magritte

My first reaction to the title of this thread was that for Thaos and the Watcher to start rapping would be totally immersion-breaking.

That's pretty much exactly how I see it. I buy games on Steam, but I prefer to use GoG if it's available. I still have some Gamer's Gate games too. Competition is good, and I don't give a damn about the Steam community and collecting cards and achievements and all that. I definitely prefer Steam to Origin and UPlay, though. Most games work fine offline in Steam, and when online, I haven't seen the time-out related crashes during loading screens that Origin and Uplay games seem to suffer.

The thing that I find most annoying about Durance is the lack of dialogue options to really challenge him.

The companion quests are definitely written in a peculiar way. I haven't got through all of them yet, but so far they've all had unsatisfying resolutions, as if the point of them is to emphasize the futility of striving for any sort of goal. I can't see it as simply being a case of insufficient time. It wouldn't really take any more time to have a vision that explained exactly how Eder's brother had come to join Waidwen or have Sagani be able to have an actual conversation with Pessoq. It's clearly a conscious choice to end the quests that way. It's a bit too nihilist for my taste.

I just had to share this. I dreamed last night that I was playing a sort of RPG in which I took on the role of Shirley Manson (the lead singer of Garbage) who, in the game, was both the lead singer of a rockband and the leader of a band of adventurers in a fantasy world. It was a game in which one wandered about a fantasy world, killing monsters, completing quests, recruiting band/party members, and playing concerts. I can't remember a lot of details but I remember being annoyed that Butch Vig kept getting charmed by enemy spellcasters and thinking I needed to find an item to improve his wlll saves. (Hence my thought that it was specifically Pillars of Eternity that my brain was on, rather than some other game) The other thing I remember is that whenever you completed a quest, you had to choose to perform a song from a list of of options based on what you thought was most appropriate. Sorry about the text but I was writing in this in my dream diary and the copy/paste seems to have included not just plain text but the background color. Cant EDIT: No worries, magritte. When I saw you didn't want the black on white background, I changed it to normal.

I have a hard time picturing him working on the Divinity series. It's not just high fantasy, it's outright camp. His sense of humor is quite different and I don't think it would work there. If he really wants to stretch, maybe he could work in another medium, like write for the American Gods TV series that's coming up or something. Something like Underworld Ascendant might be a better fit, but I'd think he'd rather do something that was his own baby.

Is it too much to hope that Bethesda has snagged him to work on Fallout 4?

No doubt there could be better party AI and more tactical options, but the rest of your suggestions (3D, voice acting, cut scenes) completely miss the whole point of the game. Yeah, tactics could be better. I think the detailed conditional tactics in Dragon Age 2 were one of the few bright spots in that game, but then again they were absolute necessary because combat went by so fast I never had a clue what any of my party members were doing, and it was hard to tell which spells worked well on an opponent. They got around that in DA:I by just making the game absurdly easy. DA:O was the last Bioware game in which I felt I had meaningful control of more than one character and people complained that it was too slow and required too much micromanagement. I think PoE fans like to be hands-on and control the action. I like 3-D games fine, but if I'm controlling multiple characters a fixed camera some distance away from the action works better strategically, though it would be nice to be able to rotate the camera. If I really want an immersive game, I'll play a game with a first-person viewpoint, not one with a wonky camera that follows me around and gets stuck in trees...but it's hard to control a squad effectively from the first person view point.

I have no problem with the stronghold in principle, but I do feel like in Pillars of Eternity, there's not much reason for the Watcher to have one. At least through the first two acts, it doesn't have anything to do with the plot and is just a few more stores and a place to dump characters you're not using. Unlike say, Dragon Age: Inquisition where you're supposed to be building an army and it makes sense for you to have a stronghold, the Watcher doesn't have a real need for a base of operations. It's just a potential source of revenue for him, and I'm guessing that I've pumped in far more than I'm likely to get back. Also, in DA:I, the opposition can attack you there. Perhaps the Leaden Key will attack Caed Nua in Act 3, but even if they do, what does the Watcher really lose? To make it work, I think they really need to have it actually provide some real assistance in the main plot not just the odd item from a traveling merchant or a smattering of crafting. Maybe sages in the library could unearth information that identifies the location of lost artifacts or vulnerabilities or plans of the Leaden Key. Maybe visiting nobles could come bearing requests for aid on something more substantive and interesting than just bounty hunting.

I'm not really sure that the major deficiencies in DA:I are because of multiplayer. It might be more the focus on quantity rather than quality. Multiplayer was just symptomatic of the fact that they tried to have every feature that any competitor game had.

Well, I probably wouldn't use multiplayer myself, but it's not a terrible idea for an expansion. It's far too much work to expect as a patch, though, so they'd have to expect to generate significant revenue. It would be interesting to see a poll of how many current players would buy an expansion focused on multiplayer. The idea pops up often enough on the boards that some people would obviously buy it, but enough to justify the cost? I wonder what percentage of people who play Divinity: Original Sin play it in pairs? That might give you some sense of the MP potential of PoE, since the games have similar target audiences, though it's not going to be quite accurate since D:OS campaign was built for two players.

It seems to me that there's no practical difference between "lie" and "attack". Maybe my character's just that bad a liar, but I always seem to get attacked when I lie.

I believe as Merina says that he describes Hadret House as where Lady Webb and her spies operate. I didn't connect that with Dunryd Row, so when I was told to find "Kurren in Dunryd Row", I figured it would be a house on a street called Dunryd Row.

I think the Raedric quest is bizarrely designed in that it is dropped into your lap so early and the boss battle is so far out of scale with any of the other fights in the quest line. And it seems a little strange from a narrative point of view because there's this whole push to get you to sneak around and get directly to Raedric instead of fighting your way through the main gate. And okay, I haven't tried it, but my suspicion is that charging in the main gate would not be as difficult as the Raedric fight. I appreciate the philosophy of not leveling everything with you because it always feels like it defeats the purpose of gaining experience. I don't feel like my character's actually advancing if common bandits are just as big a threat to me in the end game as they were in the beginning, and it can be really immersion breaking if you decide to clean the giant rats out of some woman's basement when you're a seasoned adventure and it proves to be a challenging fight. However, if you design that way, I think it works better if you make certain regions clearly more dangerous than others, as Divinity: Original Sin does,though admittedly it does impose a certain degree of linearity on the game. Pillars of Eternity is to my mind oddly laid out, especially given that most of us have been trained by other RPG's to try to complete all the quests that interest us in one area before moving onto the next. It seems strange to me to put a fight that's probably best left to level 6 or so, close to the beginning of the game and have absurdly easy fights in places like Dyrwood that you're not likely to go to until later on. The optimal way to play PoE seems to be to barrel through the main quest and run hither and thither to clean up side quests that you've left until later...which I find a bit counterintuitive. It doesn't help that I find the creature levels in the bestiary are a very poor indicator of how dangerous encounters actually are (Ogre Druids ACK!).

I'm not quite sure what exactly you are trying to say here. You said earlier that part of the problem with the romances is that there's only one right answer. The fact that one answer means that the romance continues and one means that it does not, does not make one answer right and the other wrong.