Wormerine

I Again... not really. You meet Aloth, he has some troubles with locals. Situation in the town is pretty bad, ruler of the land is kinda crazy and possibly dangerous, none of you have where to stay. Considering you are both outsiders it makes sense to travel further together. It is a wild land, with dangerous creatures roaming around, traveling in a a pack seems safer (also now can come back and kill those motherf***ing bears). The same way Eder joining you seems sensible considering the situation. I did feel some people joining you later on were a bit dodgy (Pallegina, Harvaias) but Aloth seemed solid especially when he fully reveals his story. Considering that Aloth’s hidden agenda doesn’t come as a plot twist in a way Yoshimo’s did I think making him seem a bit dodgy is a good thing. I was suspicious of him, his personal soul problems did put me an ease only to later reveal that yeah, there was something more going on. Sometimes foreshadowing is more engaging than going “TADAA” with an unexciting reveal.

Whenever DLC is an expansion or a smaller add on what I want from it is to be worth owning. I prefer more meaty expansions even if they were to double the cost of the “full experience”. I am mostly frustrated with bad DLC. Things which you don’t really want in your game as either they ruin balance or are just boring. I remember being upset at Dragon Age for starting a quest and than telling you you have to buy it (like the guy at your camp standing with exclamation point over his head). But you know what’s worse? That this content was completely not worth getting or playing through. After many years I got complete edition on steam and gosh, all the side DLCs are garbage. You loose if you don’t have it, you loose if you do. Finally forcing myself to playthrough the bigger expansion, Awakening, and so far having ok time. Well, except one of my companions having invisible outfit... bugs, bugs, bugs.

True. In my first playthrough which I will use for Deadfire she is dead. All is nice and dandy but I do want to keep Concelhaults skull and see what will happen.

To add to that there will be couple pre-made safe states for a quick start & new players. You still create your character for them.

I didn’t find stat checks pulinshing at all however I never played with unavailable options visible. I found the game gave me enough chances to use my main stats and skills. It is possible that there are even more demanding skill checks, which simply didn’t show up for me but I can’t say I find it an issue. I think it is cool if game has a range of skill checks (you need to be kinda smart to say this but you need to be really really brilliant for this situation). That way you can spread your stats and still have access to cool interactions but the game also rewards you if you invest very hard in one particular skill. If you find a more useful item without increase to base stats than it is hardly necessary, right? If you want to increase duration of your abilities or their damage you boost intelligence or strength. If it is something you are not interested in for this character you don’t. Embrace your character’s flaws. You can’t get everything in one playthrough and that is good IMO.

This itself presumably no longer applies though, since it is no longer possible to choose a second class when levelling up. I suppose that means that if you multiclass him one of his classes will have to be a mage.

I will stick to my first playthrough even though it is not an ideal one. I regret suppressing Isilmir (I still stand by choice, but I would prefer to have her in Deadfire, and Pallegina’s fate wasn’t what I hoped for (she got kicked out). I would also prefer to let Audra Dragon live in case she reappears. Still, choices I have made and I will stick to them. I will see other outcomes on later playthroughs.

I really can’t figure out whenever you are sarcastic or not

I hear you, but if that was the case rarely anyone would find out about anything you do. Escaping enemies could be an interesting ideas, but I doubt Obs will reinvent the wheel that much. I imagine system will be fairly simple with bonuses/minuses to your reputation with the faction depending and what you do. I would like to see something similar to relationship system added - for each faction having their likes and dislikes and react to those choices (for example if you don’t support animancy, Valian Republic would dislike that and ask you to be more politically correct from now on).

I am sure a book is less cumbersome than a massive sword or an axe. And who said that a book can’t be an effective weapon. Haven’t you watched Bourne Ultimatum?

On the bit about people sticking to traditional DnD stuff and upsetting the experience, I suppose it's hard for people to break out of the DnD traditions since so many games follow that tradition. Considering that PoE revives series of D&D style games, it is not surprising that people familiar with this style of game approach it the way they are used to.

Oh right. Berath's Blessing thing. Completely forgot about that.

If i understand correctly what you talk about is an issue of overleveling game content - doing sidequests make you higher level making some of the core content to easy as it was designed so you can beat it while skipping content. The game will have two modes - unscaled and scaled. In unscaled all the areas have set lvl to them, if they are higher level, or are underlevel you might wreck the enemies or get wrecked. The scaled run will scale enemies so they pose challange to your level. I am not sure if they scale them down if you wonder to harder area but it will scale them up.

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.