I honestly don't think this game would be improved by having to walk back to town every time a character gets knocked down, and with such a small party ... trying to proceed at 75% strength also sounds terrible.
Agreed.
My ideal solution would be to have expensive Resurrection Powders like in Wiz 8 so you take a big penalty when a guy gets clobbered but can keep playing. This is close enough.
I don't think so. While I've never run out of res powders in wiz8 past the very early game, the possibility of doing so influences my decisions on the battlefield, and the game is better off for it in my opinion.
This is Pillars of Eternity all over again, except BT4 doesn't even try to have any sort of resource management. Sure, it's not an RPG, it's a mismarketed card game. Still, it's a trend I'm noticing with "modern" iterations of older CRPGs: nobody wants to challenge the player on anything but a fight-to-fight basis. It was the single biggest let-down of D:OS to me (yes, even bigger than the shitty story), and with the PoE franchise having let go of the last vestiges of resource management neither of the Obsidian Larian InXile troika (pun intended) looks like it even wants to try.
And I'm inclined to excuse PoE and D:OS, because they are isometric games without random encounters. IE games' resource management was just a lot of LARP after all, a carryover from AD&D. But this is a first-person dungeon crawler. Random encounters are a staple of the genre, and they're a staple of the genre for a reason. If they don't want to make an exact copy of a 35 year old game that's fine, but look to Wiz 8, look to Might and Magic, to Wizards & Warriors for an idea of how to pull off random encounters in a modern-era blobber. But sure, it's not a blobber, it's just a mismarketed card game called Bard's Tale IV and created, free of publisher interference, by the CRPG industry legend who made the originals.
But is there some unwritten rule that card games can't have resource management? Would anything have to be sacrificed to implement some degree of resource management, other than time and effort? Maybe the lack of random encounters, but, again, why are there no random encounters? Then there's the character system, which is all skill picks and nothing else, even worse than D:OS, which I've said reminds me all too much of Witcher 3. The dungeons we've seen so far look tiny and cramped, filled with The Room-like puzzles (which I'm not opposed to in moderation) in lieu of navigational challenges. Maybe that's just true of the first few locations , but I worry it won't approach the intricacy and sense of space and scale of the originals or even the aforementioned 3D crawlers. The arcade racing game-like quest marker speaks for itself. There's the crafting system, with a million tons of crap ingredients, again looking to steal the worst parts of D:OS. I'm not opposed to InXile's attempt to marry the RPG and card game genre. If they succeed, it's a truly novel game, and has the potential to be more innovative than any old school revival CRPG we've had so far. But I need to see more good RPG in this. When push comes to shove I am an RPG entusiast before I am a video game entusiast and for that purely selfish reason I am disappointed by a lot of the things we've seen so far.
I get where you're coming from, and I don't mean for it to seem like I'm accusing you of shilling or anything, it's just that I had such a good feeling seeing a free-movement first person dungeon crawler with 2018 graphics. Now I'm on the verge of losing interest. It might turn out excellent, and I'll likely play and enjoy it - the combat
does look fun - but for my very specific tastes this is shaping up to be a massive waste of good potential.
TLDR: (Autistic screeching)
whichever way you slice it.
) picking good ideas from them all, there were a few indies which tried that with more or less success (less, mostly ).
