The problem is that all of that is completely unnecessary in 99% of the game people actually play (we're not talking about Steel Path endurance). Armor stripping especially is a null point as Pillage is an incredible subsume that is used on a lot of nuke frames that struggle with high enemy armor. Is Banshee's Sonar a huge dmg buff? Sure. But I can bring my Revenant with 105% Roar subsumed and any good weapon to a Steel Path Circulus on Lua, stay to rotation C and not have any issues killing enemies while not having to worry about a thing because of Mesmer Skin. Mesa can full armor strip in two casts of Pillage while having 95% DR, constant shield gating and an auto aim weapons for low effort crowd annihilation. Also, why would I bother supporting my teammates if I can instead get the job done myself? Why would they bother supporting me if they themselves can bring a frame that can get the job done themselves?
Keegen
What makes supports unpopular? Many reasons. For one, we have a lot of warframes that are completely self reliant and can do any mission in the game alone, either with their abilities or good guns. Supports also tend to not stack with themselves that well. A Wisp and Mesa are gonna work great together, but Wisp and Trinity? Not so much. Meanwhile having multiple Mesas is nowhere near as bad, you will just have less things to shoot. Supports also rely on your teammates to have a brain to actually use your buffs properly, and we all know how the average public player is. The biggest reason of all is that Warframe rewards speed, as most content is incredibly easy but highly repetitive. Cracking open relics as an example, all that matters is how fast you can kill and how quickly you can extract, so appropriately people will bring nuke frames to speed things along. Death is also by far the best CC effect, all enemies are vulnerable to it and a dead enemy does nothing to threaten you or impact the mission (they also drop loot). Why CC enemies when I can cast 4 as Volt and watch the numbers pop? All of that together makes support/CC frames an unpopular pick, they are still good, sometimes straight up better than other common picks, but the common picks are lower effort while still getting the job done, and for most players that's all that matters.
Yeah, I'm not keen on this change. Will reserve final judgement until I actually play the game and we see the changes to the Guardian (the dream character) they made, but it felt a lot easier to "fall to temptation" when it was just an almost guaranteed beneficial dialogue option that you could pick instead of literally shoving more brain eating parasites into your eye.
I respect their option, but disagree with it completely. I think accidentally triggering a cutscene with the wrong character, stumbling through it quickly only to reload a save and trigger it with your player character instead feels a lot worse than just always triggering the cutscene with your player character, even if it "breaks immersion" by teleporting them slightly (unless they are really far away/this is an Origin specific interaction). I'm not asking for the complex task of being able to switch characters mid dialogue, I understand how that can prove nightmarish to implement, just let me pick the default character to always initiate all interactions and I'll be happy.
I bet you in a month we'll see a mod that completely addresses this issue and we will all be left wondering why Larian didn't fix it during the entirety of this game's development. I can't believe it would be that hard to just make it so only the character on top of the party list can interact and the others are just treated as NPCs and don't initiate cutscenes/dialogue (or if they do, just swap their positions with the player character, I will take abrupt body swaps over save scumming to get the right character to initiate dialogue any day) yet here we are at almost release with this still being an issue.
I'm not happy that they still haven't figured out the "pick who initiates dialogue" problem. This has been a thing in Divinity: Original Sin 2, and continues to plague us into Baldur's Gate 3. It's really annoying to watch your party face Sorcerer or Bard sit in the background while the Barbarian gets to fumble all the dialogue checks with their 8 Charisma score just because they happened to be the first one to enter the room, or the one who was closest to the boss before they decided to plea for their life (looking at you, Hag...) There is also the dilemma of whether to pick the dialogue options you would pick or the ones the character speaking would. I would love to pet that puppy but Astarion happened to walk into the door first, so I guess I'll have to pick the option to kick it instead or break character.
Played around 80h of Early Access and I even bought the old games and played through them before release to catch up on the world. I enjoy Baldur's Gate 3's combat a lot more, but that's mainly because I loathe real-time-with-pause combat and only suffered through it in Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity and Planescape:Torment because the story and characters grabbed me enough to keep going. The game is very different and makes many changes from PnP DND ruleset, and has many "Larianisms" (spells causing surfaces, water making you weaker to lightning/cold but resistant to fire height giving advantage/disadvantage to attacks) but none of them detract from the experience. If you're not a D&D purists you will probably enjoy it after some getting used to it. As for the story and characters, it's hard to say much as we only had access to the small portion that is (not even the entirety of) Act 1 during Early Access, but what's there has been incredible.
In short, it's not like the old games, but I think considering it's been 23 years since the last game and this one is developed by an entirely different studio, it would be incredibly unfair to judge it based on that.
I was really torn between a human storm sorcerer or a half-orc battle master but ultimately decided to go with a gold dwarf hunter using a heavy crossbow. Fits in very well with my preferred party companions (Karlach and Shadowheart as frontline, me and Gale as backline) and has Talk to Animals which is really nice to have in Larian games. I also just love the visual of a grizzled dwarf bounty hunter with his pet raven (taking the Beast Tamer choice for Find Familiar on character creation).
The plot thickens! Poor Romm had a near death experience just trying to investigate "the thing" hanging around Michiru!
They framed the sister as a possessive stalker so far, but with this series' tendency to bait you into blaming the "obviously" evil characters, and with how Michiru is even more creepily possessive, literally breaking-and-entering, not hesitating to use violence (that bloody pen flashback?), she could be just trying to keep her sister from getting to close to others, knowing how bad things can get if she does.
Looks much better than the Teaser they released before, that thing was a massive disappointment. I wish they shown some actual gameplay but at least they nailed the atmosphere of the colony and the Old Camp pretty well. Here's hoping the Polish voice acting will be as legendary as in the original!