algroth

Regarding the titular question, I don't know how important this feature would be but one approach that comes to mind is to have a set of neutral or "aesthetic" descriptors that don't mechanically determine much or present any change to combat, but which omit, allow or change certain banters, dialogues and so on. For example I'm personally favouring a character who is more in his autumn years and so on yet I've heard people call him "lad" or the likes in some interactions - so an age descriptor could change a few of these nicknames to best reflect apparent age. Likewise, if your character looks like Eld Engrim (which he can) it'd be really awkward to hear companions going "he's so handsome!" left and right (something that I've noticed happens pretty often in my playthrough at least). Just a thought on how this idea could be implemented in my opinion. But really, maybe it's just not worth the work.

I was one of those who backtracked to an inn when delving into dungeons pretty often, but the reason for me wasn't so much to resupply but rather to take advantage of the resting bonus that inn gave me opposite to losing it when resting in the dungeon itself. But that's me, and I certainly never made a post complaining about it or even really minded it that much.

There's also at least one grimoire that has some abilities/bonuses attached to it. With regards to that point, however, I'm a little disappointed at how few grimoires have any special abilities attached to them. I think that could have acted as a major incentive to try out different grimoires or even keep those without unique spells.

I mean, it's right there if you google it up. It's on Wikipedia for Christ's sake. If you want to assume the issue was not that people were screaming "SJW agenda" at the game, be my guest, but all proof points to it being the case (in its majority). Meanwhile, I think the lecturing is a byproduct of terrible writing, but I don't see it as the deliberate intention, nor do I think it's anywhere in the vicinity of wrongness that the example you posted is even if it were the intention behind it. Context is important, and in this case, it's this bloody line. It really doesn't deserve this discussion, less so this much time after the fact.

What's really disgusting me is how freaking *many* of these "There are women doing things that I don't like women doing in this game!" so-called reviews have been showing up lately.Really makes me question my self-identity as a "gamer" when I see what's up with parts of gamer culture these days. I just don't understand why of all games it's this one that's getting ragged on for these reasons. So far this is like the least "political" game I've played all year.RPGs seem to be particularly vulnerable to this stuff for some reason. The worst I've seen was the Beamdog forums during the release of Siege of Dragonspear a few years ago. The devs included a minor NPC with two lines of dialogue about gender fluidity and gamergate launched a weeks-long review bombing campaign knocking the metacritic and GoG scores down to 3 (meanwhile: 7.5 among verified Steam purchases). The developer downsized and hasn't released any OC since.Yet it's somehow the "SJWs" who are still charicatured in the gaming community as the unreasonable value crusaders. Goes to show that gamergate was never really about combating censorship in gaming so much as fighting cultural change and representational diversity. I mean, I get it. When games have been made with no care for any demographic but yours for the past thirty years, it's hard to adapt when the industry *finally* notices that other people want to play too. Same thing is happening with comic books – a female Thor and a black Spiderman are always going to cause some people's heads to just explode. I was actually one of the people that had a problem with SoD. Now THAT was just virtue signaling garbage. It was embarassing. Don't get me started on the state of Marvel comics.It was two lines of dialogue + a cheeky Minsc bark. The rest was imagined by gamergate conspiracy theorists and has since been roundly debunked – I won't sift through it again here. Regardless, no team of developers should have to go through something like that over something so minimal. Go back sometime, read the **** that was said to and about Amber Scott, read the metacritic review spam, and honestly defend that reaction as proportional to the "offending" content.Gamergate has become everything that it claimed to hate about so-called "SJW's" — driven by victim/outrage politics, unreasonably prosecutorial, and finding cause for offense under every rock and behind every corner. OP practically wrote a manifesto on how a game that features cosmic space pigs and drug-addled monks is on a mission to emasculate him, FFS. That's not normal. Gamers should be able to criticize content they don't like without assuming a pervasive and malicious agenda behind every creative decision. This culturally aggrieved conspiracy mongering has been out of hand for a while now. "Hitler did nothing wrong" is one sentence but I imagine you'd have a problem if an NPC said that.Your logic doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Here's what one person said about Mizhena: Considering what the two sentences in question are, neither does yours. I think it's a rubbish couple of lines myself but the content is hardly of a damning or incendiary ilk the likes of what you're using as an example. I mean, literally the issue that people are up in arms about is that it depicts an NPC as trans. That's *it*. I'm saying that "It was two lines of dialogue" is not an adequate response to people who have a problem with the content. Whether or not my example aligns with what Mizhena says is irrelevant. > literally the issue that people are up in arms about is that it depicts an NPC as trans You didn't read the post I quoted, did you? That's not why most people don't like the character at all. Also, there isn't any evidence, as far as I can see, that OP is a participant in the Gamergate hashtag. I replied before you added the quote, but didn't realize the "quote" function here added it in. With regards to the post you made, that is exactly my problem with it, and with the depiction of many trans characters in media. But still I think the intention, and the vast majority of complaints levied towards it, is a whole other kettle of fish to saying "Hitler did nothing wrong": the Beamdog line fails in misunderstanding a condition it's portraying (though then again I know many who *would* openly call themselves trans), but its intentions are in the right place; that is not the case at all with the latter, as it rather explicitly states mass genocide is "nothing wrong". The reason why Gamergate and many others acted against and actively demanded its removal was not the above quote, it was sheer plain transphobia, and again, all for something that is *minimal*. It's *nineteen seconds* of dialogue. That's what makes this especially ridiculous. For the record, so does it do the same of Amber Scott's statements, about being "proud" of being an SJW and so on so forth. It's all ridiculous, from either side of the argument.

What's really disgusting me is how freaking *many* of these "There are women doing things that I don't like women doing in this game!" so-called reviews have been showing up lately.Really makes me question my self-identity as a "gamer" when I see what's up with parts of gamer culture these days. I just don't understand why of all games it's this one that's getting ragged on for these reasons. So far this is like the least "political" game I've played all year.RPGs seem to be particularly vulnerable to this stuff for some reason. The worst I've seen was the Beamdog forums during the release of Siege of Dragonspear a few years ago. The devs included a minor NPC with two lines of dialogue about gender fluidity and gamergate launched a weeks-long review bombing campaign knocking the metacritic and GoG scores down to 3 (meanwhile: 7.5 among verified Steam purchases). The developer downsized and hasn't released any OC since.Yet it's somehow the "SJWs" who are still charicatured in the gaming community as the unreasonable value crusaders. Goes to show that gamergate was never really about combating censorship in gaming so much as fighting cultural change and representational diversity. I mean, I get it. When games have been made with no care for any demographic but yours for the past thirty years, it's hard to adapt when the industry *finally* notices that other people want to play too. Same thing is happening with comic books – a female Thor and a black Spiderman are always going to cause some people's heads to just explode. I was actually one of the people that had a problem with SoD. Now THAT was just virtue signaling garbage. It was embarassing. Don't get me started on the state of Marvel comics. It was two lines of dialogue + a cheeky Minsc bark. The rest was imagined by gamergate conspiracy theorists and has since been roundly debunked – I won't sift through it again here. Regardless, no team of developers should have to go through something like that over something so minimal. Go back sometime, read the **** that was said to and about Amber Scott, read the metacritic review spam, and honestly defend that reaction as proportional to the "offending" content.Gamergate has become everything that it claimed to hate about so-called "SJW's" — driven by victim/outrage politics, unreasonably prosecutorial, and finding cause for offense under every rock and behind every corner. OP practically wrote a manifesto on how a game that features cosmic space pigs and drug-addled monks is on a mission to emasculate him, FFS. That's not normal. Gamers should be able to criticize content they don't like without assuming a pervasive and malicious agenda behind every creative decision. This culturally aggrieved conspiracy mongering has been out of hand for a while now. "Hitler did nothing wrong" is one sentence but I imagine you'd have a problem if an NPC said that.Your logic doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Considering what the two sentences in question are, neither does yours. I think it's a rubbish couple of lines myself but the content is hardly of a damning or incendiary ilk the likes of what you're using as an example. I mean, literally the issue that people are up in arms about is that it depicts an NPC as trans. That's *it*.

Characters that aren't one-dimensional representations of a set of traits. I assume the reputation system at large caused this, which I think is a bad system to have for companions in a RPG but that's a different problem for another time. Also it isn't about the characters themselves not being one-dimensional, but also there being a varied cast of characters too, which is also lacking with somehow the available companions at your disposal being various shades of chaotic good despite being a highly competitive, pirate-infested colonial frontier. This game's companions feel like cast of Pirates of the Caribbean, basically. I do feel that the reputation system has to be looked at very closely, but this aside I don't think you can properly summarize any of the characters in question through their likes or dislikes, or that their reasons for having such preferences is a simple one. Maia for example can be pretty self-effacing and reacts positively to a light-hearted remark - but her reasons for taking or enjoying this approach are thoroughly different to Serafen's, or Edér's, or Xoti's. In Maia's case it acts pretty deliberately as a means to deflect or look away from the moral quandries behind her role within the Royal Deadfire Company. She's not merely secretive the way Aloth may be, who by all means assumes the gravity of his mission and actions, but also deliberately tries to deflate them and look away as if shirking the gravity of some of her actions. Serafen's past as a slave completely informs his light-heartedness and his love for the Principi life too - he's a freedom-lover, a libertine and avid adventurer and embraces this life as someone who knows the opposite end to the freedom he eventually earned for himself. I think each character has their own personalities and histories that are fairly distinct from one another, regardless of how one can maybe find a general enough label to homogenize them all with.

To be fair, I think it's more the matter of reinterpreting an existing character as one of a different race or gender that really stirred the pot in that case, more than whatever else. Personally I do think that's problematic, because it's a move that does reek of corporate cynicism, detecting a popular trend and applying it to an existing franchise to feed off a brand's popularity - but then again I don't lose sleep over it either.

What, like Serafen? Serafen was pretty tame. How so? He does seem like he fits every aspect you mentioned regarding Oghren. How exactly is he "tamer" than Oghren? Just the feeling I got. I admit I didn't use him the whole game, I intend to use him all the way through my 2nd game since I'm going to be supporting the Pirates that game. But I have to finish my POE 1 game I just started first, so it will be a while. I think one problem is I can't understand half of what he says. I do like the pirate speak, it does give flavor to the game. But I have a lot of trouble understanding him. Ah, that is a different issue, and one that as a non-native English speaker I can understand. But generally I don't see how he was 'tamer' than Oghren, particularly also because I didn't feel Oghren was particularly aggressive about any of it either. He's probably more of a drunkard, but I'd say Serafen's definitely the one with the shorter fuse and, err, more expressive use of vocabulary.

What, like Serafen? Serafen was pretty tame. How so? He does seem like he fits every aspect you mentioned regarding Oghren. How exactly is he "tamer" than Oghren?

What, like Serafen?

Oh, it's one of these reviews, I see... I like how you've decided to create two distinct categories to pigeonhole all female characters into and have essentially forced them into the same. Xoti's a "lovable goof"? In what way is she "goofy" exactly? Maia's a male/female hybrid? What, just because she's an aumaua or something? Fassina never gave me the impression of someone who hated the player at all, maybe you resolved her quest differently than I did or something, while Dessiral is, if anything, more of a classic "woman scorned" than anything you describe above - and again, I don't see how either character is 'masculine' at all. If we're looking at characters as incidental as Dessiral or Aenia, then where exactly do Ezzali Bardatto, or Bahu, or Netehe, or Guildmaster Mairu, or Lueva Alvari, or Ondra and Hylea for that matter, fall into this dichotomy of yours? Some people, seriously… I skimmed through parts of the rest of the review, I honestly can't be arsed to give it a more in-depth reply. At the very least I feel it sheds some light into some of the other remarks I've seen levied at the game elsewhere, regarding the quality of writing and so on - but yeah, this seems to tell me more about you than it does about the game in question.

You are free to dislike the game, but Obsidian is not responsible for whatever craziness exists in the world, both real and imagined. They are certainly not responsible for how you imagine a hypothetical group of people would have reacted had the game been different. To your specific criticism, in this world there are 5 male deities, 4 female deities, 1 deity with no identifiable gender and 1 twinned deity with a male aspect and female aspect. This mirrors many real world religions but you are, of course, free to be offended by any of it. What do you think is the is the problem with the above setup and how would you fix it? Most gods that you see and talk to in the game are female and berath almost exclusively uses Pallid knight form, ugliest or most hideous god is male, most powerful characters are female and most unlikeable characters are male. Do you think feminist sjw culture we have now influence games or has it influenced pillars II in a way, because developers want to please sjw circles and/or avoid their rage and vocal backlash through social media. I don't know, I'm still finding both Serafen and Edér the most likable characters in my playthrough so far, and amidst the important NPCs Atsura and Aruihi are both quite well-rounded characters with a pretty noble end goal when you get down to it (despite the means of getting there). I certainly feel a lot more sympathetic towards them than I do towards their female counterparts in their respective factions. And christ, man: EOTHAS. I haven't finished the game yet but he seems a whole less shady than Berath or any other god you speak with for that matter. He's also the main antagonist, so why the heck are we even saying male gods aren't prominent in the story? Christ's sake, why are we even talking about *Skaen*, when exactly is he relevant this in game? Honestly, this sounds more like its your own preconceptions at play that any flaw inherent in the game.

Well, I'm not sure why a first post like this is allowed through because it does seem like full-on trolling to me, but I'll go ahead and respond seriously to it anyhow. In Deadfire there's women in positions of power and men in positions of power, there's villainous women as well as villainous men, and empathetic women as well as empathetic men. Gods don't necessarily have a defined genre (many gods have numerous depictions, forms and incarnations, which can come with different genders, such as Berath who can be depicted as both the Usher, male, or the Pallid Knight, female), but amidst the most common representations the likes of Galawain, Abydon, Eothas and Rymrgand are usually male in addition to Skaen, and at the very least two of these are not only not "ugly" but also arguably the ones with the traditionally "noblest" intentions among them, along with maybe Hylea (Eothas and Abydon specifically). So no, I don't think it's "men hating" at all. Feminist? Maybe, arguably. But since when is that a bad thing? Also, OP, you say that "if those roles would be reversed" feminists would call it chauvinist and whatnot… But it isn't, and instead we get accusations of the game being "man hating pro feminist SJW propaganda". So in the end it's the same nonsense from either side, wouldn't you agree?

If nothing else, that should at least help me get my data back. If anyone else has any idea, please lemme know! Thanks to those who've so far responded.

Shoplifters is one I'm really looking forward to - Hirokazu Koreeda's films are always worth watching and this one comes with a Palme d'Or win to boot. Beyond that, I'm interested in the new David Cameron Mitchell, Jafar Panahi and Niri Bulge Ceylan films, but I'm not rushing out to watch them either. Also it's already been in theatres but You Were Never Really Here is one I'd also like to watch. On a more mainstream side there's not much I'm looking forward to but I'm intrigued in the new Hellboy.

Did try, unfortunately it didn't work. Keyboard's completely unresponsive in this screen (I've been able to F8 on boot though - just nothing to do once the cursor appears).

Desktop, and I'm running Windows 7. I've been having some PSU issues of late, which have caused drives to disappear and so on, boots were pretty long when I was working with more than a couple of internal hard drives at a time (I'm trying to acquire a new PSU but between money issues and lack of availability in Argentina it's been tough yo get a hold of one, so I've since removed a few internal hard drives in the meantime). But it's never acted this way. One other thing I noted was that the computer was running very slowly yesterday, and noted thay there seemed to be several processes replicated when I opened up task manager. The computer's never been one for freezing a whole lot so that was strange. And now it just won't boot back up. I think one of the processes also had a curious name related to Avast, like "setup completion error" or something. I'm not sure if it's related, if the cause of this could be a virus (where from I have no idea), or if it's something completely incidental and maybe even normal, but I mention it anyhow.

So, I woke up today to a computer that remains stuck on a black screen with only a cursor on it. I can move the cursor about but can't click anything, can't type anything or perform any other action. I've tried running a CHKDSK (which went fine but didn't solve the problem), running safe mode, last known working state, 640x480, all to no avail. Also tried a system repair but when that window pops up, I get the reverse situation as before - I see everythong but get no cursor, while keys remain unresponsive. So I'm basically stuck. Anyone know anything about this?

Totalbiscuit died. https://kotaku.com/game-critic-totalbiscuit-has-died-1826310517

Here you go, aimico: https://www.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_ii_deadfire_rum_runners_pack

To be honest, both are pretty bad. No real need to speak of the latter here, but the former looks terribly tacky, non-descript and inexpeessive. Obviously the post is calling to mind the difference in detail and craft, but the only thing the above seems to show to me is how utterly meaningless the same is, the result is still hopelessly bland.

That's all I wanted buddy, that's all I wanted. =P ? This has nothing to do with comdemning anyone specific, and if you are feel you are being condemned that's completely on you as I never mentioned you or anyones names, You stated that you "tried to be constructive 3 months ago and were shouted down by inferior intellects." Now, you're taking it out on people who had nothing to do with whatever problems you had 3 months ago. Yes, you are condemning the whole forum. I never said "anyone specific." You think highly of yourself and obviously think you posses superior intelligence compared to most people, yet you fail to see that simple connection. You really need to be cut down to size. Oh, they were the same way back when they made their post about the topic. You didn't agree with them back then? You were an intellectually challenged filthy casual responsible for the dumbing down of muh cRPGs. There was never any constructive criticism, just PCMR whining at its cartooniest. Here is their initial topic, by the way, just so you can gauge how 'constructive' they actually were: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/96466-why-the-hell-are-they-dumbing-down-the-game/

Hey guys! I'm sorry if this has already been addressed elsewhere, but I didn't see a thread about it and thought I should bring it up since it seems weird to me... But whilst the game has been running pretty smoothly for the most part in my PC, I've noticed that the ship-to-ship combat sequences have been advancing increasingly slower, and today have threatened my game to stop working altogether a few times. I don't know if this has been happening to anyone else, but I've been noticing freezes and "thinking" up to a minute following every jibe or turn action I've been making, and probably elsewhere too. It seems strange to me as the game has run fine in some of the most demanding areas in the game like Queen's Berth and so on, and it would seem to be that a scripted interaction, if a fairly unique one at that, would be performing as poorly in comparison. Has anyone else been experiencing these issues?

I will say, I'm slightly disappointed at the lack of vithrack love in what I've seen of the game so far. Even amidst the wilder crewmembers, Big Mouth is the only one who you have to hire through the crew tab and not actually meet in the world and convince to come with you. WHERE MUH VETHRUCKS UT, OBS?!