Boeroer

That would at least explain why Deadfire sold significantly less copies than PoE without PoE nor Deadfire having bad user reviews. If disappointment and problems with Poe lead to such a massive sales drop it would have found its way into revies, I'm still convinced about that. Same as the "abysmal marketing" and "IE games nostalgia was satisfied with PoE" theories: All three don't contradict the fact that user reviews for both games were good. That's why I favor those explanations.

Hm, I played PoE on a notebook with a 555M and it ran rel. well. I wouldn't say that this game desprerately calls for cloud gaming. But anyway: your point abput Microsoft/Google is a good one and makes most others moot in the first place.

I would be very happy with an episodic form of PoE3. I mean multiple smaller campaigns instead of a big long one. You'd have a rel. small main game with one starter episode and then you can buy whatever additional episodes sounds fun. A bit like the old Hero Quest tabletop game (which was fun!). They wouldn't need to be played in a particular order (although maybe a certain level treshold would be good I guess). You wouldn't need such a huge team and once the main game's engine is set the teams could focus on story and quest designs and itemization and so on (see Deadfire DLCs). Also smaller teams could work parallel and it wouldn't be too risky to let somebody less experienced take the lead etc. Try something new... Maybe that's a stupid idea, but atm it sounds rather nice to me until you convince be it's not.

The bonuses are very minor though. They hardly make a difference.

I really doubt that Microsoft (who now owns Obsidian and therefore also the Pillars IP) would allow a Kickstarter campaign for PoE3. The first hurdle for a PoE3: the devs must be willing to do it. After the release of Deadfire and the low sales numbers the mood was pretty gloomy. But as I already wrote: several devs now came forth on Twitter and said they would be on board for a PoE3. Maybe Josh Sawyer still wouldn't be willing to direct it (too bad), but as things like Beast of Winter shows: other devs can step in and still deliver a really nice RPG experience. Imo BoW was excellent and Josh Sawyer wasn't involved that much. Then Microsoft would need to approve it and fund the development. As I said above they want a big portfolio - all kinds of different games - for the Game Pass program. Not all those games don't have to appeal to millions of players - as long as they don't burn money it's a win I guess. Deadfire could have been a lot cheaper if it didn't have Full VO and some quicksand-features like ship combat. And yet it broke even half a year ago or so (so it wasn't a commercial failure after all). Microsoft bought Obsidian in order to have more RPG expertise. Deadfire wasn't a huge financial success but broke even after all. Even such games can be a benefit for Game Pass. So while it still seems unlikely that we will see a PoE3 in the near future - mainly because Obsidian still really doesn't know what went wrong with Deadfire and seems hesitant to retry - it seems less unlikely than a year ago.

Since this saying has its origin in Germanic tribal legislation/jurisdiction of the early middle ages and Planescape Torment def. feels older than that: I guess you are right. 😄

Twin Elms was too long indeed. Ukaizo: très short. They will get it right in the third game, because "Aller guten Dinge sind drei", as ze Germans say.

Okay wait, let me think this over... ... .. . nope, still lame.

It's a split personality. Lamest explanation - but it works!

Gorecci Street is extremely hard. If you could beat it on PotD then you are totally fit for the rest of the game on PotD: it won't get harder than that (if you don't force encounters with severely overleveled enemies). DLCs SSS and FS can be tough as well - but that's more about finding out what approach you need for a certain type of enemy. For example in SSS some fights really need you to not be hasty and use brute force but spare ressources until later in the fight.

There are microwave based, non lethal weapons that make you feel as if your skin is burning but will cause no serious harm when used responsibly and under normal conditions. Maybe it's not so easy to provide responsibility and/or normal conditions - no idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

I didn't have China in mind. It's easy(er) to push things through in an autocratic society like China, no doubt. But what I admire are the democratic countries like South Korea or Taiwan where the people and their governments did pull together. On the other hand they have experience with respiratory pandemics and also a warmer climate. But still impressive how they handled it.

Eh - Animated Weapons are powerful, not just "decent enough". You shouldn't use auto-attacks with summons whenever possible - because their attack abilities DO scale. Best example is the Dragon summon whose auto-attacks are bad but whose attack abilities (breath and tail lash) are pretty good because of "internal" PL scaling (I mean the PL of the Dragon, not the summoner). Most summons do not scale well - some however do. Not with the summoner's Power Level but with the character level.

It sounds like @Constentin Lévinebelieves that somehow @AndreaColombo's mod allows for more/higher/otherwise impossible stacks of resting bonuses?

You have to admire some of the asian countries and some like New Zealand that stopped the pandemic with swift concerted and mutual action of society and government.

I agree. And without Full VO it's easy. With Full VO it's a PITA.

The average incident in Poland is nearly the same as in Germany. Thus it's reasonable to expect the same excess mortality. Sadly Poland is no part of EuroMomo so I can't quickly get reliable and comparable numbers but I would be very surprised if mortality rates among the elderly would differ that much with the same incident. This article comes to the same conclusion basically: https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/10/29/record-numbers-of-death-certificates-show-hidden-victims-of-pandemic-in-poland/ Vaccination: The point was about nursing staff not wanting to get vaccinated. Those who care for the elderly specifically. If they don't get vaccinated they will endanger the lives of those they care for. And that's reckless and bad. If you as a healthy individual with no preconditions and contact to endangered people don't want to get vaccinated because you fear unknown side effects I can understand. But I cannot understand if you're medical or nursing staff. That's a bit like a surgeon who refuses to disinfect his hands because he's afraid of dry skin.

What you should have said is that you underestimated the pandemic; showing a spine, owning your mistake. It has its merits. One of Germany's leftist gouvernors (Thüringen) admitted that he totally underestimated this pandemic. A conservative one (Sachsen) said the same after he visited some hospitals in Sachsen-Anhalt last week. They are truly sorry for advocating for soft measures instead for hard (but short) ones. And people applaud them for admitting they were wrong. It's not a political issue. It's about grit in the face of personal failure. Digging just a deeper hole just to avoid admitting a mistake on the other hands has no merit. If you're medically educated you should be able to follow the scientific publications around the mRNA vaccines which all indicate nearly no side effects - and if then mostly from additional constituents - that are all known. Also the millions of vaccinated people in the UK and Isreal who showed no severe side effects should comfort you. But I'm not surprised that you are surprised. You haven't shown a whole lot of reasonable thoughts in the past - so why start now...?

Right. But at the same time you cannot take something away if nothing was there in the first place.

True - my argument was more about Full VO, not VO in general. It's cool (and not very costly) to hear NPCs talk a few times in order to get an impression. I mean Full VO is cool as well, don't get me wrong. It's just so complicated, expensive and time consuming - and you can only do it once the whole text is locked - which often leads to extreme stress during late development. And if you have to rewrite dialogue you also have to redo the VO and so on and so forth. I understand why Josh Sawyer doesn't like it.

I find Xoti's Monk subclass very limiting. Also there's not much synergy. For example a Sister of the Reaping Moon gets +3 wounds when she downs an enemy - but only if she does so with a melee weapon. So killing and enemy with the pretty awesome "Blessed Harvest" spell of the Harvester of Gaun doesn't count and won't give you +3 wounds. That is not cool. High level Priests d have some awesome dmg spells so the synergy could have been great - but he "melee weapon only" restriction destroys that. I can see her being cool as SC Monk if you plan to make her your main damage dealer or kill-stealer - because with Whispers of the Wind you can kill pretty nicely (Inner Death doesn't give wounds on kill iirc because it's not a weapon attacks - it should work with Community Patch though). But then I'd have to get a hireling Priest and I try to avoid hirelings - so I almost always use her as SC Priest.

Yeah no idea really. Even my mother in law who's a medical doctor (70 years old) thought about not getting vaccinated - because she's afraid of yet undiscovered long-term side effects. I mean what are the odds that a side effect of a mRNA-vaccination will be more severe than an infection (which is likely to happen) at that age? Luckily she thought it over after some talks with her children (who all have 2 or more kids themselves) and now she will get vaccinated. My own parents who used to be blue-collar workers and didn't receive higher eduction would get vaccinated asap though. Weird times...

That would be my personal approach, too. Because I find real turtles pretty boring (even though they can be very effective in a party). But given the directions and requirements the OP provided I wouldn't go that route in this case. The only gripe I would have with mostly using summons is that they take a long time to deploy due to their casting times - and it doesn't help if you have low DEX, too. As the tank you really have to watch out to not get interrupted while summoning. The window of opportunity for the enemies to hit you with an interruping ability is very big. So maybe get some layers of concentration or even wear Rekvu's Fractured Casque + injury.

Because not even alleged?

Quick status from Germany: The new highly infectious mutant from the UK was officially discovered in Bavaria and Berlin. As we can see with the UK: Germany's current "soft lockdown" won't be enough to flatten or even drop the curve. At the same time vaccination in Germany isn't going smoothly. The EU was too conservative and cautious when pre-ordering vaccines and German logistics aren't working out (which is a bit of a surprise - well maybe not given the fact that Germany didn't upgrade its local health authorities during summer). At the same time about 50% of the nursing staff doesn't want to get vaccinated (wtf?). People who were rel. compliant so far start to moan because German politicians keep meandering from one half-baked solution to the next. A hard lockdown for two or three weeks could buy a lot of time in order to vaccinate more people (and to improve distribution and acceptance) and keep the incidence under a certain threshold until spring/summer, But you won't see that. I guess Merkel would do it if she could (she campaigned for more strict/impactful measures right from the start and tried to listen to scientists very closely - maybe because she's got a PhD in physics) but she can't just bypass the gouvernors. I'm usually not a fan of Merkel's uninspired politics - but she was and still is trying really hard in this case. Her approval ratings are going through the roof right now (83%) but at the same time it's like she's Don Quijote. I also want to come back to that thread from Feb. when Merkel said something along the lines of "This will be the greatest challenge since WWII" and I agreed but several forum users expressed doubt (fair enough) or even ridiculed me. I'm too lazy to dig out the quotes but still: