Fiaryn

Tekehu was the stand out for me. He in many ways out Eder'd Eder. On the surface he's nothing but a self obsessed hedonist, but whenever anything of significance is going on he gives away who he really is: a genuinely caring person with a big heart. From his outrage at the conditions of the Roparu and willingness to suggest whatever means necessary to alleviate their suffering, to his honest and well meaning efforts to understand Pallegina's childhood trauma, Tekehu is just a straight up good person. Maia is the sort of inverse of Tekehu. On the surface she's easily to like, quick to crack a joke. Friendly and funny. She is, however, in words and deeds an enthusiastic goose stepping fascist and hella racist. You cannot take her anywhere without her singing the praises of how great colonialism is and how the savages have no hope of bettering themselves without being subjugated first (and, of course, their resources conveniently plundered to fuel imperial ambitions elsewhere). She's legitimately a kind of terrible person, though her quests can soften that.

I don't know how to tell you this man but developers are not Mass Effect omnigel slathered on random objects interchangeably. The people generating art assets for DLC areas are not the people handling bug fixes. That DLC would be happening post-release was determined back in the kickstarter ages ago. This is neither odd nor unnerving.

Every ending except "**** this I'm out" and "side with the Huana" will make you lose a minimum of one companion. I think it's just the Principi ending where Pallegina gets sent to her death.

For most of Kana's endings, I can't imagine he would mind you siding against the Royal Deadfire Company. In his progressive/eccentric endings he'd probably prefer you did side against them.

I don't mind choices. I do mind where everyone is pretty rotten. One doesn't have to play "Mega Jesus" to want that. Consider situations like this a good opportunity to ask yourself what you really believe in and where your actual values lie.

You say that like it's a good thing. --- One of things I liked about PoE I is that there were a couple of factions that, while they had warts, could be seen 'good', especially if one prodded them in the right direction. Hell, even the bastard faction had one fairly decent option. If all the factions are more warts than not (to put it mildly), that really doesn't appeal to me personally. After all, I want to deal with Real Life, I'll stick my head outside the door. Basically I want a faction that I can actually want to see succeed, not where I swallow my bile and look the other way. I do think it's a good thing, yeah. There's no shortage of RPGs wherein your choices consist of "will you be Mega Jesus or Ultra Satan? Choose, but choose wisely...", it is refreshing to have some real choices now and again. Real choices means having to make a stand on uneven ground, and not being able to be sure that everything will turn out.

The D&D Wizards you're thinking of are grossly overpowered. They felt good because they were grossly overpowered. The reason PoE Wizard does not feel as good to you is because it is not God King Of All Creation, it's simply a very effective class at it's particular niche, which is mostly crowd control.

The one saving grace is that the members of their lowest caste are guaranteed to be reborn into a higher caste in the next life. If you think about it long-term (in which souls are cycling from caste to caste and every soul gets to inhabit all statuses multiple times), it actually makes a weird kind of sense. Every culture in POE has its downtrodden, but only the Huana guarantee that theirs is reborn into a better station. How (or if) they're able to actually manipulate the wheel in that way, I have no idea. sounds like traditional "opiate of the masses" sales pitch for oppressive cultures and/or regimes to be using organized religions to maintain order. promise o' reward in the next life helps keep the populace placid. HA! Good Fun! Except in POE reincarnation is a confirmed reality as opposed to a dogmatic belief. We can also probably assume that in a world with watchers/animancers/awakened, the Huana reincarnation mechanic of rotating castes has probably been confirmed to some degree. I think a lot of people are looking at it the way we look at caste systems irl, which are entirely socially constructed. In POE it's part social engineering, part metaphysics. I'm not *for* the Huana caste system or anything, I'm just saying it's more nuanced than at first glance. No, we cannot safely assume that. Animancy being openly endorsed is a very new thing, and studying souls is still not well tolerated in most cultures. We already had one example of a culture with beliefs regarding reincarnation that turned out to be ENTIRELY wrong (the Pale Elves in Rymrgand's Temple in PoE1), why would this be any different? Animancy and the mechanics of the soul is mostly used in these games as a metaphor for medical discoveries in the Renaissance/Early Modern period and the demystification of the human body, the Huana are quite likely entirely wrong in their beliefs.

Your companions could not possibly know in advance some of the **** the factions ask you to do. It's only natural they'd object when their personal values feel stretched to their limit, not necessarily before.

The factions are quite well done in this game. None of them are perfect or even close to it, none of them possess anachronistic secular humanist 21st century values or beliefs to make the player feel better, they are very much behaving like the early modern era proto-nation states that they (mostly) are. None of them correlate 1:1 to any specific real world culture, but they all clearly show evidence that the writers have done some historical research and know how human beings of the period behaved. The Huana are the natives, it's their home, but their caste system is legitimately monstrous and we have no evidence whatsoever that their beliefs about the Roparu being reborn as higher caste people is anything more than a post-facto rationalization. Especially given that studying the soul was, up until VERY recently, taboo. Nehetaka in many ways reminds me of some kind of polynesian Tenochtitlan, a central city-state to which the rest of the region owes (grudging, as the Storm Speaker in the opening shows) quasi-fealty. Rauatai is technologically and scientifically progressive, but they're also explicitly an imperialist ethnostate run by a political faction that ardently believes in Aumaua (specifically Rauataian Aumaua) racial supremacy. They remind me a great deal of early imperialist Japan. The Vailian Republics lack a race theory ideology, and are way more hands off than Rauatai but the flip side to that is that they do practice slavery. They don't seem to be practicing industrialized chattel slavery, yet, but if they go down that road that kind of thing tends to produce racist ideologies as a matter of necessity so that anyone involved can sleep at night. There's real reason to fear for the future of the Republics. None of these are good people by any modern standard. They're all acting in what they perceive to be the material interests of their respective nation, nothing more nothing less. It feels real and human.

Like I'm fond of Pallegina as a character, I said "dang" when I found out she wasn't romanceable because I think she's a cool person but I think that's kinda the extent of my feelings on the subject. She's a lady with a lot of work to do, and a LOT of baggage. It's not entirely a surprise.

PoE1 is fairly dry, and lacks the bombast that people have come to expect in RPGs from Bioware RPGs. It has a **** load of text, in no small part due to Avellone's characters being brick walls of absurdly dense prose (that is not a compliment). It's not hard to see why people would be put off, even as a fan.

This thread has made me wonder if I should regret defending fans of romances in RPGs as not-necessarily-crazy-people.

Sometimes you're just not their type and that's okay. Sorry, but that argument doesn't fly in a game where your watcher can literally have any personality. Personality is not enough, despite what our fondest wishest might tell us. Sometimes "not being someone's type" can involve intrinsic characteristics you can't change. Like being a wandering murderhobo who attracts natural disasters, speaks with ghosts, and could conceivably go barking mad at any moment.

Sometimes you're just not their type and that's okay. omg, what type? watcher type? cos the watcher can be literally any type Remember how in KOTOR 2 Mira says "you're weird, old enough to be my dad, and not my type"? I think it's fair that not everyone is into wandering murderhobos who see dead people.

Sometimes you're just not their type and that's okay.

I think they've got a reasonable amount of depth. Pallegina and Xoti in particular are interesting because they're both fundamentally "good" people, but still have a lot of ill will because of specific beliefs instead of "well I guess you're chaotic good and I'm lawful evil so we have to hate each other" or some such D&D nonsense.

Y...yes. That's the only possible explanation, you nailed it chief. We've got a real psychologist on our hands here!

But... you aren't being responsible. You're dragging it off into danger, away from home, where it will likely die. Selling it as a slave or sacrifice would also be like any other thing you could do in the game, and I can think of much worse and less appropriate 'unique' things that would be different for the sake of difference. @Fiaryn- Great, I got that. I'm asking what the appeal of the characterization of 'child thief' is and why RPing child endangerment is being portrayed as a positive. Like you're a god of war or something... I don't mean to alarm anyone, but human beings do not always act in a way to produce 100% ethically utilitarian outcomes beep boop They act on emotional impulses, cultural biases, they rationalize said impulses after the fact and then try to make the best of it. Roleplaying does not begin and end with finding a way to play a character who does the "Right" thing in all circumstances. For example, did you know that a lot of medieval and classical era military leaders led from the front despite that being a dumbassed thing to do by any practical, objective measure? Crazy, I know.

I'm hoping they're mistaken. It seems strange to me because you'd think characters you have a pre-existing history with would make for more believable romances.

All party members have multiple class options, friend. You don't need to not be a Priest to romance Xoti without causing optimization inconvenience, because when you recruit Xoti you can elect to have her be a Priest, a Monk, or a Priest/Monk. She has unique subclasses for both options. All companions have three class combination options that fit their given story/background/demeanor/etc.

It's an interesting opportunity for characterization of the Watcher, and an additional source of possible character motivations when interacting with quests. In a word, roleplaying.

Man these Pallegina complaints are uncomfortably reminiscent of "smile more" comments directed towards women. And especially women of color. The idea of calling her ugly is laughable, she has extremely idealized features and literally flawless skin.

Last I heard, Pallegina is Brotherhood of Five Suns mechanically regardless of whether or not she's working as a Kind Wayfarer. The reason for that is: Paladins draw power from ideological zeal. Even if Pallegina is kicked out of the brotherhood, that's them abandoning her not the other way around.

It's kind of the opposite, actually. Multiclassing in Deadfire isn't really about versatility at all. Because you only get +1 ability per level up, and +1 for each class when reaching a new power level, you can't possibly fully explore the options in both classes, which means you have to be very selective and focus on what synergizes. If anything, pure classes are the ones who can become truly versatile by focusing all their ability points into a single class' tree.