Prime Junta
Guest
-Boss encounters and set piece fights, some of them could be considered gimmicky for sure but entertaining none the less, they usually threw something new at you and you had to adapt.
Hmm... trying to think back to the boss battles. Revenants, that dragon with the chalice, Morrigan's mom, the shit that went down in the Deep Roads... it's been a while since I played it but honestly? I don't really remember enjoying any of them much. It was either a matter of finding a simplistic tactic and applying it to win (e.g. the very first boss, the ogre in the tower -- kite it and have everyone shoot it to death, or the dragon with the chalice -- use that one spell that makes you invulnerable, slap it on your tank who draws aggro, then use the rest of the party to kill it).
Pillars' boss fights aren't best-in-class either, but I can't honestly say that they're worse. Undead Raedric is a significant and materially different challenge, and some of the bounties are downright entertaining, as are some of the tougher levels of Od Nua and tougher encounters in White March 1.
Didn't play the newer PoE versions but in the one I did, I could barely differentiate between boss fights and dozens of copy-paste trash mob encounter leading up to it.
From where I'm at you're exaggerating a bit, but it's not entirely wrong. The main problem with the "sameyness" of fights was the AI -- it would just latch onto whoever was closest, and was not particularly aggressive or smart using its special abilities. This has changed dramatically with version 2.0 -- when it came out, there was a lot of whining that the Adra Dragon is now "impossible" for example. (They'd given it fire immunity and made it use its breath weapon aggressively, among other things. IOW it became a genuine challenge.)
-Itemization, while horrid in both games (MMO inspired shit) I still preferred in DAO because of lack of omnipotent crafting, some nice armor sets and more useful accessory items (rings, belts, helms, gloves etc.).
I far prefer Pillars' itemization. DA:O just had piles and piles of ever-more-epic loot with ever-higher numbers stacked on them. With Pillars, most unique items actually have some unique properties on them, and there are non-obvious ways of getting maximal advantage out of those properties. One major pro for Pillars is also that the usual linear progression isn't there: you get damn good items right from Act 1, so instead of just using them for a bit and then throwing them out for the next-greatest-thing, the challenge becomes finding the set of items with the unique properties that you want for the particular build you want to support, and, conversely, to optimally distribute the uniques you have at any given time.
Some of the feel of "too many interchangeable uniques" comes from the fact that there really are many of them, and whatever your build or tactic happens to be, a lot of them won't be relevant to it. Trouble is, if you want to give enough uniques to support a big variety of builds and tactics, that's always going to be the case.
I actually missed the whole point of the Pillars itemisation system when I wrote the review here. I've only figured it out later, and it has seriously grown on me.
-Party members had some semblance of a back bone and could even turn on you in specific moments, in PoE they're just docile servants (regardless of their story/ending slide).
Yup, true. That's part of what I meant by DA:O having better choice and consequence.