Insolentius

The QoL changes are appreciated, but are there any plans to tackle the (lack of) challenge/difficulty? Level scaling? Adding weight to ammo? Having companions use ammo? Anything?

Yeah, I agree. I'm just about to head to Byzantium for the first time, and I have around 5k light ammo, 4k heavy ammo, 3.5k energy cells (with nearly 200 adrenos). This is completely absurd since I never bought any ammo/meds (and I'm using weapons with high RoF). Let's not even mention that slapping a 'melt' mag onto a weapon makes it godly against every single enemy in the game. The only way for this game to be challenging right now is to ignore loot, avoid modding/tinkering items, and not use companions. In Fallout 3, NV and Fallout 4, I used or made mods that rendered resources more scarce and made enemies tougher, but that's not an option here. I don't know if anyone from Obsidian is reading this, but the game needs to: drastically reduce the amount of meds/consumables found in the world significantly reduce the amount of ammo in the world and ammo boxes make your companions use ammo make your companions' gear degrade introduce some form of level scaling (with min and max level caps for different zones) tone down the sources of extra damage (crits, weak-point dmg, elemental dmg, science bonus to elemental weapons, perks etc. make the flat damage reduction system in this game practically pointless) tone down the power level of tier 2 weapons (because the enemies' HP and armor values fail to keep up - again leading to the same problem with the flat damage reduction system) introduce skill and/or level requirements for weapons (give us an actual reason to specialize) - right now, characters with minimal strength and zero points invested in the 'ranged' skill tree are still death machines with high-level heavy weapons Make these an optional difficulty setting that caters to players who like to explore, do side quests and loot everything.

The game might be short relative to the open-world monstrosities that are chock-full with pointless collectibles and repetitive missions, but it's by no means 'short' if you take your time exploring everything, talking to everyone (without skipping dialogue), doing every quest etc. I'm about 32 hours in, and I'm just about to lay siege on the Devil's Peak station with my newfound buddies from C3.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the painfully obvious texture streaming issue during dialogue whenever the camera switches to a companion. It happens always unless you select the 'Ultra' texture setting (which is too much for mid-range GPUs to handle during normal gameplay).

Was this confirmed somewhere?

You'll just have to get used to it. Even high-end PCs can't maintain a solid 60 FPS in certain areas. Restarting the game every once in a while helps a bit (or just lock the frame rate at a lower value if you want consistent frame pacing).

After selecting a dialogue option and seeing the dialogue UI contract, the position of the subtitles adjusts itself twice before reaching the intended position (which is a bit distracting). This happens all the time.

When I first played the game (June 2018), I freed the dragon without trapping a part of its essence, and I got to fight the Guardian at the harbor even though the dragon assisted me during the scripted sequence. In my current playthrough, I freed the dragon after trapping a part of its essence with the 'Metaphysics' check, and I didn't even encounter the Guardian (I still got the assist during the scripted sequence). Are we sure that Scyorielaphas is supposed to prevent the Guardian from showing up, or is it just a bug? It didn't work this way when the game was released, so it was either broken then or it's broken now.

Those games had a much higher budget relative to Deadfire, and besides - the amount of dialogue in games like Mass Effect, Horizon or God of War pales in comparison to the number of lines in typical cRPGs. Do you get what I'm saying? I'm not claiming that full VO is the main culprit here, but it didn't help the writing process one iota.

AAA action/adventure games don't even come close to cRPGs in terms of the total amount of dialogue. Considering the limited budget/time that Obsidian had to contend with while making Deadfire, the decision to implement full VO had an overall negative effect on the writing quality (mostly in terms of having to cut the amount of actual dialogue in favor of filler prose).

Full VO is why we have tons of filler text ("furrowed brows" anyone?) and purple prose, and it's the main reason why the dialogue is chopped up one sentence at a time ('Continue' mashing), with each sentence being recorded as a separate audio file in most cases. While the voice acting for the companions and important characters like the faction leaders and gods is decent, the poor quality of VO for the rest of the NPCs is immersion-breaking at best and wholly atrocious at worst.

There won't be any more updates unless there's a problem that cripples the game.

Here's the deal - there's no gaming configuration that's able to run Deadfire at 60 FPS consistently. What makes the problem even worse is that the performance degrades over time. As for the stuttering, it happens when the game loads new assets (this is clearly noticeable in Port Maje as the weather there changes frequently). When they talk to each other or address the player, NPC 'speech bubbles' also cause stuttering. However, this only happens the first time the game loads a specific asset during a session. The frequency of periodic 400-500 ms frametime spikes gets lower the longer you play.

The character completes the drinking animation and goes into recovery without consuming the potion or getting the buff.

Try using 'Defend Self' instead of 'Aggressive' or 'Defensive'. I encountered this exact problem in my current playthouth, and this way you get to keep the AI active while being able to consume potions mid-combat.

Try changing the anti-aliasing method as well. If that fails, try downgrading the drivers or messing with the other settings.

I get a similar problem when trying to force AA via the NVIDIA Control Panel. Try settings everything to the default values in the Catalyst Control Center (or whatever it's called now).

None of the UI & UX issues I listed in this thread have been fixed (except the 'bouncy' text in scripted sequences) (the forum redesign has messed up the formatting a bit) - Additionally, this... Players should no longer be experiencing low frame rates due to multiple NPC's being on screen at once. ... is blatantly false. The frame rate still tanks in Queen's Berth and any other busy area (including naval boarding). To make matters worse, the 'performance degradation' problem still hasn't been fixed (you can easily test it by boarding a couple of ships and using a ton of spells/abilities, and then returning to an area that previously ran at 60 FPS). Just like before - saving, quitting and reloading fixes the performance temporarily.

Is it weird that the thing that excites me the most is seeing the text during scripted sequence NOT bounce up and down when selecting a dialogue option?

The scene in the camp didn't play even after reloading the area. However, the rest of the 'scenes from beyond' in Poko Kohara played just fine.

Just encountered this bug in 4.1.2.

Yup. It's definitely a bug. The conversation is supposed to go on from there (check the video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-emnJldqI9s

The final stage of Xoti's personal quest triggers immediately after she performs the cleansing ritual in Gaun's temple (even though the journal mentions the need to travel more after the cleanse and help her collect more souls). The problem with this is that she discusses Eothas' intentions long before the player gets the opportunity to learn about them (even before visiting Hasongo). She literally spoils the main story.

When Xoti initiates the dialogue regarding her infatuation with Eder, it ends abruptly mid-conversation.

the hotkeys and numerical values on the ability bar sometimes overlap with the dialogue interface