desel

Until you have all the details figured out, here's another idea in regards to the "Black Isle" itself and how it could be depicted in Deadfire: First, instead of just naming it the "Black Isle" (which imho would be too obvious of a reference) it could be, let's say the "Ebon Atoll". While the average atoll is usually pretty small in size and doesn't really have that much dry landmass (above sea level) there are exceptions like the Aldabra Atoll for instance. And this is Eora after all, so the "eoraian" version of an "atoll" could look like anything (in terms of size, shape, elevation, composition, vegetation, etc). Now in terms of shape, when you hear "atoll" you probably think of something looking like this: For the "Ebon Atoll" you would keep the mountain/volcanic peak (referencing or even modelled after the Black Isle logo) in the centre of the lagoon but replace the enclosing outer ring-like reef with an actual (full) circle ring landmass. Which in return would be referencing the "O" in the Obsidian Entertainment logo. Why the outer ring landmass is a near perfect circle would of course be left unexplained and kept mysterious on purpose.

Has it been confirmed that "Berath's Blessings" is indeed completely optional? It sure does sound like it, but I'd prefer official word on this.

Given that PoE allows you to have unspent attribute points when creating a character, I'd imagine Deadfire will allow you to leave these "blessing points" unspent as well. I might be wrong but I'd be surprised if you're forced to take them. Well I hope so. I couldn't care less about achievements or unlockable "boosts" making the game easier in any way. Some official word on whether this is indeed something you can opt out of any time would be nice though.

Could someone ask the devs over at fig if "Berath's Blessings" is an entirely optional feature and can be ignored? Thanks.

If you'd take away the complexity it wouldn't be POE anymore. And besides, Deadfire already made concessions contributing to the game being more "intuitive" by reducing the party size to 5 or making combat (by default) run at a slower pace, for example.

They should definitely stick with the 2D sketches from POE. POE and POE2 take place in the "eoraian" equivalent to the European Renaissance (14th-17th century) after all and the illustrations significantly contributed to communicating that rather well. If anything I'd LOVE to see Obsidian's artists go even crazier with this, so that we could feast our eyes on woodcut-like sketches in the style of Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros for example: And maybe even spicing it up with anatomy studies like Da Vinci's:

Even better.

Any news? ETA maybe? Or is it still looked into / almost ready to go live?

I agree, this should be a toggle. Strongly prefer to read my dialogues and descriptions as plain old text without any visual distractions too.

No, someone must be trolling. Exactly. Never touch a running system. Like eisenschwein said, they're still experimenting and trying out things, and the CURRENT iteration is just using Stamina, but that's still subject to change. No idea how people are coming up with nonsense like "regenerating health" when there's no mention of anything like that in Josh's answer from the Q&A?: Q: Is a characters vitality still split into Health and Stamina, are multiple stages fatigue, injuries, afflictions and different "death" states still a thing in Pillars of Eternity 2, and are those negative statuses still only removable/curable by resting? A: Right now, what we are experimenting with is a system that uses injuries as the main way of gating players needing to rest. At least in terms of damage taken. We're not using the Health system, we're using just the—well, we now have, whether you want to call it hit points or health, we have essentially what was Stamina in the first game. If you get knocked out you'll get injuries, and injuries are a thing you want to rest to get rid of. We're keeping all the injuries. Fatigue can be one of those injuries, we abandoned the sort of time-based fatigue a long time ago. The idea is that when you rest that's how you get rid of those things. You can also get injuries from things like scripted interactions, if you miss a check when you do a jump or something like that; you can hurt your knee or your elbow or your shoulder. Things like that. All that stuff is still in place. We're experimenting with a healthless system using injuries primarily as the gating mechanism for it. Personally, I really liked the Health mechanic. A lot of people found it confusing. We tried various ways of communicating it...I think that injuries do a pretty good job, and so I'd like to experiment at least with using injuries as the primary means for driving resting. We'll see. Like I said, I was the person who proposed and pushed for that mechanic, but I also don't want a bunch of people to not really understand what the hell is going on.

Please consider carrying over the split health/stamina mechanic from POE. Just because "some people" had a hard time understanding how it works is no reason to scrap it altogether. There surely should be enough time to come up with an absolutely idiot-proof way of communicating what that green bar represents or why characters aren't dying despite their portraits filling up with red. If I heard that right during yesterdays Q&A even Josh is more in favour of the split health/stamina mechanic, so why not stick with it?

Gameplay Options -> Uncheck "Automatically switch to Slow Mode at the start of combat" Sorted.

I think he also mentioned that you can change that through the options? So that there would be no slow down upon entering combat?

Even more importantly: Have a few more people proof-read the **** out of all the (translated) text this time, please.

Would love to have different ammo types. Chances are slim to none though: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjesawyer.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F146135413166%2Fjosh-wie-ist-denn-dein-standpunkt-zum-thema&edit-text=

Didn't Feargus say that they've been already working on Deadfire for a little more than the past year? Q1 2018 seems a bit too optimistic though. Just 2018 sounds more realistic.

For newcomers or people that don't have their POE savegames anymore I think Obsidian's going to put something similar to Tyranny's conquest mode at the end of POE2's character creation. Apart from this, the hyperlink system for lore keywords (already confirmed to be in POE2) and the more varied unarmed combat animations I hope they don't carry over anything else from Tyranny into POE2. Especially the painfully simplistic combat completely void of any tactical finesse whatsoever but also small, but incredibly dumb things like a level up automatically restoring to full health/stamina, removing all afflictions, injuries, fatigue or any negative effects and on top of that even granting a temporary stat boost like in a MMO or Hack'nSlasher. Keep the two franchises as separate as possible, please.

I thought the quest notifier popping up/scroll unrolling in the upper left corner (e.g. "Fragments of a Scattered Faith" for Edér) accompanied by other companions lamenting (or making snarky comments) for their fellow comrade's untimely demise was obvious enough.

I imagine that at least an option for the sixth party member slot would be totally doable. This as a stretch goal = easy moneyz.

Is it too much to ask these days that a modern RPG franchise doesn't have multiplayer, is (and hopefully stays) PC-exclusive and doesn't feature romances? Leave POE alone, please.

As I wrote in the other thread, I wouldn't change a single thing about how fog of war works in POE. As far as I'm concerned it should be carried over into Deadfire as is. However, I wouldn't mind if there would be some kind of clairvoyance spell you could learn/scroll you could come by or buy from merchants that would either increase the range of sight or maybe even remove fog of war and reveal the current area completely. Or a (craftable) potion/consumable that would have the same effect.

Doesn't change the fact that pledges made with PayPal were supported back in 2012 during the Project Eternity kickstarter campaign. So why not do the same but this time right from the start or at least from the moment on the funding goal has been reached? Wasteland 3's figstarter campaign did it this way using a third party solution called crowdOX that, iirc, even fed its data (pledged amount, backer numbers) back into fig for real-time updates.

From the first fig update: "Q: When we will have access to PayPal? A: We are currently looking into how we can offer PayPal to our Backers and will have more information on that at a later time."

From the PCGamesN summary: "Combat-wise, Pillars II is set to offer a little more tactical challenge than its predecessor - which was, frankly, more than tough enough for anyone without a solid grounding in the Infinity Engine games of old." Doesn't sound like they're doing away with anything, including friendly fire, but instead are going to make combat even more challenging(?).

One of the very few decent things about Tyranny are the unique animations for unarmed combat, including some really unexpected ones like a leg swipe or an actual uppercut like straight out of Streetfighter. Don't see why those animations shouldn't make their way into POE II too. I REALLY hope they also carry over the animation when a character is critically hit and explodes into bloody chunks. Definitely superior to the rather underwhelming and unbloody one in POE.