Oralaina

I don't use the premades, so that wouldn't matter to me. But I'll do all of them just to hear what they all have to say. I really hate to have to kill a bunch of people though.... And that's one of the reasons I went with Hylea - don't have to kill anyone....

That's probably what I'll do. I don't need the xp really, so I might just leave them until I'm level-capped on that playthrough (which is not using IEMod).

Yes, I thought so from other things I'd read. But shouldn't the rest of them go away then? I really hate having stuff left in my journal.... I have a few OCD issues, you know....

I completed the Hylea quest in Twin Elms. But the other god-quests are still in my journal. Do I have to do them too even though I'm set to go to end-game after WM 2?

Oh, okay, thanks! I thought I'd missed something.

There's a soulbound flail? Where do you get it?

There's a key for the workshop on a body you can get to fairly easily. Be careful though. If you want more specific than that, say so.

My first reaction was.... ewww. But, thinking about it a bit more.... it could work, and it could be a lot of fun.

Guys, if you want to do "dueling tongues" how about you take it to private blogs somewhere? Nothing either of you are posting is really germane to any of the issues being discussed here.

Indeed. That is exactly my issue. Maerwald was two sides of the same coin. If those two personalities and their memories washed over you in equal (and equally overwhelming) measure, then yes, one would be hard pressed in to integrate them into a fully functional whole. The game does not really give you any sense that there is any internal conflict within the Watcher. "To be, or not to be--that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them." -Hamlet, William Shakespeare That would have made it much more compelling. Two minds with but a single thought. I just came back to post exactly that quote. THAT is the quintessential "am I mad? or is it everyone else?" thing that we should be seeing. We do see that in Maerwald, and in some measure in Gram (the poor man in the Sanitarium - and don't get me started on that whole part of the MQ....) - but it never happens to the PC (and in a way that's fine with me personally, since I play this as my PCs are strong enough to integrate the splintered personalities). It would have been a stronger story (if less appealing to me personally) had the PC shown more extreme personality conflicts as the game goes on.

Hmm. I don't remember the sues saying directly that I'd be going mad. They didn't say it was inevitable, did they? I've only got that far twice, and my goddess it's wordy and I read it fast so I could have missed it. Then again, I wouldn't in any case take that as a given. I do not EVER play one of these games as if the devs are the gods and I have no choice at all in how things go. Call me reactionary.... or rebellious.... or whatever. I buy these games to play them MY way. Period.

Well.... I'm not. Eww.

I was going to point out something similar, Derek M. I play in offline mode almost exclusively, but I do connect once a week to let steam update if it needs to. I do this while my MMO is offline for maintenance - which was this morning. Steam found nothing there today. Last week there was a small steam update for the steam client itself. Neither had anything to do with THIS game.

Perhaps I misspoke if I implied that it is inevitable. I don't think that it is. I think that is the point of it all - to not just maintain your identity, but re-write it as you chose. I should have said that I think the game should continue to test you, to simulate the interplay between the id, ego and superego. That may be asking too much of the medium, but I feel that the premise of the story is one that really lends itself to that journey. Yep, in that case, we're on the same page. You stated it more gracefully than I did (blame it on too many glasses of wine maybe?) and thank you for that!

Tig, you forgot to spoiler that....

I don't think insanity is inevitable. I think that if you are a balanced integrated personality, you will not wind up the sort of madperson Maerwald devolved into. And that's exactly how I play the game: that my PC is a mentally balanced person who is doing her best to integrate Watcherness into her emotional and mental selfhood.

Yep. 100% agree. If I could have my perfect SPMR game, it would be one where I could go through nearly the entire game without myriad silly fights - getting xp through roleplay, stealth, negotiation, or just plain luck (either failing to step in the crud, or somehow managing to avoid the only major disabling trap, or whatever). Really hate fighting my way through a game that has potential for the other ways of solving issues.... I like the idea that the big fights should be part of the rp setup. And I truly love AB's idea too! That's brilliant!

Hmm. I guess.... I'm happy enough with dragons because they fit the "internal logic" of this type of fantasy world (if that's not oxymoronish....) I'm not sure what else would be "better" or preferable - the other couple of types of big bad guys in this game suffer from the same disconnect with logic - and also appear in other versions of high fantasy books and games. By this time in game development, there's just not much "new, never before seen, never been done" bad guys....

"Complete" to me generally means that I've done everything I personally set out to do in a given game. For me, that's not normally "do EVERY quest, get EVERY item" etc. For one thing, I never do the companion quests because I really dislike premades foisted on me. And sometimes I'll get into a quest line where I can tell I'm just going to HATE the way it turns out, and if it's going to break my personal immersion or otherwise leave a bad taste in my mouth, I won't finish it (unless of course it's part of the main quest line - which has happened in years past and games back then, but not so far in PoE). So LaSpeakeasi could have his/her version of complete with this game; and Caerdon could have a different one; and both of you would be right for yourselves alone - and explaining why you like things "that way" is fine, but as gkathellar says, please don't beat each other up over it!

Not for me. Got one guy with boots of speed and he's always legging it away from everyone. Yeah, not for me either. Which made the two pairs of Boots of Speed very annoying to mess with, so I never bothered with them after.

Um. I'm not having any issues at all playing the game. It works extremely well, with only a little slowdown loading as I get more save games (I probably keep way too many saves - last playthrough is over 600....), but it's not nearly as bad as other games I played in years past. I guess maybe I don't know what you mean about "barely functional"? This game works so much better on my antique system than I could ever have hoped for, and certainly than I expected when I bought it!

Well, so far, my older saves have been fine with 2.01 and WM 2.01. I loaded up some older ones today just to make sure I didn't really want or need to keep them, and as far as I can tell they were fine. Then I deleted about 3 gigs of them.

*shrug* I never played those games.

Hmm. Just a general question: Teioh_White says above that there's only one pair of Gauntlets of Accuracy, and one Blunting Belt, in the game. In my experience in this last play through (completed everything but the companion quests because I don't use the premades, and the Main Quest because I'm holding that until after WM2) I wound up with two pairs of Gauntlets of Accuracy and two Blunting Belts. And in one of the play throughs I abandoned about halfway through, I had three Blunting Belts. The only "cheat" I used in this play through was IE Mod about halfway through, only for the xp fix; and I didn't use any cheats on the other one. I certainly didn't cheat in those items, since I didn't find them needful when I wound up with them. So - apparently the RNG god in this game is truly an avatar of Kokopelli?

Well, that usage of the word refers specifically to dismembering an enemy with a massive crit. When that happens, you'll see "hunks" of flesh flying around (unless you have your client set NOT to show that, or you live in a country where that sort of thing is not acceptable in a game). Now, I would think the term might derive from "giblets" (as used for an informal term regarding internal organs, generally of poultry). I have to say, that dictionary.reference.com does not address that as a source - and in fact, most of the offered definitions there are.... not germane at all. Hopefully one of the devs can provide a fuller explanation for you.