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I don't think they'll do another kickstarter on this series. PoE sold well. Well enough to finance a sequel. If anything, they will use kickstarter for extra features only like more localized versions or complete voiceover.

I'm currently playing on PotD with a highly optimized tank as my PC and a druid as a custom-made companion. Everything else are story-NPCs. All I can say is that this mode is difficult as ****. Almost every map has a battle that can only be won with a good load of consumables, using all spells and tactical positioning/use of all resources. I'm actually amazed at how balanced PotD is. I never felt like PotD is cheating in any way. All fights were perfectly winable so far with a good strategy and using the landscape to your advantage. But even then you will usually reload several times per map. Obviously, the Adra dragon is nearly unkillable in PotD, but that's how it's meant to be after all. Ironman PotD? I don't see me trying this any time soon, and I call myself an IE veteran. I'd say it's almost impossible to do this without a fully customized party. With an optimized henchmen group, it will still be extremely challenging.

"A cave with three giant bears in it... I should definitely go in there alone."

Publishers publish and developers develop. An indie publishing model with physical goods would have made the whole enterprise a waste of time - it would simply cost too much. You choose the least worst publisher because there's never a perfect one. And they *always* get a healthy cut. It's just the way the business works. Paradox seemed a reasonable fit, and hindsight is a wondrous thing. Obsidian has never done this before. Not many studios like them have. So, as relative neophytes to indie development and distro and crowd-funding I'd say they'd done incredibly well. I'm impressed for one. Again, not against the idea of having a publisher for this game. It's neccessary, as you pointed out. But still, criticism on Paradox performance is justified. Bugs in a game are one thing. Those can usually be fixed pretty fast. A bad localization job or low quality physical backer goods can't.

Yeah that's my go-to solution for now. Especially Magran's Fork is a problem here, as you will likely save/load a lot (with Durance in your party) before entering the boar fight on hard or PotD... Luckily there's a small cottage on the same map.

You might have the bug with the corrupt save files storing too much temporary data (like traps, etc.), bloating up the filesize for your saves. A normal PoE save should be around a megabyte. Check your savegame files if they are significantly larger!

I'd probably use "Oger-Stammesführerin" for the female ogre, simply because the meaning is the same and it doesn't sound as clunky and generic as "Ogeranführerin", which imho also doesn't have the same meaning as "Häuptling".

Well, Obsidian made it very clear they would not have been able to do it without a publisher. Sure thing. But that doesn't change that Paradox delivered a piss-poor performance.

I'm playing a tanky Monk in my PotD playthrough. Stats: 9 / 14 / 8 / 18 / 14 / 15 Skills athletics and lore. Equipped with plate armor and 1h/board (get a weapon with +deflection on your mainhand weapon; as 2nd weapon choice, take something with +accuracy or DR penetration). Select the shield talent that grants you extra deflection early and you have a top-end tank that will tank your party through the entire game alone. I have Eder in my party, but I only use him as a melee damage dealer (equipped with a +range pike) since my PC monk is superior in every possible way. Turns out Eder is a great DD due to his high MIGHT score. Monks are great tanks due to the reactive wound abilities. For abilities, select those that debuff/knock/stun your targets instead of those that are meant for raw damage. Dealing damage isn't your job and your INT will make debuffs last longer. It plays out great in dialogues aswell due to the 14 INT and lore/athletics skills (frequent skill checks in intermissions and dialogues). Paladin is a great PC choice aswell, as it grants you some extra dialogue options! TL:DR: a warrior isn't needed for hard mode. If you don't want to hire a custom NPC, I still recommend at least taking one of the other two tank classes for your PC (Paladin or Monk). About Aloth: he is great if you play and talent him as a buffer/debuffer/CC, not a raw damage dealer. He doesn't have the attributes for high damage output, so it would be a waste to rely on DPS spells too much.

No problem. I'm playing with a Monk as main tank in PotD and had no problem so far. Engagement limit is not really a problem since the AI basicly targets the first-in-sight character anyway.

Not it doesn't. That's the funniest part of all this fuzz. It doesn't actually say that the bed-partner disguised himself as a woman or pretended to be one. They could both have just been straight men to begin with and just drank way too much alcohol. That's why this discussion is so ridicolous and why the transphobia critics on this joke are hilarious.

To be honest, I'm not happy with Paradox getting a big share of the profits. What did Paradox deliver to us that wasn't the work of Obsidian? 1) an overpriced boxed copy (compared to digital distributors that already take their 30% cut! I expected the shelf copy to cost the same as the steam copy since it requires steam anyway, but that's not the case.) 2) a low quality cloth map 3) a horrible, horrible localization job I'm not amused. Obsidian did a good job, Paradox otoh screwed up almost every job they had.

Haha, Tippfehler, sry... Jedes Wort großgeschrieben ist Absicht? Ja, ist im englischen Original auch so. Grammatikalisch ist es falsch, aber scheint so gewollt zu sein. Ist ein stilistisches Mittel für wörtliche Rede von Geistern aller Art.

Weird! I found my copy on day-1 at Media Markt (which mostly has the same sortiment as Saturn).

If you don't have items equipped for the corresponding companions that boost stats, then yes, it's very likely that only the saves change (assuming you have the cloak that boosts those by 5 equipped on one of those chars).

Fortunately, we already gathered almost all the critical information on how to perfectly reproduce almost any of the bugs. This makes it a lot easier for the devs to fix these bugs. I have been programming mods for several games for almost a decade now and I can tell you that most bug reports done by players are next to useless, as they tend to leave out context-critical info. This is fortunately not the case here. A bug report like "My character has more INT that he should have" is virtually useless for a dev, whereas a bug report like "If I equip item A, then get into a fight, drop my endurance below 50%, then kill the enemies, my INT raises permanently by two points. Confirmed happening for all other characters aswell." is basicly winning the lottery.

If this is the case...they are not very good testers. Testers should be testing all possible uses of software. The fact is that they missed major bugs that they should of caught....lets just hope they fix the issues fast and correctly You have no idea about how programming and software QA works, right? But let me explain, just so that we can move on: If you bugtest certain features and elements of your game, you usually bugtest them in isolation for pure functionality, then test only the combinations that have strong cross-references. For example, in case of an inventory system, you check out the basic features: equipping, un-equipping, art changes, etc. ... you don't have the time to test all these routines in every possible combination with each other. You just check the most critical parts and then just assume that the rest works. The Save/Load bug is particulary hard to detect in this case, as it requires multiple conditions to be true at the same time: 1) having the right characters 2) in the right place 3) with the right items 4) and after performing a completely unrelated task (saving and loading) 5) the bugtester actually checks the hero stats afterwards If just one condition is false, the bug doesn't happen or gets by unnoticed. Chances are the bugtester at some point actually did notice that the stats were changed, but couldn't backtrack it to saving and loading in the particular area. This is basicly the same as charging bike theft against unknown: it's extremely unlikely they can track it down if they don't have the critical information (in this case: location sensitive), especially with this very specific set of conditions. It just isn't going to happen. Just like hundreds of players didn't even notice that their stats changed until they almost completed the game (at the same time complaining about it being way too easy on hard mode) it is very likely they encountered this bug in their playtesting, but marked it as "could not reproduce" as they were in the wrong area and moved on. The MMO Archeage had a particular gamebreaking bug (and gamebreaking bugs are even more devestating in online games with a monthly subscription and micro transactions) that only had two conditions to reproduce that were spread silently among players until one player opened his mouth. And even that bug slipped under the radar, simply because without clear instructions to reproduce, it's hard to actually fix a bug in a complicated game. And the bug I'm talking about was not only damaging from a gameplay perspective, but also damaging from a financial perspective, as it basicly allowed players to create an infinite amount of micro-transaction credits in the game. One would think that this is the most critical system for any MMO developer and that they would properly test it for any possible abuse scenario. But this wasn't the case. You just don't have the resources to catch everything. Now again, compare this to the stat bug. This bug has 5(!) conditions to properly reproduce, not just 2.

Haha, Tippfehler, sry... There isn't much to read for the devs. Obsidian doesn't do the localization themselves, it's probably one of Paradox' partners in Germany. And the people who are responsible for the localization should have no problem at all to read our German conversation here. I highly doubt that Paradox will fix those issues. After initial release the product maintenance on games is up to the developer (Obsidian) alone. Localization errors, as strange as it sounds, will usually get fixed by the devs themselves. Chances are they will read this thread and incorporate all these changes and be done with it... which is actually an opportunity for the community to fix some stuff that isn't neccesarily broken, but not optimal.

You overestimate the number of internal beta testers of gaming companies. The team for PoE, especially, wasn't that big considering the very low (compared to AAA games) budget of the game. Considering there were only about roughly one dozen people working on PoE, it's a safe bet that the QA betatesting group consisted of not more than 4 people. It's very likely that they all used drag and drop OR just never loaded in Gilded Vale or Caed Nua (saving alone isn't enough for this bug to happen). Obviously, one would think that it's very likely you will encounter this bug - but this isn't actually true. The bug doesn't happen if, for example, you save inside a house. It also doesn't happen if you don't have the specific characters in your group. For example, saving in Caed Nua is perfectly fine if you don't have Kana in your group. The bug in Gilded Vale would never happen for someone who only plays with custom NPCs or if you just blaze through the content to get as much info out of your playing time (this is how bugtesters work... they don't have time to go into detail at every location).

I just avoid double-clicking inventory items, the temporary stat boost procc items and loading in the companion pickup zones. Not that that is hard to do, considering the game hasn't crashed for me even once, so I feel perfectly fine not saving in the companion cities anyway.

I wouldn't bet on it. I'm pretty sure if we had that, then some internet activists would come out of their rabbitholes to set the boards on fire about how Obsidian is accusing all prostitutes of not using physical contraception.

This makes me wonder who was writing those texts. I mean, the differences in quality are obvious. Some fit into the game just fine while others are extremely over-the-top.

Seriously, do you even know what you are talking about? Germany legalized prostitution because that makes it easier for legislative and executive to control and get the workers (the only real losers in the sex industry gamble) out of illegality. It's the same reason why weed is legal in the netherlands.

So, wait, those texts are written by Obsidian then, right? The backers only provided the general direction? In that case, I am shocked that the general quality of the backer NPC texts differs so much (from Mary-Sue-ish stories to a well-written story about getting out of a depression or stories about prejudice).

There are one or two particle heavy special effects that make the framerate go nuts, though.