Justin258

@bladeofcreation: Pillars 1 wizards at level 1 could get like one or two spells that could be cast per encounter. The best thing about that game's system is that at a certain level, you could start selecting some spells to be per encounter and not per rest, so in the latter half of the game your priests and wizards really could do a lot more in combat.

Pillars of Eternity rectified this entirely by making all spells and abilities per encounter, no resting required. Instead, resting was for eating food and refreshing your Empower ability, which let you make an ability much more powerful.

I got through some of Kingmaker, a whole lot of Wrath of the Righteous, all of the original BG games, and a chunk of Icewind Dale dealing with basically everything being per rest, so it's not too big a deal - but I think these games would "flow" a lot better if they could figure out how to adjust these systems such that I didn't have to click "go to camp" or something every few encounters.

I was actually very curious about how they would handle resting in general. I like these games a whole hell of a lot, but these "rest to regain spells" magic systems don't really work so well in video game form for the reason you've spoiler'd - you can run into an encounter you didn't expect and if you don't have much left in the way of spells and such - well, you're going to have a real tough time.

In the old games, resting consisted of clicking the rest button, the screen going black, a small cutscene playing, and then you're back, fully rested. After the first few times you skip the cutscene. Sometimes you get interrupted while resting, which can be disastrous but that's why you quicksave beforehand. Is that better? No, but it was much quicker.

When I made my character, I went completely against Infinity Engine convention and put a lot of points into Charisma. This has paid off in spades, as I'm able to pass so many dialog checks. I'm also a Rogue with 18 Dex and so I seem to be able to hit things with either my ranged or melee weapons with a pretty high degree of accuracy. This might be feeding into why I'm not finding myself save scumming or reloading all that much. I avoid casting anything that only returns on a long rest as much as I can (which is another mark against resting mechanics, just make skills/spells per encounter and balance around that).

On PC at least, the controller support does allow you to Quicksave - you pause, mash a button dedicated to quicksaving, and it saves. I wouldn't tell you to abuse quicksaving and quickloading, as I'm not personally doing that either, but I am going to strongly - as strongly as I possibly can - advise you to keep multiple save slots.

This game is, in my experience, far less buggy than most massive AAA RPGs at launch, but frankly it's still one of those and still has some occasional bugs. I don't think this game is going to be prone to corrupted saves or anything drastic like that, but I could see someone running across something that makes them want to load an older save.

I'm personally sticking with the dice rolls I get. I've had some things not go my way that I thought would work out and some things I very much expected to not go my way turn out OK and having moments where I go "oops, uh, I'm in trouble" are a lot of fun for me. Not knowing for sure if I'm going to fail or succeed a check is interesting and cool and at least somewhat novel in comparison to the usual "if you have X amount of Y skill you pass Z check automatically".

...narratively at least, mechanically I think this game is mostly pretty easy. I've only wiped a few times. It's not as hard as Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it's definitely not as hard as the original games even when playing those on Beamdog's Normal difficulty.

I feel like gaming has generally been in about the same spot since like 2016 or so, maybe 2015. Too many microtransactions, too many buggy games getting released, but also there are at least a few amazing games coming out every year. Despite all the complaints I might be able to make, I feel like video games in general are in a good place. Always be prepared for your most anticipated game to be a turd, be willing to look into things that are not on the top shelf, and don't buy games on day one in case they're a buggy mess.

This doesn't apply if your favorite genre is in a bad place. Amazingly, racing games do seem to be in one of those bad places, something I never thought I'd see because it seemed like a million of them were always coming out every year in the PS1/PS2/PS3 days and they suddenly dried up, like RTS games.

Pillars of Eternity gives you an invisible bottomless chest that you carry with you all the time. Every character has their own individual inventory, but that's for items that you think they're actually going to use. For instance, you might keep scrolls in your Wizard's inventory, a selection of weapon types for your Fighter, or a handful of traps for your Rogue. Everything else goes into this bottomless box. When you click on a group of dead enemies, you click the bottomless box, you click "take all". As a player, I would ask developers to consider one question - is it really important to you that players consider the importance of what they're carrying, forcing them to drop things they deem less important? If so, have a smaller number of more significant items so it's easier to sort through. If you want a zillion interactable objects, any one of which might be useful in some creative way, just give us an infinite inventory.

Maintaining an inventory in tabletop can be fun, but the thing about tabletop is that your characters likely aren't running around with a load of garbage in their inventory. There are a zillion things to pick up here and there's not really a good indication of what I need to keep around and what I don't. DOS 1 and 2 were somewhat infamous for having some combinations of items that were brilliant along with a ton of recipes for potions, food, scrolls, and equipment, some of which could be incredibly powerful, so I assume that's true here - but I don't know what's useful and what isn't. Should I carry around every single bloodstone I see? What if I find a recipe for something that needs bloodstones fifty hours into the game and I can't find any because I sold them all to a merchant I no longer have access to? Sure, I could send them to the camp traveler's box, but that fucking thing is even more of a nightmare to sort through.

My final point, and one that I've never seen brought up anywhere else but that I'd love to see discussed more often, is that grid inventories SUCK ASS. I'd love to say that as forcefully as possible in text. I love these games but for some reason all of them insist on using these fucking grids and I loathe it. Why is it a good idea to have players look at a ton of small icons, some of which aren't immediately all that distinguishable from another, and hover the mouse over every fucking one of them just to see what it is? Why is that just accepted as "this is the best we can do, deal with it?" I would point everyone who ever aspires to develop RPGs with a large inventory system to a mod for Skyrim called SkyUI, which I've brought up here before. It's a spreadsheet, a word which might scare everyone away, but just look at it. You click on the type of items you want to look at (armor, weapons, magic, miscellaneous) and you get a selection of values to sort by (name, weight, gold value, attack value, armor value, etc.) and from there you can look at whatever effects the item might have. Why can't we use this more often? Why can't I sort a spreadsheet of armor by type (light, medium, heavy) and then AC value and just see everything I need to right there?

Anyway, this got way longer than I intended it to be and is way more rant-y than I thought it would be, but yesterday I did stop playing the game and think about this for a little while.

I started playing the original games three years ago and just played them off and on until I finally finished them. I love them and I think they're great games, but I also spent a lot of time in wikis and forums trying to figure out how to play them and/or what I might be doing wrong. It's not always immediately obvious that an enemy is immune to something, for instance.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 also had a "mark as wares" option so I looked for that very early on.

You can also Shift + Click to highlight a selection of items and CTRL + Click to click on several items and just send all of those to wares. I didn't notice that quest items were highlighted orange, though!

I played a decent chunk of it with a controller, but also ultimately settled down with the mouse and keyboard controls. The gamepad controls are, I think, pretty good for the most part, but some little things bugged me. Like how if you're looking at something interactable and you just flick the stick, instead of moving the character it flicks to the next interactable over. If you get used to it I imagine that's very good, but eh. I think the game would have greatly benefited from a Dragon Age Origins-ish behind-the-back camera for everything except combat. You can almost get there, but you cannot look up. I bet that will get modded in at some point.

The camera and inventory management are my only complaints thus far. Like Divinity Original Sin 2, there's an incredible amount of loot and interactable objects in this game, but really that just serves to make me wonder if I should lug around this massive inventory of junk or if I should stop looting anything that isn't a chest or a dead high-level character. There's alchemy, there's crafting, is this unique locket that doesn't do anything but has a description just flavor or is it part of a quest? That sort of thing.

But I expected both of these things going in. DOS2 had the exact same inventory problems and I played some of the Early Access and Larian never seemed interested in making a truly third person game, instead just leaving the camera 90% of the way there for whatever reason, and I'm getting better at just not clicking "take all" every time I open something. Everything in this game thus far has been, for me anyway, golden. Exploration, combat, characters, story, I'm pretty damn wrapped up in all of it.

I flip-flopped between playing a half-Drow Rogue and a human Fighter and went with the Rogue, as I usually don't play sneaky-stabby classes, and it's been a lot of fun thus far. I stumbled across a circlet that sets my Intelligence to 17 - like, sets, in the same way the original game's Crom Faeyr set your Strength to 25. I pretty much immediately respec'd out of the Thief subclass and into the Arcane Trickster one so I can cast spells and that's been working out pretty well for me so far. This seems like one of those things where, a year from now, someone will be writing a build guide for a Fighter-Mage where they tell you to dump Intelligence for Strength/Dexterity/Constitution and go straight for this circlet and just wear it the entire game so you can get that stat back (which I will probably be doing, honestly).

I finished Throne of Bhaal about a month ago for the first time so I feel like my memory's pretty fresh on all of the original games, but thus far I haven't come across anything where knowledge of what happens in the original games is all that important. That could absolutely change and I'm very curious to know how those stories link to this one.

When I first played DOS2, I picked one of the origin characters. I think it was Ifan? I didn't finish the game back then, but I got like halfway through Act 2. When I went back and tried it again, I made a custom character and I remember feeling like I might have robbed myself of something that first time. Ifan is a character, and playing as him and making all his choices and determining all his reactions basically feels like Mass Effect 2, but Shepherd doesn't exist and you're playing the entire game as Garrus instead.

That's roughly what I want to get across, anyway.

I'm not personally interested in steering Gale's or Shadowheart's story my way, I'm interested in making my own character and playing that character and seeing how Gale and Shadowheart and whoever else reacts to that character. For me, designing and playing a character I came up with is much more interesting, both in story and gameplay.

EDIT: Also, The Dark Urge seems to be a response to people who want a character that feels more "GM-guided" but who don't necessarily want to play an origin character. If you're on the fence about this whole thing, that seems to be the way to go.

I have played a bunch of CRPGs over the past few years, BG1 and 2 among them, and if this one lives up to expectations, it will probably see at least one replay from me, so I'll do the Dark Urge thing later.

OK but I would hardly call Mass Effect "underrated". Perhaps the third game, sometimes, but as a whole? Nah.

For my answer, I would say that Legend of Grimrock 2 didn't get anywhere near the attention it deserved. Yeah, I know, you move along a grid, but if you can get past that you'll find one of the best exploration focused games I've ever played. There's brain-bending puzzles, there's combat, there's loot, there's leveling up and making characters, etc. The genre seemed like it was getting a CRPG-ish comeback when the first Legend of Grimrock came out and sold pretty well, but then poof, interest sorta just vanished, and Legend of Grimrock 2 came and went with little fanfare outside of the places you'd expect to care about it. Vaporum and its sequel appear to have done OK, though.

Seems like he just missed the "m" in the middle of "ramping", as in, action "ramping up" as a story goes on. In general, this post does need another pass on spelling and general writing, but I didn't really have much trouble understanding it.

It's been a long time since I played Kingdom Hearts 1. Last time was the PS3 HD version and I got it and played it obsessively for about a week sometime in... 2016? I think? I certainly remember being most irritated at the Tarzan world. Its level design and objectives don't really follow in a logical manner. Anyway, I finished it, had a blast, and then went on to play Kingdom Hearts 2. KH2 is a better game in pretty much every way, but for some reason I have always dropped off of that game halfway through it. Probably because I keep trying to do both 1 and 2 back-to-back and that's not a good way for me to play games. Still, it's worth firing up 2 right after playing 1 just to feel the difference in controls. KH2 feels so much better to just run around in.

Further entries in the franchise feel like they move away from the Disney influence and just use those places as backdrops for an ever-expanding but never-ending story (insert joke about 80's fantasy movie here). And the story they're trying to tell doesn't really do much for me so I never really got into the later entries in the franchise.