Wormerine

Never got the point of NGplus in RPG. Party of six could be a berath Blessing but as was mentioned before it does create planty of technical issues.

And Obsidian tried w the main story of Deadfire? Clearly their focus was graphics, combat, and factions. The main story is dreadful.Factions are main story. A lot of elements discovered via faction quests tie to Eothas' plotline.You dont need to do any faction quests to finish the game. They are optional. So? But they make up a big chunk of the story which makes Deadfire. Journal in divided into 3 categorries: Main threads: Hunt For Eothas, Huana, Principi, Valian Trading Complany, Royal Deadfire Company. Those constitute for the main meat of the game. Yes you can skip majoority of them as it is an RPG. In old RPGs like Fallouts you can skip vast majority of key content if you so wish. Perhaps Obsidian made the mistake of telling the players were to go next, instead of forcing them to use faction quests to explore. Then you have quests - major sidequests, and tasks. I am really tired of people complaining how Deadfire's "main story" is only 5 quests long, while ignoring a pile of high quality content for some weird reason. Don't give players too much freedom or they will get confused, I suppose.

And Obsidian tried w the main story of Deadfire? Clearly their focus was graphics, combat, and factions. The main story is dreadful. Factions are main story. A lot of elements discovered via faction quests tie to Eothas' plotline.

Great thread. This is getting tricky. One lesson I do get from it as attempts to balance and fix issues that original system has made it quite confusing and convoluted. Yes might makes you do more damage, unless it really doesn’t, because there are other multiplayers multipliers, but even if it doesn’t, it makes you more survivable due to healing boost, though it is not precisely what it is supposed to do. In addition new armor system makes it pretty irrelevant how much damage you do with each hit. Oh boy, if PoE3 ever comes I feel we are in a need of a serious redesign.

I can’t say. First time I played Diablo 2 was when I had over 40 degrees high fever and I found it quite enjoyable. When I played it later with better health I found it painfully boring. Made full playthrough of Diablo1 and found it atmospheric but dull overall. Never touched diablo3. I found torchlight 2 dull as well. Seeing how bad story of Starcraft 2 was, and hearing that all modern Blizzard titles follow the same formula, and character writing has never been particularly strong in Blizzard products, I highly doubt it has much good in it. I always found Blizzard products to be all about gameplay.

Then let me have a go. Personally, my struggle with liking the story of Deadfire is it's lack of clear focus. It is fine to get distracted and let the player get involved in side activities (or even force him to). The problem is when the goal is getting muddled down or when what games wants the player to is in odds with what player wants to do. I think Witcher3 handled this well (being an RPG with defined character it was somewhat easier as writers and narrative designers could depend on what Geralt wants to do, rather than the player.) The overall goal for the game (find and rescue Ciri) was clear throughout, and "distractions" on the way were always an obstacle in reaching this goal. Additionally, the narrative was switching between urgent and loose, providing encouraging both exploration and focus on main story and even game player an excuse to finish other sidequests at certain points of the story (hey, if you do it **** will hit the fan, so make sure you are ready for it, wink, wink). Deadfire's overall structure and ideas are solid. Chase Eothas, get back your soul. On the way there you need to navigate through tense political tension of Deadfire. But there is so much focus on factions, who pay no mind to reincarnated God, and you spend so little time chasing the God, that I personally felt like the conflict of Deadfire took over as a main story of the game. Which would be fine, except our character has little reason to engage in the conflict (unless for your made up roleplaying reasons) and it is difficult to care about their conflict, knowing the bigger destruction coming. It could work if you were more engaged with Eothas and factions served as background, but in Deadfire they take over. And then we get to the ending, which: 1) doesn't provide satisfying payoff to the faction storyline (I believe the game needed something on the level of Battle of Hooverdam in Fallout:NV considering how massive factions were) and as the result doesn't properly finish what is the main focus of the game for the majority of its runtime. 2) Doesn't properly explain meaning and consequences behind Eothas' plan which made me confused about how some of the basic laws of Eora. 3) Due to not doing anything Eothas related for tenths of hours before doing straight Ashen Maw and finale, I wasn't nearly as engaged in the Eothas' thread as I should have been.

Good point @xzar. Again, such tease would be difficult to design with multiple areas not connected to each other, and when not knowing in what order players will visit them (if not at all). Being as open as Deadfire does present narrative challenges. Something like Witcher 3, while open, did have linear self contained narratives within. Deadfire do as well, but they are much shorter and no individual quests gets as much attention as BoW. Maybe Deadfire bit more than it could chew.

Is quality different? I can't say I noticed that. But BoW is far more focused, making for a more engaging and impactful adventure. BoW writing has many of the same strength as base game does (deep attention to culture and world building, individual characters with personality, place in the world, motivations, backstory) but here its just more linear experience, which makes for more natural narrative. It even has some setpieces, which help storytelling and it's something they probably weren't able, didn't have time to do for base game due to sheer scale. Say what you want but seeing all the cool dragon animations does help. Good stuff.

Ahh, Good job Obsidian one implanting a seed for each DLC in base game. Pretty much every hook you used were things I wished would last longer. Glad to have 3DLC which will dive into them. 4.0 looks tasty. Lots of things to like there.

Forgotten Sanctum release date, and promising Civ6 expansion announcement. Good day.

As above - achievements in Deadfire are really easy to obtain. The hidden ones should be tied to the story - Main or DLCs.

Oh jeez. So she says it in a flirtatious way. Fits very much with her character.

While you might play those games mostly for power progression, don't make a mistake thinking that your preferences are everyone's preferances. In addition you blowing the issue way off proportions, as it takes far far more than 50% of content to reach level cap, but I do think it is far too easy to outlevel available content. Raising level cap would be a significant investment, unless they wpuld create something really crappy after level 20 just to keep treadmill going. As they chose to go for smaller DLCs they went for content over changes to core mechanics. The cool thing with bigger expansions is that both can be touched. But for 10 dollars that's a fine value.

Just like previews two DLC it is a smaller addition, and it is unlikely they will be adding something as big as extra levels. When asked about the extra XP on one of the streams one of the devs said they might look at readjusting XP gain once all DLCs are released. Whenever it will happen remains to be seen.

I finally bought myself a pad, which means I am exploring games I normally wouldn't play. Just finished Hyperlight Drifter - found it quite frustrating with mouse and keyboard, but enjoyed it much more with a pad. I am also currently playing Bayonetta which is easily one of the best action games I have ever played.

If timeline is to be believed it will be release sometime in December. I would expect previews in a couple of weeks, maybe early December. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/106505-update-57-patch-31-new-beraths-blessings-challenges-and-mega-boss/

It is a wrong section. Bugs can be reported here: https://forums.obsidian.net/forum/130-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-technical-support-spoiler-warning/ I was about to write that it is not a bug, the post your liked seems to claim otherwise. It's been working like that since the release.

They are not merging them. Now, while they have been making similar, nostalgia driven old-school RPGs for a last couple years, who know what both companies want to do. Still, even though they both RPG focused companies their approach to the subject is quite different. Maybe Microsoft wants to take over RPG space. Who owns Jade Empire IP? It was a bioware game, but Microsoft exclusive.

Once you use Iroll20s the achievements are disabled. You would need to reload the save prior to using it.

My only worry regarding a studio I like joining a big corporation is how they will monatize their games. In recent years there have been plenty of games, which had lots of potential and good stuff in them, but were ruined for me by aggressive monatization. My hope is that Microsoft will use talent of those devs to promote their platforms and we will get pure games like on the Sony’s side.

Announcing Pillars of Eternity mobile. On smartphones running Windows only

So the rumors were true after all. Wishing you all the best guys, and I hope this will result in you guys having a stability and it will give you budget and space to flourish. Looking forward to whatever will be your next projects will be.

Certainly, Deadfire doesn't ride the nostalgia train that much. Which, in my opinion, is its biggest strength. I am surprised whenever people suggest there is setting or tone shift between the two games - in this games OP bringing the subject of guns - it's like someone played through PoE1, ignored its setting, and pretended it's IE forgotten realms. It seems that neither Tyranny nor Deadfire attracted as much attention as PoE1, even though both titles were perfectly fine.

Nope. Have been wondering about it myself.

I doubt devs will be looking to overhaul the ending, but in unlikely case they do here is what I would propose: Buffing enemy faction encounter - as of last time I played it, it was smooth ride. Using some of the mechanics developed for SSS would be delightful, especially if each faction encounter would be unique, reflecting their playstyle, with a clear involvement of the ex-companion who left you for said faction. Surely, facing someone we interacted throughout the game would be more involving that fighting new monster which showed up just to act as "the final boss".