Tigranes

What might be happening is: You charm an enemy. Charmed Enemy fights other enemies, all other enemies fight Charmed Enemy. Meaning, after a couple seconds, combat ends, because technically you're not in combat anymore. The game thinks it's just two factions fighting each other, just like what happens when you, say, lure a group of bandits into a group of trolls and they start killing each other. Of course, the moment combat ends, the effect you placed on them wears off - and then, presto, combat starts again. This is what happens to me a few times, and it's easier to tell if you have autopause on combat start. It's technically not a bug, though I think it should be fixed. The easy solution right now is keep fighting them, instead of letting the charmed guy do it all alone.

You'll get a thousand different answers from a thousand different players on this one, but I think one thing most people will agree on is that wizards are pretty amazing. You find Durance super useful. You also don't like his particular character. It's not the end of the world and no, not everyone else in the world feels that way. If you drop him your party's not going to be utter crud, and if you keep him you don't have to talk to him. How would you solve the problem, anyway? Write another priest? Then devs would have to write another wizard for those who don't like Aloth but also refuse to use custom adventure companions and also think wizards are irreplaceable. And ciphers. And... I mean, if you think priests > * and Durance < *, I understand, that's how it is for you and I respect that. I just think it's not a catastrophe here and you have options available to you.

Man, this is why I don't go on Twitter. Is the game any good? I had little hopes before release, but I'd always love to be pleasantly surprised.

People talk like Obsidian or other companies sit in a room and go "say folks, why don't we do something innovative like the old times?" "No, old chap, I just can't be arsed right now". Important point that applies to almost every independent game developer except, say, Blizzard: because of the industry's exploitative model, every single one is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy and closure, and they can never escape the cycle unless they happen to hit a super jackpot on a game they somehow funded without publishers (e.g. POE selling 10 million). This is because, to put it briefly, publishers pay developers just enough money to pay the bills while making the game, and then if they're lucky get a small one-time bonus for the sales. So it is always hand to mouth and even after making multiple critically acclaimed multi-million selling games, you are still broke, and the moment some publisher cancels your next game due to a "change of strategy away from PC gaming" or something, you have to lay people off and even shut your doors. Obsidian's strategy was pretty clear coming into 2010-2012: always be making at least one AAA game and one original IP game (the two could be one and the same game), while exploring smaller budget productions as well. It only took one or two cancellations / failed pitches to bring the entire company to near bankruptcy - which, again, would be the case with every other company. The poor sales for Alpha Protocol, that means we currently have no Obsidian IP other than POE, and the cancellations / failed pitches mean that the only AAA-ish games Obsidian has produced recently have actually been smaller, safe bet projects like South Park and Dungeon Siege 3 (both of which were profitable ventures for everybody involved). And they need to do stuff like Armoured Warfare to avoid laying people off. I would love to see Obsidian resuscitate their strategy, but doing so while staying true to their core strengths. Alpha Protocol is one of my favourite games, but a studio which always struggles to produce easy-flowing gameplay was kidding themselves trying to tackle a shooter-RPG hybrid, and the same goes for DS3's action-RPGs, which is a subgenre that depends entirely on pacing, flow, and other visceral factors. A major console-PC AAA RPG, whether their own IP or somebody else's, that continues Obsidian's reputation as "your big name RPG, only smarter and less durr hurr power fantasy", combined with the continuation of the POE franchise and then other middle-level projects that diverge slightly from the old school RPG formula. But again, that depends on Microsoft or somebody accepting such a pitch, knowing that such games sell 1-4 million and not 10, and not canceling it because their head of division just left and the new one wants to focus on mobiles and angry birds, or something.

"I talk in massive hyperboles but man, you guys are so thick for thinking I actually mean that." Pillars has a terrible problem with leveling / XP tables that it never solved and only got worse, which can wreck individual playthroughs' difficulty curve. That's a very different issue from the complaints in this thread, which basically is "me and my party had trouble with this fight so it must be too hard for everybody" + "me and my party found these fights easy ... etc".

I still remember people complaining priest / Durance was crap... Priest is very far from the most useful class. Just ditch Durance if you don't like him, you'll adapt your party, and it'll be fine. You won't know that yet because you haven''t met all the NPCs and that means you haven't tried all the classes either. Of course, you could make an all custom adventurer party, copy and paste in custom portraits of hawt chicks, and go for it, if you so wished.

If they choose to appease that particular god, they may not realize there's a dialogue choice that avoids the fight, and while you don't have to appease Hylea, you do have to appease a god. It just seems odd to me that Sky Dragon is related to the god appeasement quest line at all when the other god appeasement fights are all wayyyy easier. IMO, if you can kill sky dragon then the final boss is going to be a joke for you afterwards. Only timethat wouldn't be true is if sky dragon was NOT scaled, an then you DID scale Act IV. Thaos I would say is easily more difficult than the Sky Dragon, scaling notwithstanding. Anyway, the point remains that nobody will ever be stuck in the main quest because they can't kill the sky dragon. And it's far weaker than all other dragons. BG2 had a mandatory dragon kill. Etc, etc... Since when is casting spells "cheesing"? would it be possible to kill him with a party without any spellcaster and no scrolls? (see game balance) People have done it. A lot. You can even kill Thaos solo without spell scrolls, especially below POTD. All you've ever said is that it wasn't possible for you or your party. The interesting question is what kind of parties or playing styles have difficulties with which enemies.

Did you manually delete the autosave or something? The console lets you teleport anywhere you like, and then you can play the WM content. http://rien-ici.com/iemod/console

" it's one of 4 solutions to a 100% mandatory quest, " .....exactly? (Also, to compensate, Sky is far weaker than all the other dragons. This is similar to how in BG2, compared to player power, Nizzidramaniyat [sic], who you had to kill for the main quest, was far weaker than Firkraag would be in Chapter 2 or even Silver Dragon in Chapter 5.)

Most RPGs in the last 15 years have been ridiculously easy for veteran players on their second (or more) playthroughs. Usually my solution is house rules. Less party members. Resting rules (e.g. rest once per level). Lessen XP gain (use IE mod or do it manually with console). Do not use certain 'cheesy' tactics like abusing LOS to attract a few enemies then running away. Do not pick up non-magical weapons and armour, which cuts down on boring labour and also lessens gold gain. Do not minmax attributes beyond a threshold (e.g. 6). And so on.

So it was too easy, or too hard? i just got to the sky dragon this afternoon. (lv 11) Up until that it was too easy. Probably burial isle is a boring cake walk again. The Sky Dragon is much easier than other dragons, and in fact just not a very challenging enemy in terms of its stats, abilities, etc., especially if you're 11. Many players report the sky dragon as being a cakewalk. That doesn't mean the Sky Dragon is easy for everyone, though. It just means your party / playing style was well geared for blasting past average mobs, but you didn't have good ways for dealing with high defense single units with a couple of special tricks up their sleeves. Most of the time it's got way more to do with your tactics and builds. I've had characters who sat there in front of the Sky Dragon solo not really bothered, and whole parties who had much more trouble.

So it was too easy, or too hard?

I see what you're saying. It's not necessarily exclusive. I would say MaxQuest's definition applies very well to the kinds of immersion offered by books. And if we continue to use his description, my point is that 'realistic' visuals are not necessarily more immersive than stylised ones, audio and video are not necessarily more immersive than text, voice acting is not necessarily more immersive than silent text, so on and so forth. Obviously if you're the type to respond best to a kind of visual presence, then something like Skyrim, or better yet VR headsets, would work best. I'm personally the type that can be more moved by an author's description of someone's sadness or tears than a well acted cry-out in a film, because the former gives me the kind of situating information the latter cannot (and vice versa), and being able to feel immersed doesn't require my own body and perception to align exactly. I'm sure I would love a full on VR experience, but feeling immersed in a fantasy world, its story, its characters, I don't think would always benefit from feeling the chainmail hang off my knees or smelling the decomposing corpses nearby. This is probably linked to the fact that I can get on board with any well written charracter as the protagonist, whereas some RPG players insist on creating their own characters, and usually creating them pretty close to who (they think they) are in real life.

Often, this says more about how your party is built, the tactics you favour, and the game mechanics you understand/exploit the best. E.g. some people wailed and gnashed their teeth about shadows being 'impossible' and the game having terrible balance, but once you had to understand several core aspects of the game system they were simply 'above average' difficulty. I can't speak about Alpine Dragon since I haven't run into it yet, so perhaps it really is ridiculous. If we look back at how people treated the Adra Dragon, though, it was often the case that an enemy requiring a different set of tactical considerations was often considered 'impossible' because the same tactics people had been using from xaurips to animats to trolls were no longer working.

There's your answer there. Immersion has nothing necessary to do with everything 'looking' just right. Otherwise books wouldn't be immersive at all, and a photograph would be more immersive than paintings. Games aren't less immersive because they're isometric or have text, it depends on how the different elements are used to what quality. For POE I think its strongest aspects are the consistency in its lore and language use, so that you can pick up different clues about a region or a creature from its name or get used to identifying people's backgrounds. Weakest parts are, I think, enforcing Dyrwood's frontier feel and its particular regional specifities (which really never happens) - Twin Elms is a lot more 'immersive' in this sense.

A Ranger fix affects all players, whether they are complaining or not. All that matters is whether Obsidian also thinks they were unbalanced or not. Nobody made the argument that you're arguing against.

Sure, I could always be wrong and maybe tons of people want it. It's always hard to know what a few dozen or a few hundred online complaints mean, because there's a silent majority of hundreds of thousands or millions. And I'm sure I am biased because I personally wouldn't need the toggle. Hopefully IE mod stays updated so people who want to walk can do so. I guess I'm not used to demanding that developers put in a feature just because people request it, unless it's clearly an industry standard (e.g. quicksaves, editable hotkeys) and/or benefits most players.

Uh, exactly. When you have a feature that's not clearly useful for everybody and makes no/small difference for a lot of players, sadly, it often tends to be low priority. Sometimes it'll get done, sometimes it won't. It's not because it's cosmetic, it's because it's a cosmetic feature most players will never use or care about.

The longstanding norm in this stuff is that intelligence services find out a security breach, they exploit it for a while, and when they feel that the balance of its usefulness has tipped (e.g. they think it's been long enough that unsavoury parties will cotton on to it too), they inform the tech companies. FBI telling Apple how they did it after a 'grace period' is the norm; Apple building a backdoor OS for them is pretty much unprecedented. Of course, the FBI may now wish to change this norm to a more antagonistic relationship.

It's probably easy enough to add, it's just that it's always going to be low on any game's priority list because many players will never use it and it adds nothing to gameplay mechanics. That's not me being hostile to the idea, it's just the truth (what it does add, for some players, is a more subjective sense of immersion).

They'd have to design new abilities, talents, etc. beyond Level 16. Or they could just let you gain HP, accuracy, etc., but it would break the game making you supermen.

Continue here.

Obsidian's first two games were Bioware sequels, so that might have set the trend. Oddly, some publisher-backed games still managed to get forums hosted here. There's no problem talking about Tyranny here, of course.

Unarmoured monks can survive well into later game and thrive, and monks get more attention in White March. There's very little reactivity to your class/race and it was a time/resources cut. You don't have to talk to the one dude in the inn to save the Vale.

It'll be closer to Obsidian's own reputation systems. See: FNV.