Zwiebelchen

Camp material is limited to 4 on medium game setting and 2 on hard or PotD.

... wait ... is that ... Katara? https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hrV2NLG64Sc/VRPMZqpg-5I/AAAAAAAAD74/izuVzH667T8/w210-h330-no/05_lg.png

Yeah monk is very unintuitive. It's weird to see a monk in plate armor and weapon+shield. Then again, I like that PoE twists class expectations a bit... My build is mostly pure tank (because I'm playing PotD): High PER and RES (for defense bonuses), some CON (extra endurance) and INT (debuff duration and dialogue choices), only 10 MGT and DEX (because damage is more or less the only thing that you don't need when tanking). Plus, monk is extremely reactive due to wound mechanics. The harder the difficulty setting of the game (more incoming damage = wounds), the stronger your monk.

I'd say that a game that scores a 90+ score on metacritic can't be that ****ty. You are essentially what is the problem with metacritic: haters and fanboys posting extreme ratings like 10/10 or 0/10 even though the game was actually somewhere inbetween.

... basicly all 3D games produced after 2005. Skyrim had great graphics. It is beyond me why the characters look so uncanny-valley-ish.

Absolutely! I'm just saying that Min/Maxing is pretty much required in order to succeed in PotD right now. It's insane how hard this mode is.

You can also try to force AA settings on your graphics card for PoE. Both Nvidia and ATI cards have a control panel that allows overriding hardware AA (don't use the default "use application settings" and try out manually what works best).

Both are extremely strong classes right now and a great choice for your PC. However, if you want to play on PotD, I recommend taking a tank class for your PC, simply because the NPC companions are not Min/Maxed and won't take a lot of punishment before going down.

The metascore might matter for a 10$ indie game, but for anything above 40$, I'd say people usually read some reviews before clicking purchase.

Because science can not be done when you are in a barn, listening to country music and watching your kids do the line dance while you stroke your shotgun in the swing chair.

This is a bold assumption. Have you considered that a metacritic score of 90 or more means that it is a generally good game? I just fail to see how metacritic should affect anything. Metacritic scores high points on good games. It's no surprise good games sell well? If a game is rated 85 or lower, it's mostly for niché audiences so it's no surprise those games sell less, simply because there will be more people that score it low based on their genre-prejudice. Basicly, sales affect metacritic scores, not the other way round. Also: it's a logarithmic scale. Even at a metacritic score of 95, sold copies can vary between 200.000 and over 10 millions! This is a factor 50. Just because the variance is even larger on lower scores doesn't mean there's any perceivable correlation to be seen here (other than: good games will sell well and receive good scores). There's even a game with a 65 rating that sold almost 10 million copies there...

In the meantime, just rename the portrait files to change images.

Seriously PotD is meant for those completionists that know all the underlying gameplay mechanics AND take their time to do all the quests. If you started your game without feeling confident enough about this and then rushed story content, then it's your own fault.

Bump for visibility. The combat log and item names are extremely immersion-breaking and will certainly cause point-deductions in reviews if not fixed ASAP! The other stuff is lower priority but this is urgent!

I think the dialogues or anything that was translated by a real human being is decent. However, everything game-system related is an utter mess and looks like google-translate was in the works. Also, the flavour texts are hit-or-miss. At least half of them have a faulty color coding or wrong quotation marks. I made a post about this here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72163-the-german-localization-is-a-mess/ Come on, germany is one of the biggest gaming markets in the world. This is just embarassing! Even BG: EE did a better job on their localization and this one was done by fans, not by paid translators.

Not helpful. Also, this isn't an issue with ironman, all three of my saves do this. Yeah but at least you can decide to avoid the place until fixed if you have a backup save somewhere.

You need a well-rounded group and a lot of Min/maxing for PotD. For my PotD playthrough, I selected a monk as my PC (equipped in heavy armor and shield). This is perfect because the monk class is highly reactive and being damaged increases your DPS. So the increased difficulty of PotD actually also boosts the effectiveness of my PC. Pushed Perception to 17-18, added some low Resolve (12-13), then distributed the last points to Con, Dex and Int for dialogue choices. Reduced Might to 8, simply because it's meant as a pure tank build anyway and heavy wound stacking will take care of most of my DPS needs. I had no problem getting through the opening dungeon or anything to gilded vale. Just had to reload once (damn spiders!). When getting to the first Inn, hire at least one or two custom adventurers, as the named NPCs have only sub-par attribute and skill selections. I selected a priest and a druid. Good weapons of choice for the PC are anything that gives +accuracy or the +deflection hatchet. I almost take no damage at all with a hatchet equipped.

You can always just swap the portrait image filenames in your portraits folder. All the portraits (even the default ones and the ones for NPCs) are externalized.

It's a balancing decision. If you could freely select who can talk to the NPC, you could basicly just get rid of the skills in general, as you will always have someone with the appropriate skill in your party. It's fine the way it is, imho. At least it feels like your PC skill choice really matters in the game. I just wish there were more mechanics or survival checks in dialogues. So far, the only skills worth getting for the PC are athletics and lore, as those have the most dialogue choices.

If all localizations are as terrible as the german one, the game must be insanely good, considering I would easily take 2 points away just for the crappy translation job. :/ http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72163-the-german-localization-is-a-mess/ So in it's current state, I'd personally give it 88/100 ... which is a great rating and still a must-have purchase for every RPG-nerd, but I'd score it nowhere near as high as most professional reviews so far. I think there's a lot of nostalgia bias here... Fun fact: I feel that for once the user score on metacritic is more representative than the professional review score atm.

Nope. Only the PC will do the talk, hence why you should select your skills with the dialogues in mind (lore!). For the scripted intermissions, it's a different story.

Dude, do you know what "Variance" means in statistics? Basicly, this chart shows that there is literally no relation between metacritic scores and sales.

And this, folks, is why you never play Ironman on your first game.

I got to say that PotD, so far, looks pretty playable. It's painfully hard, but it's never been unfair (as far as I played). Obviously you aren't meant to go into the bears cave or wolf den with just your main character alone. If you accept that sometimes you have to leave something out until you're stronger (which is awesome, btw! I'm so sick of linear streamlined casual games scaling everything to absurdity), PotD is pretty damn playable.

The title says it all. But before I go on a rant and point out the most critical issues (that need to be adressed ASAP; as there is press looking at this game right now and germany is a big gaming market), let me just tell you that the dialogues themselves are acceptable. No, really, every contextual text block has been decently translated. However, everything that doesn't have a context, in other words: system messages and gameplay elements look like horrible, horrible google translations. Here are the worst offenders: Character attributes 'Constitution' has a weird translation. Just use "Konstitution" and be done with it. 'Dexterity' was translated with "Gewandheit". Use "Geschicklichkeit" instead. This is btw also what every single dictionary suggests first; why go for the least likely translation? Combat log Every friggin' damage text! The words "Piercing damage", "crushing damage", etc. were translated as verbs, not nouns! This leads to weird gibberish like: "Haut Schaden" which would, translated back to english mean: "crushes/skins damage" So, again, here's how it should look like: "Piercing" --> "Stich" "Crushing" --> "Wucht" "Slashing" --> "Hieb" Item names This is by far the worst issue: Every second item in the game has wrong string references for it's name. A Hunting bow has the name "Intellekt +2" instead of "Hunting Bow". Yes, I'm not making that up. This is confusing as hell for new players, as they will assume the item is enchanted with +attribute. Fix this asap please! Flavour texts Every second flavour text has wrong formatting. Grey and white are completely mixed up most of the time. Very often the grey for a flavour text mixes up with the white for direct speech, making it extremely hard to read as the double quotes imply something is direct speech, but it's marked as a flavour text and vice versa. Also, there's plenty of double quotes missing completely. This is especially offending at the beginning of the game, where almost every single dialogue has loads of flavour text. Fortunately, it getting better at later points in the game when the flavour text gets more scarce (I never liked it anyway ... I wish Obsidian would go back to BG-style direct speech only). Dialogue-voiceover disparity I know that this was a budget decision, but it's extremely confusing to read german dialogue (which you, as a german, will understand) and listen to english voiceover at the same time (which, again, most germans will understand aswell). This creates an enormous disconnect between hearing and seeing, which makes dialogue really hard to understand. I have absolutely no trouble watching japanese anime with subtitles (as I don't speak japanese), but watching english with subtitles is confusing as hell, as you understand both and your brain can not concentrate on one of the perceived languages completely, mixing things up, not understanding anything. I mostly couldn't read anything until the voiceover was done playing. It's like someone constantly screaming in your ears when you are trying to read a book. It doesn't work (Imho, for a 45€ off-the-shelf game, not having german voiceovers is unacceptable, but that's another story). At least give us an option to disable the english voiceover in dialogues when activating the localization! I tried decreasing the speech volume but that also disables voiceovers that I don't want removed (outside of dialogues). I ended up switching back to english, as the german localization was painful in every imaginable way. Sometimes even outright unplayable (system messages are virtually unreadable). Please fix this ASAP!