Dee-Jay

It took me 60 hours to complete my first and only playthrough on normal difficulty. I did all of the quests available to be and must have experienced at least 85% of the content. What are people doing who spend more than 80 hours on a playthrough?

The breath RNG really is a bit stupid. I was hoping for an epic, climactic encounter but instead got frustrated and ended up spaming her to death with Maelstrom scrolls.

As I have stated in other threads, I've never been a huge fan of the resting system in IE games and PoE. I find it breaks my immersion if I picture my party settling down for an 8h session of R&R, sometimes in some of the most hostile environments imaginable and with dragons and Vampires just yards away. I also don't like the "per rest" skill-limit because it doesn't make for interesting resource management. Instead you end up "conserving" them for the hard fights...that don't end up coming before your next rest. Ar you blow through all of them too quickly and end up having to rest despite the last rest just being an hour ago. And yet somehow my group is still willing to travel 3 days without resting at all. Yeah it just makes no sense in a video-game and is a relic of the old D&D ruleset which just sin't relevant anymore. So instead I wanted to propose a different, more appropriate system, based on the even-older Realms of Arcadia series from 1992 (similar to Wizardry). In it time would pass fairly slowly when in a city or zone. Characters generally wouldn't tire much based on exploration. You could still go to taverns and wait or rest if you needed to wait for a particular hour of the day but otherwise exhaustion wasn't really a factor. This changed when you traveled across the world map. Instead of being an instant teleport you could follow your group's progress across the map along the route. At the end of every day, the group would make camp and you could assign every group-member a specific task. - You could assign people to night-watch, reducing the chance of being attacked at night (random encounters will local wildlife or bandits mostly) - You could assign people to cook, which depending on what dish you cooked for the group, gave everyone a special bonus for the following day. - You could assign someone to hunt, which would get you various supplies. This was only really needed if you were running low on food because characters always had to eat. If they went hungry they wouldn't heal. - You could assign someone to look for water for if your group didn't drink, they wouldn't regain Stamina/Mana over night. - You could assign someone to treat wounds, which would increase the healing everyone received from resting and removed wounds. - You could assign someone to recover, which removed any wounds they might have received. - You could assign people to collect herbs which would give you an appropriate selection of regional herbs for brewing and healing wounds. - You could have a character brew new potions, which would allow you to use these potions the next day as you couldn't just brew them "on the fly". - You could also have a character enchant gear, which too wasn't possible "on the fly". I can't think of anything else at the moment that would make sense, but you get the idea. What I liked about this system is that it really helped characterize the different members of the group. You really noticed when Amoen, your Hunter, was heavily wounded and needed to recover and thus couldn't go hunting that night. You noticed when you replaced your primary herb gatherer with the Alchemist dude because while you now had access to much cooler potions, you now needed to buy most of the ingredients. It also enhanced the sense of "here's a group travelling through a hostile and barren land" as certain environments left you starved for resources. If you were looking to travel through a desert for three days, you better prepare for it by stocking up on water and supplies. For PoE such a system would also provide a good basis for expanding on the secondary skill system. Because currently, it feels a bit underwhelming. It would also provide a great opportunity for more "chose your own adventure" stories as "...while looking for water you come across a strange fountain unlike anything you'd seen before....". Or "while out hunting your prey you are surprised by a huge bear...". Of course, abandoning the current resting system would require reworking some of the current game-mechanics, first and foremost the "per day" skill limit. But that's a matter for another topic.

No, but why wouldn't there be? After taxes, publisher cuts, and other costs, I'm not sure if Obsidian earned enough money to fully finance their next game, but even if they did, Kickstarter is a great way to gain additional funding. With the stellar reviews Pillars is getting from players and journalists both, this new campaign certainly wouldn't suffer from lack of interest. While you are correct and crowd-funding has very little downsides, I do resent the idea of a well-established and financed studio resorting to crowd-funding. PoE did well enough to earn Obsidian healthy revenue throughout the coming year. They should be financially well-secured at this point and as long as they don't overreach, should remain afloat for a while to come. Since it was Obsidian that initiated the KS and Paradox only really came in as a publisher its safe to assume that Obsidian secured a lion's share of the profits. And even if they should need more money, with such a successful and highly-acclaimed title to show for it wouldn't be hard to secure funding from a 3rd party investor, one that doesn't care to influence games much. Imo crowd-funding should be reserved for studios and projects that cannot yet stand on their own two feet. KS can enable them to do that, that's what they're for. They're not meant to be preorders, 3 years in advance.

Yeah I read that too. But it only seem to apply if you've triggered the "go to Canada" Quest. And even after running around for almost an hours, there's only two exists. Canada, which I cannot yet enter and the farm......but coming from the top I simply cannot fart the rats away. I've ended up having to restart the game. This seriously sucks.

Hi, I got really frustrated yesterday. I accidentally ran into the woods. I don't recall how exactly I ended up there, but I did. This is before the quest to go to Canada. Now I can't seem to leave. The only ways out are Canada, which I can't yet enter or the farm, which is blocked by a rat-pack which for the life of me I can't fart on. I'm stuck....I can't get out and had to effectively restart the game unless you can help me.

The unity engine is very accessible and makes content creation fairy easy. But he Baldur's Gate series has just had a remake and I have no idea why you'd want to do it again. The only gripe I have with the game in the AD&D ruleset , which is completely non-intuitive. But there's no chance of that ever changing. And frankly PoE doesn't look that much better than the BG series did back in 2000. And that ran on a 300 Mhz PC.

Really? Discussing the location of a potential item that has no plot-relevance is now worthy of spoiler tags? Aren't we getting a little excessive?

This is one of the reasons why the game-mechanics remain so opaque for casual players. Most buff and debuffs just affect the stats in some way or another. Very few actually have a tangible effect in game. That's disappointing.

I don't get this obsession with min./maxing. There are more ways to spec a character than maxing a few stats at the expense of others. And frankly, you don't even NEED that many stats above 16 for dialogue. Withe the right gear and buffs, you can easily get good enough stats for every dialogue option.

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 21:9, 34", 3440x1440 widescreen monitor with Freesync.

Random weapon malfunctions have NEVER been fun in any game I've played. And while gear degeneration has its uses it mainly serves to sustain demand in a player driven economy. In a single-player RPG I see no room for such a feature.

Well I did most of the quests on my playthrough and, including all 15 levels of Od Nua, and ended up being level 12 with the entire party by Act 3. I think that the XP curve is basically balanced without Od Nua in mind, which iirc, was added as a stretch goal.

My main reason for killing everything was to explore every nook and cranny. I hate the idea of missing something and stealth just wasn't reliable enough.

I agree that the stronghold feels a bit like an afterthought. It was a stretch-goal iirc, which explains why it feels that way. That's one of the reasons I don't like games adding content as stretch-goals because they always end up feeling "tacked on". To be honest, I think the game could easily do without the stronghold. Being a lord of a castle would really change the way people interact with you, but it doesn't. Generally the life of a lord is very different from your typical RPG protagonist. Even Dragon Age: Inquisition, where the castle was always a central concept, has you doing a lot of mundane stuff and travelling the world with a "rag-tag" band of followers. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. If they want to expand on it, there are some things they could do. Just look at some old Facebook or browser games for inspiration. Building soldiers, RTS battles, attacking other castles, consolidated vendors etc. could all be potential ideas. But really, if they're going to stick with the classic RPG formula of "Protagonist from humble origins bands together with rag-tag band of followers to defeat evil" then I'd rather they'd leave any "grand strategy" elements out of it. Even in Dragon Age, the "management" stuff was really boring.