Review and Score

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Indeed. This and the "give neutral NPCs blue selection circles" option alone make the IE mod worth the trouble of downloading and installing it. Feel free to ignore the rest - all its options/features are opt-in, so no need to worry about unintended changes.

(PS: I really wonder what Obsidian was thinking, giving neutral NPCs the same selection circle color as party members. It creates confusion, and I can see no upside at all.)

 

I understood the circle color choice had something to do with making the option for those who are color blind viable. I could be wrong though. I do appreciate that OE did make some attempts to make the game more visual friendly for those of us who have visual problems.

I support modding as it makes it possible for people to tailor the game to their individual likes and dislikes and I hope that OE eventually supplies modding tools.

 

Colorblind mode uses blues instead of greens to differentiate things because they're easier to tell apart than greens and reds. I haven't actually tried it, but that's what I've heard/read. That said, I don't know what that has to do with non-colorblind mode. If a mod can change the circles, the devs could have as well.

 

It really isn't worth arguing about. Even if I put the color blind mode on I will still not see what a color blind person will see because I am not color blind. Since the mod fixes what what people want fixed I also see no problem. Everyone gets what they want s all I am saying.

I don't know enough about monogramming and graphics to make any judgement.

 

The bigger problem that I have is that it annoys the hell out of me how DUMB the party AI is. (This does partially relate to circle colors.)

A couple of examples.

1. When you have a member of your party charmed they turn red. Well, OK, sort of. But what I find annoying is that your team mates are so freaking dumb that they can't tell the difference between a true enemy and a charmed friend and will attack a charmed friend without a second thought. IMO, charmed friends should be ignored.

I really hate it when I have team mates charmed, not so much because they've temporarily switched sides and are attacking the party, but because the braindead AI forces uncharmed team mates to attack the charmed ones. It forces me to go into uber-micro-managing mode to do the best I can to force the party to ignore charmed ones, which annoys me no end.


2. It's annoying as hell how you can have traps lit up, and the party's pathfinding is so completely braindead that party members will go la-la-la-la-la and walk right over the spotted traps. If you can't disarm a trap, you almost have to move your party one character at a time, at a crawl, because if you tried to move them at any speed, the pathfinding AI would run them right over the traps no matter how you tried to get them to avoid'em.


3. It's also annoying as hell how badly pathfinding interacts with party formations. Let's say that you're in a 2 by 3 formation, like this...

1..2
3..4
5..6

If you are moving down a narrow passageway ... too narrow for the formation to easily place the characters, for some annoying as hell reason, the character in slot #5 feels an overwhelming compulsion to move ahead of the 1 and 2 guys!!!! That is, ending up sorta like this...

..5
1..2
..6
3..4


Why the hell can't pathfinding figure out that if you can't fit the formation in a narrow passageway, then just stretch the formation out and make ever more narrow, but keep the characters in the same relative positional order, 1 through 6. It annoys me no end to see people at the back of the pack moving ahead of the guys at the front just because a passage is narrow and the AI is dumb as a bag of rocks.

If the passage way is too narrow, pathfinding should just force the formation to end up looking more like this....

1
.2
3
.4
5
.6

rather than the idiotic crap that it currently does.

Sorry for the rant.

 

Pathfinding in 3D, especially for formations, is a pain in the arse to code. The amount of wasted cycles needed for each individual to note the relative positions of others in a formation and adjust accordingly are simply not worth the effort.

Also, I don't recall ever seeing a game where the AI would consciously avoid a trap that has been spotted. I suppose it would be possible to have the AI act as though a trap is impassable, but how is the AI supposed to tell whether you want them to move around or through?

I do agree that the combat AI is lacking considerably though. The ability to modify the AI scripts would have been very welcome.

 

If you drag a file to another folder, how is the OS supposed to know whether you want to move or copy the file? A similar solution could be applied in the case of spotted traps. Just because no game ever did it before, doesn't mean no-one should look for a solution.

Other than that the pathfinding and formation AI sounds like it's on about the same level as BG was. Not exactly a glowing endorsement, that, though BG was mostly functional at least.

 

When I have a trap that can't be disarmed I put the party on single file and this works most of the time. I have auto pause on for sighting enemies and hidden objects. Personally I think the combat in PoE is better than in the IE games.

I use stealth a lot and try to position my party members to best advantage. My biggest problem is when the fighting bunches up and spells are being cast from both sides that hide who is fighting whom.

I can understand why some folk may find combat needs macro or do I mean Micro management. I had a hard time adjusting from the combat in the TES games back to the type of management need in PoE.

 

Suggestion: I would turn off auto-pause on hidden objects in the tutorial dungeon because that 8x8 (?) square of trapped squares will drive you batty as you walk by it.

You can turn it back on after you've left that par of the dungeon behind.

 

This may be off topic but based on posts I have seen on the official forum I keep wondering if people who have never played this type of RPG but have played other ones think they don't need the tutorials that are available in-game.

PoE is very different from many of the modern RPGs and I think can be bewildering to some players.

 

I don't see the analogy. I also don't like "intelligent" solutions because they inevitably force you to jump through hoops to achieve what you want.

 

Sure, when programs start to think for you, it usually gets pretty annoying. Seeing your party wander into already identified traps is also pretty annoying.

What I was thinking of was that you'd use Shift or Alt or Ctrl to force the party to avoid identified traps. Or the other way around. Similar to the way you could make your unit force attack something or force move somewhere in the early C&C games.

 

I suppose that could be doable. Not sure it's really worth the manpower to code it for those 10 occasions when you encounter a trap, but that's a different issue.