Tigranes

Pfft. Europa Barbarorum 2 is out. Don't need anything CA is selling.

That routinely happens depending on the zeal of your antivirus.

But but it's my job to be high-minded and absolutely disposable when the apocalypse hits!

More pointless money-grubbing from Beamdog, more distractions for players who could be playing a great RPG instead of a great RPG loaded with an ugly UI and pointless 'improvements'. I suppose the good thing is that they'll run out of IE games to make pointless changes to after a couple more.

Tigranes are you sure that you weren't playing Risen 3 on easy mode? You may have enabled it by accident which would explain why combat was so easy? Uh. No.

Generally agree. It is R2+, and it could have been a good game just by fixing the easy combat. The encouraging point is that they improved upon their previous title; the discouraging point is that the ways in which they are improving shows the old PB is well and truly gone. Not sure what to feel about item progression though. Risen 1 did a superb job of making each upgrade expensive, alluring (oh god I can see it in the shop window) and meaningful (feels different when you smack someone with it). In Risen 2 and 3, the game is easy enough that it hardly matters, and I also found that the majority of R3's melee weapons had very similar stats (30-55 damage or 40-50?), until you craft/find some of the SPESHUL ones that are good for the rest of the game.

In trying to fix this we discovered a bug with the character creation tags. We'll get it fixed.

Continue this discussion here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67447-support-ticket-status/

No idea there, I never use companions in PB games.

I enjoyed it and finished it, but I'm not really likely to go back to it. I fired up R1 afterwards and it is so much better. If only they had tuned melee combat animations and timing properly it could have been a nice piratey romp, and it is definitely not as broken as R2 was, but it's disappointing. By the end I was literally running through the final island at full speed sprint smashing every enemy into pulp within half a second. Got to say I love the R2/3 gnomes though. Ugly blotched pig-nose faced dwarfs covered top to bottom in filthy pouches talking about ****ing stupid homis not understanding ways of the gnoo (=steal everything) in high pitched tones.

UI / Interface is not an early dev fix & forget issue. RPG UIs at least tend to keep getting polished right to the end.

There are quite a few of those. Finished it tonight just before POE downloaded. It is indeed R2+. The combat is far too easy and the exploration is not quite there to make it a proper Gothic-y game, and indeed I think PB has lost far too many original developers (unlike Black Isle / Obsidian) to make it possible. But it is an upgrade on R2 and a decent romp with quite a bit of charm in the world.

Little do you realise that this is a prelude to your birthday next year, when POE's full release will be delayed in 15 minute increments throughout the entire day.

Since the beta forum is now live, do continue the wailing and gnashing of teeth here.

The Backer Beta is not live yet. The current estimate is 3:00PM PDT, August 18. This is not 100%; I expect that the main priority is to ensure everything is good to go and solid, rather than rushing an hour or two and having things break. Watch this thread for updates. When it does go live, here is how you access the beta: The beta will be Steam only to take advantage of Steam's updating system during this phase. The beta key is not the key for your final copy.

Funnily enough they're using Steam so it would've actually been possible to do that. Send the keys out over a couple of days and have Steam release the beta staggered over the individual time-zones at a given local time. Not that I'd expect that kind of effort for a simple beta, just saying it's not unreasonable to hope for something like that. That would be terrible. Everybody would complain that some people are getting the beta before they are. That wouldn't be 'effort', or rather, that would be a special kind of effort to make everyone as pissed off as possible. It all comes down to the fact that we all had to wait the 15th of August, the 16th, and the 17th too. It comes out when it is ready, and it's ready a few hours later than expected. It's got nothing to do with caring about the various timezones of the world. Anyway, 2pm PDT, at least we have an ETA now so people aren't F5'ing forever.

Technically, the 18th isn't a special day. It's not like they're making non-Americans wait until Boxing Day to get their Christmas gift. If you know that you live 12 hours ahead of people who are making the game in California, why would you get up at 9am and say GO TIME? I lived in NZ for fifteen years, so it's not like I don't know how it is...

He's telling the other guy to take a nap. Looks like you could do with one, too...

I'll ask. Forum feature upgrades, etc. are the domain of the Administrator God...

All of those images are too large - that is why you are seeing the error. As Leferd quoted, we limit images in signatures to 125x600. I don't think we resize automatically for sigs - and in any case, those images would become really squeezed. The reason is that nobody wants to scroll through a huge list of pictures every time someone posts something - it is annoying and ugly, no matter what the image in question is. You are of course free to use Paint, photoshop or whatever else to edit an image into the right size then use it in your signature.

Yeah, it may be a size problem, or you can try using other extensions like .png. If you still have problems PM one of us mods the image you want to use and we can try and figure it out.

~10 hours in and my impression is actually pretty good. It is not your good old G1/2 style PB game in many ways. Combat is no longer the difficult, bare-bones affair that once iconised, say, Night of the Raven, and enemy attack patterns are less intelligent. But unlike G3 vanilla, where it was just 'same old PB combat just crap', or R2 where it was 'same old PB combat just crap + broken awkward guns/voodoo', R3 now adds many new elements to combat that at least are substantial. There is crystal magic, voodoo and rune magic; magic has now been made actually practical to use, where awkward controls + long casting times + scarcity in previous games often made them tricky. I don't know if guns are OP again, but in general, the rule seems to be - there's a lot more flexibility and a lot more stuff for you to do in fights, even if it doesn't mask the fact that enemies are sometimes quite stupid and the combat is not that challenging. I am pleasantly surprised by exploration, quest and atmosphere however. The first two islands that you will likely visit (Tutorial, Antigua) are crap. They recycle old assets, they have barely no NPCs, there's a lot of crap cutscenes, and it's the worst way to misrepresent your game for thousands of people that will probably give up there. After that, once the game opens up, the islands are bigger than R2 and all combined are bigger than R1. Each island has its own backstory which is fully borne out in the visual design of the island and the dialogue, as well as the quests - you know why the mages have a thriving harbour, why they have built their buildings on top of a big ring thing, why they are not on good terms with the inquisitors, etc. There's also a large number of quests to do, dozens upon dozens, and some of them evoke both R2 humour and good old PB'ish quests that have been in every single game. From bullying a gnome to get back to work to sneaking onto the rooftop of a ship to recovering a drunk pirate's lost belongings. Anyway, it's a fun game with a lot of content packed in, and a game which shows surprisingly good design in world cohesion; sadly it will neither be a Great game or a true old school PB game because the core melee combat & enemy AI has not been well built. It's definitely better than R2 by far.

Let's be reasonable and say, there has been an expression of interest for a Pathfinder CRPG, and it's probably safe to assume Obsidian would have such plans in their minds as they do a deal like this, but that no concrete set of contracts, circumstances, resources, etc. are in place. the game is nothing like magic. it is an RPG, except the games master is removed. I would say it is more of an RPG than diablo III but less than PnP games. you have characters, loot, spells, skill checks, weapons, you characters level, gain feats they can die ( the death penalty is quite harsh). I feel confindent in saying if you like PnP Rpgs you will like this game. and you do need dice. you use a set of D12, D10, D8, D6, D4 That's interesting. In that case isn't that a little more expansive than what we'd imagine by 'card game'?

Done. Post editing expires after a set duration & thread titles cannot be edited by users. But let me know if this isn't to your liking, I only edited it so people wouldn't be confused.

Interesting that she's willing to come out and say 'will', yes.