I mean... Neither of those things really mattered much in Divinity either. With companions being literal blank slates and their starting "Class" being derived from them literally asking you "What class do you want me to be?" upon recruitment.
I mean, you say it as if implying that I liked it in DOS 1 and 2... I didn't.
But it was praised by most even there, so I'm resigned to see it return in some form.
Even in other games like Owlcat's stuff, it barely matters. Other than the arbitrary restriction of "You can't respec below the minimum level they can join you at"
AND you can't change their basic stats.
That's already more than enough, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm for having some commitment and restrictions, not for ALL of them.
Or things like me just using Hirelings because the actual companions have garbage stats (Which is the case for Pillars of Eternity... I at least was able to mod PoE2 so that companions didn't suck complete and total balls. Same is true for Owlcat's Pathfinder games, I ended up modding so I could full respec
That's on you.
While I'd prefer for default companion to be at least SOMEWHAT competent (and ideally to have some unique ability on top of it) I'd rather deal with sub-optimal story-relevant companions that with robotic hirelings, if not as a last resort.
What people do with modding has no bearing on what's in the actual game, as far as I'm concerned.
Honestly that's more of an issue with dumb things like items that set stats to specific things rather than the system itself.
Given that Divinity games never had such things (Also most other DnD based games don't have them either), there's no reason why they would necessarily be a thing going forward.[/quote+
I have no issue with "dumb" thing as long as it feels earned (you have to commit to get to the item with the stats you had, and to keep that item equipped and slotted only to compensate a stat gap rather than taking advantage of something else).
DOS 1 and 2 had something a LOT worse, which is a stat bloat system that quickly ballooned out of control in the middle levels.
[quote]Especially in games like BG3 or Pillars of Eternity where there's 0 consequence for resting after literally every fight. Solasta at least limits your ability to rest based on specific locations and Owlcat games do a combination of location based things (Though there's always the cheese of just backtrack and leave the area and rest aboard your ship/in the wilderness) or better yet the PotR Corruption system. But even then it doesn't really add too much besides annoyance that your casters simply get progressively weaker while your martials run around at full power doing way more stuff with no consequence...
Yeah,, I'm NOT going into this debate once again.
Sufficient to say I very much disagree that any system related to managing limited resources is inherently pointless.
- One thing that I'd love to see return in one form or another is a REACTION SYSTEM. For all the silly concerns people had before they added it to this game that it would "slow the combat down", having the option of the occasional input even during the enemy turn never stopped being thrilling.
Personally... I don't really care.
Reactions have never really felt particularly interesting.
But I do, because they do to me. Especially the non-automated variant -aka "innterrupts" (which "overwatch" in XCOM is very much NOT a part of.
But I'd rather simply not have to rely on a die roll for things to function in the first place.
I very much rather do. Fully deterministic systems are very rarely done well enough to be as interesting as their vocal supporters claim them to be.
And while I've occasionally seen exceptions handling the concept well enough (i.e. I recently spent a bunch of hours playing WH40K Daemon hunters, for my moderate delight)I can hardly think of ones that could rank as "my favorite shit ever".
- Another feature of BG3 I hope to see return in future Larian games is STATIC HANDPLACED LOOT.
[quote]Honestly... I'm not sure where I stand on such a thing.
Oh, but I am. 30+ years of playing RPG and adventure games of any sort made me pretty confident on what I like and what I don't.
I like the reliability and thematic pertinence of hand placed loot, I like item systems that keep the stat bloat as limited as possible, I like finding items that can potentially remain useful for half a playthrough, if not even all of it.
Conversely, I don't like dealing with randomly generated trash I need to constantly compare with multiple variations of the same item "but with slightly different stats" etc.
Like, yes, DOS's randomization being based on that luck stat and opening every container and magically finding loot was kind of stupid... But most of the notable loot was from static locations (Usually drops from boss enemies or vendors)
Well, we agree on the first part.
On the second part you seem to forget or ignore that most of these "uniques" were level scaled to the moment you dropped them and/or comically outclassed in a matter of a couple of levels, given the way itemization worked in the game.
Needless to say I was never a fan, as these characteristics openly contradict my above list of "things I like".
Static loot placements are the bane of BG3, where the beginning of every run involves the obligatory slalom between each piece of loot (Exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of good items are on vendors...)
I'd rather see more randomization in loot so that runs feel different, so you're not just always running the same path to get the same items for the same builds. But obviously not DOS's luck based "Any container can contain any item"
Eh, this is a hard disagree for me.
I'll take the "bane" of predictability in loot placement (which works great with rolling different characters and planning ahead what you want to do with them, incidentally) over the agony and the inventory busywork of having any place of drop feel generic and having to constantly compare them for trivial differences.
