Boeroer

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:

lmao - who is that moronic Caitlin?

Sure, but that doesn't take a lot of effort or preparation. My point was that often the work (or money) you have to invest to doesn't pay off.

You don't need per rest bonuses or even consumables to play PotD successfully. Megabosses aside (here you need everything you can get). I play PotD exclusively (party and the occasional solo run) and I almost never care about resting bonuses and especially not about consumables besides food (which you just have to use during camping so might as well pick the good stuff if I happened to pick it up - I'm not looking for it/hunting it/hoarding it actively). Unguents are an exception because they can be very helpful in scripted sequences and when trying to pick locks and unlock dialogue choices - but they don't help with combat so I guess they don't count when we talk about difficulty. And yet to me most parts of PotD seem to be rather easy. Again: not Megabosses - those are just awful. Of course that's partly because of meta knowledge and experience with the mechanics - but still: you don't need resting bonuses not consumables to play PotD and have fun. I did my first run on PotD (no scaling) and had fun - and didn't use resting bonuses or consumables. SSS and FS became a bit more challenging without them but still doable.

Given PL scaling a good early damaging ability like "Thrice..." can't really become weak in the late game, can it? I mean besides immunity issues which should not be a problem in this case. I think Skeletons are underrated. They do very poor damage in most cases and especially in the later game because while their stats do scale their weapons (poor swords) do not - which leads to severe underpenetration very quickly. Thus they hit like wet noodles. But they have engagement slots! Thus they can be seen as a steerable/controllable CC effect: they will reliably stop enemies from approaching (if you didn't opt out of movement cancellation on engagement in the game options menu), block melees and present cannon fodder for ranged enemies, too. And if they die they will at least provide two replacements (which are not controllable but still). You just shouldn't look at them as damaging tools. They are very bad in that regard. If I would play a dedicated tank who focuses on soaking damage and do support I wouldn't raise PER and I wouldn't use Thrice wSW or any offensive invocation. Summons can be a good substitute to direct CC (skeletons engage, whisps are great interrupters with unlimited knockdown uses) and damaging (wyrms, later animated weapons etc.) invocations without the need for any investment into accuracy and PER. Thrice wSW is a really good invocation but I don't think it's a mandatory pick - especially not for a supportive, non-aggressive tank.

Both PoEs run on rel. old hardware (not smoothly necessarily but they do run). Also they work on Win/Linux/Mac. So your hardware and OS are not really a limiting factor - something that cloud gaming wants to overcome. So maybe that's why those games are not the no.1 focus now. Also the player base isn't that big to begin with. Are the Divinity games there? Also I know that several Obsidian devs are not very fond of Cloud Gaming in general - the dev/publishers have to agree to their game getting put on Stadia. If they don't like the while business model it could also explain why their games are not there. Is Outer Worlds on Stadia? Any Obsidian game?

The point is that Obsidian didn't do this. It's the publisher. I guess Obsidian does gain something from the console ports (no doubt actually), but they said right away that they will only do PC and nothing else. The publisher then took the game and handed it over to a development team to do a port. Of course this will fall back on Obsidian because they developed the game and their name is still on the box. But I just think they don't have a big say in this.

I can close the circle then and ask: If that was a problem for the majority of PoE players and a reason of disappointment so big they decided to not buy Deadfire: why isn't that reflected in the user reviews of PoE - which are very positive and don't talk about the mechanics a lot?

I agree to the general statement - but Full VO for RPGs is extremely overrated given its immense costs* which makes it a bad choice for games with small and mediocre budgets. The increased immersion (and that's debatable, too) almost never outweighs the drawbacks (a lot less money for other things that would do the game good). Also, while CRPGs certainly aren't books - they come pretty close in comparison with other video game genres. Adventures, too. Same as TTRPGs which are a bit like interactive books. While I like the DM to put on some fitting music and try to speak with different voices it's not really needed for immersion. Makes it easier of course - but often the ton of work required from the DM to pull that off doesn't warrant the outcome (even if it's nicer than without no doubt). )* If done professionally. And you def. don't want to do amateurish VO.

Which is awesome.

Stormlands got canceled - yet it was pitched successfully before. I think in this case Microsoft approached Obsidian though iirc. Besides that: Stormlands was supposed to be a multiplayer game with online raids etc. and not a single player RPG/Elder Scrolls on Eora. Two quite different games. Stormland's leftovers were used for Tyranny by the way.

He's not putting distance between that world - while you wrote your post he probably continued to write for the Pillars TTRPG. Also - while he's not directing Avowed he said several times that he will give feedback during development. I wouldn't call that "unwillingness to be involved".

Would be good for your purpose.

I wasn't fond of most of the Ultima games except Underworld (and only because I played it with a friend side by side) so no: I didn't even try Ultima IV. The only Open World game I really enjoyed was Skyrim - but only because I turned it into "Thief"- or "Hitman"-ripoff. Eh and Deadfire obviously.

Even if it was impossible to play PotD without meta knowledge: it's something completely different to take that statement and then use is as a reason for bad sales numbers of Deadfire. Only a very low fraction of players even tried PotD or even Hard. Most players just started both games on normal, enjoyed it for a while and that's it. So the majority of players wouldn't even know how the game's like on harder difficulties, nor would they follow a pedantic min-maxing path to optimization. For them the look, feel, atmosphere and story are more important than the exact stacking rules and potential powergaming. That is the bulk of players - at least that's what telemetry and surveys were telling Obsidian and I have no reason do doubt that data. So to take a very special approach to play those games - which isn't the apporach of the majority of players - and then deduce that this failed approach and the feelings it induced represent the feelings of a majority of players - who then didn't buy Deadfire in disappointment is rather... venturous. The issues that are mentioned do exist, no doubt. But I doubt they are the reason for a massive sales drop - because most players didn't even notice.

Maybe you have Open World Syndrome. PoE was more "guided" than Deadfire is, also because content was gated behind its acts. I personally don't like "Open World" and this whole "you can go where you want, yeah!" approach very much. It often leaves you felling lost - or not feeling compelled to really do anything. You can experience the same when you play TTRPGs and the game master just lets you run around without nudging you into the right direction. Open World is completely overrated and isn't necessary for a great CRPG - at least that's my personal take. Maybe other players like it but I feel that it takes significantly longer to really connect with a game if it follows the Open World approach. What saved Deadfire for me was Fort Deadlight. I entered secretly and did a "Thief"-like dungeon crawl in order to reach Benweth. It's such a satisfying part of the early game that I got hooked. So maybe try that one first?