Thanks for this post. I was thinking of leaving the game unplayed in my backlog forever after the reactions here made it sound like it was as bland and boring as Baldur’s Gate. But reading this has renewed my interest. Perhaps I will give it a shot when I get the opportunity.
I suspect Baldur’s Gate is one of his favorite games, so I don’t know how much weight you should give to his post!
Razgon
2645
If I didn’t know better, Id suspect you of trolling really, really bad right there. And yeah, if you disliked Baldurs gate, this is definitely NOT for you.
Hmmm, well I loved Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights 2. And even Dungeon Siege 3. Obsidian’s writing tends to be a lot better than Baldur’s Gate. I do dislike that Infinity Engine combat engine/real time combat. But the writing (Planescape, NWN2) and the enemy variety and combat scenarios (Icewind Dale) make up for that.
I think PoE’s combat enables a better tactical feel, overall, than the IE games, though it lacks D&D’s broader spell selection. If you build your party right you can really lock enemy encounters down. The game was certainly far easier the 2nd time for me than the 1st (I kept going for dmg spells for my casters).
Huh. To me, Planescape Torment (aka Planescape Talking) and Icewind Dale neatly straddle both sides of Baldur’s Gate. I cannot fathom how you like both of them but not BG itself.
Just goes to show…
To be fair, BG2 is a significantly better game than BG1 in many ways.
Amazingly so. I remember my 3rd or 4th play through still marveling at the sheer amount of content in the game and just how much fun it was to play.
It remains the best RPG of all time, yes ;)
(Especially the EE, which is basically the good vanilla mods and some nice UI QOL stuff. Just ignore the stupid fanfic bonus characters and you’re good.)
I’m playing this game fairly slowly. 14 hours done right now.
When I finish with the game, I will write some impressions, but for now I will do another comment for now:
Does anyone feel the inclusion of the backers-npc like… gross? I feel like they totally prostituted their game. Kickstarter was needed to make the game, we wouldn’t have the game without it, but I can’t feel happy with how they handled this part.
I always supposed the backers that could have a npc in the game would be a real npc, like a innkeeper or a quest giver, where their name, portrait and a bit of his backstory would be chosen by the backer. Instead of that, they just put a pair of hundred? npcs that have a name instead of reading “villager” and you can click on them to read their backstory (where the prose is very lacking and don’t have any ties with the rest of the game), using the excuse of your soul-reading capabilities (why you can’t do that with the real npcs?).
It feels lazy, it feels poorly integrated in the game, it feels like just a pure commercial decision without any real basis from a game design perspective, and it breaks the immersion, because after the first ones you understand what it’s really going on. I don’t see how this is better than a npc that sells micro-transactions in a EA or Ubisoft game. In both cases you say how you can ignore them and go on with the game, but eewww.
I don’t know about it being “gross”, but it’s definitely poorly implemented and distracting. :(
robc04
2654
I didn’t feel like it was gross, but after reading a bunch in the beginning I ignored them after that until I saw a character named Desslock - I read that one.
There were a lot of them, so I can’t see how they could have integrated them into the game better. People chose to pay the money for it, so I feel it wasn’t sleezy.
Devs chose to accept money in exchange of messing with the game, putting stuff that it doesn’t improves the game but diminish the game. That’s the sleazy part! It’s about ethics in games journalism! integrity as creators.
edit: Yes, it’s part the course for game development being affected by people who pays for the game, be a normal publisher or a hundreds backers, but giving the option for people to “graffiti” their carefully constructed game world is past the line, imo.
They had complete control over how many of that reward were offered, so if they couldn’t integrate them successfully with so many, they shouldn’t have offered that many to begin with.
Squee
2657
Was wondering how you loved IWD but not BG, but enemy variety and combat scenarios could do it. Unfortunately I kinda feel that’s lacking in PoE (So many damn ghosts) and I wasn’t that pumped about the writing, either.
Still, sales hit fairly regularly on it. The Steam winter sale starts on the 22nd and PoE will probably be around half-off (I think that’s what it was during the Thanksgiving sale). Since you say you normally like Obsidian games it may be worth rolling the dice. For all the grumbling I do about PoE it was still good enough that I finished it, and I’ll be making a new party whenever the second DLC is released. Didn’t like the combat as much as BG (Which I replayed BG1 immediately after beating PoE to see if it was just rose tinted glasses. If it was, they were still firmly attached) and didn’t like the writing as much as almost any other Obsidian game, but overall I still dropped 54 hours on it. I’ve actually got some hopes that the “Improved enemy AI” they were talking about will spruce things up some, plus I think they rejiggered the enemies a bit so you can no longer trip ghosts with grease. Both could go a decent way toward making the combat better.
robc04
2658
I guess I felt they were easy enough to identify and ignore. Do I think the game would be better without them? Sure! It would have been easier if I didn’t need to ignore them. They just didn’t bother me much.
Probably the better question is whether the rewards for meeting the stretch goals were implemented well. Some of it felt a bit half baked, but they needed to be able to say they put the feature into the game.
Once I figured out that gravestones and NPCs with goofy highlighted nameplates were terrible fanfic garbage, they were easy enough to ignore. There were a couple in the first town that were okay, but beyond that yikes.
It’d be one thing if there were a bunch of NPCs named “Buttsnort Fartknocker” roaming around Defiance Bay, but a) I didn’t donate enough to the KS and b) they seemingly screened out the worst of the names or hid them deeply enough that I didn’t notice them.
Edirr
2660
The backer NPCs didn’t really bother me, but the gravestone markers are just stupid with all the garbage in them. The warning about not reading them because of immersion breaking is more than justified. I wish there was an option to disable them entirely. Not that I will actually pay attention to them after the first few, but it was bloody annoying.
stusser
2661
IE Mod will change the backer names and disable their dialogue.
This mod will either change backer memorials to be lore-friendly or remove them altogether, if you prefer.
This stab at logic worth -25 points.
