xzar_monty

Wow. I have not had that problem with locks. I'm pretty certain the trap bug wasn't there earlier.

I believe a new bug has been introduced in one of the patches. Has anyone else seen this? When you're in a dungeon with a trap in it, if you happen to move your cursor over the trap, your cursor will change into the "disable trap" thing EVEN IF THE TRAP HASN'T BEEN DETECTED YET. That's mightily strange, I would say.

What are the chances of Microsoft embarking on a project such as this for anything other than profit? I'm not sure, but here's my guess: exactly 0%.

I'm not sure there's ever been any need for POE3. But the frankly disastrous sales figures may well mean that nobody else is keen to produce games in this genre, either. However, I don't know the relevant figures for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, so I'm not sure whether that title would lead you to the opposite conclusion. Hopefully so.

I have read (and contributed to) feedback that says, "It would be a good idea if it was possible to turn the narrator off", which is entirely legitimate and inoffensive. The likelihood of this causing umbrage in a realistically-inclined professional is nil.

Being a very academic sort of guy, I had no other option but to pick "erudite" in my real playthrough that I just began with 4.0 and the last DLC installed. Wormerine: Obsidian do hide an awful lot! Like the God challenges. They're totally hidden in plain sight in the opening menu. Crazy.

Yeah, could well be. Which kinda shows you that there are some balancing problems in the game.

Dear OP, Whichever difficulty level you choose, bear in mind that the first island is likely to be a lot more difficult than anything you meet after that. For me, the hardest fight has been on that first island, right before I was able to pick up a certain companion. Nothing has come even close after that.

i guess there are always things obs can - and could have - done to push game harder. but ultimately, i think success is in lap of gods regardless of how good output is. there no end of people out there doing great work with no recognition. This is a good point and worth reiterating: success is indeed in the lap of the gods. When it comes to the means for reaching success, the great film producer Samuel Goldwyn famously said: "Nobody knows anything." He was referring to the fact that neither budget, nor stars, nor anything else is ultimately a guarantee of success. This used to be just anecdotal, but it has subsequently been statistically proven by Arthur de Vany et al., who've studied the math of extreme uncertainty in the film industry. The same logic (i.e. the lack of all discernible logic) applies to the music business, and I'm pretty sure it applies to the game business as well. Nobody knows anything. (Incidentally, do you know what's the best predictor of major success? Surprisingly, it appears to be good early word of mouth. And that's something that cannot be generated, it either appears or it does not.)

I can see his point perfectly well. The narrative is only new once, and since it contains no surprises, why repeat it?

I don't know, of course, but given the apparently terrible sales figures, it would be a huge surprise if there was anything more in store. Incidentally, regarding the sales: I'm at a loss as to what actually happened. The game is better than its predecessor. Where did nearly everybody go?

I may be putting it in slightly strong terms, but I've been playing computer games since 1981 (when I started on a ZX 81), and this is one of the stupidest things I've seen in a major release. I mean, why would a game developer intentionally hide an entire group of settings?

Yo! I was starting a new game, and I'd heard about Magran's challenges. I tried to find them. Couldn't. Berath's blessings were all there, though. I thought something was bugged. So, I went on the net to see what's going on. Then I found out where to find the Magran settings. And now I must seriously ask: WTF?! Has there been any justification as to why it's done like that? If you entered the game without any meta-knowledge, you'd need sheer luck to find the settings. This seems stupid.

Yeah, it's weird. At no point did he suggest it was actually half-assed so the title is misleading, and this isn't a Kotaku article it's a forum thread. There's two possible meanings here: JE Sawyer put half-assed effort into it, or the system itself is half-assed (essentially: half-baked). I don't think the first is justfied, but the second is definitely justified by the quotes. But the OP is putting terminology in JE Sawyer's mouth, which is a definite no-no. You don't do that, especially if you want to avoid lawsuits (I'm not saying there's going to be a lawsuit here). What makes the OP's posting doubly unfortunate is that he's putting less than proper terminology ("half-assed") in JE Sawyer's mouth. You definitely don't do that. Now, JE Sawyer may, in fact, agree with the OP. However, the OP is not qualified to make that statement for him.

I seriously dislike metagaming, but well-phrased ambiguity is always good.

It is not quite ok legally, either. It gives an impression that Sawyer said something, but the quotes below clearly show he didn't. If I were the OP, I wouldn't do that.

I seriously dislike metagaming. Does the game itself give you a hint as to when would be a good idea to do the DLCs?

So, are these detailed already?

Incidentally, since the patch number goes up quite a bit, to 4.0, does this mean that it's going to contain a great multitude of changes?

I haven't found anything wrong with the quest level indicators so far, but sometimes the skulls for individual encounters can be very misleading. It is, of course, a question of approach and tactics, but it's not rare to come across a "one white skull" beastie that is significantly more difficult than a "three red skulls" one.

This approach, while valid, requires metagaming to give you a nicer experience, which is meh in the extreme.

Well, that's fair enough then. I agree that sometimes a fairly small change can have drastic consequences. I'll give a personal example: after BG2, I was very much looking forward to NWN. But when it actually came out, I found the whole 3D setting was, in my eyes, utter c**p. It just didn't interest me. The graphics looked copypasted from one scene to the next, there was no immersion whatsoever, etc. (It also didn't help that the campaign was badly written.) So there it was: I thought I was a huge fan of Forgotten Realms style CRPGs, but it turned out I wasn't, just. There were other factors, too.

Well, with my first monk, whom i did everything in the game, i got 900k at the end. And with the new upcoming patch, ships respawn for more loot. You get absolutely ridiculous amounts of gold in both PoE1 and Deadfire. There's one big reason for this: limitless stash. In fact it's so limitless that once you've picked something up, you cannot just drop it, you either have to find a container or sell it. After something like level 12 or 13, you start coming across parties with pretty good equipment, and when you just pick everything up and sell it, you're going to be one very rich fella (or lassie). I'm not entirely sure how this should be solved, but it's another of those factors that make the game too easy. I mean, you can give yourself a challenge by cranking the difficulty up to PotD, but this thing doesn't change.

I did mean publicist. Your attempt to make an argument on the basis of my username was the point where I stopped reading, I have to say.

The system is vague, rather hard to master, not intuitive at all and much of the time very badly explained. Whoever wrote those ability descriptions would be sacked immediately as a publicist, for instance, because they don't know their job. In short, it would be quite justified to call the whole thing a mess. But then, as the OP quite rightly points out, combat is really very easy, so in essence it doesn't really matter if you understand nothing, because you always win anyway. Somehow, despite all this, the game remains quite interesting, at least for me where I am now (level 16).