Best of the New Shit?

[Sothpaw]

Stuff I've completed recently:

Great:
Shadowrun Dragonfall

Good:
Divinity Original Sin
Wasteland 2
Shadowrun Returns
New Vegas

Meh:
Witcher 1
Witcher 2
Fallout 3

Horrible:
Skyrim

Fucking Horrible:
Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age Inquisition

Additionally I loved the following ARPGs:
Grim Dawn, Demons Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne.

 

[Delterius]

took away your option to be methodical?

Well, any game, any new experience really, can do that. The point I was trying to make in that conversation was that there's this meme about pointing out the mediocre trashy encounters that filled the IE games as though they are representative of the whole, and therefore evidence that PoE is very much superior. When in reality, both games are filled with trashy, mediocre encounters, that won't really challenge you or force you to change tactics. The only real difference is that PoE requires more clerical work to be done to dispatch mooks.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, any game, any new experience really, can do that. The point I was trying to make in that conversation was that there's this meme about pointing out the mediocre trashy encounters that filled the IE games as though they are representative of the whole, and therefore evidence that PoE is very much superior. When in reality, both games are filled with trashy, mediocre encounters, that won't really challenge you or force you to change tactics. The only real difference is that PoE requires more clerical work to be done to dispatch mooks.

The IE games do have their own form of clerical work - the RTS autoattacking-and-kiting gameplay which Sensuki and co are convinced is the pinnacle of tactics, even though it's just as amenable to the methodical "solving" I described. I think that's kind of arbitrary, and to wit, you have people like butchy who actually find using abilities to be a more enjoyable form of repetitive crunching.

And he's not the only one - during PoE's playtest period, Obsidian found that players responded very positively to having per-encounter abilities. So I'm afraid they're here to stay. What we should do is ask for them to be more contextual - more useful in certain situations, rather than universally useful no matter when you use them. Like the special abilities in The Banner Saga, for instance (although I don't think they can ever be quite as contextual as those).

 

[Delterius]

The IE games do have their own form of clerical work - the RTS autoattacking-and-kiting gameplay which Sensuki and co think is the pinnacle of tactics, even though it's just as amenable to the methodical "solving" I described. I think that's kind of arbitrary, and to wit, you have people like butchy who actually find using abilities to be a more enjoyable form of mindless crunching. And he's not the only one - during PoE's playtest period, Obsidian found that players responded very positively to having per-encounter abilities. So I'm afraid they're here to stay.

That's all irrelevant to what I said. I didn't say that for the most part having 'select all>attack' is a better form of mindless trash gameplay than spamming cooldowns. I didn't say that cooldowns in themselves were a bad thing. I didn't even make a judgemental comparison of the games this time.

All I'm saying is that both games have trashy, shitty, mediocre, mindless encounters that are really a mere formality to gameplay. They don't force you to change tactics in the context of either game. All they do is pad the gameplay and pointing out, in isolation, that either PoE or the IE games have their own form of trash content has become a way for people around here to kid themselves into thinking that their favored game is a more fun take on RTwP, when in the real world nobody gives a damn about more generic mobs, even if you buff their stats to unreasonable levels.

People want novelty. They want unique enemies with unique traits that change the game. They want environments to matter. Etc. And it is only in that respect, I'd say, that base PoE rightfully sucks when compared to the IE games.

 

[Infinitron]

That's all irrelevant to what I said.

You are correct, but I had a point I wanted to make.

pointing out, in isolation, that either PoE or the IE games have their own form of trash content has become a way for people around here to kid themselves into thinking that their favored game is a more fun take on RTwP

Heh, okay.

 

[Delterius]

Heh, okay.

I realize that sounds a bit good fighty but it is basically what you've got around here.

On one hand you've got people who pretend that PoE is really just the wolves and lions that for the most part don't really put a pressure on your resources. And that you have to jack things up to Nightmare mode levels for even the 4 to 5 creative encounters to be enough of a paradigm change to matter. In other words, PoE is isometric Dragon Age.

On the other, you've got about three people who say that the IE games were all xvarts and select:all attacking, as though mage battles never really existed.

When in reality people are just being selective about their pedantry. This is really just about trash combat.

 

[Sensuki]

The IE games do have their own form of clerical work - the RTS autoattacking-and-kiting gameplay which Sensuki and co are convinced is the pinnacle of tactics, even though it's just as amenable to the methodical "solving" I described. I think that's kind of arbitrary, and to wit, you have people like butchy who actually find using abilities to be a more enjoyable form of repetitive crunching.

And he's not the only one - during PoE's playtest period, Obsidian found that players responded very positively to having per-encounter abilities. So I'm afraid they're here to stay. What we should do is ask for them to be more contextual - more useful in certain situations, rather than universally useful no matter when you use them. Like the special abilities in The Banner Saga, for instance (although I don't think they can ever be quite as contextual as those).

You're taking that a bit far. Even I think that Obsidian's (Josh's) design of active abilities as 'cool action you can do' in combat is a good way of taking something you might do from P&P and implementing it in a simple and easy fashion that works in a computer game, rather than using elaborate P&P rules such as Trip mechanics or something like that, even though they're basically the "feat" equivalent of those kind of attacks but with a resource cost/use limit.

The problem is there are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many of them and they have individual use limits. Because of this, 95% of player time in combat is spent performing active per-encounter abilities. There is little to no thinking involved in the use of these abilities either - it's bad playing to not try and use as many as possible every encounter. Obviously you don't necessarily have to choose them but I believe that on many characters they are better options than their passive counterparts.

I agree that The active abilities in The Banner Saga are well designed and take some consideration before use but they're a different design to the PE ones which are, for the most part: "special attack that is always better than standard attack" and "buff or debuff that you should cast every encounter". Abilities in The Banner Saga all cost the same amount of 'time' to perform in combat, one turn. Whereas in PE, many abilities, particularly self-buffs and stuff like that have very short cast times/cooldowns and/or use both weapons with no recovery in between to attack - helping further make them a no brainer to use.