Fenixp

Starting combat out of an in-game cutscene is always a major annoyance. Thankfully, Pillars of Eternity does not have that many moments of that sort, but those which are there are that much more noticeable - to be fair at that point I don't even care about immersion or whatever, if you can't assure that my party arrangement will protect me, just don't ever take control from me. If you absolutely have to take control from me, feel free to warp my characters around to be in the default formation. Just... Whatever, but not this.

Just disable Steam cloud before you do that.

You don't need it, the game literally saves all the time for you :-P

Yes, there you go, that's why you don't get EXP for combat. Not being forced to kill off every single enemy you encounter is a lot more natural and therefore more intuitive than having to hunt every single last monster on the map because 50XP, man.

Drowners are arseholes, they would have obliterated entire Wild Hunt via their bull**** power of "Come on, I dodged that attack!" Edit: Actually, is the word "arsehole" bypassing profanity filter? I thought it's quite widely accepted 'spelling'. Or is it just considered ... Less profane?

Yeah, that was cool. The most impressive bit was the villain tho.

Just did the wedding bit in Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Not really quite what you're after, but have you tried these two? I've had much more fun with them than I ever expected to. ... Yes, I'm mostly just sticking around to recommend stuff. Actually, I'm sticking around to find anything that sounds remotely similar and keep recommending Sunless Sea. Yes, I'm glad we all agree that WH40k classical RPG needs to become a thing.

Italically disagree. Uuu, I know - Bold disagreement from Italy with Underline. There we go. .... Eeee, right, anyway: I generally don't feel scared while playing horror games, 'tense' pretty much describes what I feel while playing most of them (Then there's 'annoyed' when they use too many jumpscares), and Bloodborne definitely made me feel tense, just like Alien: Isolation (which is probably my #1 horror game I have ever played purely for the horror). It just made me feel tense for different reasons - I feared the unknown, and the game never really gave me much space to get a good look at enemies so even the whole "Unimaginable horror" thing kinda worked. But sure, I can definitely see where you're coming from - horror is pretty difficult to point out purely due to different ways different people experience it. Cardassia. Deserts of Cardassia. *sigh*, I wish.

I... Actually tend to disagree. Horror in Bloodborne works because you're constantly threatened, and sadly, in challenge lies frustration when it comes to videogames. Lovecraftian horror, among other things, makes protagonist vulnerable, sends him into a spiral of insanity he can't prevent - funnily enough, these concepts translate exceptionally well into From software's formula. I'd say they did much better job of this than frictional games with Amnesia in spite of giving you means to defend yourself - but, well, From software games are hardly for everyone (DISCLAIMER: This is not in any way, shape, or form me telling you that you suck - personally I don't think Souls-like games are actually that difficult as long as you're patient enough)

You mean Bloodborne? :-P

Fair enough, the release date seemed kinda insane given what patch 3.0 is supposed to change in the base game anyway. Hope Obsidian will use the time to properly polish the experience and won't break more things than they fix (fat chance of that happening)

As I don't have any evidence to prove what Obsidian was thinking while releasing the game (and neither do you, by the way), I don't actually make any claims either way and I honestly don't care. All I can do is compare. Original Fallout, Planescape Torment, Elder Scrolls Arena, Daggerfall, Baldur's Gate and many more got released with game-breaking bugs, design flaws and unfinished/barely finished content. Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun: Dragonfall and many more got released with game-breaking bugs, design flaws and unfinished/barely finished content. The main difference is that for the older games, only bugs got fixed. For the newer ones, bugs, design flaws and unfinished/barely finished content got fixed too. Somehow I prefer games of today. Edit: I'm sorry if I come off as rude, but if there's something that 'triggers' me (which is an actual psychological term that's kinda stupid in this context, by the way), it's these kinds of arguments. I'm still having nightmares about purchasing Fallout and having to wait for months until a friend handed me a floppy with a patch which resolved constant crashing, but I still couldn't finish some quests. I've had to purchase Lord of Destruction for Diablo II to get a patch crucial to my enjoyment of the game. I never really played Daggerfall, because it just never worked properly for me at the time, and so I really started TES with Morrowind, in which I got lucky and only occasionally fell trough the floor. And since I've had dial-up, downloading patches literally cost me money and of course, if you wanted improved journal system, you've had to purchase first expansion, Tribunal. You'll be hard pressed to get me to see the point of view saying "Older games were tots more finished and without bugs, promise!"

Replaying the original Baldur's Gate recently, there's something to be said about a big number of smaller quests. I'm still not sure I particularly like the approach (and Pillars of Eternity certainly did offer more complex quests than BG did, not that it's a difficult task), truth to be told tho, I'm kinda busy at times and having stories which you can finish within a single play session is not always a bad thing. And it does allow for more freedom for player to accept/refuse quests and roleplay. You can't? Why not? Is there something in the base game that doesn't work without White March? Does White March take content away from the base game? You're right, if it was 1998, Obsidian would be forced to handle Pillars of Eternity like companies of the time handled their big, sprawling games - fix bugs in patches that are as small as humanly possible and release any gamechanging fixes as a part of expansions (which existed back then as well, just by the way.) Thankfully, it's not 1998 and digital delivery allows Obsidian to not only decouple their patches from expansions so even people owning the base game can enjoy the changes, it also allows Obsidian to fix fundamental issues with how their games are designed. I will always support companies which are willing to go for months listening to community and improving their games - how can somebody find an issue with this will remain mystery to me. If you want to play games that companies release and then leave alone, only fixing basic bugs and errors - go ahead, Ubisoft and EA do that all the time. And if this makes the game "Unfinished" in your eyes, take off your rose-tinted glasses and just look at all problems unmodded Infinity Engine games have to this day. Hell, let's not stop there - look at both Fallout games, older Elder Scrolls games, you name it. Now if you're so bothered by the fact that developers finally have means to properly support their games post-launch, just ... why don't you just wait? You say you don't want to, but when it comes to single-player games, they'll be the same thing whether you play them now or 10 years down the line. As for me, I played vanilla Pillars of Eternity about 2 months after it launched (just for it to become my GOTY of 2015) and now I'm very much looking forward to v 3.0 playtrough with both expansions. As far as I'm concerned, these changes just gave me more incentive to replay and more things to look forward to while doing so. And if you don't want to do that ... You won't miss anything at all by waiting. Wilderness, dungeons and their exploration is central to gameplay of Pillars of Eternity. You spend like 10 hours out of 70 hours long game in Defiance Bay, so clearly, it's not central to the game. The only one attacking anything in this thread is you. This is not a blog - it's a discussion board. Opinions posted will be discussed. It's sort of in the name. And... Well, are you honestly surprised that people populating official discussion boards of a game will tend to lean towards being quite positive about said game? Edit: Added bits. Edit 2: Added more bits. Edit 3: Fixed some bits and elaborated on more bits. Edit 4: Added more bits. Changed bits in the edit description to be perfectly clear about what it did with bits.

Something like the original Mass Effect set in Warhammer 40k universe. Yeah, that's pretty much my dream game.

Every time I see "But BG2!" I strangle a kitten. Just so you know. Anyway, some good points, others not so much. I'm one of the rare examples of people who prefer Baldur's Gate 1 to Baldur's Gate 2 - a lot of it has to do with writing which I consider boring as sin in both BG games and Pillars of Eternity improved upon it drastically, just so you know where I'm coming from. So, first of all, let's talk about cutting stuff. You seem to be coming from a position of a person who primarily plays RPGs in order to immerse himself into story, into the dialogues and quests - not everybody approaches RPGs from that perspective tho. One of the reasons why I enjoyed Baldur's Gate 1 so much over Baldur's Gate 2 was precisely because progress trough the entire game was not tied to quests, that you were more or less free to roam the game's world, explore and discover things at your own pace. You're saying that it looks like Obsidian first built the world and then populated it with quests - as far as I'm concerned, that's praise, not criticism. Same applies to the dungeons. There's this idea of many RPG enthusiasts which I find quite bizarre, and that's the idea of getting rewarded for playing the game. To me, playing the game is the reward. When I'm playing an open world FPS, areas filled with enemies is all I need to have fun. When I'm playing a strategy game, likewise, all the reward I need is simply to play the game. Similarly, while playing Pillars of Eternity, the excitement of the unknown, the thrill of combat, the joy of discovery - that's all I need to enjoy the game. Neither XP for killing monsters nor huge, sprawling quests randomly stumbled upon in wilderness - little stories told via notes and small dialogues was all I needed to spruce up the experience, and to be fair, areas in Pillars of Eternity contained a lot more quality content than those in BG1 ever did. Then we get to the idea of cutting Od Nua and merging it with the main game. Why? That it explores similar themes is not much of an argument since the whole game explores similar themes. While I would agree with cutting it down to like 7-10 levels as it's clear it's 15 levels long purely to fulfill a promise, I would strongly disagree with making it mandatory and adding it to the main game. As it stands, Od Nua could take risks, introduce difficulty spikes that the main story never could, purely because it's entirely optional. If you don't enjoy it, you can ignore it and carry on - I did enjoy it, therefore I finished it twice. Most importantly tho, these areas give player freedom, they give player choice in how to progress and they give the game world a feeling of a big, coherent and continuous location as opposed to a buch of small "planes" you warp between. Formula seen in Baldur's Gate 2 is far overused in modern RPGs - I'm not too keen on seeing another one implementing it. And my last counter-point would be that the Obsidian's kicstarter promise was to make a sequel in style of Infinity Engine games, not a sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Pillars of Eternity has bits of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (exploration, balanced approach to storytelling and monster slaying), of Icewind Dales (dungeoneering and exploration) and of Planescape Torment (many words and focus on specific themes). With that said, I definitely would not be opposed to see fewer, yet more complex questlines. Similarly, it's apparent the development was running out of breath in the third act. And yes, faction involvement should be way higher, and they should be present troughout the entire game as opposed to being mere means to an end in Defiance Bay.

There's more than just two extremes of scaling everything and scaling absolutely nothing at all. Urgent quests could use to be scaled to your level in order to make them more believable. Similarly, scaling main questline would make a lot of sense in order to make supposedly challenging boss fights actually challenging (at least scaling it upwards anyway). Level scaling has been used to great success for ages, the earliest game I know of to use it is Baldur's Gate for random encounters (or was it Baldur's Gate 2?), but I'm sure it reaches much further back than that. Not to mention that Witcher 3 sort of cheats - monsters above your level are artificially strengthened and those below are weakened to make you feel like you're progressing more than you actually are.

"My son! He was just dragged into the forest by drowners! Can you help me, Witcher!?" "I would love to help you, my good sir, but I can see the drowners dining on your son are character level 20, whereas I am mere character level 5. I trust the drowners will politely wait for a few weeks because they're good sports. Now if you'll excuse me I will go kill these drowners 20 meters away who look exactly the same but are level 5."

Cossacks and Total War have just about nothing in common

Yes, that's the one I wanted to try to attain. Of course that would mean overwriting progress of my current game.

I feel happy.

*sigh* Far Cry 4 doesn't trust me with such advanced concepts as save management, and so I can only have one at any given time. I guess I'll get to watch the alternate ending only after finishing the game.

Yes. I clearly have not watched the same movie since I dare to disagree with you :-P Look, just about everything you wrote is based on speculation. There's very little evidence in the movie actually supporting it, aside from the bowcaster hit, which I never really disputed. That was my point all along - Force Awakens failed at communicating its intent properly. There's only ever so many scenarios I'm willing to construct to make a fictional story work, and for Force Awakens to fully work for me, I'd have to write an entire second movie script in my head. Force Awakens tries hard to convey concepts which were not explored in the original trilogy without realizing that you also need to divert screen time from pretty explosion to properly explore these concepts. Perhaps because I don't think it was particularly good, so "bad writing" kinda presents itself? Except Blade Runner actually put massive amount of effort into presenting its dilemma to the viewer before leaving itself open to interpretation. There's a huge difference between being open to interpretation and quite simply not conveying sufficient amount of information in the first place. *sigh* Do we really have to do this? Should I retort with "Well you're stupid and you stink because you don't think what I think" or something along these lines or can we just drop this genuinely dumb line of argumentation?

Nah. You'll watch the process of being slaughtered for painful dozens of minutes.

That's an excellent choice.