Wormerine

How can you eat spaghetti without a spoon?! You would waste so much sauce without it! EDIT: I am really hungry for some spaghetti now. Thanks guys.

Sagani was probably the first dwarf companion I cared for.

8-I That's such a weird decision.

I will be really surprised if they will keep using "high quality" portraits for ship crew. As we will be finding them via quest using waterpainted ones seems to make more sense. While I always enjoyed those hand painted portraits I rarely felt like there were enough of them. Luckily it is fairly easy to import your own. At least with dwarf you can easily remedy lack of portraits. Tis more difficult with orlans or Aumaua as they are unique to Eora.

I did find and "equip" baby boar, but did no experimenting with it.

Yeah, Deadfire runs on updated engine, pretty much everything is made anew. Quality of current animations can be easily judged by watching any of the updates on Obsidian site or any playthrough on YouTube. For example here is one of the updates which feature unique animation for pommel strike as well as some basic attack animations. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=64U0n2SaNmI

Isn’t the idea to target weak defences? If enemy has over hundred fortitude, you are not supposed to target him with abilities attacking fortitude.

If there has been any updates done in animation department throughout the beta I didn’t notice any.

Confirmed: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/966481109021175811 Gunpowder barrels will go BOOOOM! when shot with a gun.

You did miss something - like couple updates and one stretchgoal. Game features 7 companions and 4 sidekicks. Companions are getting expanded in Deadfire - with the relationship system. They will also have all their own character arch’s and personal quest. Sidekicks are companions light - unique NPC whom you will meet on your journey, with their own story and character, but they are less complex. They won’t have relationship system, nor story arc nor personal quest. The idea was to give players more cool characters to choose from, with less design and narrative work. Josh compared it to how in Baldur’s Gate some of the companions had robust arcs, while other were cool, but didn’t evolve or interact with you all that much.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jesawyer/status/966445724731764736 Orlan baby I presume. I am tempted now to corrupt my save import by distorting reality a bit.

Snake Pass made me strangely sympathetic toward all that is snakey.

Ya, I had my eyes on it for a while. I will wait till its finished though and reviews are out before purchasing. Visual presentation isn't much of a concern to me, what Deadfire already has is great, and I really can't figure out mechanics from store page to see of there is anything there Obsidian could borrow from. EDIT: Watched a playthrough on youtube. Based on a tutorial, it doesn't seem to do anything more than what Deadfire already does - basic crew stats, manning different parts of a ship, different cannons useful against different ship arts (connon, chain, grape). It seems you can aim manually, but I am not sure how much it does - you need to use different cannons for different ship parts (sail, hull, crew). "Abandon ship" has a damage and repair system (like in FTL) though Deadfire has something like that with the "event" system. Positioning seems more limited than in Deadfire.

Strangely enough this is one of the main reasons Josh said he decided to change to system - to make it clearer when your weapon is working and when it is not. In beta1 it was even more extreme as you would do only 30% damage when you were below pen. This change should actually make it easier to play with less digging into stats. What it does, is communicate to you clearly when you play badly, while in PoE1 you had to do more analyzing.

This will be good point if there wasn't BUT...You watch movie usualy w/o skipping BUT if there is some kind of comercial or someone tell you "now stop watching and start reading. Next 20min of story will be only available in written form". So you got movie, but you have to read part of story from book if you want catch the point of whole movie. If someone tell me, this movie isn't whole available as movie, part you have to read as book what do you think? Yes you are right - I can live w/o this movie (say you can't read or you hate reading because your eyes are bad). (...) One annoying trifle can kill fantastic game (movie, book, any product...). I do think you are right. A mechanic, which takes you away from the fun part of the game, or doesn’t fit with the whole experience can negatively impact a game. Ship mechanics in Deadfire can be that thing. Bat mobile in Arkham Knight was for many people that thing. Fin and Rose subplot in Last Jedi was for me that thing. Still, I would argue that all of those are necessarily for the intended experience and none of the can be just cut out, but they need to be good and engaging rather than skippable. As far as your previous analogy to ship combat being like a commercial or tacked on product. I disagree that this is a case. If it doesn’t work (and I am not sure about it yet - it might work, it might not, I feel like I haven’t seen enough of it to fully form my opinion.) it won’t be because it doesn’t fit the game, but because it was poorly executed. One of the things I think they nailed is that it does fit cRPG style. Ship to ship combat is presented in a way of tabletop RPG or a scripted interaction. It doesn’t strike me as a feature not fitting rest of a product. All of the ship elements have a potential of interacting and enhancing the core dungeon crawling experience. Therefore, I will agree with Yosharian - let’s keep talking about way of improving it, rather than demanding skipping it.

It’s actually not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be. UI clearly tells you you are below pen, when you hover over enemy. See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zFSsIEApvKo 1:37 For some reason they don’t show you pen info anymore when you are above armour rating. It still comes down to checking out enemy sheet and seeing what it’s least resistant to. Enemies in beta tend to favour crush damage for some reason.

Speaking of D:OS2 - maybe someone could give an advice: There's A LOT after that. Your're 50% in. Uhh. Thanks. That’s what I was afraid of. I will try to go on, but I might give up on it.

I think @Yosharian has a point, though I might not agree with an attitude he is presenting it with. Games are created as an entire experiences, they shouldn’t be chopped to bits and made into a buffet. Different game systems should interact, support and complete each other, not be a series of seperate mini games. That is clearly an idea for ship system in Deadfire - it players into exploration, economy, resting system, reputation system. Being your primary source of transportation it should be rather important. Whenever ship systems are good enough to fulfill that role is up to discussion. Asking for it to be seperated from the main experience seems detrimental to the overall game. Statement: “it wasn’t in other games I liked” is understandable, but it is not “the other game you (we) liked”. It’s Deadfire - ship is central to the setting and, it seems, gameplay. As far as “gameplay choices”: I suppose there is no harm to give customers and option to not play the game they buy, but i always found difficulty setting and “skip” option questionable. It’s a bit the same to me as the recent trend of “we allow you to buy lootboxes to skip through gameplay” - gameplay is either fun, or it is not. If it’s not fun, it should be improved, and if it is - you shouldn’t skip it. It’s like asking to skip a storyline in a movie - you shouldnt be able to and you should not want to skip it. Than again, I am in favour of respecting work you are consuming - don’t talk during movies, read book in quiet space, give your attention to games. Of course, it does me little harm if someone puts on a good movie in their private home and yaps over it, so sure, disable ships if ya want.

I also plan to skip multiclassing, at least for a first run (polish thing?). I am tempted by Pallegina as Herald and Serafen as witch, though.

I usually dislike if beside two potentially bad choices there is a third one which allows you have cake and eat it too, unless it is really hard to achieve, or requires a cleverness on players part (like solving a conflict in Rail Nomad Camp in Wasteland 2) but even then it limits replyability, because who would you ever go for potentially bad options? That said, the quest in the demo doesn’t allow to attempt solving the problem, even though it gives you tools to do so. Hopefully it is still a rough version of the final quest.

Speaking of D:OS2 - maybe someone could give an advice:

Ha! For a longest time I was playing as white dudes only - because I was trying to make my avatar. It wasn't until couple years ago, that I stopped trying to recreate myself (mostly due to premature boldness - maybe thats why I choose an orlan for my first PoE playthrough - hard compensation for my insecurities). I still find it rather odd to play as female - I usually do it, if I want to detatch myself from a character for an easier roleplay - usually evil characters. I never make dwarfs. I don't find dwarfs interesting nor relatable. It is true that I don't make my main character a support one. I usually aim for him/her to be promary DPS. I even know someone who would intentionally not recruit companions in BGates to overlevel them with his PC.

Right now most magical items seem to have a "missing string" problem. For example the Beza's Toothed Blade doesn't have a base damage attached. Almost all of those also seem to lack an icon for said item. Thing is, with PoE1 there really weren't what I would call "magical items" until soulbound weapons showed up. Any weapon could be upgraded and most of items you found, simply had some generic upgrades already implimented. In Deadfire those "magical" items are to be more unique, and receive their own look tied to its mechanics. Either way, visually it never bothered me, though I missed some of the more over the top and one of a kind weapons of BG2.

ha! Everyone has their preferences. I wouldn't treat KoTOR as a benchmark. 3rd person view made it impossible to really get a grasp on what is happening, attacks had to be manually order, forcing MMO style button smash, overall, it was rather boring. It felt like Baldur's Gate style starwars game, for people who wouldnt want to play Baldur's Gate. I am sure it is possible in Unity, I am not sure if what they build for PoE would support additional animations being inserted inbetween attacks.

I assumed you do, and I don't think it would work in game's favour. Here is why: Pillars has an issue were the game takes place here. The space which takes the most space and should provide majority of information is here. However, information that are needed to make informed decisions either aren't there, or are difficult to read. Addition of cosmetic animations to make combat look more natural would make this space look nicer, but would make it even less helpful that it is now - potentially even being misleading; suggesting your character is blocking, while he is being hit etc. Ideal situation would be to move gameplay from combat log and enemy sheet to game space. That is what Divinity: OS2 does much better than PoE. While you can check detailed enemy stats, they tend to be obvious by their character design (Oil Blob will be vonourable to air, healed by earth, firery enemy will be weak to ice, healed by fire etc.) Positioning, line of sight and distance is much more important. Creating an animation system, which would communicate gameplay in the game space would be a great addition - tank is blocking - he is not getting hit, the sword gets deflected by enemy armor - not enough penetrating etc. This brings couple problems: 1) topdown games aren't best in visually comminicating what is happening - especially with "realisitic" artstyle PoE has. 2) animations take time, and if not used as an intergral part of a system, it could clash with game rules (which is what I have written about in my previous post). Game to utilize animation in a way that would benefit the game would require art and gameplay designed to directly support that idea. Adding flavour animations which don't support or go against gameplay (communicate actions that are not actually taking place) would do more harm than good... well, maybe beside a more effective advertisements due to better visual presentation.