xzar_monty

Is it clear that they did? (I only arrived here basically for the launch.)

Well, I played approximately one third of PoE 1 at max level (which was a huge, huge minus for the game), so there is a precedent for that, at least. But I do not know the answer to your question.

Of course it should not be like this. But I already explained why it is like this. To put it even more simply: 1) The folks at Obsidian probably have no understanding of languages other than English. 2) Languages other than English are not important enough for them, so the translators are paid peanuts, if that. 3) Obsidian cannot do any quality control on the translations, because there's nobody in-house who speaks foreign languages. I agree that it is a travesty. The honest way to do it would be to completely refrain from making any translations, if there are no resources for making good ones.

It is unreasonable and unjustified to expect patience if a product that has been paid for has been delivered and is clearly not working.

What? Okay, thanks folks, that explains the weirdness. I have only tried staring the game, once, and after importing my save game from Poe 1 I was asked some questions that I thought the save game should definitely have answered quite thoroughly. So I basically got the sense that something is not right here, this still looks like an unfinished beta or something. Ahem. I really liked PoE 1 and thought it was worth the money. This is not a good start for PoE 2: you immediately see that things aren't working. Like, that's literally the first thing you see.

Yeah, this. Makes no sense to make a beginning that takes as long as that. Particularly when that "walk through the mist" or whatever is just there for effect and reminiscence. At least 50% of that should have been cut. I agree that an option is definitely needed: seeing it once was bad enough, and not being able to skip it after that would be really bad.

This is no surprise. I wrote the following reply to a thread complaining about the terrible quality of the Italian translation. Here goes: I feel your pain. Here's the thing. I'm a professional translator. I've translated about 70 books in the past 20 years. Dickens, Wilde, Pynchon, Doyle, Dylan Thomas -- also biographies of Disney, McCartney, Cleese, Salinger, Stalin's daughter. Fantasy or sci-fi wise I've translated Scott Lynch, Gene Wolfe, stuff like that. And so on. Hard stuff, demanding stuff, literary stuff. First, my sense is that the understanding of foreign languages within Obsidian is either zero or very close to zero. After all, it's a North American company. I am prepared to stand corrected and take this back as soon as someone demonstrates that I am in error. I have an apology ready. Second, I'm guessing that Obsidian are paying peanuts, if that, for the foreign translators. Consequently, what you're likely to get are Google translations quickly scanned through and edited in a hurry, if at all. Third, because of point #1, there will be no quality control at Obsidian. Nobody will know, nobody will care. The result is that unless there is someone with enormous dedication working on your particular foreign language, you are almost certain to receive a piece of cr*p. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is.

The narrator made me want to quit right in the beginning: it's way too slow, it's extremely immersion-breaking, it's a total distraction if you want to read at the same time. And if you don't want to read at the same time, you will proceed slower than a snail's corpse stuck in frozen tar. I think it's great that she's there, for anyone who likes the narration. But boy would I enjoy the option to just turn her off.

I feel your pain. Here's the thing. I'm a professional translator. I've translated about 70 books in the past 20 years. Dickens, Wilde, Pynchon, Doyle, Dylan Thomas -- also biographies of Disney, McCartney, Cleese, Salinger, Stalin's daughter. Fantasy or sci-fi wise I've translated Scott Lynch, Gene Wolfe, stuff like that. And so on. Hard stuff, demanding stuff, literary stuff. First, my sense is that the understanding of foreign languages within Obsidian is either zero or very close to zero. After all, it's a North American company. I am prepared to stand corrected and take this back as soon as someone demonstrates that I am in error. I have an apology ready. Second, I'm guessing that Obsidian are paying peanuts, if that, for the foreign translators. Consequently, what you're likely to get are Google translations quickly scanned through and edited in a hurry, if at all. Third, because of point #1, there will be no quality control at Obsidian. Nobody will know, nobody will care. The result is that unless there is someone with enormous dedication working on your particular foreign language, you are almost certain to receive a piece of cr*p. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is.

I also have nothing against it in theory. It's quite nice that the option is there. But we should have the option to turn it OFF.

Sounds like a bug, surely?

Seriously, the narrator is a nuisance, and we need the option to turn it off. The narration is (obviously) so much slower than a realistic reading pace, and if you try to read while it's talking, it's nothing but a disturbance. It is also immersion-breaking in the sense that it works against your imagination; in that sense it's like spoon-feeding, to an extent. Stuff that I read on my own is much more evocative of mood and detail than someone else's vocal interpretation of the same material, particularly in a CRPG setting. I understand that someone has spent a heck of a long time reading all that stuff, but it's not only unnecessary, it's frankly bothersome to have to listen to it.

The second sentence in that review deserves a massive facepalm. Difficult to read further, actually! First rule of journalism: only be ambiguous when you absolutely need to, and never write sentences whose ambiguity makes them look senseless.

* NOTE: I am something of a difficulty fetishist (though not on the first couple of playthroughs). But even I realize that it's a side challenge that the vaaaaaaast majority of the user base not only won't care about, but would be upset to find out that things were cut just so folks like us could scratch an itch. By the way, it would be extremely interesting to know what percentage of players do more than one playthrough (you mentioned "first couple", and this caught my eye). In my view, PoE 1 had a replay value of exactly zero: there was nothing random in the game, and the world was totally static except for the choices you made as a player. I really liked playing the game, but having got to the end, I can't see why I would ever want to start another game. (No criticism implied here.)

I did my playthrough approximately a year after PoE 1 had come out. I thought it was really good. Giving this one a go in, August, maybe?

A lot of users on niche forums, which is what this is, live in a bubble and refuse to ever consider the big picture. My post is not to say full VO or death, or even that Deadfire can compete with those games (though I promise you I will like it more than Original Sin 2). I am just pointing out that full VO is basically a staple of most video games these days, even RPG's. Suggesting it is a mistake is living in denial of modern gaming standards, and more to the point, no one has any proof to indicate the money could have been spent better elsewhere. 1) There is also the question of whether most video games these days, even RPG's, are worth anyone's time. I did try two recent ones and lasted much less than an hour on both of them (which allowed me to cancel my purchase, luckily enough). So, there's that, too. It is entirely possible that essentially the whole industry is producing rubbish. And obviously I'm not saying that it's full voice acting that is ruining these games, but it would appear to be a contributing factor. 2) Strictly speaking, outside of mathematics, no one has any proof of anything at all. But even if we're being merely realistic, your argument about money spent is so speculative that no proper comment can really be made, as it doesn't really make sense. What could possibly constitute such proof?

Ditto. Quite some time ago, when Neverwinter Nights came out as the successor-of-sorts of Baldur's Gate II, I remember thinking: what will the 3D engine do to the party interactions that were such an integral part of the massive attraction of BG2? What will remain of that particular magic? Well, the answer was, nothing at all remained. And so (for that and many other reasons) the successor was infinitely inferior to its predecessor. I found Pillars of Eternity to be quite fascinating, although, to me, it has no replay value whatsoever, so having played through it once I won't be returning. I'm still very interested in PoE2, although this particular piece of news, the voicing bit, does cause some concern.

My main question would probably be: what of significance does the game gain from full voice acting that it doesn't already have with partial voice acting?

Naturally, I do not know how things are. But let's be frank here: how many of us genuinely believe that having all dialogue voiced does NOT reduce the amount of dialogue options? It's superb if it does not, but it does not seem realistic at all to me to suppose that this is the case. The OP pointed out that random NPCs on the street will repeat their voiced lines over and over again. This, again, seems like a very poor choice. We have a precedent from Neverwinter Nights, for instance, where some inane dialogues continued to be repeated. In Port Llast, there was this bit of conversation in an inn between "young Alhelor [sp?]" and the guy who turned out to be the werewolf in the end. When you heard it for the fifth time, it really started to break your immersion in the game. Obviously, the game world is utterly and completely fake. But when it continues to announce its fakiness this way, it becomes quite difficult to suspend one's disbelief.

I'm not entirely sure whether that's a productive approach towards someone who is indecisive. Furthermore, rest assured that under no circumstances would I ever even consider basing my decisions on what you think or suggest. In my experience, voicing has always worked best when only a selected amount of dialogue is actually voiced. In Icewind Dale II, for instance, some characters had all their dialogue voiced, and it got quite grating quite quickly: as reading is so much quicker and more convenient than listening to someone speak, the continuous voicing simply became a nuisance. I wonder if there'll be a demo that'd allow people to check this out before purchase.

Oh, dang. Full voicing is such a bad idea, especially if the only options you're given are either to use it all or not to have any voicing. This is actually a feature that seriously makes me question whether to buy the game at all. And I was already so much looking forward to it.

I did have them enabled, but disabling them did nothing. Thanks for the try, anyway. Any other ideas, anyone? The lag is really considerable when you move items on the inventory screen. But it never appears anywhere else. As for Steam in general, I would rather have nothing to do with it, frankly. The "achievements" I occasionally get, for instance, are simply a nuisance. Couldn't care less.

Hello all, I recently re-installed my copy of Pillars of Eternity and purchased both White March add-ons. I decided to give the game one more try (last time I lost interest the minute I reached maximum level). So, everything is working fine except for one thing: when I pick up an item on my inventory screen and move it from one slot to another, there's a rather terrible lag in graphics. I did not have this before; everything worked just fine. As of yet, I have not seen this lag anywhere else in the game, but on the inventory screen, it's there whenever I'm moving an item, i.e. whenever the cursor changes. Does anyone have an idea of what's going on and what, perhaps, to do about it?

Ok. My rogue is at level 4, so that might explain some of it. I suppose I'll try the traps later on. I have also found them just piling up in my stash, uselessly...

Indeed. Even the damage they do amounts to about one reasonable attack, which is not much. But hey, thanks for the info. And yes, the traps weren't there... The game also seems to have very poor intelligence in some senses. I opened that door, ran away and had one of the mercenaries run after me. I dealt with him. Fine. But, I couldn't save the game, even though there was no active encounter going on. I could only save the game after going back to that room, luring the mercenaries out one by one and dealing with each one. I thought that was pretty badly done, in terms of game mechanics.