tdphys

The hypothesis does not mention the recent addition of affliction immunities, but they are largely a strategical consideration and may fall into the instances mentioned in the fourth paragraph where the player may have to alter their encounter strategy but still proceed with the rote sequence. I have pondered on this issue for a long time now, and I'm thinking of producing a piece that will closely examine this problem, and other problems related to the game's combat and system design and present some feedback and possible solutions that might be of interest for the sequel IF there is any acknowledgement of this issue and intent to try and solve it - and by this I mean intent to design a combat system that is more reactive and requires more tactical diversity from the player. Explanations as to why you agree or disagree and discussing the points I made in the hypothesis would be welcome, thankyou in advance. - I think most of your problems with "rote" combat could be fixed with better encounter design. I found that often times in Od Nua, I'd begin a fight; it would shift a bit in place and then new monsters would join in, making things more dicey, and tactically enjoyable - an alarm system that codified this would go a fair ways in making you adapt rather then "invis-alpha-mopup" repeat and rinse. Other things that would be cool is separating sneak mode and detect trap mode ala IE types, so you either gamble on alphas strike or look for traps ( save scummable, I know ) I've thought engagement a problem for a long time; anybody who doesn't think it's a bad system, I suggest you try playing the game with auto-stop on engagement off. It's impossible to detect and stop engagement attacks from happening without the AI holding your hand. So it's either on or off, and you have to micromanage when you want a character to bypass it. I think movement affecting recharge time isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'd like to see it used to promote movement. One way to do this is to use the current target of an actor as a point of reference; if he moves towards the target, the recharge accelerates. When you click a character, you should see who's targeting him; ( I also think this should be resolve dependent ) . In chasing scenarios, If you've moved a certain distance you could get a speed surge to catch up to kiting enemies. This would allow decisions such as... should I run from the three goblins to take out their mage, knowing they'll get faster attacks as they track me down? In my mind, this is exactly the kind of thinking that opportunity attacks allow in turn based games. You'd even have incentive to stun targeting mobs to enable the positives from your own movement, just as you do for disengagement. Finally, in terms of per encounters... they need to be meaningful enough powers that you have to think when to use them. I usually found with my rogue, I would hold off on an alpha strike until I had debuffed the target enough to maximize my chance. Of course, if encounters are so easy that they're over in a few seconds in "rote" play, then yeah, encounter powers are kind of dumb. The worst ones, though, are powers which do almost nothing but a bit of damage buff or something. My ranger stag never used his "horns" encounter power because it was too painful to do a micro damage to surrounding creeps with an encounter button power; stuff like that should be passive.

Yeah, I guess I disregarded a couple hundred years of history because I wanted that style of writing I mean, Chaucer's nice, but, Dickens is unbeatable...

I like the two stories; Sometimes Paul uses big words that seem cumbersome when he doesn't need to... eg. "extremities" instead of say limbs; But I thought his scene crafting was nice, along with the character tension/development. I like Carrie's brisk visual/dialogue style. Sagani needs a little more vibrancy and depth as a character... Somebody who is driven enough to leave kith and kin for a crazy quest needs some quirks. I don't know, some kind of inner rage ( maybe saw this in her quest... I'd prefer it more prominent) bubbling over, maybe a craving for raw liver she'd do anything for ... I know Carrie's capable of it, cause, well Aloth. I appreciate that Eora isn't meant to be the same kind of pulp Fantasy shtick as Forgotten Realms; but the reality is, in the push for "realism" some of the characters are to underdeveloped/bland; The cool 19th centuryish fantasy world of Eora deserves its corresponding dickensian charicatures. Now, I realize I'm just a hypercritical - fanboy - Pillars is awesome - well worth the time and money. Just want more and better of an already good game.. I'm looking forwards to the new expansion characters, but I'm waiting to buy the expansions together.

Spell timings are really dependent on graze/hit/crit ; so If you try to hit some higher level CC enabled mobs and don't get buffs on... yes them reliably critting you is going to seem overpowered. Come back in 3-4 levels, and use scrolls / spells to buff up.

Thankyou... thankyou... This is marvelous info ... I'd given up on it because my party gets mowed down by the breath weapon.... I didn't realize that you could avoid it by attacking.... tonight I'm making adra dragon soup !! (also, my party is priestless... so yep.. not easy)

and those necessary portions were quite adequate developed in poe and will no doubt be developed in white march. developing the stronghold functions and features more than the critical path required is what folks is complaining 'bout, yes? hire henchmen and build a church and fight off intruders is all optional stuff beyond the scope o' the critical path. the stronghold is a significant feature, even if it is optional. makes sense that the stronghold would appear along the critical path to guarantee that all players became aware o' it, yes? HA! Good Fun! True again, Luckmann, but the Stronghold still feels to me like an unfinished project, a sop tossed to the backers, a token of the strongholds in BG II. Maybe I am being irrational but the place feels dead to me. I tried saying I just wanted to go to Defiance Bay and then spent an hour trying to see if by some chance another path opened. I had no luck. And millions of people spend millions of dollars playing crappy "strongholdish" city builders. I have to admit, 3 playthroughs and I still couldn't resist throwing some cash at the stronghold, just to renovate my digs. The rest on stronghold screen was really nice for bounty hunting. Alot of pillars of eternity was making a decent shot at satisfying stretch goals. I'm amazed at how many they put in. I'm also looking forward to their next game when they can focus on story and design instead of stretch goals and backer *crap*. Getting all that stuff in and still pulling off an amazing metacritic score seems to me an impressive feather in a dev's hat. -- not that that gets them any points on the codex per say

So given the rumors that perception is going back to boosting accuracy, I'd like to propose a change to critical hits that will make choosing per a little more difficult. We all know that boosting accuracy is probably the best way to get better damage... higher percentage of hits over grazes, and crits over hits. (this from back in beta days) graze,hit,crit result in increasing modifiers to base damage, which favors heavier weapons over light; and generally makes per the go-to stat ( when accuracy is involved) My change would be thus: Take the base damage modifier away from critical hits (leave for hit and graze), but allow a critical hit to instead reduce the targeted dr of an enemy by half. I think this would be a more interesting way of overcoming DR; either maxing damage modifiers on heavy weapons (might over per?), or going for more lighter, accurate weapons that could possibly get damage reduction. Thoughts?

K, Just piping up in this thread too, the XP problems are due to the growth in the XP differences per level being too slow: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79514-difficulty-a-graph-of-my-potd-playthrough/?p=1702383

If you keep the xp level progression higher, then you can generally balance for completionists, since once they go up a level, all the subplots they pass do less relative XP at that level. It just lets you fit things in. I totally agree with you about hard levels and meta-gaming, but the design should be like this: to pass a level on easy takes 2 encounters at that level. to pass a level on hard/POTD takes 3-4 encounters at that level ( requiring sidequest xp, bestiary etc) But when you don't increase the required XP per level fast enough, then those encounters 3 levels ago on easy/hard/whatever count for nearly the same as the ones designed for your level, and you can get on the trivial treadmill by milking those all the way to the end of the game -> this is the current problem in Pillars. It's why I played very carefully both times, not to get overleveled and be able to appreciate most parts of the game.

If you're not doing bounties, I don't think current XP is too much. In my playthrough, at the end of Act II, the party was roughly level 9 (about 2/3rds of the way through). I did all quests/tasks I could find, except bounties and only 4+ levels of Od Nua. Act III at L9-11+ does feel quite a bit on the easy side. After finishing Twin Elms content, including some of the relevant companion quests, the party was roughly level 11 (about 1/2 the way through). I then turned back to finish up Od Nua, the bounties and the Champion of Berath quest. Nalrend and his group of ogres was one of the tougher bounties for me. If you hit Twin Elms at L7, I'm actually not sure if there's enough xp to get to L12, as there aren't that many Act III quests/tasks. Yeah, but I don't think the game is meant to be only finishable at level 12. I passed it on hard at level 10 (skipped Raedric cause rollout bugs). So 7-10 seems to be the appropriate act 3 levels, imho. The devs stated before that the game is finishable by only following the main story line. Because of the xp levels growing too slow, deviance from the main path will put you OP for parts of the main story. (most of act 3 ). My 2nd playthrough on POTD, doing raedric (1 and 2), bounties and Od Nua, has me at level 11-12 and I've done none of the act 3 quests yet. I'm stuck at the adra dragon... haven't pushed myself to go by a truckload of adragan traps yet That's a tough fight. I really like that there's a lot of content in the game, with some better XP requirements progression, I think you could enjoy more of it without getting OP too quick.

No, power levels really depend on accuracy and defense levels in this game. Yes, you have more powers at lvl7, but often times (druids, priests, especially) the powers are just stronger/more damaging ones compared to lower level. Most types of buffs/debuffs, which are the most effective way of changing both acc and defense, you can get before lvl7.

No they can't. You aren't overlevelled by the time you leave Defiance Bay. Look at the diagram in the TO. I was about level 7/8 when I completed Def Bay, which I consider intentional, due to chapter 3 and 4 being rather short. Also, I didn't finish the game much later than when I hit max level. The XP is properly balanced now. The encounters are not. How can the XP be balanced? The only balance that i've heard of is reduction of bounty XP. Changing xp rewards still doesn't change that it takes relatively the same amount of XP to gain higher levels; meaning you get over-leveled because there is a ton of side content in the game. On your graph you did a bunch of bounties and od-nua levels before heading to dyrford at level 9; dyrford is part of the act 2 -side level xp gain, since you can get to it before act 3,of course you're overleveled. You should be hitting twin elms at level 7/8 not dyrford. But instead, you're at 11 at twin elms and overleveled. Side quests throw out level-balancing in this game really quick, and it's a function of the bad xp per level design.

Actually, all the pacing problems can be ascribed to the level progression in pillars. Each level requires 1000 xp more then the previous. This is a very slowly growing level progression. Thus from 1 - 5 you have a near doubling of experience from the previous level. it means that the four fights you did to get to level 2 (250 xp*4 = 1000), you need 16 of those to get to level 5 from 4 ( 4000/250 = 16)... IE , level 1 sidequests don't relatively boost your XP at level 5 2: 1000 3: 3000 4: 6000 5: 10000 Now take the 4 fights it took to get to level 6, ( 5000/4 = 1250xp) , you only need 6.4 of those to progress from level 8 to 9 (8000/1250). 6: 15000 7: 21000 8: 28000 9: 36000 Now take the 4 fights it took to get to level 9, ( 8000/4 = 2000xp) , you only need 5.5 of these to get from level 11 to 12. 10:45000 11:55000 12:66000 So if you have a ton of 6 level sidequest content, it's easy to power to level 9, because you the relative xp gain is almost the same, but it's easy to kill that when the power per level (Accuracy gain, etc) in pillars put you ahead so easily. (which I'm a fan of , by the way, an important part of progressing is, well progressing) . Pillars should be balancable, because the power increase per level is fairly significant. I find it only takes 3-4 levels where deadly enemies (crystal eaters? ) become manageable. So it's fairly straightforward to distinguish what an encounter's xp level should be. Unfortunately, you power past most of the content way too rapidly. A more appropriate leveling would be: 1000, 3000, 6000, 10000, 15000, 23000, 35000, 51000, 71000, 103000, 151000, 215000 This was computed with a python script that ensures that the amount of XP to get to the next level is 4x the xp from 4 levels ago, seeded with the first four levels of Pillars. This way, you can have tons of quests at a level, that won't push you too fast into higher levels by xp overgrowth. Of course, you'd need to rebalance to give higher level encounters more XP, but that's the point. (sorry for the highlighting, crossposted from the codex, and screwed things up)

Yeah, but this is highly dependent on what you're hitting, and with what modifiers, which is why I think these dps stats are somewhat misleading.

So I've been looking at the DPS spreadsheet, well done on all the calcs and info guys. One problem I have, is that the affect of damage mods don't really seem to be included, except for the crit mods. I really think a discussion about max weapon damage vs DR in the context of damage modifers needs to be had, since damage mods are fairly plentiful through talents and class abilities and debuffs ( Petrify anyone?). So maybe a run-down of all the different damage mods available, so we can get an idea of the maximum mods available. Then maybe someone could make a table similar to vs DR, except have a single DR, with varying levels of damage mods. ( could do multiple tables for different DR's) Thoughts? Or just correct me and tell me I'm reading the spreadsheet wrong. Thanks

I'm cross posting this from the codex... just for fun Having near finished Pillars for the second time, I wanted to stoke the fire a bit about what Pillars means in regards to the evolution of rtwp. As far as I know, Pillars is the only serious attempt at tactical party based RTWP combat since the old IE games, though I'm sure somebody will disabuse me of that fact. (Actually, I'd be interested in knowing what's out there that's good that I've missed) I don't see myself ever belonging to the cult of perennial BG2 pilgrims... so excuse me for being a bit irreverent, but I'd like to compare a bit of what Pillars brings to rtwp in terms of the evolution of the rtwp combat. I'm also a fan of 4e dnd combat as a turn based tabletop system. IMHO, Sawyerism could be pretty much defined as a conversion of 4e to crpg, adding funky health mechanics and equipment using DR. I wholeheartedly support this effort. I play 5e now for the greater roleplay experience, but it really has nothing on the concise tactical combat of 4e. Oh, and for all those complaints that Pillars isn't a D20 system... just divide your accuracy and deflection by 5 and truncate. My +n bonuses in pillars looks real similar to my 4e character progression. Since I was aware of the large amount of extra XP available in game, my first playthrough skipped Raedric and most of Od Nua. It was on hard. My second playthrough was POTD with expert mode, and focused on gaining xp via bounties, Raedric and Od Nua. Both playthroughs have been done avoiding degenerate tank and spank playstyle and over-levelling. I'm going to give a somewhat critical overview of what positive things POE brings to rtwp as compared to the older games, having avoided the generally declaimed pitfalls experienced by a lot of players. So first off, I enjoyed combat in Pillars at least as much as I did in both IWD's and BG2. In terms of the mechanics of combat, I think Pillars is a richer, more tactical evolution of rtwp. The classes in general all bring some interesting unique active mechanics that require tactical consideration during a fight. To a certain extent, I agree that Pillars suffers from some lack of varied encounter design, decent pathing and AI and clunky engagement mechanics. However, I think I appreciated the encounters more then most who either were OP for most of them or Tank'n'Spanked all the way through. So without further ado, where I think Pillars innovates on old-school IE rtwp, without any ordering whatsoever: #1 consistent, understandable action/reload/recover timing mechanics that correspond with the animation reality in game. ( Obviously the big caveat here is engagement attacks, crappy vfx) One of the aspects of Pillars combat I enjoy is synchronizing buffs/debuffs with other powers that exploit them. Being able to understand the timings helps to do this and feels good when these combos work out. Having the animation correspond to the actual in-game mechanics helps to target and get visual feedback in game. It's nice to be able to read about weapon speeds, armor recovery damping, then actually be able to see what that means through visual feedback. #2 Real-time opponent feedback. Discovering the defensive weakness of enemies and also seeing the debuff/buff durations/impact during combat enables informed tactical play. This could be even better if there were more unique enemies not residing in the bestiary that required in-combat discovery. However, the bestiary was very useful for informing combat tactics before a fight, moreso then as an XP source, and I thought it was well done. Perhaps we could have the bestiary as the *average* stats of a monster, but get deviations, like a particularly large xaurip etc.. #3 Existence of repositioning powers. I really enjoyed using the push spells, place switching powers, etc. This is remniscent of the tactical positioning available in 4e tabletop. If anything, pillars needs more of this, particularly some cool pulls and transporting items/scrolls. I'd like to be able to force transport that skeleton wizard into the middle of my party and bash him down... I'd also like to see that as an AI tactic. #4 Damage being a combination of to-hit defenses with varied DR ratings. Optimizing damage relies alot on understanding and exploiting your ability to debuff an appropriate defense in order to hit an enemy with an attack on its lowest DR rating. Again, this requires understanding the powers /weapons at your command, and then tactically applying them to the battle at hand. #5 Multiple limited active powers to choose for each class. limited resource, whether through per/encounter/rest or more fancy monk and cipher mechanics requires thought and planning... and strategy. For example, I often had my cipher cast pain link on my monk, who was propped up with priest heals to take a ton of damage. #6 Health/Endurance Mechanic Having players get knocked out introduced a whole new stage of combat to me... When you're trying to punch above your level, many times fights come down to a last couple characters vs a few enemies. The loss of a character and their accompanying skills means you have to adapt, and I really like it. In IE games, I hated having a character go down, even with resurrection, it meant I had to pick up all their crap and have resurrection scrolls/spell slots available. (not to mention unresurrectable races.. yechh). Generally it meant a restart from save. However, there are funky times when you run into a place where you don't want to heal a character, or would prefer to have them knocked out. This is especially raw in POTD where if you heal that last bit of endurance up to the bar on your wizard in a tough fight, you know he's going to die. I think the quick fix for this is to incur an immediate max endurance penalty to health when your character is knocked out. In this case, converting those last bits of endurance when death is on the line becomes really important. Now, onto a more critical point of view, hopefully with some useful suggestions: Engangement: Engagement is horrible. I understand that it comes from the desire to convert the notion of adjacency with opportunity attacks into rtwp. Originally I thought it could add something to the game, since opportunity attacks provided some interesting tactics in 4e, but it instead detracts as a weird hard agro mechanic that supports tank n spank. Also, opportunity attacks are impossible to tactically use because engagement attacks generally only go off when weird ai/pathing stuff goes on, because some ai has lost a target and starts moving. You cannot play the game with the engagement ai turned off, because you proc attacks just by going to close to attack an enemy. Engagement is passive and pretty much too overbalanced, making tanking too easy and too available and making most movement in a group a mess of random engagement attacks/weird pathing problems. Engagement is bad because detecting adjacency is ill-posed in continous 2d environment as opposed to discrete tile based combat. I'm convinced that making an equivalent useful measure that's tactically enriching in 2d is actually harder then getting a good pathfinding algorithm. Let's do pathfinding first eh? The simplest solution, in my mind, is to award engagement only when a character has succesfully procced a melee attack (hit or no) against an enemy in range. No multiple engagements, just a single engagement line saying, I'm melee and in range and it's going to hurt you if you run away. You can get an opportunity attack if your currently engaged target leaves range. This covers the "anti-kiting purpose" of engagement, I believe. Thus you choose who you get an opportunity attack on by "targeting". This is well defined in rtwp. I'd suggest that even forced movement should give up an opportunity attack in this case. (where's the fear mechanic that forces an enemy to run away?), leading to combos you can take with other character powers. As for losing the aggro mechanics, this could be replaced by a 4e tactic called "marking" where the tank has a power that causes the target to lose a large amount of accuracy attacking any other target other then the tank itself. Since this power could be limited, you'd have to make tactical considerations, which would make combat *better* and limit some tank n spank. AI should naturally switch targets based on this info ( I think they would as of 1.04), and even if they don't, it will provide some back line support. Movement damping of recovery: Yet another mechanic that doesn't come from the point of interestic tactics, but instead penalizing many things for the sake of one (kiting). This needs to go, or be modified. If you really want to discourage kiting, here's what I think should happen. When a creature is targeted, it's recovery should be slowed if its attacker is moving towards it. When a creature is targeted, and it's running away from it's attacker, its recovery should be slowed. When a creature targets another, and the target is running away, the creature should have its recovery speed and action time increased. When a creature moves towards its target, the creature should have its recovery speed and action time increased. All of these mechanics should be increased/decreased by the difference of the resolve of the two participants. This could allow an interesting mechanic, where if your melee character is ready to strike by the time he gets to his target, he can have a charge bonus or something. Tanks could protect the back line by running towards mobs that have slipped through... let's *incentivize* movement. Weapon balancing: There's a bit of redundancy that happens with the DR system, the fact that each weapon does at least %20ish percent of damage means that large weapons have generally better bypass then light weapons, even those with bonus like stilleto. I understand this is somewhat balanced with action speed, but given that damage modifiers all benefit heavy weapons more then light weapons, there needs to be a change in mechanics. 1. every weapon should have a DT rating and it should be fixed, no percent min damage. 2. Critical hits should be 2*DT (or 3*DT) instead of bonus damage ( okay, I'd be fine with keeping critical hit damage bonus). 3. perception should increase accuracy. Encounter Balancing: 4e was interesting in that there was a lot of powerful DM tools for making varied and cool encounters with lots of tactical variety. Can we port this over? With a combat system this interesting, you can get a ton of ways to make cool encounters. In general, there seemed to be a swarm element to most of combat encounters, I'm assuming this was necessary to overcome engagement. There was very few encounters where the target was one or two elites or a terrible solo creature, generally they were accompanied by reams of trash mobs and supporting characters. That being said, the final fight was pretty good example of a few elite characters versus the party. Thaos needed some better stats before buffing himself. Hard Counters and Immunities: I wasn't a big fan of these in BG2, but I think there's enough of a crafting/scroll/magic system in POE that it could be done without making a single class GODS. I'd like to see multiple immunities to different types of attacks and conditions, with a variety of counters, probably spell scrolls that require some interesting, dangerous to find components, and perhaps some high level counter spells. Maybe some soul engine that crafts arcane veils for fighters. Really, the 1.05 arcane veil is near enough a hard counter, it will be cool when/if firearms actually become its counter. Encounters based on various immunities would require more variety and thought. There was some of this in Pillars, where an enemy had a high freeze DR, but we need more then one immunity to really influence gameplay. Itemization: Yes, this has been beat to death. My chime: quality of equipment should be inherent. Higher qualities and unique weapons should support more, or more powerful enchantments. There should be a few, hard to get items in the game that are meaningful, and which make combat tactics dependent on bringing them to bear on your enemies. Ranged Accuracy dependent on clear line of sight: This might be over-reaching a bit, but one way to avoid tank n spank would be to give accuracy penalties to ranged attacks that clip through your allies. No friendly fire, just optimal targetting requires shooting lanes, which can open up your back lines to more fun ... Pathing Problems: Why is this such a huge problem? I understand pathing is hard, but has there really been so little rtwp since BG2 that we can't get something better then this since early 2000's ? I kind of get the feeling pathing in Pillars is a horrible mishmash of Unity pathing/3d weirdness. It would be cool to get some developer feedback on what the issues are. I'd be interested in joining an effort to support the incline by hacking together some good 2d pathing and ai for rtwp. My brain cycles are on short supply currently, but a nice slim c,c++ rtwp code on github with BSD style licensing could probably help indys and bighouse dev alike. Thanks for reading... eviscerate at your pleasure.

Actually, I was talking about the ranger companion I don't think anybody else is ...

Should be a passive ability, Just sayin.

There's a lot of interesting "what if's" left at the end of the game. 1. If a mortal race can create "immortal beings" using soul energy, then why couldn't there be more of them, perhaps created by some more ancient civilization? Interestingly enough, the beings aren't written as automata, machines , but portrayed as thinking, scheming entities that are capable of self promotion, but somehow are tied to an Ideal. What happens when the Gods make Gods? Is there a limited amount of souls on the wheel? I'm feeling shades of terminator here, soul skynet anyone? 2. Where does the "powers" that exist in Eora come from? Faith, magic, soul-power, psionics... what kind of mechanics drive these powers ( I'm not asking for an answer, I like it when it's not necessarily cut and dried, don't really like Forgotten Realms view). Is it going to be a purely "scientific-passive" system, like the inventions of midichlorians in the star-wars prequels... or is it going to stay a mystic/semi-intelligent view of things. Atheism still needs a creation story, yo.

I don't know....I look at the companion like a mobile extra weapon set rather then a tank... as long as you keep it alive, it's doing decent bonus damage you wouldn't otherwise get. I tried a stag and a bear, the stag seems to do decent damage, but the bear just kept whiffing (missing) all over. The stag power is pretty lame, only does a fraction of damage, and it's a one off. Should be a passive constant IMHO. In a pinch, I'll have the priest cast withdraw on the companion so as not to have it die and debuff my ranger

Damage multipliers are summed and then multiply base damage. --- The boards have called this additive since some backer beta version because previously: Damage multipliers were were all multiplied together with base damage. --- This led to higher then intended damage for classes with multiple damage modifiers. Historically this was called "multiplicative" . I'm quite certain that Pillars is using "additive" in this context.

I'm actually running an estoc-melee ranger, wounding shot/merciless companion, but it would be nice to know how much damage my stag does at base for further talent options.

Does anybody know the base damage of the ranger companions? Thanks... Can't find it anywhere... on the ranger stats sheet it just lists the companions attributes. maybe my google-fu is lacking

I apologize for calling the mod *teenmod* in the sense that everyone thinks this is done to make POE more palatable to teens ( If anything... it would make it less, as pointed out by a lot of posters) This is a personal mod that I did, because it was trivial and added to my own enjoyment. The naming convention came from the absurdity of rating agencies, who I feel would have given a T to the game without the cursing involved, not so I could sell it to teenagers . The following is a purely subjective point of view, (it's mine) , I don't doubt some of you will find it ludicrous or offensive. However, some asked for it, so here we go: Discussion about evil and immorality is healthy and usually an important part of storytelling. Generally this is done with varying levels of abstraction, according to the sensitivities of the audience. I personally find that most of the actual story telling in POE is done in a mature sense... ie, it's not overly visceral or descriptive, and when it is, it's not hard to skim. Things like prostitution, incest, racism, are generally presented in a *mature* sense, not glorified or trivialized, or presented in such detail to be tasteless. Some of my favorite examples of tales of immorality with good/necessary abstractions are classics, for example, referring to the impacts of adultery, like "Anne Karenina". Others like "crime and punishment", include a moment of visceral (the actual axe murder scene), which frankly I skipped, but spend most of the time in an incredible description of the outcome or impact of the evil on the characters. I think a lot of POE fits this mold. Comparatively, It's pretty hard to skim swearing, which I personally find tasteless and regressive (not that I find the people who do it *tasteless and regressive* , okay , maybe some, depends on context ). I know a lot of people like to contrast swearing with some of the immoral acts in game. When I read the swear, I feel like I'm mentally doing it, there's no abstraction, no distance. I understand others don't have problems with swearing, so I'm not lobbying Obisidian to change it. I'm just grateful they left the data open for us to mod it, which was pretty trivial in the case of the text. As for voice-overs, I did figure out how to link the swearing in the text with the voice-overs, but the easy solution is to turn off the voice acting. If there was someone else interested, I could provide the names of the audio files. As for violence. The top down viewpoint abstracts a lot of the violence. I'd prefer less blood splatter, but it's pretty cartoony and I find it more silly then offensive. If it was an easy mod, I'd change it too. I don't play a lot of First person stuff, since it seems a lot of that is to place you as viscerally as possible into the situation. Edit: Replying to the above: yeah a gore filter would make me more liable to buy, but I already did.... woops