xzar_monty

Now, correct me if I'm wrong (and I'll be very happy to be proven wrong), but my sense is that well-written computer game reviews no longer exist.

The sentence and description are all right as such, but the choice of words is somewhat Lovecraftian. It's not downright bad, but definitely in the neighborhood. I mean, there are only so many pavoninely-dressed sutlers wearing insalubriously-colored lambrequins you can squeeze into a sentence before a reasonable person goes ho-hum and checks out.

Yeah, just in case I gave the wrong impression earlier, I wish to reiterate that P:K clearly aims for pulp. It's not as if it tries to be Dostoyevsky and fails miserably. The pulp is clearly very much the intention. Every once in a while I do feel some frustration because my dialogue options are all so silly and pulpy. I mean, Deadfire at least gives me the sense of playing someone with a bit of sense, not just cliche.

Wow. I wonder why Xoti provokes such violent hatred (see Daidre above). I agree she's both naive and a zealot, but why such extreme rancour? Given how Aerie also created extraordinarily strong aggression, I'm sorta inclined to think there's a male-female thing going on, as much as I'd like to discount that angle. (The NPC I like the least is the watershaping druid fellow.)

Hey, thanks for that, much appreciated. I haven't met Nok-Nok yet, so I cannot comment on the writing there. But I will pay attention now.

Ok, good to know. Thanks. Which ones? There hasn't been anything interesting in the ones I've seen so far. I mean, the dwarven cleric is nothing but a depressed pessimist, the barbarian is nothing but cliched rage, etc. They're all nothing but rather tired jokes.

I haven't even tried. King is a prodigious but very uneven talent. The quality varies enormously -- even within novels. Like, The Outsider, a very recent one, was superb for about 150 pages and then went rather steeply downhill, ending in a strangely disastrous homage to Tom Sawyer.

I also understand that Avellone has something to do with P:K. You'd never guess from the writing. I wonder what the truth is, there.

Even some ardent King fans have found The Dark Tower to be too much for them. So, good luck! (It's not that it doesn't contain excellent stuff, it's just the sheer amount and unevenness of material.)

The freedom of tabletop RPGs is immortally summarized by that apocryphal player whose first comment in the beginning of a painstakingly planned Middle-Earth campaign was, "I kill Gandalf". Railroading is the death of role-playing, although it definitely is unavoidable in CRPGs, at least to a certain extent.

Now that was well put, protopersona. Every once in a while you do indeed get the idea that Obsidian are somewhat unsure about the mechanics of the medium they're using. Deadfire is a very ambitious game that deserves respect and applause -- I do like it a lot -- but it does contain a few lapses. [incidentally, and on a different topic, here's another example of a minor but stunning lapse: it impossible to show Beza's pages to people without giving them away at the same time. That's just not how the world works or how people act.]

Hey that's just the way Russians talk. They're trying to translate talking with your hands to text, so lot's of exclamations. You're talking about stereotypical South Europeans now, Italians especially.

If there's a discussion you're not interested in, it's extremely simple not to participate.

i didnt test eyestrike. it seems fine but is it really any better than chill fog? I did test the charm a bit. what is so great about it? It's only on one guy when you're usually fighting hordes of pirates in ship combat. and the duration is short. how are you using it that makes it so good? valor echoes seemed good but once again it falls short. it needs to be able to target yourself and also last 45 seconds. i just said biting whip looks good on paper but ya it falls short like cipher always does lol. I think the +2 pen from devoted is better than biting whip alone not to mention all the other amazing passives and skills fighters can take. cipher spells are so annoying to use. arcane knight is just one build i like. i also like devoted/trickster, -10% sneak attack is a small price to pay for mirror image. and although i havnt tested it i think devoted/paladin will be the melee king for obvious reasons. You are power gaming and doing boarding fights? Somewhat contradicts itself. Devoted/Paladin is not really the king of anything. It can be a good balance of defense and offense though or a no-frills tank that can't be disenchanted by Arcane Dampener. King of melee combat is anything with Monk I'd say. Devoted is for players who are too lazy to switch weapon sets or can't let go of their favorite weapon. I mean if you only recently discovered PEN/AR that totally explains why you think Devoted is so good. You have to know that the malus of underpenetration is multiplicative in most cases. So if a Devoted helps you to not underpenetrate then the gain is massive, yes. But you can achieve the same without Devoted. Whisper of Treason is great because it's like taking away an enemy while calling a summon at the same time. Obviously you shouldn't attack the charmed enemy - else it flips back immediately. But you can still apply stuff like Miasma or other debuffs that have friendly fire but don't do damage. The charmed and further debuffed enemy will distract other enemies and get shred to pieces by his former fellows. That's why it's powerful. The only drawback of Whisper of Treason is its short range. Bit it's still doable (with a bit of stealth) to charm enemies from stealth. That is very powerful. The combat starts and the party is still stealthed while the enemies attack each other. Puppet Master is even better because the range is a lot higher. Don't forget that base duration scales with Power Level. That means that a lvl-1 power like Whisper of Treason lasts a very long time after some levels with decent INT (even more so if you are a single class Cipher which I personally value over multiclass ones). Eyestrike is foe-only and lasts quite long for a replenishable cipher power. But the best part is that you are not limited to 2 (or 3) casts per encounter. It also doesn't take too long to cast/recover. Only 3/2 secs. For a Soul Blade you can use Sun & Moon: it applies the raw damage with the first hit and refills focus with these second flail head. Also here don't pick Biting Whip. Pick Draining Whip. Then you can spam Soul Annihilation more often or with more damage. More effective than Biting Whip. what is good about monk? In a word, everything. In PoE, monk was probably the most powerful class (not going to argue about this; I don't powergame and I don't calculate stuff, I just found monk unbelievably strong), and things haven't changed that much in Deadfire. Unarmed monk, for instance, basically never has problems with penetration. Hits twice as often as most other classes. Etc.

Ha! I still haven't fired my cannons once in the entire game.

does the difficulty fall off a cliff at higher levels? because it sure is difficult at the start if you use the regular NPCs. and the ship combat still keeps me on my toes usually at level 5. the expert captains sometimes still kill me and i need to reload quite a bit. Yes it very much does. What difficulty level do you use? You might turn it down one notch. I'm quite happy with Veteran myself (most of the time). Simply avoid ship combat that early on. You can outrun other ships.

I suppose this is not that objective. I've had Serafen with me, and I feel he pulls his weight perfectly well. Some of the cipher spells are superb. (I never pay attention to stuff like -10% because let's face it, you can beat the game with any build.)

The game is good, I agree, but the writing is extremely clichéd, basically pulp. With plenty of exclamation marks, too! So coming to it from Deadfire may feel... surprising. And yes, you don't walk very fast at all.

I know very well what you're talking about. But when someone gets as obstinate as in this case, there's apparently no hope of the message getting across. It's funny: when you make a mistake as blatant as this, owning up to it nearly always gains you respect, 'cos we all do the same from time to time. But continuing to dig the hole always makes things worse, always.

Sounds like a bug. At least earlier it was, for example, possible to receive a gift from the naga without that gift actually appearing in your inventory.

Given how very poor the arguments are, at this point it's surely simplest just to ignore them.

Can you give examples of the type you listed? I haven't been that bothered by bugs -- but perhaps all the ones you mentioned are counteracted by the fact that combat tends to be on the easy side.

Btw, there's a whole another layer to this intuitive/counterintuitive system in the sense that many of the things that may need explaining in Deadfire are actually explained in a way that occasionally leaves you more baffled than you were before. Whoever, or whatever system wrote the in-game explanations did not do a good job. Some of them are frankly self-contradictory. There was one ability that "sometimes gives an added bonus whenever you hit", which is like, d'oh. So is it sometimes or whenever? It can't be both.

The Mona Lisa analogy is incredibly forced, starting from the small fact that it's a commissioned artwork (i.e. the commissioner made specifications) where outsider feedback is not relevant whereas Deadfire is a game people actually buy to play at home and where customer feedback is specifically valued.

Yep, the fluctuation in walking speed is really something now! Astonishing bug, by the way, as it's so incredibly obvious.