@grimplimp
A few points:
1. There are some good interesting spells but they are dpread amongst the spellcasting classes. I do agree that more spells would be nice but compare this to like BG1 before xpacs and sequels and the selection is pretty good. Might be nice to have sequencers and contingencies but those didnt come into play at the early levels anyways.
2. In early and early mid level IE, you mostly auto attacked. In this game, you can build a party to do far more from the get go. I dont find ability use to be mindless but this may due to different party composition. Ive done a few playthroughs now with a paladin, a dps fighter, a melee chanter, a priest, rogue and cipher. The lack of a tank fighter makes the game far more active. I also find myself using more diverse abilities as I familiarize myself on what they do.
3. You do not have to play passively but it is possible. Again, most IE classes were passive, so your anger at this is puzzling. But again, passive play is not necessay. I find this to be a strength in the game. You can craft a party active, passive or in between to suit your preferences. Also, the beta should be hard to learn. You are jumping in at level 5 with a nearly full party. The full game will start you at level 1.
When I said that mechanics are hard for casuals I don't mean combat, I mean like what is D.T., does sneak attack ignore it (it doesn't but I had to check to make sure), does sneak attack stack with other damage, what does prone effect do, what does dazed effect do, how does accuracy and deflection even work, etc.
These are all things you get at level 1 so unless you did some reading before this you have no idea what you're doing.
I probably made a mistake in my wording. So this might make some confusion in my reply when I say active, I don't really mean the ability spamming, I mean more with what you can actually do with them. Currently you use knockdown to just temporary stop damage and not to really use it to perform another action, as you don't need to. This is mainly what I feel is missing from this game. It's trying to be tactical but not really succeeding.
This isn't really an excuse if BG1 was like that. They know what worked in BG2 or IWD series so they can build from that. Baldur's Gate EE isn't as devoid of interesting actions as PoE is so you don't need
I did try the paladin and a custom party as well, after all I did see all the videos of people playing on the forum but I wasn't really impressed.
Able to heal with the paladin isn't really actively more challenging, and neither is the debuff suppression really.
You use them when you get hit by a debuff or when health becomes low, it just overwrites the actions of what you did with the priest so I don't see how it's different now somehow.
Other abilities are dps increase and are completely brainless, so use them as quickly as possible basically and they wont make any difference on how long you can go without rest.
I did play with cipher as well and I have to say that they were simply overpowered compared to most other classes. This is the only class that had really useful abilities but they either need to be toned down or other classes need to be brought on par.
And the chanter is the most passive class so I don't see how the game is more active with him. They do have invocations, or whatever they are called, but they take time to use so you can't really use them to counter something or use them in a clever way other than to increase damage or temporary lower it which is the same as any other ability. Yes they do have a knockback but it's a single gem out of many useless ones where you can actually do something with it, yet I have not seen anyone actually use it tactically, as there is no need to.
The summons are there for a laugh as all they really do is do more damage rather then allowing you to use them for something different like as a scapegoat to soak up some damage or something differently.
Like I mentioned before I made a mistake in wording with what I mean "actively" so I'll talk from a different stand point when I mean active. (Maybe I should have used the word "tactically"?)
Yes you are right you can play actively, however you get punished for almost every meaningful active action you take by either wasting a spell or losing health so you really have no motivation to actually do it.
I tried both ways, passively and actively and at the end of the day I needed to rest on the same spots. So if you don't need to play active meaningfully then why bother do it? To create more work for yourself?
For example there is a beetle that fires some kind of aoe shock blast at you that does 40-55 damage. I decided to try and be clever and interrupt it's attack with the level 1 wizard spell that's specifically made for this and even when it actually worked and didn't miss I ran out of spells pretty quickly so I had to press the rest button to be ready for the spiders in the cave.
Then I saw that I actually get better through this if I just run with my tank directly at the enemy so that the aoe shock blast hits the enemy as well which I think is just retarded gameplay btw, but because of low health I had to rest on the same spot again.
This was the most interesting thing I did in the beta and it happened in the first 3 seconds of combat, then it became the same tank and spank with damage/healing ability spamming.
If you have the exact party composition then maybe yes you're right, the game becomes more interesting but in most cases it happened once or twice per playthrough for me, the rest is just repeating the same thing every fight and I personally don't think that's really going to hold when new players come to the game.
It didn't really for me.
I doubt it will be well received.
No one plays Obsidian games for the combat. I expect people who like Obsidian and other storyfags will like the game very much dispite it's gameplay.
People who don't like Obsidian and pledged only because "IE successor" won't like the game. All in all, the game propably will meet a mixed reception, where some people will love it (similar to PST, assuming the content will be up to par) while others will dislike it because of the gameplay.
And there is a chance some people (outside of the original audience aka IE fans) will like the combat, after all even NWN2 abortion of a combat has fans
Given that Obsidian have another 3 or 4 months to work on this, I'd think that they are expecting this game to be received pretty damn well. Like D:OS well. (By well I just mean metacritic score + general reaction I read on the internet which of course might be different for everybody).
If they can minimize the bugs and clean up combat, I think it will do well too.
Although I still think it will be funny if this game gets received and the story and dialogue are absolute crap.
The game has quite a lot of combat to simply ignore it like you could in PST. The maps are filled with hostiles, which is even more than in the BG series, so we're probably looking at more at IWD number of combat encounters than BG.
As for NWN2 and DA:O
I think NWN series mostly rides on D&D success and it ability to create your own games with the modding tools that can with it, the game would probably not have the audience it has without it. Yes there are some that like NWN combat but in no way are they the majority so i wouldn't really count on that.
And DA:O had the cutscenes, visuals and voice acting to back it up so that attracted some of the main stream players, not to mention it was less buggy than PoE will probably ever be, knowing Obsidian history and seeing the state of the game atm.
PoE is intended for very niche type of players as it pretends to be a real time strategy game with pause while having the mechanics of a turn based game so it only works for people who like something in between, it has no popular brand backing it up, it won't have voice acting/cutscenes, it will probably be a bugfest and it has more combat than even storyfag PST fans will like.
I still don't think it will be well received wholly.
(before people start bashing this i don't care for cutscenes and voice acting either, but some do)
