This is a game made by people who genuinely loved what they were doing, and it's clear that rather than asking themselves "How can we best serve the market?", the developers instead asked "Wouldn't it be awesome if . . .?" It has all the enthusiasm and the quirkiness (for better and worse) of an indie game, but the production values that only a multi-million dollar budget will buy.
"Wouldn't it be awesome if . . .?" that ranged weapons have greater DPS? There is investigation by Myrten & Co on Obsidian board. I got the same result by naive venturing through the game. Very soon in the game, I got sick of non-existent enemy AI, which joggles its chars hither and thither, therefore my party members start doing the same shit. I switched to ranged and never switched back. I did game on “Path of the Damned” with simplest combat strategy – all party members use range weapon only and wear max DR armor possible. Combat tactics was simple too – hit casters, hit tanks, hit the rest.
Positioning of members does not really matters. Taking in account another obvious failure in combat design that there is no pre-buffs + short duration of buffs + circle effective area of buffs, you quickly ends up with bulletproof tactics. Stick yours party together, do not move, spam buffs on yourselves and use ranged and even chained (very unbalanced feature dare to exist by an oversight of lead designer!) offensive spells. Any other tactics is pretention to be needed, and is a LARPing by definition. Any reviewer using word “tactic” about PoE combat has to be fed with Doritos to death.
And there are neither heart, nor soul in the game. Bitter regret only.
Key point was something about twenty years ago when game publishers being in a constant quest “How to enrich ourselves within CRPG?” They sent scouts to reshuffle CRPG genre. Lucky ones found direct road to Skyrim. Unlucky scouts stuck in dead ends and died there. Therefore, all beloved Codexian titles are just gravestones in dead-ends of the road of decline. These titles are culls, not achievements. Beloved Codexian designers are not gods. They are just unlucky scouts of decline. A lost sheep.
Somehow, these lost sheep learnt its lesson and started the same quest for money with knowledge of right direction in mind. They rummaged among nostalgia funs and silly hopers. Thus, modern “incline” titles are just scratching in shallow baskets for some money. The obvious overuse of word “whore” toward goddess, which helps in-game apostols, is the substitution, it is Obsidian’s way to say to its own fate “Fuck you, whore! You had betrayed us, und made lucky others!”
Of course, few indie people try to make game for themselves, not for money. They bring us short relief. However, nothing can change the nature of the man. For example, Mr.Vogel is already in a constant quest for money, you, VD, are on your way, and the only one Styg digging underrail, not yet derailed.
Everything is shit. There is no incline. It never was.
