xzar_monty

I believe it has been fairly well established that Deadfire absolutely and truly bombed. I don't know if the sales have picked up since this was thoroughly discussed, but I wouldn't bet that they have. Here's something you may want to check (noting the date): https://www.onlysp.com/pillars-of-eternity-ii-sales-below-expectations/

Absolutely, they did indeed. And they deserve full credit for it.

English and French are relatively easy, given their structure. We're still pretty far away from the AI being able to grasp inflected languages like Polish and Finnish and what have you. But yes, some of it is surprisingly good, I did say that.

In many respects, my sense was that White March was intended as a nostalgia trip down Icewind Dale lane, which had a quite a bit of filler combat. I didn't have an issue with that, even though the XP system is (mostly) no longer oriented toward rewarding battle. Still, one of the thing I remember about WM is how tighter it was over base game. I replayed it twice and I can remember individual encounters, I think the only area which I found to be a grind was the final 3rd level of Durgan's Battery in WM1 - with repeaded spirit encounters. Other than that I remember it being quite varied. I replayed WM a couple of weeks ago. I agree it's good, but for chrissakes they should have dropped at least 50% of the battles on the outdoor maps. That was such a poor design choice: the maps are full of beasties that necessitate meaningless fighting (i.e. almost no loot, essentially no xp) that just takes your time. Also, the fights made some things look hard to believe, like, how has that villager been able to get into that ice hole in the first place, with that amount of monsters around? And so on. Otherwise: yes, WM is very good.

Boeroer: Could well be. MaxQuest: Good questions. I am not certain about the answers, but I think they are: Yes. No. Can't say -- it would have taken an awful lot of scrolling to find that information.

(Btw, I re-loaded, tried again, it didn't repeat. Also, as I'm at the very beginning of the game I don't even have any AoE weapons.)

I don't use any weapon, a monk with fists. AI completely off.

Right, so it's not specific to monk or Stunning Blow? That should sort of guarantee that it's going to be fixed, then. Thanks for the reply! Sheesh, the game's been out for almost a year and we're still at this.

So, after finishing PoE1, I continued to Deadfire, but it seems to me that some bugs have definitely got worse along the way. I just got into a fight, and there's a line in the combat log saying "Leyla abandoned casting Stunning Blow". That's all well and good -- except that I'm getting this message like twenty times per second. Really. It absolutely overwhelms everything else in the combat log, and the display keeps sort of flashing long after I press Pause. This is crazy! This was in the game earlier, but now it's totally, totally wild. What has happened? If anyone still remember the C64 era of the 1980s, the display is almost identical to this basic program: 10 Print: "Leyla abandoned casting Stunning Blow" 20 Goto 10

I was a bit unclear there, so your umbrage is understandable. Apologies. When talking about nostalgia, I only meant the specific example of printed music journalism, i.e. it's the "old guys" who buy these magazines devoted to Genesis et al., the new generation doesn't really consume the music press in printed form. It used to, but it no longer does. I wholly agree that the music of these artists does indeed capture both young and old alike, and I see that as a very good thing. Clearer now? Again, apologies, I was too ambiguous.

Having very recently played both, I feel there are only two things where PoE1 surpasses Deadfire: tone and companion quests. There's something very appealing about the dark, almost brutally harsh general tone of PoE1. It's not horror by any means, but it really is gritty and quite well done. This, of course, is subjective. What I think is less subjetive (ha) is that the companion quests in PoE1 are more involved, better written, more immersive and just generally a lot better. Sagani, Zahua, Eder, Aloth and the Devil of Caroc are all very good(*). And, furthermore, damn it: I've never had to sleep so much in the game that I would've got to the end of Durance's or the Grieving Mother's quest. That's a definite downer. I'd say that except for Eder, all the companion quests in Deadfire are inferior to what we had in PoE1. (*) Aloth's quest is a bit of a disappointment in the sense that it doesn't seem to matter at all what you choose in the end, i.e. whether you destroy the research or allow the animancer to keep the results. Is anybody certain about this? Does your choice make a difference? I didn't steal or destroy the research, I wanted the animancer keep her work, I thought it was a fair exchange, and although Aloth was a bit disappointed, nothing at all seemed to follow from this.

The extent to which artists having more control has been a boon is debatable. I mean, more control to the artists is good as such, no question, but because the industry has essentially disappeared (ha, I used to work alongside it for quite some time and saw it happen; the changes were extraordinarily drastic), there is almost no way for a new artist to make a breakthrough. The reason for this is that there is simply too much content on the internet/Spotify/etc., and no outside arbiter -- for instance, no more music journalism or anything of the like to create anything more significant than niche interest. To give a concrete example: what is the newest band that can go on a worldwide stadium tour and expect it to work? That would be Metallica, founded in 1981 (nothing against Metallica, their second and third albums were seminal works in the genre). This is the extent to which the industry has collapsed. I just checked the local magazine stand the other day to see what the music magazines write about, and what they wrote about was David Bowie, David Gilmour, Genesis, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. These were the artists pictured in the covers. There's nothing wrong with any of them, but the choices show where the (paltry) money is: it's in nostalgia. There are no new stars, and there won't be any. But, again, excellent new music is constantly being made. Chances are, you just won't hear most of it, unless you make a dedicated effort.

This is a superb comment. Such a succinct and apt description of what it is. I wholeheartedly agree that the huge news screen displays a baffling lack of discretion and style. I mean, what were/are they thinking? We already have the game, we are already customers.

I like the game. Really. I think it's great. BUT it was launched on 8 May 2018 and the patching is still unfinished. This is not good.

Wow. Thanks! Kudos to you for that. (Btw, I wish to point out that minimum budget in and of itself doesn't guarantee anything, of course; it's just that as film is an expensive medium to work in, this tends to make it learn towards a certain kind of conservatism. There are some worthwhile mammoth productions, too, as we all know. For instance -- to stay within the realm of these forums -- I thought Jackson's LotR trilogy had quite a few things to recommend it -- especially if we ignore his Two Towers -- but then the first part of his The Hobbit was so poor that I haven't wanted to even try the other two.)

It's definitely been really quiet for quite some time now.

That's an excellent comment, and much appreciated. Thank you very much. I will check him out.

It's not a problem from a financial point of view, that's true. However, I'm interested in original movies, and from that point of view it is a problem. One fascinating thing about this is that precisely because the profit margins are so much smaller, creative costs are minuscule(*) in comparison, and the industry itself is so much smaller, there's a lot of good stuff coming out in the field of literature, and I mean a lot of seriously good stuff. In movies, much less so. In pop music, even less so (although there's some fantastic stuff around). (*) I think this is the inherent creative/financial problem with movies. It's pretty much impossible to create a movie that's both cheap and impressive. And by cheap I mean costing less than, say, five grand. Writing a book, in comparison, costs essentially nothing. Similarly, there's a lot of good classical stuff around, as in notes upon paper, but who's going to pay the orchestras to play them? And this is why most of all global repertoire is Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, all of whom are great of course. But if you're new in town, your chances are almost nil.

That was a strangely improper knee-jerk reaction to a perfectly legitimate and politely phrased question. The haughty comment on intelligence makes someone look particularly foolish. But let us stop this here, there's clearly no way forward in any constructive manner.

The interesting thing about Google Translator is that it's both surprisingly good, at times, and really quite awful, much of the time, without any predictability or consistency. German -> English and English -> German are quite naturally among the easier combinations. It is in serious trouble when it comes to inflected languages. I just checked what it says about "kaatumaisillanikin" (a Finnish word), and its suggestion was "to halt", when the correct answer is "even at the very moment I was just about to fall over". So it still has work to do.

Phenomenum: Interesting, isn't it, how casually folks on forums like these use extraordinarily demeaning pictures to illustrate their jokes, and even more interesting how it tends to be women who are demeaned. What does this tell about the attitudes of these guys?

As far as I know the English word for Butterflies and Moths as a collective group would be lepidoptra. Carl Linnaeus coined the term for the family in 1758, using Latin (but working from Greek) as was (and is) the way of scientific classification. Old English only had the terms for the two distinct parts of the family (butorflēoge and moþþe). I don't think the language made a catch-all for the family (probably didn't realize the relation). The thing to remember about English is that what it doesn't invent it gets off the back of a lorry, no questions asked. So around 1773 the use of the Latin classification, Lepidoptra, began being used as the English word to represent butterflies and moths. But lepidoptra is not English, it's Latin or mock-Latin. There is no English word, that was the point. This is why we get projects like "Butterflies and Moths of North America", which, in many other languages, would simply have one classificatory word that includes both butterflies and moths. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with English, only that there are these interesting differences between distinctions and classifications. To give another example: Wittgenstein famously wrote that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. The interesting thing here is that in his original German, there is a single verb for "being silent", schweigen. But in English there is no word or concept for that, you can only explain it by saying that someone is silent, whereas in German and many other languages, there is a distinct verb for remaining silent. Similarly, in Finnish, for example, you cannot "ignore" someone, you can only "not notice" or "pay no attention" to them. It's almost the same, but not quite, just like in the "being silent" example.

You misunderstood Wikipedia. Butterfly does not include moths, it is Lepidoptera that does. Check a dictionary.

In German you absolutely do, but point was that in English you don't. This was pointed out to me by an English friend who thought it indicative of the English psyche (his words, not mine), that the language doesn't contain anything describing the thing meant by joie de vivre. Many languages contain concepts that are likely to befuddle users of other languages. One other thing that baffles me about English is that there is no common term that would include both butterflies and moths. I mean, these insects are very close relatives, one group just flies by day and the other (mostly) at night, but there is no common term for them in English. It's peculiar even from a scientific perspective. In Latin, the term would be lepidoptera.

Here's a funny linguistic tidbit for you: the English language lacks the concepts of both Schadenfreude (German) and joie de vivre (French). There's something hilarious about that, in my view. (And of course all languages lack some concepts that other languages have, which is a very good reason for studying as many languages as you can. This is just a particularly nice combination.)