Ethics Gradient

The first dividend has been announced. Here's the details:

It's true that Feargus is the CEO of DRIL, but the other board members are his fellow owners of Obsidian. Urquhart, Jones, Parker, and Monahan are all listed as being directors of DRIL. In the original filing from 2015, Avellone also had a stake in DRIL, but that presumably changed with his departure from the company. As you've pointed out, Dark Rock Industries Ltd. seems to be a lifeboat for the Pillars IP if something forced Obsidian into bankruptcy. The only major downside is that since it isn't an Obsidian asset, using as collateral for a business loan or other financial instrument isn't quite as straightforward. Previous developers like Interplay or Bioware weren't entirely being short-sighted to keep IP in-house. They saw that they built valuable things, and could easily borrow against it, or liquidate it, to pump cash back into the studio.

The economy change happened a little over a year ago. You can read all about the proposed shift in this developer blog. But as Hannibal pointed out above, a brief summary of the changes would be: cash for content, gold for consumables.

Hm. Sorry. Last I remembered, tis quest was incorrectly granting the Festive Wool Hide. It's possible that it changed, or got broken in some new way... In any event, send an email to support@obsidian.net. Include your PFID# (at the bottom of Options --> Settings) and a brief description of the issue (like "I was not awarded the Halloween Dice after completing the weekly challenge"), and customer support will sort it out. Per a similar thread on the steam forums, the turnaround was fairly quick, and the user got the seasonal dice reward.

As of this morning, it seems like Avellone has just edited at least one of his posts to remove the line about Justing Bell possibly resigning. What does that mean? I dunno. But he's been the only "source" for this rumor so far.

Oh man. Here we go again. Thanksgiving Thanks is bugged. It advertises a copy of Spooky Dice, but the actual reward it points to is something different. Everyone who completed this weekly challenge should open up their collection and check: Promos (P) --> Armor. After redeeming the challenge, you should have a new (or additional) copy of the Festive Wool Hide armor. (sorry)

I entirely agree. Though, it's hardly an atomic bomb. We were discussing that very idea a little earlier in this same thread. Aside from providing some nominal shelter for their IP should the studio fold, it also makes buyouts a little less straightforward as well. Should Microsoft acquire Obsidian, all they will get is a production studio. DRIL IP can remain outside any deals that are made. The downside to that, is that the IP is not an asset that Obsidian has on the books. The Pillars IP isn't part of their valuation for the purposes of determining the company's total worth, or for business loans... etc...

Growing the studio to over 200 employees? Such power will be unstoppable.

Dark Rock Industries Ltd. was formed well over a decade after Obsidian was incorporated and its existence coincides with the development of the first Pillars of Eternity. It appears to be less of a shell or holding company for Obsidian, but a shelter for the Pillars IP and any other originals they may develop in-house. I'm not sure how many other developers go through an extra step to essentially license IP back to itself, but for a studio that had a history of going paycheck-to-paycheck, it seems like a fairly shrewd business decision. If Obsidian were to go under, the Pillars IP wouldn't automatically be up for auction like the office furniture. It feels like a lesson learned from the original Fallout. After Interplay went bankrupt, the rights bounced around between creditors until Bethesda ultimately secured the franchise. This way, some of the original Pillars stakeholders could still have a say in where further development ends up.

No. But there have been a ton of amusing and evasive answers. It's all winding down, but here's a link to the Q&A. or

Per social media discussion by the developers elsewhere, v20 and v21 were just a couple hot fixes.

I was actually going to post some sort of grumpy reply like: Yeah, the narrator is a speaker like any other character, the game would need to run a test against every line of dialogue to... blah... blah... and then I poked around the binary a bit. The game already does specifically test and handle narration differently. It really is just a single if/then and fancy button away from redirecting (almost) all calls for narration off to a null. The caveat is that there are still something like 100-200 pieces of dialogue which include narration, but are owned by a different speaker. Any time you come across something like: [sNARKY GOD]: "FI FI FO FUM, I SMELL A WATCHER... AND... VATNIR? SERIOUSLY. TAKE A BATH, DUDE." You swear his lips remained motionless, but the weight of the reverberating sarcasm brings you to your knees. that is all a single piece of text and single audio file owned by [GOD]. Splitting it apart would mean inserting a new dialogue node for just the narration and cutting the audio into two pieces. There's no easy coding fix to address those instances, and would require a moderate level of rework. But as I mentioned before, there is a relatively quick thing you can try. Just dig through your install to find: StreamingAssets/Audio/[platform]/Voices/English\(US\)/narrator Renaming/deleting that single directory will cut out any audio where only the narrator speaks. That accounts for something over 80% of her total lines. The mod on Nexus took a more complicated approach to achieve the same effect, but the audio subsystem is fairly resilient, and doesn't appear to get too upset when it simply can't find a piece of VO.

Editing every single conversation bundle where the narrator speaks would be a doable, but ugly mod. However, somewhere in the Deadfire install is something like: StreamingAssets/Audio/[platform]/Voices/English\(US\)/narrator Just rename the directory to narrator2 or i_hate_quality_VO or whatever, and without placeholders or much additional effort, the bulk of narration should disappear. There is still a bit of split narration where a different character is the active speaker, and the narrator chimes in at the beginning or end, but that is a different matter. Those are single files with two different voices in them. The author of the mod on nexus apparently identified and edited each of those files manually to trim off the narration. As far as low-effort hacks go, renaming a single directory isn't too complicated. However, since it is outside the mod framework, expect the narration to be restored every time Steam or GOG processes an update.

As a humble acolyte of the Church of Durance, and chronicler of Aarik D's many photoshops and/or crimes against good taste (I put together the above imgur gallery), I present the following: Just need to get the water color versions done!

No way to know for sure until the release of DLC2. While references and assets relating to Ryona started appearing around the 2.1 beta, there hasn't been anything definitive to specifically tie her introduction to the next expansion. Data-mining can be quite hit-or-miss. It's sometimes difficult to determine if we're unearthing secrets, or digging through piles of discarded trash.

Fair enough. Though, not everyone is comfortable using UABE to alter the game files. The desirable thing would be to import via override. The alternative works, but is likely to get wiped out each time there is a game update.

It is quite probable that the date is wrong, but the day is correct. I'd wager that the livestream will be Thursday September 13th, versus Thursday September 14th noted in the announcement. These streams are very typically announced the afternoon before the event. See you in about six hours!

The answer is currently no to all of this. Editing 3d models post-compile is something that can't really be done with Unity. Best case, maybe you can sub in a new texture for an existing model, but that's about it. While there are some third-party tools that may export 3d meshes from game files, there are presently none that can pack any modifications back into the assets. Being able to create new things is definitely on the mod wishlist, but it is a fairly large challenge for Obsidian to implement.

For what it's worth, companion portraits can also be modded in this fashion as well '<mod-folder>/gui/portraits/companion' Now we just need Aarik to package up his durance photoshops into a Church Of Durance mod!

Areas are one of the least modable things in Deadfire. An "area" is a combination of several things such as: tile sets, 3D meshes, hardcoded enumerations, audio cues, and position/encounter data. Quite unfortunately, the information is so spread out that introducing new areas is practically impossible. Maybe if we're lucky, Obsidian will find some sort of way to allow user-created levels later, but making all the additions/edits on the user side is something that can't really be done presently.

I'll miss the derp graphics, but the latest beta seems to be tending towards watercolor:

It's fairly unlikely that's finished art. By the time release comes around, I'd wager that it will be similar in appearance to the woodcarving-esque menu decorations seen throughout the the game. Pillars and Deadfire have had some pretty derpy placeholder art throughout the years; usually in the form of MS Paint-style doodles. The arena window is actually better than average for unfinished graphics.

So, I guess it does contradict itself. All we know for certain is that 2.1 will be released on the 11th, 3.0 and DLC2 on the 25th, and LAXF Megabosses whenever they decide to ship it. With timelines sliding around, who know's when the above post was drafted. The "Patch 2.1 and Incoming" section was probably information meant for release in late August.

The three things we should see in the next few weeks are: "Abydon and Skaen challenges" ---> (Patch 2.1) "Mega Boss for those who adhere to the "get good" philosophy" ---> (Free DLC6, LAXF) "An entire DLC focused around proving your worth" ---> (Paid DLC2, LAX01) & (Patch 3.0) I wouldn't have brought it up if there weren't some confirmation via data-mining that the Megabosses were indeed a separate DLC, the mysterious LAXF package that I started seeing references to a little over a month ago.

I don't know if that statue/construct has a name, but it is "Seeker, Slayer, Survivor", and we will see that three-creature motif elsewhere in the DLC. Seeker (Spider), Slayer (Stelgaer), Survivor (Boar) Edit: It's almost certainly Galawain/Toamowhai "sometimes called the Faces of the Hunt" per the cyclopedia.