The Roguey assessment is finally here.
As expected, I loathed the beginning. Hated the long walking sim intro where a bunch of people I don't care about said a bunch of things I had half- or fully-forgotten before I could even get to character creation (and of course one of the first patches made this skippable on replays
). Hated the addition of quippy Whedonesque dialogue responses for the player character. Hated the new per-encounter system for spells with its expectation that you use them in nearly every encounter and its "two spells per level maximum in any given encounter" limit. Didn't like the new penetration system and how it encourages you to just stick with the highest-penetrating weapons so you don't have to frequently micromanage. Didn't like how large Neketaka was (which is funny given Sawyer's previous criticisms of Athkatla) and how it's full of hours of talking and walking and not enough potential combat in each individual map to break that up (unlike Athkatla); sure I was collecting combat quests, but they were all either higher level than I was or took place out of the city so I felt incentivized to collect everything before starting to work my way through them.
Contrary to many others, I didn't dislike the music. Seemed like a typical fantasy soundtrack to me. I really liked the jig that plays when you board an enemy ship (and the rearrangement that plays in taverns), but that turned out to be a reinterpretation of a song that played in the first game. An improvement's improvement though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Everyone was right that Pallegina is far more irritating than she was in the first game. The logic used by the antagonists in her personal quest is also incredibly stupid and nonsensical. Pure failure on Sawyer's part, more supporting evidence that Adler and Avellone were right.
Despite that, I didn't hate the story like I thought I would. Sawyer must have taken the mocking nickname "Pillars of Equality" literally because this game is full of showing off the consequences of inequality. I could not in good conscience side with any faction because they were all terrible. And at first I wanted to make Eothas pay for killing all those people, but the more the gods talked, the more I hated them and thought the world would be better off without them, so Sawyer successfully persuaded me into going along with his railroaded plot.
I recall a lot of praise for Scokel and the Forgotten Sanctum, but I didn't think much of his work. Fyonlecg's animosity towards me really didn't have any justification other than him just being crazy. I also really really hated Tayn, but I suppose that was the point; he's an anachronistic-feeling absurdly goofy mediocre rich boy who coasts through life while all his capable female peers have to work twice as hard to get comparable success. Guy made a strawman of the kind of person he hates.
Despite my seething over some of the new systems, the combat was fine. I'm glad that after PoE and Tyranny they finally figured out a good default speed. I played on Veteran with no scaling whatsoever. It started off pretty demanding after the tutorial area and leveled off as I gained levels, but would still periodically challenge me. In the endgame, the islands on the north and south of the map were particularly demanding, and there were a good amount of tough encounters in the Forgotten Sanctum, though I insist that the Oracle of Wael was too demanding for something on a DLC's critical path. My endgame stats:
Anyway, it was a fine game, though it has too many bothersome aspects to be a classic (the reasons why I cancelled my fig pledge and put off buying it in the first place). Pretty typical of Obsidian at this point. I'm glad I gave it a chance.
I'm not bad, I'm just not great at them. Bad players are the kind of people Sawyer describes in his QA horror stories: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...te-march-expansion-thread.100006/post-4409223
