Fenixp

Rest assured that the other ~85% of players really enjoyed Pillars, me included :-P I actually liked it a fair bit more than Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games combined, but I guess I'm in a minority there.

Actually, just add "Are you retarted?" as a response to every line in every conversation. Imagine the hilarity.

The games aren't much more expensive because of lack of dailies, they're much more expensive because, as it turns out, early deep discounts are kinda bad for long-term sales. As digital market grows and gets more established, expect deep discounts close to release be increasingly rarer concurrence. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but ... You know.

The games and activities were a neat idea I suppose - but as far as I'm concerned, a sale giving me a list of games at a discount publishers are willing to sell them for is precisely what I sort of want out of a sale, as opposed to a whole bunch of games being withheld from deeper discounts in order to become dailies or whatever. Because, after all, that's what I'm using sales for - to buy games for cheap. To play games I have ... Well, games. And besides, the old approach was quite exploitative. "Here are our discounts, but they're not actually our discounts and you can get deeper discounts if you keep refreshing our main page!" Annoying. Anyway, I'm buying Doom. The Demo has really impressed me. HEAR THAT, BETHESDA!? I'M BUYING DOOM OVER YOUR DEMO! KEEP IT UP!

Pfff, you're lucky I didn't start using metaphors. Now that's where the real walls of text start.

*Fenixp chuckles* There's a local sect which believes in invisible space ships that dwell on Earth's orbit. The only thing you can really base definition of God on is context. Christians don't believe that Roman or Nordic gods are actually gods, because they sort of can't - so if you belong to a religion, your definition of God or god-like beings is going to be quite clear, to you anyway. If you're an atheist or agnostic, definition of God is going to vary by culture you're thinking/speaking of. Still, the basic definition, as with any word, varies by territory and ethnicity - in other words, "Gods are beings or entities that people believe to be gods" is about as accurate definition as you can get :-P

Just FYI, there's an option burried somewhere in gameplay options which allows you to disable question marks. They're still in the game of course, but you don't see them on the map - depending on just how obsessive you are, this might work. And of course it's all just, like, our opinion, man :-P I liked Dragon Age 2!

The whole expansion was nicely summed up by Geralt looking straight into the camera and winking. Because that's what it was - a huge look into the camera and wink at the audience, a goodbye, retrospective which poked fun at the three massive games before it. It offered a lot of quality content, I'd even say most of it was better than what the base game had to offer - on the other hand, it was also a lot less subtle.

Eh, don't know about that. Honestly I found it kinda boring - it felt like a world designed for a videogame as opposed to a believable place, which Witcher 3 nailed (and then ruined with overabundance of places of "interest" and nothing dynamic ever happening.) And the quests are all variations of "Bring me 3 bear asses" - EVERYTHING you do is a checklist of n things you need to bring to y, or n things you need to destroy or even erect (and it's not even the fun kind of erecting, just boring erecting). Generally, quest design in W3 is several levels above whatever DA: I threw at me, even tho I could do with less of "Use witcher senses to..." Still, the low layer of how the DA: I's gameplay is constructed works a lot better for an open world - you've got a goal you're building towards, and the goal is one which makes sense to build towards by exploring, talking to people, making alliances. That was probably my favorite part of the whole thing. And then I had to erect. Uuugh.

Yes. Not understanding text is exactly what prevents them from progressing :-P

Great news, thank you, Justin! My programming has a chance of becoming even more epic! (yes, my programming is usually pretty epic by itself. I do pushups, fling my mouse and then click mid-air, type code while jumping from a plane. If the epic White March music plays in addition to the epic Pillars of Eternity music, epicness of the whole ordeal will be trough the roof.)

So um... Any chance of also getting White March soundtrack on Spotify now that the original game's soundtrack is up there?

Let me put it this way: I have played it for over 25 hours which doesn't actually happen with me and dem videagamez all that often. (and I'm still playing it) However, I'm a WH40k nerd and I'm certain that seeing these massive ships come to life on my screen added a fair bit of fun for me all by itself. With that said, it's generally regarded as an extremely enjoyable SP RTS (both if you enjoy playing skirmish, which can also be played co-op trough the internet, or campaign), but lacking in MP balance which makes the active MP community slowly die out already. Mechanically, I don't think I've ever played anything quite like it - it's basically broadside combat in space complete with ramming, boarding, advanced maneuvering or subsystem damage but it also contains other things you'd expect in spess RTS like fighters and long-range weaponry. I suppose the downside is that it takes place on 2D plane, but I can't see how a lot of mechanics would function on 3D plane anyway, so I guess that's all good. I won't go into how does the game work, I think there's a fair whack of reviews doing just that (in fact, it was this video that sold me on it, and good news is that a bunch of his complaints were solved via patches) And yes, Tindalos interactive are shockingly good at producing great videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_4200411877&feature=iv&src_vid=3pxdtigmeDY&v=M3w3XeHpsis

Sometimes, two characters met mid-way and so they proceeded to stare at each other for several painful seconds until their advanced AI finally managed to figure out a path around each other. It was realistic and Pillars doesn't have it, clearly its pathfinding is inferior.

Ask Paradox, it's not just Pillars. All games with Paradox Interactive as publisher are hidden on SteamSpy for whatever reason. Just try searching for Stellaris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pxdtigmeDY I feel happy.

There's White Orchard, there's Toussaint and then there's the eastern bit of Novigrad map added by Hearts of Stone. Stellar examples of how to design your open world, all of them. They contain these notes and pieces of information which connect even random question marks together into a bigger narrative, adding depth and intrigue to the game's world. Encounters are clearly thought trough and added for a reason most of the time. While they still lack dynamic events which would make riding trough the same spot twice worthwhile, which is one of the cornerstones of good open world design, they're still brilliant. And then there's Velen, Novigrad and, especially, Skellige which are all far too big for their own good and end up being an inconsistent mess of seemingly random encounters. How monster levels are set up doesn't make sense at the best of times, you said yourself that finding good loot doesn't happen since it's levelled (as opposed to monsters) and even if you do happen to find something worthwhile, it's higher level than you and you can't use it for whatever reason. And the progression mechanics are just crap. ... There will come a time when I'll stop complaining about Witcher 3. This is not that time :-P

Doesn't really help us GOGers :-/ Or anyone owning the game trough any other platform for that matter. Then again, I'm pretty sure I'll be playing Pillars a few years from now still, so waiting for a more polished version seems worthwhile.

Oh please no random encounters. I've yet to see a game in which they'd be anything but massively annoying and often enough when playing a game that contains them, I just tend to reload until I don't run into one. Not because I'd be afraid of challenge - because I can't be bothered. And I'd absolutely not introduce risk to returning to safety, purely because that can lead to "dead man walking" situations - one where you can't possibly continue playing the game because every option will get you killed. Not good design, definitely not for a story-focused game like Pillars of Eternity where a party wipe means game over.

When googling "Pillars of Eternity Super Murderer Achievement", this was the first thing that popped up, so... Apparently yes, it used to be or still is bugged and you get it as soon as you kill 1200 creatures.

Oh yeah, did that a while back. In spite of its jankyness, I think I have enjoyed Jedi Knight the most out of all of these - nice and open level design, the courtyard around Imperial base and collapsing space ships being my personal highlights. I found Dark Forces next to unplayable, in spite of routinely playing original Doom.

Wouldn't put too much stock into the amount of backers vs. amount of people finishing the game. I didn't back Pillars of Eternity, in fact I have suspected it to be bad to average like I perceived original BG1 and 2 to be - then I finished it two times and I'm on my third playtrough. On the other hand, a good amount of people that I personally know who backed the game either ended up rightdown disliking it or not finding time to finish it yet. I don't think that more than 10% out of those 8.5% of backers actually finished the game and even if it is, the number won't be significantly higher. Then again - I am just speculating without having more than anecdotal evidence.

Funnily enough, both fights OP has mentioned were avoidable.

They did. Press escape, Difficulty tab -> switch to "Story mode" difficulty. If you enable AI for your companions, they should now be able to win most encounters even without much of your help. I for one enjoyed the challenge and so I finished White March on Hard. I'm sure there's more than enough people around who'll claim that hard difficulty was primitive and so they finished White March on Path of the Damned. Gauging by achievements, eh? They're not that precise, but if we take a good look at them: 44% of players finished Act I, therefore it was only 44% of players who really got into playing the game. That's nothing unusual by the way, even in AAA blockbusters like Bioshock Infinite, only 60% of player-base got as far as like 3 hours in and ending of Act I in Pillars is what, 10 hours? 15? Now, 9.5% of players have finished base game of Pillars of Eternity. That doesn't sound like much, until you realize that this is nearly 1/4 (more like 1/5?) of people who really started playing the game in the first place. That's not at all rare, most people just don't finish videogames. As for White March, 1.1% of all owners of Pillars of Eternity finished WM pt. 2. How many people do actually own WH pt. 2, tho? Sadly, Steam Spy is not able to gauge owners of DLC, so again, we'll have to guess based on achievements alone. There aren't many achievements for White March, but there's at least one thing that majority of players who actually got into it will do - and that's recruiting Zahua and Devil. How many owners of Pillars of Eternity did that? Well, 2.8%. So it would seem close to a half of Pillars of Eternity players who own White March and actually started playing it finished White March. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Sadly, disabling minimap in Witcher 3 proved so much hassle that I re-enabled it again, and it didn't lead to any improvements of the game anyway. But removing compass in Skyrim was the best thing I've done to improve the darn game. Not only it got rid of UI element taking place on my screen, I found that I suddenly started looking around as opposed to following markers for undiscovered locations and as it turns out, Skyrim's open world is really, really well designed and there's just so much stuff which is in no way indicated by the markers. Suddenly I began to find all kinds of cool stuff! And the best part? Apparently, Skyrim's world was designed by smart people who made sure you don't need no unexplored markers at all! Pretty much every significant location is plainly visible in the terrain, either marked by a path, object you see in distance or something along those lines so it's not like you'd even lose out. Anyway, modern obsession with open worlds is rather tiresome, especially when games like Ass Creed or Dragon Age Inquisition perceive it as a chance to give players a ton of shopping lists to do.