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I really scared of elevators. But I'm taking steps to avoid them.

Does this promotion come with a pay increase?

What do you call a person with no nose and no body? no body nose.

Congrats 2133, nice one

Congrats, Numbers!

am taking comfort in the certain knowledge other options woulda' been worse. then again, we might be channeling our inner wesley looking for the silver lining. HA! Good Fun!

You sold out, man!

Of course other opinions are available. I know others here have really enjoyed it, just not myself. I'd suggest listening to what they have to say too, to make a decision! And it's not like you can't ever change your mind on it anyways.

Excellent. Btw, the italics feature is barely perceptible to me.

Congrats on becoming an authority figure.

Oh, ****, we're ****ed!

Uh oh.... we're in for it now!

Congrats!

Numbersman!

Yay, welcome Numbers! https://youtu.be/sAn7baRbhx4 ... 15 years and even an offered bribe at some point hasn't brought me closer to figure out the FLoSD.OBE thing

Turn on blade turning and ghost will teleport just himself.

I think big appeal of BG1 over BG2 was that whole exploration portion of the game, where you could run around countryside. I was missing that in BG2 a lot

Only 30k views! You should record a clean version (without Brian Heins speaking over NPC dialogue all the time) and upload it to your YouTube channel. In general, I don't understand why more game developers don't publish their own "gold standard" official gameplay videos instead of relying exclusively on incidental previews from third parties. This is the best advertising you can have, much more important than silly 2 minute trailers.

Heya Troll, denizens, lurkers and community, Just a quick welcome to our newest member from the community to join the Mod Squad: 213374U I'm sure you will all be warm, welcoming and kind! Now don't spill any sand of out the box as you go about your greeting! FLoSD.OBE

We need a begrudgingly chuckling emoji.

Don't be speciescist! How do you know you won't like it? If Larian reads this topic, they may well use this idea to troll the players.

maybe not pointless. exploitive? yeah. immediate after completing port maje, is possible to start the lucrative ship combat mini-game. scaling or non-scaling don't matter. got scaling active and don't want the xp bloat? then do not turn in ship bounties. sink ships in the deafire for negligible xp while acquiring 1007 including superb gear and unique items. start nekataka at level 6, but with elite gear and a deep well o' money. use ship bounties as strategic insta-level-up opportunities as desired. converse, if you want quick xp, then there is no faster and easier route than the ship bounties. start nekataka at level +11? start nekataka at +11 and with superb gear and every purchase-worthy item in the game. is not pointless, but is cheesy and exploitive. HA! Good Fun!

Thanks all! I look forward to... not screwing the pooch excessively.

It occurred to me that I do really enjoy one Deadfire improvement that I don't think has made this thread yet: The interrupt system. Pillars 1's interrupt/concentration system was very murky, RNG-driven, and unreliable. Now it's a very clear, useful, and fun part of gameplay.

I wasn't a fan, and it's a massive time-sink, probably twice as long as Deadfire overall and largely because of a lot of trash encounters, artificial timers surrounding the kingdom management system, and a much more extensive main story opposite to optional sidequesting and the likes. However, I would recommend giving it a try at least. It has its worthwhile elements and others have loved it so, who knows? As to how it compares specifically with Deadfire, well... I think it doesn't. I started a second playthrough of Deadfire as soon as I was done with Kingmaker and the more I played, the more the problems in Kingmaker became extremely apparent. Kingmaker is a pulpy high fantasy power trip, your goal is essentially to rise from novice adventurer to king of an entire new nation, and amidst it all there's numerous threats to your realm and pretenders to your throne, plenty of big epic stakes and enemies, but it's all very surface-level, it's all there for spectacle and entertainment's sake. Nothing wrong with that of course, it knows what it is. But Deadfire, as most Obsidian games, thrives a lot more on a solid thematic foundation, and even at its pulpiest there's still a sense of purpose to much of the content therein, if only to describe another facet of this world that is so deeply tied with the undelying discourse the game presents. And whereas the writing in Kingmaker frequently comes across as crude or generic, there's a life and character to the particular cadence of the Huana or the Valians that is unique, lively and very underrated when in contrast to the former. From a sidequest or side content perspective, there's no doubt in my mind that Deadfire's the better game - most of the side content in Kingmaker is lacking, the sidequests tend to be very straight-forward and not plentiful, whilst 80% of what is there to discover in the world map amounts to endlessly rehashed small areas that act as little more than "arenas" to trash encounters. And whilst the game does react to the choices you make, these are almost exclusively dialogue or build-based, and often dialogue options are gutted outright by arbitrary barriers like alignment - in comparison the roleplay in Deadfire seems much freer and more plentiful, as quests and area design allow for a player to resolve the same in multiple ways just by choosing to *play* the sequence differently instead of merely choosing a different dialogue branch. The freedom of exploration and liveliness of the world stand out a lot more in Deadfire when directly compared to Kingmaker, which on the other hand feels generic to a fault, if no doubt appealing on a sheer comfort-food level. All this without touching the worst aspect, which to me is the combat. Kingmaker's combat is absolutely woeful, ubiquitous and inescapable. If the first Pillars had a trash encounter problem, this one has it three times over. And all this without taking into account that the game does everything in its power to worsen and exacerbate every flaw in the IE games' combat system as well. This is the kind of game that follows the same balancing principles as a regular combat/strategy mod for Baldur's Gate II in that even in normal difficulties it requires you to have the prescience of knowing what you'll face when and what scrolls and characters to bring alongside you for which area; and since the game is on a timer all throughout, backtreading to acquire X or Y supply or companion is *very* costly. This is essentially a game where prebuffing isn't just a clever and accidental workaround to combat the way it proved to be in the IE games, it becomes a mandatory element through which all encounters are balanced around - and if you happen to forget to prebuff your party for a single trash mob of spiders (which can also occur as a random encounter on the road), then good luck because you'll likely end with two or three characters sporting a massive -8 STR, DEX and CON permanent debuff at the end of it. If you think this is just a single type of creature, or just a couple who can do this, think again, because basically *everything* here is capable of dealing attribute damage or permanent afflictions (see blindness too) to your party - and that's not even touching on several other baffling enemy designs like the AoE paralize auras on the Wild Hunt which themselves become your usual dungeon filler during the end of the game. Other irritating features, as with the IE games, include crowd control conditions and DoT AoE spells alla Wall of Blades, Web or Cloudkill enduring for minutes after combat ends*, rest interrupts and random road encounters consisting of trash mobs are plentiful to the point you could well have four or five of the former and two or three of the latter occur before you finish either action, enemies having a tendency to be dumb and heavy on spamming single moves or attacks (case in point: alchemist enemies tend to bombard you with a seemingly endless and constant barrage of fireball, regardless of whether it's effective against your party or not (say that we've cast communal protection against fire on ourselves for example), despite also wielding a crossbow for example), and these shortcomings in AI tend to be 'balanced' through inflating base stats and abilities to absurd degrees, to the point that even a regular boar in act 1 can have an STR score of 32. It's compared to games like this that you realize just how much great work has gone into redesigning and improving combat in the Pillars series. All of which also leads me to the bottom line which is... Kingmaker is very likely a game served best by playing with cheats and cheat mods on. Movespeed cheats, difficulty down to a bare minimum, even the removal of random road encounters, anything to not have to deal with the relentless, tedious combat in this game and nevertheless allowing you to experience the story and several companions and companion arcs which are all very decent - I'd likely have enjoyed the game way more had I played it this way and not tried foolhardily to beat the game at the difficulty I did. Anyhow, these are my thoughts on the matter, hope they're worth something. *: On the matter of endless Wall of Blades, I watched a stream on Kingmaker by Lorerunner a month or so ago where upon defeating the final villain and casting three Wall of Blades to do so, the prologue proceeded to play on top of the battlefield with the Wall of Blades still active. All across the prologue you could hear the grinding sound of the blades and see their animation blurred out in the back, absolutely non-stop. It was rather hilarious. Here's the video, jump to 3:20:00:

Oh, I completely own up to my ignorance on this point, no question. But you know, in retrospect this feels pretty weird: I have never felt any want or need to be able to swap Grimoires before. If anything, Aloth knows many more spells than he ever uses, and the ones he uses are very good indeed. I believe this, once again, reflects the perhaps-overly-balanced system of the game in general: everything is as effective as everything else. The same goes for items: for the most part, everything works just as fine as everything else. As I'm probably nearing the end of my playthrough, I'm beginning to feel that the storytelling in the game is good, it's very enjoyable, but the mechanics side is a little bland. There's no loot that gets you excited, because everything is as good as everything else -- my inventory is full of unique items I have never used that make me go ho-hum at best. It's not that anything is poor, it's just that everything is roughly the same.

It also would've probably made more sense to link the real RLM review instead of the Plinkett Review that switches between good points and hyperbole and mocking all the people who were getting comically outraged by what's just yet another bad remake and calling it "the worst thing ever" at the time.

I guess those are the spells that also work with Instruments of Pain, gaining range*6 in the process. They seem to be tagged as "melee attacks" iternally.

other than too easy/too difficult, single biggest complaint 'bout bg1 on the bg2 development boards were the bg1 map. not kidding. not hyperbolic. even more than complaints 'bout underdeveloped party npcs were criticisms o' the repeated and reflexive mowing o' mostly empty wilderness maps. made folks... unhappy. "exploration" were a curse. weren't no meaningful exploration if all you is doing is uncovering every bit o' fog on every map, eh? bioware listened. for bg2, bioware took out most 'o the admitted pointless and rote exploration and replaced with dense maps containing involved/multi-step quests. were a paradigm shift focusing on depth over breadth. other than too easy/too difficult, single biggest post bg2 complaint were questioning why bioware abandoned all the wonderful bg1 exploration. am having some small sympathy for developers. game development must, at times, feel like groundhog day. doesn't matter what changes is made or what improvements they attempt. doomed to repeat endless cycle. poe were more streamlined. deadfire went sandbox. didn't matter. lack o' exploration v. lack o' depth. and cycle repeats. HA! Good Fun!

Interestingly, the relatively lack of options in AD&D made for an easier translation into real-time, the thing that Bioware back then did. What did Bioware do? Inspired largely by RTS games (mainly their own Warcraft sessions), which Combat had relatively straight Forward resolutions, going with the System now known as RtWP. So, whilst BG(1)'s combat is largely simplistic in comparison; I personally still prefer it over say the bulk of the combat in the recent Pathfinder Kingmaker. There's less depth for sure. Still on Pathfinder there's so much happening simultaneously, also on the opponent's end, that it's hard to get a feel for what really is turning the tides of battle. This inherently complexity naturally grows the higher level the encounter; as the amount of attack rolls resolved across the battle field multiply true to the source material; and opponents also tend to have/use more abilities. [I think it would be much better as a turn-based game, btw]. I'm still waiting for a RtWP game that would refute my Theory, but the more complex the mechanics, and the more Abstract the Combat Resolution (concentration checks on spellcasting; positioning triggering flanking conditions; checks on concealment/miss chances), the more you Strip real-time of ist inherent strength. Which is the more natural flow of Combat. IN D&D style Systems, it naturally doesn't help that unlike RTS truly, which are almost like rock-paper-scissor Affairs in comparison in their unit ability design; buffs/debuffs are oft ever stacking marginally increases to hit Chance, etc. which are hard to visualize and get a feel for -- and thus go against the inherent strength of simulating a more "natural flow" of battle itself. There's also a lot to be said about choice fatigue, but then I've always prefered Myth with its distinct Units/abilities over a Command&Conquer clone that back in the day tried to trump the original by providing hundreds of Units, each of which a slight Variation of the other. Whilst this is subjective; choices don't equal immersion. Whilst it is a wholly different game; the original Thief doesn't provide the player character with a gazillion of options and tools; but each of them have their use, and are meaningful. Actually, the entire game is still a masterclass in minimalism and is as much defined what the player can do, as well as the many things he -- as truly being a Thief -- cannot do. tldr; I actually think that not a single dev going with real-time combat these days fully understands where Bioware were coming from back then. At the very least, the difference in feel is enormous. An interesting podcast on this, I think. https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/to-infinity-engine-and-beyond-1

Definitely not going to watch an hour breakdown on why a two hour movie wasn't good. I probably agree with a lot of the points, but my first point would be that it isn't worth the time.

The "big money" combo requires separate priest and cipher, because a cipher cannot cast Ancestor's Memory (for the Brilliant buff) on themselves, and that is the buff that potentially allows unlimited casts of Salvation of Time (and thus indefinite durations for any other buffs). Ascendant works well either solo or multiclass, but you should think of it more as a tradeoff, where you sacrifice -1 PL to get significantly increased focus generation. Ascending for the +3 PL bonus can take quite a while to assemble the focus at the start of the fight, which is generally the part of the fight that you most want to be spending your time casting actual spells (like, say, Ancestor's Memory on your Priest so you can get the sweet, sweet SoT spam going). Once you get things under control, you can either Ascend (and stay there forever with SoT spam), or don't bother because there aren't all that many fights where you aren't already well on your way to mopping up before you finish ascending. That's true for single-classed, anyway, if you multiclass rogue or ranger, you will gain focus a lot faster and it becomes a little more feasible to Ascend soon enough to really make a difference. Because action speed is so worthless in turn based, Time Parasite is not the sexy thing it is in real time, so the only real draw in my mind for a SC cipher is Driving Echoes, which basically makes penetration as a mechanic a nonissue. However, if you are paying attention to gearing and spell choices, penetration isn't as big a deal as all that. Beguiler is interesting as well, because you can basically spam Deception spells to gain focus instead of weapon attacks, at least early in the fight when there are many enemy targets. Once the board clears, they instead gain focus SLOWER because they get a lower total multiplier on their damage. But they are more friendly with caster multiclassing, spending the first couple of rounds maxing out their focus (and throwing around AoE debuffs while they're at it), and then rationing out their focus for the rest of the fight along with spell casts. Psions get a bad rap because their focus generation is slower than you can get from the other options, but it's automatic, and in turn based mode it has the extra benefit that you get your focus gen for the round up-front rather than trickling in per second. They also pair well with casters, particular casters that hang back from the fight (because they lose their focus gen for a round if they get hit). Psions in turn-based get 6 focus per round, and an additional 6 per round at every odd PL. So at max level, a MC psion will get 24 focus each round. Which means that as long as they aren't getting hit, they can spam PL 1 or 2 powers indefinitely, which is something other ciphers can't do (except for Ascended Ascendants receiving SoT cheese). If they are instead spending rounds casting spells from their other class, they can bank up a bunch of focus for dropping bigger spells. A minor note, if you are abusing SoT for endless buffs, you are also in the position of abusing Barring Death's Door, and casting BDD on your psion, extending it with SoT, and leaving him at 1 hit point without healing, will mean that he technically doesn't take damage even if somebody hits him, and so he will not lose his focus generation. All that said, a Beguiler is probably better than a Psion in most situations. I personally don't think Soulblades or vanilla ciphers offer any real advantage compared to these three options. Dumping focus on melee strikes just isn't that great. TL;DR: go Ascendant/Trickster, you'll probably be pretty happy with it. Once you play through and see how things work, you'll be able to judge for yourself what you'd like to try.

I don't think you can romance a creature that would eat your brain, though I would be open to a game ending romance for sure, whoops I fell in love with the assassin trying to kill me ... just saying lol. I am not sure I would want BG3 to go from level 1 to 20 in one campaign either. I read that the prequel campaign goes from 1 to 13 in levels. Why force the higher levels just because it is a video game? Plenty of great enemies you can fight at the lower levels, not to mention dragons and demons really feel unique rather than just another beast my overpowered God basically wipes off the map.

Yeah, this is my view in a nutshell. It's like the correct CRPG immersion dialled in for my taste. I have a gazillionth playthrough in the works right now, and I'm utterly hesitant at even entering Baldur's Gate. Ever since my first playthrough, I always have been. We've heard from Swen that the game will take place in a few sections of the city initially (I wonder for how long, though).

Dex is not quite a dump stat in TB mode because you will lose a significant amount of Stride if you fully tank it. But otherwise it's pretty terrible. They could have made it slightly better if, when you delayed your turn, you decided exactly when you would re-enter the initiative order instead of just going straight to the end. But as it is, if you really do need to interrupt some crucial thing, having an initiative that is too low is just as useless as having one which is too high. 10 dex is fine. In practice, the way to make sure you can interrupt at need is simply to make sure every one of your characters has a ready method of interrupting at will. If their class doesn't provide one, a single point of Arcana will let anybody use Thrust of Tattered Veils scrolls, which are super cheap and will do the job on any opponent except if they put up Spell Reflection. Note that ToTV even works on skeleton mages who are immune to the piercing damage- they take no damage but still get interrupted. Ciphers still work well for ranged. Good weapons are the Red Hand (arquebus), which is still very good even if it isn't the ridiculous monster it is in real time with pause, Scepter for enemies weak against bludgeoning, Hand Mortar/Fire in the Hole (special Blunderbuses you can get from Serafen's starting equip & personal quest) are good, and in RTwP particularly, Rod with the Blast modal enabled is a pretty decent weapon for clustered enemies, so long as it gets sufficient penetration (which Rods are relatively weak at). There's a unique ring that gives +4 ranged ACC and +1 ranged PEN, which on top of Hammering Thoughts gives ciphers reasonable penetration even with the weaker weapon types. There's also a late-game pistol doing Raw damage (with a modal to also do Crush/Corrode with VERY high penetration), which is also pretty awesome in turn-based because the initiative penalty of the modal doesn't matter at all. For a ranged cipher, pure single-classed will work well enough. Multiclassing either rogue or ranger would give good performance at range. Damage-wise Ranger doesn't really take off until Driving Flight though.

Some of this is cleared up with Woedica’s book and the additions to the conversation with Eothas at Ukaizo. According to Woedica, the gods generally put on a big show of presenting differing viewpoints when they are in front of the Watcher, but in fact they are generally on the same page. Her goal is to convince the gods to rally behind her solution of once again directly intervening in the affairs of mortals, but that decision seems to be tabled for now. And the reason that decision seems to be tabled is probably also the reason why no one is freaking out about the Wheel being broken: according to Eothas, the effects of the breaking of the Wheel will not be that noticeable for a generation or so. Eothas has set in motion a massive crisis, but it will take some time before it becomes very obvious. One possible out for the writers in a potential sequel to escalate the conflict without jumping too far ahead in time would be to focus on all the side effects caused by all the souls trapped in the In-between, as that will likely cause massive blights and who knows what else.

Hmm, Octodad is the vision that pops into my mind, reading about this mindflayer romancing speculation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJKtJG7bDME Hmm, how to post a Youtube-vid? My old format doesn't seem to work... And here's a snippet from PCGamer's interview a week ago: 'Vincke suggests the game will be heavily systems-driven and Larian will be creating its own D&D-inspired ruleset. "We'll stay true to our roots, so we'll give players lots of systems and lots of agency to use these systems and try to accomplish what you need to on your personal adventure and your party's adventure. That's not going to change; that's the core of what we're doing. But then there will be an interpretation of D&D, because if you port the core rules—we tried it!—to a videogame, it doesn't work."' Will this be Sword Coast Legends all over again, with a few skill trees and skills on timers? Since that was a pretty huge mistake on their behalf.

Well, a good gamer always prepares for a new challenges. You could for example binge watch some romantic ecchi animes with lots of tenatacles involved, to qualify yourself for such a deep RP experience

its fantasy, I think most of us fantasy about chainmail bikini chicks than coitus with brain eating squids xD

As do I. This is why I hold BG1 in higher regard than BG2. I really liked the scarcity of magical items, and also the whole deal of everything being threatening from the get-go (at least before you realized that you could cheese your way through via ranged weapons, etc.) Swen's statement certainly has me worried.

To be fair to the CIA at least, their assessments were in general a lot more realistic than they are given credit for. But they got end run by what was effectively a parallel intelligence apparatus set up by Cheney, Rumsfeld et alia which was designed with the sole purpose of removing every bit of nuance and equivocation from supplied intelligence about Iraq. When the CIA did believe bad intelligence it was usually a case of scenario fulfillment. And, in the end, it was CIA director Tenet (and, facpov, Powell) who took the fall for the bad evidence despite having tried to get accurate statements made on things like the Yellowcake issue; all the little asteriskroaches doing Cheney and Rumsfeld's bidding went and hid under metaphorical couches. The same was true to an extent with MI6 and GCHQ in Britain. The big issues there were the thesis plagiarisation and the 45 minute claim* both of which were almost certainly political additions. The biggest direct intelligence issue was them ending up circularising the evidence of yellowcake- the US using the Brits running with the story to reinforce their own belief and vice versa. Which is a similar situation to the Iranian limpet mine story: the Brits say it must be true because the US says it must be true, then the US points at British support as evidence they're right. *and lest we forget just how much of a whitewash Hutton was; the 45 minute claim was obviously incorrect and equally obviously manipulated for maximum effect- there really isn't any dispute about it at all- but the only people who got in trouble for it were... the BBC and its reporters who debunked it for making an unprovable sourcing claim.

I'd love it if optional romances were woven into the main plot like the Atton & Kriea storyline for Kotor 2. Done well romance story threads can be amazing, because stories. If they're just going to do something shallow though I'd rather they put the time and resources into something else.

Thing is though: several heads of development studios aren't businessmen and/or managers by heart but were game developers who fell up the career ladder.

I came back to visit the Obsidz board for a change... I’ll try to come back a bit more, maybe. Haven’t done much gaming in the past couple of years. Started working out seriously and painting miniatures (mostly Necromunda). I find it’s a lotmore efficient as stress relief. Really busy in real life these days. Can’t pretty much say what I do in any detail I could accidentally dox myself for the Finns. Litigation with a lot of high profile cases, probably at the top of my career.

Hello! I hope everyone is having a glorious first week of 2019! I'm Brandan Lee. I co-created the Fallout: New Vegas mod Fallout: New California with my partner Rick. A few months ago I missed the only Environment Artist post in the Obsidian jobs listing -- the mod wasn't done yet! Now it is, and all the positions to apply for are Toolset and Code / Engineering related. I can unwrap a mean UV, but that's all witchcraft way beyond my Ki. Being a stickler for following instructions, the application process is to email with the title of the open position as the subject. Are there any hidden handshakes for house elves you can show me? I'd love to come sweep the floors at Obsidian and live under Mikey's desk if there are no art department posts available. Love, Thain.