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For this to be an apt comparison you would need the sales numbers for each game at the same point in time. There is no statistical significance in comparing the current, and potentially outdated, sales numbers for Deadfire with the overall sales numbers for games that ha e been out for multiple years doesn't really tell you much. True, especially when you consider that Deadfire actually caused more PoE 1 sales. PoE 1 Definitive Edition was very popular on Steam soon after Deadfire launch.

You'll need a reserve crew, I guess. I wonder what pirate captains did historically. Did they split their crew every time they captured a ship?

Well, no one can answer OP's questions until OP defines what exactly makes BG2 better than PoE for them. Simple example - if the game has to be DnD for the OP to like it, then PoE can't compete. I am sure it is not that simple but OP needs to explain. PoE also has story, characters, dungeons and fights. Liking or not liking them is going to be subjective.

Sure. This is a link to the modified file. It is from PoE version 3.07 - make sure you are running this version. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/aro617dlsdseyu8/Assembly-CSharp_3.07.rar?dl=0 Once in combat the slow mo kicks in immediately. You cannot change the speed while in combat. Additionally I modified the file such that the game returns to normal speed after the enemies are dead even though it is still in combat mode.

I guess it is not much of an achievement to finish the game on PoTD if you can easily change to classic for some select battles. It should be possible to go from a lower difficulty to PoTD though. But then it should not be counted for a PoTD run.

This is a big discussion you are undertaking here And one that have been discussed many times earlier. But good luck. I will remark however that PoE 1 reached its current state in two years and also - it is not clear whether Deadfire will bring as much profits. Those games are hard to make and hard to sell. All I hope is that we will get PoE 3 nevertheless.

The only thing in I'm sure of now is that it is not possible to obtain these skills in a legal way. I'm glad that they have not been removed completely. But I'm not happy that they were not properly introduced into the game (rewards for quest or something) Yes, I think my feelings are really contradictory. Realities of life. Design, content and programming is done by different people and at different times. There isn't an overarching mind that coordinates everything like in a RTS. Also people change their minds all the time. Maybe there are even fights about what should be included and what can be skipped or delayed. Then the release date comes.

OP, are you curious, or are you indignant? You are sending somewhat mixed signals. If you are curious it is a bit early to be indignant. If you are indignant then you probably already know everything you wanted to know.

I like realism even in fantasy games but this is indeed a question of taste. You can't prove anything by using realism in such a case. At least OP convinced me that fighters, barbarians and rogues indeed use soul magic in this game. Because of my tastes I was willing to overlook this and think about those abilities as abstractions. If it is any consolation I can remind the OP that not every fighter, barbarian or rogue in Eora will be able to use those magical abilities. Most of them will be stuck to mundane tricks because they will be too low level. The characters that we play are legendary heroes. They are an exception, not a rule.

This means literally nothing, because there is nothing clear cut about what souls are. You can say that all magic comes from waffles, and everyone can have waffles. It's same as description of Magic missile in D&D - what is the spell about? Well, it's magic. missile. Magic alright? So you don't need any more explanation. Yeah, just like Force in SW, magic in pretty much everything that has magic in it, nanomachines in MGS. I am not saying that makes it good - as I have mentioned before, I treat those moves as an abstraction. Are they? I honestly don't know, and don't really care. Magic in PoE always felt to me like "because D&D had magic". This whole: how do priests/wizards/chanters channel their magic - I am not really interested in that. This means literally nothing, because there is nothing clear cut about what souls are. You can say that all magic comes from waffles, and everyone can have waffles. It's same as description of Magic missile in D&D - what is the spell about? Well, it's magic. missile. Magic alright? So you don't need any more explanation. Yeah, just like Force in SW, magic in pretty much everything that has magic in it, nanomachines in MGS. I am not saying that makes it good - as I have mentioned before, I treat those moves as an abstraction. Are they? I honestly don't know, and don't really care. Magic in PoE always felt to me like "because D&D had magic". This whole: how do priests/wizards/chanters channel their magic - I am not really interested in that. Agree. A game engine is always going to be much cruder than the reality we live in, so abstractions are inevitable and desirable. The fireball in Infinity games is described to allow reflex saving throws and successful roll meant your character managed to hide behind a stone or jump or something like that. However it is never shown how your character does it. They just stand there, seemingly taking the full force of the fireball but only suffer half damage. It is the same with Escape ability in PoE. The rogue seems to teleport but this is an abstraction for them using a moment when the enemy is distracted to "disappear" and then suddenly appear somewhere else. Without this abstraction Escape ability will be ruined by the game's pathfinding. Is Josh Sawyer going to tell us "No, these are not abstractions and these are soul magics"? I don't think so because what's the point? The game has it's rule system and that is what is needed - the computer needs some rules to be able to resolve the combat. I even imagine that Intellect stat is actually some abstract stat that determines the duration and AOE of abilities and I don't try to understand how the barbarian's sword can reach farther if the said barbarian is more intelligent.

I wonder how much you write in comparison when you do care lol.Care to explain how every classes' use of magic restricts variety in roleplaying?Sure, I can explain. So you want to role play a wizard. Great. How wizardly do you feel when that brute barbarian over there lights up his weapon in magical fire and tosses it at his enemy, exploding in a ball of flame as if he is Ares, God of war himself? And then that back alley cutthroat over there waves his hand and dissapears in a cloud of purple smoke, and teleports across the room to stab you in the back. All those years studying magic with your pretty book, and spells that take ages to cast, and any Tom **** or Harry can throw around spells like its nothing. Bet you are loving that "wizard". Heck, what good is going to medical school when some 18 year old is practicing medicine out of his garrage with a high school degree. Why go to school for nuclear physics if the tech is so easy to understand that my 12 year old niece could build nukes in the back yard. Are you getting it?? I always assumed that those barbarian and fighter abilities were not magical in nature but developers wanted to make them cool and added all kinds of visual effects so now they look like magic. The other day in PoE 1 (White March) I watched some large ogre throw a snowball at me and that snowball was bright and shining as if it wasn't a physical object but was created by magic. Those visual effects are overdone in my opinion and make the combat scene harder to read which is a known problem. But you are not required to think about them as magical even if other players do. Those games involve player's imagination anyway so who's to tell you how to interpret the setting.

Also, It will be easier for new players to understand combat mechanics if they have the option to replay the encounter several times.

That picture is hilarious but in my opinion it tells the truth. Josh looked tired to me on the video. I imagine the last month was pretty stressful for the team.

Prepare to get attacked, this forum is no place for reasonable criticism or logical explanations! Haha On guard, touché, my sword's bigger than yours! Why is it so hard to accept that some things can happen in parallel, rather than consequentially? Obsidian just released a patch containing hundreds of fixes and balancing. At the same time they released the free DLC. It seems logical to assume that the patch was done by programmers and gameplay designers while the DLC was done by artitsts. You know - because the DLC contains only art.

Burned too much by the bugs? I probably got lucky, because I didn't try to import a save - I just selected one of the predefined outcomes, played on classic without scaling, then skipped most of the side quests and safely arrived at the game finish (while having a challenge). Now I have only good memories about my first playthrough. I managed to avoid all the serious bugs without even knowing about them.

No problems with updating through Galaxy for me.

I guess making the game any better will improve sales, so it is indeed a cash grab. But by that logic the patch they are releasing is also a cash grab, hmm....

From a realism point of view it is possible that someone can be known both for cruelty and benevolence. Because different people can have differing opinions about them or know different things about them. But from gameplay perspective it is pointless to allow conflicting reputations. What is this going to achieve other than players making sure they have maxed dispositions on everything in order to get all the dialogue options?

Thanks, I wondered if spoiling the story was the main reason. It is true that story is important for such a game but it seems to me that our current situation is very similar to what it would be with early access - but with one critical difference. The official release is now in the past. Obsidian will not be able to release the game again. I mean, they will try to draw attention to the game by releasing DLCs but that won't equal the level of attention the games get on official release. Another trick the companies have tried is releasing Enhanced Editions. But the most important moment in the lifecycle of a game is its official release and I feel it was somewhat squandered. The story can be considered spoiled at this moment but all those people that intend to buy the game will just try to avoid spoiling it for themselves. And those people are many more than those who have bought and played it already. BTW, I read that other thread and I believe that delaying the game can only be a good option if they already have a list of gamebreaking bugs and they need time to fix them. But if they have fixed all the gamebreaking bugs that they know about and the release date is nearing, then how can they justify more delays? Simply testing more is hardly the answer because they can never know when to stop. At this point releasing the game without more months of testing is risky but delaying it is also risky. The game is simply never going to be really finished without throwing several thousands of gamers at it and that could have been achieved with the early access option.

The way to do this shoud be with options in the game, not by allowing the players to select which patch they want. There can be only one latest game version, not several. What you want will probably be achievable with mods. This is the most realistic possibility. i like the idea of potd having options. I‘m not a fan of adding even more enemies but i‘m all for reducing the impact of empower and abilities, so it would be cool to have toggles for that. I am fan of toggles too. For example I would want to have an option to get more enemies without their stats buffed as in PoTD. With Icewind Dale there was this Heart of Fury mode which meant you'll have more enemies, they will be ridiculously buffed and the player will get much more experience for killing them, leading to the game possibly becoming easier in the later stages than the normal mode. Beamdog introduced more options later and players are now able to select only what they want. Maybe Josh Sawyer doesn't want to introduce many toggles - either because he is trying to nail that perfect gameplay or out of fear that they'll end up supporting several game modes. That's why I think modding is our best chance. Berath's blessings and Magran Fires are probably going to give us nice additional customizability though.

This is nice. More options for customizing the challenge.

The wiki (which cites Josh Sawyer): https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Eora "There are two moons above Eora, but most people think there is only one moon, Senn Beläfa (or Ondran Beläfa, "Ondra's Beloved", but most people just call it "Beläfa"). It is smaller than Earth's moon but closer to the planet and has a faster orbit. Though uneducated people are unaware of it, there is also a second moon called Cawldha Debh (Glanfathan for "Black Runner"), that has a very fast and irregular orbit. Tides in some coastal areas are more extreme than on Earth."

I think they originally tried to find a combat pace that is "just right" but during the beta they gave up and introduced the slider. For which I am grateful, because I am exactly the person who wants to watch the action without much pausing. Too bad they didn't make such a slider in PoE 1.

The way to do this shoud be with options in the game, not by allowing the players to select which patch they want. There can be only one latest game version, not several. What you want will probably be achievable with mods. This is the most realistic possibility.

I was thinking about this for several weeks and it seems other people also think this would be a good option, based on some remarks on the forum. It is clear that such a complex game can hardly be released without bugs. Many, many games have been released in a rather buggy state. They only become relatively bug-free months after the release. It has become a norm for the companies to release the game and then spend several months bugfixing to bring the game to where it needs to be. That the games have to go through this process is in my opinion unavoidable. It is simply a reality of life. Tens of thousands of players will inevitably find more bugs than the internal QA team. What I wonder is - why don't make this process official and simply develop it as an early access title? Some players just don't care that much about bugs. They will be happy to test their builds, play with game mechanics, report bugs and give feedback to the developers. They are probably going to do at least several playthroughs and don't place that much weight on their first or second playthrough. Other players are only going to play the game once and their playthrough must be perfect. For them it is simply a mistake to try to play the game in its current state. But it is hardly a defensible stance to sell a game for a full price to someone and then tell them to wait and don't play it for several months. In an effect, currently we have a situation where the game is as in an early access state - it is not fully finished because there are still bugs, the balance is far from what will be achieved in several months and so on. On the other hand the game is playable enough to be Very Positive on Steam. The first group of players are already very happy with it. For me it has become my all time favorite RPG. Not so with the second group of players though. Some of those that have bought the game are already disappointed and it is hard to convince them that it was their fault - that they had to be more patient. Some of them leave negative reviews, which hurts the game and is not really undeserved. Those that are waiting cautiously are better off, but having a large portion of the potential buyers not buying the game is bad for the game success. New games are released all the time, so those potential buyers may end up not buying Deadfire at all. With the early access model those players would also avoid playing it and that would be Ok, because the game would be officially in a development state. Then, on release, the game would be much more stable and will fully benefit from the attention that the official release brings. There was the backer beta, of course. It seems that the backer beta was several versions behind the main development version. It was good for gameplay feedback but it didn't really give access to the main portion of the game. And it was restricted - it wasn't enough to just be a backer or to preorder the game to play it. So it's value was limited. Having the game as an early access where everything in the game is accessible would be another thing entirely. I wonder why Obsidian didn't do it. Was it because of fear of spoilers? This seems to be the only real disadvantage - but then, how is that different from the current situation where the plot can be easily found on the Internet yet most of the potential players are yet to play the game?