xzar_monty

The sheer amount of time one spends sailing around a mostly-empty sea is kind of absurd. Not sure why you want to do that. I suppose one good reason for not adding that is that you may be attacked by other ships at sea. If you actually guide your ship, you can choose whether to avoid this (and how) or not.

I have also noticed this, yes. The mechanism does appear arbitrary or not working properly.

Yes, I see your point. However, in this game, you're probably going to have plenty of max level time almost no matter what. But I'm not arguing with you -- from where you're coming from, the game design does appear rather punishing.

I'd like to introduce you to my friend, the Gul. Oh how do you pronounce it? It's pronounced "ghoul." No, it's different, I swear. Indeed. I agree that it doesn't work. However, it's part of the beauty (and utter messiness) of the English language. Let's look at the old linguistic joke. How do you pronounce ghoti? Well, first of all, "gh" as in enough. Then, "o" as in women. And, finally, "ti" as in emotion. Thus, "ghoti" is pronounced "fish". Can't argue with that, can you?

Merla! They are postenago. Ekera. I like the fact that if you know anything about the languages spoken on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, you can pretty well infer what they're talking about. The most unsuccessful coinage in my view is "fampyr". It's like a huge sign saying, "We wanted to change words just for the sake of changing words." It doesn't work at all.

Ok, fair enough, good answer. I absolutely accept that words from made up languages may irritate some people in Deadfire. I quite like most of them, but if you don't, I do take your point. Also, if you are not a native English speaker (or at native level), the clumsiness of some of the writing in P:K may not be apparent. And again, fair enough. It's comparable to music, in a way: if your ear isn't that well trained, you might not spot that something is out of tune. And nothing wrong with that: when I read Swedish or Spanish (and to a lesser degree, French), I often can't tell whether something is stylistically good or not. I just don't know the language well enough to tell the difference. You can absolutely "fool" me with badly written Swedish, Spanish or French prose.

In comparative terms = switching companions around will lead to what you describe, i.e. some characters will be more experienced than others. This is a legitimate concern, if you feel that way. I don't question that at all. In absolute terms = no matter how you play and how much you switch around, all of your characters will reach the xp cap with plenty of adventure to spare, especially if you have all three DLCs installed. For me, the second concern is more troublesome: the xp cap comes around way way way too soon, and it's not possible to avoid this without modding. Well, actually, it is, by deliberately not doing a whole lot of quests, but that's not fun.

Yep, good point. I would agree. However, I am not entirely sure whether the demystification really works. Wormerine presents some of the reasons in his comment right above.

I don't follow. The only result of this mechanic is that swapping characters will make your party have less xp than keeping a set squad. How could that possibly encourage swapping? Or do you mean the point is to encourage people to use a single squad for the sake of replayability? It's a two-bladed sword (hmmm... I don't think this allegory exist in english but let's roll with it). In English the phrase is "double-edged sword". Just for your information -- I happen to enjoy this kind of stuff. Which language were you sort of translating from?

Yep. In move terms, it's Alien vs. Aliens. When it comes to impactful and intimidating, the first one wins hands down. (The second is great, too, just in a totally different way irrelevant to this particular discussion.)

Well, personally I found it refreshing to have some companions with more XP still to be gained. So in that sense swapping works quite well. The bottom line is that you will reach maximum xp quite early, with an awful lot still to do (especially if you've got the DLCs), so although you do have a point, the problem you describe doesn't really exist. In absolute terms, that is. In comparative terms, yes, it is there.

Pretty much this. I was curious about turn based and thought about giving it a try. After noticing it was still beta, that was it. Let's face it: if the first released version of the game is substantially unfinished, what do you expect from a beta?

I don't think it's exclusively an HDD question. I have the game on HDD with few if any problems like this. (Btw, yesterday I noticed that the movement speed of my characters, and only that, fluctuated wildly. Clearly a new problem with a new patch. D'oh.)

Ok. Why? I'm genuinely curious.

There's nothing in it worth hating, I just found it uninteresting.

D'oh. Those bugs do sound nasty. I haven't seen any of them. I found the entire Tyranny uninteresting: the premise, the setting, the approach. Also, the first fights felt unsatistying. But this is definitely a matter of opinion, and as you're mostly asking about bugs, I have nothing to say on that.

I also wouldn't want to use a mod as such, having had problems with them before. The suggestions given in the thread you bring up above seem clear enough. I hope they work, too.

I understand minor bugs, but what have you seen that constitutes as major? (I found Tyranny almost completely uninteresting and gave up on it in less than an hour, but please, do not take my word on it. I may be totally wrong.)

Now, as a general statement this depends on style, but by and large you are quite correct. Verbosity is likely to lead to trouble (very few can pull it off), but then it's not a good idea to be overly concise, either -- you'd have to be a Hemingway to really make it work, and almost no one is. In this particular instance, you are completely correct. There is too much description, and it could have used some editing. Luckily, the description is not overly dramatic (we don't hear the narrator talk about the "staggering immensity of the humongous figures" or anything like that, thank god), but there's too much of it. Also, the fact that visual information is also narrated to you doesn't really work, it's just repetition. Having spent the majority of the past twenty years in precisely this area, I dare to claim that I know what I'm talking about. A lot of the writing in Deadfire is good, no question (considering the genre), but here, some editing would have been in order. (It's extremely interesting to compare the writing in Deadfire to that in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. They are not even in the same league. Deadfire is so much better every conceivable sense that if there's a person who doesn't see that, I'd have a hard time taking their sense of judgement seriously.)

It is partly this, yes, but this is not all it is. It's a combination of 1) hitting the XP cap really quite early -- look at my OP to see where I haven't been and what I haven't done. As for the main quest line, I don't know how much is still in store, because I have no idea where it's going to lead. 2) nothing happening after the XP cap. I've been playing RPGs since the mid-eighties, and the idea of being able to go further, to develop more, has always been a key thing for me. Once that goes, quite a lot goes. (Having said that, though, I would also say that high levels are not the most enjoyable -- things tend to be most fun from approximately level 5 to level 15 or so. The early levels are quite limited, and the high levels often give you unreasonable power.)

Regarding your very last point: indeed. I mean, in Deadfire, the Engwithian Digsite is the killer encounter. Hardest one for me by far. (My perception of it may be skewed a little by the fact that later on, there are encounters I specifically avoid if I realize I'm not ready.)

Fairly long experience with computers (since 1981) suggests you should never work with just one save. Conceptually, I can understand the appeal of ironman, but technologically, I simply wouldn't try it.

Seriously I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. This. Very simply, this.

Please, Verde, for the sake of simple human courtesy, do not tell lies. I did not take offense. You are not going to be able to demonstrate that I did, because I did not. Do not take your own interpretation as truth.

OP is talking about being aumaua. It's always so interesting, in a genre that is predicated on the fantastic and limited only by one's imagination, that some people (OP included) are really stuck in a particular mindset of how a game must be and that vision is generally based on a very tolkien-esque rendition of AD&D. Kind of antithetical to the genre's point. Regarding aumaua: indeed, yes, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out. As for the paradox you've mentioned: yep, it's absolutely delightful. And almost incomprehensible. Interestingly, this phenomenon can also be seen in fantasy literature: much of it is just staggeringly poor, umpteenth-generation Tolkien-derivative drivel. And then, every once in a while, when something spectacularly good appears (like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which is clearly fantasy but not only fantasy), its success is somewhat hampered by the fact that it doesn't follow the rules (like, what rules?).