Tigranes

Yep. That's why overall reduction should be a mod. The 'default' balance is pretty much fine.

When you have everybody selected and you choose to open a door or something, it'll be the closest character. If it's a lock or trap, the high mechanics character will step up. But conversations will always check PC stats no matter who initiates the talking. Just like how you do anything else in the game, you can select individual characters by clicking on them or using 1-6 hotkeys, then direct them individually. There's no real reason to do this when you open boxes or talk to people, though.

My dual-wield rogue on POTD is doing just fine, dishing out a lot of damage. No idea how it compares to a ranged rogue, as I haven't tried that.

BG1/2 eventually had Dungeon-Be-Gone mods. An equivalent would be nice indeed, since there are few 'choices' of interest or derivations in XP gain. It would need to drop you off at the start of the Valewood, though, and not the tavern.

I too would recommend that you engage in brain injuring pastimes (seems more purposeful than talking on and on about a game you clearly think is superterribad), but that's neither here nor there. I suppose I may have an inflated idea of POE's difficulty, playing with 2,3,4 party members. BG1: Bows everybody. Wands everybody.

Looks like the original topic has faded into the Great Beyond... (To confirm: no, there aren't any anti-piracy measures of the kind.)

If you don't know what you're doing and you auto-attack on the highest difficulty, you die. In a fire. The same is true in BG1/2. If you spam attacks with a halfway decent party in Easy or Normal, you can mostly steamroll. The same is true in BG1/2. It's sad that that has been the norm for most RPGs in the last 20 years, yes.

That is the 15 level dungeon, but all you need to do at the moment is just enter the basement of Caed Nua and find Maerwald. It's more or less a straight walk from the entrance of the keep to Maerwald, so if you really can't find him, you should perhaps use a walkthrough. Also remember the Journal will always tell you waht the main quest is and what your next step is for that. The 'bells place' I assume is the first floor of the Temple to Eothas in the Gilded Vale. There's at least one more clue in there, and after that it's fairly easy to guess the order. That is a sidequest. If you need it: is what I remember.

That's because not every enemy has regen. I don't think skeletons ever regenerate, though?

2 would be the easiest solution. Couldn't someone just unpack the asset files, find a leveling table, and change the numbers?

*shrug* it's possible to call anything apophenia. I could just sit here and say, "hey you people are not seeing the patterns that are there". It's an utterly meaningless statement. If I pick one specific point to answer: You're basically flattening all of the nuance in the delivery and the situation. If you asked Eder whether his problem was 'answered' or whether he was given a full 'closure', his lines throughout his entire quest say the opposite. Eder didn't set out to say, "did my brother fight for X or did he fight for Y?" He wanted to know why, he wanted to know what drove his brother, and so on. Your interpretation is basically like saying "you cheated on me, now I want to know whether you kissed him 3 times or 4 times." Similarly, you find with Sagani that Persoq was the white deer and so on. But again, focusing on that is completely missing the point. Everything Sagani says from the start shows quite clearly that she begins with unquestioned certainty about this ritual practice / journey and she is looking forward to just finding the guy and getting it done, but as time goes by, she begins to wonder what this journey means at all, what it means to Persoq, what it means to her, what it means to her tribe, and whether finding Persoq will really solve anything or answer anything, and what finding Persoq would be able to give to her at all. We find, from all of her lines at that last encounter, that indeed, finding Persoq could give her no answers on what mattered most. The only answer she did get is the answer that matters the least - that Persoq was a white deer. Of course, if a reader hypothetically went through those quests and thought, "OK we were trying to find out who Eder's bro fought for and who the hell Persoq was, done and done, their stupid problems are solved", then I'm sure the whole thing will feel rather pointless. I would say that's an extremely impoverished reading that ignores most of the nuance in the writing - and under such an impoverished reading, the only type of plot that would feel satisfactory is a highly melodramatic and explicit "here we are saving the world, here look you see this person die right now, can you save her?" and so on. Sure, everything I said here is my interpretation, but I found that the themes were weaved quite indirectly and I enjoyed that 'non-epic' approach.

5 year old PC, under 10 second loading screens.

(Having only played Eder, Sagani and Durance's quests to their end:) The companions don't turn out to be crucial to the main plot, but they are crucial to the main themes of the setting and the story, and the way the companions' quests resolve just as you understand the main relationship between you, Thaos and the Legacy make them extremely important. It's a different strategy, but one I am really pleased by - and it also makes sense that even though you are a Watcher, you are not some Super Chosen One, so it's not likely you'll end up picking up 8 people who have some critical interest in your mission. What I mean by the themes, as I posted elsewhere:

Agreed, there needed to be a little more to the Watcher's madness, and even more effective would have been to see more of the consequences of the hollowborn. The Sanitarium animancer's failed demonstration of a soul transplant in the town square? Why didn't they show it live, you approach it and there's a text sequence? Why can't we visit some place where hollowborn are quarantined, or places where abandoned hollowborn children eke out an animalistic living? Twin Elms was fantastic, and I also support the shorter final dungeon.

Well, consider the following: Prone enemies have -10 deflection Blind enemies have -24 deflection How much more often is your party going to be hitting/critting against enemies that are blind and prone? All thanks to your mage. Why bother blinding them when you can just cast 2 fans of flames and finish the whole encounter ? The more party members you have and the lower the difficulty this will be more true of everything. Level 3 PC Rogue & Alroth in Eothas Temple right now on POTD, and if I don't act quickly to disable them with blind or whatever, Alroth won't be alive to cast two flames, especially given interrupts. I disagree. I play on PoD and I find it extremely easy to use the FoF. Even with a tank in the door you can stand right next to him and get most of the enemies behind a door casting it so that the straight line of the half circle is perpendicular to the door. With expert mode, or not? Maybe when I use it more I'll get more used to it. I also find Aloth misses with it quite frequently. Besides, Aloth setting everyone blind or prone is often a more surefire way to get my rogue to stab them all in the face 80 times a second, while not taking damage.

I don't really like how the stats are balanced right now, for obvious reasons (how was it not obvious that 3 stats are so much better than the other 3?). Of course, OP's system just reproduces every existing problem in a different guise. Instead of 3 stats everyone takes, you now have "each type of player has 1 or 2 obvious no-brainer stats and ignores everything else". Instead of schwarzenegger wizards, you now have fighters who have to be intelligent to hit people more often, whereas a really perceptive and dexterous character doesn't get any bonus to hitting anybody. There's no improvement. I do hope Obsidian gets on rebalancing the stats in a future patch, perhaps reintroducing the accuracy bonus to perception where people who dump perception end up far worse than the 'normal' accuracy.

Flames isn't always the answer when you're on Hard/POTD and Expert Mode. The AOE on Flames fans out pretty quickly, so if you're in a chokepoint and one of your characters is standing next to the mage but maybe one step ahead, you're going to kill him/her instantly on earlier levels. Well, consider the following: Prone enemies have -10 deflection Blind enemies have -24 deflection How much more often is your party going to be hitting/critting against enemies that are blind and prone? All thanks to your mage. Why bother blinding them when you can just cast 2 fans of flames and finish the whole encounter ? The more party members you have and the lower the difficulty this will be more true of everything. Level 3 PC Rogue & Alroth in Eothas Temple right now on POTD, and if I don't act quickly to disable them with blind or whatever, Alroth won't be alive to cast two flames, especially given interrupts.

Yep, I love the fact that animancy is basically a speculative science and you never get a single instance of it going right. This also makes your decision at the Trial a little more nuanced, since otherwise most players in our secularised, science-loving, knowledge-fetishising society would say "Yes, of course do the R&D". I'm not sure I got you straight, but I don't think the themes are really postmodern. Actually, if I had to fit it in that way I'd see the POE story as a riff on the Enlightenment as tailored to that setting. It's not that the world has no meaning and nothing matters and you just have to do whatever (although that is one of Thaos' fears) - that's not the kind of conclusion reached by any major character or companion in terms of what I've seen so far. Even Wael is not presented as particularly committed to any kind of entropy or fatalism. The point with Wael, exemplified in the Rebury the Scroll quest, is that mysteries are not always problems that have to be solved, but the fact that a mystery confronts you today is itself an interesting and indeed worthwhile part of life. The short answer would be that what you attribute to N&O I would also support. POE isn't about a world where there are no gods and humans just do whatever, and it's not even a world where humans are freed from primitive religious beliefs and go forth into a better world. It's a story where the objective 'fact' that the gods don't exist isn't even the point - the point is always what knowing can do to you, what not knowing or forgetting or wondering can do to you.

I'd really love an XP reduction mod, e.g. 75%. I also think the bonus for solo is way too high, disincentivising me from it (although this was the same in IE games where you'd gobble up all that quest XP and become a demigod while still in Athkatla or whatnot).

Nosey and Opinionated is right - and I thihk it was very clearly supported by the game, in that all of the writing was clearly oriented towards this. The game is about a personal story, but the whole "personal v. epic" distinction isn't really the point here. The point is that the story is very tightly wound so that all the different kinds of problems many different people (including yourself) have in the world, the chickens come home to roost in the final actor as you understand the similarity binding them together. That similarity, of course, is foreshadowed throughout the entire game in the scriptures of Wael you find throughout the world: what is an answer without a question? What does struggle mean - your struggle against Thaos, all of 'humanity' (& other races)' struggle against their own lives and disasters like the Legacy, Thaos' struggle against the 'false gods' - what do they mean when you understand that nobody can guarantee an answer for you? When Thaos asks you at the end, why would you want a world without the gods? You can give a number of answers. This isn't just flavour text. Through it, he (the game) is asking: what did your journey and your struggle mean, and that of Eder for his brother, Sagani for Persoq, etc., mean? Can you find meaning when the game does not throw you a Nice Happy Ending, and can characters find meaning in a world without gods? If you want to save the "ENTIRE WORLD" (whatever that means when you play a video game set in a tiny fragment of it) from a HUGE AND ANCIENT EVIL, okay. Plenty of games out there for that. I loved what they did.

The technical quality of the recording would be the least of the problems, really.

Every time new game comes out and hundreds of thousands / millions of people buy it, you get all kinds of complaints about every imaginable thing. No one person can ever hope to even understand what many of those complaints even mean, and many complaints directly contradict each other.

Althernai is right. Those two numbers have nothing to do with each other, and Obsidian didn't take $ from Paradox. (POE team was about 12 people; the 1m figure is for Obsidian as a ~100 person company.)

I think of the future. Probably next Eternity will be 2D But the further, will have to deal necessarily with the times. Not everyone loves the 2d, we are a narrow niche, but you have to think that there are millions of players who now only appreciate the 3D and Obsidian works not only for passion but also for money and must extend its users. Not every game needs to reach millions of players. This is exactly the reason Obsidian went to Kickstarter. Publishers said, 'we want your game to sell 3, 5, 10 million copies, so you can't do 3D, you can't do this, you can't do that'. They said, 'a game that is made for people who love 2D, people who loved IE games, etc. will not be viable.' That's the whole reason POE was born through Kickstarter. Obsidian has other teams and projects which will continue to go through publishers. It would be sad and also pointless to do the same with POE.

1) At the bridge they'll tell you that Northern bridge is currently inaccessible, as you've noticed. The way is the Eastern bridge seen on your world map, which requires going through Caed Nua and exiting through the Southern exit. 2) To do this you need to do what the main quest told you to do way back in the Gilded Vale: speak to Maerwald in Caed Nua. Have you spoken to Maerwald? Have you spoken to the Talking Statue after that? This should clear your way to exit South and proceed to Defiance Bay. There's 5 or 6 sidequests in the Gilded Vale, and there's dozens in Defiance Bay which is 'the' big city in the game. Levelling is infrequent, and each level is a significant change in your power - just like the IE games.