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Greetings, Watchers, It's the 1 year anniversary since the launch of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire! We here at Obsidian can't thank you enough for the support and feedback you have given the game since the Fig campaign launched two years ago. Now we're here, a year out from the release of Pillars II, and have one final patch for you all. The time has come for the launch of Update 5.0 for Deadfire! This patch brings some new features and bug fixes to Pillars II and our own Design Director, Josh Sawyer, has made a video to let you know what you can expect from the update. Patch 5.0 Highlights There are a host of bug fixes in the 5.0 update that you can read on our forums, but here are some of the highlights for you: New Ship UI An update to the UI has been implemented that will come up any time you engage with a ship on the seas that brings a more elegant way to perform ship-to-ship encounters. Turn-Based Mode Out of Beta Thanks to feedback from the community, we have made a lot of changes to turn-based mode to account for bugs and balance fixes and it is now in full release with the 5.0 patch. New Story Content Added After listening to feedback on the critical path of the game when it came to reactivity with Woedica and Eothas, so we’ve decided to go in and write new lines and get them recorded by the original actors to add more to that aspect of the game. Anarchist Path Adjustments Some critical path items have been moved out of Neketaka to other locations in the Deadfire to address the difficulty and length that the game had if choosing to not side with a faction at Ondra’s Mortar. The Ultimate The final God Challenge will be live with the 5.0 patch. This challenge, “The Ultimate” will turn on all other God Challenges, Trial of Iron, Path of the Damned, and Solo mode. The Ultimate Challenge In addition to the above changes, Patch 5.0 also introduces the Ultimate Challenge for Deadfire. The challenge is not for the faint of heart, and only the most devoted and erudite of our players stand even a chance in this challenge, but the first twelve players to triumph will be immortalized in Obsidian's studio lobby for all to see. The first twelve Watchers to succeed at the challenge will get their names and their Watchers' names, classes, and levels upon our Deadfire Ultimate Challenge plaque hanging in our lobby. And yes, that means that everyone who comes through our studio will bear witness to the glory of your triumph. Not only that, but the first 50 players who complete the challenge will get a very special patch that not only celebrates your achievement wherever you wish to flex it, but also has Josh's face on it to let the world know you have his approval. The Ultimate Challenge Submission Guidelines and Terms In order to streamline the review and vetting process, please read the following submission guidelines and terms: Cheating, including save-scumming, use of third-party tools or mods, and/or doing anything in a manner contrary to the spirit of the challenge is prohibited. Console commands that do not require the "iroll20s" command be enabled are allowed. Submissions must include a video of the entirety of your run and a save file of the run completed. We reserve the right to disqualify a submission without notice or explanation. If you have completed the challenge and wish to send it in for review and judgment, please send the following evidence to theultimate@obsidian.net: We require full video evidence of your run - acceptable forms of video include: YouTube playlist links, or direct download links via Dropbox. We also require the save game file with the completed challenge. Pillars Pen and Paper Josh has updated the Pillars of Eternity Pen and Paper ruleset and had it playtested with an intrepid band of merry developers - he is now pleased to release it to the general public for play and feedback. You can download it from the front page of eternity.obsidian.net later today. We will also be pushing it live to your backer portals and, for those who have it, game libraries as well. Thank you again for your continued support! If you have any issues with the game, contact us through our support portal to help you on your journey. Cheers, The Deadfire team Reach out to us on our various social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or on our forums) and let us know your comments, your critiques, and what you love about the game. Did you miss our last update? Check it out!

New Features Ship Combat UI update - A new UI has been added that pops up when you encounter a ship, allowing for some immediate options. This bestows the ability to interact with ship combat for players that continue to enjoy it, while allowing a way to quickly choose a different options to avoid them such as boarding or parley. Turn-based mode leaving Beta - Thank you to our players that have tested turn-based mode! This will now be set to live with the 5.0.0 patch. The Book Of Woedica: Unfortunately, The Book of Woedica contains a bug that doesn't allow for Woedica's VO to be heard unless the player opens the book on the World Map due to technical limitations. We apologize for this inconvenience! A Note from Narrative Designer Paul Kirsch: After Deadfire's launch and public reception, leadership and the writing team closely scrutinized some of the narrative issues which could have presented better or required some clarification. We distilled the most prevalent issues down to a couple of core factors: a lack of clarity regarding the metaphysics of Eora, and missing connectivity between Deadfire's "god plot" and "faction plot," for lack of a better term. Shortly before launching The Forgotten Sanctum, those of us still attached to the project had some availability to address these concerns. A handful of developers pooled their efforts to execute on a plan that seeks to address these story problems through modestly-scoped, unobtrusive changes to the core game experience. What follows behind the Spoiler gate is a broad outline of the solutions we pursued. We hope you enjoy them. Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing! Expanded Eothas Dialogue - The end game with Eothas has had many new voiced lines added to address some pressing questions from the players. The Ultimate Challenge - The Ultimate Challenge is now available for those adventurers that dare try to brave it. Those that manage to best the challenge may even find themselves with physical rewards! The Ultimate Challenge requires the following to be enabled/completed: Triple Crown - Expert Mode, Trial of Iron, Path of the Damned Level Scaling (Only scale upwards) Solo All 11 God Challenges - Wael, Woedica, Hylea, Rymrgand, Ondra, Skaen, Abydon, Magran, Berath, Galawain, and Eothas. All DLCs - Beast of Winter/ Seeker, Slayer Survivor/ Forgotten Sanctum. All major enemies and boss battles completed. The Ultimate Challenge requires the following to be disabled: Console Command Cheats Mods Beraths Blessings Anarchist Path - Changes have been added to the Anarchist path to allow for more of the game to be experienced before the player can attempt to finish the game. Resolved Issues Afflictions now work as expected for immunities, resistance, and suppression. Players should no longer be experiencing low frame rates due to multiple NPC's being on screen at once. Terrified party members who cannot move will now pass their turn correctly. Effect durations in breakdown tooltips are now displayed in Rounds when turn-based mode is enabled. Caltrops traps will no longer cause the turn-based combat to become stuck in certain cases. Pulsing spells are now displayed throughout their entire duration in the turn-based mode. Resisted Afflictions will no longer progress in real time in turn-based mode. Turn-based Combat Start banner behaves properly on ultra-widescreen resolutions. Party AI can no longer continue to use quick items with no charges left. Firearms users that act last in a round will no longer be incorrectly placed first in the next round. Creature summoned with Berath's Throwing Bones is now correctly queued in turn order in turn-based mode. Attack abilities will now apply their effects to child attacks such as AOEs in addition to the character's primary weapon attack. Characters with unused engagements will now engage enemies that move in range even if they are not the primary target. The description of Berath's Challenge now describes the effects in turn-based mode. Berath's Challenge will now show an effect icon and timer on unconscious party members. Wall spells now apply their effects on the turns of the characters affected by them. Imp Tricksters will no longer become stuck when attempting to use certain abilities in turn-based mode. Characters using Whispers of the Wind in turn-based mode will no longer remaining invisible until their next turn. Beam spells now deal the same damage per second in turn-based mode as they do in Real-Time with Pause. Turn-based movement indicator will correctly show the unreachable segments when targeting an enemy. Turn-based movement indicator will show a better estimate of the character's final position when using ranged attacks. Turn-based movement indicator will now be more accurate when attempting to move through a narrow space between multiple enemies. Invisible characters will no longer block movement. The player can no longer briefly switch weapon sets after hitting with an attack in turn-based mode. Cancelling the animation during a full attack no longer prevents Initiative from being set in turn-based mode. Creatures summoned with Figurines now appear for the correct number of turns. Priest's "Symbol of Eothas" has been adjusted to turn-based mode. Ability tooltips will clearly show "Not Your Turn" when it isn't the selected character's turn. Modal abilities cannot be toggled unless it's the caster's turn. With Berath's Challenge enabled in turn-based mode, enemies will never exit the turn order. Consuming drugs properly sets the character's initiative in turn-based mode. Priest's "Blessing of Wael" has been adjusted to turn-based mode. Camera in turn-based mode no longer moves to dead enemies between turns. Blade Turning now ends early if the monk moves. Monk's "Whispers of the Wind" ability now correctly uses an action point in turn-based mode. Characters that are naturally neutral to the player will no longer drop out of turn-based combat when they are all charmed. Brilliant Tactician's effects will work correctly when there are multiple Tacticians in the party. Fixed the flanked condition rarely persisting after combat ends. The Miss glossary entry now has the correct threshold value in turn-based mode. The End Game Slides "Continue" button will no longer permanently disappear. In turn-based mode, pulsing AoEs no longer pulse in real-time when the caster dies. Cost numbers on the ability bar will no longer occasionally show when the ability bar is hidden. Combats in turn-based mode will more reliably pull nearby enemies. Resurrection's "Cannot Die" effect is now applied for correct amount of turns in turn-based mode. Enemies will no longer lock up when attempting to target destructibles with certain attacks in turn-based mode. Auras are now updated in real time in turn-based mode. Passive abilities will no longer show "Action Type: Free" in the ability tree. Immobile creatures will now switch to ranged weapons if necessary in turn-based combat. Barks of the enemy ships' captains are properly assigned to them instead of to the Watcher. Camera in turn-based mode with Hylea's Challenge enabled no longer moves away from party. Option to disable camera centering on active character in turn-based mode has been added to the game. Characters will play a visual-only flinch animation when they are bumped by allies. Relentless Storm in turn-based mode will now Daze by default, and its Daze attacks that critically hit will upgrade to Stuns. Gaze of Adragan has had it second redundant defense roll removed. "Llengrath's Safeguard" no longer can be cast out of combat. Combat Attack Results tutorial has been updated to reflect new Graze range. Mortification of the Soul is a free action in turn-based mode.

Hear me, progenitors of the board! Give me your advice, since me and the missus are apparently expecting a hellspawn of our own.

Could be worse-- it could include the Gorecci Street looters!

And the whole discussion made me think of Andrew Ryan. I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a game dev not entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man at Valve. He should be happy if people are willing to buy it at merely 50% off during the Steam Summer sale. No, says the man at Humble. He should be happy if it gets in a $1 Bundle. No, says the man on the torrent site. He should settle for my appreciation. (also, No says melkathi, I'll ask Shady for a key in the Giveaway thread, because people are not grabbing enough of those keys)

18:09]draego_:it prob has lots of bug fixes to [22:03]Aarik D (Community Manager):so many bug fixes [22:12]Helmino:@Aarik D (Community Manager) hope is not only bug fix [22:14]Aarik D (Community Manager):Turn that frown upside down my friend, many cool things coming! From the discord chat

So they have decided to wait till release anniversary) Btw, now we have some sort of time estimation dictionary - "ASAP" in technical forums = up to 100 days - "soon (tm)" on discord =~ 40 days - "almost at the finish line" on discord = ~ 2 weeks - "very soon" by Josh on reddit = 1 week

Meet Isabella, or just Bela for short. She came to live with me today. She belonged to one of the guys in the VFW. Sadly he passed away last week. His only family is a daughter in St. Louis who can't take her. Her options were few... they were going to put her in a shelter. I couldn't let that happen. I know Bela and she knows Sunny and me so I offered to let he live out her days with us. She is 12 years old. John had her from 8 weeks, literally her whole life. I'm trying to keep her engaged and trying to make her feel comfortable. She is stressed at the transition and I think sad because she doesn't know where John is. He adored her. So right now she is getting lot of love and attention and hopefully she will adapt smoothly.

I finished Ironman Santa Rosa. Bib #1570 if you want to see the results. It took 15 hours and 7 minutes. I started this whole triathlon thing because I wanted to see what my physical limits were, and I found them. It was humbling. The swim was fine. I got cold at one point, but I only had mild thoughts of quitting. The bike was hard after around mile 50. I just kept trying to get to the next 5-mile segment. It took me an hour longer than I hoped, and I was really uncomfortable by mile 112. I never want to sit on my bike again. I also burned badly, so that was bad planning. The run was pure misery. I walked a lot of the miles. Every once in awhile I'd find someone to jog and talk to, which helped. It was a 3 lap loop, and when I saw my wife after lap 2 I totally broke down crying. I walked for awhile with a blanket (since it was now nightime), ate some chicken broth, vomitted up the chicken broth, then just tried to stumble forward. Oddly enough, with 2 miles to go, I was able to start running and ditched the blanket. I finished on a nice jog, but it was still about a 6 hour marathon. That was so hard. At least I finished. It was not a sure thing.

Yeah, it's totally ridiculous and lazy to write new dialogue, draw new scenes and doing new voiceover one year after release - and for free.

aw shucks, yeah that's mine. i don't pretend to be 100% accurate or claim that it's 100% my work - I hope I credited everyone who helped contribute it to it (there's some more updateds pending phenomenum's contributions, but i'm waiting on 4.2). but if people get good mileage out of it, that's all I can hope for

Standing fast against the invasion of Conan Exiles screenshots: The Mordheim Inquisition went to the library

So PC gamer is fluffing about casting actors for video game characters (or their body parts. Like Steve Buscemi's eyes for Sonic ) and this is perfect:

I will start my actual ultimate run on stream today. (after a couple of days of testing)

[minor editorialising] I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Epic Games Store. A vendor where the artist would not fear the distributor's cut; where the publisher would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by GabeN! And with the redistributable binaries of your software and a signed guaranteed minimum sales agreement, EGS can become your store as well.

Someone already did a full run of the ultimate:

i'll just post it here. it took probably ~15 minutes at a mix of slow and super slow game speed (plus ~8 minutes of very fast speed prebuffing). not too worried about it being public, since i think the ultimate will ultimately come down to execution and time, and between a dayjob and kids and a family, there's no chance i have the time to be first. i think it's best just to be collaborative on the metagaming here. unless i say otherwise, anything i list below is essential. items: gauntlets of greater reliability (can get away with normal reliability if need be); scordeo's edge dual-wielded with a ranged weapon; helm of the white void (for +10 acc on mule kick), marux amanth soulbound to priest (convenience) consumables: deadeye, potion of impediment, scroll of avenging storm (forgot to use it for prebuffing though, used it in the middle of hte fight to some effect), potion of perfect aim race: boreal dwarf abilities: mule kick, confident aim, BDD, salvation of time, shadowing beyond (automatic), escape (automatic), champion's boon, 2w spiritual weapon, halt (convenience), spiritual ally (automatic), minor avatar (automatic, convenience), storm of holy fire (convenience) real life equipment/setup: stop watch; combat speed up and combat speed down bound to keys so you can adjust easily AI script: set up your AI to auto attack as default action, defensive, and create a new AI script that all it does is "always true: cast salvation of time: self" with 1 second cooldown (I tried with a 0 second cooldown in an earlier run and it sometimes causes weird "abandoned casting salvation of time" issues, less so with a 1s cooldown) you absolutely need the combination of boreal dwarf, potion of perfect aim, gauntlets, and the helm also really helps, because otherwise you have no chance to consistently mule kick hauani o whe's first two forms. i had made an earlier attempt without the potion of perfect aim and i missed a real important merge interrupt of two gigantic oozes and the fight basically reset. (at massive ooze and below the fort defense is low enough that it's less of a concern) actual strat: set to AI autoattack run into top left corner and wait for vela to come close. cast halt on vela run close to aggro Hauani O Whe (henceforth HoW), immediately shadowing beyond back to vela you should trigger brilliant because you've already de-aggroed run back to vela summon spiritual ally, whack it with your scordeo's edge until you proc blade cascade (you may have to resummon the ally a few times). you dual-wield scordeo's edge with a ranged weapon not because you care about the ranged weapon, but so you're attacking at 2w speed levels with just scordeo's edge. as soon as you proc blade cascade, slow down time all the way and salvation of time. start buffing with minor avatar, BDD (on vela, too), deadeye, impediment, avenging storm, champion's boon, and any fighter buffs. make sure to intersperse consumables with abilities (so you buy more time for salvation of time to recover from brilliant) and keep spamming salvation of time to keep buffs active. once all your initial buffs are setup, turn on your AI, crank game speed up to max speed, switch to marux amanth, start stop watch for 3 minutes and go get a drink. cast spiritual weapon. start stop watch for 4 minutes and go get a drink. slow game speed down to normal, switch AI script back to autoattack only. start stop watch for 20s. run towards hauani o whe. once vela starts cowering, withdraw her. run all the way to the east side of the map. you might take a few symbiote or solvent cleanses while HoW periodically ranges you while following. once HoW melees you, turn on your AI script, just start unleashing hell. use mule kick any time HoW doesn't have distract. everytime you proc brilliant your character should salvation of time automatically. once HoW hits near death, turn off your AI script. wait two cycles of mule kick (to gaurantee that you have two level 6 casts) and then alternate between manually casting salvation of time and spiritual ally with each mule kick-induced brilliant. the spiritual ally will help DPS down (mostly by eliminating tactician PEN penalty). (edit2: note - you wait for near death because keeping an ally summoned otherwise exposes you to too much corrosive solvent while casting an ally. otherwise, even without avenging storm being up, you can pretty much prevent HoW from doing anything) once HoW splits, have spiritual ally attack one ooze, and then escape or shadowing beyond behind another ooze and lure it away, to the bottom of hte map. if you have symbiote active, you'll have to stop to clear out a few oozes. slow the game speed down to the slowest at this point so you don't miss a merge from here on out. dps down the ooze you have split off, refreshing an ally every 3-5 mule kicks or so. if you're unable to keep them fully apart, it just means you'll have to be a little bit more careful about interrupting merges. notably, for the gigantic oozes, it looks like you only need to mule kick one of them to make them both give up on merge (isn't true for smaller forms). when a greater ooze splits, don't need an ally anymore, so turn back on the AI script. just try to keep mule kick up on everyone and avoid flanked (for some reason even though i had nomad's brigandine equipped i would still periodically get shaken/confused). when a massive ooze is getting to near death, try to mix in a cast of storm of holy fire (though highest priority is interrupting any merge) when split down to greater ooze, mule kick spam and hopefully you have one or two storms of holy fire active to help aoe down the greater and lesser oozes. rinse and repeat with the other massive ooze rinse and repeat with the other gigantic ooze and its splits. (should be much easier - when you're back down to just the one gigantic ooze you basically get 100% salvation of time uptime and can refresh your buffs because the gigantic ooze is really easy to interrupt and mule kick and proc perma-brilliant) the scariest part of this was the fact that after HoW splits into two gigantic oozes, you'll start getting hit by the corrosive solvent, since it becomes much harder to keep both oozes interrupted. at massive and lower they don't have corrosive solvent so once you split one of hte gigantic ooze it becomes easier to just periodically mule kick the gigantic ooze. but you should have enough duration (coupled with ongoing salvation of time spam) to face tank it all without losing any critical buff. (meanwhile vela, after popping out of withdraw, is just terrifying wandering around a spot near the entrance of the map and is out of range of being hit by symbiote) if you're not dumb like me and have avenging storm up for your initial buff, it should be pretty fast and much easier (because you'll be interrupting a lot because the lightning bolts can also proc impediment or deadeye). i started avenging storm halfway through phase 1 when i realized i wasn't seeing any bolts, managed to get the duration up, but it got dropped during the two gigantic oozes from corrosive solvent. with the same 500+s worth of buff as everything else, it should last you the entire fight (which itself will be much shorter). edit - the stop watching timings, waiting for specific mule kicks, etc is to make this strategy wael-proof. wael doesn't appear to block information on an enemy's relative health status (you can still see e.g. "bloodied") and is the only in-game information this strat ends up relying on. though even with expert mode + wael, you'll still see little ability icons appear for the merge cast (which fortunately is a slow cast ability) so you can still interrupt them with mule kick, you just won't have the combat tooltip telling you where in the recovery the oozes are. edit3 - a very similar strat should work for other megabosses and faster, at least in terms of prebuffing. did some paper math and scordeo's edge plus buffs plus spiritual weapon should take out dorudugan in 180s, so 4-5 minutes of prebuffing with spiritual weapon is all you need. you'll need rekvu's helm to avoid getting proned all the time though, and you need spiritual ally uptime for flanked and removing tactician PEN penalty. belranga you need antitode as one of your buffs to prevent paralyze/petrify, but you can even skip any hand mortar/avenging storm and just dps down 150+ spiders and then the burrows until belranga can be trivially mule kicked to death (though hand mortar + storm will probably make this fight super easy and you'll probably just kill belranga by accident while slaughtering hundreds of spiders). all other bosses should be like dorudugan at worst. the only remaining wildcards are a) any fight where you are unable to deaggro (hopefully these don't exist, i have to double check a few) and b) sigilmaster auranic and her cleansing rune.

Ok, all subclasses' icons done - at least the first iteration: Feel free to comment. Next step is to create the last missing general passives (Quick Summoning and such) and then to incorporate the feedback I get/got from you. Some changes I already implemented, but not too many of them. I will compile a list with the feedback so far.

No hard ETA, but we scope on next weekend for BETA release. And, HOORAY , thanks to the @MaxQuest, we found the solution for Penetration problem, that works for all - existing and newly created - characters. Penetration will be scale with Arcana skill, +0.25 Pen for 1 point = +5 Pen with 20 Arcana. Tested it just right now and it's works with all Imbues.

O-ha. That's an improvement which most players will dismiss as unimportant, but I guess it will have quite an impact (if you play around with engagement slots).

Well, not like saber moves in the movies couldn't get more unnecessary.

saturday were the first day o' our retirement. no excuses, but our dogs didn't get the memo. for weeks we have stressed to the four pooches how saturday were gonna be retirement day, and we were intending to fully indulge our sloth for at least a weekend. no such luck. turkeys (literal, not metaphorical or figurative) got in the backyard on saturday and the dogs went ape$&%#... at 5:30 am. so we fed 'em 30 minutes earlier than normal and then took 'em for a walk. fixed irrigation lines and then began addressing some dry rot in anticipation o' the house getting a new paint job within the next couple weeks. took the older dogs for their second walk o' the day (15 and 16... the vet says multiple shorter walks is best for their arthritis) and by then it were time to pull our fully cooked pulled pork for dinner. after dinner we caught up on a couple correspondence we have been avoiding. before we knew it, were 11:30pm. sunday has gone similar to saturday, save for the absence o' turkey, so we were able to sleep in 'til 6:00am. retirement weekends, so far, doesn't feel much different than any other weekend. HA! Good Fun!

Out and about at the Portsmouth Comic-Con. It's only it's second year, but it seems to be doing well and it was on May the 4th, so lots of Star Wars. General practice run before trying London Comic-Con in a few weeks with a few tweaks and tidyups now that I know how this works...

I noticed that Gfted1's rank is "Forum Moderator" and he's part of the "Moderators" group. He also has a huge "MODERATOR" tag right under all of that. My considerable deductive powers suggest that he may be a moderator, but I would need more evidence to make a definitive statement.

I know what I'll be playing every single time