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PrimeHydra

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About PrimeHydra

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    (4) Theurgist
    (4) Theurgist

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  1. I don't think we need to worry about Deadfire throwing away semi-open progression for sandbox-style "open world" absolutism. While I can handle a certain amount of freedom, you are right that "open world" is overly fetishized and a bit at odds with coherent, compelling narrative. For those who would rather write their own story, good for them, but I don't think PoE is that kind of series. It places a premium on unfolding a central tale rather than making it one of many equally valid time sucks, differing only in that it can cause the game to "finish".
  2. Wish I could play Dragonfall and friends, but they crash on my PC. I loved all the Hero's Quest (Quest for Glory) games so I take your word for it that Heroine's Quest is awesome. I just like PoE the most out of the stuff I've played. It feels closest to BG2 for me, which is my fave RPG of all time. One killer feature that could set Deadfire apart is the customizable AI scripting. The scripts in PoE are very rudimentary, mainly good for making sure your guys don't stand around once their target is gone. But scripting, combined with Real Time combat...with a little experimentation, you could set up a smart team and watch them go to work, pausing only to issue exceptions to your general strategy. Then RTwP helps the flow of the game rather than hindering it. In many fights on high difficulty, I pause so much it may as well be turn-based.
  3. Coming late to this discussion, I really hope they knock Deadfire out of the park. D:OS2 sets a high bar, but Obsidian are more than capable of clearing it. Personally, I enjoyed the first D:OS but have no desire to play the sequel; the UI is too finicky and involved for my taste, while the writing and art just didn't do it for me. Bright/colorful/silly just isn't my thing. While the combat and interactivity lured me through the entire first game, the thought of playing another seems like a chore. Have some irrational anxiety about D:OS2's glowing reviews, because I want Pillars to remain the king of the RPG renaissance. Can they win the crown back from Larian? I mean Jeez, 10/10 on Gamespot is like...no pressure. On the other hand, perhaps one RPG doing well is a boon to all of them, and competition will result in better games for years to come. You'd think a game like D:OS2 was the final word on RPGs from some of the reviews, but the revival is just getting started.
  4. Action queuing could use better feedback for sure. Although we can queue actions with Shift + click, there's no indication of what's in the queue. A little row of queued action icons would be nice, with the ability to remove or reorder them.
  5. Working my way through a tactical battle in the first game, and I noticed something: The auto-pause options in PoE I don't cover every situation where characters are twiddling their thumbs. For instance, when you're done quaffing a potion. Rather than set lots of options for specific things that tend to leave your character idle, why not auto-pause on the idle state itself? As soon as your character has the [...] over their heads, auto-pause. Then I can rest assured Aloth isn't lollygagging after nipping from his purple flask. It also covers "xaurip gibbed" and "finished moving out of the way of a flaming dragon belch".
  6. It's still mine. Much as I love Pillars, and Divinity: Original Sin, nothing has surpassed BG2 for me. What did it for you? Because I want to play it!
  7. Thanks all--some excellent points that I hadn't considered. Perhaps the bigger issue isn't sequencing, but leveling and scaling. If my the WM cap were, say, 18 and not 16, and the WM 2 content were a bit more challenging--I'm breezing through it on highest difficulty, and chose High-Level Scaling--I'd probably be more motivated to finish the game
  8. Hi Obsidian, Super excited for Deadfire. It looks amazing. Congrats on your E3 showing. I'm currently playing through Pillars with both expansions. What took me so long? Having resolved the major conflict, I was kind of meh on exploring chapters "4a" and "4b" of a book I'd already read. A quasi-sequel would have seen me loading up the White March immediately, to pick up where I left off. I'm glad I took the plunge; the expansions are great fun, but they may have been better served up like other games do it: Following the main game rather than alongside it. Now, it's awesome to add a major area or two to the main game, the way Throne of Baal added Watcher's Keep, accessible early on. Durgan's Battery and the Yenwood Field were great examples of this. I just would have preferred White March to follow the main storyline, with little risk of maxing out my characters before completing it. I'm currently level 16 all around, just getting started on White March Part 2, and I've only done a few bounties. Please consider setting Deadfire's expansions after the original story, allowing us to, say, pick up an auto-save from when we finished the game. Then we can carry on fresh, leveling potential ready for the raised cap, without feeling like we'd already reached godlike status and also retrace our footsteps. I actually might wait until the expansions land so I only need to play through the game once to see everything. Hey, I don't have as much free time as I used to! These games are huge. Thanks for reading. Bring on the pirates!
  9. Congrats on 100 updates! Pillars has been an absolute smash, and I've loved playing through it. You guys have earned your beers. I do wish you'd released the expansion in a single go, rather than in two parts. Not because I have to buy two expansions, but because I'd rather play through the entire game again once ALL of the side content has been released. The length of the main game simply dwarfs the expansions, so there'd be too much repetition. That's why I'm holding off (hard as it is)! Looking forward to returning to Eora once it's complete! (At least, until the sequel...please, please...)
  10. I'm confused about Trial of Iron in the new update. It says that "loading a game causes a save to happen." Previously, we couldn't load a savegame in Trial of Iron while ingame at all. We had to quit and then load the save game. Should it have been worded _leaving_ a game now causes a save to happen? In other words, if we quit to main screen or Alt + F4, it now saves the game (even during combat)? Or is it simply a booby trap replacing the non-functional Load button?
  11. Nice changes! I'm a bit confused on this one, though: Do you mean "Leaving a game"? Previously you couldn't load a game at all during Trial of Iron; you could only quit. In other words, does this prevent players from quitting (via Exit or Alt+F4) and then reloading their game, by saving the game when they do that? Uh oh!
  12. Your newer ones are probably more useful--but the original one takes me right back to 1998, in a good way! At any rate, I hope OBSIDZ considers separating per-day from per-encounter abilities and spells like your interface so nicely does.,
  13. I think that's how it'll play out, too--only I'm not sure you'll need to even give a basic amount of any given skill to each character. This is because most skill checks are per-character rather than per party, so to unlock the most content you'll want a team of hyper-specialists. It would be more interesting IMO if you could benefit from having a) more than one character focusing in a specific skill--like how having a party of all Fighters is viable. b) a reason to have "jack of all trades" characters or at least a reason to split into two or three skills. Maybe this will be more appealing for players who want to go through solo, or with fewer characters in their party? As it stands, it seems the default for most people is going to be "this little piggy does Mechanics, this little piggy knows Lore". It works, it's just--kind of uninteresting. One idea is to have checks that take into account your party's total score in a particular skill. This increases replay value--maybe you need an army of musclemen to join the Fight Club side area. Or perhaps it takes multiple mechanics to disarm a particularly devious trap, or to crack the penultimate safe. Spreading your skill investment across toons could give you another way to reach these goals. So rather than acting on the maximum of skills among your characters, which encourages maxing by definition, the game would look at your total--adjusting the formula if necessary to avoid "must-have" configurations, one-point wonders and other loopholes. With the right tuning, such a system could award specialists, generalists, and combinations thereof. No particular party would be able to access all of the content in any one playthrough, which is kind of the definition of replayability.
  14. I like the separation of spells into per-encounter and per-day rows. Other than that I actually prefer your OP version because it's more balanced (the buttons on the left balance the portraits on the right, whereas the latest iteration feels a little too "right-heavy"). That's a nitpick though, this is some really nice work.
  15. I'm very excited for the PoE release, but one thing has me a little worried: Skill points. Will there any incentive not to max one skill per character? Won't buying, say, five or ten points each level-up be mainly a matter of "clickclickclick" on the same arrow for the same skill each time? This is in order to reach skill-check thresholds. Mechanics is the classic example--who won't have a character in their party with maxed Mechanics in order to unlock and disarm everything in sight? (Before you say, "I won't, I don't like mechanics or rogues"? It's just an example, thanks.) I realize you guys had changed things up a bit for an earlier beta build, where you buy "packages" of skills, talents or some combination thereof. While a little hard to sort through, I found this more interesting. Not trying to revive a debate about that particular design, but it took more thought to decide "I'm going to forgo all these perks and JUST max my Mechanics skill check". In other words, you could still min/max skills, but it came at an actual cost of missing perks, not the possibly-fake cost of forgoing skills you would never use with that character anyway.
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