mumbogumshoe

The ship wasn't a stretch goal, it was in no matter what. It's supposed to replace the stronghold. The crew is a stretch goal. Originally they said your companions/sidekicks/adventurers would be your crew. I don't know if they meant by that that no-one else would be on the ship but there definitely wasn't a crew management system where you could hire and level up your crew. That's the stretch goal. The ship works without it but it adds another layer of complexity and makes it more fleshed out and interesting. There's nothing wrong with how they did it. Crew management is fully in the "nice to have but not essential" category that stretch goals are best used for.

I'm almost certain that if we don't get to the 5m stretch goal via the backer portal, Ydwin will come in the form of DLC. People were really excited about her. About the 4.75 goal, I'd love the additional sea monsters to be in, but I'm indifferent about the fishing. Let's see how the paypal pledges go.

YES!!! Just got confirmed! 4.5 million stretch goal here we come. Thanks, Obsidian!

Whilst I agree, I think they do need to make concessions to ensure we can actually see our characters on the deck of the ship. True dat...

I don't mind the hull so much, even though I agree that it doesn't look sleek enough for a sloop. But I would like them to get the proportions right. Part of what makes sailing vessels look so cool is towering, billowing sails. Especially the mainsail on this thing looks tiny.

So did Hornblower. Didn't stop him.

I totally agree the boat is ugly. Sloops are fast, this thing doesn't look fast. However the model in the op isn't a sloop either. A sloop has only 1 headsail, 2 or more and it's a cutter. Doesn't matter to me though, at least it looks good.

You needed NPCs guarding/manning Caed Nua to provide your security and prestige ratings which dictated guests, attacks and quests so I can't really see why they'd abandon that mechanic for what is essentially the same thing. Yes, but they've specifically said so far: no crew except your companions. Yeah and you're right, while it would be nice to have some crew in addition to your companions, it's a real problem when you do a solo run. I didn't even think about that. Are you going to be alone on your ship? That'd be serious weird. I'd love some clarification on that from the devs.

It's been well said: "I don't know what you're expecting, but as a sword I'm pretty one-dimensional in what I want!" No but seriously, I hear what you're saying. I hope they're going for some variety in personalities, at least.

Come on party! Let's go track down that god! We will bravely go where most Kith fear to trod! We're trouble some corsairs! And we're here to loot your treasures! We would shoot you on the downbeat... but we have to rest five measures! A pirate I was meant to be! Trim the Sails and roam the sea! Someone posted a youtube clip of that a few weeks ago and since then i can't get it out of my head...

Yeah I was considering that, that's why I'm not asking for a crew in the form of sailors who would be there for purely cosmetic reasons. But a couple of these specialists would be cool, guys who actually have a purpose mechanically, and some personality.

I'm really hyped that we get our ship, open exploration and ship to ship combat. All that is terrific, I was hoping for it from the start and I'm really happy to see it confirmed. However yesterday during the live-stream, Josh and Bobby said something that I'm not so happy about regarding the crew. They said that basically your companions were your crew and that there wasn't any crew system beyond that. Now, I felt that the weakest point of the stronghold in PoE1 was that there was basically nobody there except for the hirelings and some visitors who didn't have anything to say and were just standing around. I hoped that Obsidian would remedy that in PoE2 by letting us hire, manage and, most importantly, get to know (as in talk to and learn a bit about) our crew. Seems there aren't any plans for this. So, since there are a few "empty" stretch goals now between 4 and 5 million, maybe one could be something like this: we can meet some npcs on our travels and hire them as specialized crew members on our ship. There could be a navigator, a sailmaker, quartermaster, bosun, gunner, carpenter and so on, all of them improving a specific aspect of the ship and having some backstory and something to say here and there. I think something like that would help a lot to make the ship feel more lively. As it is I'm worried that the ship might suffer from the same feeling of emptiness as Caed Nua.

I talked about the names because you brought them up as particularly bad examples of what you mean. I thought that they really weren't that bad, so I just pointed that out. I don't talk about the rest of the translation because I don't know it. It might be every bit as horrible as you say. Same thing about the bit with guilds and guilded. You brought it up, I tried to make sense of it, told you that I think it's wrong. Now you looked it up and you agree. That's fine. This is how discussions are supposed to go. I don't understand what you mean by "what has that to do with it"? Also, what do you mean by "why try"? Stop being disingenuous. I never suggested people shouldn't try, I just pointed out that it's really quite hard and implied that one shouldn't assume that one could do a better job. Why don't you try to come up with a name for that town that both sounds good in your estimation and keeps the metaphorical nuance? Lastly, I remember those adventure books. They were extremely simplistic. I also didn't feel that there was anything wrong with how they were translated when I was a kid but in terms of complexity, quality and the sheer amount of the writing, you really can't compare it to PoE. I don't think this makes a very good point.

"Die weiße Mark" would be better for example. But as I said: I wouldn't have translated it anyway. The language of the Dyrwood is very specific and it's partly fantasy. You just can't do it right without loosing something. Take Gilded Vale for example. It has that settler vibe to it (I even think it has a double meaning, like guilded). Somehow the name itself sounds a bit ironic. Goldtal, or any other translation with gold in it sounds like a name from a fairy tale or medieval high fantasy bull****. I expect to find elves there. And I'm not talking about the names only. Or about the fact, that they didn't even bother trying to get the accents right. Almost every sentence sounded idiotic, out of context and straight from the translator. How come that my stupid adventure books for children had better translations? It seems you're insisting on a totally subjective aesthetic preference as something that's objectively better. You would just leave the names in English? Fine, I guess, but that would seem to be quite out of place to me if the rest is in German. About the connection you're making there with guilds (guilded isn't a word), I think it only exists in your head. There are no guilds in Gilded Vale, nothing that might point to guilds and any translation that hinted at such a connection would be a genuinely bad translation in my opinion because it would seem to just be based on a misunderstanding of the word 'gilded'. That said, I agreed that Goldtal isn't ideal because it does lose nuance in the translation as you can understand 'gilded' metaphorically as something that keeps up appearances, looks more beautiful and valuable than it really is. A really good translation would have kept that bit of nuance but I can't come up with a good one myself. Can't say anything about the rest of the translation, I never played the game in German. I'd expect it to be bad though, because good translation is hard. As to why the translation in your childhood books was better, it wasn't. I read a lot of that too and the translations generally were atrocious. You don't notice it that much as a kid, though.

Look I agree that names translated to German don't sound ideal but unless you can come up with better ones you should understand that these are just the hazards of translation. Any translation of names will sound more or less bad, the only thing you often can do to avoid this is to make up completely new ones. Only then it isn't a translation anymore and others will complain about that. To your specific examples... Dyrwald, ok I honestly don't see what you think is so wrong about that. Dyr is a made up word in English as well so they decided to just leave it and only translate the 'wood' part. It loses the connection to 'deer' but since it's supposed to be in a fantasy language anyway, that doesn't trouble me too much. What would you have liked better? Rehwald? Goldtal doesn't sound ideal to me, but again, have a better idea that still might pass as a translation? Gilded would translate to vergoldet, so does Vergoldetes Tal sound better to you? Or maybe Güldental? Both seem much worse to me. Or is it the 'Tal' bit that you're objecting to? Well, a vale is type of valley, a wide one with a river running through. There is no directly equivalent word for that particular type in German. So what would you suggest? In any case there are several real world examples of "Goldtal", so why do you think it sounds so incredibly stupid? Weißmark, this is just the most literal translation of White March possible and I don't see at all what's wrong with it. It is a Mark, or a march, a borderland, and if you think the white/weiß part is maybe a bit unoriginal, an argument that can be made imo, then it's still not the fault of the translators, who, you know, just translate it. edit: actually thinking about it again, "die Weiße Mark" would have been better than Weißmark, I feel. Anyway, that's a totally subjective judgement, there's nothing wrong with Weißmark. In general I agree with you, translations, localizations almost never sound quite right but that's hardly, or not necessarily, the fault of the translators. That's just the obvious tension that something that sounds elegant in one language may sound quite clumsy in another but change it too much you're losing the original meaning. So there often has to be a compromise. Translators who can avoid that, convey the full meaning of the original while still making it sound good are few and far between, it's an art in itself. Only way out is to read, watch, play things in the original wherever possible.

I was pretty skeptical about crafting when they put it as a stretch goal in the first game. Most often it's a stupid grind. There's nothing less fun than to create hundreds of iron daggers to level up your smith skill in Skyrim and while it can be fun for a while to just walk around hunting mushrooms and picking berries, at some point you're wondering if you're playing a hiking simulator, not a fantasy RPG. Bethesda generally does an abysmal job with crafting systems. Fallout 4 was awful in this regard. While it might seem like a good and immersive idea to use all that trash lying around everywhere to MacGyver something useful, what it basically meant for a compulsive person like me is that I had to pick up every piece of junk, thinking that I'd probably have need for it later. Played havoc with the limited inventory, especially in survival mode or what it was called. Wasted so much time because of course I have to have the latest upgrades for my sniper rifle. Anyway, the crafting system in PoE wasn't half as bad I found. Generally you had enough, or could easily get enough, crafting materials. That meant you didn't have to grind for them. As for rare materials, they were really rare, only two to four specimens of the most high end materials in the game. Prevents grinding as well because you can't do anything to get more of those anyway. No stupid hard to find recipes, no crafting skills that take skill points away from the skills you want your character to actually have. That was a big annoyance for me in NWN2. Crafting in PoE is extremely basic and hassle free. That makes it much less annoying than in many other games. I didn't mind it, in fact I quite liked it. I'm also looking forward to the changes that Josh has been talking about. Not being able to throw just any effect on a weapon but to upgrade an existing one is cool I think.

As a second step on Fulvano's voyage, we got a town. It's gonna be a small town but if it's around the size of Gilded Vale or Dyrford (or Brynnlaw for that matter) that's quite a bit of content right there, definitely a lot more than 1 level of the Endless Paths. That lighthouse and the skull island also look like they're going to be dungeons in their own right. I'm pretty confident that even if we only manage to get 5 or 6 steps this time around, there will be more content for each. I believe it's gonna be more than 5 or 6 though... number of backers will pick up again in the last week and I'm sure we'll be hitting the twitter and Facebook goals too.

I think the reason they're not going to be convinced is that they've spent a lot of their adult lives making and balancing CRPGs; JE Sawyer has been working on them for just under 18 years. The decisions they've made come as the result of a lot of experience making and playtesting games, and watching people with all different experience levels play their games. It is going to be very difficult to convince them to reverse a decision they've obviously put some thought into, especially when the arguments are rubbish like 'but if someone wants to play with 5 they could just choose not to recruit that last person'. EDIT: I have heard it suggested that one of the advantages of crowdfunding is that it also opens a dialogue with fans regarding the development of the game. I would suggest that it is also one of the disadvantages, because it opens a company up to a lot of people who think they know what makes a game good, but often actually don't. Yeah, I'm as guilty of that as anyone, and I do enjoy the feeling of being involved in the development process somehow, but at some point we have to realize that a lot of what we're doing here is just armchair quarterbacking.

I'm all for quality over quantity in general but I hope they do bring one more companion... and I believe they will, saw Feargus drop a hint over on fig. In any case, I'd like to be able to go through the game a second time with a completely different party.

aloth's spell book has, at most, ~40 spells. perhaps the big book he carries is actual his diary. if any one o' the joinable npcs from poe were channeling their inner teenage girl, it were aloth. probable doodles unicorns in the margins when iselmyr is deep submerged. HA! Good Fun! That looks extremely like Manfred Deix... or Gerhard Haderer... where's it from?

I I understood it, the abiliy would be cast as if 3 levels higher, ie the equivalent of 9 points in the power source. Maybe I misunderstood, I was awfully tired during the stream. But seems to me that this would make sense in terms of balance. Having it cast only 1 level higher would be quite underwhelming while 6 levels sounds like overkill. As I said, could be wrong there.

I would be very surprised if it did. Why would they name it after an incredibly obscure obscene hand gesture? There's always the much more obvious fruit they could have named it after. My personal theory, although I have no information to back it up, is that fig stands for "funding indie games".

We're almost in the middle of the campaign where all campaigns are slowest. The Project Eternity campaign made only 20-30k a day around the mid point. This campaign has made 70k two days ago and a bit more than 60k yesterday. And it's already about 300k ahead of the 1st campaign after an equal amount of days had passed. There's really no reason to worry. I'm almost sure that this campaign will raise more money than the first one.

I feel there are the kinds of game where having a requirement to eat and drink makes sense and there are games where it doesn't. Games like Fallout, where you're trying to invoke a survivalist feeling are among the former, heroic fantasy games are not. Afaik they're planning to make food only consumable while resting, maybe use it to add a bit more variety and depth to the resting bonuses. If so, that's a good idea. Food really didn't do much for PoE1.