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[evanvolker]

Ive been playing it. Graphics are probably the worst part. I agree with above posters that a 2d style would have been far better. The combat is alright, involving some slight tactical differences between weapons, such as daggers using less action points to attack with, and spears having a longer attack rage and sometimes stopping someone from approaching you. You can't play a mage of any sort, and the fights are always so lop sided in favor of the NPC, you pretty much have to sacrifice your cat to the RNG gods to progress. The writing is kinda descriptive and enjoyable in parts, but often its too generic and flavorless.

[gomez]

I was watching a Lets's Play of this, it looks intresting, but the impression I got(might just be the way the Let's Player plays games) is that the game is very Min/Max orientated.

Also The F-bombs, coming out of the npc's mouth's was quite jarring.

[phoochka]

I've only seen the game on youtube and I really like the writing. If I could get a book with the various plots I would really love it. The gameplay itself is ok,  but I think thats a problem with me rather than the game though, as I felt the same with other games like Pillars of Eternity.

[debvon]

The writing is really well done. The premise of the game (and it even tells you) is violent conflict is deadly and your best bet is to avoid it whenever possible. So then why are you essentially forced into it? Maybe I just suck at min/maxing and save scumming, but it seems like no matter what path you choose you HAVE to invest a hefty number of points into some combat oriented thing to get far. I guess the exception might be the merchant? I got my merchant halfway through the first town before I became incredibly bored.

My first character was a dagger assassin. It was really thematic and really shitty. If I couldn't back into a 1-wide corridor in fights against 2-3 dudes I was dead unless I saved and loaded 15 times. "Why not just avoid those fights like you mentioned earlier?" He couldn't progress any further through the story without facing one of those suicide scenarios. I must have spent too many points in sneak or some shit, like I'm supposed to know exactly how much sneak/streetwise I need to not be a terrible assassin while having just enough points left to not be a terrible fighter.

edit: To add on to my experience with an assassin character without getting too spoilery:

you'd think putting a bunch of points into dexterity, critical strike, dagger, stealth, streetwise, etc would open up a lot of opportunities to avoid conflict by simply.. assassinating people. And while

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

there are certain skillchecks for exactly that, either to reduce the number of hostiles in an encounter or to pass an event

, there simply isn't enough weight to those fluff skills to warrant bringing a knife/leather to an axe/plate fight. Even with poison, bleeding, a bag full of nets and bolas, it's still just a major pain in the ass and you die a lot. Again maybe I just put too many points into the social stuff expecting them to matter more, I don't really know. And while having some of those social skills is nice when the situations arise, that's almost a full (or half) of a weapon level you could have had just being wasted. Apparently you're constantly fighting dudes (weapon skill checks) but are you constantly walking through traps? Nope.

My assassin got to around the end of the second city before he got stuck. After that I started playing around with all of the other paths for more perspective being very careful with how I spent my points. Basically I'd just save the points and spend them as I failed checks. Failed a check relating to my class, load, add points, try again, let the game's checks shape my character. Just so I could get a feel for what a 'perfect' archetype was supposed to be, skill-wise. Not the best idea because it burnt me out rather quickly, then I went and started bitching about it on a forum (right in this thread, in fact).

[Stuebi]

I playtested the game on a friends account. And I'm pretty glad I did, because it's definetly not for me.

I've been trough a ton of characters now, from Full Combat Builds, to Sweet Talkers over Assassins. And I cant even get past the first Hub. There was exactly one encounter, against a bunch of naked Thugs, that I could barely win. And the reward was ONE Combat Skill Point. Guides tell you that you shouldnt generalize and instead focus on a couple key parts. That's neat and all, but that also means that some Encounters are unavoidable because you do not have the right Skills to talk your way trough them.

Also, most Encounters are stacked way too hard against you. A 2 on 1 Fight is actually one of the fairer ones. There are a couple Quests early on where you will fight against 3, 4 or sometimes even more Enemies at once. And since you can barely win against two regularly equipped characters, those are basically impossible.

If the appeal is supposed to be to reload 15 times for each encounter until you get lucky, or to die your way trough each hub until you find the way of least resistance, then whoopdie-doo. But then it's not for me at all. From the little I've seen, Pillars of Eternity is better in about every way.

[debvon]

Yup, that sums up my experience nicely. Hard games are great but this just got annoying, or I just suck. I'll try again some other time.

[Majestic7]

I played beta as an assassin and got pretty far; the fights were challenging but not frustratingly so. I've only played this full baby as a talker and haven't got into a fight yet. I guess I'll have to start a fighter build to see if they jacked up the difficulty.

There is a real threat that they did due to an echo chamber effect; the game had a hardcore group of fans that played all combat demos and such for YEARS in a row. That might have made them demand harder and harder combat, unable to see how their view of the game was slanted. I just hope the devs didn't buy into their bullshit too hard.

There are always people like that surrounding every game; I swear they actively try to sabotage the games reaching wider audience in order to keep them their special thing or something and to hell with the consequences to the developers. If I really like some game I want it to succeed so the guys who made the good game can keep making good games, you know.

[woosholay]

Afaik that's how devs wanted it to be. Hard, unforgiving at times (it's a bit like Dark Souls in this regard, you will die a lot), closer to PnP games than your usual CRPG fare. There are plenty of ways to deal with almost every situation however.

[Stuebi]

Afaik that's how devs wanted it to be. Hard, unforgiving at times (it's a bit like Dark Souls in this regard, you will die a lot), closer to PnP games than your usual CRPG fare. There are plenty of ways to deal with almost every situation however.

It's not like Dark Souls at all, in my opinion. In Dark Souls you win fights because you're good at the game. Death is your own fault. AoD is more like those old Adventure games, where 4 of 5 avaiable actions will get you killed, and you just reload and try again, and again, and again.

I've actually beat one of the early fights against two Thugs now. With a dodgy-Dagger built. It's telling that I can win that fight basically only wearing a bit of cloth and with a little knife, when I couldnt before with a set of full armor and an actual weapon.

[Majestic7]

The game heavily projects you into pushing up your defenses; so if you had armor and no block you did likely worse than with rags and high dodge. Typically I find most games to underplay the value of armor stupidly; rather than being HP buffer it should negate damage completely with a certain chance or the like. (I'm looking at you Mordheim, that changed tabletop armor save into percentage HP buffer.)

[a1s]

The premise of the game (and it even tells you) is violent conflict is deadly and your best bet is to avoid it whenever possible.

I heartily disagree. They talk up (or is it "down"?) combat a lot in the tutorial, but it's not deadly at all.
You want to see deadly combat? Try (old) X-Com or Jagged Alliance. Every time you get hurt, they ding your combat ability, and if you get hurt enough you bleed out right there on the battlefield (not for 2 turns- until you die, or until someone uses a medkit on you.) Can you guess what happens if you don't die? That's right- you go to the infirmary for a week or two. There's a also no way to make sure you don't get hit- that sectoid might get lucky and give you a fatal wound (read "critical hit") right through your powered armor with his puny plasma pistol. In X-Com this was fine, because you had reserves. In a personal-scale game? It's bowel-emptyingly terrifying (unless you savescum).
In AoD you can be objectively better than your opponent (I slaughtered about 10 random villagers last night, without breaking a sweat, because of some high-quality armor,) You don't suffer consequences in combat. And 9 times out of 10, once it's over you can heal yourself very easily (for a small amount of money/plants). And of course suffering any stat damage is inconceivable (this wasn't in X-COM either, but it was in JA)

[Svampapa]

Next Thursday finally happened?

[woosholay]

Finished it, finally. Initial impressions didn't change much over the course of the run. Solid mechanics/writing and variety of playstyles certainly helped me to look past it's shortcomings in terms of presentation (Still think it would be better off as some sort of KoDP-like game, CYOA with some neat artwork). Running through butt-ugly districts gets old quite fast. Enjoyable experience nonetheless.