Tigranes

*shrug* dude has grievances which may be about Obsidian, we have one side of the story presented in vague terms & will likely never get both sides. Any opinion I could have would just be speculation. A nothing story.

Pillars hearkens back to a specific cluster of old-school games with beautiful quasi-2D art styles and immersive writing: Other IE games (IWD1/2, PST - originals not remakes) Arcanum Fallout 1 & 2 & certain newer games that evoke parts of that feel: NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer NWN2: Souls of Zehir Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 KOTOR2 For party-based tactical combat with a modicum of challenge and thought, well, there's very few, but let's throw in: Dragon Age: Origins (not the sequels) IWD1&2 (again) uh... If you wanted to go further in tactical combat that you enjoyed in POE, you actually want to go towards more strategy-influenced RPGs (Baldur's Gate was originally developed as a strategy game): Jagged Alliance 2 Expeditions: Conquistador Blackguards 1 Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall or Banner Saga 1 for an easier pick up and play iteration Realms of Arkania (originals, not HD) Might & Magic and Wizardry series...

The point is that while IE games tried to simulate resource management and attrition via multiple means (random encs, res costs, a few no-rest areas), they never made it strong enough to really prohibit rest spamming. And that worked out in a way that we have a huge amount of players who love rest spamming and hate scarcity, and also many players for whom resource management is super important, both of whom were able to more or less enjoy the games. POE has had to carry over this difficult job of satisfying both camps, which is why while you have camping supplies, injuries, etc., none of them are too strict. And tilting it very strongly in one direction or another is really going to piss off a lot of players.

Look, many people who played BG/etc spammed rest and played each battle like it happened in a vacuum, and they hate being forced to do meaningful resource management or attrition. And many people also played these games conserving rests, and they hate games where HP loss or spell resources or even death doesn't matter anymore. As crude and problematic as the 'ambush' mechanic was in BG, and as controversial as camping supplies are in POE, it's hard to come up with better solutions because ultimately those are two groups you can't please perfectly at the same time. So I'm OK with the compromise mechanics we have, because I just need enough to be able to play my way, and I don't need to forbid others from playing their way. Beyond that, it's easy enough to cheat in more camping supplies or houserule yourself less, for example. Making hyperelaborate theories about why everybody should spam rest because that's how it was always meant to be, or why everybody should never rest, is rather pointless.

Ugh. Really? Rubbish. So you go from a qualitatively distinct state which introduces new gameplay elements, to a trivial annoyance that half the time won't even be noticed by half the players (so it doesn't really matter if your Rogue built for single target damage dealing is 'Confused'). Terrible choice.

You don't really need thievery above 5 for the vast majority of locks and even pickpockets, and with many gloves offering +1 Thievery usually you can stay on top of climbing requirements. I'd say Labadal's thoughts are on point. Good game to romp around and get into some fun fights show off zany skills; not really for any kind of quality writing or moral dilemmas or tactical complexity. I enjoyed my time with it plenty.

They have very different art styles, it's not about which one has more polygons or whatever. DOS1 has a very cartoony/Blizzardy look with gigantic pauldrons, three or four massive rock pieces filling up a rock outcropping like it's some kind of stage prop (exhibit A), and superbright colours. POE goes for more sombre and realistic in all those regards. (DOS2 is slightly more in that direction.) Never understood why people like big blocky superbright things, but it seems to be very popular for gamers. [

Eh. You basically pick a weapon type, then every level you pump Warfare (which gives better damage bonuses than actual weapon skills for some reason) and Strength or Finesse. If you're going magic, every level you pump Intelligence and your chosen magic skills. Everybody benefits from plopping one or two points into a couple of secondary skill trees, because that's all the investment you need to get 90% of the spells. That's about it. In a standard four-man party, it's hard to NOT end up taking almost every skill and damage type and magic school. I don't think this is a game where you can even have 'builds', in the sense that the choices are so obvious and a standard party will have 99% of the skills and abilities available to it. The only thing to do is really powergame to see what combination of framed runes and whatnot will give you the highest damage output, but really the mechanics are so basic there's no theorycrafting to be done. Having fooled around with a rogue, ranger, twohander and mage across two tactician files, seems like physical damage is king - far easier actually to disable enemies and achieve high battleground mobility, instead of fiddling around with contradicting elements. Also seems perfectly possible to run with a physical dude and magical dude, though that usually means each guy focuses on a different enemy.

It depends, I found her while I was underlevelled when I made an early escape from the Fort and she could toy with my party at will. The placement of encounters and their scaling itself is actually done very well, but the problem is how 1 level makes a massive difference in your/enemies' power level and that dictates everything else that follows.

I mean, you can teleport your friends and enemies so far that sometimes the enemy's having tea on the other side of the beach because it can't figure out how to get back. Warfare gives you at least 3 mobility options, Aerotheurge gives you two, Huntsman gives you one (right?). If the enemies weren't positioned as well as they are now, it'd just be cold game. Meanwhile, it's pretty rare for enemies to teleport you, for example. There certainly are a lot of mechanical issues, but I don't think putting enemies in dumber places is the solution.

I mean, there's nothing really special that happens after it, you're not missing some brilliantly written finale to a tearjerker story. If you can't make it on explorer mode - and possibly your party's underpowered, it's hard to say - then it seems like you either cheat (if there are any), grind some levels/equipment, or walk away. I probably had it a lot easier that the first stage of the battle bugged out, but I don't know how you'd purposefully reproduce that. In terms of the second phase of the fight, you can basically ignore everybody else and go for Brac, and surely you can get his armour down in the first turn, allowing you to keep him permanently CC'd?

Once the big ugly thing shows its face, take out the mwahahaha dude and it's all over. In spoilery terms

How can people get more than one go during a combat turn. It must be because initiative = an opportunity to use your action points and receiving a helping of recovery ap. i.e. Initiative = number of turns you will have. An initiative 30 has twice the ammount of turns as an initiatiive 15, that's why his card shows up twice in the same turn. AFAIK this is not how it works. High initiative (e.g. via Wits) determines your starting turn: e.g. if you have more Initiative than all allies and enemies, you'll go first. But then, after that, it's hardcoded to make sure enemies and allies interchange turns. So e.g. Player 1 (I=30) Enemy 1 (I=27) Player 2 (I=29) Enemy 2 (I=16) Player 3 (I=20) Enemy 3 (I=10) Enemy 4 (I=9) Enemy 5 (I=7) And so on. So this is the first sense in which it is obviously ludicrous, because initiative only matters in a very partial sense. However, no amount of initiative would give you a free extra turn within that round. There seem to be a few known places where initiative order gets weird, and this is probably where that ends up happening: One of player characters enters combat midway, in which case usually they'll get the alpha strike that they manually executed to enter combat, but then they wouldn't get a turn, their turn will be filed in the appropriate place in turn order Fane's ability would give you an extra turn straightaway When you summon something it gets a turn immediately after the summoner's turn ends, no matter what. And then it goes into the turn order normally. So some shenanigans/bugs in that process may result in something getting extra turns, though I haven't really seen it myself. Ultimately neither DOS1 nor 2 are well balanced games in any sense of the word. It's always been a game where you use the barrels and elements etc at hand to wreak havoc with supercheese tactics and have fun doing it. I certainly enjoy that, but the mechanics are just too broken and threadbare to allow the kind of theorycrafting that you can do with IE games, NWN2 or POE.

Quite apart from the question of what exactly should be done or not done about guns, what do you mean exactly? Are you saying any limitation on individual freedoms is bad? America is not a land of absolute individual freedoms, no country is, and its (rightly) celebrated commitment to freedom of speech too is (rightly) restricted in many ways. Considering minimal restrictions on guns partly to protect other freedoms isn't singling guns out for special treatment, it's treating guns in line with everything else from hate speech to brawling in the streets. We can certainly dispute what should count as 'minimal' for guns, but you can't argue that any advocacy for gun control is 'anti-freedom', for example. I don't think that gets us anywhere, same as telling gun owners they're de facto murderers doesn't get us anywhere. And/or are you saying guns specifically help protect Americans from governments taking away our rights or abusing their power? I.e. a scenario where the rest of the world gets conquered by Kim Jong Un clones, America alone will resist because its citizenry have guns. I accept that that's one possibility, but it's quite a distant possibility compared to the present reality that this country just keeps killing its own citizens again and again and again every year all the time in massive numbers that would be much more difficult to achieve proportionate to forms of gun control. If you want to argue that the safety of America's basic freedoms is so under threat that it is worth killing [insert number here] of citizens each year, OK - I may not agree, but it would be a rational argument, one which presents a costs and benefits assessment. Is that where you are going with it?

Yeah, everything I've heard suggests Summons are the big fat Win button? Which is why I haven't used them.

Initiative is broken to begin with and it gets further confused when you have party members enter the combat separately. Don't worry about it so much - I tend to just walk up to enemies, or position specifically then alpha strike.

Not that sneaking is really very useful within combat, as opposed to positioning outside it, because AP cost is high for early game and in general Scoundrel gives you so many options for movement. I don't think sneaking in combat + GUerilla is really worth the trouble.

Finished it. Very good, very solid, very fun game, but the main changes from DOS1 are questionable and overall is not really a step forward. That's a pity, but like DOS1, it remains a very enjoyable game for me. Basically, it's a game where you run around a theme park world talking to chickens to get quests, getting into chaotic turn-based fights setting the whole place on fire and teleporting people this way and that, all the while supported by what is mostly a very solid, smooth, technically sound 'big fat RPG' experience. That's the appeal. What the game isn't for: The writing, while improved, is nothing memorable, though if you previously loved Larian humour you'd probably like it again. The combat has no tactical complexity, and plays more like a frenetic turn-based action game where you don't generally lay elaborate tactical plans but keep responding on the fly as the whole place goes up in flames. As I say, it's fun, so it depends on what you're looking for. There's some trappings of reactivity, faction politics and choices/consequences, but not really - the whole world is so silly, and the factions are mostly one-dimensional dudes who all double-cross each other anyway. Looking forward to cool mods/modules/GM stuff cropping up, but I've only tried bog standard single player so far.

Had the same bug, right click, send it to your ship, done. Your game isn't killed.

"Christians NEVER had a problem with happy holidays! This video of a Christian that has a problem with happy holidays now I'm not saying he's a fake Christian but you know maybe he is maybe he isn't is all I'm saying, I mean even if he is a Christian he could just be a nutjob exception am I right?" There's nothing wrong with a simple "I didn't know that, that's an interesting point to consider". It really is about America and other Western nations trying to decide to what extent they're still a 'Christian nation' and to what extent they are fully secularised. It's pretty clear that America, for one, isn't quite ready to blatantly abandon the vestiges of the former, even as we move in many ways in the second direction.

Yeah, basically, armour penetration only matters if you can do exclusively AP damage to kill enemies without touching their armour, but as far as I've seen, there aren't enough skills/resources for a party to actually strategise in that way. And since it's damage that penetrates armour, not effects, it's not like you can do a clever AP attack to debilitate them, that just means dude has 70/100 HP but you still now have to destroy his 100 armour. There are just so many obvious problems with the armour system while it only solves one issue (players 'stunlocking' enemies all battle with disabling spells), that it is incredible it made it through. You're penalised for mixing damage types across the party. You can't taunt someone because they are wearing heavy armour, but somehow putting oil on the ground still slows them down even while they are invulnerable to the raging flames at their feet. They need to have disabling effects have a chance of penetrating armour, or provide more robust armour-penetrating attacks for both players and enemies, or sort out how environmental effects are blocked by armour. Overall it feels like the actual mechanics and combat tactics haev taken a big step backwards from DOS1, which is a huge pity, but otherwise it's still a big, solid, fun game with tons to do - almost like a turn-based action or action RPG game - and I'm enjoying it.

Like DOS1, Lone Wolf is for people who run less party members. I'm playng with two lone wolves and in some circumstances it's probably more effective than four normal characters. Initiative is totally broken as the game brute-forces alternating turns between allies and enemies, instead of having everybody actually go by their initiative order. I guess you might want to pump it on one person that you want to have the very first turn, and that might be your glass cannon. The armour system is very silly and compounded with bad decisions on how player/enemy/item power scales e.g. with level, but I'm playing with toned down armour Tactician and a mod for reducing leveling bloat and it's working quite well so far. Looking forward to other mods that crop up over time.

They went for EE that way because (1) a major part of it was about building up a console userbase and expanding beyond their already excellent sales, allowing DOS2 to be significantly bigger budget and bigger dev team - which seems to be paying off; (2) they knew that things like really good controller support and full voice acting is really key to drawing in a lot of console players, non-hardcore RPG players, etc. It's well known that Larian set up new international offices and ballooned to over a hundred employees across multiple nations - usually a recipe for production nightmare and huge costs - as they went from DOS1 to 2. Seems like they made it work, though. It's also well known over the years that Swen is a risktaker, he believes in investing ambitiously to a degree that he himself has noted can look ludicrous, partly because he really believes in a big fat RPG that he's wnated to make ever since he started the company, and for various reasons (e.g. publisher demands on Divinity 2's direction, funding) was difficult to do until DOS1/2. None of this requires conspiratorial thinking or making stuff up - the various costs and difficulties with VO are well documented in, say, Obsid and Bio devs' comments on it over the years, and Swen has in various big retrospectives talked candidly about not only spending every penny for DOS1 but his vision of installing a solid playerbase to allow them to not only go independent but then have the resources to make big fat RPGs like DOS2, and how things like console EE release and full voice acting fits into that strategy. We're all very happy, I think, that Larian's do or die strategy with DOS1 worked out - and while we can't speculate about how much DOS2 exactly cost and what they'll need to sell, at least it seems like it's selling bloody well.

It's a win win if you can afford it, maybe, though I'd be genuinely interested to see how many people consider the trainwreck VA of the narrator added value. Larian have quite clearly squeezed every penny they have (and don't have) and risked the whole company, banking on bringing in the kinds of gamers for whom stuff like full voice acting is a dealbreaker. I hope they succeed, and I'm glad I can turn off the absolutely awful narrator, but that's not a "win-win situation" as if there are no costs or risks involved and that everybody should do it as a matter of course. Unless you are Larian's finance manager I don't see how you can be so sure that they squeezed every penny they have. "Clearly" so! No one knows and no one should care unless they've invested money in the company somehow. What we should care about as players is the final product, and the final product is, imho, very good. As I said, if one's problem is the voiced narrartor or the voiced characters in genereal , they can very easily be muted. If one cares about the game being voiced, like I am, I don't think they'll be dissapointed at all. What I mostly see, tbh, in this forum, is people being against VO because. There are, clearly, solutions to that and the budget-expert talks by fans are pure speculations if not just self-assurance that thank God our precious game won't be voiced. Personal opinion, the voices of DOS 2 are way better than Pillars' - still I wouldn't have muted Pillars even if there was an option; I like voice in games where there can be - it makes their world more alive for me. I care about companies like Obsidian and Larian, and it's not your place to tell me I shouldn't care, is it? That said, if you're talking about the consumers enjoying the best product they possibly can, I personally don't think voice acting adds value to 90% of games and I think any form of resources or priorities spent on it are better spent elsewhere. If you think people are "just" against VO then (1) you haven't been reading their arguments, and (2) you think somebody wakes up one day with some random hatred of VOs. It has been very well documented by many devs how costly VO is; how hard it is to get it to acceptable quality; and how, if not in all games, then in many RPGs over the years, it constrains the word count and prevents writers from having enough editing rounds. (You see one funny consequence of this in DS3's opening, which was voice recorded and then it was too expensive to redo VA when they wanted to change the script, so they ended up with a subpar script that still fitted the new storyline but ended up repeating "JEANNE KASSYNDER" (or whatever the name was) like 18 times in this spliced dialogue.) It also sets up additional barriers for lower budget / indie games to reach what many players demand as acceptable polish. I and some people also just prefer not having VA unless it really works well with the rest of the presentation and it is done really well. There are many reasons that rational consumers have developed their opinions about VO, many of which are well grounded in industry realities or their own preferences. I can't help you if you insist that I can't care about certain things to qualify as a rational consumer, or that facts about how VO impact development well documented (no, I'm not going to look it all up and give you citations) must be pure speculation, or whatever. I respect your right to your opinion, of course, about your own preference for VO. DOS2, from a couple hours play, seems to have decent VO, everything except the awful narrator seems pretty OK. Nothing memorable or quality but nothing poor that detracts from the experience.

Tried the first scene. Everything looking nice and picking up right where DOS1 ended, the writing also seems to be a promising mix of tolerable and snarky rather than awfully written over-the-top humour, which is a great sign. But I've only played 15 minutes. The voice acting for the narrator is god awful and it's a good thing it can apparently be turned off. It's hard to keep up quality VA for something with so many lines all over the place, but it's just terrible. That's small fry though, compared to just how long combat is going to take in this game without animation skipping/speedup. Already in the first 10 minutes of the game you're bored waiting for enemy turns. Well, that will be small fry too if the gameplay ends up being great, so we'll see.