Baldur's Gate Sensuki was right

[Cyberarmy]

For me Kingmaker, at times, did bring the feeling of playing one of the cool, big quests in BG2. With YUUUGELY better party building as an added bonus. It's the first "old school brought back to life" title since the first Grimrock that managed to actually capitalize on the promise of being like the games they aim to emulate.

This.

 

[Maxie]

slowness and ponderousness of poe rivals that of late game shadowrun hong kong when i took a nap in the middle of some fight

 

[Cross]

Perhaps you should try using mobility skillz in PoE? My non-tank melees rarely ever move somewhere on their feet. Escape is bread and butter for rogue mixes. Evasive Fire is good for Rangers. Barbarians Leap. Monks eventually get Flagellant's Path. Fighters can use Charge. Movement restrictions hardly exist in PoE.

When you have to rely on special abilities to be able to do something as basic as moving freely, that's actually an indication that there are heavy restrictions on movement.

 

[Grunker]

^exactly

 

[Lacrymas]

When you have to rely on special abilities to be able to do something as basic as moving freely, that's actually an indication that there are heavy restrictions on movement.

Movement is not "basic" in combat, evidenced by kiting. When you play tabletop, movement is a huge part of combat that you have to actively think about. Speaking of tabletop, it has five-foot steps which can't be transposed to RTwP. Even then, you can move whenever you want in PoE, you'll just eat an AoO.

 

[Grunker]

When you have to rely on special abilities to be able to do something as basic as moving freely, that's actually an indication that there are heavy restrictions on movement.

movement is a huge part of combat that you have to actively think about.

It is in BG as well, it's just way less restrictive. Yes, that means it can be abused, but it's a premise to feel good, or at least better, in comparison to PoE. I mean, you say it yourself:

When you play tabletop, movement is a huge part of combat that you have to actively think about.

Tabletop is turn-based.

 

[Lacrymas]

Movement is not an issue in the IE games at all and you can exploit it to no end, kiting is just the tip of the iceberg. Also, how free the movement is doesn't affect how slow or fast the game is.

 

[Haplo]

Perhaps you should try using mobility skillz in PoE? My non-tank melees rarely ever move somewhere on their feet. Escape is bread and butter for rogue mixes. Evasive Fire is good for Rangers. Barbarians Leap. Monks eventually get Flagellant's Path. Fighters can use Charge. Movement restrictions hardly exist in PoE.

When you have to rely on special abilities to be able to do something as basic as moving freely, that's actually an indication that there are heavy restrictions on movement.

Well, each of those has a useful side effect. Escape offers a short but hefty bonus of +50 defenses (guess you can even make it last long with Salvation of Time or Wall of Draining). Evasive Fire buffs Dex and gives a free potshot. Leap can aoe Daze and even damage enemies (Daze makes their attacks much less dangerous, also they cannot engage). Lion's Sprint provides a significant Accuracy bonus for next attack. Flagellant's Path does some damage along its path, but more importantly ends with a Full Attack on target with no Recovery (often devastating with Swift Flurry/Heartbeat Drumming). Charge... I guess it can stun or something?

 

[eli]

just finished my BG1+2+TOB play yesterday and I have to say BG combat is clusterfuck because of its age. several things like;

- horrible pathfinding
- characters getting stuck in each other and things in general
- low detail (cause of age) that gives me little info then I am used to so that I can infer good decisions
- character A attacking character B, character B is attacking character C so character A goes to the location of character C in advance of B's action (sometimes happens)
- mages still chanting after a pause so I can't know when they will cast the spell unless I have an encyclopedic knowledge of every spell
- more mental tasks trying to compute AOE of spells in regard to the overall battle
- low effects on spells so that I can't know what spells I need to counter (mostly protection spells of mages) unless I have an encyclopedic knowledge of every spell
- attack animations sometimes stopping

just make the simplest of battles tactic-wise a chore to play. somethings like not knowing what kind of protection a mage casts could just be solved by throwing breaches/ pierce magic nonstop since you have more than enough, but it is still bad.

 

[Fedora Master]

toons

 

[Roguey]

Kingmaker and Tyranny on default and PoE on slowest felt fine to me. PoE/Tyranny's disengagement attacks and lack of rounds are the problem. Kingmaker's attacks of opportunity can be an annoyance, but they're not nearly as bad as disengagement attacks.

 

[Grunker]

PoE/Tyranny's disengagement attacks and lack of rounds are the problem. Kingmaker's attacks of opportunity can be an annoyance, but they're not nearly as bad as disengagement attacks.

Sounds like we agree except for how big of a problem AoOs are compared to disengagement. Though I don't think they're the only problem, they're clearly the biggest one.

 

[Haplo]

Well then, build some +100 Defense vs Disengagement Attacks... maybe also get Riposte and/or Whispers of the Endless Paths with Offensive Parry enchantment... problem solved!
Run in circles around enemies, laugh out loud as they try to attack you and kill themselves in the process.

Better yet, get Nomad's Brigandine or Gipon Prudensco armors, enchant them with Engagement Immunity, profit!
Bonus points if you're also a monk and get Imagined Pain. You'll earn Wounds in the process

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Rofl. PoE has millisecond recovery times when using one-handed weapons and the char is built for speed. PoE is actually too fast to control properly if you aren't using the slower setting. PoE is unwieldy because everyone has different "turn speeds" that don't follow any rime or reason when looking at the big picture, and as so you can issue much more commands per time frame than any of the IE games.

Brofisted. This is absolutely correct.

PoE plays like you're controlling 6 MMO characters cycling through routines. The timings of ability/spell execution are so granular and poorly integrated that they often cause every character to appear like they are operating asynchronously in a vacuum. For example, an effect might have a shorter duration than the time it took to execute it. Do this with 6 characters all behaving at their own pace with distinctly contrived abilities while an interrupt mechanic potentially disorders the entire flow. There is far too much to fidget with and monitor. Had they better standardized action timing and not used a percentage approach, it would have alleviated this humdrum busy-work play style significantly. Comprehension and clarity of the battlefield would have also been drastically improved.

There were many other contributors, like flat-out boring and contrived class/spell/ability design. The soft-counter philosophy, while laudable, was aborted by "balance" and excessive granularity. All of that busy work didn't result in anything that felt satisfying. Had those things been good, the gameplay might have been salvaged.

 

[Shadenuat]

ok grunker.

 

[agris]

Sensuki was always right, it did not happen overnight. Too many interpreted his criticism of the game as criticism of themselves and the idol of their devotion (OE), leading to tribal-like rejection of what he was saying independent of the actual arguments made and examples given.

It is as if the same tribal thinking that defines modern American political discourse was at play during discussion of Pillows.

To the OP, you don’t even touch on the other defining aspects of the IE games (especially Balldurrs) that POE whiffed on entirely: encounter design, and UI.

 

[Grunker]

Sensuki was always right, it did not happen overnight.

Who said it did? Note the past tense in the thread title

 

[agris]

Grunker perhaps I'm reading too much between the lines, but it sounds like a retrospective of his words with the context of present day, whereas my point is that his words and by extension his conclusions stood on their own, way back in 2015 or whatever.

 

[barghwata]

Pillars's combat is a lot more comprehensible and easy to follow in comparison with IE games, the combat is very slow due to rounds and you can see what everyone is doing and what moves and spells they're going to use and how much time is left before they use them at all times (not to mention things like having better pathfinding and showing you the exact range of AoE spells etc..).

There is a flipside to this however; Rtwp's strength ... for all its flaws, lies is in allowing the player to synchronise their party's moves and abilities in order to execute more complex strategies that wouldn't be possible otherwise in TB, the problem with pillars's round based system is that it throws this completely out of the window, every character has their own round speed and pace and it makes it almost impossible to synchronise anything, this combined with the engagement system that hampers movement causes every encounter to quickly devolve into a shitshow where your party and the enemy party are just throwing spells and abilities at each other untill the other side dies.

Despite pillars removing the clusterfuck problem that the IE games had by making the combat slower, with less movement and easier to follow ; all this ends up doing is sacrificing any tactical depth the game could've had, and the end result is shit.

 

[Grunker]

Grunker perhaps I'm reading too much between the lines, but it sounds like a retrospective of his words with the context of present day, whereas my point is that his words and by extension his conclusions stood on their own, way back in 2015 or whatever.

It wasn't. It was an honest acknowledgement that I was wrong, and he was right, back then (about this point in specific, which was the main core of his criticism).