I have played both DOS1 and POE1.

Preferred POE, I liked DOS1 but the world building was poor imo and hated the silliness like walking bombs etc.

FWIW DOS2 is in every way better than DOS1.

seems terrible

Just bought this after finishing up my second play through of div 2. I never played Baldurs gate growing up and I think div 2 and dragon age inquisition are the only team based games I have played. I started off exasperated by divinity and didn’t figure out what I was doing until about 20 hours in but I think it might be my favorite game ever now. Quit dragon age inquisition after a few hours and picked it up again months later and played it through and enjoyed it although found the combat stale and mostly consisted of me button mashing. Not a huge fan of the equipment and inventory interface so far but that’s always a problem with these PC centric games I guess (I’m on Xbox). Any must have skills or any build tips? I’m a wood elf ranger with a bear companion only a couple hours into the game

The great thing about PoE's class design is that you can't really screw up your character. You're (reasonably) free to allocate stat points, and pick whatever abilities you like, without worrying that your character will end up being rubbish. In that way it's very different to BG and D:OS.

That said, Apprentice's Sneak Attack is universally useful. Gives you bonus damage on all weapon attacks against an enemy suffering from afflictions. As far as party composition goes, Priests are the MVPs because of their heals, buffing, and removal of afflictions. For your ranger specifically,

So it's confirmed that they're adding a turn-based mode to Deadfire this week, albeit in beta. The mode was accidentally leaked in a patch a while ago, then quickly removed. Quite a striking move as it must have taken a lot of work to design. Maybe Obsidian looked at DOS2's sales and came to the conclusion that turn-based is more popular than real-time with pause, particularly as it's easier for console players. They could be right, I do pause so much when playing BG and its ilk in order to micromanage that I sometimes feel I might as well be playing a turn-based game. Things can get a bit chaotic with the real-time system.

For some reason (perhaps because I grew up on Baldur's Gate) I love RTwP, but just can't get into turned based games, even though, on a lot of levels, they are pretty much identical.

I like things getting "a bit chaotic" personally. The fun of RTwP is trying to coordinate multiple things at once and recovering when your plans get screwed up. I don't want to plan 7 turns in advance. Turn based is also annoyingly slow when you want to just smash through an easy fight.

Obsidian acknowledged that this will be a problem for fights that were designed as waves of enemies that exhaust the player's party. In turn-based mode, those fights could be tedious. Obs is rebalancing encounters though.

Yeh having the characters AI in the fights was great for when I became OP in Deadfire, as I didn't really need to micromanage non-important encounters if I didn't want to.

I think my problem with turn-based is I lose the feeling of control (even if some of the time this is just an illusion in RTwP), e.g. having the enemy have a bunch of turns to pound on me, and there's nothing I can do.

As long as it's not mandatory I don't see what the big deal is. It's just giving players more options when playing the game?

The game's beyond awesome, still speechless after the whole adventure is over. Narratively amazing, gameplay wise precise and mechanical, and environmentally immersive to the very last detail, would recommend for anyone and everyone!

Picked this up again six months after buying it and put in about 25 hours so far over last week or so. Not a bad game but I still don’t understand the mechanics that well...the worst part of the game is the loading screens though I don’t understand how you wait 10x as long as freaking Morrowind from 15 years ago

Btw, anyone who liked BG2 or Pillars should check out Pathfinder Kingmaker. Year ago when it released, it was super buggy, but has been brought up to very good shape since then. I think I liked it quite a bit more than either Pillars of Eternity game. The pathfinder ruleset is basically D&D 3.5, so the game feels very familiar to anyone who played pen and paper D&D or neverwinter nights.

As for the DLC, you want Wildcards. The other two are optional and IMO unnecessary.

That's great to hear, I bought Pathfinder on release but gave up on it pretty quickly due to the bugs and forgot about it. I'm a Pathfinder nerd.

Do you have to do the building your own kingdom thing? Sounds like a huge drag to me.

Yeh I bought it and didn't get very far. I've tried to pick it up a couple times since but just haven't got in to it. It's weird because it's a game I should technically love.

As I'm currently unemployed and bored, maybe I'll try again.

No, you can set it on automatic. It is really fun part of the game, though. It is mainly events that happen every month like your chancellor coming to ask your advice on how to deal with a refugee heir from destroyed kingdom (support him, send him to death, ignore...).

Yeah that sounds OK, if it's just occasional decisions to make on stuff. I found the stuff with maintaining your keep/ship in PoE 1/2 to be a giant drag. If I wanted to micromanage resources I'd play German board games.

The cheesy voice acting in this game killed it stone dead for me.

What’s put me off Kingmaker is stuff I’ve read about how early, small mistakes in kingdom-building can lead to game over. I am totally uninterested in intensive HQ management. Is it that bad?

You can turn it off completely if you really hate it or turn the kingdom difficulty down. Recent patches have added stuff that make it very, very hard to lose the game though (giving you bunch of one-time stat boosts to kingdom checks which you can stack if you want.). Basically, you can't lose the game unless you on purpose refuse to do the main quest every 6 months or so.

Just started Kingmaker again. My main character, who had high Con, got snuck attacked then crit and died on like the second lot of guards in the fricking tutorial. I rage quit...

Tyranny is an old school game, I'm thinking of playing it, just finished reading it's review:
https://www.pcgamer.com/tyranny-review/
https://gameskeys.net/tyranny-review/
What do guys think of this game, is it worth playing?

Yeh it's pretty good if you enjoy isometric rpgs. Personally thought it was a bit short, but I'm used to these games being epics like Pillars or Baldur's Gate. Bit of a different take on the genre as it pushed you to play a bad guy.

I think there's a DLC out which I've not played.