpiece fights that PoE lacks, but the Baldur's Gates especially were often really bad when it came to populating its dungeons. And BG2 loved its high level wizards way too much. The expansion packs were better, but they also produced things like the werewolf island. And were expansion packs, which PoE doesn't have right now. But that only really means that grognards complaining about PoE while talking up the IE games are not to be taken seriously, which, yeah. It doesn't mean that PoE doesn't have problems with encounter design. I think that PoE already achieved quite a bit by making enemies with varied abilities and using them in pretty diverse groups. My tactics varied a lot between encounters even in the same area, but I also have to say that I rarely actually had to stop and think about what to do for long. Part of that I'll chalk up to problems with class and ability balancing - even when the situation doesn't really call for Mental Binding, it's never going to be a bad idea to use it because it's just that good - but to a large degree it's that, as understandable as it is that they're not there, the game could really use some more fine-tuned scripted fights. Even just something like tuning down the Adra Dragon and giving it two Xaurip High Priest buffbots casting Prayer spells in exchange. Also, I don't think the game needed that many trash mobs (RPGs in general really need to get over their love for suicidal wildlife), and I don't understand why so many of the more memorable fights are confined to the Endless Paths and bounties and so few have been worked into quests. Edit: Also... zedprime posted:sick burns on Iovarra Wizard Styles fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 16:56
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:And that's why (insert pop star here I dunno) is a greater musician than Beethoven by any real metric, right? This is why we have Internet forums boys. We've made it.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:59
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:And that's why (insert pop star here I dunno) is a greater musician than Beethoven by any real metric, right? Bad example. Beethoven has been enjoyed by more people than Katy Perry, they just aren't all alive right now. And to make it meaningful you'd need to express it as a percentage of the population anyway; there are more people in the world, so a larger number will be entertained by less entertaining things. Adjusting for those factors, yeah, I'll defend what I said. The only purpose of art is to evoke a particular emotional or intellectual response in the person experiencing it. If it does that, it is good art, and if it doesn't, it is bad art. That is the only standard of art quality that has any meaning whatsoever, and everything else is just a bunch of farting around. That isn't exactly popularity, because it doesn't take advertising into account; plenty of people would probably like things that they'll never experience because they'll never even hear about them. And I'm certainly not going to try to convince the Codex guy that he's wrong. In fact, I believe that in a particularly meaningful way, he's not, which is why I said he's welcome to hate the game for whatever reasons he wants. If you don't enjoy a piece of art, or a game, that's generally an absolute; people are not going to be able to talk you into enjoying it later on. But when you take that opinion and make it into a review of the game, you're trying to make an argument to people that haven't played it to convince them that they either should or shouldn't, and when speaking to those people, yes, "most people liked it even if the codex guy didn't" is actually a pretty convincing argument, as it turns out.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:02
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Well, as someone who doesn't play this type of game. Never played all these classics everyone is talking about and completely forgot about backing this until it was out for a month, I'm having a blast. So if nothing else, they've got a good game for the completely inexperienced.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:10
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idonotlikepeas posted:Bad example. Beethoven has been enjoyed by more people than Katy Perry, they just aren't all alive right now. And to make it meaningful you'd need to express it as a percentage of the population anyway; there are more people in the world, so a larger number will be entertained by less entertaining things. Adjusting for those factors, yeah, I'll defend what I said. The only purpose of art is to evoke a particular emotional or intellectual response in the person experiencing it. If it does that, it is good art, and if it doesn't, it is bad art. That is the only standard of art quality that has any meaning whatsoever, and everything else is just a bunch of farting around. That isn't exactly popularity, because it doesn't take advertising into account; plenty of people would probably like things that they'll never experience because they'll never even hear about them. Of course, nobody's going to be convinced to like something they don't like or vice versa, but it's possible to accept that some things you like aren't particularly great by a lot of metrics. I think PoE has some serious flaws (though I don't agree with all the ones in that review) but I'm still really enjoying it for reasons I can't explain very well, so I'm not going to argue that it's actually objectively good.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:12
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Blotto Skorzany posted:The guy thought it was a particular really well-treated philosophical problem (which gets brought up in every western Phil 101 course when epistemology comes up) and the nigh-canonical answer for three of the last four centuries is not a response option uh, canonical for like, two hundred years maybe. I assume we're talking about Descartes thinking that he could use logic to prove that his reality exists, right? Except Descartes's reasoning comes from assuming an all knowing, all powerful, benevolent god, which more or less wouldn't want to trick him and so he can use his senses and know they're true. That explicitly isn't the case in PoE. So... I don't know why this is a problem? I mean, think of the inverse - you get to the end of PoE, find out that the Gods are real, all powerful, all knowing, existed ex nihlo, all that western-christian goodness, and then you get asked "Well since there's no meaning, what do you do?" That would be a nonsensical question. Given what you just learned about the game world, the question may be unoriginal and well considered but it's certainly not one that can be answered with Descartes reasoning. The only way your PoE character could have logically answered with a version of Descartes's argument is if (s)he didn't understand what was being said or was willfully ignoring what was said. I suppose that could have been an option, but they already had a who cares if the gods aren't "real," they're still powerful and we still need them choice.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:13
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I'm quite sure that if PoE was a carbon copy of BG2 with just the title names swapped out, that the codex would still call it a piece of poo poo compared to the old classics.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:14
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Eh. I'm not well-versed in art criticism so I guess I don't know what I'm talking about, but something about this way of looking at it seems... kind of depressing, really. Like there's no point in arguing about the merits of anything subjective because any criticism is meaningless. Why bother having reviews at all? Just poll people and go with the average score. Criticism as a practice wasn't originally about assigning a piece of art a score that tells you how good it is. It used to be about engaging with and discussing a piece of art. Modern criticism is absolutely meaningless, yeah.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:22
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Kana for whatever reason left my party roster. He's completely disappeared  One moment I was switching to him and sleeping, the next my party only had 5/6 members!
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Apr 23, 2015 17:23
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Eh. I'm not well-versed in art criticism so I guess I don't know what I'm talking about, but something about this way of looking at it seems... kind of depressing, really. Like there's no point in arguing about the merits of anything subjective because any criticism is meaningless. Why bother having reviews at all? Just poll people and go with the average score. I think that's all legit, actually. The interesting thing about retrospectives and post-mortems and like that is to figure out WHY people liked or didn't like the game. That's especially a question you want to answer if you're engaged in creating art, since it helps you figure out how to achieve the response you want. (And potentially make poo poo-tons of money.) Edit: Just to add to this a little bit, this is actually why I keep trying to read this Codex review. Even if I think the guy is wrong, I kind of want to understand WHY he thinks the way he does. idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 17:23
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Four Score posted:Kana for whatever reason left my party roster. He's completely disappeared Is he...dead?
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Apr 23, 2015 17:24
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Disco Infiva posted:Is he...dead? No, I just rested at Brighthearth and he was gone. 5/6 party members.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:25
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Four Score posted:No, I just rested at Brighthearth and he was gone. 5/6 party members. Can't really blame him for that.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:26
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Obviously he was tired of waiting and wandered down Od Nua himself.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:28
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Batham posted:I'm quite sure that if PoE was a carbon copy of BG2 with just the title names swapped out, that the codex would still call it a piece of poo poo compared to the old classics. Wonder how they feel about Wasteland 2, that game was so old school it actually suffered for it.
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Apr 23, 2015 17:45
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Avalerion posted:Wonder how they feel about Wasteland 2, that game was so old school it actually suffered for it. Also the codex of 2002 did in fact hate Baldurs Gate for being RTwP 
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Apr 23, 2015 18:34
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precision posted:BG2 had outright terrible encounter design, especially when fighting wizards. The BG2 superfans consider those the best parts, so there are some irreconcilable differences of opinion here.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:38
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People don't have as much fun playing RPGs in general these days. It's all been done etc etc.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:41
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One criticism I don't understand is that the game has bad/mediocre writing. I think the writing of the companions, and just the game in general is very good.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:54
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a slim pixie posted:The BG2 superfans consider those the best parts, so there are some irreconcilable differences of opinion here. Yeah, BG2 was a great game but it gets some serious rose-tinting from all the nostalgia. The magic/spell system was a buggy, opaque, and confusing mess. Once you know the handful of good spells for dealing with magical defenses and the ones you can exploit to break the game over your knee, combat becomes an exercise in recasting party buffs, engaging, and stripping magic defenses in the right order. My main complaint about PoE is, like many others have posted, the slogfest that combat becomes. The way difficulty is tuned up feels mostly like it just turns fights into bigger sacks of HP you have to maneuver into place and slowly kill. Rather than making me adapt my strategy or come up with specific approaches to tackle encounters, the trash packs have so many goddamn monsters in them and on PoD mode are so beefy I feel like I'm forced to do the same thing every time. It's mostly positioning, funnel the monsters into your tanks while your back line CCs and grinds them down. The only fights that are difficult are situations when you lose that ability to keep monsters pinned on your tanks (large open area fights, charm/domination, ghosts and rogues dodging engagement), and that's the extent of the challenge: monsters are eating your squishies. On PoD especially, monster stats are so high and there are so many of them in trash packs you can't just CC and blow them up, almost every fight devolves into a lengthy tank 'n' spank.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:58
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:And that's why (insert pop star here I dunno) is a greater musician than Beethoven by any real metric, right? How is it "extremely gay"? Is this some kind of bizarre new stereotype?
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Apr 23, 2015 19:02
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idonotlikepeas posted:The best option would probably be turn-based combat and fewer enemies so it's not a slog, but as Ropekid pointed out, not his personal dream RPG, etc. Then ready your wallets for their next kickstarter, or buy as many copies pre-sale as you can! I just don't want them having to work with tank games to make enough money not to starve 
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Apr 23, 2015 19:21
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I dont think that the majority of the Codex hivemind is in agreement with content or tone of Roxor's review. Most are waiting for VD and Grunker to put out a more substantive and, hopefully, even handed review.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:38
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Yarrington posted:How is it "extremely gay"? Is this some kind of bizarre new stereotype?  DrShevek posted:I dont think that the majority of the Codex hivemind is in agreement with content or tone of Roxor's review. Most are waiting for VD and Grunker to put out a more substantive and, hopefully, even handed review.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:51
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a slim pixie posted:The BG2 superfans consider those the best parts, so there are some irreconcilable differences of opinion here. Pellisworth posted:Yeah, BG2 was a great game but it gets some serious rose-tinting from all the nostalgia. The magic/spell system was a buggy, opaque, and confusing mess. Once you know the handful of good spells for dealing with magical defenses and the ones you can exploit to break the game over your knee, combat becomes an exercise in recasting party buffs, engaging, and stripping magic defenses in the right order. Caster supremacy is a sacred cow in old-school D&D crowds. After all, it requires "expertise" to know which spells are the best, and you should be rewarded for your expertise! Also, "expertise" means "Google it or ask a forum."
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Apr 23, 2015 19:52
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Yarrington posted:How is it "extremely gay"? Is this some kind of bizarre new stereotype? I think maybe we've all fallen through a time hole back to when 'gay' was a ubiquitous, apparently general-purpose pejorative.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:55
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:it is, my friend............ it is. Most folks are posting about their second and third replays there.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:56
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Eh. I'm not well-versed in art criticism so I guess I don't know what I'm talking about, but something about this way of looking at it seems... kind of depressing, really. Like there's no point in arguing about the merits of anything subjective because any criticism is meaningless. Why bother having reviews at all? Just poll people and go with the average score. You should stop posting if it's so meaningless.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:01
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So I finally got the NPC Cipher and  Any problems I was having with fights before are completely gone now. Eder as maintank with Durance as a backup tank (heavy armor and quarterstaff? Any better weapons for him?) with Aloth, Grieving Mother, and Hiravias in the back CC/Nuking and my PC Rogue just wailing on whatever's closest, and I think battles are finally starting to click. Granted I'm only level 5 but still.
Fhqwhgads fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 20:01
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Fhqwhgads posted:So I finally got the NPC Cipher and Nah this is basically when the game comes together. It's pretty fun from here on out, level 5 is just a confluence of when you have some actual gear, the party is rounded out, and you get your first class talents. It's basically when the game comes fully online. Enjoy!
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Apr 23, 2015 20:03
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a slim pixie posted:The BG2 superfans consider those the best parts, so there are some irreconcilable differences of opinion here. There was this sweet spot around midgame where the casters were challenging because they could do interesting poo poo, but not full-on Level 20 gently caress You I'm A Wizard. By the end of the game what used to be some really tense fights became a frustrating slog. I remember enjoying the non-wizard fights in ToB more, but I've been slacking on my BG2 replays so that could just be nostalgia talking. E:My favorite parts of the end-game caster fights were if you could lower their defenses enough that the Vorpal sword cut actually hit them, leading to occasional fights that ended as soon as Minsc got in swinging distance and instagibbed them. POE spellcaster fights are a lot more fun because it feels like they have a lot of power but are limited in what they can do. And the rare enemy ciphers are pretty scary if easy to kill. Ugly In The Morning fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 20:07
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The game is great, and for me one of the best RPG of the decade. Could be because I've followed its development for two years and a half, but I don't think so. The only thing I dislike really is that some of the quests could have been solved better, I feel. Twin Elms: The quest where you need to kill the father or the baby seems to rely only on one Resolve check, or it's a bloodbath. In The Blood Sands, you have to kill all of the Priests if you want to complete the quest. I wish there were more ways to solve those quests - even at the price of less quests in the game. Less combat and more alternatives. Not a big deal, and being more of an IWD than BG1 spiritual successor, it shouldn't be surprising. Still, I hope they'll work on that for the extension or the sequel. There must be a sequel, please don't let this be like Alpha Protocol.
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