Tigranes

I haven't played the expansion yet, so just going by your words. It sounds like you've relied very strongly on engagement as a semipermanent sticker in your tactics previously. Your go-to is "See enemy, engage, no worries!" It is not necessarily that the AI has become exceptionally dastardy as to make an Easy battle Impossible - even if we assume the patch/xpack monumentally broke things, it would be really hard to screw up that badly. It is much more likely that the specific changes happened to target specifically the habits that you had come to rest your tactics on. In your scenario, it already takes some time for enemies to emerge and engage your enemies, and then a few more seconds for them to disengage and run towards your squishies. You have time to cast spells: you say yourself "GM, Aloth and me are firing spells." So if you decided not to cast any disabling spells when you had the time, then of course you are going to be in trouble. Aloth, for example, could have opened the battle with some sort of crowd control spell - not an unreasonable thing to do, given the number of enemies. Or Aloth could have held off for a couple seconds, deciding to watch how the enemies open battle, so that he can react immediately. You decided to rely very heavily on engagement, making the AI's disengagement more effective. In addition: I don't know the expansion enemies, but if I think of any regular game battle, even if multiple enemies have engaged your squishies, that does not mean instant death. Firstly, this may mean your party is built far too dichotomously into tanks and squishies, if half your party manages to die so quickly. Secondly, every class possesses several skills for such situations, from Escape to Arcane Veil. Thirdly, there are even ways for, say, Monks to rush over and knock a guy prone to save the mage, or the high-defense Fighter to swallow a couple Disengage attacks, run over, and use Knockdown to save the cipher. In short: if disengagement is so instantly catastrophic to your entire party, this suggests that you have relied very strongly on engagement in the abilities you use, in your party builds, and in your tactical habits. In fact, depending on how the AI works, the enemies may be disengaging so frequently precisely because your 'tanks' are so heavily armoured yet weak in attack, and your squishies are so delectably squishy. I don't know if that's true for sure, I can't see your party, but that's a possibility. Now, I'm not about to say the xpack AI must be great - I'd be an idiot to say so without playing myself. Even if my party was well equipped to deal with disengaging enemies, it would be very annoying if enemies were doing it literally every second. I do think that it's a big step forward if the AI finally understands "Engagement" doesn't mean "Stand in that spot and never move".

I did, but I'm sure you're remembering somebody else. Wizard at 3 is eminently possible post-1.05. As always at such low levels the margins of error mean you need some rolls to go well for you, but it's pretty reliably replicable. What would be really interesting is if anybody did it with level 1. I suspect the sheer HP / Deflection / Attack Roll numbers make it an exercise in frustration, but who knows?

Ciphers were never necessarily the best at everything - even at release other classes could become more/as powerful, Ciphers were just the easiest to pick up and get lots of explosions out of. That remains the case at least up to 1.05/1.06, which is when I last played. It just means that your blunderbuss Cipher, who usually had almost too much focus and was spamming his/her best abilities every few seconds, now at least has some kind of downtime. Mental Binding, of course, remained ridiculously good.

Why not? Pillars of Eternity seems to take place in high middle ages which means somewhere between 13th to 15th Century. Flintlock weapons were introduced hundreds of years later in the beginning of the 17th Century. They totally break the immersion of the game to me but I learnt to live with it. Now if the devs decide to add grenades that'll be the final straw, I agree with Cantousent when he says we're on a slope from there on. Pillars of Eternity seems to mix high medieval tropes with late medieval / Renaissance ones aplenty. There's not only firearms, but forms of cannon amongst the Rauatai (akin to how Western Europeans might have heard stories about Orban's bombard in 1453 - and, in fact, how 13th century Germans actually already knew about bombard technology); the Vailian Republics are clearly evocative of the Italian merchant empires, whose heyday stretched well into late Medieval times (16th century, for Genoa)... So I don't think there's a problem here, really, it's more about your expectations (which isn't unfair given how many fantasy RPGs are just 'medieval'). That said, I certainly think adding grenades and all sorts of modern history-inspired weaponry will start to make things a mess. And grenades aren't really similar to traps in a gameplay sense, they are just non-magical AOEs. Maybe some kind of expansion of the crafting system for traps, making some of them throwable in combat?

Yep. I'm quite sure people who paid for the expansion on KS, for example, get both parts.

Nobody knows why he left. He did not have a leading role in POE, so it should be relatively unaffected. I do hope, after a quiet last few years, he gets to make some games where he takes complete charge over the theme and story, wherever he ends up. I'm not really interested in him reading over SoD notes and giving them feedback, that won't substantially change the quality.

That's a lie and you know it. While not as good as BG II, NWNs Campaign was far from being badly written or executed. I have fond memories of the quests that involved time travel, the quest in the snowglobe, the Captain's war and Mage Tower in Luskan and then some stuff. I remember the NPCs in NWN were mostly excellent written. But what I always loved the most about NWN ist the UI. A thing of beauty. "Please go to the 4 MacGuffinLands and pick up the 4 MacGuffins, Hero!" *Leaves town* *Comes across a symmetrical 4-way intersection leading North, West, East, South* NWN's campaign was a hack job in the literal sense of the word, because they had to devote so much resources to the world editor & multiplayer segments. Understandably so; it is still remarkable that NWN got those bits working so well, and it's no surprise nobody else has since.

There's only a single part of a single quest that ever requires you to have more than 1 person, so it's fine. However, if you want to make sure you do every single companion's quest in the same playthrough, you'll have to do some thinking ahead. Durance and Grieving Mother require lots of time spent in-party to unlock their dialogues. Other companions just need to be there when you do their business, I think (e.g. take Alroth to a place that he wants to go to). You could just leave a couple of them for replay value later...

As far as we know it seems MCA is doing some basic "this looks cool/not" consultancy, like he's done for several games recently. Their new content for EE's was amateur and cringey, their new UI for EEs (& SOD) is terrible and they should have just left it alone. Hopefully they can come up with something new that they made that is actually positive - looking forward to details on the shaman class, or perhaps gameplay/encounter design improvements.

I saw some of the twitch. There seems to be no real info on quest design or gameplay mechanics, other than, of course, the IE base that it's built on (which already takes them pretty far, though). What we can actually see: -Meh writing... but this isn't actually an issue yet, since a lot of BG writing was pretty pedestrian and yet added up to more than the sum of their parts. It's also hard to judge writing until you see a good chunk of it. Of course, their atrocious writing in the 'enhanced editions' doesn't bode well, but we need more info. -Environments look nice. All they needed to do was copy & paste the old BG style seamlessly and it seems they are doing that OK. -Utterly atrocious UI. Again. It's amazing how they take one of the best looking UIs in RPGs and utterly mangle it every single time. Just don't change it. You're terrible. Don't touch it. Why is the solid, skeuomorphic BG UI elements suddenly mixed with floaty, wiry, NWN-style 'modern'? Why is everything suddenly floating around? Who thought the big white Windows arrow for the log merges well with anything in the game? Why are the old icons resized so that they look really compressed, and then all of your new icons are so big they hardly fit in the icon box? Why do you have a multicoloured wizard's hat that disagrees with every part of the colour palette in the entire game? Why are the spell descriptions starting right at the top of the faux book page without an offset, so that it doesn't look like you're reading from a book, it looks like you're looking at somebody trying to copy-paste text using their feet to control the mouse? Why do all the text headings in the inventory have atrocious ugly borders? WHY?! -And why are the sprites changed to look like cardboard cutouts? OK, sprites are cardboard cutouts but the BG ones looked beautiful. Why do they all now look like cheap Walmart "cut out heroes" merchandise propped up with pieces of paper? Why did you change something that looks so great? WHY?! You know it should be easy to make literally everybody in this forum open their wallets. Just copy-paste everything from the old games, do a new campaign, maybe judiciously add some interesting mechanics. I'm certainly hoping that's what we get. So far, we have (1) a history of crap cash-grab 'enhanced editions' that demonstrated atrocious UI design and writing skills; (2) a game announcement that doesn't really tell us any new gameplay feature except for the Shaman class; (3) some good environmental art. I really hope they start showing us stuff that we can actually classify as 'improvements' soon, as opposed to 'eh mods did it 10 years ago' or 'oh god why'. That game doesn't need anything else to kill it.

I am loving those quotes. They read like machine generated user feedback on a niche sex object site. Hopefully, against all prior evidence, something good will come of this.

I'm very forgiving of bugs (hard not to enjoy half of the Obsidian games otherwise), but when you make "improvements" that are amateurish, negligible, and/or recreate what mods have done for years, then charge twice as much money as the good old versions, and then you have some bugs, you really have to ask yourself why this thing exists in the first place. As I say, if they just came out one day and said "we want to make a new IE game", I'd have best wishes and hopes for them. Currently, their track record is money-grubbing through three enhancements that hardly need to exist.

They started off with a buggy trash that added amateurish content, replicated some things mods have done for years, and added an ugly UI. Their second and third tries, it seems, went a bit better. If you feel like paying twice the price, that is. If they were a new studio announcing this adventure, I'd simply wish and hope for the best. Harder to do so when they've raised cash in this ridiculous way, and along the way have hardly shown a great deal of talent.

I hope they release something good, because they sure as hell haven't done so in their entire history so far. All that pointless nostalgia cash-grabbing would ultimately be a little less terrible if we got a nice game out of it. They do have some long-time IE modders on board, and I have a lot of goodwill for them.

The lesson, as backed up by dozens of examples in this thread alone, is that if you know anything about how naming worked throughout human history, then you see how it works in things like POE, The Witcher, LOTR, and so forth.

where i found this video they said it was obsidian who was making it Typical game journalism, don't worry about it. It's Ubisoft.

Collector's edition. Tight fitting cardboard box packaging I think? It was a while ago. Zero damage. US.

MCA leaving seems confirmed, there's no reliable news as yet on anything else. Continue here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/80155-chris-avellone-leaves-obsidian/page-3?do=findComment&comment=1702006

What we call "light" or "upbeat" isn't necessarily happy or pleasant or enjoyable. Pop songs are undoubtedly more upbeat than prog rock, but people who think the latter is just 'depressing' have a depressingly narrow emotional range - it is possible to enjoy or be happy through sad music or dark narratives. In any case, I don't even think POE was particularly dark and gritty...

Indeed. Bethesda, sensibly from a corporate view, is likely to create the FO4 that everybody expects. True to form, the trailer could literally be used for almost any Fallout. I think it's an easy decision for the consumer. For me, Fallout 3 was an offensively stupid story, a combat system devoid of any logic, challenge or simple-minded fun, served on a setting that was occasionally nice and occasionally stupidly bad. No need to go back for seconds.

None.

Mine did? It was the $140 Backer version, which I think might be different.

Unsure about resources and code, I'm pretty sure it's not Obsidian. It would also make little sense to resurrect the actual code/assets at this stage. For those reasons and more, a partnership with Beamdog is indeed unlikely. Beamdog probably wants to do a BG3 or something like it themselves - they're working now on a bridger game between BG1 & 2, though I have zero confidence in their ability.

Xaurip Skirmishers' paralysis ability is for each successful hit with their spear - it is not a castable ability. This is easiest to see when you leave Xaurip Shamans alive, and they'll keep casting their priest spells endlessly.

Come back at a higher level. You're looking at basically several small levels (except for level 13) until the end of the dungeon, there's no need to try and basically finish all of Od Nua at half the max level.