xzar_monty

The awfully sad irony is that the West certainly has had extraordinarily weak and poor leaders in the very recent past, and some countries have extremely poor leadership even as we speak. I mean, who's the prime minister of England? Would you, in any circumstances, be inclined to trust him?

Hmm, which wands?

11 per cent. But far too much, anyway, no question.

Täällähän on ihan saatanasti suomalaisia juuri nyt. Translation: an awful lot of Finns taking part in the conversation right now. Actually, no wonder, given where that delightful country is situated...

@kanisatha: Thank you!

A personal question prompted by your comments: what is your speciality? Obviously it's quite all right if you don't want to answer, but I am genuinely interested to know the background these comments are coming from. Oh, I very much appreciate your comments. Just to make my stance clear.

This is an interesting point. I wonder if it has something to do with complacency/hubris brought on by their numerically superior forces. When you look at the statistics of, say, the Winter War (Soviet Union vs. Finland, 1939-1940; stats available on the Wikipedia page), they are nothing short of astonishing. It just shouldn't have been possible for the Finns to put up a resistance like that.

My logic was to come up with a name that reflected what I encountered on the island. Thus, one of them was "Cannibal Island", another one was "Tuk-Tuk's Island", and so on.

Given this (and as far as I can tell, you seem to be correct), it's actually quite surprising that the game seems to be doing so well. Does this mean that the "niche" audience consisting of hard-core RPG enthusiasts with a broken-system-abusing streak is a lot bigger than anyone could have guessed?

Playing on Core, too. The difficulty is mostly all right, with some absurdities. Enemy generals one-shotting you with Scorching Rays or Lightnings (this is absurd in the sense that you can't do anything about the generals, only their minions). Really over-the-top stat- and otherwise-buffing on some enemies, such as Playful Darkness and the ancient tree thing in Wintersun. These are doable, but I'd still regard them as absurd. My biggest gripe is that the game so blatantly cheats, as it did in P:K. Just one of the many examples: when you go to help Regill and his fellow hellknights, you end up taking shelter in a cave. Once the battle begins, the gargoyles start spawning out of nowhere inside the cave. It's perfectly fine that approximately half of them seem to come in through the entrance, but what's the deal with the other half appearing out of nowhere, possibly through the ceiling or something? How's that not cheating? If the cave has no ceiling, it's not a cave by definition, and if its ceiling has larger than gargoyle-sized holes in it, these should be obvious to spot and communicated to the player. Owlcat just goes and cheats. It's an awful policy. And this is just one example. Facing difficulty can be stimulating (how could it not be?), but facing a cheat is such a letdown, because there's nothing you can do except save-scum and meta-play.

Btw, whoever designed the random wilderness encounters in this game should be... forced to wear a dunce cap. Sorry, I almost got nasty there and then decided not to. I mean, heck, how broken can they be? Every single one of them. I just ran into a group of Ash Giants. These huge things. And I encountered them in such a way that I by the time the encounter started, I was surrounded by them. How is that supposed to be able to happen? I mean, some of the folks in my group are really very good at Perception, and every one of them at least has eyes. How is it possible for a group of GIANTS to get to surround you without you noticing? It's so bad that every time I get a random encounter, I just save-scum. I don't like it, but the design is so poor. Anyone got similar feelings about this?

Ok, thanks! Then the display is wrong, as it clearly implies a calculation, doesn't it? Once you know, you can read it right (in the way you describe), but you have to know it first.

I rarely check individual attack or damage rolls in the combat log, but since I just dealt an odd number of damage on a crit, I decided to see what's going on. And this is what the log says: 1d6+12 (x2) = 27 Piercing. So how is that possible?

Thanks a lot!

Sorry for being an ignoramus, everyone, but what is that game in @Chilloutman's post right at the top of Page 12 in this thread? Looks nice!

Here we enter the world of pure subjectivity, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. But just to give a different take on these two games: I thought PoE was superb, and D:OS2 was utter rubbish. It is poorly written, doesn't look good, only has turn-based combat, and so on. It took me all of two hours to toss it aside, and I'm not getting back to it.

Do you work in the game industry, or something that is very closely comparable to it? If not, then I would say this: It is quite easy to put forth something along the lines of "If it were me", but life has a funny habit of showing that these claims cannot actually be made. By and large, the only honest answer to the question, "What would you do if you were in person's X position?", is, rather astonishingly, "I don't know". So, unless you have been at least very close to where Obsidian and Sawyer were after the release and aftermath of Deadfire, you don't know. One of the possibilities is, of course, that you'd do precisely as you now think you'd do. But you might also fall into severe depression. You might want to get out of the whole industry. You might want to design a totally different kind of game. You might be quite confused. The choices that people make in these situations reflect their whole life and experience up to that point, they are not just a reaction to a singular, isolated event. Please note that there is no criticism intended here, and I am not trying to be clever or unkind. It's just that these situations are more complex than they seem. As for your argument that Deadfire is a very curious outlier: that could indeed be true, and I agree that it does sound like a distinct possibility. The problem with this theory is that I can't see any way to either prove or disprove it to any reasonable degree. But again, I do agree that it does sound like there's something to it.

@Gromnir, if memory serves, you said that Glitterdust and Grease (heightened) are some of the best spells in the game. What do you think of heightened Hideous Laughter combined with the Best Jokes mythic feat? Would it be a) good, b) worth it? My sense is that it's good (Nenio could make it pretty strong), but I'm not sure if it's worth it. Two feats and all.

Interesting! How are you supposed to work out the order in which to click? The parts part (sic) is obvious, because you only have only so many parts from which to choose. But anyway, you may well be correct. I'd have to go through the area again. Incidentally, if it really is as you say, this highlights another problem that I think the game has in almost every aspect of it: the world-building is just odd. There is no conceivable way to think someone builds a puzzle like that and then scatters clues all over the place. It just doesn't happen, ever, anywhere. Now, I know this is a game, but I'd like to remind what Tolkien said in one of his letters: even when building a fantasy world, miles are still miles and weather is still weather (or something to that effect, I can't remember the exact quote). The Owlcat world-design goes against this quite a bit. The cities, towns, villages and even the rural locations have chests and other containers with gold and other valuables inside. There are magical items all over the place, just lying around (in the wilderness this is ok, but in the cities and towns certainly not). Why would this ever happen? It's just so nonsensical. Heck, you can find smoking pipes and other ordinary items just lying around in the *Abyss*. In P:K, there's a small village where people go on about their humble lives, but right on that same map there are very dangerous creatures, such as dire wolves, fairly strong fey, and so on. It's inconceivable that these two could co-exist in such proximity. And so on. So, while P:K and WotR are enjoyable, they are also quite strange on so many levels.

Speaking of the puzzles in the game: is there always a clue somewhere? Let's take an example: the first Nenio-related location is called Nameless Ruins, and that area contains a clickable puzzle. It's not the one at the bottom, the one where you need masks (of which I have found one so far). It's the one on the way, the one where you have a circle within a square within a circle and you need to click the right spots in the right order. But is there a clue anywhere? Damned if I could find one. So I just cheated (i.e. googled it). It felt odd and wrong, but I'm not going to just click on stuff randomly if that's what the game expects me to do.

How do you equate this with the fact that Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous seem to be doing very well indeed?

Haha. That was my first thought, too.

@Gromnir: That's really interesting, thanks! Btw, one of the many very sub-optimal choices I thought Owlcat had made with many NPCs is that they've got plenty of ranks in Persuasion. Which nobody except the main character ever uses, I used to think. But I had totally forgotten about the intimidation side of things, I only thought about conversations.

I'm pretty sure much of the loot is useless no matter how you play.

@Agiel: You can just have one of your characters run around the table (must have 30 speed) while Lann and others shoot the chasing large water elemental from the doorway. It's tedious, but it works. You won't get hit once.