Re: best RPG?
Explain why you didn't use the stealth mechanic then? Isn't it like asking for ambush?
The stealth mechanic in PoE uses up real wall clock time, i.e. my life. It is not free, it makes the game take more painfully long to play. It is appropriate if I think there's a NEED to be stealthy, but following a seeming 'ghost' into the woods, that seemed like the game was prompting me to follow up on something interesting. So why should I have to be stealthy for that? And, the game had never previously assaulted me with 5 of anything.
It seemed pretty clear that I needed to leave the town I was in and go somewhere else, because I hadn't gained any solution for my slight lack of health, which the game had imposed upon me by design, no choice allowed in that regard. They told me the person I needed to talk to, was strung up on the tree in the middle of town. The jerk jested that I could search her pockets for a cure, but there was no actual ability to do that, I did try. I went to everywhere in that town, did everything, still no solution, so yep I was being forced to hit the road. Go down the road, see something interesting, get gratuitously death assaulted... my conclusion is the game is lame. Deleted.
There's a point at which you realize your game designer <-> player contract is not being respected and is not likely tenable. I reached that point with PoE fairly quickly. The UI was really slow, they were wasting my time with a gratuitous crippling + lack of direction on what to go on for a solution, then they kill me. So later for that.
The way game designers end up doing that sort of thing, is they've played their own game for so long, they've forgotten what it's like to approach it as a new player who doesn't have knowledge of the game yet. It takes a rather deliberate 'QA' mentality to approach a game 'fresh' that way.
I think the other typical cop out is the game designer says, who cares, the player will just replay the level and learn from the mistake. But the problem with the save-load mentality is, then things can take 2..3 times as long to get through, due to the trial and error. When I think my actual wall clock time is going to be disrespected that way repeatedly, I turn off pretty quick.
It wasn't the 1st dickish thing they did either. They killed 2 of my party members gratuitously by a scripted event. Absolutely nothing I could do about it, they were meant to die. Start to get interested or even invested in a minor characters life, hey poof, gone, we're writing them out. They gave me an illness at the very beginning of the game too. "We will give you an illness to compel your action" seemed to be a trope that these designers were into. Not impressed. So when they're doing it a 2nd time and not offering any solution to the problem, the trust in their intentions as designers is pretty much eroded.
Plenty locations involve storing bigger challenges for later use, you could continue your game but you decided to uninstall because some side content killed you? Maybe you weren't supposed to kill everything?
I didn't seek to kill anything! I sought to follow the 'ghost' into the woods that they had put there for me to see and become interested in. Then I was summarily ambushed by 5 wolves for daring to go off the main path. With no previous experience that this sort of thing would happen. Or any likelyhood that my party would be strong enough to withstand such an assault. Yeah tried to get a cone of flames off, if that would have even helped. Wizard was wolf meat immediately, barbarian moments later.
