Wormerine

Maybe Josh could redo the talk... just for usssss.....

I meant Planescape: Torment. Numenera certainly had some issues. Those lengthy barely interactive Merecasers weren’t all that fun. In conversations as long as you can make choices and game respons to them/your character it’s already gameplay for me. I think the point I am trying to make is that while BG2 was easily the most entertaining of all IE games i am not all that fond of its use of dialogue system. I found both Torment and Icewind Dale2 to be superior - Torment for obvious reasons, Icewind Dale2 for an attempt at reactivity.

In most cases I am with you. But as much as I like when movies are movies and express things via images, editing and other movie-like features I also appreciate films which are essentially recorded plays. 12ve Angry Man, Rope, Carnage are all great films, even though they are based on a play and don’t gain that much from being adapted to screen. I always thought of Baldurs Gate or Torment as interactable novels, with writing being a central part of an experience. I found Icewind Dale and NWN much less engaging as it was more combat oriented. From Deadfire I want increased reactivity and flexibility on how I approach given objectives as I see that as main gameplay of this type of RPG. I do get a feeling though that our preferences are simply a bit different;-)

Judging from his tweets and imgur pics, he's on vacation atm. More like a business trip. He is currently in Poznan, Poland (hey Josh, give me a call:-) attending GIC17. He should be having his talk right bout now.

Actually, DOS2 has 74k lines of dialogues with voice over and over 1m words. That's about Dragon Age Inquisition level of voice acting budget. BG2 had 57k lines of dialogues, but around 1 millions words. For comparison, POE1 had 25k line of dialogues with a bit over 6k of them voice acted. It was announced in the FIGstarter that Deafire would get x2 the voice acting budget of POE1, so their VO budget is for ~12k lines. Bottom of the line, DOS2 voice acting budget was 12x larger than POE1's budget and 6x larger than POE2 VO budget. An interesting comparison but I wouldnt use the word “budget” as we don’t know how much money is spent on what. We can’t possibly compare voice acting budgets between both games, as they are created on different continents.

That pushed me to thought that I never had before - Pallegina should have feathers not only on head, right? Hylea heritage and so on... Well, Hiravias speculated even further...

... no he doesn’t. In the conversation with him, you reveal something about yourself, which makes him follow you around as you find out later in the game.

I don’t think anyone will contest you on that.

With multiple in-house projects I would expect the art team will move to another project, or expansio once their work on the base game is done. Overall I like the idea, but keep in mind that in order to flesh out characters they would need to make 11 seperate versions of the same adventures. If they were to truly expand on characters they would need to modifiey vignettes for each companion, describing their unique approach to the situation. At this point it becomes kinda insane. Unless, you want them to create adventures for specific companions only. hopefully, with crew management system there will be things you will be able to assign to your companions. At the very least Eder can mop the floor while you are out.

I always liked an idea of joinable companions, who wouldn't be your property and would have their own lives. However, that would go against the function Obsidian wants sidekicks to fulfill. They want you to have a variety of classes to choose from, and they wanted them to be interesting, interactable characters (I for one never used custom made adventurers.) However, they wanted to deepen companions as well, which made it problematic as it meant more work per companions. As they didn't want to leave people with only 7 people to choose from, they looked at how unevenly BG2 companions were designed and decided to both have cake and eat it. So you have 7 fully developed companions and 4 sidekicks for variety.

I can’t properly reply as your post is barely readable. Please, change the font colour. I don’t think stronghold adventure will be a thing this time around. They were patched them later to the game to make it more interactable. In case of are not up to speed there is no stronghold in Deadfire. Instead, you will have your ship which will serve as a base of operations and your primary way of moving around the world. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YzXD0apipV0 There will be some crew management system as well as ship combat via scripted interactions (showcased in the video). Sending your companions out alone would made little sense.

.... we don’t even know anything about beta yet.

I personally like when expansions expand the base game rather than adding new, short campaign. It does need to be well implemented though. A good example of base game DLC which doesn’t disrupt the flow of the game is Heart of Stone for Witcher3, which nicely fits into the base game and has a story reason to either do the expansion in one go or dip in and out. I certainly don’t like it when games end on cliffhanger in order to make space for DLC (NWN2). And as I like replaying a good RPG new content is always a good excuse to jump back in. I really don’t get why people who didn’t want to replay the whole game had an issue with WM. The automatic save is there, ability to rebalance WM to fit your level is there. Overall it seems like a better option being a content which can be played both by those who beat the game already and newcomers.

Guys at Obsidian from the very beginning of the campaign were very confident that the change to 5 character parties is for the best. Now when the game has been in the oven for a while and encounters are balanced around a party of five I doubt there is anything we can do to change their minds.

But then we won't get the sassy deer hybrid https://youtu.be/uRCrYgtCLPA?t=5m34s

Because they don’t change into animals but, like you nicely described, its were-animal versions. They call it “spirit-form”. I don’t know if it’s because of lore or if they want to distinguish druids from summons, but I like it, nonetheless.

It wasn’t my impression that they are going fo it. Rather than endless backstory and conversation, Josh talked how your actions in the game will influence companions. If you are a religious fanatic or are needlessly cruel to animals Eder will start having issues with it and after a while when he gets annoyed enough, or you do something too outrageous with you he will confront you. What I hope for is a system which will make your relationship with your companions different depending on a character you’re playing and won’t allow you easily “game” the characters. In Dragon Age:O your could be best buddies with everyone because: 1) ability to feed them gifts 2) more importantly they all lived in a bubble. You would talk to Morigan, she would constantly talk about “power” and you would act accordingly. Then you would go to Leliana and be super romantic and then you would go to Alistair and be kind, understanding and seemed like you played mini game with each character (guess what I like!) rather than have them responding to your character. There weren’t a single confrontation in the game between companions in which you had to take sides. Already KOTOR2 did it better as I found it difficult to make everyone happy. Hopefully, Deadfire will bring it to another level. The basic system discriptions sounds promising, I am curious to see how it will turn out.

As a matter of fact there are two “main tabs” combat log represented by crosses sword icons, and conversation log represented by speech bubble icon. The same buttons were implemented in PoE1. Those portraits (and the red button) are additional filter options for the combat log. It is not new. This very same filter (and similar UI) was featured in th first “from directors feed “ update. https://youtu.be/zFSsIEApvKo See 2:35 Those buttons seem to toggle on and off specific characters (not sure if you can filter 2 or more at once). Red button showed all logs with Rotghast in them so I assume that it a filter for all logs regarding enemies in them (I doubt they will make separate buttons for each enemy as that would get messy). I imagine that what Adam is showing off is modified UI. Seems like you can move individual elements of UI around.

That’s not really true. What we know about full companions is: 1) they will have their own story arch. Now this is a big deal and one of the reasons I have been against (I am sort of coming around but not fully yet) to idea of “upgrading” sidekicks. Creating companions you have to create for them a dilemma to solve and tie them to the main story in a way so they will be influenced by what is happening around them. Josh did call it as one of the challenges which makes it so time consuming for writers to write a full companion. Not only they have to create a fun character but they also need to think how will this character develop throughout the game and how your choices or conversations with them will influence them as characters. Sidekicks will be simply fun characters who will agree to join your quest. They might have their own opinions, and banter but they will not develop or change throughout the game. Companions quests do add to that but saying that companions = sidekick + a quest is not true if anything hinted by Obsidian is to be believed. 2) relationship system - this time around companions are supposed to track your behaviour/decisions with various preplanned reactions/story arch directions playing out depending on how much they approve/disapprove your actions. It was confirmed multiple times (ever recently by Josh) that companions will also interact with EACH OTHER positively or negatively. How much of a big deal will it be (just flavour text or possibility of harsher actions - characters trying to kill each other, refusing to be together in a party etc) remains to be seen. Overall, with companions Obsidian advertied system similar to something have have attempted before (companions in KOTOR2 for example) though much more refined, flexible and detailed than ever before. How well it will work, and how complex it will really be in the final game is to be seen but so far it has been described as a rather big deal and one of the flagship features of Deadfire. And important note: relationship system is not the same as romance option. It seems that with some companions, if your behaviour really suits them it will be possible that a romance will happen. But it will not happen with every companion. They are not aiming for a specific amount of romances and the whole thing was described as: “if it makes sense with the character and their story arch we might put it in”.

No it doesn’t. Those buttons are for filtering log messages regarding specific characters. I believe the red one filters messages about enemie(s).

While I would like to see new people who would tag along with expansions I am slowly getting around creating existing sidekicks into full fleshed companions, assuming of course, the expansions will work in similar fashion to White March and not be standalone. The problem with making full companions with expansion is that they need to retroactively fit with the whole game. It is not impossible but it is tricky to do if expansion takes place later in the game. So what I would like to see is one of the sidekicks becoming full companions AND one new sidekick being added with expansion.

You can get used to many things. I always find 3D view and rotatable camera in topdown games annoying. While I understand that making game isometrics brings a set of design challenges I feel it works much better for players side. NWN2 camera was special though.

Uhh I hope not. I never managed to get into Bloodlines. A more classy steampunk victorian style might be more tempting but I would hope for something less magical.

They probably defined Ydwin as cypher/Rogue to give you a choice. My character is cypher, and I dont want another one in my party. That way I can make her a Rogue or multiclass her with one of the classes being a rogue. It was probably the class which made those most sense for her.

hmm.... no trash items? What about Xaurip's spears? PoE had A LOT of trash items but with stash they were easy to seperate from stuff you wanted to keep.