Maybe many players saw the "pirate" theme and it triggered an "never buy" reaction... I understand. Risen 2 and most pirate games are awful. IMO if PoE 2 was exactly the same game, but in a different setting with minor adaptations, like an steampunk setting(instead of a ship, you control an airship for eg), the game sales would be dozens of times bigger.
When I heard the game had a pirate theme I thought about it and decided a pirate themed RPG could be fun. It's got a big world with dangerous combat and you have a ship home and plenty of interesting areas to adventure though that all lead to nights spent in pubs across the map. I wasn't disappointed and it felt fresh because I had never played a Pirate themed RPG before. I think POE 2 is in my top 5 RPG's of all time. It won't appeal to people with short attention spans and ADHD but it's a gem in a field of manure.
I think Baldur's Gate is a niche game. Back when it came out it was mainstream but gaming itself was not mainstream back then. I've had to face the facts that the majority do not like what I like and vice versa. It's hard not to hide my disappointment with the gaming community when they continue to support and enjoy games that I find extremely dull but nobody is to blame and things are simply not to my liking and I have to deal with it.
I look at mainstream AAA gaming as an offshoot of Disney or Hollywood's mainstream comic movie spinoffs. They water things down to appeal to the largest audience and it all feels uninspired and nothing truly appeals to anyone anymore. Do 20 year old girls have the same interests as 40 year old men? Probably not but the industry has decided that making everything appeal to everyone is the most profitable.
Smart people can enjoy a Disney film but it's obviously aimed at lesser minds as a children's line of movies. Disney films have good writing and characters. They can be funny and entertaining but 99% of the time I am not interested in watching Disney flicks because I am not a little kid. Same thing with AAA gaming. It's why I gave up arguing in the BG3 forum. I know it's going to be an AAA turn based game with 3D graphics and an adjustable camera. It's going to appeal to the same audience as DOS 2 but they have the Baldur's Gate title to gain more interest from a larger pool. Basically DOS 2 with a Baldurs Gate title. It will get good reviews and sell well. It will probably be another ho hum game that I don't care about.
Back to POE though.....Part of the problem with POE2's sales has to do with POE 1. It got good reviews by reviewers who hardly played the game. Those glowing reviews caused a bunch of people to buy the game but most of them didn't finish it. Most people probably didn't buy POE2 because they have not finished POE 1 or they decided that POE was not for them.
POE was a good game but not a great one. It had serious flaws in it's gameplay balance. If you played the game on hard difficulty when it first launched, it would run you out of every spell and ability until everyone was standing around in many fights and the trash mobs were grindy enough to cause many to lose interest. The second act became a boring grind and the main city of the game was bland with quantity rather than quality when it came to it's side quests. The endless trash mobs of Cad Nua was also a problem that most people took on at the end of act 2 and caused them to lose interest.
Act 1 and 3 were story oriented and very good in my opinion. The character building system became much more interesting at higher levels and the White March expansion packs were fantastic. Overall it was a good game and better than Baldur's Gate in many ways. I would rather play BG though and I doubt I will be playing POE 20 years from now because of those flaws. Baldur's Gate also melds seamlessly with BG2 and the second edition D&D rules had enough endurance to push out 40 levels through nearly 3 games worth of content. It was spread thin at times but Baldur's Gate feels like one large game to me and that gives it advantages.
POE 2 stands on it's own as a top notch RPG. You don't get the benefit of importing your character into the game when it comes to character building stats and that hurts it when comparing it to the king. Mainly, the gameplay can only push 20 levels but it's got a lot to offer in those 20 levels and makes for a very high quality game. I think POE 2 is capable of going toe to toe with any RPG out there. Even Baldur's Gate 2. POE's Neketaka is bigger and has more to do than Athkatla and the city is surrounded by an ocean of islands that are more open and numerous than BG1's free roaming adventure. It's like Both Baldur's Gate games combined into one.
Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2 and POE2 all have the same story structure. You start out in a large open world and can play for 100 hours without really dealing with the story all that much. Once you take the boat to spell hold or look into the Iron throne in Baldur's Gate.....the story becomes a linear chain of events that play out very fast. POE2 is the same. The original POE had more in common with Final Fantasy style games. Most areas were visited because the story required it and in the center of the game things open up and you can explore openly before returning to the story for the climax.
POE 2's story is fine. I see a lot of complaints about it from people who think every game needs to be like the Witcher. I don't think the story in POE2 is as involved as Baldur's Gate's but it's structure is fine. The combat is very fun and has a ton of options. It can't go beyond 20 levels but what is there is top notch. POE 2 has unmatched graphics and I prefer it's music to that of other RPG's. I even like the boat combat. I bought a junk ship and fully upgraded it with 10 double cannons and turned my crew into a bunch of bad asses. I shot down pretty much every bounty out on the sea and had a blast doing it. The naval combat could use a better explanation at the start and some added complexity to the gameplay but overall it was fun.
There is a ton of little things in this game that make it feel very perfected and you can tell that many people spent a lot of time and care making it that way. It's sad that the majority would rather play yet another COD game or the same football game from last year with updated player names instead of a title like POE 2 but that's the way it's been ever since Microsoft sold out to console land. Sad they noticed Obsidian like a weed in their backyard and had to pick them. More mainstream console land rubbish to come if I had to guess.
I am only really playing the game properly now even though I paid for the full edition of the game at launch.
A big problem I had with the game is the optimisation, it just didn't even qualify as playable in combat, it stuttered that much due to the effects. Add in what I heard about the direction of the main plot and I set it aside wondering if I just completely wasted the money.
So they add the turn based mode and whilst it'd still be better if the game was playable in real time, this option did address the problems and let me play the game.
It is really, really good. It successfully extends and improves on a lot of things from the first game. Its giving me an experience akin to all the CRPGs I've really liked, only with probably the most indepth, slick, polished combat and class system I've seen to date. Its actually a lot easier to get how its gameplay works compared to the first one, they did a lot of clean up to make it all much more neat and tidy.
The setting is not what I would usually go for but its well done. I've found all the areas I've explored so far interesting and fleshed out.
And @the_sextein, I'm a PC gamer now mainly due to economic convenience, but I grew up with consoles and believe me, modern gaming has took a big old dump on what was good about consoles just as much as classic PC gaming. (I also blame a lot of it on MMOs)
But slowly and surely I do see more and more games made by smaller devs clearly seeking to draw from what made a lot of classic games tick, it is just a shame though AAA games like that are tough to find.
I played on consoles for years and don't care about the platforms people choose to game on. My comments about console gaming stems from them going mainstream first and the types of audiences the games are now focused on. They stopped appealing to me and I focused on PC gaming ever since. Microsoft has turned PC gaming into a watered down console port station and now there is nothing to play but indie titles and crowd funded stuff. Just thought I would clarify. I agree POE 2 has poor frame rates and that may have added to its poor sales. At 4k, even dual 1080TI cards overclocked can drop below 60FPS in the largest fights and the CPU stutters were a total pain until I found a way around them.
Yet the game flopped - for what? The less than perfect ship-to-ship combat mode? Honestly, that's like saying BG2 should've flopped because of its lackluster strongholds. Was it simply bad timing, poor marketing? I feel like PoE2 would've deserved several game of the year awards as well as sales in the millions. How they holed out at a measly 250k seriously astounds me.
I can give a lot of reasons why it flopped. But to me it boils down to the game lacking a singular vision for itself.
The game seems a product of trying desperately to please every fan by adding a some lever or switch in the settings that you can fiddle with. And no game company has the tools to QA that many options. I mean look at the number of subclasses and multiclass combinations alone. Were all those playtested in full playthrus? It'd be an impossible ask.
And this is largely my criticism of the game. I can praise a lot about it too, the artwork, the audio, the design of the factions, the world design, and, in general, the writing and dialogue are stellar.
The gameplay isn't. Maybe the best example is to refer back to all those classes and multiclasses. They added all these options. But they also removed all per rest skills and spells from the game. So in a way, they actually made the classes more homogeneous. Even though you superficially have more choice, the actual play experience of the different classes is more similar.
The great shame, imo, is that the first game had the nuts and bolts of being a great system for an epic dungeon crawling RPG. The only shortcoming is that they didn't make camping supplies a little more costly, or perhaps some other cost associated with leaving a dungeon to go to town, or both. It's ironic, to me, that Deadfire greatly expands on the camping mechanic, adding all kinds of art assets and almost making a whole minigame out of the thing, while at the same time making camping less necessary, due to excising per rest abilities. And this killed the magic of the immersive, strategic, dangerous dungeon crawl that the first title mostly delivered.
And this gets to my original critique. There's no coherent game here. There's a multitude of options, that we as players are expected to calibrate in a very non-immersive way, in order to find our ideal play experience. It's a huge turnoff for me.
I don't think calling it a flop is accurate or fair. It won widespread praise from critics and reviewers, and those players who bought it and played it have given it mostly positive reviews. But it just didn't sell that well, although even there it was not a financial loss for the company. My understanding is that they essentially broke even. And at least for me, sales figures alone don't make a game great. If sales figures were all it's about, then games like Pokemon and Skyrim and Fortnite should be considered the best games ever made.
Resting and per rest abilities is not "wasting the players time". Unless, perhaps, you're not a fan of the BG games?
It forces the player to make decisions that have consequences beyond a single battle. I'm not saying every single RPG has to revolve around this mechanic to be good. But if your game has a resting system, as Deadfire did, it's better when this system incorporates more elements into the game than merely a bonus / debuff removal.
The gameplay isn't. Maybe the best example is to refer back to all those classes and multiclasses. They added all these options. But they also removed all per rest skills and spells from the game. So in a way, they actually made the classes more homogeneous. Even though you superficially have more choice, the actual play experience of the different classes is more similar.
You are correct about this, and many of us who love the game have pointed this out on the Obsidian forums. However, this is more the result of Josh Sawyer's single-minded obsession with "balance" than anything else.
I think Sawyer is one of the best in the business out there and I have great respect for him and his talent, but tbh I don't think he has been a good fit for the PoE games (even though the original game concept and idea of going to Kickstarter were his ideas). I think him stepping away from PoE2 after the game's release and leaving it to others to take the lead on the subsequent DLCs shows in the very high praise those DLCs received. My hope is that if there is ever a PoE3, and I surely hope there will be, then someone else will be the project lead for it.
Very much agreed. There's stuff I like about Sawyer's systems. The stat system was pretty well designed imo. And the base classes in the original PoE were a pretty good blend of variety and balance. Even if they weren't all properly balanced.
I love the original fwiw. I simply find the sequel, especially its combat to be dull and repetitive. But yeah, I think his own desire is to make a class-less RPG, more like Fallout than BG. And it sure as heck showed in Deadfire, imo.
My personal opinion is that party-based RPG's, especially larger parties, are generally better with strict class systems, and classes that are quite distinct from each other.
@DinoDin You make an interesting point, albeit one I pretty much completely disagree with.
PoE2's class system is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best, multiclass systems ever introduced in a crpg. I find that it offers a GREAT variety of class combos that play very differently from each other. Heck, there are great varieties within singular combinations, thanks to subclass bonuses and skill tree and equipment choices.
Take the Herald (Chanter/Paladin) multiclass. To date, I've completed the main campaign with three different Herald builds that were like night and day from each other. You can build this class like an AoE DPS, an unbreakable tank, a ranged summoner and much more... and we're still talking about a single multiclass combination!
I believe the repetitiveness you bring up is not due to the class system but rather the designs of combat itself. The glaring problem with the PoE series is the abyssmal enemy AI. Obsidian definitely went the IWD route of increasing difficulty by stats and numbers rather than smarts and strategy. Even on PotD, every encounter pretty much boils down to CC and DPS. Because the AI plays so dumb, encounters of 6 and fewer are almost guaranteed wins, and to keep you challenged, the game simply throws waves upon waves of enemies at you. There are very few intelligent fights, and nothing that comes close to the strategical nuances of battling dragons and mages in BG2 - especially if you have SCS installed.
These are some interesting points, but they just make me feel like I have to double down on what I originally said.
As I said, the game stripped out per rest abilities and gave every class a balanced pool of per encounter abilities. This literally means that every class, no matter what multiclass combination you come up with, is relying on the same general strategy every battle. Exhaust all of your characters' abilities. The only times you don't do this is when the fight is so easy you don't have to.
Contrast that with playing a Wizard, Priest, or Druid in the original. Or contrast that with how casters had to be used in the BG games. Casting spells was a strategic decision that had consequences beyond the single battle. You could not just unload your class-given resources in every single fight. (I suppose you technically could but it'd result a playthrough so tedious, players were rewarded for not doing it.) Hell, one of the beauties of the original is that they added a few of these per rest skills to other classes -- but you also didn't have to take them.
So I don't buy the argument that simply because the class combinations allowed for a variety of superficial choices that they played differently. Your unbreakable tank herald, your AOE DPS herald, your ranged summoner herald were all going in to every encounter with the same basic strategy--exhaust your skill pools. The only choice was perhaps on what particular skills to use. But whether it was a good time to use? Setting up spell combinations to absolutely maximize critical, short supply damage spells? All this higher level tactical play is gone.
I'll concede that the empower mechanic is a little remaining shred of having strategy in the party. But its uniform across all the classes (thus adding to my argument that it's more homogeneous) and it's not enough of a game changer, imo, at even the highest difficulty levels to compensate for the loss of per rest skills. I'm glad it's in there but it's not as good as the original's systems.
And I could go even further, but I want to keep this all short. But even on objective, measurable things like hit point pools, item restriction, armor and more, there is more homgeneity in Deadfire than almost any class-based RPG I've ever seen.
The gameplay isn't. Maybe the best example is to refer back to all those classes and multiclasses. They added all these options. But they also removed all per rest skills and spells from the game. So in a way, they actually made the classes more homogeneous. Even though you superficially have more choice, the actual play experience of the different classes is more similar.
You are correct about this, and many of us who love the game have pointed this out on the Obsidian forums. However, this is more the result of Josh Sawyer's single-minded obsession with "balance" than anything else.
The obsession with balance is indeed extremely apparent in the game, and it does cause problems. For example, you would really have to make an effort to create a build that doesn't work. Also: there are no items in the game that make you go wow, because everything is basically as good as everything else. So it tends to get a bit bland. Near the end of the game, you have incredible amounts of money, but there's just nothing to buy, because with the balance being what it is, nothing would improve you in any meaningful way. Companion choices, ability choices, item choices, all of that, mean little. Everything works.
As I said, the game stripped out per rest abilities and gave every class a balanced pool of per encounter abilities. This literally means that every class, no matter what multiclass combination you come up with, is relying on the same general strategy every battle. Exhaust all of your characters' abilities. The only times you don't do this is when the fight is so easy you don't have to..
Being pragmatic about this whole "per rest" argument;
Basically all of these games amount to using all your abilities in combat. In the IE games, rest is still too easy an option not to abuse it, and if the answer to that is "well choose not to", I'm sorry but that doesn't address the issue. And its the same in the first Pillars (I'd maybe argue that its idea of imposing a numerical limit based on resources is the only way to counter how easy it is to abuse), and its the same in Pathfinder, in Tyranny, all of them. PoE2 opting to do what it did isn't particularly bad, it still makes it to easy to rest so even the injury system feels like it has no meaningful consequences, and traps causing them also means nothing in the end. I agree with Brand, the challenge in the game would have benefited from tougher AI, that'd do more to improve it than going back to the vancian casting system, which with the rest mechanics in the game would have been meaningless. And also Sawyer's approach might have hurt the game in terms of enemy abilities because to offer more challenge enemies probably should have abilities the player doesn't get. I don't know if the game's modability extends to enemy AI but if it does, it'd be cool if someone did an enhancement mod for it.
Tougher AI, better AI, extremely intelligent AI etc. are all something that would be extremely good. It's just that it's damn difficult to do, given where AI in general is at the moment.
As I said, the game stripped out per rest abilities and gave every class a balanced pool of per encounter abilities. This literally means that every class, no matter what multiclass combination you come up with, is relying on the same general strategy every battle. Exhaust all of your characters' abilities. The only times you don't do this is when the fight is so easy you don't have to..
Being pragmatic about this whole "per rest" argument;
Basically all of these games amount to using all your abilities in combat. In the IE games, rest is still too easy an option not to abuse it, and if the answer to that is "well choose not to", I'm sorry but that doesn't address the issue. And its the same in the first Pillars (I'd maybe argue that its idea of imposing a numerical limit based on resources is the only way to counter how easy it is to abuse), and its the same in Pathfinder, in Tyranny, all of them. PoE2 opting to do what it did isn't particularly bad, it still makes it to easy to rest so even the injury system feels like it has no meaningful consequences, and traps causing them also means nothing in the end. I agree with Brand, the challenge in the game would have benefited from tougher AI, that'd do more to improve it than going back to the vancian casting system, which with the rest mechanics in the game would have been meaningless. And also Sawyer's approach might have hurt the game in terms of enemy abilities because to offer more challenge enemies probably should have abilities the player doesn't get. I don't know if the game's modability extends to enemy AI but if it does, it'd be cool if someone did an enhancement mod for it.
I appreciate the responses here, and there's a lot I do agree with. I wanna be clear that I'm not saying everything revolves around the pieces of the game I've highlighted. They're just the biggest issues for me.
I just don't buy that most players abused the rest mechanic while playing BG1 or BG2. It's just not a fun way to play. Of course, some players did, but who cares? Some minority of players are always going to play games in strange ways. The frequency of ambushes in certain areas combined with the fact that you don't need to use a crapton of spells to win certain encounters, means that most simply don't play this way. So I don't buy that all these games are about exhausting all your skills all the time. The same is true of the first pillars. I sincerely doubt players were resting so often that they were going back and forth to town on the regular. And if they were, I don't feel sorry for them, nor should game design be catering to that imo.
The problem is that the systems aren't working in concert here, when they could have. Deadfire added a great deal of NPC reactivity, a kind of inter-party politics. And then cut party size to five, limiting this feature. They created a bunch of art assets, recipes, and a much more complex set of bonuses for resting, as well as making those resources compete with your ship maintenance... and then cut out the chief reason you would rest in the first place. The food system isn't perfect. Even though it would be immersion breaking, I think much more expensive food would have made for a great resting system (with the original's vancian systems still in).
Nor am I saying Deadfire could be merely rescued by implementing the original's ability mechanics. Obsidian isn't stupid. They designed the levels and dungeons with these system changes in mind. You'd have to re-work all the encounter sections
But this encounter design is the problem. Encounters in the game are monotonous in a way that they weren't in the original nor in the IE games. Size. Almost all of the encounters in Deadfire have to be balanced to take down a fully loaded party. So all the meaningful encounters need to be roughly the same kind of difficulty. Almost every battle needs to be epic. And if every battle is epic, it's functionally equivalent to no battles being epic.
Whereas the IE games and original Pillars could contain *both* segments of epic battles and a series of medium and small battles, Deadfire can only meaningfully contain the former. Because only tatters of a strategic layer in the party management remain.
As I said, the game stripped out per rest abilities and gave every class a balanced pool of per encounter abilities. This literally means that every class, no matter what multiclass combination you come up with, is relying on the same general strategy every battle. Exhaust all of your characters' abilities. The only times you don't do this is when the fight is so easy you don't have to..
Being pragmatic about this whole "per rest" argument;
Basically all of these games amount to using all your abilities in combat. In the IE games, rest is still too easy an option not to abuse it, and if the answer to that is "well choose not to", I'm sorry but that doesn't address the issue. And its the same in the first Pillars (I'd maybe argue that its idea of imposing a numerical limit based on resources is the only way to counter how easy it is to abuse), and its the same in Pathfinder, in Tyranny, all of them. PoE2 opting to do what it did isn't particularly bad, it still makes it to easy to rest so even the injury system feels like it has no meaningful consequences, and traps causing them also means nothing in the end. I agree with Brand, the challenge in the game would have benefited from tougher AI, that'd do more to improve it than going back to the vancian casting system, which with the rest mechanics in the game would have been meaningless. And also Sawyer's approach might have hurt the game in terms of enemy abilities because to offer more challenge enemies probably should have abilities the player doesn't get. I don't know if the game's modability extends to enemy AI but if it does, it'd be cool if someone did an enhancement mod for it.
I just don't buy that most players abused the rest mechanic while playing BG1 or BG2. It's just not a fun way to play. Of course, some players did, but who cares?
From my experience, I can say that I'd never even heard of abusing the rest mechanic before some people on internet forums regarded it as a given. As you quite rightly say, it's just not a fun way to play. It's an alien notion. Also, as you quite rightly say, who cares if somebody does it.
Resting and per rest abilities is not "wasting the players time". Unless, perhaps, you're not a fan of the BG games?
It forces the player to make decisions that have consequences beyond a single battle. I'm not saying every single RPG has to revolve around this mechanic to be good. But if your game has a resting system, as Deadfire did, it's better when this system incorporates more elements into the game than merely a bonus / debuff removal.
I didn't say per rest skills and resting was bad. But when limiting how often you can rest, COMBINED with per rest skills, that just either encourages the player to either not use their abilities (which limits gameplay) or forces the player run back and forth between locations multiple times for a single dungeon run (which DOES watse the palyers time). That's my point. If resting is limited, then the options available to the player shouldn't be tied to resting. THe direction Obsidian took, with resting beign an injury recovery mechanic, was the right direction to take in my opinion.
Limiting how often you can rest and having skills tied to resting is exactly how to design an awesome dungeon crawler RPG. It opens up a wealth of opportunity for level designers to create a broad suite of challenges.
Essentially giving your party a refill after every fight limits what designers can create that will truly challenge the player.
Limiting how often you can rest and having skills tied to resting is exactly how to design an awesome dungeon crawler RPG. It opens up a wealth of opportunity for level designers to create a broad suite of challenges.
Essentially giving your party a refill after every fight limits what designers can create that will truly challenge the player.
No, it just means that encounters can be designed around all abilities. Having skills be limited just increases the number of trash encounters, which are never fun.
I'm going to add that limiting abilities is just fine in an RPG. An ability that can be used all the time, in every single fight, with no off-setting cost will need to be balanced as such. Which means it will no longer be an awesome ability. Deadfire suffers from a kind of inflation problem as well, because of the changed skills.
Like some kind of video game Zimbabwe, they've thrown in a bunch of super cool spells and abilities, that you're expected to use all the time. These thing cease to feel super cool and powerful, when you're using them in every fight.
One of the problems with Deadfire and some player demands around it, is the idea that "attacking" is just doing nothing. This didn't use to be the view in turn-based RPG's. You either attacked, cast a spell, or used an item in say the old TB Ultima or D&D Gold Box games. We can see this in the OS games too, which do respect basic attacking.
The problem is the base AI of the IE games and PoE can attack for you. So it feels like attacking is just some non-action. But I find it perfectly fun and just fine that 1/3 or 1/6 of my party isn't doing much more than attacking in the IE games. I'm doing an evil-party playthrough right now of BG2, with Dorn and Korgan. They do little more than swing their weapons, but they still feel like they're carrying their weight. I'm still constantly making decisions on positioning them, whether to use ranged to poke a mage or whether to tank for my own back-liners. And I'm constantly swapping weapons with the two depending on the circumstance. When your design philosophy is that the base skill of attack isn't fun, you're already on the road to needless inflation.
The base attack *should* be something these kinds of RPG's respect and design for. That's what all the cool weapon choices and their cool stats are about! I don't mind giving fighter types a few more skills than the IE games did, and I think the original PoE was a solid progression here. The shame is that it all got tossed out in favor of, imo, a radically different system. One that hadn't had previous iterations to build upon.
Limiting how often you can rest and having skills tied to resting is exactly how to design an awesome dungeon crawler RPG. It opens up a wealth of opportunity for level designers to create a broad suite of challenges.
Essentially giving your party a refill after every fight limits what designers can create that will truly challenge the player.
No, it just means that encounters can be designed around all abilities. Having skills be limited just increases the number of trash encounters, which are never fun.
This sounds true, but it's the opposite of true. If players have access to all abilities at all times with no offsetting costs, you are actually limiting the size of encounters that will provide a meaningful challenge. "Trash mobs" imo aren't defined by their objective size. They are defined by their size relative to the player's power. If you are recharging my party after every combat, you are de facto raising the bar for what qualifies as a trash mob in your game.
I just don't buy that most players abused the rest mechanic while playing BG1 or BG2. It's just not a fun way to play.
I very easilly buy it personally, but here is the problem that means it doesn't matter in the end; if you reach a point in any of those games, where basically you cannot win the next fight unless you rest, and the choice is either to load an earlier save (which is something but it is just replacing one cheat for another), rest, or accept the game is over, it would take an immense amount of discipline and determination in that player to accept that. I'm clicking that rest button. I think most people would.
In fact the resting is so unable to really address the whole situation aptly I just mod even getting random encounters out because they're just annoying.
I do agree with you that PoE2 added these rest mechanics and also the ship battling mechanics and it was all completely wasted because they don't make any aspect of it mandatory really. Boarding ships should have involved at least a skirmish to get close enough to board. As it is, I don't fight the ships because I might as well just fight the enemy crew.
I recognise all this and I also recognise that sometimes the encounters drag (but its ah, far from the worst I've seen, I honestly still infinitely prefer this to the Divinity Original Sin 2 approach to encounters), it says a lot for what the game does well that I really, really love it and its probably the closest a game has ever got to toppling BG2 for me, if it just had a more reactive main story and handled its new mechanics better it would have done it.
I mainly do hope if Pillars 3 ever happens that they don't drop these things (although the next might not be naval based), but build on and improve on them. With more refinement they'll work, the direction they went wasn't wrong, they just didn't quite go far enough.
I just don't buy that most players abused the rest mechanic while playing BG1 or BG2. It's just not a fun way to play.
I very easilly buy it personally, but here is the problem that means it doesn't matter in the end; if you reach a point in any of those games, where basically you cannot win the next fight unless you rest, and the choice is either to load an earlier save (which is something but it is just replacing one cheat for another), rest, or accept the game is over, it would take an immense amount of discipline and determination in that player to accept that. I'm clicking that rest button. I think most people would.
I agree with a whole bunch of what you said, except for this part. I'm not sure what the issue is here? An occasional rest mid-dungeon isn't abusing the mechanic, to me. And it worked out to be a perfectly fun mechanic in the IE games. They generated five titles with this mechanic. And then there's the NWN games. And then there's the old gold box games. All these games had the same fundamental risk-reward mechanic with resting. That's quite a number of titles over quite a span of time, and several have ranked as top CRPG's or even top video games in their respective eras. Deadfire isn't going to hit that level of acclaim.
Of course modern games can improve on that mechanic. Ultimately, I would have loved the potential tradeoff Deadfire could have offered where resting comes more or less at the cost of gold. So a more well-run party has earlier access to better gear or other purchases. That mechanic is still extant but because of dearth of resting needs and the low cost of resting resources, it's a vestigial game element.
And this reinforces my point about the classes being more homogeneous. If you have classes that rely heavily on the resting mechanic for their power pool and classes that don't, you have true variety. Or if you have classes that rely on the resting mechanic for other reasons, hit point recovery, you also have class variety. But when all the classes get the same thing out of the mechanic, you have less variety in your classes.
I agree with a whole bunch of what you said, except for this part. I'm not sure what the issue is here? An occasional rest mid-dungeon isn't abusing the mechanic, to me.
Well, I'm really going deep into the game design philosophy there, which is really asking the question if the availability of something that will get you out of dire straits is really destroying the challenge posed by just simply being there at all. Its the basis of why I feel that though PoE2 didn't fix the problem, the changes that it made to its combat system is really an entirely different subject, and on that in your last paragraph, ah, I don't really feel it matters to me. I like the classes, and I still feel there's a decent amount of variety to their abilities, but it is true that there's some redundancy, and I feel the big missed opportunity with multiclasses was not introducing some unique abilities for them.
The balance of the classes could be a factor in the plummeting of the sales, but I do not think you can blame those low figures in actual gameplay. To find that the classes are balanced or not, if the combat is repetitive, etc you have to actually play the game for some time. And for that, you have to buy it and it takes time. The sales were not good from the start, and there are games with far worse press that had better sales figures (the critics of the game weren't even that bad as games like ME: andromeda or Pathfinder and the "you cannot hit swarms with an axe, the game is bad" thing)
I think the fault was in the pirate theme, there were very bad titles in the past years and it is a little demodé now. People usually like the "fantasy-medieval-Europe" theme in their (non-japanese) CRPGs.
Also, even PoE1 has some good sales because they cater to the nostalgia, but many people were disappointed (not me in that particular matter) with the game itself because of multiclassing faults, excessive reading (wtf?), low level reached, short game, etc... That happened too to other games like legends of Grimrock.
And PoE does not even have a tabletop or anime fanbase to fish upon. They provided support for modding very late when most of the modding community already lost interest.
You can even blame the lack of multiplayer options. That worked well with DoS2, a TB game.
And that takes me to the competition in the same niche, where PoE2 lost against DoS2 or the fabulous pathfinder by far (Personally I bough those three and I like them very much, being PoE2 and Pathfinder at the top).
IMHO I think the game was one of my top20, easily, with DLC and patches is very well polished. Music, art, character creation(better than the first one, I think) were top notch. and I especially liked the writing and the story of the DLC but the OC was good. The diverse factions, talkative companions, good voices, firearms, the ship minigame while you travel and explore... that was well made. One thing I like much is that you can customize a lot of gameplay options, including the possibility to play RtWP or TB: a surprise and a very good one. I am not really a fan of the tropical theme and the rest and crafting system tho.
I hope that does not hinder the possibility of PoE3
I definitely think you're right that the pirate / tropical theme didn't help it. But I still think my issues with the game pinpoint why a lot of players came to the game disappointed. Players might not be able to put their finger on it, but there's something simply boring about the gameplay experience. And personally, I think it's this monotony in the encounters and a homogeneity in the classes that creates that dullness. And it's not the plot, the characters, the art or the audio, all of which are excellent.
Yes, players had to play it a decent amount to get it. But that's just it. The game didn't spread by word of mouth, because, imo, few players had anything compelling to really rave about. Reviewers gave it good but not glowing reviews. And I think this is one of the bigger culprits. Nothing prevented this game from becoming a slow-growing hit.
A key illustration of the dull gameplay is that there's no element of the game that's going to become a staple feature in other games. The original Pillars can boast of those written vignettes, that while not 100% original, certainly grew in popularity. Hell, even a game like Hollowknight copied the slowly-growing bestiary encyclopedia.
But none of the new features or reworked design of core elements (such as power pools, empower) are likely to be copied by future RPG's, imo. The increased party interactivity/dispositions might, but that ground was broken by Tyranny anyways. It's a sign that none of the changes delivered something both innovative and fun. The easy contrast Original Sin, where players were wowed by the fun environmental interactivity.
I also don't think the wealth of difficulty settings and knobs is good for attracting players. How can a new player be expected to know what they're going to prefer? And now someone buying this game post-launch has to choose between TB and RT? It's lazy game design imo. It's essentially outsourcing the labor of fine tuning a solid game experience to the player. I don't doubt that some veteran on here found some loadout that was an ideal experience, but the less hardcore players that turn games into best sellers aren't going to enjoy trial and erroring the options.
Most games that become classics don't have all this knobbery -- BG just had one difficulty setting choice. The OS games as well. Slightly different genre, but Dark Souls has no real gameplay settings. Same thing for the first two Diablo games for that matter. The old Gold Box games. The praised Ultima titles.
I tend to think of Dark Souls' success as just incredibly unfair, because those games are just not very good, like I've played the first two anyway, I don't think they're good, I've heard every argument for them that there is to be made, I've made every argument against them that there is to be made, and its stubborn but I just feel that its evidence that a game becoming successful tend to mean it does one thing that makes a certain subset of players really happy, and it will do so even though the game has vast gaping flaws in it. The Divinity Original Sin games also suggest this because I did not see a good game in those either.
And it is often dirt simple like that, yeah the pirate theme probably put off a lot of people on PoE2 which is a shame, and the REALLY cynical part of me things that people found the first game and Obsidian's general approach to the world building and storytelling to be too complex (aka good) for them because most people, they want Star Wars, even though Star Wars is essentially a story for children, and Lord of the Rings, which well, I won't say in terms of language that was written for kids, but the plot is incredibly basic. But as I said, that's the REALLY cynical part of me. :P
Comments
I think Baldur's Gate is a niche game. Back when it came out it was mainstream but gaming itself was not mainstream back then. I've had to face the facts that the majority do not like what I like and vice versa. It's hard not to hide my disappointment with the gaming community when they continue to support and enjoy games that I find extremely dull but nobody is to blame and things are simply not to my liking and I have to deal with it.
I look at mainstream AAA gaming as an offshoot of Disney or Hollywood's mainstream comic movie spinoffs. They water things down to appeal to the largest audience and it all feels uninspired and nothing truly appeals to anyone anymore. Do 20 year old girls have the same interests as 40 year old men? Probably not but the industry has decided that making everything appeal to everyone is the most profitable.
Smart people can enjoy a Disney film but it's obviously aimed at lesser minds as a children's line of movies. Disney films have good writing and characters. They can be funny and entertaining but 99% of the time I am not interested in watching Disney flicks because I am not a little kid. Same thing with AAA gaming. It's why I gave up arguing in the BG3 forum. I know it's going to be an AAA turn based game with 3D graphics and an adjustable camera. It's going to appeal to the same audience as DOS 2 but they have the Baldur's Gate title to gain more interest from a larger pool. Basically DOS 2 with a Baldurs Gate title. It will get good reviews and sell well. It will probably be another ho hum game that I don't care about.
Back to POE though.....Part of the problem with POE2's sales has to do with POE 1. It got good reviews by reviewers who hardly played the game. Those glowing reviews caused a bunch of people to buy the game but most of them didn't finish it. Most people probably didn't buy POE2 because they have not finished POE 1 or they decided that POE was not for them.
POE was a good game but not a great one. It had serious flaws in it's gameplay balance. If you played the game on hard difficulty when it first launched, it would run you out of every spell and ability until everyone was standing around in many fights and the trash mobs were grindy enough to cause many to lose interest. The second act became a boring grind and the main city of the game was bland with quantity rather than quality when it came to it's side quests. The endless trash mobs of Cad Nua was also a problem that most people took on at the end of act 2 and caused them to lose interest.
Act 1 and 3 were story oriented and very good in my opinion. The character building system became much more interesting at higher levels and the White March expansion packs were fantastic. Overall it was a good game and better than Baldur's Gate in many ways. I would rather play BG though and I doubt I will be playing POE 20 years from now because of those flaws. Baldur's Gate also melds seamlessly with BG2 and the second edition D&D rules had enough endurance to push out 40 levels through nearly 3 games worth of content. It was spread thin at times but Baldur's Gate feels like one large game to me and that gives it advantages.
POE 2 stands on it's own as a top notch RPG. You don't get the benefit of importing your character into the game when it comes to character building stats and that hurts it when comparing it to the king. Mainly, the gameplay can only push 20 levels but it's got a lot to offer in those 20 levels and makes for a very high quality game. I think POE 2 is capable of going toe to toe with any RPG out there. Even Baldur's Gate 2. POE's Neketaka is bigger and has more to do than Athkatla and the city is surrounded by an ocean of islands that are more open and numerous than BG1's free roaming adventure. It's like Both Baldur's Gate games combined into one.
Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2 and POE2 all have the same story structure. You start out in a large open world and can play for 100 hours without really dealing with the story all that much. Once you take the boat to spell hold or look into the Iron throne in Baldur's Gate.....the story becomes a linear chain of events that play out very fast. POE2 is the same. The original POE had more in common with Final Fantasy style games. Most areas were visited because the story required it and in the center of the game things open up and you can explore openly before returning to the story for the climax.
POE 2's story is fine. I see a lot of complaints about it from people who think every game needs to be like the Witcher. I don't think the story in POE2 is as involved as Baldur's Gate's but it's structure is fine. The combat is very fun and has a ton of options. It can't go beyond 20 levels but what is there is top notch. POE 2 has unmatched graphics and I prefer it's music to that of other RPG's. I even like the boat combat. I bought a junk ship and fully upgraded it with 10 double cannons and turned my crew into a bunch of bad asses. I shot down pretty much every bounty out on the sea and had a blast doing it. The naval combat could use a better explanation at the start and some added complexity to the gameplay but overall it was fun.
There is a ton of little things in this game that make it feel very perfected and you can tell that many people spent a lot of time and care making it that way. It's sad that the majority would rather play yet another COD game or the same football game from last year with updated player names instead of a title like POE 2 but that's the way it's been ever since Microsoft sold out to console land. Sad they noticed Obsidian like a weed in their backyard and had to pick them. More mainstream console land rubbish to come if I had to guess.
A big problem I had with the game is the optimisation, it just didn't even qualify as playable in combat, it stuttered that much due to the effects. Add in what I heard about the direction of the main plot and I set it aside wondering if I just completely wasted the money.
So they add the turn based mode and whilst it'd still be better if the game was playable in real time, this option did address the problems and let me play the game.
It is really, really good. It successfully extends and improves on a lot of things from the first game. Its giving me an experience akin to all the CRPGs I've really liked, only with probably the most indepth, slick, polished combat and class system I've seen to date. Its actually a lot easier to get how its gameplay works compared to the first one, they did a lot of clean up to make it all much more neat and tidy.
The setting is not what I would usually go for but its well done. I've found all the areas I've explored so far interesting and fleshed out.
And @the_sextein, I'm a PC gamer now mainly due to economic convenience, but I grew up with consoles and believe me, modern gaming has took a big old dump on what was good about consoles just as much as classic PC gaming. (I also blame a lot of it on MMOs)
But slowly and surely I do see more and more games made by smaller devs clearly seeking to draw from what made a lot of classic games tick, it is just a shame though AAA games like that are tough to find.
I can give a lot of reasons why it flopped. But to me it boils down to the game lacking a singular vision for itself.
The game seems a product of trying desperately to please every fan by adding a some lever or switch in the settings that you can fiddle with. And no game company has the tools to QA that many options. I mean look at the number of subclasses and multiclass combinations alone. Were all those playtested in full playthrus? It'd be an impossible ask.
And this is largely my criticism of the game. I can praise a lot about it too, the artwork, the audio, the design of the factions, the world design, and, in general, the writing and dialogue are stellar.
The gameplay isn't. Maybe the best example is to refer back to all those classes and multiclasses. They added all these options. But they also removed all per rest skills and spells from the game. So in a way, they actually made the classes more homogeneous. Even though you superficially have more choice, the actual play experience of the different classes is more similar.
The great shame, imo, is that the first game had the nuts and bolts of being a great system for an epic dungeon crawling RPG. The only shortcoming is that they didn't make camping supplies a little more costly, or perhaps some other cost associated with leaving a dungeon to go to town, or both. It's ironic, to me, that Deadfire greatly expands on the camping mechanic, adding all kinds of art assets and almost making a whole minigame out of the thing, while at the same time making camping less necessary, due to excising per rest abilities. And this killed the magic of the immersive, strategic, dangerous dungeon crawl that the first title mostly delivered.
And this gets to my original critique. There's no coherent game here. There's a multitude of options, that we as players are expected to calibrate in a very non-immersive way, in order to find our ideal play experience. It's a huge turnoff for me.
Except they literally did not take the mechanic out, as I said.
It forces the player to make decisions that have consequences beyond a single battle. I'm not saying every single RPG has to revolve around this mechanic to be good. But if your game has a resting system, as Deadfire did, it's better when this system incorporates more elements into the game than merely a bonus / debuff removal.
You are correct about this, and many of us who love the game have pointed this out on the Obsidian forums. However, this is more the result of Josh Sawyer's single-minded obsession with "balance" than anything else.
I think Sawyer is one of the best in the business out there and I have great respect for him and his talent, but tbh I don't think he has been a good fit for the PoE games (even though the original game concept and idea of going to Kickstarter were his ideas). I think him stepping away from PoE2 after the game's release and leaving it to others to take the lead on the subsequent DLCs shows in the very high praise those DLCs received. My hope is that if there is ever a PoE3, and I surely hope there will be, then someone else will be the project lead for it.
I love the original fwiw. I simply find the sequel, especially its combat to be dull and repetitive. But yeah, I think his own desire is to make a class-less RPG, more like Fallout than BG. And it sure as heck showed in Deadfire, imo.
My personal opinion is that party-based RPG's, especially larger parties, are generally better with strict class systems, and classes that are quite distinct from each other.
PoE2's class system is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best, multiclass systems ever introduced in a crpg. I find that it offers a GREAT variety of class combos that play very differently from each other. Heck, there are great varieties within singular combinations, thanks to subclass bonuses and skill tree and equipment choices.
Take the Herald (Chanter/Paladin) multiclass. To date, I've completed the main campaign with three different Herald builds that were like night and day from each other. You can build this class like an AoE DPS, an unbreakable tank, a ranged summoner and much more... and we're still talking about a single multiclass combination!
I believe the repetitiveness you bring up is not due to the class system but rather the designs of combat itself. The glaring problem with the PoE series is the abyssmal enemy AI. Obsidian definitely went the IWD route of increasing difficulty by stats and numbers rather than smarts and strategy. Even on PotD, every encounter pretty much boils down to CC and DPS. Because the AI plays so dumb, encounters of 6 and fewer are almost guaranteed wins, and to keep you challenged, the game simply throws waves upon waves of enemies at you. There are very few intelligent fights, and nothing that comes close to the strategical nuances of battling dragons and mages in BG2 - especially if you have SCS installed.
As I said, the game stripped out per rest abilities and gave every class a balanced pool of per encounter abilities. This literally means that every class, no matter what multiclass combination you come up with, is relying on the same general strategy every battle. Exhaust all of your characters' abilities. The only times you don't do this is when the fight is so easy you don't have to.
Contrast that with playing a Wizard, Priest, or Druid in the original. Or contrast that with how casters had to be used in the BG games. Casting spells was a strategic decision that had consequences beyond the single battle. You could not just unload your class-given resources in every single fight. (I suppose you technically could but it'd result a playthrough so tedious, players were rewarded for not doing it.) Hell, one of the beauties of the original is that they added a few of these per rest skills to other classes -- but you also didn't have to take them.
So I don't buy the argument that simply because the class combinations allowed for a variety of superficial choices that they played differently. Your unbreakable tank herald, your AOE DPS herald, your ranged summoner herald were all going in to every encounter with the same basic strategy--exhaust your skill pools. The only choice was perhaps on what particular skills to use. But whether it was a good time to use? Setting up spell combinations to absolutely maximize critical, short supply damage spells? All this higher level tactical play is gone.
And I could go even further, but I want to keep this all short. But even on objective, measurable things like hit point pools, item restriction, armor and more, there is more homgeneity in Deadfire than almost any class-based RPG I've ever seen.
The obsession with balance is indeed extremely apparent in the game, and it does cause problems. For example, you would really have to make an effort to create a build that doesn't work. Also: there are no items in the game that make you go wow, because everything is basically as good as everything else. So it tends to get a bit bland. Near the end of the game, you have incredible amounts of money, but there's just nothing to buy, because with the balance being what it is, nothing would improve you in any meaningful way. Companion choices, ability choices, item choices, all of that, mean little. Everything works.
Being pragmatic about this whole "per rest" argument;
Basically all of these games amount to using all your abilities in combat. In the IE games, rest is still too easy an option not to abuse it, and if the answer to that is "well choose not to", I'm sorry but that doesn't address the issue. And its the same in the first Pillars (I'd maybe argue that its idea of imposing a numerical limit based on resources is the only way to counter how easy it is to abuse), and its the same in Pathfinder, in Tyranny, all of them. PoE2 opting to do what it did isn't particularly bad, it still makes it to easy to rest so even the injury system feels like it has no meaningful consequences, and traps causing them also means nothing in the end. I agree with Brand, the challenge in the game would have benefited from tougher AI, that'd do more to improve it than going back to the vancian casting system, which with the rest mechanics in the game would have been meaningless. And also Sawyer's approach might have hurt the game in terms of enemy abilities because to offer more challenge enemies probably should have abilities the player doesn't get. I don't know if the game's modability extends to enemy AI but if it does, it'd be cool if someone did an enhancement mod for it.
I appreciate the responses here, and there's a lot I do agree with. I wanna be clear that I'm not saying everything revolves around the pieces of the game I've highlighted. They're just the biggest issues for me.
I just don't buy that most players abused the rest mechanic while playing BG1 or BG2. It's just not a fun way to play. Of course, some players did, but who cares? Some minority of players are always going to play games in strange ways. The frequency of ambushes in certain areas combined with the fact that you don't need to use a crapton of spells to win certain encounters, means that most simply don't play this way. So I don't buy that all these games are about exhausting all your skills all the time. The same is true of the first pillars. I sincerely doubt players were resting so often that they were going back and forth to town on the regular. And if they were, I don't feel sorry for them, nor should game design be catering to that imo.
The problem is that the systems aren't working in concert here, when they could have. Deadfire added a great deal of NPC reactivity, a kind of inter-party politics. And then cut party size to five, limiting this feature. They created a bunch of art assets, recipes, and a much more complex set of bonuses for resting, as well as making those resources compete with your ship maintenance... and then cut out the chief reason you would rest in the first place. The food system isn't perfect. Even though it would be immersion breaking, I think much more expensive food would have made for a great resting system (with the original's vancian systems still in).
Nor am I saying Deadfire could be merely rescued by implementing the original's ability mechanics. Obsidian isn't stupid. They designed the levels and dungeons with these system changes in mind. You'd have to re-work all the encounter sections
But this encounter design is the problem. Encounters in the game are monotonous in a way that they weren't in the original nor in the IE games. Size. Almost all of the encounters in Deadfire have to be balanced to take down a fully loaded party. So all the meaningful encounters need to be roughly the same kind of difficulty. Almost every battle needs to be epic. And if every battle is epic, it's functionally equivalent to no battles being epic.
Whereas the IE games and original Pillars could contain *both* segments of epic battles and a series of medium and small battles, Deadfire can only meaningfully contain the former. Because only tatters of a strategic layer in the party management remain.
From my experience, I can say that I'd never even heard of abusing the rest mechanic before some people on internet forums regarded it as a given. As you quite rightly say, it's just not a fun way to play. It's an alien notion. Also, as you quite rightly say, who cares if somebody does it.
I didn't say per rest skills and resting was bad. But when limiting how often you can rest, COMBINED with per rest skills, that just either encourages the player to either not use their abilities (which limits gameplay) or forces the player run back and forth between locations multiple times for a single dungeon run (which DOES watse the palyers time). That's my point. If resting is limited, then the options available to the player shouldn't be tied to resting. THe direction Obsidian took, with resting beign an injury recovery mechanic, was the right direction to take in my opinion.
Essentially giving your party a refill after every fight limits what designers can create that will truly challenge the player.
No, it just means that encounters can be designed around all abilities. Having skills be limited just increases the number of trash encounters, which are never fun.
Like some kind of video game Zimbabwe, they've thrown in a bunch of super cool spells and abilities, that you're expected to use all the time. These thing cease to feel super cool and powerful, when you're using them in every fight.
One of the problems with Deadfire and some player demands around it, is the idea that "attacking" is just doing nothing. This didn't use to be the view in turn-based RPG's. You either attacked, cast a spell, or used an item in say the old TB Ultima or D&D Gold Box games. We can see this in the OS games too, which do respect basic attacking.
The problem is the base AI of the IE games and PoE can attack for you. So it feels like attacking is just some non-action. But I find it perfectly fun and just fine that 1/3 or 1/6 of my party isn't doing much more than attacking in the IE games. I'm doing an evil-party playthrough right now of BG2, with Dorn and Korgan. They do little more than swing their weapons, but they still feel like they're carrying their weight. I'm still constantly making decisions on positioning them, whether to use ranged to poke a mage or whether to tank for my own back-liners. And I'm constantly swapping weapons with the two depending on the circumstance. When your design philosophy is that the base skill of attack isn't fun, you're already on the road to needless inflation.
The base attack *should* be something these kinds of RPG's respect and design for. That's what all the cool weapon choices and their cool stats are about! I don't mind giving fighter types a few more skills than the IE games did, and I think the original PoE was a solid progression here. The shame is that it all got tossed out in favor of, imo, a radically different system. One that hadn't had previous iterations to build upon.
This sounds true, but it's the opposite of true. If players have access to all abilities at all times with no offsetting costs, you are actually limiting the size of encounters that will provide a meaningful challenge. "Trash mobs" imo aren't defined by their objective size. They are defined by their size relative to the player's power. If you are recharging my party after every combat, you are de facto raising the bar for what qualifies as a trash mob in your game.
I very easilly buy it personally, but here is the problem that means it doesn't matter in the end; if you reach a point in any of those games, where basically you cannot win the next fight unless you rest, and the choice is either to load an earlier save (which is something but it is just replacing one cheat for another), rest, or accept the game is over, it would take an immense amount of discipline and determination in that player to accept that. I'm clicking that rest button. I think most people would.
In fact the resting is so unable to really address the whole situation aptly I just mod even getting random encounters out because they're just annoying.
I do agree with you that PoE2 added these rest mechanics and also the ship battling mechanics and it was all completely wasted because they don't make any aspect of it mandatory really. Boarding ships should have involved at least a skirmish to get close enough to board. As it is, I don't fight the ships because I might as well just fight the enemy crew.
I recognise all this and I also recognise that sometimes the encounters drag (but its ah, far from the worst I've seen, I honestly still infinitely prefer this to the Divinity Original Sin 2 approach to encounters), it says a lot for what the game does well that I really, really love it and its probably the closest a game has ever got to toppling BG2 for me, if it just had a more reactive main story and handled its new mechanics better it would have done it.
I mainly do hope if Pillars 3 ever happens that they don't drop these things (although the next might not be naval based), but build on and improve on them. With more refinement they'll work, the direction they went wasn't wrong, they just didn't quite go far enough.
I agree with a whole bunch of what you said, except for this part. I'm not sure what the issue is here? An occasional rest mid-dungeon isn't abusing the mechanic, to me. And it worked out to be a perfectly fun mechanic in the IE games. They generated five titles with this mechanic. And then there's the NWN games. And then there's the old gold box games. All these games had the same fundamental risk-reward mechanic with resting. That's quite a number of titles over quite a span of time, and several have ranked as top CRPG's or even top video games in their respective eras. Deadfire isn't going to hit that level of acclaim.
Of course modern games can improve on that mechanic. Ultimately, I would have loved the potential tradeoff Deadfire could have offered where resting comes more or less at the cost of gold. So a more well-run party has earlier access to better gear or other purchases. That mechanic is still extant but because of dearth of resting needs and the low cost of resting resources, it's a vestigial game element.
And this reinforces my point about the classes being more homogeneous. If you have classes that rely heavily on the resting mechanic for their power pool and classes that don't, you have true variety. Or if you have classes that rely on the resting mechanic for other reasons, hit point recovery, you also have class variety. But when all the classes get the same thing out of the mechanic, you have less variety in your classes.
Well, I'm really going deep into the game design philosophy there, which is really asking the question if the availability of something that will get you out of dire straits is really destroying the challenge posed by just simply being there at all. Its the basis of why I feel that though PoE2 didn't fix the problem, the changes that it made to its combat system is really an entirely different subject, and on that in your last paragraph, ah, I don't really feel it matters to me. I like the classes, and I still feel there's a decent amount of variety to their abilities, but it is true that there's some redundancy, and I feel the big missed opportunity with multiclasses was not introducing some unique abilities for them.
I think the fault was in the pirate theme, there were very bad titles in the past years and it is a little demodé now. People usually like the "fantasy-medieval-Europe" theme in their (non-japanese) CRPGs.
Also, even PoE1 has some good sales because they cater to the nostalgia, but many people were disappointed (not me in that particular matter) with the game itself because of multiclassing faults, excessive reading (wtf?), low level reached, short game, etc... That happened too to other games like legends of Grimrock.
And PoE does not even have a tabletop or anime fanbase to fish upon. They provided support for modding very late when most of the modding community already lost interest.
You can even blame the lack of multiplayer options. That worked well with DoS2, a TB game.
And that takes me to the competition in the same niche, where PoE2 lost against DoS2 or the fabulous pathfinder by far (Personally I bough those three and I like them very much, being PoE2 and Pathfinder at the top).
IMHO I think the game was one of my top20, easily, with DLC and patches is very well polished. Music, art, character creation(better than the first one, I think) were top notch. and I especially liked the writing and the story of the DLC but the OC was good. The diverse factions, talkative companions, good voices, firearms, the ship minigame while you travel and explore... that was well made. One thing I like much is that you can customize a lot of gameplay options, including the possibility to play RtWP or TB: a surprise and a very good one. I am not really a fan of the tropical theme and the rest and crafting system tho.
I hope that does not hinder the possibility of PoE3
Yes, players had to play it a decent amount to get it. But that's just it. The game didn't spread by word of mouth, because, imo, few players had anything compelling to really rave about. Reviewers gave it good but not glowing reviews. And I think this is one of the bigger culprits. Nothing prevented this game from becoming a slow-growing hit.
A key illustration of the dull gameplay is that there's no element of the game that's going to become a staple feature in other games. The original Pillars can boast of those written vignettes, that while not 100% original, certainly grew in popularity. Hell, even a game like Hollowknight copied the slowly-growing bestiary encyclopedia.
But none of the new features or reworked design of core elements (such as power pools, empower) are likely to be copied by future RPG's, imo. The increased party interactivity/dispositions might, but that ground was broken by Tyranny anyways. It's a sign that none of the changes delivered something both innovative and fun. The easy contrast Original Sin, where players were wowed by the fun environmental interactivity.
I also don't think the wealth of difficulty settings and knobs is good for attracting players. How can a new player be expected to know what they're going to prefer? And now someone buying this game post-launch has to choose between TB and RT? It's lazy game design imo. It's essentially outsourcing the labor of fine tuning a solid game experience to the player. I don't doubt that some veteran on here found some loadout that was an ideal experience, but the less hardcore players that turn games into best sellers aren't going to enjoy trial and erroring the options.
Most games that become classics don't have all this knobbery -- BG just had one difficulty setting choice. The OS games as well. Slightly different genre, but Dark Souls has no real gameplay settings. Same thing for the first two Diablo games for that matter. The old Gold Box games. The praised Ultima titles.
And it is often dirt simple like that, yeah the pirate theme probably put off a lot of people on PoE2 which is a shame, and the REALLY cynical part of me things that people found the first game and Obsidian's general approach to the world building and storytelling to be too complex (aka good) for them because most people, they want Star Wars, even though Star Wars is essentially a story for children, and Lord of the Rings, which well, I won't say in terms of language that was written for kids, but the plot is incredibly basic. But as I said, that's the REALLY cynical part of me. :P