The RPG that pissed you off the most

[Humanophage]

Mass Effect. I was already apprehensive when all the characters seemed to be similar to KOTOR and Jade Empire. When I left the starting town and saw that it was a console shooter of some kind, I just dropped it and never came back. I also realised that Bioware will never return to Baldur's Gate, that there's no point giving it the benefit of the doubt any more, and that consoles killed it.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Mass Effect. I was already apprehensive when all the characters seemed to be similar to KOTOR and Jade Empire. When I left the starting town and saw that it was a console shooter of some kind, I just dropped it and never came back. I also realised that Bioware will never return to Baldur's Gate, that there's no point giving it the benefit of the doubt any more, and that consoles killed it.

The problem with Mass Effect isn't even the shitty shooting mechanics, although they don't help.

It's the fact that most of the story and gameplay is filler, the only interesting stuff happens at the end.

In terms of the trilogy, it's all for naught anyway - critical decisions you make like killing the entire council are rendered meaningless because they just get replaced with nearly identical copies. The game cannot properly account for your decision making and so it basically continues down the same path but with minor differences.

People complain about Mass Effect 3's ending all being the same cutscene with different colour filters. That's a valid criticism, but the problem runs deeper - EVERY major decision, not just the endings, results in the equivalent of a colour filter. The story is largely the same, it's only the minor details you can really change.

 

[Butter]

I have found most if not all Infinity Engine games an absolute chore to play - Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate, etc.

Their stories are alright (although Icewind Dale is basically a dungeon crawler, not much story there), the problem is that DND 2E is kind of bad in many ways, and putting it in a game in that way basically makes it very diceroll heavy, but in a frustrating and annoying way that lacks consequence.

For instance, picking locks. Having a low chance to succeed doesn't mean much because there's no resource cost to endlessly failing.

Trap Detection is basically a case of "walk around until traps magically appear", and if you get unlucky and miss one, that can often mean a TPK. So it's a mandatory skill that also doesn't really have much interesting gameplay associated with it.

Resting is basically a free party heal since random encounters are rare and usually significantly easier than the amount of damage you healed off in the first place (and you can rest again after if you take damage)

Specialising in certain weapon types is pointless because there might only be 3 of that weapon in the entire game, and no nice magical ones. Baldurs Gate players should basically metagame and always get the Katanas skill since there are lots of awesome katanas, and never get the Quarterstaff skill, for instance.

I would describe Infinity Engine games as: Story written by an adult, gameplay designed by a child.

I guess my gripe is more with DND generally sucking than it is with the Infinity Engine, since it's just a recreation of DND in software, but I dunno, it seems to come off even worse than DND for some reason. I guess it's because if I tried to rest 5 times in a row in a real DND game to continually heal after random rest encounters, my DM would slap me. But that's totally permissable in an Infinity Engine game. It's like playing DND but your DM is an idiot, so you can abuse the broken ruleset as much as you want without consequence.

This is all IE-specific. The Infinity Engine games are basically D&D for retards. The Gold Box games had much better gameplay, and the IE games traded that for better presentation.

Maybe for DND2, I wouldn't know, I never played it in tabletop.

I play DND5 weekly though. DND5 sucks in many ways.

Issues include, but are not limited to:

The "Advantage/Disadvantage" system makes a lot of skills useless because there are so many ways to get advantage (like flanking) and they effectively cancel each other out. We play without flanking and even then we almost always have advantage in every encounter for whatever reason, meanwhile skills that give advantage sit unused in fight after fight.

Classes are horribly unbalanced (The default Ranger was so horribly shitty they had to remake it in UA)

Character skills are largely useless outside of combat except for the occasional check and save, so outside of combat the party are basically an amorphous blob of nondescript people. This is partly the DMs fault though, as many good DMs can add flavour by having things like racism within the world that differentiates characters of different races. But DND itself makes no real effort to encourage this sort of play (and the community actively discourages anything that might affect one party member of another), so it never happens.

DND also encourages you to help your party members with checks, which means that it's basically impossible to fail a check, since there should be more than enough skill balance spread among any competent party, and when members can assist each other for advantage (and when the person with the highest skill can do the check), it highly biases favourable results. Checks may as well not exist at this point. Again, this is partly the DMs fault, but again DND actively encourages this sort of play. Saves are far more balanced in this regard and as a result tend to be a lot more interesting.

Alignments are meaningless, as are alignment spells (such as detect good/evil)

Resting is just as borked as it is in IE games. This is partially the DMs fault though, this could be easily mitigated by placing a time limit on objectives so the party can't just rest constantly. In my current party we basically take a long rest after each encounter and always have full health as a result.

I could go on.

DND just sucks.

I wouldn't play post-TSR D&D in tabletop. 3E multi-classing convinced me that WotC don't understand it at all.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

dark souls 2

how come?

Dark Souls 2 was such a complete mixed bag for me.

The Good:
- Powerstancing. This added some actual utility to equipping a weapon in the left hand, which is practically useless in every Dark Souls game otherwise. Dark Souls 3 regressed hard here, and made left hand weapons useless again. Instead you have to use specific "dual wield" items.
- The Respec Potions. In any sort of RPG respeccing is pretty much a must, especially if certain skills are bad and are noob traps.
- Mostly balanced weapon and spell roster. They tried at least. Most other DS games have horrendous balance, to the point where most people use a few items specifically (like havels set) and nothing else. Dark Souls was always supposed to be a game where every weapon class was viable and there weren't tiers, so you could use everything rather than rummaging through loot for that slightly better sword. But in practice weapons like short swords were basically inferior to long swords in every way. Same with spells and miracles, which ad pretty horrible balance. DS2 tries to fix this.
- Some of the gameplay like the hollowing system are actually alright for punishing repeated deaths. It's badly thought out though because the regeneration ring renders most of it moot, and you can get it right after the first boss
- People say it has the best PVP but people who play Dark Souls for PVP are dumb. Dark Souls has one of the jankiest, most broken, cheater-prone multiplayer systems ever, and I don't know why anyone plays it seriously or praises it.
- It has the best NG+ in the entire series because there are unique items and enemies, it's not just the same thing again but everything is stronger. NG+ is still mostly boring in every DS game though, and as a concept in general it usually just results in a hard ballbusting experience with no progression.
- Torch mechanics. Light management is an interesting mechanic and I feel they pulled it off mostly okay, at least in SOTFs. In vanilla, dark areas are so bright there's no reason to ever use a torch, but in SOTFS there is, which is some good left-hand depth. It's short lived though since you can run through an area to light braziers, and even if you die in the process, you have effectively cancelled the need for a torch in that area for next time.

The Bad:
- The world kinda sucks. I'm not even going to complain about "ree fast travel" and "ree the world isn't interconnected like DS1". The world interconnectivity in DS1 was as much as a blessing as it was a curse, often resulted in horrible boring backtracking, and while novel was largely a chore in implementation. It's only real advantage was for the lore of the game and making the world feel more alive. I don't think that's really worth it if the gameplay suffers as a result. In DS2, the main problem is that the locations are boring. We don't get anything like the great hollow. Instead it's a bunch of boring castles, a boring mill, and lava in the sky.
- The controls are horrendous. The left analog stick is probably the worst example. Instead of being a true analog movement system, it basically locks you to one of 8 directions, and will suddenly snap at random times as you slowly move your hand on the stick, which can make diagonal jumps extremely problematic and easily result in death.
- Branches of Yore were interesting, as were Lockstones, however they were also a total mixed bag in terms of rewards. Sometimes you would get an awesome item, sometimes you would get nothing, and sometimes you would get punished for using them. This made them extremely frustrating since you HAVE to check everything, to not miss any important game-changing items, but most of the time you will be disappointed.

The Horrendous:
- Endless spam. This is more of an issue in the SOTFS edition, where it seems like they copy-pasted all the enemies in a given area about 3 times. There are veritable rooms filled with 15-20 enemies who all rush you at once. Dark Souls is not a game that plays well with large numbers of enemies in a fight, it's at it's best in a dueling setting, especially with the lock on which will literally make you roll into danger when you press the roll button if you're looking at one enemy and another one is perpendicular to it. Dark souls did enemy spam as a novelty occasionally, and it sucked then. Dark Souls 2 is practically enemy spam the whole way through. It definitely makes the game hard, but it doesn't make it good.
- You had to buy the game twice to get the real ending. At the time, scholar of the first sin basically changed the game significantly AFTER everyone had already bought the game for release. Greedy!
- Adaptability. Responding to Endurance being an overpowered stat is good, as it trying to fix the roll-spam that is Dark Souls 1. But making an outright mandatory stat that every build will require? That's just dumb.
- Copy-Paste bosses. Sekiro does this too, as does Elden Ring, but they both do it much more subtley and tastefully. Repeating bosses usually come MUCH later in the game, have a different moveset, and the challenge is changed in some significant way. Sometimes even adding an extra copy of the enemy that you fight at the same time is enough to significantly differentiate a repeat fight. Instead we get Ornstein again, multiple versions of the Smelter demon which are essentially identical except one does extra damage, and in SOTFS the ruin sentinels are just copy-pasted into a random room (and not even marked as a boss) becuase they were SO MUCH FUN the first time. We also get bosses that have random hidden mechanics you'd never know about, like stopping the poison in one boss fight by setting the METAL wheel of the windmill on fire. This is not documented anywhere.
- LIFEGEMS. You have literally infinite health regeneration, available on the cheap. They could have fixed this easily by capping you to 10 lifegems total, but instead you can hold 99 of each type. This isn't like Humanity in DS1, which is also an infinitely stackable source of HP, because in DS1 they are relatively hard to farm, so you have to waste a bunch of time to get infinite health. This wasn't truly fixed until DS3, where you could only ember once per life, thus stopping the infinite health regen items entirely. To make matters worse, the estus flask in DS2 absolutely sucks (it takes forever to use, and for most of the game you only have a handful of uses per rest), so the game essentially encourages you to spam lifegems endlessly. Ironically they made the game WAY harder to compensate, but this just results in more time spent waiting to heal between (or during) encounters, and more heal cheese.
- The entire marketing for the game was a lie.

Despite the really good bits I wished they had ported into future games, DS2 in general sucks hard.

 

[Lhynn]

Ive always been a jaded cunt, but I think the last fucks went with Pillars of eternity.
I was there in the thread arguing with half the codex about how shit it was, and nobody fucking saw it, I felt like I was fucking insane. Pointed every fucking flaw months before the game was released and was mocked out of the thread because of it, I saw people like Sensuki and Bester actually try, and I saw them broken for it, I saw their dreams of a good game shattered by the hipster trash, go back to fixing your bike sawyer.

Then the game releases and the fucking jew starts censoring reviews while pushing propaganda, in the fucking codex of all places, trying to gaslight people. It was such a fucking shitshow.

And worse part was that this fucking game was the chance to get a decent game inspired in BG 1 or 2, but no, we got a vanity project from black isles coffee kid.

Fuck you sawyer, fuck you Infinitron , fuck you @Primecunta, fuck the other shills with reviews lined by the jew and especially fuck everyone that still praises that steaming pile of shit, you are less than human to me.

#mygamergate

lol, if you standards are that high then there's plenty to complain about with the Infinity Engine games.

>High

No, in fact I can play almost anything and enjoy it. Its just that PoE was a mess in every department.

Writing was boring and bland, completely devoid of joy or with anything interesting to say. Only time I found myself reading something was in the talks with Durance, it was colorful and interesting, and completely divorced from anything else in the game. In BG games the writing wasnt brilliant, but it did the job. There are a bunch of memorable side quests and the main quest itself is fairly gripping from start to finish.

The gameplay was an absolute mess, visually impossible to tell what the fuck was going on. In the IE games while the combat wasnt a masterpiece, you could at least always tell what was going on, there was a lot of care that went there to inform the player of anything happening in what should have been an incomprehensible clusterfuck.

Itemization in Pillows was shit, while magical items in both games were memorable and interesting.

Theres plenty to complain about with the Infinity games, sure, but Pillows betrayed every design principle it was supposedly based on, and managed to make it worse with the solutions it came up with. It is beyond my comprehension how a human being could so thoroughly fuck up what was a golden opportunity.

I will fucking cut anyone trying to debate me on this shit.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I wouldn't play post-TSR D&D in tabletop. 3E multi-classing convinced me that WotC don't understand it at all.

What would you recommend playing in tabletop?

I was thinking of abandoning DND entirely and playing Call of Cthulu or someting. Something with a good ruleset that doesn't suck.

Also, yeah, WOTC basically sucks. They have also run Magic into the ground as well.

 

[Butter]

I wouldn't play post-TSR D&D in tabletop. 3E multi-classing convinced me that WotC don't understand it at all.

What would you recommend playing in tabletop?

I was thinking of abandoning DND entirely and playing Call of Cthulu or someting. Something with a good ruleset that doesn't suck.

Also, yeah, WOTC basically sucks. They have also run Magic into the ground as well.

There are probably better rulesets out there, and someone will no doubt call me a pleb, but I'd happily run 2E AD&D campaigns for all time. There are a variety of cool settings; it's not like you have to play in Forgotten Realms every time just because that's what most video games do.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

>High

No, in fact I can play almost anything and enjoy it. Its just that PoE was a mess in every department.

Writing was boring and bland, completely devoid of joy or with anything interesting to say. Only time I found myself reading something was in the talks with Durance, it was colorful and interesting, and completely divorced from anything else in the game. In BG games the writing wasnt brilliant, but it did the job. There are a bunch of memorable side quests and the main quest itself is fairly gripping from start to finish.

The gameplay was an absolute mess, visually impossible to tell what the fuck was going on. In the IE games while the combat wasnt a masterpiece, you could at least always tell what was going on, there was a lot of care that went there to inform the player of anything happening in what should have been an incomprehensible clusterfuck.

Itemization in Pillows was shit, while magical items in both games were memorable and interesting.

Theres plenty to complain about with the Infinity games, sure, but Pillows betrayed every design principle it was supposedly based on, and managed to make it worse with the solutions it came up with. It is beyond my comprehension how a human being could so thoroughly fuck up what was a golden opportunity.

I will fucking cut anyone trying to debate me on this shit.

Ehh, pillows did at least some things right, much better than the IE games in many ways. No more Camping spam, more balanced classes, and at least an attempt to make things interesting with wizard grimoires and chanter songs and other gameplay ideas.

The real problem is the boring story, the fact that it's impossible to tell what's going on, the insane difficulty spikes, and the boring quests. Oh, and the RPG stats are an incomprehensible mess. It took me a good 5 hours to figure out how Deflection, Will etc worked because the mechanics are really obtuse and not explained very well.

The game isn't too bad. I wouldn't call it a betrayal of the IE game philosophy. It's just kind of bland and uninteresting.

Go ahead, cut me.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Title. And in what way or means, such as a particular happening or feature of the game.

Maybe not the most, but NWN was a pivotal disappointment for me.

I remember being excited seeing the trailer teasing its development. I thought it would be like the IE games, but improved. lol. Though, in fairness, a lot more work was put into it than NWN2. Animations for dodges and blocks, for example.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

BG2
I'm stilled pissed that they made the concept of "romances" popular in western crpgs. Someone else would eventually do it but it's not an excuse.

The point of romances seemed to be to extend BG1's intraparty dynamics. Intraparty interactions and romances were something that previous games did as well. Treasures of the Savage Frontier comes to mind for romances.

I think JRPGs created the market for romances in general. BG and Torment just came up with a more interactive format that was easily imitated.

It was an improvement on BG1's features, so it should be praised as a rare quality incline. What other games did with it afterward, and what the fan response to it turned out to be wasn't Black Isle's fault.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

BG2
I'm stilled pissed that they made the concept of "romances" popular in western crpgs. Someone else would eventually do it but it's not an excuse.

The point of romances seemed to be to extend BG1's intraparty dynamics. Intraparty interactions and romances were something that previous games did as well. Treasures of the Savage Frontier comes to mind for romances.

I think JRPGs created the market for romances in general. BG and Torment just came up with a more interactive format that was easily imitated.

It was an improvement on its BG1's features, so it should be praised as a rare quality incline. What other games did with it afterward, and what the fan response to it turned out to be wasn't Black Isle's fault.

This is true of basically every mechanic. I have seen everything from infinitely respawning enemies, to regenerating health, to quest markers, all done extremely well. But they are commonly done so lazily and horribly nowadays they are basically considered universally bad mechanics. I don't blame regenerating health for ruining call of duty. I blame call of duty for ruining regenerating health.

 

[Robotigan]

I'd like to rage about DOTA2 even though it's not much of an RPG. If it was 100% shit then I would ignore it but there are parts that are amazing. When you get a big battle between 5 people vs the 5 enemy people, and everyone is good and contributing, then it can be amazing. And it's always different because of the many different interactions between the many characters. But everything else about the game is completely retarded. You depend so much on the rest of your team and usually they are fucking morons. In games like NOX you had all the same cool gameplay but it was deathmatch so you could just enjoy it, you only had to rely on yourself. Teamplay could be great but mobas allow shit people to ruin everything for everyone. You also can't leave the game when if someone on your team is deliberately trying to ruin the game, if you leave the game punishes you. So you are held hostage for an hour by these stupid fucks. Also kill stealing is like the stupidest mechanic that goes completely against everything else in the game. It ruins everything, it makes the players play like useless bastards and rewards them for it. It punishes people who play well. Also having to 'farm the lane' for 30 minutes at the start of every game is boring and stupid. Basically everything about these games is really annoying shit and stupid, except a few awesome bits of gameplay. I can't believe someone hasn't taken the few good bits and made a new game out of it, but this retarded games business instead just copy pastes the same DOTAs with the same shit problems. Same thing happened with MMOs, all these promising genres die out because they all copied 1 game instead of trying a few things.

I happen to like the farming economy side of it (since it's the only thing I'm remotely good at), but fully agreed that the lack of any surrender option is so damn tedious. And the way the player base celebrates it absolutely reeks of insecurity. Of course I understand maximum tryhard, play until the ancient falls will net marginally more wins; and I don't give a shit. If you wanna do that, get a 5-stack that feels the same way. The rest of us don't want to waste half-an-hour tilting in a game we're 99% sure to lose especially in unranked. Dota sold its soul to the hardcore audience and as a result is utterly devoid of new/casual players to bolster the lower ranks leaving everyone else is on the mmr treadmill.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

This is true of basically every mechanic. I have seen everything from infinitely respawning enemies, to regenerating health, to quest markers, all done extremely well. But they are commonly done so lazily and horribly nowadays they are basically considered universally bad mechanics. I don't blame regenerating health for ruining call of duty. I blame call of duty for ruining regenerating health.

True. BG2 also did level scaling correctly, but because Todd did it so poorly in Oblivion, it's considered a universally bad feature by many.

 

[Lhynn]

>High

No, in fact I can play almost anything and enjoy it. Its just that PoE was a mess in every department.

Writing was boring and bland, completely devoid of joy or with anything interesting to say. Only time I found myself reading something was in the talks with Durance, it was colorful and interesting, and completely divorced from anything else in the game. In BG games the writing wasnt brilliant, but it did the job. There are a bunch of memorable side quests and the main quest itself is fairly gripping from start to finish.

The gameplay was an absolute mess, visually impossible to tell what the fuck was going on. In the IE games while the combat wasnt a masterpiece, you could at least always tell what was going on, there was a lot of care that went there to inform the player of anything happening in what should have been an incomprehensible clusterfuck.

Itemization in Pillows was shit, while magical items in both games were memorable and interesting.

Theres plenty to complain about with the Infinity games, sure, but Pillows betrayed every design principle it was supposedly based on, and managed to make it worse with the solutions it came up with. It is beyond my comprehension how a human being could so thoroughly fuck up what was a golden opportunity.

I will fucking cut anyone trying to debate me on this shit.

Ehh, pillows did at least some things right, much better than the IE games in many ways. No more Camping spam, more balanced classes, and at least an attempt to make things interesting with wizard grimoires and chanter songs and other gameplay ideas.

The real problem is the boring story, the fact that it's impossible to tell what's going on, the insane difficulty spikes, and the boring quests. Oh, and the RPG stats are an incomprehensible mess. It took me a good 5 hours to figure out how Deflection, Will etc worked because the mechanics are really obtuse and not explained very well.

The game isn't too bad. I wouldn't call it a betrayal of the IE game philosophy. It's just kind of bland and uninteresting.

Go ahead, cut me.

Wrong. You could still camp spam in pillars of eternity, just waste minutes of your valuable time in loading screens and rest at nearest inn an unlimited number of times.
Fuck balance, especially PoEs take. Balance should come from party composition, as it did in the IE games, not from any single class being "better" than any other, but sawyer, in his infinite idiocy, decided classes should be balanced against each other, meaning party composition didnt matter, removing a layer of strategy from an already simple game.
Wizard grimoires were shit, in truth you only ever use your own. Its a mechanic that would have been decent in a single character rpg, with grimoires carrying unique spells that offered interesting choices when it came to your loadout, but no, there was really nothing to them, wasted idea and more shit to tell to the merchant, thats it.

Chanters were interesting in theory, in practice you had an incredibly passive class that was outright broken because of how good the passive bonuses were, great at abusing mechanics.

Every fucking new idea that came with PoE was retarded to the extreme. For example, "No prebuffing" meant there was magic that could only be accessed during a fight, which made absolutely no narrative sense, it was there strictly because of banalce, on a game that still included prebuffing in the form of food, because you cant slap your face hard enough when it seeing to making design choices in pillars.

It was a poorly thought out game made by an imbecile that thought he knew better and enjoyed by drooling retards that should probably neck themselves. And having a "it was an average experience" opinion just goes to show how shit the games you are playing are, or how shit your taste is. Fallout 3 and oblivion are objectively far superior experiences to it, and both those are bad.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

PoE is basically realizing that the IE games had issues and deciding to replace those issues with even worse solutions

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I'd like to rage about DOTA2 even though it's not much of an RPG. If it was 100% shit then I would ignore it but there are parts that are amazing. When you get a big battle between 5 people vs the 5 enemy people, and everyone is good and contributing, then it can be amazing. And it's always different because of the many different interactions between the many characters. But everything else about the game is completely retarded. You depend so much on the rest of your team and usually they are fucking morons. In games like NOX you had all the same cool gameplay but it was deathmatch so you could just enjoy it, you only had to rely on yourself. Teamplay could be great but mobas allow shit people to ruin everything for everyone. You also can't leave the game when if someone on your team is deliberately trying to ruin the game, if you leave the game punishes you. So you are held hostage for an hour by these stupid fucks. Also kill stealing is like the stupidest mechanic that goes completely against everything else in the game. It ruins everything, it makes the players play like useless bastards and rewards them for it. It punishes people who play well. Also having to 'farm the lane' for 30 minutes at the start of every game is boring and stupid. Basically everything about these games is really annoying shit and stupid, except a few awesome bits of gameplay. I can't believe someone hasn't taken the few good bits and made a new game out of it, but this retarded games business instead just copy pastes the same DOTAs with the same shit problems. Same thing happened with MMOs, all these promising genres die out because they all copied 1 game instead of trying a few things.

I happen to like the farming economy side of it (since it's the only thing I'm remotely good at), but fully agreed that the lack of any surrender option is so damn tedious. And the way the player base celebrates it absolutely reeks of insecurity. Of course I understand maximum tryhard, play until the ancient falls will net marginally more wins; and I don't give a shit. If you wanna do that, get a 5-stack that feels the same way. The rest of us don't want to waste half-an-hour tilting in a game we're 99% sure to lose especially in unranked. Dota sold its soul to the hardcore audience and as a result is utterly devoid of new/casual players to bolster the lower ranks leaving everyone else is on the mmr treadmill.

The absolute worst thing you can do as a game designer is cater to the hardcore audience. Hardcore gamers are some of the most retarded people on the planet, usually pointing to some individual mechanic as "skill" while ignoring or not understanding the core design principles that make games fun and interesting.

At least actual casual players will play something for a while, get bored, and move on without yelling endlessly into the void about how "the game is catered to people who arent me so its bad". I know plenty of casuals who know what makes a game fun other than "OH it needs to have super skillful headshot" or "oh everything needs to be a skillshot". Hardcore gamers are likely to call needing to eat and drink in a survival game "hardcore" despite most of these systems adding nothing to a particular game other than busywork.

The worst example of this is probably Rainbow Six Siege. The game is horrendously designed - sight lines are massive so you can instantly die from anywhere (including spawn) which encourages rushing to various "magic kill spots" on each map, characters are unbalanced, it's difficult to read opponents - there are a lot of issues. But because the game has a low time to kill, it's obviously good in the eyes of hardcore gamers, and criticising it makes me a "noskill noob" who just needs to play more (or something).

What makes a game "skillful" and "good" in the eyes of a hardcore gamer has nothing to do with good game design, and is entirely about how obtuse the game is to learn and play. Then when people struggle initially to overcome that hurdle, they can then smugly post "get good" or "play for another 1000 hours to master some skill" as if it justifies their shitty game design decisions.

League of Legends is the quintessential example. Everything is done in the name of "more skills" from Dota - more targeted abilities, more skillshots, more complex heroes, more complicated matchups etc. It should be a far deeper and more interesting game than Dota. And yet every other area of the game has basically regressed since their original Dota inspiration because the hardcore idiots that made it have no idea how a game works or how core mechanics function to create problem solving, tension and interactivity. Even something as simple as a town portal scroll - something that could require interesting resource costs, tradeoffs, and depth, is now just a magic teleport button. It didn't exactly require a lot of skill in Dota, but they could have moved forward, not regressed backwards. But because it wasn't a "skillshot", it's obviously not REAL skill so it was jetissoned.

This is why Counter-Strike has been in a broken state for over 20 years. It's also why it's completely devoid of fun. The game is broken on purpose. That's the way the community likes it. Certain guns aren't "overwpoered and broken", just "the community meta" (which is forever unchanging). 4 AKs and an AWP on every team forever, unless it's a save round. That's how CS "works" and if you suggest maybe some of the other guns (like the short range weapons aka shotguns) be made viable? "LOL you just want to use a high spread shotgun, just get good and learn how to use rifles", so the game is forever an unbalanced mess, because headshots are all that matter and all that counts as skill. The game is so stale and so barely functional to the point where the META is entirely broken, every game plays the same, and there's no strategy or nuance. Just shooty kill kill.

Don't even get me started on hardcore fighting game players. They think a game sucks if it doesn't require as much button mashing and "caters to casuls" as a result. Just ignore the character interactions, how each fighter can work, how balanced special abilities are. It's all about "those difficult to master combo moves". Divekick has more depth than a lot of professional fighting games and it was made as a joke parody of fighting games.

I have basically given up on multiplayer games at this point. All the interesting game design is happening in single player games. Multiplayer games are mostly just iterations on the same formula to cater to the same "high skill" hardcore audience of screeching autists, and I usually don't find them compelling or interesting enough to actually invest the time into to bother getting good, because all the higher leagues offer is the same game but usually with less content (since everyone sticks to the meta weapons and classes, rather than using everyting).

Certain types of skill are basically considered invalid because pro's have a very concise list of what count's as "skill". Overwatch is a good example of this. Take Torbion for example. The skill in playing Torb relies mostly on carefully placing a turret in a clever area to cover your team or surprise enemies. He's a very positional character. He is also underdeveloped and not complicated enough, so he caps off quickly and is not competitively viable, which I see as a game design issue. Because he doesn't rely on traditional aim or dodging skills, it's considered totally acceptable that he's not competitively viable because "only noobs play that class". It's a self fulfilling cycle where unbalanced game design is justified because a handful of pros have largely dictated what is the "correct" set of skills to be "pro" at videogames. Because his skill relies more on positioning and situational awareness, and not on aim, it's totally okay for the game to be unbalanced and him to not be viable because the pros said so. As a result, positional gameplay will not be developed, he will not be made more interesting, and will never be competitively viable. The design is stuck and will never go further. Personally I blame this phenomena on Quake, which is basically where these autistic pros came from.

Meanwhile single player game developers are free to explore every avenue.

 

[Funposter]

This is why Counter-Strike has been in a broken state for over 20 years. It's also why it's completely devoid of fun. The game is broken on purpose. That's the way the community likes it. Certain guns aren't "overwpoered and broken", just "the community meta" (which is forever unchanging). 4 AKs and an AWP on every team forever, unless it's a save round. That's how CS "works" and if you suggest maybe some of the other guns (like the short range weapons aka shotguns) be made viable? "LOL you just want to use a high spread shotgun, just get good and learn how to use rifles", so the game is forever an unbalanced mess, because headshots are all that matter and all that counts as skill. The game is so stale and so barely functional to the point where the META is entirely broken, every game plays the same, and there's no strategy or nuance. Just shooty kill kill.

Don't even get me started on hardcore fighting game players. They think a game sucks if it doesn't require as much button mashing and "caters to casuls" as a result. Just ignore the character interactions, how each fighter can work, how balanced special abilities are. It's all about "those difficult to master combo moves". Divekick has more depth than a lot of professional fighting games and it was made as a joke parody of fighting games.

The irony of course is that the consistent meta for something like Counter-Strike is what people want in "e-sports", ignoring the fact that actual sports see more regular innovation and development in how they're played, even if they've been around for over 100 years.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

What would you recommend playing in tabletop?

I was thinking of abandoning DND entirely and playing Call of Cthulu or someting. Something with a good ruleset that doesn't suck.

Also, yeah, WOTC basically sucks. They have also run Magic into the ground as well.

There were six editions of Dungeons & Dragons published by TSR, though it's important to keep in mind that all of these editions are closer to each other than to any new rules with the D&D name published after the demise of TSR in 1997.

1st: Original D&D, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, consisting of the three "little brown booklets" (about 110 pages total) sold together starting in 1974, with three character classes (fighting-man, magic-user, and cleric). There were three rules supplements (about 190 pages total) --- Greyhawk (paladins and thieves, among many other new rules), Blackmoor (monks and assassins plus a sample adventure among other things), and Eldritch Wizardry (druids and psionics among other items) --- plus Supplement IV: Deities, Demigods, and Heroes, which was a precursor to Deities & Demigods / Legends & Lore but didn't really contain new rules.

2nd: Eric Holmes' "blue book" D&D in 1977 consisting of a single, 50-page booklet with rules only up to 3rd level. Not exactly a complete version of D&D in itself, but it sold quite well due to being cheap and comprehensible.

3rd: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons by Gary Gygax with three core rulebooks (about 500 pages total): the Monster Manual released in 1977, the Players Handbook in 1978, and the Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979. TSR began publishing adventure modules in 1978, about 100 specifically for this version of the rules. Two World of Greyhawk setting books by Gygax were released (the brief Folio in 1980 and the lengthier box set in 1983), although TSR only moved heavily into campaign setting material in 1987, after Gygax's ouster from TSR, starting with the Forgotten Realms box set and Dragonlance hardcover book. A few optional rulebooks were published beginning with Unearthed Arcana in 1985, not counting the earlier Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II with additional monsters or the Deities & Demigods / Legends & Lore book about representing (mostly) real-world mythologies with AD&D stats.

4th: Moldvay/Cook B/X D&D in 1981 consisting of the Basic Rules and Expert Rules (about 130 pages total), with covers by Erol Otus. The Basic Rules were a somewhat more expansive revision of Holmes D&D, while the Expert Rules took players up to level 14. Supposedly, this version of D&D had been intended to conclude with a third rules set that was never published.

5th: Mentzer BECMI D&D, published starting in 1983, ultimately consisting of five box sets (about 500 pages total) with covers by Larry Elmore. The 'Red Box' Basic Set was similar to Holmes and Moldvay Basic but much lengthier with a drastically revised presentation, and the 'Blue Box' Expert Set was similar to the Cook Expert Rules. The third 'Green Box' Companion Set took characters to level 25 and included rules for dominion rulership and mass warfare, among other things, while the fourth 'Black Box' Master Set took characters to the maximum 36th level with rules for questing for immortality. The final 'Gold Box' Immortals Set provided a new set of rules for playing as immortals that was almost divorced from normal D&D rules. Beginning in 1987, a series of Gazetteers were published detailing the various countries of the Known World, followed by a few campaign setting box sets and other material. A 1991 Rules Cyclopedia compiled the rules from the first four box sets, while a 1992 Wrath of the Immortals box set replaced the Gold Box rules for immortals with new ones. About 60 adventure modules were published for non-advanced D&D, overwhelmingly for the BECMI version.

6th: 2nd edition AD&D by David Zeb Cook, a revision of Gygax's AD&D, released in 1989 again as a set of three core rulebooks (about 600 pages total) but with the Monster Manual hardcover book replaced by a Monstrous Compendium contained in a binder. Most of the AD&D campaign setting material was published for 2nd edition AD&D, including everything for the new Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Al Qadim, Planescape, and Birthright settings. There were also a voluminous amount of optional rules --- 15 Complete ____ Handbook's, 8 Dungeon Master's Guide Resources, 7 Historical Reference Books, and many more --- plus about 150 adventure modules and a considerable quantity of other material before TSR went bankrupt in 1997.

Each of these six TSR editions of D&D is better than any version of "D&D" post-TSR.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

...Long winded descriptions of all the DND rulesets...

Each of these six TSR editions of D&D is better than any version of "D&D" post-TSR.

That was interesting, but you didn't exactly explain the main differences between editions or how they differ to current DND.

What is it about TSR DND that makes it so good in comparison to WOTC DND?

The irony of course is that the consistent meta for something like Counter-Strike is what people want in "e-sports", ignoring the fact that actual sports see more regular innovation and development in how they're played, even if they've been around for over 100 years.

Yes. You have to be literally stupid to want a stale, unchanging meta in any game. As you point out, even sports which have had standardised rulesets for 100 years or so still undergo changes every season, and many of them improve the games.

Chess has had an unchanging ruleset for a long, long time and as a result it's one of the most boring games to watch and play at the professional level, because the strategies haven't changed in a long time.

The perfect multiplayer game, in my opinion, would be one where the meta is permanently shifting. Aparrently Pokemon has that, but I wouldn't know because I have better things to do with my life than ride around on a virtual bike for 500 hours waiting for eggs to hatch with the perfect stats.

But I'd rather play a good singleplayer game where the mechanics are tight, the design is good, and the game is made to be as much fun as possible, rather than some "skill based" boring multiplayer experience where I am expected to spend 10000 hours on an empty server alone learning how to bunnyhop correctly and where my teammates could lose a match at any time regardless of what I do. If I wanted to grind, I would play an MMO. Single player games are (usually) much tighter experiences, they deliver the good content, then they fuck off and I can complete the next batch of good content in the next game.

Dark Souls is a lot more hardcore than any e-sport.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Wrong. You could still camp spam in pillars of eternity, just waste minutes of your valuable time in loading screens and rest at nearest inn an unlimited number of times.

So because they fixed one mechanic, but not another, their fix is therefore invalid?

Also, good luck resting in an inn when you're in the middle of a dungeon. Oh you can backtrack for 20 minutes to go to an inn? That's enough of an incentive NOT to do it. Yes, wasting the players time is a valid incentive to not do something, just like I COULD travel to and from town in any RPG with a full inventory and dump items repeatedly for unlimited free inventory space. That doesn't make inventories bad game design. Making something inconvenient to the point of being unviable is a perfectly reasonable approach to balance. Plenty of games already do it and nobody complains.

Literally any game that allows farming implements this style of gameplay. I can technically farm 99 humanity in Dark Souls and have a virtually unlimited source of healing, and completely break the game. Farming that much humanity would be a painful, long and tedious experience. The reason I don't do it is because I don't want to, and the game is disincentivizing me from doing so by making the task inherently annoying. Game design wise, that's fine. Nobody complains that "Humanity was a horrible mechanic because the game wastes your time when you farm it, and you can get unlimited healing so the mechanic is broken". Can you see how retarded that line of reasoning is?

Fuck balance, especially PoEs take. Balance should come from party composition, as it did in the IE games, not from any single class being "better" than any other, but sawyer, in his infinite idiocy, decided classes should be balanced against each other, meaning party composition didnt matter, removing a layer of strategy from an already simple game.

Who made you the arbiter of which balance is correct or not?

There are advantages to both approaches. Forcing party composition basically enforces certain hero compositions (duh), therefore giving the player less choice. If I am basically required to have a Rogue, a Fighter and a Wizard in every party JUST to remain viable, then that's a really boring party composition.

Ideally a game would ALSO make party composition interesting. But both are viable approaches to balance.

Making one class borderline useless (like the Wizard Slayer) for the sake of "the party" is a horrible way to design a game. At that point you're excusing balance issues because "oh but they help the PARTY".

Obviously every class shouldn't be able to 1v1 each other in a direct fight. Classes can be more support focused, or more area denial focused, or etc. But they should all be balanced less they sit there unused because better choices are available.

There are plenty of games where underpowered or useless items have some specific niche use in one build. In most cases they are still unbalanced. Having something that's only rarely situationally viable (usually by accident) isn't a sign of balance. It's a sign of lack of balance.

I'm sure there are cases where Exotic weapons in System Shock 2 are viable and certain builds that can make use of them. That still makes them significantly less good overall than a Standard build, and they are still generally underpowered from a balance perspective.

If you want to argue that the class matchups and compositions are boring, then that's fine. I agree with you. But if you're arguing that "choosing to balance classes against each other" is somehow a bad approach to design and that the developers are idiots for taking that approach, then no. You're advocating for terrible balance for the sake of making things more interesting in some weird class matchups, which is a stupid idea.

Wizard grimoires were shit, in truth you only ever use your own. Its a mechanic that would have been decent in a single character rpg, with grimoires carrying unique spells that offered interesting choices when it came to your loadout, but no, there was really nothing to them, wasted idea and more shit to tell to the merchant, thats it.

Chanters were interesting in theory, in practice you had an incredibly passive class that was outright broken because of how good the passive bonuses were, great at abusing mechanics.

If you say so. Also I like how you just finished saying that making classes balanced against each other is a terrible idea, and now you're complaining that a class is overpowered. By your logic, who cares? If it's balanced in terms of "the party composition" (whatever the fuck that nonesense means), then it's okay.

Every fucking new idea that came with PoE was retarded to the extreme. For example, "No prebuffing" meant there was magic that could only be accessed during a fight, which made absolutely no narrative sense, it was there strictly because of banalce, on a game that still included prebuffing in the form of food, because you cant slap your face hard enough when it seeing to making design choices in pillars.

Fuck narrative realism. Prebuffing to the extreme is a major problem in a lot of games. I'm glad they fixed it. If it's at the expense of the narrative, so be it.

"Oh, combat is coming up soon. Let's just spend the next 5 minutes casting spells on ourselves to make the fight easier" adds a lot of unneeded tedium to a game, especially when it needs to be done repeatedly. Worse, you either have to balance accounting for prebuffing, making the tedium a hard requirement to progression, or you balance around people not prebuffing, which means that when people do take the time to prebuff they become extremely overpowered.

Never argue for worse gameplay in order to maintain narrative cohesion. That's a terrible game design approach. Nobody is going to care about story cohesion if your gameplay sucks.

It was a poorly thought out game made by an imbecile that thought he knew better and enjoyed by drooling retards that should probably neck themselves. And having a "it was an average experience" opinion just goes to show how shit the games you are playing are, or how shit your taste is. Fallout 3 and oblivion are objectively far superior experiences to it, and both those are bad.

No. Absolutely not. Fallout 3 is literally unplayable. Every aspect of it's gameplay is utterly broken and irredeemable. They can't even get skill checks right.

Also your use of "objectively" gave me a chuckle. You haven't made a single objective argument.

I can't believe there are people on forums so retarded and with such bad takes that I have to defend a below average game that I don't even like that much because people have stupid takes on it.

The important take away is: Just because you don't like a game doesn't mean every design decision is shit or that it's creator is a moron. I don't like this game either, but many of the decisions in it are solid. They just have really uninteresting archetypes, the RPG systems are a convoluted mess, and the story and world are bland.

If you really want to argue against Pillars being a good game, you should focus on the stats system. The way the stats work is so convoluted that finding an item that gives +1 to a stat often means (for new players at least) jumping into the character sheet and reading multiple pieces of text to figure out exactly what it does. This is especially when one meaningless attribute can give you a meaningless stat. Oh, it adds 1 might. Now I need to read up on what might does. Oh, might gives fortitude. Now I need to go read what fortitude does. It's confusing and very number heavy, and as a result making any sort of build is an exercise in complicated busywork. I was not the only person with this problem - I have seen multiple reviews and multiple lets plays where the person complained because they had to work very hard to figure out exactly what each attribute and stat does and how it realistically affects their character. Splitting defense over 3 separate stats is confusing. Tying healing and damage (including magic damage) to the same stat is also confusing. It's much easier to understand "Strength makes me hit thing better", especially when tying healing to damage means that ALL mages and priests will both need to prioritise the same stats and will both naturally end up as high DPS characters, most likely glass cannons, which is really boring and weird. Critique the actual bad parts of the game, rather than focusing on stupid shit like "I can waste a bunch of time doing something the game obviously doesn't want me to do, therefore the game is bad".

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I saw people like @Sensuki and @Bester actually try

Actually, I didn't have any semblance of a vision of what was "wrong" with the game at the time. All I personally tried to do was to bring it closer to the IE-experience, but it didn't redeem the game.

Sensuki saw problems with some stuff, but I don't think he had a cohesive vision of what needed to change overall.

I think it was the first time for both of us that we saw a game which sucked, and desperately wanted it not to suck. I can't speak for him, but I hadn't given game design much thought before PoE. We lacked experience to understand why PoE sucks and how to fix it.

Years later I saw Sawyer's presentation of "how to build an RPG" and he meticulously broke down PoE into smaller parts and argued why those parts worked. And listening to this video was instrumental in understanding what those parts were and and why they ACTUALLY DIDN'T WORK. All the points he made were wrong. For instance, he said "in D&D there's a lot of abstractions, like you can fall off a castle and survive because of some abstract stats, so as you can see abstractions aren't evil and we can put in as many as we want". Which led to him making "intelligent barbarians" and "strong wizards". Which is pure nonsense. Abstractions are okay in moderation, not in his post-modernist way of "anything goes, there's no universal truths". Later, it didn't surprise me when he said that postmodernist art is awesome and that people who don't appreciate it "are fascists". I can explain why pouring blood out of your vagina on a canvas and calling it art, doesn't make it art. Because there's no conscious thought in it. It's so basic, but unattainable to him. He's a genuine idiot. To think that he was a "web designer" in a studio full of talented people, but he wasn't allowed to approach games, it says everything there is to know. Then, once the titans left, he was allowed through the door. It's like inviting a janitor to design games, because he at least saw how it was done back in the good days. It's the definition of civilizational decline.

So now I think I understand how to fix PoE.
To fix its systems - simple: revert it to D&D.
To fix its writing - rewrite everything. Or at the very least, a strong editor pass + deep modifications of the story, characters and their motivation.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I saw people like @Sensuki and @Bester actually try

Actually, I didn't have any semblance of a vision of what was "wrong" with the game at the time. All I personally tried to do was to bring it closer to the IE-experience, but it didn't redeem the game.

Sensuki saw problems with some stuff, but I don't think he had a cohesive vision of what needed to change overall.

I think it was the first time for both of us that we saw a game which sucked, and desperately wanted it not to suck. I can't speak for him, but I hadn't given game design much thought before PoE. We lacked experience to understand why PoE sucks and how to fix it.

Years later I saw Sawyer's presentation of "how to build an RPG" and he meticulously broke down PoE into smaller parts and argued why those parts worked. And listening to this video was instrumental in understanding what those parts were and and why they ACTUALLY DIDN'T WORK. All the points he made were wrong. For instance, he said "in D&D there's a lot of abstractions, like you can fall off a castle and survive because of some abstract stats, so as you can see abstractions aren't evil and we can put in as many as we want". Which led to him making "intelligent barbarians" and "strong wizards". Which is pure nonsense. Abstractions are okay in moderation, not in his post-modernist way of "anything goes, there's no universal truths". Later, it didn't surprise me when he said that postmodernist art is awesome and that people who don't appreciate it "are fascists". I can explain why pouring blood out of your vagina on a canvas and calling it art, doesn't make it art. Because there's no conscious thought in it. It's so basic, but unattainable to him. He's a genuine idiot. To think that he was a "web designer" in a studio full of talented people, but he wasn't allowed to approach games, it says everything there is to know. Then, once the titans left, he was allowed through the door. It's like inviting a janitor to design games, because he at least saw how it was done back in the good days. It's the definition of civilizational decline.

So now I think I understand how to fix PoE.
To fix its systems - simple: revert it to D&D.
To fix its writing - rewrite everything.

Seems to me like your opposition to the game is largely political in nature.

Besides, if it didn't have "intelligent barbarians", we would be in an alternate universe where you would be complaining that "you can only ever put strength on your barbarians, there's no nuance or builds, it's just the same character archetypes over and over again that we have all seen before"

The problem with the abstractions in PoE is that the stats are difficult to understand and putting a number in one category will just give you another number in another category, so you have to snake through and discover what each number does and look at multiple mechanics to really understand what your one stat point means.

If I put a point into Might, that gives me +3% Damage and Healing, which is obvious and makes sense because anyone who has played a game before knows what those things are (although I have seen players confuse healing and health, which is also a problem). But it also gives 2 Fortitude. So now I need to go and look up Fortitude.

Fortitude (FOR): Represents a character's endurance to "body system attacks" such as poison or disease. It is based on Might and Constitution

Okay, so that definition is meaningless to a lot of players. "Body system attacks" is a meaningless term. Most poeple know what poison is, but then it begs the qeustion, should I put points into constitution or might? Well okay, constitution gives endurance and health. So now I need to look up what Endurance does, and I need to understand the difference between endurance, health and healing power.

etc etc.

It becomes a giant mess of numbers, where every stat affects every other stat, and you basically need to understand how every mechanic works in order to determine what any given stat does. And because multiple stats give the same outcomes, if I just want to "build a character that's tanky and resistant to damage with high health", I basically have to research the nuances of all the different stats and abilities that give me some combination of the 3 different defensive characteristics, and health, and endurance.

Making even basic build decisions is a chore.

Meanwhile, in a game like Fallout, I can look at Strength, and it will say "This affects your melee damage and your carry weight", and it's simple. I know from that point on, barring some special circumstances, if I want to increase my carry weight, I need to increase my strength. The path from desire to outcome is simple. If I want to increase my defences in PoE, I have to invest in a number of stats, which could all have different tradeoffs and strengths and weaknesses. In a better game this would be a welcome bit of depth, but here it just comes across in a confusing way that makes the whole process harder. Why they wanted multiple attributes to do the same thing (and thus created a stat for it) is beyond me, but it definitely makes the whole thing a hell of a lot more confusing.

Why they couldn't go "Might: This increases your damage, healing and resistences to poison, disease and poison-based attacks" is beyond me.

Or better yet, stop making each attribute do a lot of different things in tiny amounts and instead segregate functionality to different attributes like a normal RPG. That's simple, works, and isn't a convoluted mess/

That is how you critique PoE. Stop wasting everyones time pontificating about vagina blood paintings, it's irrelevant to game design. Josh Sawyer could be Satan himself, it doesn't change whether or not the game is any good.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Seems to me like your opposition to the game is largely political in nature.

"If you don't enjoy poe you're a fascist"

From the first sentence, I know you're an idiot who uses words he doesn't understand.

That is how you critique PoE.

You're not describing a systemic problem, you only describe the symptoms, which doesn't constitute "critique", but constitutes "useless whining".
You mention that the system is confusing, but not why in a systemic fashion. You describe that Might and Const give Fort, but the obvious conclusion escapes you: only one of these stats need to give Fortitude to be clear.
Another problem with the stats is their bonus curves. They're linear and too unimpactful (AGAIN due to influencing multiple secondary stats). For example, going from 18 strength to 25 in AD&D gives you +120% bonus dmg, but in Pillars only +20%. The boring linearity itself (vs staggered bonuses) is something that can be talked about at length, but that's for another time.
There's a lot of other problems to point out, but the way POE destroys your fun is "death by a thousand cuts". To critique PoE, you need to explain a myriad of systemic problems and I don't have time for it.

 

[Rieser]

Dragon Age 3 is the one that instantly comes to mind. Offensively shit in every way. The UI/UX alone is enough to warrant gutting this fucking thing and be done with it, but no, I persevered only to be haunted by quest and narrative design borrowed from the most soulless of MMO's. Horrible itemization, boring fucking combat and retarded writing. Trash, trash, trash. If only EA could hang, draw and quarter the oozing cesspool that is Bioware already.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

"If you don't enjoy poe you're a fascist"

From the first sentence, I know you're an idiot who uses words he doesn't understand.

"You don't understand that my dislike for the game is not political like you claim, and I am going to prove it by quoting a political statement by the creator as my main evidence"

Nice, you played yourself.

Yes, Josh Sawyer is a cunt. But not liking it because he thinks you're a fascist is still a political reason to dislike the game.

You're not describing a systemic problem, you only describe the symptoms, which doesn't constitute "critique", but constitutes "useless whining".

I mean I literally described how the systems work and how their core design makes them confusing. That's the definition of systemic.

You mention that the system is confusing, but not why in a systemic fashion. You describe that Might and Const give Fort, but the obvious conclusion escapes you: only one of these stats need to give Fortitude to be clear.

No. The problem is the existence of Fortitude itself. An attribute should not just give you a stat, because then you're just abstracting the bonuses from the attribute onto the stat. The attribute should just give the benefits directly. The reason they added the stat was so that multiple attributes can give the stat, but that just makes attributes into grab-bags of benefits, giving a collection of small bonuses rather than doing something specific and unique, which just makes it even more confusing what a given attribute does. I explained this in my post (I have edited it to make it even more obvious).

Another problem with the stats is their bonus curves. They're linear and too unimpactful (AGAIN due to influencing multiple secondary stats). For example, going from 18 strength to 25 in AD&D gives you +120% bonus dmg, but in Pillars only +20%.

You mention that the system is linear, but not why in a systemic fashion. You describe that stats give a linear bonus and that it's different to DND, but the obvious conclusion escapes you: Levelling up only give you small, diminishing bonuses.

The boring linearity itself (vs staggered bonuses) is something that can be talked about at length, but that's for another time.
There's a lot of other problems to point out, but the way POE destroys your fun is "death by a thousand cuts". To critique PoE, you need to explain a myriad of systemic problems and I don't have time for it.

You don't have time for it, and yet here you are.