NegativeEdge

Huh? What difficulty are you playing at? I reposition quite a lot in DA:I to doge aoe attacks and enemies that can teleport past your tank, to place the tank correctly to absorb maximum ranged damage with with shield block, to aggro enemies correctly, place character so that the Barrier spell hits the most of them, etc. Nightmare. I'm not saying there's no movement at all just that it's not really an integral part of encounters. You can tell they don't want you to move much because your characters movement speed is dramatically reduced when combat begins...for no reason other than that's how they wanted it. And while you can do all the things you mention unfortunately you can also just take 2 mages and spam barrier and war cry/challenge and never die so positioning is a chore and not really required. Whereas it could be the difference between defeat and victory in the IE games and was something you paid attention to a lot.

One thing I've noticed while playing DA:I and was also present in DA:O is how clearly the combat is designed around static characters. Outside of certain abilites you're not supposed to physically move which actually seems kind of odd when you think about how important positioning is. Like your characters in Dragon Age games start walking through molasses when combat is initiated and they draw their weapons and the only reason it's like that is because the designers decided they were going to heavily disincentivise moving around. I defintely prefer IE style where you're just as free to move around in combat as out of it and I hope the melee engagement system doesn't lead to PoEs combat being too static.

Yeah Obsidian definitely were lucky that their reputation for good writing and characterisation survived NWN2s bundle of 90 s counter-culture teenage rebellion references called Qara (actually had to google her name there she's so forgettable) and the evil ranger with black eyeliner along with the single most boring first act in any game ever. It's supposed to have a really bad ending too but I've never been able to finish the game.

All the complaining about DAIs m/kb set up just sorts the boys from the men to be honest, if you can learn to use NWN2s camera and UI then this is no problem. It works really well on m/kb although the tac cam is mostly uneccessary but useful in certain circumstances. Overall the combat is pretty good on Nightmare, better than PEs for sure.

woops double post, nvm, that work of art deserves it.

Hahaha that is amazing.

Level 1 : Fan of Flames, Eldritch AIm, Minolettas missiles and Kalakoths Sunless grasp Level 2 : Rolling Flame, Combusting wounds and Ray of Fire Level 3 : Fireball and Minolettas bounding missiles I picked Scion of Flame and Secrets of Rime as my talents as those two increase burn and freeze damage. Eldritch aim is really good because it's an instant cast and gives +50 Acc, I wanted lots of resolve to get as much use out of that as possible and as it applies to spells my fireballs were coming in at 90+ Acc. On top of that I would have the priest use Dire Blessing which gives a 20% increased crit chance and if I placed the fireball correctly it would scream in and crit everybody it hit. As they were all bunched up around the fighter the small AoE wasn't a problem and honestly I had more problems not hitting the fighter as i didn't have aoe markers on. I had long enough duration on Eldritch Aim to get off two fireballs and then run in to apply Sunless Grasp which can also do insane single target damage if it crits, I've had 150 off that before and then reapply Eldritch and try and deal with anything that's left. Unfortunately I didn't find much use for Rolling Flame because it is extremely likely to clip a party member and for some reason the Acc bonus form Eldritch isn't applied to Ray of Fire (bug perhaps?). Fan of flames can also potentially do a huge amount of damage but due to melee stickiness you're almost guaranteed to hit one of your own guys. Obviously this was a Wizard I made just to try and dish out as much fast and accurate damage as possible at the expense of everything else so not something I would make for a PC but having said that both Int and Con are easy picks for dumppable stats imo. Smaller AoEs just aren't a huge problem and can even be a boon for offensive spellcasters and it doesn't matter how much health, endurance and deflection you have if you're not getting hit.

Been trying this fight out on PoTD. My Wizard after the fight. She killed everybody.

I don't have a preference right now regarding engagement but there are a few things which make me think it will be a difficult thing to implement well. Firstly the process of becoming engaged cancelling a characters orders has to go. Total control over your party is crucial to this kind of gameplay barring status effects or other disabling conditions. When you give a character an instruction it needs to follow that no matter what. There are few things more disruptive and annoying than having your characters doing something you didn't tell them to or failing to do something you did. If I tell my priest to walk over to the fighter and heal him then I need to know that only death is going to stop her doing that. Secondly, with 6 party members a certain amount of automation is needed in a game this long. Nobody wants to micro manage every single encounter but you can't trust the AI to intelligently work around engagement. Just like in NWN2 where you could tell your rogue to disable traps on sight and then watch in horror and disbelief as he runs through a throng of enemies provoking a storm of AoO's to get to the single gas trap behind them because computers are dumb as bricks and it can't see how stupid that is. Can you imagine how bad it would be in PoE if you even tried to automate something simple like "when travelling from point A to B, always skirt around enemy engagement" with this games pathfinding!? edit: I suppose you could think about being engaged as a status effect in itself but that just leads back to problem number 2. Sometimes it would be a good idea to plow through and take the disengaement attack other times it wouldn't and I wouldn't trust an AI to make good decisions like that. Somehow you will also need to communicate to the player that char A is now engaged and not doing what you just ordered anymore, The red arrows kind of work I suppose.

I like the Foley a lot. I always pay close attention to it in games because although subtle I think it adds a lot of texture to the environment. I love the opening door sound, it's weighty and chunky, the footsteps are solid and most importantly looting coins sounds satisfyingly chinkly. I can't really think of any examples I don't like. The tink for menus is elegant, the sliding paper for scrolls is not too thin or short, equipping armour sounds punchy and right. Overall a very good job to whoever did the sound design and It's one of the areas I prefer IWD over the BG games (those footsteps on snow tho!) so Obsidian clearly have a very talented foley artist. A bit late in the day perhaps but I would love to see an update all about sound design because it's cool and interesting.

Ugly green filter when hovering over character model still there. Enormous NPC backer icon still there along with yellow nameplate. I am usually the last person to use the word immersion but holy lol these have to go or at least make it a toggle. Pathing is still complete garbage, most apparent when right clicking and pivoting the party. Performance is worse, micro stuttering in combat. Looks a bit sharper I guess? Disappointing overall. Outside of cosmetic changes (ability icons, targeting indicators) doesn't feel like meaningful progress is being made. Combat is still too fast and chaotic. When is that getting a pass?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/291650/ MINIMUM: OS: Windows XP Processor: 2.6 GHz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Model Shader 3 Compatible Video Card, 512 MB or better Hard Drive: 25 MB available space Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Sound Card

Only thing that comes to mind, and I'm paraphrasing here, but they've said the game will have "The epic scope of Baldur's Gate, The tactical combat of Icewind Dale and the thematically rich storytelling of Planescape: Torment". So yeah, nothing that precludes locks or traps giving XP.

It's telling that you assume I’m excited because I’m expressing disappointment. But there are plenty of people that have inexplicably responded to disappointing news with happiness and are far more excited than me. Why is that? http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/destinys-unintended-critique-consumerism The NewYorker recently wrote this article suggesting that Destiny unwittingly critiques late stage capitalism but they should have written about PoE instead because people here, uniformly rejoicing at the delay, have ascended to the highest possible state of consumerism where things are acquired but not actually consumed, making the people who bought and play Destiny, shooting mindlessly into a cave look like amateurs. After all they are actually playing a game and people here don’t want an actual game called Pillars of Eternity, the game for them is this whole process of anticipation, observation and speculation. A real game would only ruin it because of the “bugs and lack of polish”. Watchdogs was one of the best games ever made until it actually came out and ruined the fun for everyone. Every piece of software ever written has bugs and polish is just a bull**** word. There are thousands of bugs in Baldur's Gate 2 (some of them massive game breakers) that were only fixed with a community fix pack. http://www.gibberlings3.net/bg2fixpack/docs.php . Here's a few thousand that not only made it into the Gold version but also survived some official post release patches. Playing the game was a buggy experience, it still is over a decade later but somehow it was and still is amazing. PoE will also not be the first game in history without a crunch, that's ridiculous, there is always crunch. But the truth is a lot of people don’t want the game to actually be released because then they’ll have to face up to the fact that while nostalgia and hyper capitalism are a heady mix they’re not a kid anymore playing Baldur’s Gate on their Voodoo 3s and the "bugs and lack of polish" they feared is instead the spectre of an empty, meaningless existence stretching out before them called adult life. Sushi, in it’s purest form isn’t eaten, that would be base and vulgar. Instead as a customer you are invited to observe a chef who spent 2 years sweeping floors before he was even allowed to handle a knife and a further 10 years in meticulous and exacting training after which he could begin calling himself a decent sushi chef. You watch the preparation of this food by a skilled artisan and when he has finished, the food is admired and discarded. It distills the whole thing down to its barest, purest essentials, giving you the satisfaction of consuming something without the hassle of actually having to eat and sit there and pretend that you even enjoy food, or eating, or dining in company or anything at all in life that isn't the process of buying and acquiring things, only the joy of consumption matters to you, the hyper-capitalist. This is what Obsidian should do with PoE. Releasing an actual piece of software, at any point, this year, next year, five years from now, will only enrage and disappoint the people rejoicing without reservation at its delay. For Pillars of Eternity to be an authentic success they should continuously delay and then show footage of a complete masterpiece without letting anybody play it and immediately discard it, delete all versions and backups and announce pre-production has begun on PoE 2. The KickStarter money will again flood in. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68876-this-game-looks-great-in-every-way-obsidian-you-rock-de-house/ Some here are either more honest or ahead of the curve and already asking for it.

Skyrim. Funnily enough it had bugs (which it made a virtue of) and no polish. I think it did OK commercially.

Bad call, and to have Paradox be the ones to make the announcement without even a heads-up to the KS backers? definitely raises some questions. Who made the decision? Obsidian or Paradox. How is the further development being funded? because if Paradox are digging into their pockets are they exerting creative control in return and to what extent? KickStarter backers at least should be informed, they have that right. The Witcher 3 is going to sink PoE if you do release early 2015. March is nowhere near a comfortable enough gap and Paradox has it's own single player strategic RPG releasing in the first half of 2015 so PI isn't going to allow Pillars to compete directly with that. Which leaves Summer/Autumn when nobody in their right mind wants to sit indoors playing a 50 hour RPG. Which leaves delaying it to Winter 2015... What was in 2012 a crowd funded IE succesor free of publisher involvement is now a Winter 2014 Paradox press release informing people who gave a different company their money that the game they funded is coming out sometime next year probs dunno lol but it will definitely be polished to a high shine!

This explains the ubiquity of bow wielding enemies in IWD. Obsidian didn't like players kiting in BG so every encounter in IWD has you approaching (as of course you must to continue the story) groups of shadowed goblin and snake archers with +1 arrows hiding behind their tanks and other obstacles. Such encounter design, much tactics. If I have to walk into every enemy group who can sit in a stationary position until the heat death of the universe, giving them positional advantage every single time(no you can't stealth because then you can't detect traps which is another obnoxious, omnipresent enemy advantage), let me kite a motherf*****, if I so choose. That's not degenerative, it's actually more balanced. I'm legit starting to worry about PoEs combat based on what they tried to do with IWD and things that self evidently should be in PoE (targeting reticles etc) but are not. Aside from how they decided to address bow superiority in IWD there are a lot of other things that smack of design philosophies similar to those being used for PoE and the reason something like movement pausing recovery are in. Design approaches that result in thinking that because people abuse resting in BG let's spawn a group of six orc archers right behind the party where the mage is standing so even though she has shield, blur and mage armour she's dead as disco as soon as you unpause. Cool now track back and pay 1400! coin to revive. Why? because I wanted to rest once and that would be unbalanced? it doesn't even solve any perceived problem unless you're going to enforce a single rolling save that gets deleted on party death because I'll just re-load and hope the RNG doesn't screw me again. Spellcasters start to become overpowered mid to late game? OK fine I agree with that and enemies should definitely get mages with good spells because those fights own. What doesn't own though is some half invisible guy who can cast 3 fireballs before I've even seen the bastard and has subsequently wiped half my party because every time I try to get my vita mortis carrion on he drops another fireball on my priest and my goddamned dwarf tank is stuck on geometry again because thanks to IE pathfinding he couldn't find his own arse if it had a bell on it. Traps not very scary in BG? Lets make the suckers poison and confuse the hapless sod who triggers it because you literally just took the thief off trap scouting duties because my god that is tedious and now the fighter is shooting arrows into the druids face and interrupting her every time she tries to cure the poison that's killing him where he stands. I mean I was laughing but c'mon. Anyway my point is this: I think the reason that movement pausing recovery is in PoE is that on paper, divorced from the reality of playing a RTwP game with pathing so bad that characters cant take two steps to the left without making a Broadway show out of it, It looks like a cool and good thing that challenges degeneracy. But It's not and players should be able to kite because who cares if they want a massive slice of Gorgonzola with their Pillars? does somebody at Obsidian HQ shed a single tear every time I stand offscreen and drop enough Cloudkills to kill God on Sarevoks unmoving, idiot head? Why does it matter in a single player RPG?

Even the bloody RPG Codex has threads on DA:I and TW3. I'm sure there are a lot of people there that would argue robustly and probably convincingly that DA:I at least is not going to be much of an RPG but they still have a thread. They allow that these games exist in the same genre and appeal to similar people. They do not have threads for Alien Isolation or Borderlands though because they clearly exist in different genres.

It is absolutely competing directly with DA:I and TW3, They're all going straight into the RPG category regardless of whether you think they have any equivalency. This is supposed to be the foundation of a new IP, If it gets delayed to Summer next year people will start attaching the words 'troubled development' to it. Not releasing this year will hurt the game immensely.

There's a pretty small window that's ideal for a release; Long enough after DA:I to be out from under its shadow but before the Witcher 3 begins its marketing blitz in earnest. Mid to late December is where they are hopefully aiming. Ideally Pillars would actually come out before Dragon Age but given that's 6 weeks away it seems extremely unlikely, but there's no way around the fact that those behemoths are going to have a big impact and releasing after both is going to draw comparisons that will not be favourable at all for PoE. All you hear at pre release presentations now is devs saying 'see that mountain? you can climb it!'. Even the new frickin Zelda game has this and its all thanks to Skyrim setting a new paradigm in 2011. DA:I and TW3 both have the potential to do something similar and PoE does not have any mountains. It has to be Winter this year. Summer 2015 is too late. It's not going to look like a faithful, spiritual successor to a much loved game in a dead genre in Summer 2015, it's going to look antiquated and anachronistic. People are going to say 'didn't I hear about this six months ago, what happened? I guess bugs and Obsidian amirite?'. But... seeing as though we don't have a release date and Feargus promised one by this time and judging by the glacial rate at which the beta is improving a delay looks more and more likely.

No you haven't.

I think one important lesson from Wasteland 2 is that extended early access not only severely blunts release sales but also doesn't appear to have a significant effect on the final quality of the game. I've been playing WL2 and am pretty amazed at how low budget and amateurish it all feels, looks and plays and this is after 8 months of EA? PoE beta is already leagues ahead combat funkiness notwithstanding. So don't put the game on early access and related to this; meet the Winter release deadline. I see a lot of people arguing for the need to delay the game as if giving a game a longer gestation period automatically results in a better game. It doesn't. Missing the often and emphatically (by Feargus) stated release date means the project has gone awry in a way that an extra 3 or 6 months development time probably won't remedy. It also dilutes the hard earned convention and press attention they have built in the last few months and makes the studio look unprofessional.

A lot of the small things in the (BioWare) IE games makes you realise how much care and attention went into them. Such a small thing like this is only noticeable by its absence but when it is absent it has a disproportionate effect. Much like the combat ready pulse animations that I never paid much attention to in BG 1 or 2 but as soon as I played IceWind Dale 2 was immediately struck by how inactive my characters seemed in combat.

Hy Pillars of eternity Team So, well the same question again, as it has been almost a month and the newest Backer-Update has been out on 19.09: When will we be albe to get the FIRST linux and OSX Backer Beta? A Bit more information on development status on this behalf would realy be appreciated thanks in advance There was no update on the 19th, There has only been one update which was on the 3rd of Sept.