Wormerine

I think JOSH said that the AI will influence aggressiveness of AI and how many skills they will use. Whenever there is a AI gap between veteran & PotD or if PoTD is veteran + stat boost remains to be seen.

True, but you wouldn’t be casting fireballs or other high/medium level spells in majority of fights, would you. As matter of fact, you wouldn’t cast many spells at all, except 1nd or 2nd level one, you could use every fight later on and spend most of the time spamming main weapon. Than you would go to final fight, or the one you knew you will rest, and you would use your arsenal of spells making spellcasters a god class outperforming every other one. Now we can cast less spells but every fight. Result - casters are just so much better than everyone else. So you nerf them with action economy so they can’t spam those powerful spells all day long. I still find fireball targeted at a group of enemies highly effective, dealing 30+ damage to most of them (playing on hard). I am glad I am not the only one finding spellcasters fine - they tend to still be good damage dealers when they are build to do so. Just a question - people who complain about casters - are we all analysing caster as a part of a team or are we judging casters performance in a solo run environment? Because I can see how caster could be useless in solo runs, but than again, it is a party based RPG so classes shouldnt be judged in that environment. Just like Gromnir, I found that my spellcasters cast quite a few spells before combat is over, with exhausting a lot of spells in major fights. If certain multiclass options break combat so much, that they roll over enemies in a matter of seconds (which is what people stated multiple times) it seems to me like those require closer examination more than spellcasters. Having every class be capable of killing enemies in less than 5 seconds just doesn’t sound very interesting.

I dunno. KOTOR made it look like kids beating each other with toy lightsabers. Than again, so far Jedi Knight only did lightsabers well.

Time a ferret and I might consider it (doesn’t have to be space one)

From what I gathered he used to be active here, and than decided against it. It’s an anecdotal knowledge, I myself didn’t join the forum until Deadfire crowdfunding.

I have expressed my likes/dislikes regarding ship systems before so I won’t repeat myself. I didnt test melee combat much outside boarding, I am not even sure if anything changed. Yesterday stream with Josh clarified a lot of mechanics of ship combat, but those need to be communicated better ingame - how your positioning affects your stats (evasion, defence, chance of “crit”) + what are the chances of doing damage to specific part of a ship (haul, sails, crew) in addition to general hit chance. “Special events” like gunpowder explosion or loose cargo could use a better “alert” - something to communicate that an event is taking place, not just flavour text.

They have threw out nothing. The last time I checked PoE1 is still in pretty good state. It seems AssCreed way of releasing the same game over and over again is desired by many. So 1.0 will be a bit of a mess. So what? They will release expansions, with time hopefully it will be better. Maybe in the end it will be better than PoE, maybe worse but at least it will be a bit different. A reason return to PoE and PoE2.

Yeah, being based on a rollbased, tabletop rules, I felt like the combat never really translated well into a digital setting, with actual space and positioning. Building your character is fun, but combat itself isn't very engaging and forces you to stare at the combat log, instead of the battlefield. PoE improved on IE game system in that respect, and Deadfire has a potential on improving on PoE, with bigger focus on positioning, and making space for your characters to do their thing. Still, I don't expect it to be too rewarding, and if I return to it, it will be for the writing and story rather than combat.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/170909698336/we-just-saw-that-brandon-adler-is-game-director-of Most of the things we knew already + ciphers will be given some extra love.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/170559585501/how-would-you-feel-about-having-a-customizable

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa-qgRasdvc

Happy to see more skill points for single classes. With passive tree getting expanded they will be needed. I was worried that investing into passives with singleclass characters will be too much of a loss, making multiclass even more useful. As it is, multiclass will still have a bigger flexibility due to dual resource pools. Josh will not be one buying and playing his game, I imagine, so listening to feedback is a smart thing to do. He seems to know what he aims for, and changes Obs made are tackling some of the issues PoE1 had. Deadfire had a benefit on being a sequel to a game inspired by IE games - they can move further from the source now. I found PoE1 to be the best in story and mechanics when it was exploring its own ideas, instead of trying to recreate what was good in 90s. It’s dangerous for creator to rely on his point of view, as it gets skewed during lengthy work on a project. While he quotes fan feedback as a reason for change a bit too often for my taste but he gave good, logical reasons for said changes as well. With B.B. we still pretty much have the same build we had months ago - I do sincerely hope that what we get in April will be much better. All the changes should work on paper but in B.B. they are off in BB.

It doesn’t seem there will be additional drastic changes to ship2ship combat, however, most of the things I requested are in the game, but they are either bugged, or not communicated properly. It certainly isn’t a system which will steal a show, but that’s potentially good, depends on how frequent the encounters will be. I am not sure how I feel about critical damage being done when shot from bow/stern. I would like a better view of my stats and what my chances are for doing specific damage (hull, crew, sails, special events). With some automation (flee, board) it might be fine. @Sedrefilos yes! Shanties! Ship combat will be part of bounties, and factions - enemy factions will become hostile, probably will become friendlier with enemy factions of a sunken ship (a bit like in New Vegas). Being able to “fool” factions by wearing false flag is neat. You might want to raid a ship or two on your way to your destination to pay for the trip. We will see. I like that the ship is more than a cursor on a map.

Ah! That’s interesting. I was wondering how people find time to watch their characters wait through recovery, with all the craziness that is happening. In solo runs it makes so much more sense. It reminds me of NWN1. I got stuck in a fight with spider where we couldn’t hit each other, so I went to make some tea while my character was swinging at the enemy occasionally hitting him. They were still swinging when I came back.

Josh never encouraged importing save games from PoE1. While it is a feature, he always stated you will be able to start a new playthrough configuring everything that matters to your preferences. It has never been said that you will gain a bit of “advantage” by playing PoE1 first. There are no “golden pantaloons” for example. As far as spoiler goes - Josh said the save creator will allow you configure main choices (end state of the world, companions etc. Would be my guess) and optional advanced options with smaller choices that get reactiviry. Let’s be honest, how much reactivity can there be - if there will be 20 references to minor choices from PoE1 I will be impressed, and that would be easy to set up within minutes.

What are you on about? “Iron man” has been a thing in RPGs since I can remember (rogues&likes, wizardry8) but it isn’t a “benchmark” or a definitive way to play. It’s a singleplayer RPG - you do you, let others do their own thing. I imagine that implementing a system which tests your skills with an already implimented ruleset is easier to do, than designing and balancing an entirely new one. In Deadfire there is something like “Beraths Blessing” which on consequent playthroughs we allow players to add some bonus challenges or bonuses to vary things up. It might do it for ya.

I found it informative enough. Couple information regarding changes, and explained a lot of current ship mechanics.

Good news. It was a big complain during in-house testing as well. Yesterday during stream Josh confirmed that they will remove it and you will be able to move/change spell without loosing your resource.

If that is what you think, then, no, you are not starting to understand me.Joe I “love” how you respond without actually having anything to say. That wasn’t a guess, but an observation. I can see you have no interest in discussion. G-bye.

I think some of that thinking (all of that thinking?) was built on the original premise of roll your stats and decide what class best suits the resulting rolls. Of course, back in the day, Charisma was always fodder for some animated discussions on what it was exactly, too, never mind how important it should be. I'll give BG credit for having it affect shop pricing. I never thought of that as a DM. Makes sense. What I liked about stats in at least PnP D&D vs PoE is that having a certain stat score did not always guaruntee outcomes. It increased chances for things, but sometimes, depending on how DMs weighted certain encounters an intelligence or other attribute score could be high enough with at least had a _chance_. Now with PoE your stat is either high enough or it isn't. You don't even get a probability roll. To me that removes role playing entirely from many encounters. You are comparing tabletop experience to singleplayer computer game RPG - here I think I start to understand your stance a bit, but at the same time I havr to point out issues with that line of thinking. PoE isn't tabletop game, isn't played with DM (not present, human one) and is a singleplayer experience. Making a roll for a conversation/skill check would only make sense, if the game had a hard ironman mode. It is a bad design, to include mechanics which can be easily avoided. For example, "Transistor" had a neat variation on the death system, however, it could be easily bypassed by reloading last checkpoint making system irrelevant. It's the same reason why chance of being ambushed during resting was removed - because players who got ambushed in a critical situation would reload, therefore the mechanics didn't do its job in this particular type of game. Dice rolls during attribute distribution in BGs was bad, because you could roll it as much as you please. And of your roll badly, DM won't adjust game for you to have fun. I understand, it had its role in a tabletop, but those two are, and shouldn't be, the same. In lengthy cRPG its more important that you can create a character you want, rather to have to adjust to inferior and randomized attributes.

If they were to show newer build it should be worth it. If we are again, back to basic, I might not bother with staying till 2AM again. We shall see.

https://twitter.com/WorldofEternity/status/963856238323818496 Stream tonight! This time with some random streamer. Everyone prepare your questions of an interogation, just in case, though I feel it might be more of an advertisement stream, than anything worthwhile for us, backers.

It's Valentines Day so I am rewatching relationship update.

I finally watched Duncan Jones’ Warcraft. As someone, who believed that decision to adapt Blizzard’s IP to be a horrible idea from the very beginning, it wasn’t half bad. Yeah, it was boring, visually confused movie with too many plots and too little character but from my experience it’s Warcraft in a nutshell - a lot of lore, not much story. Gameplay which makes blizzard games worth playing can’t be translated into a movie.

We really really don’t know. I would prefer if save creator would include all of the choices, so I can easily replay Deadfire without feeling I am missing out without going through PoE1. Josh said they want it to be a seperate program (so not in game editor) and that they plan to have main choices, and extra detailed one as an option. However, it was at the stage when editor hasn’t been made yet. It was never definitely specified how detailed (or undetailed) the editor will be.