PrimeHydra

this is a good idea--I end up pumping everything up to 10 or 12 anyway, for fear of being vulnerable due to a horrible stat. Then I put the rest into what I feel are my char's specialties.

Just saying. Companies like Blizzard wish they had forums this responsive, slick, and feature-rich. They're even mobile friendly and work great on my phone. If these are third-party components, what are you using?

As far as difficulty goes--you are playing on hard mode. But having said that, hard mode should still be fun. And running back to the inn every time you nearly get killed by trash is not much fun.

Jumping in with level five characters and no tutorial is indeed jarring...I even made the mistake of turning on Expert Mode (yeah, that'll show me!) After turning on all of the HUDs and indicators it started making a bit more sense. But yeah, we need to start from level 1 with a tutorial. If they implement a good one it will alleviate this problem. Backer beta = thrown into deep end

I couldn't quite put my finger on why transitioning between the various screens felt a bit jarring, but having read your post it makes sense; they need to bring the look/feel/dimensions into harmony.

I wouldn't worry. 99% of the things they fix in the beta will apply to the full game. The same code underlies combat, for example, whether in the beta village or a multiple-act commercial release. Granted there were a lot of bugs in this beta, but they already knew about half of them. If you follow the bug forum at all, they've already fixed most of the reported issues. That kind of responsiveness bodes well. Take heart citizen, Obsidian will deliver!

Yes, please! I missed seeing these in the backer beta. They added so much to Baldur's Gate items.

Game is gorgeous, animation is smooth, character creation is deep, weapons and spells are varied, combat is complex. This game is shaping up to be everything I wanted Divinity: Original Sin to be. The dearth of voice work is noticeable, but understandable; they'd want to do that stuff after the beta. But its absence reminds me of how memorable the dialog was in BG2. Good writing is paramount, but good writing with good voicework really takes the experience to another level. May they find comparable talent within their budget. Load times are very long. But once polished and optimized, I have every faith that the Infinity Engine classics will have a modern match.

Combat in this game promises to be deep and rewarding. I've had a lot of fun with it. But one annoyance (other than the bugs) is that I can't tell what command I just issued to a character. I don't know whether my mage is in the process of casting a Lightning spell, for example. I sometimes have to check the character's spell/ability counts just to see whether he's in the process of casting it, or just cast it. In Baldur's Gate they remedied this by showing the pending spell/action on the bottom-right corner of the portrait. Some sort of indicator like this would be awesome when issuing orders during a pause. PS--sorry I didn't see the General Threads before posting this! Next time I'll use 'em if they apply

Call me OCD, but whenever I get a new quest, I like to immediately review it in my journal. Pillars pops up a nice-looking scroll with a new/updated quest (resulting from the conversation I just ended, for example). But clicking the scroll doesn't do anything...feels like it should bring up the Journal with the associated entry expanded.

It seems odd that the Load Game and Save Game screens don't auto-expand the active character (where applicable). Each time I have to click my character's name to expand his saves. Folks will restore games for the active protagonist much more often than not.

If I load a game in the middle of combat, where I have several status effects on a number of my guys, the character portraits in the loaded game sometimes show vestigal placeholder status icons.

Clicking Set All in the Auto-Pause options, then clicking an individual auto-pause option, clears ALL of the other auto-pause checkboxes. Annoying when you want to use Set All and then just clear a few of the options. I've noticed multiple times that the "Enemy Sighted" option for auto-pause is grayed out. This is during a game, whether in or out of combat. I can check it by clicking Set All, but then the above bug bites me when I want to uncheck other items. Also, a few times I've opened the Auto-Pause options to find all of my carefully-chosen checkboxes cleared out.

Getting this as well, get the same "whump" sound over and over during combat. Pretty annoying!

In the Giant Bomb interview from a few weeks ago, they said they haven't even gotten to the voiceover part of development. Here's hoping they find talent on the level of David Warner.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir with you guys, but it needs to be said: The superb voice acting made the Baldur's Gate 2 characters really come to life. Jon Irenicus, Minsc, Aerie, Jaheira...I remember that dialog to this day. Please don't make your voice talent an afterthought. I suspect you already intend to make it awesome, but just in case you weren't? Don't make Pillars of Eternity sound like Divinity: Original Sin. That is all.

Love the smoothness of the animations, reminds me of Temple of Elemental Evil in the best way. The little things too--like how you can right-click and drag to rotate your party's formation. Things like this really make PoE feel like the second coming of the Infinity Engine games. The writing, what little I've read so far, has all been excellent. If they take enough feedback into account and smooth out the bugs and UI, this could well become the best RPG ever made.

It's one of those things that's not really a big deal, but one expects a double-click to select an item and perform the default action on it. This is true of Windows list boxes for example. So it seemed a little weird that when I went to load a game I couldn't just double-click the game to load it. PS Beta is awesome.

Beta is indeed awesome. For what it's worth I DO check the Known Issues sticky before posting...you guys have probably been too busy to update it

First of all, I apologize for not having repro instructions. If I figure out how to repro this, I will update the post. After playing for about an hour, capital letters started appearing where they shouldn't. I wish I could tell you what precipitated this. A few screenshots: gAme pAused LoAding... CoNtiNue

Maybe I'm blind, but after picking a few plants, I can't find them anywhere in my inventory. Bug, or am I not on the right screen? If it's the latter, the UI might need to be clarified a bit...i tried clicking the various filters in my inventory, cleared all filters...no shrubbewy.

I'm excited to cast spells in PoE, but it took me a moment to figure out the Spell Grimiore. The UI could be maybe a bit more intuitive. Some observations about this screen: Clicking the spell-tier buttons on the right page affects what's displayed on the left page. I expected these buttons to affect what appeared to the right of them on the same (right) page. The top of the left page simply says "known spells", and I didn't even notice the "1st level" or "2nd level" specifier on the bottom. Users aren't trained to look for titles/descriptions in the bottom pane. UI text on right page, "In Grimoire" didn't make sense to me...I'm already in the grimoire.This screen might be more intuitive if the spell tiers/options were shown outside of the book, and by selecting a spell you move it into the corresponding level page in your book. Or, rename "In Grimoire" to "Ready", "Memorized", something like that. Better yet, have the grimoire represent the caster's known spells. Have page forward/back buttons to move among levels, rather than the un-book-like buttons currently on the right-hand page. Selecting a spell would move it into a separate "ready" or memorized" list, a la Baldur's Gate. Right-clicking a spell to get details made sense in the limited-resolution days of Baldur's Gate, but it feels too static here. Mousing over a spell in the spell pool should be enough to yield a description of the spell. This is less important but I was a bit frustrated trying to get descriptions--a non-Infinity-Engine-veteran might get discouraged when clicking a choice (un)memorizies it rather than yield information. (This can be remedied by making the UI flow more intuitive as suggested above). Thanks for reading, hope this feedback makes sense!

Started a new game. Saved it and quit to the main Pillars of Eternity screen. When I hover over buttons such as New Game or Load, the cursor becomes a red circle with a line through it ("not allowed"). I can still click the buttons and they still work. And oddly enough the cursor is an arrow when hovering over any part of the menu box other than the buttons themselves! Tried taking a screenshot but couldn't get cursor to show in the screenshot.

Clicking on Game, Graphics, or Sound categories in the options causes the category buttons to lose their captions. Clicking Auto-Pause or Controls category restores their captions. I noticed this on launching the backer beta for the first time, and clicking Options before starting a new game. In case this is display driver-related (odd since two out of five buttons work) I've attached DxDiag output. Looking forward to playing the game! Update: Started a game, went into options...all buttons worked correctly. Quit to main menu, brought up Options, bug recurs. Update 2: This is happening in Full Screen mode. DxDiag.txt