Hoeya

The only thing the High Priest says is "Get in the pit." Then he attacks you. As far as the dying xaurip, you can't save him as far as I've been able to find out. You can either leave him to suffer or put him out of his misery.

From what I saw on the in-game loading screen tips, there's a chance that you'll get a visitor who wants to take a prisoner off your hands for rare items. I haven't had it happen. There's a bunch of different prisoners out there, you need to go find the side quests for them in some cases. However, make sure your security level is pretty damn high, or they'll just let themselves out after a while.

Patch is coming this week or next, from what I understand. Shouldn't be too long. No idea about the documentary, but it'll probably be soonish.

I think the spoiled entitlement among the extremely vocal minority is driving away people.

RPG's are not dying. Seriously. Just stop. Aside from the fact that DA (any DA) are completely different games from this game, RPGs are hardly going anywhere. Reading people on this forum leaves the impression that everyone here is either alternate measures of Chicken Little sans falling sky, or actually being a ragey, headless chicken. If you want something different, please, go start your own kickstarter and make your own damn game. Barring that, take games for what they are and the limitations they provide. No game is ever fully going to fully live up to your standards.

There are a lot of bugs in any games that are released to the general public. Sometimes the bugs are fairly innocuous, and are quietly patched out, but no game is completely free of bugs. Skyrim was a huge release for Bethseda, and it was chock full of gigantic game-crashing bugs. Get over it, bugs happen.

I should clarify. When I say checkpoints, in this instance I mean set locations/times where the party may rest within the dungeon. You'd still be able to save anywhere but you'd need to progress to a certain point to allow your party to rest. Some examples: If you're invading Readric's Hold by force then resting is completely disabled until you rout the guards. This can be done by eliminating (kill, bribe, persuade) one or more captains or by killing a certain number of mooks. Rest is then enabled. If you're infiltrating Readric's Hold then resting is disabled until you convince an NPC to help you. You're then able to rest in their quarters. If you're sneaking into Readric's Hold you're able to rest in remote locations (sewer/dungeon) so long as your party remains unseen. Sounds like a great idea for a mod. Also, I know that in NWN you can't rest if there's an enemy within a certain distance, and that resting in the wild win BG/BG2 sometimes triggered a random attack/event. That might be easier to code, because resting when you can physically see the enemy through FoW but he can't see you is cheesy.

Even got your pimp cane swagger stick.

This game is great. Wonderful atmosphere, great character design, and a very compelling story. Yes, there are bugs and some things do have that tacked on feel, but for the most part, I'm enjoying the hell out of the game.

Wizards kind of got the shaft in this game. Your best damaging spell is in fact your first level spell, Fan of Flames, which does an obscene amount of damage in an AoE effect. If the monster you're fighting has large resists to fire, well, too bad. The free spell you get per encounter isn't particularly useful, as you have to stand within melee range to cast it, and it barely does more than your autoattacks. The daze effect is nice, but meh. You don't get a lot of spells per rest, and the spells you do get aren't very good. You are also extremely squishy, and a lot of your best spells require you either to be away from the party so you don't kill them when you cast a spell or within the enemies melee range. There are other problems, I am sure, but that's the things I've run into so far. Go cipher.

When in doubt, more tanks. And deflection. Gods, so much deflection.

Edér is one of my favorite characters, but I have to say, Obsidian did a really wonderful job with all of them. Even the least likable character in my opinion, Durance, is actually very interesting to have around, just because of how well he is presented. Too many companies tend to equate dislike with off-putting and uninteresting. When you manage to keep around a companion you don't like at all just because of how awesome a character he is, you've done something right. Edér also loves the cat companion, and keeps making comments about how he's going to pet it eventually. It's adorable. I haven't tried any of the other pets, because I haven't found them yet.

They could add a "Trial of Steel" mode, in which the game bricks itself when you die. If you want to play again you have to buy a new copy. Would that be sufficiently hardcore? Shh, EA might steal this idea.

Good sportsmanship costs nothing, except maybe a box of cookies. Here's the thing: the type of games many companies make depends on how successful the product actually is. The reason shooters became popular is because they are successful products, and they appeal to a wide audience. They are also extremely difficult to screw up from a story standpoint, and are in many ways fairly simple games with well-understood rules and mechanics. That doesn't make them incomplex as a genre and there is a lot of variety, but there's only so many ways you can shoot someone. Shooters are very focused on one strong mechanic of gameplay. RPGs differ widely from one another, and there are dozens of rulesets and paths to dealing with how to present the game, and that's really the problem. Since RPGs are heavily story-based, the myriad of different ways to tell a story means that you have nearly as many ways to present that story. Even looking at the different way Obsidian has handled their recent RPGs is telling. South Park: SoT uses a more Final Fantasyish approach with their combat, while Pillars is familiar to people who play games like Neverwinter Nights or Balder's Gate. KotOR 2 used a first-person system that had elements of PnP rulesets for hits and spells. RPG and RPGish games probably now encompass the largest range of games, and many genres that would not be RPGs at all have taken to use RPG-like elements like leveling, side-quests, story progression, and character customization. Even games like Cities:Skylines kind of have that leveling-up feature, as you need to gain population in order to unlock things like new buildings, vanity objects, and open new spaces for development. Because of this increase in the genre, I think a lot of what made more traditional RPGs was lost. I think a lot of developers saw that the RPG had moved from being a genre in itself and instead birthed an era of RPG-like games that had none of the difficulty of creating an RPG game from scratch but kept a lot of the elements of RPGs while keeping to relatively familiar mechanics. Shooter-type RPGs began to dominate, the Skyrim/Fallout/Mass Effect game becoming the norm rather than the exception, and appealing to a much larger population than your traditional RPG. But a lot of other things that made RPGs were lost, like the rulesets, strategy, and tactics. Parties in these games usually consisted of maybe two other people at most, and micromanaging them is almost always sub-par. A lot of the complexity was lost, and a lot of the thought process involved in boss and even normal fights was lost. In games like Fallout or Skyrim, defeating enemies and advancing relies on basically having the biggest/fastest/best weapon and shooting/swinging it a lot, with the occasional spell or blocking of an attack. The recent success with a relatively small game like Pillars may actually help to revitalize the more traditional computer RPG game and help developers to realize what made these games actually fun, and I hope it does, because it's been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience so far. It's far from perfect, especially on the balance end, but it's refreshing as hell. I hope Bioware and others wakes up and realizes how untapped and successful that this niche can really be.

You could start a text file backup, and just copy-paste what you delete so you don't have to lose anything.