Mm. It's specially disappointing, because it's actually the case that this "strategy" of theirs wasn't naturally chosen out of incompetence or lack of ideas - like what happens to most studios. Instead it was chosen in spite of them.

With the first game, long before the rushing and releases, they actually had a playable version of Josh Sawyer's first draft for the rules, with interfering spellcasting, counter magic, and also counter skill and so on. Along with the whole accuracy vs. strength mechanic that very cleverly allowed you to make narratively believable types of characters - that also made mechanical sense in the game.

There were cleraly some technical challenges with this setup, because it required some types of calculations that disagreed very obviously with the scripting approach someone at Obsidian loves. And this is of course the same type of issue that turns up with conversations, the quest trees, and so on. So there is a wish here to develop something interesting, but it has to be worth it.

But importantly, these issues were solvable - it's actually possible to get something that looks and plays a lot like Ice Wind Dale 2 wishes to be, but couldn't due to engine (and licensing) limitations. And there's no need to have any insider knowledge about the development process to recognise some of the design goals in PoE from Sawyer's earlier spin on D&D3.5 in IWD2.

So why didn't that happen? Why did Obsidian choose to go with linear tables and a "traditional" approach. Why did the dexterity/accuracy mechanic disappear, why did potion scumming return, why did magic conventions survive, etc. And on the design stage, why did we get linear and largely isolated hubs of activity, with quests that were more or less independent from each other, and so on.

It's because of two things. One: I know for a fact that a certain senior super-producer at Obsidian became convinced that the entire rule-system was impenetrably complicated for a majority of the fans (he also spoke about how ten very loud people on their forum - I'm not making this up, I swear - were representative for the wishes of their potential customers). Two: It is massively easier to plan and schedule a project that has solid milestones, and where completing threads and paths, such as quest-lines and stories, can be developed in parallel. This is why you get quests that could just as well not exist in the same universe - where they only tie together in superficial ways.

And according to the focus-groups any major or minor publisher will make use of nowadays - a massive, massive majority won't ever notice the difference anyway. They'll choose the colour of the ending, and accept it as a unique and specific ending responding to their choices, etc.

Worse than that - when you also know that your ruleset and vision is extremely narrow. That after you've presented it, and showed it to your "trusted" fans -- only 1 out of a 60 or so internet assholes will actually see how brilliant it is. Then is it worth gambling the company's reputation and finances on that one person?

I mean, I haven't got many nice things to say about Obsidian's managers, and clearly neither does the major design people in the company. But you can see the wisdom of not spending time, and quite a lot of time, on developing a system that 1/60 people likes. It might be what the designers wanted, and it might be brilliant - but if you genuinely become convinced that it isn't possible to sell, then it makes sense to choose Obsidian's approach where they churn out masses of games that are semi-popular, rather than spending time on developing a gem that maybe just one person will loudly celebrate as the best game ever.

In the same way, the previous games Obsidian had that were superb - they were universally panned in the reviews. It took years and years before anyone "important" admitted that Fallout NV made "Fallout3" look like an unfinished piece of garbage in comparison. And they didn't even sell that well.

So it's truly a shame that Sawyer's original draft wasn't used, and that the requirements of the scripting language for having quests interfere with each other in semi-interactive narratives wasn't completed - and likely never will. In spite of a working product, a running draft, actually making it through the production stage.

But it is also understandable why it happens. Personally, I would have chosen differently - but then again, I'm not the one paying people's salaries here.

I have finally played this game now, am about 40 hours in and it really is pretty boring. I don't care much for stories in games, so that might be part of the problem, I loved BG2 and Planescape for the great gameplay. (played through Planescape 4 times in a row a few years ago to test the various classes solo).
I did try to read the texts, but wow, it feels like high schoolers trying to write the Great Gatsby or something, really forced and mostly unnecessary. After a few hours I only skimmed over the dialogues, which are sometimes pretty good, but totally skipped the verbose descriptions that accompany nearly every sentence uttered by anyone. (and I did read everything in Planescape)

The combat is just so boring, oh my gods. First of all, you can't even see whats happening, it's a mess. There are like 5 million spells, and none are really distinguishable. I mean I cast something super cool sounding like disintegration, and I don't even know whether my char got to finish casting.
Even casting magic missile in BG was more satisfying than any spell in this game.

The items are boring, I don't even want to sort through this mess in my inventory. Every item you have to read like half an hour before you can even determine if it is better than what you have. This is a problem with everything in this "game", every skill, spell, item, feat. Even after 30 hours I still had to spend minutes during combat to look through the spells I want to cast. And then in combat of course I notice nothing.
Soul items seem interesting at first, but then in combat I don't even notice anything and you quickly forget about them.

Leveling and the charsystem is boring, this wasn't that great in the other infinity games either, but at least you looked forward to doing it. Getting a higher level spell was a highlight. Here I don't care at all, it is just tedious and bothersome. You don't get interesting stuff anyway. It doesn't even feel like it matters how I level.

It has some interesting mechanics I'd like to see in good games of the genre, like the whole stronghold/inn thing, and the puzzle paper screens. Various other new stuff is pretty cool. But I am not sure I can finish this game, let alone bother with part 2. Most of this playthrough I caught myself wanting to play better games like Thea1/2 or Sots:The Pit for the 100th time, or even just BG2 again.

I liked the settings and quests.

Loading times suck, but at least you can tab out while waiting. It takes like half an hour loading time to explore a town because every house takes a few minutes to load when entering and especially exiting.

The whole thing feels like a cheap knockoff from the infinity games and the devs did not understand why the old games were fun. I always wonder if the devs themselves have fun with this game? I can't see them dig this out once in a while and play through it. It is probably just work for them, and that is how it feels to me.

I'm in Act 3 (so no ending spoilers, please).

I absolutely love, *LOVE*, the setting, the lore, the story. The pantheon. It's so... original. It doesn't overdo the usual cliched tropes about dwarves, elves... while at the same time it does keep some of them there, so it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel either. I liked the languages, the history... I felt there is just enough of it to give interesting background without there being too much of it (like Silmarillion). I mean, honestly, I read about some of the places mentioned there and I think "I'd like to see a game in that setting." The nations, their customs... Really refreshing to see something new.

I also loved the reputation/moral mechanics. Instead of good/evil, being given the whole range of alignments. I absolutely loved the quests from that perspective. I swear during some of them I genuinely was at a loss how to proceed (from a "moral" point of view).

But...

But...

These are so true

And this:

... This is so very very very true.

I thought it's just me getting old.

I remember in BG/IWD/NWN I loved analysing the mechanics. The items. The spells. The abilities. Planning before combat: first I advance the fighter, cast web, retreat, then go with fireball. Maybe wear that item for the AC, or that for the extra spell. I could click cast spell, then pick the one I want immediately.

Over here... it's like it doesn't matter at all. Heck I put combat AI on, something I never did with BG, because I couldn't be bothered to click the abilities every time. Most combat is just attacking, then wondering what spell to cast for a second, before deciding that it doesn't really matter, so I just cast this spell or that, or nothing at all.
Got a new unique item? In BG I'd be super excited about it. Here? Meh. And I can't even tell if it's better or worse than what I already have.
I... I can't even recall varying my combat strategy depending on what enemy I'm facing.

Maybe it is just me getting old, because if you read the forums, there are tons of discussions about strategies, items, damage per second... etc. etc.

I'm a bit sad, because if the mechanics were better, I'd feel this game would be amazing.

As it is, I'm still very happy I played it. The story/setting made it worth it.

But I can totally understand where you're coming from.

Couldn't agree more. I have 25+ experience playing RPGs, but I have never played game that was as tedious as PoE. After the initial excitement wore off, the game felt really really plain and boring.

You listed all the main sins:
1. Super long loading times.
2. Hard to see what is going n during fights which means it is hard to learn basics (recognizing spells, monsters' abilities, ets.).
3. Unbelievable dull items, where (1) it is hard to compare which item is better, (2) there are soo many of them, (3) even supposedly unique items are at best marginally better (and often it is not even clear if they are).
4. Lore is dumped on players. There is too much of it and it is introduced too quickly.
5. Dialogues are too long and super boring. There walls of text and most of the time it is unimportant.
6. Leveling is super boring. There are no cool skills that really make a difference. Everything is "balanced" so every skill is boring.
7. Many quests are tedious as there are filled with fights where I have to dispatch again and again the same monsters.

To those I would also add

8. The immersion breaking aspects of having content from Kickstarter backers.

I spent 40 hours playing it and gave up. It seems I am not the only one as I read somewhere that the vast majority of players that tried PoE failed to finish it. I really felt it had potential, I though initially the plot is interesting, companions are interesting, the stronghold quest was fun.

But overall, I found PoE really tedious and boring. As if PoE was trying too hard to be BG1&2. Because of that I did not even consider trying PoE2 for a second. I did enjoy Tyranny though. I felt that it improved upon PoE in many aspects (even if it still suffered to some extent from boring items and hard to follow fights, too).

Not sure how you guys play 30-40 hours before realizing this game is a dud. I doubt I'll be able to make 10.
It's like Tyranny, but terrible. I enjoyed the prologue quite a bit and was hooked for a few, but I shouldn't be getting my ass handed to me by some random trash mob.

Just like Tyranny, abilities feel completely unimpactful, tanks suck at tanking, any damage pulls aggro. Lot of quirks too which I wasn't expecting, the autosave system is disorganized and annoying. Every time I want to load I have to read through the top 5 saves to see which one is the most recent. I guess the tech wasn't there to sort by the newest/most relevant.

Selection highlighting is probably the worst I've ever seen in a game. I can never figure out which party member I have selected. I might slog on for a bit more but I've lost interest in the story now that a stray dog or whatever stomped my squad several times.

I played through the first game and enjoyed it, but I also have to say that I agree with a lot of the complains. Particularly the total chaos of effects overload of combat, and the same trash mobs over and over again. Many enemies were damage sponges too, which made the whole thing even more frustrating.

It has been mentioned by everybody and their mother, but it bears repeating: a big problem in the game is that everything has to be balanced. Which means that nothing has value.

Bought the second game too, but wasn't able to complete it. Got pretty far (I think), but at some point I simply stopped playing. It suffers from much the same problems when it comes to combat. The effects mess is a bit better in fairness, but the 'free' spells means I just use those over and over and over again (because it's often enough). It's akin to manually going through a script or macro or something, for each combat. It gets pretty tedious and uninteresting.

I expected these games to have great story and lore. The lore is good at times, but the story feels a bit messy. Then you have that huge lore dump towards the end of POE1, as if they didn't have time to finish it or something. Felt very weird.

Seems like the series ended with the second game. Maybe that was for the best. Kind of a shame as well, because they created a whole universe here and could have done soooooo much with it, but kinda fluffed their chance when particularly POE2 sold worse than expected.

Then they ended up selling out to Microsoft anyway, and that was that.

Yes true. It often felt it doesn't matter what weapon I choose, because they're all "balanced".

I miss BG, where I'd often try a fourth, fifth... nth run this time trying a different set of weapons/styles/classes. This game I don't feel like doing it. I want to do a second run to try the quests/story differently. But not the weapons or mechanics.

I know why I find this boring:
- the character has no involvment in The Threat. Your goal is to get to a village and settle down. Nothing changes that, and settling down is not interresting. Settling down is what you do in the aftertext when beating the game.
- the skill-system is boring. Every time you level up, you get fifty gazillion choices. You'll still get only the traditional 24 levels or such, but there are way too many skills to feel to have any real effect, and you can't even plan ahead to make a character-build. You mostly pick a skill and hope for the best, but the picks never feel you upgraded significantly, so the whle thing is a mess and a whatever.
- there is the consant chance to use your vision-thing on NPCs. But that never nets you any useful (or interresting) information.
- so after the whole thing crumbles down to a big fetchquest of ticking boxes on the quest-list is the very annoying camping system, which is overly complicated, very restricted, and just feel a pain to try micrmanaging it, especialy after learning from the leveling up the system of the game will never reward you substantialy.
- oh, yes, the questing is also linear despite the map looking open world. And omg what quests! "The smith needs some material, the local herbalist too!" Who cares. Especialy they take forever to get there, these are NOT a Fallout-like "clear the rat infestation" miniquest, on the same map, lasts 5 minutes, everybody likes you now, instant lowered prices for local karma. Nah, these quests take a whole new locatiion, a week walkingtime just to get there...
- I also have like 5 locations open, but I can count on half of my fingers how many battles, or substantial activity happened. The locations are EMPTY. Empty is boring.

Wait, what?

What skill are you referring to here? I almost finished the game, but didn't know you can use anything on NPCs. All my skills I used in combat.

Not "skill" by technical means. That feature you start "talking" to a random NPC, and you get those weird ~visions.
The others described it was planned you feel going insane, I thought you somehow see their dark secrets or some BS.
I thought this is a "skill" of the character, some kind of psi-skill, or whatever, like the Nameless One gaining back memory at occasions in Planescape.

Ah, OK. No, that was just for backers and it purposely had no game related info.

Hell and i thought it was just me, have the Game a couple of Years now and at first, it didn't took off for me.
After i was now in Isolation because of Covid for two weeks, i've got through the two Baldurs Gates and Icewind Dale for the first Time, being into such Genre i was giving it another Try aaaaand... Boring.

The Game throws with grey Colours, trist Music and a underwhelming Szenario at you.
I tried to find some Fun in it while Progressing, but the loading Times and all the needless filler Texts made the Game somehow just more dislikable.

Next on my List would be Tyranny, it seems to run on the same Engine, is it any better, before i am wasting my Time?

Personally, I like Tyranny the most out of all the Infinity Engine inspired games. It's a bit short and you have fewer companions, but there are varied paths to complete the game. Different setting and the story made it a fresh experience for me. Since it wasn't advertised as much as PoE games, it went under the radar for most people unfortunately.

I also really enjoyed Torment: Tides of Numenera, but I'm the minority here, most people didn't like it due to broken promises after the crowdfunding and walls of text of mixed quality.

I will admit it is quite a chance from the original...

It's surprising that so many people want to bag on PoE1 when Deadfire was obviously the worse of the two games. I'll agree with the following:

-Backer NPCs needed an off switch, though murdering them can be fun.
-Game performance was disappointing at times
-Some of the writing was Community College Creative Writing 101-level fare (looking at YOU, Grieving Mother)
-Even when the writing wasn't perniciously overwrought, they still went out of their way to upset classing RPG/CRPG/fantasy tropes, and it gets to be a bit much at times.
-It was buggy for a long time.

Otherwise it's a pretty solid title, especially for a Kickstarter nostalgia project. Personally I always found the old 2nd Edition AD&D rules set to be awful for CRPGs, so most of the old Infinity Engine games got on my nerves. No amount of kits and other add-on crap could polish the unbalanced turd that 2e was compared to modern systems. It's amazing how well Planescape: Torment turned out despite its own game system.

In any case, seeing PoE use a funky hybrid of . . . I guess 4e AD&D was nowhere near as disappointing. Yes you can have game-breaking character builds so if you want "impactful" character upgrades, they do exist. Your party can snowball out of control pretty quickly. I even managed to run Paths of the Damned with 1 Chanter + 5 Rangers, and they tore stuff apart. It was stupid but kinda fun.

The setting is lore/text heavy, and this is a direct consequence of the developers trying to appeal to the Planescape crowd. They didn't have the budget for more visuals so they had to describe everything happening in text most of the time. Also the game easily could have been broken into two or three episodes on its own with a few more locations to pad it out and stretch out the main storyline, I guess? Anyway that much lore could have lasted them for 2-3 games, is the point. But it all got crammed into one product. Again, it's a Kickstarter, it's not like they had the budget for the content + area design to pad that out.

So by the end of the game, they pretty much hit you with the entire history of Engwith all in one very dense go, and it's possible to slog through it without picking up all the details.

What else were they going to do? Not tell you what's going on? End the first game at Defiance Bay and call it good? The overall story arc was a pretty good idea (see below), they just didn't have the resources to carry it off more-elegantly. So we got what we got.

Now as for whether the plot was good or not - I kinda liked it. Again, these people were obviously influenced by Planescape so instead of making it a game where you're caught up in major events, they made it a game where you're on a very personal quest. No, the plot isn't just that "you're settling down", that's just the exposition to put you in the right time and place to have your life turned upside down in the first 5 minutes of the game.

The plot is that your life gets messed up, and you're looking for the guy who're responsible so he can set it right. That's it. That's the entire plot. And there's nothing wrong with that. The setup is kinda weak compared to Planescape (waking up in a morgue is still one of the best CRPG intros ever) but the execution is good enough. What you discover along the way is of some import if you want it to be, or you can just be like "meh just give me my life back I don't care about this other crap". It's really your call, and that's somewhat refreshing versus your typical CRPG product that makes you a Big Part of Big Things (tm).

Combat was, again, in my opinion, better than your typical BG game because no 2e AD&D. I can't even begin to go into how bad that system was. Contrary to what a lot of people here are saying, once you understand PoE's underlying system, the equipment makes sense, and there's some very very very good gear. It's not all the same stuff, it's just that a lot of the bonuses don't necessarily help your build, so you do get backpack fodder somewhat frequently. Fortunately the enchanting system is robust enough that you can take the weapon/armor you like and set up a good generic enchanter piece of equipment that can outperform most of the game's uniques in the same role.

I get that some people just didn't grok the way PoE1 plays, especially when you get so many people who never really understood Ciphers (or how great they can be). It actually requires some research to figure out the system, and it definitely upsets some old CRPG tropes in ways that aren't always for the best. I'm still not really happy with the whole Str-determines-spell-power thing, but they painted themselves into that corner and stayed there for Deadfire. In the end, you can have very successful spellcasters without focusing on Might so no big whoop.

Despite all the above, you are allowed to dislike the game for what it is. But let's be honest about that rather than making factually inaccurate statements about the game.