Tigranes

I like how consistent the references for POE's made up words and terms are. There are clear Celtic, tribal and even druidic vibes in the 'native' Glanfathans, while the Republics' clothing, names, even Pallegina's little quips in her native language, etc. clearly run off Renaissance Italy. There is an issue with how loredumpy it is sometimes, which is a feature of being the first game in a series.

Take a disengagement hit, run. If you took Fast Runner or had some other means of increased movement speed (e.g. items), you'll eventually shake most/all of them. If you're engaged by many enemies or are 1 hit away from death, well, your fault for getting to that.

Yep. Sorry. I typed up a lot of useless convoluted stuff just now and then I realised: in Trial of Iron the quit button should be replaced by a Save and Quit button (which is what the Save button itself does, so basically get rid of the quit button.)

We have a tank-loving, cave-fight-loving fellow called Monte Carlo. You two would do well. Purely from a visual / atmosphere perspective I thought all the Engwithan ruins, especially Cilaban Rilag, were interesting - combining the cave flora (and some appropriate creatures like forest lurkers) with the runes and sometimes remaining texts / spirits. This was particularly good in Level 13 of Od Nua, where you basically get a step by step process of turning Engwithans into Animats. Level 10? The one with the spiked room? Was a good one in terms of the placement of encounters and obstacles, I wish there was more of that. Pretty Durlag in feeling.

G2Revelation is correct. Just read the DR values on the item description. Or the DR values on your character sheet when you equip the armour. This makes it a strategic decision to swap in different armour against different opponents - not so much that everybody has to do it, but in tough fights it can make a difference.

Don't be silly, Luckmann. Our old friend luzarius is actually employing a nuanced and sophisticated mode of persuasion. Don't you see? By making his own writing ubiquitous and insufferable, he is awakening us to the nature of his own suffering when he has to read words in a video game without voice acting! I, for one, have been fully converted to his wisdom. I think we should start a new kickstarter right away, and raise a couple hundred million dollars so that every dialogue can be voice acted, and why not, transformed into a FMV cutscene.

But.... if quitting deleted your save, how would you ever quit?

Ah, I'm wrong then. So what was all that about LOTR=Earth as apocryphal that I swear I read in dozens of different places, online and print? I'm pretty sure the England=Shire etc thing was never confirmed by Tolkien, but I suppose that's two different things. Maybe that's what I'm misremembering.

I love this fixation some people have with Sawyer, it's like I'm listening in on a bunch of 13 year olds who have randomly decided to zealously hate a celebrity and talk smack about how he probably never brushes his teeth before he sleeps, either. Interesting build from that chanter guy in the reddit link. From my limited experiments with solo it definitely seems Con/Res/Per become more important in higher difficulty solo, and it's not a no-brainer to max Might/Dex/Int. Getting that animat horn is a big booster to survivability, though from what I've seen you basically need to pick most of Act 1 areas clean (let's say, everything except Caed Nua and some of Raedric's Hold) to raise the sum.

If my ironman druid dies again, I will try these nudist ways of yours, oh longknife. My monk will always be ready for some many-on-ones.

(testing, topic should be visible to everyone)

^ It's a crappy bug, and the easy way to tell is if you ever go to the same area twice and you find less enemies than before. It seems to be utteryl random as to who it happens to and when.

You must have missed launch day. "Game is too hard!" "Game is too easy!" "Game is too buggy!" "Game won't let me rest!" "Game won't let me walk slowly!" "Game has backer NPCs!" "Game is too confusing!" It looks a lot less nutty now. People complain, all the time. The question is what substantial criticisms there are (and there certainly are some, e.g. the encounter design).

You didn't have to.

Yeah, game companies have been trying to take the Chinese gold farmers' revenue for themselves for years now.

Thanks! A fantasy Earth, in the same way that Tolkein's Shire is intended to be England, even though there are no hobbits in the real England. Science fiction frequently features other planets, but fantasy usually takes place on a slightly different Earth -- one that has elves and/or dwarves and/or dragons and other creatures not found on the real Earth, one where magic works or where praying to a god or gods gives a priest magic spells. You must have been reading some fantasy I haven't, because LotR is pretty much the only fantasy setting I can recall that takes place on Earth LOTR world as Earth is also an apocryphal theory.

Let's make it simple. You're talking six-digit figures for full VO. You're talking POE1, a game which was made on ~4-5 million, has possibly earned several million in profit, profit which is meant to fund future POE games (with presumably a larger budget), and is unlikely to ever be a Naruto-style franchise in a billion years. You want them to then invest some more of that money into auxiliary products like card games, and then siphon off a huge chunk of revenue after all that bother to add VO? It is just never going to add up. The crux of the matter is this. You are saying: "here's this really expensive thing which some people think is cool but is not a core part of a game. Now let's raise money through whatever way we can, so that we can basically lose money providing this thing."

Look at the previous posts who pointed out that Obsidian isn't limited by words count cost or changes to scripts, it just needs to fill in the gaps now for the first game. Further if I wasn't clear earlier, the idea of making it big via franchising isn't just for VO. Would you rather see the developers being paid a larger project/year end bonus, or would you rather give some of that pie back to the industry by hiring competent VO veterans - and thus contributing back to a support industry? Right, you're talking about raising additional funding from auxiliary POE products to go back and fund POE1 VO. From a business perspective, this doesn't make sense, because adding VO onto a game you've already sold isn't profitable. You're not going to get enough sales of a 'VO DLC' to recoup costs (otherwise you wouldn't need VC funding and the like) and you're not going to make enough new people buy the game either. Does VO add so much to the game that it makes sense for a company to raise new funds with additional products, and then go back and add VO? I can't imagine how. Your comparison between paying Obsidian devs big bonuses or giving money back to VO actors is very strange. The most sensible, and the most likely, thing that Obsidian can do with any profits from POE1 is reinvest in it for expansion pack and POE2. They should use any money for making more games, making those games bigger, and improving the more important parts of that game (gameplay, engine, music, etc, as I described above). It makes zero sense to suggest that either Josh Sawyer goes on a cruise to the Bahamas or you get some VO.

There is more than one way to handle cost. Obsidian is in the talks to franchise the IP right? If a tabletop and card game is in the works, 2 expansion packs are planned and a sequel is even being discussed, I can see this happening in a future version without passing the cost directly to the customer base. Director's Cut/GOTY with funds raised from VCs and private equity (after the PoE IP gets huge naturally)? Split financing from multiple revenues? On top of table top and card games, Obsidian can do figures, comics, sell mugs and T-shirts. Obsidian didn't just score for itself with PoE. It is arguably one of Kickstarter's most successful project, giving traditional financing models a wild run for their money. PoE - and Obsidian - has brand power now and with that comes financing options. Let's assume for now a best-case scenario where Obsidian gets a huge amount of money from POE-related revenue. The question then becomes: would that money be well spent on providing VO? I would say, it's a huge waste of resources. And this still doesn't change the fact that VO has a negative impact on the quantity and quality of the writing, due to the way it impacts the development schedule. (And no, that bit is not solved by money, unless you throw away good money after bad and have everyone twiddle their thumbs after the game's gone near-gold to sit and record/re-record VO). If Obsidian gets a big windfall through POE franchise, that money should be spent on making the gameworld bigger, polishing the game mechanics, ambient sounds and orchestral music, upgrading the engine and using more expensive middleware (Obsidian couldn't use their own proprietary Onyx engine for POE1 because it would cost too much in middleware), and so on. I would hate to see them spend time and effort selling cards, grabbing VC funding, etc. just so there could be some VO. (By the way, for a game which has sold 400-500k so far according to most estimates, you're certainly being very optimistic.)

This is a good point. However, to play Devils advocate 2 and 3 wouldn't be an issue for a hypothetical VO DLC. Everything in the game is already written, so adding VO to it wouldn't effect the writing at all. Would it sell enough copies to recoup the high costs? Doubtful. You couldn't exactly charge $15 for a VO DLC and you wouldn't expect the majority of your customer base to pay extra for VO.

This is the feedback forum - just like every other developer forum around. See: pages and pages of reporting, criticising, suggesting. It's a high activity period right now, but we know devs regularly drop in to read the posts.

I disagree, bar fights can be great fun, right until when the brain damage begins. Whether you like or hate VO, here's some concrete facts to consider regarding VO and game development: 1) VO is expensive. Very expensive. It's a big chunk of your budget. It's not something you add on a whim. 2) VO changes your writing process. When you have VO, you need to finalise your writing early on so that you have time to process all the recordings. When you change the writing, you often don't have the $ to bring in the actors again. This means less flexibility in writing, and less ability to change your writing later on as you polish the game. This sometimes ends up with places where existing dialogue is weirdly spliced together ot mean something new, or where the writer would really like to change the scene but can't. 3) A full-VO game means less writing. Expensive VO means in some cases you had RPGs where there was a hard limit on how many words you could have in your game. 4) VO is hard to do well... and hard to just not be crap at it. There are very few games that have good VO all round. No, you can't have random people on the Internet voice your game. No, you can't have the developer's cousins do it. Even when you pay professionals and direct them, you often get barely tolerable VO - which is what you see in most games.

Wait, so Hiro's Mantle is now in the game with those stats? Or that was what you originally submitted? Those stats could be anything from OK to Epic, depending on what 'retaliate' does.

Swen didn't tell us all the details about D:OS funding until some time after release in a postmortem. Hopefully we'll get similar info on POE too. (One thing that can be trickier is that Larian at that point was basically everything on D:OS, while Obsidian's workforce, incomes, expenditures, etc. are all divided across multiple projects and funding schemes.) We should at least get sales numbers & Paradox' cut, once the dust has settled, I'd want to see that.

TOTSC was pretty big relative to the rest of BG1, since Durlag's Dungeon was basically 3-4 vanilla dungeons in and of itself.