Minervin

Imagine the following dialogue option: PC: Thaos, since your people decided to manufacture a polytheistic pantheon, you have already accomplished your task 1000 years ago by making the other nation forget their original gods. You don't have to keep the manufacture a secret, since in a polytheistic religion nobody cares. Thaos: No! The world still needs me! I am not ready for retirement! *Thaos attacks you*

I agree with Concordance: it does not matter. Does it matter, if a god is an ancient wizard who became "godlike" by a ritual, some god's testicles were cut off and by throwing them into the sea a new goddess was born (actual ancient story) or that they are made by an ancient civilisation? No it does not. That the game makes a big deal out of it only makes sense in the light that Thaos is willing to kill for it. In a polytheistic pantheon absoluteness makes no sense, different to Christianity. So worshipping a god is more a contract with that god (I worship you, therefore you are helping me). Since the gods are actually powerful that still makes sense even tho they have been manufactured. I mean non of their teachings can be very influential for a society as a whole on the basis that they are divine teachings, for there is always a god in opposition you can rather pick whos teachings are divine as well. I always picked the dialogue option that Iovara as well as Thaos motives are rather pointless. Which makes it even more serious to stop him to kill for it. However the game defiantly takes this options more in the sense of "humans do human-stuff anyway, with or without the gods", but I ignored that flavour.

First, I want to say that I love this game. As a particular picky wizard player I am really into the concept and game mechanics of grimoires, what glyphs are shown when doing arcane magic and (and that is the biggest like) the spells Merciless Gaze and Expose Vulnerabilities. Those spells are rare examples of combat relevant clairvoyant spells which are not conceptualised as divination spells. Latter are conceptually very implausible (over powered level 1 wizards and stuff). Well done! However, I did not get a wizard feeling while playing the game. Why? Basically because it is said several times in the game that animancy is a science and therefore not magic (implying that magic is not science for the NPCs). I don't want to go into philosophy or history of science in the real world, but it seems partiuclary implausible in a fantasy setting that animancers, which are to big amound wizards in the game (Osyra, Azo, Helig), are dividing their methodology when studying animancy from the one they use when studying magic. That is especially true for the concept of a wizard the game has chosen (and I adore). Ok, one might say that is only about words and I should just mentally substitute the word "science" by "engineering" and the word "technology" by "machines" in the dialogues by myself. The first response would be that this is not really possible, because there is still the concept of an artificer (as a artefact building wizard) in my head, but I don't want to take that line. There is actually a problem about the game mechanics I want to point out: There are no wizard specific dialogue options and wizard not a single wizard specific quest (beside killing a wizard during the bounty hunt, which I did not do of course). And that is first, sad, and second, a direct outcome of the conceptual division I was talking before. After I finished the game 3 days ago I felt somehow cheated about my role playing experience. For I should have played a Magran or Eothas priest to get this feeling. And the lack of possibilities is for sure the division of animcany from magic. For therefore all usual quest that might be related to a wizard character are already taken by animancy (since animancers are take over the place usually taken over by wizards in the story line), which is by definition not magic and hence not wizard specific. Ok, some might say that when abandon the magic/science-division PoE just reheats the already gotten old story of the hate against necromancy, but I don't think so. I think one can still make a difference between those two things, can keep the difference between wizardry and machines (by announcing it as two different technologies coming out of the same science[, which is traditionally performed by wizards, but not exclusifly in all aspects anymore]), making it therefore to a story-line-component wizard-PCs can react to and also include the non-wizard NPCs to the research (since they can perform "magic" through those machines). I wanted to suggest this, because maybe my critique finds it way into a hypothetical expansion (or even some dialogues get chanced).