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I also skip the ship battles. Maybe Obsidian needed to just autogenerate and present to the player in text some battle results based on the skills of the captains, their crews and the qualities of the ships. That would have been much easier instead of developing this ship combat minigame.

It can be tricky though. It seems that those cooldown timers are not reset at the start of the battle and some actions may not have cooled down from the previous battle. I am at Villario's rest, fighting some boars. Battles with them are very short and this seems to cause some crucial swaps to not happen when they should.

Yes, "combat time elapsed" is from the mod. I did swapping at combat start and it seemed to work great. This way the script ensures the right weapon set is selected before proceeding. Swapping at the end of the combat runs into problems if, for example, the battle finishes too quickly, or if I change the weapon set in between battles, but otherwise it works too. There is enough time between the last enemy falling dead and the actual combat end, so characters have plenty of time to switch.

Wow! So the opening volley indeed totally works. I just tested it. Thank you very much for the idea. It seems that the cooldown is the magic trick. I did the following: "Combat time elapsed > 5" NOT -> Attack (cooldown 10s) "Combat time elapsed > 5" NOT -> Attack (cooldown 10s) "Combat time elapsed > 5" NOT -> Swap to weapon set 2 "Always true" -> Attack "Always true" -> Swap to weapon set 1 And the character fires his two pistols, then immediately switches to weapon set 2. I am also looking for a way to force the character to switch back to weapon set 1 at the end of the battle. The final rule is meant to be reached when the last enemy drops dead and there is no more eligible targets. But it is probably better to move the "Swap to weapon set 1" command to the start of the list. For example: "Combat time elapsed > 5" NOT -> Swap to weapon set 1 (cooldown 10s)

I set rules saying that the ranger should attack targets that have the Marked status. The very last rule is that the ranger should cast Marked for the Hunt. So, at least theoretically, the ranger should cast it only once for this encounter, because if there was already Marked target, the ranger would attack it instead of reaching the last rule. You may need the "More Custom AI conditions" mod for that. Sometimes I get two Marked enemies at the same time, though. I'm not sure what is causing it. The opening volley with pistols won't work very well, I think. The problem is that after firing, the character will start reloading immediately instead of reading the AI script to find what to do next. At this point you probably want to change to melee weapon already, but you have to wait for the reload to finish. Opening the battle with a bow shot works well though. You can also set up the character to switch to melee weapon when there is an enemy in melee range and switch back to range weapon when there isn't.

On PC at least, there is a hotkey to open the world map over the, well, the world map. It helps.

Boeroer: you are writing in the wrong thread This thread's OP has indeed selected PotD upscaled

Just to give newer players some context - there were numerous complaints on this forum that PotD was too easy during the last two years. Therefore Obsidian tried to silence the complainers by making PotD much harder. And SSS PotD is meant to be even harder, I guess (and it is still not hard enough for some people, so they find it necessary to torture themselves with the Ultimate challenge ). So, yeah. I'm not surprised that the difficulty of PotD may look a bit exaggerated to some people. I learned not to touch PotD since POE 1.

I wonder why developers never gave us another option to pause, besides the toggle. There is a mod Smarter Unpause on Nexus mods, which I discovered two days ago. It changes the exe though, and, unfortunately, requires an older version of Deadfire. Too bad. I was about to get excited.

BG2's Jaheira suffered the same problem. RPG studios should avoid designing quests in such a brittle way because it can tempt even the most principled roleplayers to metagame

POE 1 had them, so it makes sense to include them in POE 2 too. And they probably weren't a total waste. I think the russian translation for POE 1 was good. If some russians read this, maybe they can confirm.

Because the translations were stretch goals.

Obsidian still won't know how good would be these translations though?

Well said. The quests are intentionally ambiguous, to make them more "serious" and "mature" and sometimes they simply lack a payoff. Because that's realistic and in life things aren't clear cut and all that, therefore players shouldn't expect to necessarily feel good after they complete a quest. Also, in my opinion POE 1 had a very real problem with the writing. It was excessive and it wasn't clear. Probably this made many players bored, causing them to abandon the game without bothering to write a negative review, so that we could put a finger on the issue and proclaim that it was the reason for the POE 2 sales drop. Just yesterday I was playing POE 2, there was this conversation with the gods and at some point, in the middle of the conversation, Skaen said: "A moon will do the job nicely." As many times before, I stopped and thought: "what the hell does that mean?". But there was no way to switch to the previous screen to get the (already forgotten) context and so I had no way to decipher the meaning of the phrase. Neither did I want to reload the entire boring conversation. The possible answers given to choose from hinted that this phrase had something to do with destroying the world. They also showed that my character knew much better than me what the phrase meant. For the rest of the conversation I was clicking on "Don't say anything" and I decided to roleplay a character who is fed up with the gods and who doesn't want to deal with them at all. So I will probably never get to know the meaning of this phrase (unless some kind soul from this forum decides to tell me). This is just a small example to show that POE 2 also has cryptic conversations. The entire conversation would serve as a much better example. It tries to describe a situation and a problem that is so abstract it tends to quickly bore the player and make them switch through the screens quickly. A real problem is that writers don't seem to realize the players don't know the game universe as well as them and so the writers didn't sufficiently care to present the information clearly and understandably. It wasn't a major concern at all. The end result is that too much things in both POE 1 and POE 2 lack an emotional impact.

I'm starting to think it was just a perfect storm of negative factors that led to such drop in sales. A critical miss.

I realise that I didn't really explain why I think WeGo would be the best of both worlds. Sorry for that and let me fix it. It is my thinking that many people prefer turn based gameplay, because it is more comfortable, gives precise control and is just more orderly. There is no way to accidentally miss the moment to give orders to one of your units. In RTwP there is this problem: you have three characters and you give them commands. Then you unpause. Your characters won't finish their orders at the same time. One of them will be finished after 2 seconds, the second one - after 3 seconds and the third one: after 5 seconds. So you have to pause the game at different intervals, sometimes forgetting to give orders to somebody. Pause-unpause, pause-unpause and so on. This is tiring and it is not an orderly way to control your units. And you don't have much opportunities to watch and enjoy your units while they are moving and fighing for any prolonged period. Rather, the game is mostly paused while you "play". So the point of the realtime action and all the dynamic effects is somewhat lost. Now, with WeGo system, you have the opportunity to plan your actions for as long as you want in the commands phase and after that you have the opportunity to watch the action without having to worry that you aren't giving orders to somebody. Combat Mission has the option to rewind and rewatch the action phase for as many times as you want before proceeding with the next phase. Many players greatly enjoy watching the action phase many times and from different angles. Which, by the way, helps the player to understand exactly what happened; and to understand the game mechanics.

Because you'll have to think ahead. Not have the superpower of reacting immediately to everything. The player already is able to see everything, thanks to his elevated point of view. But of course, this is also a question of taste and I didn't mean for it to be the default game mode, just an option.

What I wonder is, why didn't Obsidian introduce WeGo gameplay, like in Combat Mission. It would be ridiculously easy to implement and to me it seems to be the best of both worlds. There will be turns where the game would be automatically paused, say, each 4 seconds and the player will have to give order to his units. Then the player unpauses the game and the action unfolds simultaneously in real time, but there is no way for the player to pause again (or give orders) until the next turn after 4 seconds. So the player will be forced to think carefully and calculate what he wants to achieve instead of hitting the space button each half-second, which is tiring in itself. Maybe a better system for queuing of commands will be needed though.

The thing is, Cohh was enhtusiastic enough for Deadfire ("Phenomenal story, phenomenal characters, phenomenal writing, phenomenal etc.") and I think these people who bought PoE1 had some other reason to pass on Deadfire than reading subtle signs and concluding that Cohh probably wasn't blown out of the water by the game. If players were happy with their PoE1 experience, they would not need any more encouragement to buy Deadfire than what Cohh said about the game. After all, he finished it. He doesn't even finish the games he doesn't like.

After 30 hours playing Deadfire, Cohh still liked every second of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dopRHgRjlFs&list=PLN39y5i_H0FkkkRl2hhJ4-doVQ1QS-KW3&index=64 He says this at the start of this video.

Then it is all the more puzzling why they don't do it. Maybe because BG2 didn't do it BG2 is the gold standard after all.

As we all know, RPGs often look artificial in that everybody waits for you to solve their problem and are willing to wait for you forever. Hub cities that dump on you twenty quests as soon as you enter the city make that situation look even more artificial. Were these poor souls waiting specifically for me? And what would they do if I didn't show up? Unfortunately, there aren't easy solutions for this, it seems, because if the quests were spaced temporally, this would force the players to patrol the city periodically to check if there are any new quests whose time has come. And if the quests were set to be dependent on each other, then players would start to complain that their freedom is restricted.

How can this be your mistake. You cannot know beforehand that a certain game is not for you. You simply doesn't have this information. There are so many things that can potentially turn out to be wrong for you and cause the game to be not enjoyable.

In fact, he says that not too much classical RPGs are released each year, so fans have enough time to try them all. He says they didn't have concerns if there would be enough buyers, only whether their game would be good enough. I too think that if you are RPG fan, you will buy the games you think you'll like, which, of course, doesn't mean you will actually finish them.

Oleg Shpilchevsky, who is the studio head at Owlcat Games thinks there are three million people who like classical RPGs. https://app2top.ru/industry/kak-v-rossii-sozdavalas-izometricheskaya-rpg-istoriya-razrabotki-pathfinder-kingmaker-131491.html The interview is in Russian.