Fenixp

In other news, Obsidian has a new CEO, man named Bobby Kotick. He has promised to get entirely new offices for Obsidian, including spiked chairs and torture devices, to remove all fun from game development. He'll use this newly found seriousness to develop Pillars of Eternity 2: Gears of Pillars of War. It'll be a third person shooter set in post-war Eora where everything got brown and machine guns were developed. Magic will be present in the form of magic shotguns. Armor class of female characters will naturally increase with their decreasing armor coverage.

Yup, pretty much. It'll be a nerf fest in order for people to not call it "A mess", which they'll do as long as Obsidian won't spend a significant amount of time polishing and balancing the system. Which they do for PoE right now quite successfully, all in all, the changes they've made are all for the better (while pissing some people off that their OP/glitched builds won't any longer work as well, but that's a price worth paying)

That's because the areas are not designed to be believable - they're designed to be strange, unsettling, to tell you a story and, of course, to provide the best and most varied gameplay possible. Remember, not all games strive to be realistic and I believe level design of Dark Souls serve well to give you a feeling of something alien and bizarre, which I do believe was the primary goal all along.

Look at that magnificent hat!

Yup. The content flowed seamlessly from personal to epic which is definitely what I like about it. Also, that 99% of the information is not necessarily relevant to your character is a rather narrow viewpoint - the first act served to explore the semi-unique aspects of the setting, thus personal story, and that's why perhaps a lot of information doesn't seem relevant at first. However, the storyline sort of twists around and back on itself when you find out what should your character actually start doing aside from saving his/her hide. And that's the point where you should start discovering why reading every single piece of content should be useful to you - I'd find answering many questions posed by NPCs and by the game + the decision at the ending pretty damn hard if I didn't have the full scope of information. Thankfully, all of that information is provided troughout the game and there's only a small amount of quests where you'd need to make uninformed decisions. In fact, tight focus of the world, its lore and the main storyline is one of my favourite things about the game - just about all the information you are given is there to serve a purpose, you just need to connect the dots. Before I found they're written by the backers I thought they're an interesting way of exploring life on Eora unrelated to the protaginost. It's not like you couldn't ignore them if you didn't want to read that stuff, so... You know. Besides, the mechanic does actually get a proper use in White March. Edit: Oh and Sagani was my favourite companion. In fact, I generally liked companions presented in Pillars a lot more than those in Baldur's Gate - companions in BG II had one strong character trait which got overplayed to the extreme. Sure, that makes memorable characters as the game hammers the point of "Jaheira is kind of an ass" so hard you can't forget it even if you wanted to, but Pillars of Eternity has characters with actual... Well, character. They're not just walking gimmicks, they feel like living beings. Sadly, living beings don't tend to be as memorable as walking gimmicks.

I got Pillars of Eternity roughly at the same time I got Witcher 3. I got bored with Witcher 3 relatively quickly, yet finished PoE twice in a row. And Witcher was my favourite RPG franchise up to that point.

There are two steps which any intelligent person who wants to back a game should take: a) Think "So, how much money can I shove down the drain without feeling guilty about doing this?" b) Put this amount of money into kickstarter/indiegogo/whatever project and consider that money effectively lost I will never understand how can people possibly put such high expectations into a project which has not even been worked on up until the kickstarter/whatever campaign. What I understand even less is how people see "We won't use D'n'D" and still expect D'n'D.

That sort of depends on how you want to buy them - they also sell both in a single package for about 18 EUR or so.

Pillars of Eternity II, but since they're absolutely making that, I'd be incredibly happy for another Fallout game by Obsidian. Oh wait what I meant was another Fallout game, period.

I bet you talked Gwyn to death by repeatedly talking of dangers of firebombs. He jumped on his sword rather than to be listening to you. I, on the other hand, am currently doing a heroic Shield + Spear + Bow playtrough. There ain't a more difficult way to play Dark Souls.

I know. You're a wuss.

Pillars of Eternity is actually filled with various fantasy tropes, the good thing about it is that it takes these tropes and tries to do something fun with them - they did it in the main campaign on many occasions, they did it in White Match as well. If Obsidian wanted to do something entirely original, PoE would not be taking place in a semi-generic fantasy setting with renamed vampires, orcs and halflings. As for it being "unfinished", well... I played PoE about a month after released and it felt entirely finished. The third act is somewhat rushed, true, but there's nothing substantially wrong about it, it could just do with more content. And now the game is actually a very pleasant experience, altho if you expected a 100% polished experience with no bugs, you should not be purchasing games by Obsidian, seriously. That's not an excuse, that's just how things are and always were with Obsidian.

Not as long as Great Club exists - it's got only slightly lower damage but scales better, not to mention it being lighter and not having such insane strength requirements

The DLC argument comes from the fact that there's a lot of people who will only ever do a single playtrough of a game, no matter how big the game is, and especially for DLC which ties into the base game in some way which Bethesda is quite known for, this means effectively missing content. And even when the DLC works more or less outside the main game, you might want to toy around with the rewards in the main game, but that's not quite as satisfying when you perhaps already have superior gear or have finished most of the main game. Besides, when GOTY of some description comes out, the game will have a lot less bugs and there'll be more community content to fix whatever you might dislike about it. The way games are sold now there's little to no reason to purchase SP games close to release. Personally I only ever purchase purely base games when I know I'll replay them and/or want to support the developer (like Pillars of Eternity)

There, killed Asylum Demon with a sword hilt. YOU'LL NEVER HUMILIATE ME AGAIN, SUCKER! And I got a useless hammer for it!

Dark Souls 2 was fine, look at Lords of the Fallen if you want to see how can a Dark Souls-like game fail. Then again I suppose DS2 bore the name of Dark Souls franchise...

The practical difference is so minor that it's hardly worth mentioning. Naturally, completely top-down camera angle with icons clearly representing roles of different units is by far the most practical way to display a game. From practical standpoint, both IE games and PoE do a poor job of conveying information on screen clearly - and both games are guilty, IE is more readable due to slow speed of combat, on the other hand PoE shows info on hover, has info boxes above heads of characters and shows such things as AoE. Still, there's much more to RPGs than just clarity - these games are also trying to present player with a world, both in their own way. Arguably your preference of how the camera is angled will stem from how much do you like what do you see, and personally, I prefer art style in PoE to that in BGI and II.

Mostly because I don't have to deal with poopoo from anyone but you alone. Even on the general boards. The politness around here is a small miracle on the internet, which makes you stand out like a sore thumb. Why do you think so many people react negatively to you around here? That's the point where you should stand back, look at what you're doing and think on it for a bit. Anyway, that's the last I'll say on this particular exchange.

*sigh* Zenbane, is there something with your brain which makes you physically unable to communicate in a polite fashion when somebody disagrees with you? I like some of things you have to say and you're right, partnership is a solution which did not come to my mind, that's useful information. Of course, presenting it as you did just makes me want to go back to ignoring you as opposed to carrying an argument, so... I'll just go and do that.

Obsidian has a lot of experience with RPG development - they don't have much experience with developing casual games. Risk would be lower than that of someone entirely new entering the market but it would still be too damn high. Rise of the Tomb Raider is partially funded by Microsoft, which gives them timed Xbox exclusivity

Well the best thing is that it's open source. While I don't believe there are any plans to implement MP anywhere in the current goalposts, if enough people want such a feature, it's not impossible to add it. To be fair tho, I would not get my hopes up - implementing a functional multiplayer is not exactly an easy task. I did small amounts of modding for Morrowind, but that's long lost in the abyss of time. It was nothing major anyway. At this point I do have sources of OpenMW downloaded and am reading trough them, altho I don't think I'd ever get to the stage of actually contributing. It does seem fun tho. The thing with Morrowind engine is that it's already highly modular, and this project is based on matching original engine and construction set perfectly. Since even the main game and expansions are 'just' modules for the engine, if you own them, you can just put them in the new engine's data files, load them up and the game'll work. I've never seen anything of the sort happen, but I can imagine that if someone created completely new assets and a new landmass, it could most likely be loaded precisely like Morrowind is - but all mods, even total conversions, I've ever seen were based on Morrowind + expansions. At any rate, they're not recreating any of the assets or maps - just an engine which can properly read the original's data.

Yeah, in the current state, it's definitely not the way to play the game yet - but it seems like it will be, in due time. I'm really glad talented developers take from their free time to do a project like this, I can't even imagine doing anything of the sort after spending 8 hours programming at work and then some time learning new things at home.

With the release of version 0.37.0, OpenMW celebrates another milestone as it has completely switched rendering engine which drastically improves performance (at the cost of some graphical features, for now) So, what is it? It's a multi-platform, open source implementation of a fully featured Morrowind engine and its construction kit. The current version allows you to play main game and the expansion + any plugins which do not rely on any kind of .exe injectors should function properly as well. Tamriel Rebuilt, here I come! The engine is still in beta tho, so bugs are to be expected and some features don't quite work as they should. What's it good for? Linux/Mac support, runs well on modern versions of Windows, natively supports widescreen resolutions. Optional features include dynamic shadows (temporarily removed for the new rendering engine), a ton of fixes of the original engine's bugs, native distant land - basically, end goal is that you no longer need to run any external software to play the game properly and full support of modern operating systems. There are also some quality of life improvements, like saves getting automatically grouped by character to which they belong. Where do I get it? https://openmw.org/en/ Is it awesome? It's friggin' Morrowind, of course it's awesome! For ****'s sake, why are you asking such stupid questions? Dear Lord, you're an idiot, Fenixp.

Skyrim had an awesome mod (called SkyRe) which completely overhauled the skill tree. I think it merged stealth and lockpicking into a single tree and added an entirely new skill, outdoorsman or something along those lines, which contained a chain of skills allowing you to don clothes of various factions around Skyrim, making them non-hostile. What I expected to see was a bunch of bandits on patrol routes, but it turns out Bethesda put a lot more effort into this and the bandit 'colonies' were a lot more lively than that. It's just a shame that Fallout 4 sounds like it was never even made for roleplaying, so such mod would quite simply not bring much of a benefit.

Your ass is too big, it's way too easy to hit. And... Yeah, expert mode is a bad idea for a new player :-P If you want it disabled, go to menu -> Difficulty -> Click the Expert Mode icon beneath difficulty options. It can be disabled at any time, but IIRC you can't re-enable it