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Will PoE be shit?

Will PoE be shit?


  • Total voters
    451

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
I trust the team, visuals look great, but no one really knows anything for sure until the fucking thing comes out. Poll is silly.

Edit: Oh a beta is out. I'm out of the loop. Well the vote being all over the place thus means... nothing, still. Okay.
 

Gulnar

Scholar
Joined
Oct 25, 2012
Messages
133
Someone was expecting more than a spiritual successor to BG1? (Read as: a game with a ok-ish plot and a mediocre combat but who will bring back the genre because it will be subject to mass publicity and who will open the gate for niche games a la torment/arcanum/bloodlines) It will be OK, but not much more. I don't expect more. If it's any more fun than a random dungeon crawl run, i will deem it a shining succes.
 
Self-Ejected

Bubbles

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 7, 2013
Messages
7,817
Read as: a game with a ok-ish plot and a mediocre combat but who will bring back the genre because it will be subject to mass publicity and who will open the gate for niche games a la torment/arcanum/bloodlines

That's DA:I's job.
 

Duraframe300

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2010
Messages
6,395
I trust the team, visuals look great, but no one really knows anything for sure until the fucking thing comes out. Poll is silly.

Edit: Oh a beta is out. I'm out of the loop. Well the vote being all over the place thus means... nothing, still. Okay.

The mechanics itself are also still the biggest construction site. The last patch introduced a whole new stealth system for example with the one before turning out just being temporary.

Basically if you don't feel PoE needs to absolutly have X to make it IE you can stay safely away from the discussion till the game releases.
 

Xor

Arcane
Joined
Jan 21, 2008
Messages
9,345
Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
My vote is "Modders will fix it. Mabye." Until I see what kind of modding tools the community can come up with, I don't think it's really possible to tell what the game's longevity will be, at least to me. It probably won't be very popular with casual RPG fans, though.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
Someone was expecting more than a spiritual successor to BG1?

Yes, actually (like, are you retarded or something?).

The problem is that form what i understand the game fails at being a spiritual successor to BG1, at least mechanically speaking. For what its worth, D&D > whatever the fuck they were trying to do with this game.

Aside for this, game might excel in other things so its hard to say.

What Obsidian should have done is a spiritual successor to Torment. It is the only thing they are good at, vis Mask of the Betrayer.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,656
For the record, I thought he did great on New Vegas. What can we criticize about what he did on New Vegas? Don't say first-person real-time.

Guns and energy weapons and melee and unarmed aren't different enough to justify separate skills. He said if he ever makes another Fallout game he'll merge them.

Speech skills as a win-button. Also something he'd remove.

The interface (inventory, crafting menu, etc.). Not entirely his fault considering it was inherited from the previous game and they didn't have the resources to spare to re-do it.

Item stats aren't as detailed as they should be, but it's a UI issue

Number of action points aren't well-communicated both when it comes to your total and how many you get per agility.

Still awarded xp by ways and means instead of strictly by quests and challenges

Still didn't explain the hacking minigame well enough http://new.spring.me/#!/JESawyer/q/163949761966138043

Still used randomization when it came to forcing locks and stealing items (and you don't know your chances of success when stealing either)

Could have used a stealth perk similar to Living Anatomy so you could better determine when you were getting closer to making someone cautious, like in Bloodlines and other games with a stealth meter

Headshots were still the thing to do for the most part because of the damage multiplier

Quest compass was too specific, but this was an engine thing they couldn't change. Bethesda addressed this themselves with Skyrim.

Perception and charisma are easy dumps, unless you want perception-required perks, in which case there's no reason to have more than 6 (there are a couple that require 7 but one's really only somewhat useful for Dead Money and the other is for those who wouldn't just reload when they break a lock)

Though New Vegas was released in October 19, 2010, it took until the final version of JSawyer released September 29, 2012 for it to be in a state considered "done."
 
Last edited:

Volourn

Pretty Princess
Pretty Princess Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Mar 10, 2003
Messages
24,924
So, the one game Sawyer made that was actually good (depsite some flaws), he wants to down down and make it shit? LMAO

Seriously, he is such a retart but I'm a bigger retart for being suckered by Obsidian. :p
 

Gulnar

Scholar
Joined
Oct 25, 2012
Messages
133
Read as: a game with a ok-ish plot and a mediocre combat but who will bring back the genre because it will be subject to mass publicity and who will open the gate for niche games a la torment/arcanum/bloodlines

That's DA:I's job.

I had to look at what the fuck DA:I was on wikipedia... and oh, god, i agree.

Someone was expecting more than a spiritual successor to BG1?

Yes, actually (like, are you retarded or something?).

The problem is that form what i understand the game fails at being a spiritual successor to BG1, at least mechanically speaking. For what its worth, D&D > whatever the fuck they were trying to do with this game.

Aside for this, game might excel in other things so its hard to say.

What Obsidian should have done is a spiritual successor to Torment. It is the only thing they are good at, vis Mask of the Betrayer.

It fails at being a "one person run in circles while five other sling stones to the enemy" simulator? Wow, it's even worse than expected. Because that's how the greatest part of encounters in BG1 went: kiting + slinging. Yes, at high level it was better, but how many such encounters were in the game?

OTOH i agree on the last line. Seeing how they profit on ... games such a DA:I, their money would have been better spent on a MOTB-esque game. But who knows, maybe i'm wrong and Poe will be such a game?
 

Nikaido

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Sep 14, 2013
Messages
521
Location
9th Hell
Guns and energy weapons and melee and unarmed aren't different enough to justify separate skills. He said if he ever makes another Fallout game he'll merge them.

I don't even need to read more. Sawyer truly is a pile of shit.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,656
:lol:

Blame the non-trivial amount of people who were really upset that energy weapons weren't superior to their gun equivalents in every way. His decision, going-forward, is to make it more like Fallout 1 and 2, but he's not going to include a specific skill that only sees use for the last quarter/third of the game while everything else can be used from start to finish.
 
Self-Ejected

Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
It fails at being a "one person run in circles while five other sling stones to the enemy" simulator? Wow, it's even worse than expected. Because that's how the greatest part of encounters in BG1 went: kiting + slinging.

Sorry, but kiting with slings is a messy, tedious tactic reserved for dumb noobs with no imagination. Veterans and decent players use stuff like Sleep, Blindness and Web in BG1. Debuffing, disabling and then destroying has always been the elegant and efficient solution to combat in these games.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
Zeits elaborated Spirit-Meter mechanics:
Good day Mr. Ziets, if you could go back in time and change Spirit Eater mechanic in MotB, would you change how it works or leave it as it is? Or maybe have thoughts on how it should work in your opinion?

My single biggest objection to the spirit-eater mechanic is that it discouraged exploration and side questing… because if you explored at a leisurely pace (and didn’t know how to exploit the system), it could literally kill you. So that’s the issue I’d want to solve, while still retaining the threat that the curse represents.


The easiest fix to the spirit meter might have been to remove the death component. You’d suffer effects over time if you didn’t devour spirits, but those effects would stop short of killing you. They could still impact your abilities and cause status effects. Maybe they’d affect your appearance, too. If things got bad enough, NPCs might try to drive you off, and you wouldn’t be allowed back into town. (We actually discussed something like that during development – it reminded me of the vampire and werewolf curses in Elder Scrolls.) But you could always devour a spirit to temporarily reverse these effects, and they’d never actually end your game.

While that sort of fixes the problem, I don’t like the fact that the gameplay and the narrative are at odds (i.e., the narrative says the curse is fatal, but it’s really not).

Another possibility is to make the progress of the curse be story-based, rather than timer-based. Mask of the Betrayer, like many game stories, was arranged in a series of story steps – e.g., step 1: escape the Barrow, step 2: prepare for the battle with Okku, etc. Instead of basing the progress of the curse on a ticking clock, we could have advanced the severity of the curse with each story step. At each stage, the player could arrest their condition - to a greater or lesser extent - by devouring souls/spirits or finding ways to suppress the effects of the curse. (Additionally, we could have controlled what options the player had available to feed or suppress the curse at each stage, and what impacts those options would have if the player chose to take advantage of them.) If the player failed to adequately address the curse on any given story step, their condition would deteriorate further on the next story step. Eventually, if they allowed the curse to progress too far, they’d actually die.

I like that solution a little better because within each story phase, the player has infinite time to explore, take side quests, etc., but the curse is still potentially fatal if the player doesn’t address it.

Just for fun, I also ran this question by Kevin Saunders, since he and I both worked on the high-level vision for the game. Here's what he said:

“Overall, I really liked the design Eric Fenstermaker devised and I thought it achieved our goals for the system. I do think we could have helped players better understand how to manage it. But I think the primary reason some disliked the spirit-eater mechanic was because of psychological impact, not the practical gameplay effects. Just knowing that you're under time pressure changes how you approach the game and makes it feel less like a Neverwinter CRPG. So what I would want to change would be to give the PC some true respites from the effect -- I'd want to approach the area design differently, so it's an active mechanic in some specific sections of the game, but irrelevant in others. This separation would have allowed us to improve the overall pacing and have the tension caused by the spirit meter be more deliberately woven into the design of specific areas without altering the feel of the game in others.”

I like Kevin’s idea a lot. The curse would still have gameplay consequences, but they’d be limited to situations that we controlled via area design. As long as we prepared enough of these situations for the player, they’d feel like the curse had a meaningful impact on their game.

Essentially, this is a content-based solution, and it avoids the constant maintenance mechanic that (I think) a lot of players disliked. So something like this may have been a good choice for us too.
 
Last edited:

mastroego

Arcane
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
10,250
Location
Italy
Guns and energy weapons and melee and unarmed aren't different enough to justify separate skills. He said if he ever makes another Fallout game he'll merge them.

I don't even need to read more. Sawyer truly is a pile of shit.

It just might be an illness, no need to be harsh.
Still, I'll avoid any game he is involved in like the plague :)
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
As for PoE - I have a high level of tolerance to bad design and mechanics, especially in Infinity-like games deprivation. The broblem is not that PoE mechanics are bad but because Codex expectations are extremely high.
 

Shannow

Waster of Time
Joined
Sep 15, 2006
Messages
6,386
Location
Finnegan's Wake
More whining from butthurt BG2 apologists :troll:

Btw your beloved BG series is much closer to Mass Effect than to Wizardry
Wow. I was gonna reply in a similar vein as Zagor with a few additional/different points, but you're obviously just another OE apologist trolling and not interested in discussion.
Now we're even losing the old-fucks. Truly decline of the codex.
 

Night Goat

The Immovable Autism
Patron
No Fun Allowed
Joined
May 6, 2013
Messages
1,865,441
Location
[redacted]
Codex 2013 Codex 2014
Guns and energy weapons and melee and unarmed aren't different enough to justify separate skills. He said if he ever makes another Fallout game he'll merge them.
I see people bawwing over this, but I think it's great. You're not going to spend points on guns and energy weapons, and it sucks to find something really nice that's useless to you because you don't have the skill for it. Especially since they both are held the same way and used the same way, and the only difference is the type of projectile they fire. As for melee and unarmed weapons - fuck it, no one used them anyway. Might as well merge them so they don't take up as much space.

Also: PoE will be GUD
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,825
Guns and energy weapons and melee and unarmed aren't different enough to justify separate skills. He said if he ever makes another Fallout game he'll merge them.
I see people bawwing over this, but I think it's great. You're not going to spend points on guns and energy weapons, and it sucks to find something really nice that's useless to you because you don't have the skill for it. Especially since they both are held the same way and used the same way, and the only difference is the type of projectile they fire. As for melee and unarmed weapons - fuck it, no one used them anyway. Might as well merge them so they don't take up as much space.

Also: PoE will be GUD
Lets just merge all weapon skills into "weapon skills". This will be a much more definite solution to those problems you mentioned earlier. Also merge all other skills into "misc skills", so you are never frustrated for not having the adequate skill maxed.
It really adds to the experience when you can see and experience everything in a game in one go, i fucking hate whenever some content is locked just because i didnt spend my points the way the game wanted me to. Shit, there should be a mandatory auto level feature. Also fuck those faggots that think that it would be better to make different weapons, armors and skills play in (sometimes very) different ways, better to make the differences cosmetic at best, then come to the natural conclusion that because they play exactly the same its really not worth keeping 2 separate skills.

....
 

Bonerbill

Augur
Joined
Nov 25, 2013
Messages
302
Location
North Carolina
Guns and energy weapons and melee and unarmed aren't different enough to justify separate skills. He said if he ever makes another Fallout game he'll merge them.
As for melee and unarmed weapons - fuck it, no one used them anyway. Might as well merge them so they don't take up as much space.

Go eat a dick (not really). Melee was awesome in the fallout games.
 

Night Goat

The Immovable Autism
Patron
No Fun Allowed
Joined
May 6, 2013
Messages
1,865,441
Location
[redacted]
Codex 2013 Codex 2014
GrognardsGonnaGrog_zps559fe40c.gif
 

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