I agree. BG/BG2 set the bar too high and no other games can compare anymore.
POE was really fun but it lacked a reason to keep playing. I didnt enjoy most of the npc's either and making your own party like IWD takes more effort.
I really don't agree with the idea that BG/BG2 set the bar too high. They where first to reproduce the authentic PnP experience. That's all. BG1, in particular, sticks very closely to the "heroes journey" metaplot, to the extent that it is virtually a fantasy remake of Star Wars.
PST, Mass Effect 1, KotOR are all, IMO, better than Baldur's Gate.
"BG set the bar to high" is just an excuse. Write better.
You know what I hated the most? It just kind of throws you into the plot out of nowhere. You get an origin of sorts, but you get no real introduction and it hardly gets referenced in any meaningful way. I felt no real attachment to the world and honestly, I get really tired of crapsack worlds where it feels like there's no hope because the world itself is royally screwed up. That's what I felt was better about the FR world.
POE does take far too long to make the story personal, it does happen, just over half way through the game The game does seem pretty doom and gloomy, and your actions often have consequences beyond what you can predict, the ending can be very hopeful. You CAN change the Dyrwood for the better.
that was my issue as well. they throw you into a new fantasy world and just expect you to fully understand what is going on. your new to the region it's like how most rpg have you be sheltered your whole life and only now going into the world. it just does not work.
and to be fair i'm personally losing interest in the game. i lost motivation at act 3 and barly play the game anymore.
Case in point. Near the beginning you can ask about the strange stuff growing out of the ground. You are told that it is common all over the world, which would mean that unless the protagonist had been living in an isolated community all their life it would be practically impossible for them to need to ask about it.
Oh yeah, and when you make up names, why do they have to consist of an unpronounceable string of consonants? "Oh, those are the Ghwinglffiphian barbarians. They live round here so they can kill anyone who touches the ruins we have just made camp in."
@Fardragon , I think somebody earlier in the thread already suggested that they did that thing with the names in order to avoid any legal entanglements with WotC, and I thought that explained it pretty well.
The barbarians you're referring to are Glanfathans. I'm getting used to the names in the game, gradually and slowly, and it's starting to feel more and more like home, just like the Sword Coast. I even found a linguistics book in the game with a pronunciation guide, which was very helpful. (For example, in "Shieldbearers of St. Elcga", "Elcga" is pronounced "EL-dga"; "cg" in a name is pronounced "dg" as in "edge".
Xaurips are kobolds, Minoletta's line of spells are Magic Missiles, etc., etc. Sometimes I just call things what they obviously are, and sure, it might have been easier for new players to get into it if they hadn't been afraid to use WotC's monster and spell names for legal reasons, but I've spent enough time with it that I'm used to it now. And I find it a richly detailed world that is fascinating to me to explore, read, and play in.
Also, on the adra stones thing, "all over the world" does not mean "commonly seen". There are oceans and islands all over the Earth, (two thirds of the surface, in fact), and I can easily imagine never having seen one if I lived inland all my life and had never traveled.
It's quite possible to make up names without having unpronounceable "lcg" letter strings. Tolkien managed it.
And there are absolutely no legal restrictions on using names like kobold, just as there are no restrictions on using vampire or hippogriff. They are all creatures drawn from mythology, anyone can do what they like with them.
so i finally finished the game a couple days ago. i kinda rushed act 3 and was playing on story time mode so it only took me around 25 hours to beat.
i need to play this game more to get a real good opinion on it. right now i'm mixed. i liked act 2 the most and felt act 3 was the weakest of the whole game. when it got to the more personal story about your past life i started to get engaged in the story.
i'm very glad the final dungeon did not out stay it's welcome it was short and to the point. and the final talk with the big bad was just as good as every other rpg.
and i'm glad they had epilogue slides whitch more new crpg needs.
but like i said i'm gonna need to replay the game again to really form a real opinion. do all the quests i missed, buy white march etc. might play as a god like cipher.
Okay, I have just completed White March One and Two, and have to say I very much enjoyed them. The storyline was interesting and exciting, striking a much better balance between thought provoking and heroic than the original game. The combat was not excessively difficult, as I had been led to believe by some reviews. Minor negatives: the art and music aren't quite as evocative of cold as Icewind Dale, and of the three new companions I only found one particularly interesting.
Okay, I think I'm going to make myself very unpopular with this, but...
Pillars of Eternity is not Baldur's Gate. You will not get another game that is exactly like Baldur's Gate. If you want Baldur's Gate then play Baldur's Gate.
The bar a new game would have to reach to be like Baldur's Gate is so high that it can but fail meeting those expectations. Yes, so Pillars of Eternity should have never been advertised with Baldurs Gate, I'll give you that.
That's because people put Baldur's gate on this pedal where it has no flaws or just the perfect game which it really isn't. I love baldur's gate but my time on this forum showed me much about how some people think when it comes to this game.
It's quite possible to make up names without having unpronounceable "lcg" letter strings. Tolkien managed it.
And there are absolutely no legal restrictions on using names like kobold, just as there are no restrictions on using vampire or hippogriff. They are all creatures drawn from mythology, anyone can do what they like with them.
The names are perfectly pronounceable, but they use a foreign orthography (Welsh, it looks like, or some progenitor or obscure relative thereof). Tolkien's words were mostly either from the Germanic language family or from languages he as an Anglophone considered pretty, and thus much easier for Anglophones to wrap their brains and tongues around than words based on the language that gave us the infamous town Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
I think PoE's one big flaw is its excessively conservative balance. They've tried so hard to eliminate difficulty spikes, game breakers, and non-viable character builds that no matter how many types of enemies and attacks they add, they all kind of start to blend together because none of them pose challenges that really lean on specific game mechanics or abilities. There are no hard-counter mage defenses that force you to come up with appropriate counter-spells or strategies, no status effects that can really wreck your party, no seriously impressive gear aside from fully leveled soulbound weapons, no truly squishy wizards. Sometimes you just have to slap the guy who wants to make an idiot meathead mage on the hand and say "no, that's not how mages work, raise his INT back up or pick a fighter" or force someone who does something obviously stupid like pack his party with six rogues to bear the consequences of a bad decision by having to spend all his money on scrolls of the equivalent to Breach. There is a middle ground between the arbitrary unfairness of 2e AD&D making 17 STR warriors completely gimped or 18 CON mages literally throwing away two stat points and what PoE does.
That was in part my problem with PoE... all classes felt too similar, too balanced... In some points I felt it didn't matter who I brought with me in the group, they could deal with whatever attacked me.
It's quite possible to make up names without having unpronounceable "lcg" letter strings. Tolkien managed it.
And there are absolutely no legal restrictions on using names like kobold, just as there are no restrictions on using vampire or hippogriff. They are all creatures drawn from mythology, anyone can do what they like with them.
The names are perfectly pronounceable, but they use a foreign orthography (Welsh, it looks like, or some progenitor or obscure relative thereof).
There was no reason to do that though. Welsh includes certain sounds which simply don't exist in Germanic languages, and so have to have different spellings (eg ll). Every phoneme in PoE exists in English, but some are spelled differently for no good reason (other than a childish attempt to make it look more "fantasy"). As is says in one of the books you find "In Dyrwoodian whjdt is pronounced 'dog'". Tolkien's approach was he was translating his various languages into English, so he spelled the words in accordance with the language he was translating INTO. Thus he would have written "Deerwood", not "Dyrwood", irrespective of which language group he was translating from. (Perhaps with a note in an appendix to indicate if there was an actual connection with the animal or not).
I've finally upgraded to a laptop that can run PoE properly, and I decided to give it another go. I am still in the early part of the game in the Gilded Vale surroundings, pre Caed Nua, but have really been enjoying it this time around. I do still feel the game suffers some from it's overly serious tone, but that's my only real complaint so far. I love the ease-of-use features Obsidian built in, such as the fast-forward mode and the bottomless stash. Taking some the tedium of inventory management out of the game is awesome! I really like the spell animations too. The laptop I originally tried playing it on wouldn't even show most of those, and would lag really badly in a lot of areas, so it's like playing a totally different game with my new set-up!
I take back anything bad I've said about PoE in the past. I am really having a great time playing it this time around. It's obvious Obsidian has done a lot of work improving the combat system since the earlier versions. Plus, with both halves of the expansion installed, the stronghold is a lot more engaging (almost to the point of distracting me from the main game). my elf rogue watcher deals some pretty ridiculous damage, but Aloth is the star of the show when it comes to putting the hurt on enemies!
Comments
POE was really fun but it lacked a reason to keep playing. I didnt enjoy most of the npc's either and making your own party like IWD takes more effort.
PST, Mass Effect 1, KotOR are all, IMO, better than Baldur's Gate.
"BG set the bar to high" is just an excuse. Write better.
and to be fair i'm personally losing interest in the game. i lost motivation at act 3 and barly play the game anymore.
Oh yeah, and when you make up names, why do they have to consist of an unpronounceable string of consonants? "Oh, those are the Ghwinglffiphian barbarians. They live round here so they can kill anyone who touches the ruins we have just made camp in."
The barbarians you're referring to are Glanfathans. I'm getting used to the names in the game, gradually and slowly, and it's starting to feel more and more like home, just like the Sword Coast. I even found a linguistics book in the game with a pronunciation guide, which was very helpful. (For example, in "Shieldbearers of St. Elcga", "Elcga" is pronounced "EL-dga"; "cg" in a name is pronounced "dg" as in "edge".
Xaurips are kobolds, Minoletta's line of spells are Magic Missiles, etc., etc. Sometimes I just call things what they obviously are, and sure, it might have been easier for new players to get into it if they hadn't been afraid to use WotC's monster and spell names for legal reasons, but I've spent enough time with it that I'm used to it now. And I find it a richly detailed world that is fascinating to me to explore, read, and play in.
Also, on the adra stones thing, "all over the world" does not mean "commonly seen". There are oceans and islands all over the Earth, (two thirds of the surface, in fact), and I can easily imagine never having seen one if I lived inland all my life and had never traveled.
And there are absolutely no legal restrictions on using names like kobold, just as there are no restrictions on using vampire or hippogriff. They are all creatures drawn from mythology, anyone can do what they like with them.
https://www.twitch.tv/obsidian/v/104427656
i need to play this game more to get a real good opinion on it. right now i'm mixed. i liked act 2 the most and felt act 3 was the weakest of the whole game. when it got to the more personal story about your past life i started to get engaged in the story.
i'm very glad the final dungeon did not out stay it's welcome it was short and to the point. and the final talk with the big bad was just as good as every other rpg.
and i'm glad they had epilogue slides whitch more new crpg needs.
but like i said i'm gonna need to replay the game again to really form a real opinion. do all the quests i missed, buy white march etc. might play as a god like cipher.
I think PoE's one big flaw is its excessively conservative balance. They've tried so hard to eliminate difficulty spikes, game breakers, and non-viable character builds that no matter how many types of enemies and attacks they add, they all kind of start to blend together because none of them pose challenges that really lean on specific game mechanics or abilities. There are no hard-counter mage defenses that force you to come up with appropriate counter-spells or strategies, no status effects that can really wreck your party, no seriously impressive gear aside from fully leveled soulbound weapons, no truly squishy wizards. Sometimes you just have to slap the guy who wants to make an idiot meathead mage on the hand and say "no, that's not how mages work, raise his INT back up or pick a fighter" or force someone who does something obviously stupid like pack his party with six rogues to bear the consequences of a bad decision by having to spend all his money on scrolls of the equivalent to Breach. There is a middle ground between the arbitrary unfairness of 2e AD&D making 17 STR warriors completely gimped or 18 CON mages literally throwing away two stat points and what PoE does.