#infinity engine

i wanted to have my own custom portraits for my Icewind Dale party so i challenged myself to draw ALL of them!

my characters are as follows by order: Elf Bard - Honeydew

Human Fighter - Baldwin

Beastman Barbarian - Freya

Gnoll Cleric of Ilmater - Cyrano

Half-Elf Fighter/Mage - Shakti

You can just say you've never played them, Anon.

you can basically let the melee units do whatever they want

No you can't. You'll get your ass killed.

and Infinity Engine has the AI settings that let party members automatically use their abilities at good times

No, they'll use their abilities, but not at good times.

leaving only the use of aoe spells as real considerations.

You need to actually play these games sometime instead of talking out of your ass.

With Turn-Based Combat, you have to strategize for possible scenarios instead of reacting to them

No you don't. No turn based game is made like that. If the encounter isn't designed with that in mind, then you don't get to use strategy. It'd be great if they were designed like that, but they aren't.

GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS

Old games packagings^^

UPDATE: According to a $1000 investor who calculated using his dividends, the total costs came out to around $29 million, not $15 million. So the Fig campaign covered only 15% of what they actually spent. Good lord!

I got back into Pillars of Eternity II and checked the forums to discover that Obsidian Entertainment has been acquired by Microsoft. And Pillars of Eternity II sold only 150,000 copies and cost about three times the $4.4 million raised to “fund” it (which means Obsidian, after support, overhead, DLC development, etc. could be a good $20 million in the hole). It is likely Pillars of Eternity III, or any other serious CRPG project, will never happen, and Obsidian will forever be one bad chart performance away from ending up making tire textures for a Forza Motorsport game. Everyone is pointing fingers and arguing and blaming the media or the casuals or figures within Obsidian or the SJW hordes, but really? They brought it on themselves--excuse me, as a Pillars of Eternity II backer, we brought it on ourselves. This was our chance to have the game of our dreams made, and our outsized demands coupled to Obsidian’s outsized ambition blew the series’ future. Here is the post I made on Obsidian’s forums in case it proves too controversial and disappears:

Is anyone really surprised? The first thing I thought when it finally dawned on me how huge Pillars of Eternity II was, was "There is no way they could have possibly made money on this." The fans wanted bigger, the fans wanted better, and Obsidian gave the fans, including myself, exactly what we wanted. The biggest, baddest, most complicatedest Infinity-style RPG ever. A game nobody but us wanted.

PoE2 is huge, huge, huge. I'm 30 hours in and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of it. I ignored all the backer updates I received after pledging because I didn't want to know anything going in, and the sheer enormity of it blew me away. This feels almost Skyrimian in its breadth and content-richness, and that costs a huge amount of money, while drawing the potential length well past 150 hours and exacerbating the reputation that large CRPGs have of being scary and overbearing, which is further exacerbated by the fact that Obsidian have to tolerate RPGCodex and their legions of trolls, Trump cultists, and white supremacists because they donate and nobody outside the CRPG community was ever going to give a shit about this game. This is a game that was made for us, and only us. Made according to the specifications of a crowdfunding campaign that sold us our every desire, with little backer content bits to reflect our own vanity back at us. It turns out Infinity Engine/PoE nerds are (a) not even close to numerous enough to fund the promised game, and (b) unwilling to compromise for the sake of "casuals". I mean, that was the whole point of this whole crowdfunding thing, right? To make games that the fans want and make a profit? Funny, it looks we forgot that whole "making a profit" bit somewhere.

And for a focused, linear, and above all modest game like the first Pillars of Eternity, the money from the fans was enough to cover the budget and keep the lights on. But now we've "made it", we showed those AAAs and we're going to make a game that will blow everyone away. But we instead we got a baroque game, a niche product with a big-boy budget. It doesn't matter whose fault it is or which games journalism conspiracy is true or salacious rumors that would fail a difficulty 2 Bluff check. Pillars of Eternity II is a game too expensive to fund on the backs of CRPG nerds but seldom considers the needs and wishes of people who aren't CRPG nerds, except when it does the job so poorly it actually makes the problem worse. Let's talk about the mechanics.

For all its attempts to be fair and balanced and not screw you over for bad build decisions, the sheer number of mechanics and status effects and stats and systems makes the Infinity Engine look sleek and streamlined, if not exactly elegant. Not to mention that a lot of the people who played Baldur's Gate also played Dungeons and Dragons (which was huge at the time), while the people going into PoE2 have no such luxury. The micro-balancing with all the soft counters and clever trickery makes it more difficult to play on a truly expert level than an Infinity Engine game, so Easy and Classic are mushy and dumbed-down and basically let you coast, while the harder difficulties require you to learn far more obscure rules, some of which are virtually undocumented, than someone throwing themselves upon the rocks of Baldur's Gate 1 for the first time. However, the system is also less exploitable than the Infinity Engine, so there is also less reward for putting in above the minimum effort. So PoE2's game system is exceedingly complex, strongly favors PoE1 veterans over everyone else, hides information from the player, has too many rules, is easy to coast on by with, hard to play well, and won't ever give you the satisfaction you get from the sort of gambits even a mediocre Infinity Engine player can pull off.

Backstab instakills out of the shadows? Can't do that. Pre-buffing? Too OP. Contingencies? We'll have an ordinary spell that namedrops Contingency and pretend it's the same thing. Summoning? Nope. Incredibly powerful sword wrested from a lich's cold dead fingers? It's sure as hell not going to be as good as Daystar was in BG2. Even the simplest crafting (aside from food) requires money, just to make it less attractive. Fortunately there is a lot less of it now, and a lot more of the talking and plotting and loredumping, which is generally good if playing it a bit safe. But Eora is also a much more "out there" world than Forgotten Realms, and the comfy old Arthurian, chivalric, etc. tropes and themes no longer apply. Nor, unlike the similarly complex world of The Elder Scrolls, is it based (however loosely and occasionally disrespectfully) on archetypes from other cultures and mythologies--in fact it seems to strive towards the total obliteration of everything ready-made. Bhaal and Elf Jesus the Nerevarine are immediately relatable to the casuals in a way that Eothas and friends are not.

Why did this happen? Because we wanted it. We wanted more. More. More. More. Pillars of Eternity was good, so Bigger Pillars of More Eternity will be more good. The incentive structures of the crowdfunding model (stretch goals, etc.) encourage and exacerbate this mentality. A pirate ship! Many pirate ships! Pirate ship battles! New Vegas style politics with intersecting schemes by several power players! A reputation system underneath that makes New Vegas' implementation look primitive! Webs of intrigue! Webs of treachery! Webs of adultery and relationship drama! Voice acting for almost everybody with lines! Half-hearted commentary on colonization that pulls all its punches to avoid making white people feel bad and angering the RPGCodex crowd who gave us a big chunk of our budget! It had everything except a workable business model.

Hardcore CRPGs are not competitive on a big budget, and they never will be. There's a reason this game put Obsidian's future in jeopardy and the guy behind the Avernum series has been able to crank game after game through thick and thin, for over 20 years. If the Infinity-style RPG has a future it will involve smaller, simpler games with less elaborate graphics, less voice acting, and a much lower budget. A game with production values more similar to PoE1, Wasteland 2, or even Siege of Dragonspear. But that's what we wanted. We wanted big. We got big.

If you meet a talking chicken in Apulia, Italy, bring it to Thalantyr the mage in Castel del Monte, for the Antichickenator.