Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9083408" data-attributes="member: 18">It's a terrible design that strongly encourages you to have a totally unbalanced party focusing entirely on one mode of attack, forces you to fight every fight you possibly can (and then some, arguably - there's debate but some people say that unless you get into some strictly unnecessary fights you are behind the curve, level-wise), and the MMORPG-style constant equipment grind was just purely crap-tier design that clashed extremely hard with the ideas behind the game (tactical, role-playing - these don't work well with "upgrade your equipment constantly or else fights are literally 10x harder than they should be"), and that the design director let that happen or worse intentionally did it speaks very poorly of them.That is absolutely bottom-tier design on a variety of levels. It's distinctly worse than DOS1. DOS1 had issues with spamming certain abilities and excessive barrelmancy (the latter sadly retained in DOS2), but it actually allowed you to take a wide variety of approaches to fights with a relative success, which was not true in the sequel.Absolutely. Some people love that over-the-top grand guignol "everyone is a jerk of some species" grimdark stuff, especially with a side of "black humour". Johnny The Homicidal Maniac was big for a reason. Warhammer 40K is absolutely huge. South Park is still getting made. Joe Abercrombie still sells books. The one improvement they did make is that the dialogue distinctly improved in the Definitive Edition, so the one place I can say they got better was in dialogue. The learning that they did do was "Our dialogue writing is kind of rubbish", leading to them hiring a ton of good writers and even opening studios for them. However, they didn't follow that through to "Our obsession with grimdark grey choice bollocks is deeply sophomoric and kinda bad, actually!", because Swen doesn't think that, he think it's totally badass and awesome, because in his heart, he is forever 17 and wearing a lot of black in the 1990s (which is not a curse, to be clear, there's a lot of upsides to living your life that way!).Actually they did improve in another area too - humour. DOS1 is full to the brim of terrible attempts to emulate Pratchett, but like in the most tone-deaf enthusiastic-but-unfunny way possible. DOS2's humour, whilst often tryhard in it's darkness, is actually a lot funnier.I'm aware, I was using metaphor and meaning when they actually start writing it.Ultimately, your reaction proves my point - because there is an audience for that stuff, because there are plenty of people who uncritically accept objectively bad system design, and who embrace this sophomoric dark grey stuff, they will make DOS3 and it will be "like that".And then a huge number of people will buy it, expecting BG4, and be utterly horrified, and it'll probably seriously damage Larian's reputation.(As an aside, Rivellon is a world so generic it makes The Forgotten Realms look original.)</blockquote>

Verification