xzar_monty

No, I did not. There was just my main character (monk), Eder and Xoti. I did consider hiring, but then I thought what the heck, I've never been one for using hirelings and I'm prepared to take the stealthy route. Btw, as I tend to like diplomacy, I've solved Family Pride that way, so I haven't had to fight. The head of one of the families appears to have a nice shining armor, though -- I wonder if it's good. As for Oathbinder's Sanctum, I haven't been able to do that without a fight. I suppose it's not possible unless you choose an evil route of some sort.

That was so good, loved that. Btw, it's amazing how often you spot pleonasms and other foolish faults if you pay attention. My pet annoyances are "very unique" (not a pleonasm, just silly) and that everyone's favorite, "at this moment in time". Please note, nobody ever has to say that, you can just say "now".

Oh, right, you mean inside the digsite. No, I don't think you can avoid all fighting there. But you can avoid the fights before you go underground.

Hang on. I can't remember any oozes. Where, exactly?

Btw, I did the training area after the area sub-level and after recruiting Aloth. Once you rank up the difficulty, the training area also gets really quite hard. The skeletal sorcerer isn't that bad, but one of the skeletal warriors is extremely nasty. The two encounters there were doable with Aloth and after the level gain I got from the adra pillar below, but I don't think I could have dealt with them without Aloth and on a lower level. I suppose the main issue is that at low levels, on high difficulty, the real baddies can almost one-shot you to death. The drake breathes in a big way, and the boar hits very, very hard. Etc.

Yes. You can descend the slope from the north and reach the arena sub-level that way without needing to fight anyone. North here is defined as the top of your screen.

Yeah. Gorecci Street is a side quest, as you say, but you absolutely have to do the digsite. I don't know how many players would discover the stealthy option unaided, but probably not that many.

So, with the corona and all, I decided to start the game again, as it's clearly the best one around at the moment. And I also decided to give myself a proper challenge, ramping up the difficulty. Whoa. And I couldn't deal with it. I mean, the digsite is just too much. I tried using the clearly designed choke points and so on, but both the boar (in one of the fights) and the drake (in the other) were too much for me. I'm clearly not good enough. So I decided to take the stealthy route, entering the sub-level and finding Oderisi there so that I wouldn't have to fight any battles at all. Gorecci Street: ditto. I took the south route to avoid the battle altogether(*). And then, after leaving the first island... no problems. On the same difficulty level. I've done Fort Deadlight (no problem with the guards at the undergound docks -- I was able to use the gunpowder barrels to my advantage), Purakau and another bounty encounter. It's not exactly easy, but it's not difficult, either. I have to say this is slightly peculiar. I can't think of another game where the beginning is just incredibly difficult but everything gets so much easier immediately afterwards. I can't help but think that Obsidian made a bit of a mistake here. Of course the game is still great. (*) In other words: I was able to keep the difficulty level only because of my meta-game knowledge in both encounters.

Yeah, this very often happens with textbooks. I don't know how the problem could be solved -- people's definitions of "practical" seem to be so different. I seem to remember that when I was learning English, it took me quite a while to learn the word for "scissors", for example. (Come to think of it, I've no idea what scissors are in Spanish.) @Boeroer: I haven't read P. Rothfuss, sorry. There are so many books compared to what anyone has time for.

King is a good example, yes. He is fairly easy to read, and at his best he's also really good. Of all the ridiculously successful writers King is probably the best, in literary terms. He's surely not Shakespeare, but he's really good.

By and large, you are probably correct here. If Deadfire is one of the tools, it's unlikely to cause much harm -- but it might give you some very strange ideas about some things. Not sure about this. Anyway, having seen a fair amount of really poor translations, I personally wouldn't try learning via a medium where the translation is apparently not very good. thelee does what he does, of course.

Actually, it's not. The dialogue can be easy, this is true, but there is a definite literary bent to pretty much all of the narration: the vocabulary is varied, and I remember some people even calling it too complicated for its own good (which I don't think it is). For example, in the very first scene of the game, in your meeting with Berath, the "aged" (not "old") dwarf is said to have a "rictus" (not "grin" or "fixed grin"). This is not easy stuff. If the translation is faithful to the tone, it's probably going to look quite hard for a beginner, because much of the vocabulary is intentionally stylized. Lem is hard, not recommended for novice learning. If you want to read high quality literature where the vocabulary is easy, try either Albert Camus or Ernest Hemingway. I'm almost certain the German translations are good. Comic books are good, too; Asterix is brilliant, and I have used it for French and Swedish myself. I'm currently learning Spanish on the Duolingo application, which is pretty good. I can't read books yet, even detective stories, but one day, one day...

I myself am learning Spanish at the moment, but I wouldn't play Deadfire in Spanish. Because of, for example, this:

There's a fairly big difference between reading and speaking, especially when you're speaking with a number of people. I.e. when learning a language by speaking, you are quite right that the occasional oddities don't normally matter that much, especially if you also get feedback from the people you're speaking with. When you only read and do not interact, the relationship is different. You are likely to remember stuff very precisely, and if that stuff is wrong or just very weird, that may not serve you very well in the future, especially if it takes a long time before you learn that you have picked up something that is wrong or very weird. I don't think playing Deadfire in German is going to make thelee's German worse (as he puts in in his OP), and it's almost certainly going to improve it at least in some ways, but he may also pick up stuff that's just extraordinarily strange, and he won't know it.

As a professional translator, I would be hesitant to try this method, even if the idea does sound very good. If you need a mod, that is already a warning sign about the quality. And if you're only learning German, you can't tell when the translation is faulty or odd, and you may well find that your early German learning contains stuff you wouldn't have wanted to learn, given the choice. How about subscribing to a newspaper? The context will help you a lot, and the language is going to be professional.

Yeah, I liked that, too. The trope is as old as Treasure Island, but it often works. Certainly worked here.

That's a fair point. Will have to agree. @Boeroer: I don't know about you, but for me the coolest weapons in PoE are Tidefall, Stormcaller and Persistence. Not necessarily the best (I can't really say), but they sure are cool and have nice abilities. There's also that soulbound scepter, but it has the annoying habit of dominating enemies, and I don't want that. I want to get rid of them.

This divides opinions. I don't feel strongly about it one way or the other. I would have been happy with an Endless Path type of thing, but only if it was done a lot better than the original Endless Paths. It was unnecessarily stretched and contained far too few ideas; at least half the levels were just filler stuff, and that was poor. By the way, I think the biggest disappointment in all of PoE can be found at the bottom of the Endless Paths. It's twofold: 1) After defeating the dragon, you see an awful lot of gold in its hoard. There's even a clickable question mark which tells you that there really is an awful lot of gold here. But in fact you can only pick a couple of thousand copper pands from the hoard. This was so poor, so poor. I fully understand why Obsidian might not want to give the player unlimited gold (or just ridiculous amounts of it), but in that case, please do not put ridiculous amounts of it on display. Have some logic! 2) Essentially The First Law of Role-playing is that proper dragons have good loot. This one doesn't. I know @Boeroer disagrees, it was either the crossbow or the shield that he thinks is really good, and as he knows the system so much better he's probably right, but when I killed the dragon, I was mightily disappointed with the loot: none of the items looked any good. In that game, I never even tried any of them, and I never felt they would have helped me in any situation. This was so strange, because you can find a mightily good sword (Tidefall) from a mere drake a lot earlier on in the game.

The first sentence is very true. There's an interesting psychological phenomenon here: people who behave improperly are often very keen to take the victim position. You mention the word "bully", but in this case, the OP's word of choice was "troll". As soon as he received justified criticism for his tone, he started calling other people trolls, which sounds like a defense mechanism: the person was out to deny personal responsibility and place the blame on others. Not a good strategy, if you wish to reach some kind of adulthood in your emotional life and behavior.

Wow! That's good to know, thanks. Apparently, this can go wrong, too: I infiltrated them, but Aloth spoke about bloodshed. So there's a bit of a bug , there.

I don't disagree with anything the two of you said. But there was one interesting thing I noticed between PoE and Deadfire, one where I wondered whether Obsidian had chosen the "most common outcome" or not. In PoE, you can solve the Leaden Key situation in the Defiance Bay catacombs either by fighting or by posing as one of them (after acquiring the Woedica hood stolen by the troll who killed the cultist). But in Deadfire, it will be automatically assumed that there was bloodshed. Aloth makes an unequivocal comment to this effect, no matter what you did in PoE. Not a problem. Just an example of something that made me go hmm.

By the way, here's a thought experiment that I think illustrates the way in which Obsidian's system is slightly odd. Play Aloth as a fighter, or play your PC as a wizard who behaves like a fighter. In other words, give them a sword and heavy gear, never once use spells or any other wizard abilities, play them as if they are a melee fighter. I believe this will work quite well, although probably not on PotD. You will never have any combat abilities, but you won't need them, either, because of the general balance of the gameplay. Just use your heavy armor and shield and sword and you will do fairly well, even if you are a wizard. You probably won't be able to go solo, but as a member of a group you won't have any major problems. This, I think, is somewhat odd. (That's all it is, though: I'm not saying this makes the game a failure in any sense whatsoever.)

What you say is fairly accurate, stats don't matter all that much (although you can fail, if you really try), but what @asnjas says still doesn't really make sense. I don't see in what way Obsidian could have dug its own grave, and as the OP of this thread is a newbie, it's perfectly reasonable that they are asking for assistance with stats. I also believe that @Boeroer is slightly exaggerating the problems of the D&D system, although they are undeniably there. A beginner's choices can be "complete trash" from a powergaming perspective, i.e. in relation to what is optimal when you know how to exploit the system, but they are unlikely to be generally trash, i.e. unplayable or very difficult to play. Boeroer does have a point, no question, but D&D is not as bad as he makes it sound.

Great game, no question. And yes, the improvements made after PoE are just stunning. One absolute biggie for me: the fact that so much filler combat has been removed.

He is not a troll, though, and his response to your original post was quite justified, even if it was harsh. If you read your original post again, you should be able to notice that it is not particularly reasonable: it is petulant, right down to the vocabulary you use (feces, grey and boring, boring weakling, etc.). You can be mightily dissatisfied with Obsidian's approach, and there's nothing wrong with that, but if you choose the tone you chose, you can't really complain if others think you're quite childish.