But this is also why I wonder how all those D:OS fans who are unfamiliar with D&D will react to BG3. Those fans will be approaching BG3 with D:OS2 as their baseline for comparison. Will they be thrown off by D&D's complex mechanics? I already see on some forums people asking: How come this game (BG3) doesn't have cooldowns like D:OS? Or, how come there are no action points? Etc.
And overall, I think that is something other RPGs can learn from. If with all available gamespace, the gameplay takes place in two small boxes in two corners of the screen (
https://imgur.com/YZhn2B2) I think it is time to rething the design.
I am curious to see how much Larian will alter DnD. Something I have to applause is constant inclusion of dice in gamespace: you land critical hit - big dice animation on screen. You roll skill check - you actually roll a dice. I think those kind of tricks can help a lot in making gameplay mechanics understandable. I don't think having a system roll a dice for you, to be nearly as engaging or intuitive as doing it yourself. Seeing dice being rolled visually, be it in initiative, attack or skill check I think should help a lot.
More freedom? Lets suppose that i wanna play as a caster.
Well, first of all, in BG1 you could play as just plain wizard (if my DnD terminology is wrong I am sorry - back in a day I played it in PL). As to subclasses you have those in PoE2 as well. A fair deal less, I give you that, but still a good offering for multiple playtrhoughs, and a decent amount of builds. I played with some of them, and they are all effective. As to necromancer - Beckoner is your PoE2 substitute I think - never played as necromancer myself so I might be missing some of the appeal.
And yes, I remember casting my first fireball and a room full of hobgoblins and seeing them all die. I think that's a really bad gameplay. I am not saying that powerful but limited spells of BG2 couldn't work, but it needs structure to pace rest and limited access to those spells - think like bonfires in Dark Souls. If I need to make myself special rules of not using Finger or Death, stop time, or dragons breath to not trivialize the game, then we have what I call a bad design. You don't have a way to reinforce design based on limited resources, then you shouldn't have skills made for this kind of structure. It might be my problem of liking RPGs and Tactical games. As I said many times: PoEs seemed to be created precisely for me.
I am just flabbergasted, how people complaint that spellcasters suck in PoEs, when they are possiblely still a bit OP. "Oh no, the fireball doesn't completely kill all enemies - it's just does a really good damage to a large amount of enemies." Like seriously, whenever I go for spellcaster DPS they outperform everyone else by a large margin. And sure, I am not the guy who can abuse systems to the point of making single-character run, but comeon - casters went from God level to really really good. Gap between them and other classes in terms of fun and versatility was slightly minimised. Great. I would never consider playing other class then spellcaster in DnD - I did the mistake of picking a ranger in Pathfinder after PoEs... big mistake, really boring.
I think if you take spellcasters alone you could be right. I think where I disagree is that spellcasters are the most fun and only fun classes in BG1&2, where is PoE spread the fun around. And in team based RPG with what is supposed to be tactical combat - I think PoE is much closer to it, even if it has still a lot of space to improve.
EDIT: Oh, one thing I miss was the sequencer. I thought that was a handy utility spell, and I would welcome it in PoEs - especially with no prebuffing.
EDIT2: I watched the video. I definitely agree on items in PoE1.
