xzar_monty

The game does look excellent, I have to say. Will wait for a couple of patches and then start it properly.

Why is the game developer spending any time on a walkthrough? Assuming you are right here, I find this quite baffling. I thought they just made the game, and others played it. If someone out there wanted to do a walkthrough, they could, but I don't see why. (Isn't using a walkthrough the best possible way to ruin your game? Like, voluntarily giving the joy of discovery to other people, not having any yourself?)

I know there is an in game encyclopedia, but I can't seem to find if there's a manual somewhere (I don't have the game yet to say). Yep, but the encyclopedia doesn't tell you what kind of options are available for Ranger at lvl2. Like, whether it's a simple choice between two-weapon or ranged, or whether you have more options as per PnP rules. Turned out you have more options. The encyclopedia only tells you you make a combat-style choice at lvl2, but doesn't tell you the options. D'oh. As it happens, the game looks great, but I'm going to wait for a couple of patches before really playing it. Not that I found any bugs, but there are guaranteed to be some around.

I feel kinda stupid right now after not finding the game manual anywhere despite buying the whole damn thing (through Steam). I would've liked to check how exactly my Ranger develops, i.e. what are the specific rules. Where's the manual, folks?

Pathfinder looks supercool, although I did find something a little off-putting straight away: the number of possible portraits for your PC is quite small, and only a couple looked interesting. However, the NPC portraits are *great*.

My very first impressions were that it's generally a lot better than Deadfire but the NPCs (the two that I saw) were caricatures, perhaps intentionally so, and thus not engaging at all. However, as these are just very first impressions, I don't even trust them myself.

I believe cykow's comment was intended as satire/irony, since it is so obviously lacking in common sense.

Amazing how this is such a problem in both PoEs. In PoE, I reached maximum level right at the start of the last chapter. Well, the game stopped being interesting right there and then, with maybe 25% still left undone. In an RPG, the ability the develop is so crucial.

That's an interesting point, in fact. Somehow I don't think anyone wishes to find out whether a court of law would agree, but it does make Obsidian look very bad.

You do realize that, if you’re going to be even the tiniest bit consistent, that’s a valid argument for every line of dialogue in the whole game? In which case they’ve already provided a solution via the aforementioned volume slider. Problem solved! In theory, almost, but in practice, no. It's a question of quantity, i.e. there's a lot more of narration in any given situation than there is dialogue content after a mouse click. This applies to games like Baldur's Gate II as well: the dialogue lines are short enough so that the overlapping of spoken and written word create no problems. And when there is narration in BG2, it's done in cutscenes between chapters, like it was done in PoE1 as well. That works just fine, no problem. PoE2 is incredibly awkward right at the start, it took me less than two minutes to want the narrator to simply just shut up.

It's precisely that. A very good analogy. Given how obvious the error is, I'm actually surprised they made it. It's a very bad call.

While I can understand someone not liking the performance (though personally, I disagree) this is the weirded argument to be made, and I see it pop up over and over again. Of course you can read it faster. Reading is faster, than reading aloud. Sure, she takes extra time, as she builds a scene, and creates atmosphere, but that is a weirdest criticism of voicacting I can think of. She is performing, not being a google translate "read" function. How is this a weird criticism? I am genuinely very curious. It's a perfectly legitimate and logical criticism concerning a fault in the game. It is an excellent idea to go through all the text presented in the narration. You have, essentially, two choices: 1) Listen to the narrator, 2) Read the text yourself at your own pace. If you choose #2, which I want to do, the narrator is a constant pain in the butt while you read. She also takes a *huge* amount of extra time that provides absolutely no extra value whatsoever. So, how is this a weird criticism?

Amentep: Ahh, so that's what happened. I was trying to comment, but stuff just disappeared. Now I understand why. Good call on your part, that. The OP should really learn some manners and take a thorough lesson in how to respond to good constructive criticism. Their deleted comment showed that they have problems in both.

The problem with the narrator is extremely simple. She reads the text very slowly, a lot slower than I read, so I would rather read the text myself to get along with the game. But reading the text while the narrator is also reading that same text aloud, lagging behind me, is extraordinarily jarring. It has nothing to do with the quality of the narrative performance.

This is a really good question. The narrator is very poor, and not giving the player an option to turn it off is just unnecessary.

This highlights an interesting and important point. Owning up is actually very powerful: if you have the guts to come out and say, Yes, we screwed this one up big time, we're sorry for it and we intend to learn our lesson -- it's actually surprising how much people are willing to forgive. Quite probably because they know that they themselves have almost certainly also screwed up at some point and know how it can happen. But if you just shut up and don't even acknowledge there's a problem, it makes you look like a <insert a reasonably ugly word here>.

I wonder whether anything can be read into the fact that nobody from Obsidian has said anything on this topic. Perhaps not.

You might be on to something here. That's a really good potential explanation. Which, of course, doesn't make it an acceptable way of doing things.

So, how is it possible that they've gotten significantly worse from PoE1, as the OP suggests?

Incidentally, if you don't click on this "X has something to say" icon, will they ever speak? Has this been tested? I for sure know from my PoE1 experience that it took me a long while to realise people wanted to talk to me, by which point there were plenty of them and they'd probably been wanting to talk for quite some time. I found this approach slightly immersion-breaking, because it strengthened the sense that I am the center of the universe and nothing will ever happen until I will it to -- and this, in turn, strengthened the sense that the world of the game is essentially dead.

So the new DLC essentially sounds like Black Pits from Baldur's Gate:EE.

Absolutely! I just don't find those spells meaningful. But it's Power Word Kill that sucks more than anything else in the 9th level repertoire. I mean, if someone has only 50 hp left, they're already dead. Thus, the spell is useless. 4 and 9 are the spell levels that don't provide much for the wizard in BG2, in terms of quantity.

Nope. I never, ever use or used Time Stop. There's just no need. Most 9th level spells are pretty useless, I would say. In fact, I have never even cast most of them. The ones I use are Spell Trap, Spellstrike and... that's it.

I've never had inventory lag before. It's likely not a graphics issue. I imagine (I may be incorrect), that you have a rather large amount of items in your inventory/stash that the game is trying to reference all at once; it might be an issue with system memory- especially with the memory leak issues after long periods of play. A reasonable theory, but the lag is there right from the start of the game, when the inventory is basically empty.

The inventory lag was already present in PoE1 and was really quite noticeable. It has got worse in Deadfire. Interestingly enough, although toning down the graphics settings will fix all other graphics issues (i.e. lag) for me, it does absolutely nothing to the inventory lag. I wonder if a graphics expert could make an educated guess on the basis of that.