Batbro

Cipher is certainly a strong contender, especially given how central manipulating souls already is to the story, but I would also nominate priest as a very lore-friendly protagonist, especially towards the end-game when you're dealing with the deities a lot more. Not to mention it makes you a nice counterpart to Thaos, the priest villain driving the plot. And if you want to REALLY commit to your watcher being personally invested in the story, be a priest of Eothas, especially with what the sequel's looking like.

You're comparing Earth with Eora without accounting for a pivotal difference between the two: the gods are known entities in Eora, where they are not on Earth. Information that reveals the hidden nature of a known entity is vastly different from information that confirms the existence of an unknown entity, and the implications and ramifications of both are not comparable.

Simplest implementation would probably borrow code from the stronghold visitors with the "Send Escort" and "Pay Off" buttons. Give adventures two buttons, "Assign" which lets you select a companion to do it (and receive the full rewards and XP bounty) or "Hire Mercenary (1000gp)" (which just nets you the item rewards).

While I enjoy romance options in my games greatly, I am also alright with games forgoing them entirely as a design decision. But I will tell you this much: I am absolutely not interested in romance options in any role-playing game if you do not also include gay and bisexual options for the player. We are WELL beyond the point of developers considering such an inclusion to be a "risk" not worth taking, and I am well beyond putting up with developers who obviously don't care about their non-straight fanbase and their role-playing desires.

Fallout 2 and Icewind Dale 2 both were also franchise sequels, they didn't use characters from previous games so there was no reason for transferring characters or save games. I mean, there's no REASON they couldn't have carried characters or world states over in the sequels if that's what they WANTED to do. I brought this up precisely because lots of people have talked about save file transfer for PoE2, despite Obsidian having no precedent of implementing such things. Personally, I think I generally prefer making new characters with new games. Character creation is one of my absolute favorite parts of any RPG.

While that's a pretty clever and neat idea, I have to ask, have Obsidian EVER made a game sequel that allowed for character transfer? Or even SAVE FILE transfer? Obsidian has yet to make game that is sequel to their own game. Even if we count Black Isle stuff, did any of those have either? I know Fallout didn't.

While that's a pretty clever and neat idea, I have to ask, have Obsidian EVER made a game sequel that allowed for character transfer? Or even SAVE FILE transfer?

I contest the assertion that the game wasn't designed with solo play in mind on the basis that there are ACHIEVEMENTS for it. Solo play was something the developers considered, that they knew a portion of their fanbase would be interested in, and that they knew was achievable within the systems they designed. I personally have not yet done a solo playthrough, though I'm considering it for my next one, but I support the OP's position. Increasing the number of viable builds is an admirable design goal, but it should indeed have some sort of in-game cost. Money and/or time are obvious options, but we shouldn't forget that this would also mean the player is forgoing the EXPERIENCE bounty these adventures offer.

That's as valid a theory as any other. They could be ANY NUMBER of things, all of which could make for fascinating material to explore. At least as interesting as this game's big question of "Who's stealing all the baby souls?"

I'd like to see a future game in Eora explore the nature of the Godlike in more detail. An interesting and unique race created for this world, and yet we never really got any answers regarding them, despite Pallegina's best efforts. Why do the gods "bless" them, or are they some sort of unintentional side-effect of the Engwithans' animancy? RPG protagonists are often defined by some sort of unifying feature that makes them uniquely equipped to tackle the game's plot (Watcher, Inquisitor, Courier, etc.) Perhaps in PoE2 that feature could be "Godlike." Hopefully we'd have more than 4 customization choices, though. Include ALL the various gods' domains. Golden glowing godlike of Eothas and eye-covered godlike of Wael and hairy beastly godlike of Galawain...

The AI settings are a very obvious afterthought addition to the game, and while I greatly appreciate them as a quality-of-life improvement, they are admittedly underwhelming. Dragon Age: Origins did indeed have a very robust yet easy-to-use AI scripting system that I'd love to see in more games, but really, ANY of the Dragon Age games had better AI scripting options than PoE currently does. At this point in the game's lifespan though, I doubt it's a system we'll see much improvement on until a sequel.

Cipher, personally. Tons of build variety possibilities, and between their utility, damage, and crowd control, they always have something meaningful to contribute to every fight. To top it all off, they narratively fit very neatly into the player character's role in the story.

Great stuff in that interview, Eric definitely seems like he handled it with aplomb. I am definitely in the camp of "make the game shorter if it allows you to give it more depth and make it more reactive." Replay value is one of my highest priorities with RPGs. I want to be able to roleplay fundamentally different characters and have the world respond to them differently. Personal highlight of the interview was this bit: Brilliant writing advice, and it feels personally validating, since it's a philosophy I've been trying to apply to my own game development. Have the story raise questions, then let the player answer them. This definitely applies to one of the themes I picked up in PoE's story: "Things are what you make of them." That is to say, how you INTERPRET what happens in life is as important as the events themselves. You can see this really clearly with the whole "gods" dilemma, as well as most of the companion quests.

Update: You can now watch a video of the whole talk. It's pretty much the same, more good stuff, but if you wanted to hear Josh Sawyer expanding on the bullet-points from the slides, here you go. Also includes a brief Q&A session afterwards. They'll probably include this in their next blog update anyway, rendering sharing this moot, like they did with the slides, but whatever.

Cipher's 'Amplified Thrust' no longer generates focus. Noooooooooooo! That was my favorite cheese! It was overpowered as hell and this nerf is absolutely deserved, but NOOOOO!

For those of you who don't follow Josh Sawyer on social media, he has graciously shared his slides from his GDC talk, "Gods and Dumps: Attribute Tuning in Pillars of Eternity." They're fairly self-explanatory, and it's a fascinating read for those interested in systems design. Read here. I love a lot of the points he makes, especially the reasoning behind de-marrying attributes and class abilities, and the quote "If something is required for viable play, why is it an option?" Definitely a lot of notes I'll be using when designing my own game.