Wormerine

I don’t know about Ubi, but multiple devs certainly seem unhappy about it. Klei and Paradox pulled their games out of the sale: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-05-17-paradox-pulls-bloodlines-2-from-epic-store-during-mega-sale so did Gearbox: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-05-18-borderlands-3-pre-order-pulled-from-epic-games-store-amid-mega-sale-kerfuffle Supergiant got a panic attack as well: https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog If this act of devaluing the game is as undesirable as it seems, devs might be more cautious about signing with Epic, if they keep up this behaviour. Especially undesired for non-exclusive games to have their game on sale. ONI is to launch next month I think, clearly a bad idea to have it discounted by 10 pounds.

While we are at Epic, the Epic Store Sale is an interesting topic. What initially might seems like a swing into the other direction: attempting this time to bribe consumers into coming to Epic, instead of paying off devs/publishers, might have somewhat backfired, I saw somewhat, because I don't know what exact intentions were - I imagine the deals are good enough to get new people into the Epic Store (success!) but they might have pissed off publishers/developers (not good!). Here is the short version: Epic store has currently discount on every game they sell: old, new, pre-orders. If the game costs more than 13,99 pounds (UK prices from me) they decrese it by 10 pounds. Some results are crazy - just announced indie John Wick game can be purchased for 4,39 (less than a 1/3 of its price), all ports of David Cage's older, ekhm, games can be bought for 5.99. How did Epic convinced game owners to do such drastic price cut before games are even out. Well, they didn't. They didn't ask for their permission, and didn't actually lower the cost for them. Epic is covering the missing discount and paying devs the full share. All good then? Win, win? Not quite aparently. Game owners don't seem to be happy with their game getting devalued, often before they even launch. There was some brief attempt from Supergiant to raise price of Hades earlier then they planned, the big boyz Borderlands3 and Bloodlines got temporarly pulled from the shop for the duration of the sale. Fun times.

The door leading to the stairs down, or the high level lockpick door which act as a potential shortcut?

Or dudess. Sorry. You think talking to dead people is an effective aphrodisiac? Or going insane? Or getting killed and resurrected, and spasmic in the city harbour summoning spirits from the beyond? Sounds more like Xoti's thing.

That is sort of correct - higher Perception means higher chance of crit, which means double PEN

Your praise of Tyranny over Deadfire is vague enough that I don’t even know were I agree/disagree. Tyranny’s combat is quite bad, and that is a problem as a majority of game is combat, much more than in PoE. Story bits are cool, and opening chapter is really strong. After that, not so much. I dislike how choice/consequence is done - to me it suffers from Witcher2 syndrome, where while reactivity is impressive, it is not particularly engaging. I found it to be quite good for a single-play through, but didn’t find it appealing upon returning to it (it didn’t help that Bastards Would was pretty bad). Still, quite sad that this tv show ended on the pilot episode.

Just keep an eye on questlog. All characters I mentioned are signposted via questlog’s recommended companions feature.

I know of one specific interaction between Fassina and Konstanten, which is not quest specific, but it triggers if you explore certain dialogues option when talking to K. With F around (be it in party, or on the ship). They might have more interactions which I am not aware of - I tend to favour companions over sidekicks. I dont think he gets much more content outside what was on the base game. He is recommended for one of the areas of BoW, but haven’t seen this content myself. Considering the context I wouldn’t expect it to be anything major.

Nay, that’s how companion quest were called during campaigns and it sort of stuck with me.

Ha! Because it’s a bust.

I dunno, it triggered for me couple days ago just fine, after completing his “vision quest”.

I for one am glad she isn’t romanceable - she has defined path and life goals, and having random dude wanting to bed her changing that would be disappointing. The thing is: Pal isn’t evil or wrong. You shouldn’t be able to change her, simply because she doesn’t fit your characters viewpoints. Unlike most RPG companions, Deadfire companions aren’t there because they are lost, or need a strong leader, but because they want something from you. Pal wants to ensure, that your will support her faction and in return she will help you to reclaim you soul. I feel that Pal suffers for the way companions are handled just as every other character does. For the most part companions role is reduced to responding to what you say and do - each likes/dislikes are pretty limited. In case of Pal it’s: me like Valians, me dislike Gods. That’s not in conflict with her character, but as she expresses her feelings often, she does come out as a one note and shallow character. Due to its more restrictive nature PoE1 managed to explore a paladin who was loyal, but had doubts if her orders are actually beneficial to the cause. That was interesting. Ideally, the sequel would explore in-depth repercussions of that decision. Alas, no matter what happened she goes back to bit more bitter square one, and becomes the mouthpiece of one of the factions, without no interesting direction nor dilemma. He personal quests is there to explain, why her look is inconsistent with other godlike, and much like Deadfire overall, focuses on lore and seeding plot details rather then the character. Nothing as sympathetic and compelling as her confrontation with Hylea in the Council of Stars in PoE1.

It’s not an isolated problem, I have been encountering it in my second playthrough - character gets stuck not being able to cast ability he doesn’t have. She would “reset” if she got killed. Never reported it, as I never managed to reproduce it reliably. If op has a character and save, which does fairly reliably reproduce the issue, he should head over to technical forum: https://forums.obsidian.net/forum/130-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-technical-support-spoiler-warning/ and report it, sending over the relevant save at: support@obsidian.net.

No. We know that beside "Outer Words" Obsidian works on two other projects. It is unlikely they will reveal anything about those two, until OW ships. One can only hope that one of those is PoE3, or at least Eora related.

Hardly - sidekicks had little to no content in the base game - giving them more content was an easy choice because: 1) they badly needed some depth 2) Fans wanted to learn more about them 3) You could write arcs from them, which didn't conflict with the base game content. As such, already developed companions do get interactions when appropriate, supporting their already established believes/personalities, while fairly blank slates, such as sidekicks, get some much needed background.

Correct. Just like the other quests, companions with more special content are listen in the quest log. Big picture wise: Ydwin and Vatnir for BoW Konstanten for SSS Fassina for FS. In addition some of the main cast get more to say depending on the quest within each expansion - I remember Takehu and Rekke being recomended for one area of BoW, while Eder and Xoti for the other. Aloth was recomended for FS as well. In shot just keep an eye on the journal.

Thank you for taking effort to reply to each one of them. However, I meant them to be rhetorical questions, and they were meant to be an argument: meaning, there are many elements which could contribute to Deadfire selling worse then PoE1, or in case of our argument: worse then DoS2. I cast the net wide, as I prefer not to claim why DoS2 sold better, as my “analysis” would be very subjective, and as a backer of Deadfire, I don’t see my personal perception as very valuable in this discussion. I do, however, intend to put to question claim, that if PoE2 had coop, it would sell much better. Part of it is subjective (coop mode doesn’t present much value to me personally, especially as DoS2 coop mode is left untouched in my gog library) but genuinely don’t believe that a big chunk of DoS2 would automatically transfer to PoE2, nor that PoE would work well as a coop game. Things I don’t like about DoS2 are things that make it work as a social, coop adventure. To make PoE2 work as a coop game would take substantial changes to writing, world, game design, tone and overall focus of the game. One might want to invade DoS2 market space, but as I expressed in the past, while there certainly is an overlap, I don’t believe that those two games fight for quite the same audience. Sure, both are top-down RPGs, but it’s like claiming that every first person shooter appeals to the same crowd. i do agree that PoE3 (if it happens) might need to innovate and dazzle in some way - there is clearly an audience for a game of this type, but for some reasons Deadfire didn’t resonate very well outside the very involved core audience (and even core audience tends to have pretty major complaints). All I can say for certain, is that the reception hasn’t been kind. PoE1, in spite of its shortcomings, was praised with enthusiasm, while PoE2 seems to be praised for objective reasons, but with a lukewarm attitude. If Obsidian is interested in continuing the IP, something has to be changed, but I don’t believe that changing genre (and I do consider a sandbox coop RPG to be a different beast then story driven single player RPG) is the right answer. edit: typos

I am sure there could be a pretty cool combat sequence, where you project yourself and the team into Eothas and battle him from within. ah, if only Obsidian were an old-Bioware-style crowdpleaser... or had more budget :-).

Wages are paid daily. If at the moment of pay (in the morning) you are currently at land crew will find food for themselves and will not consume food. If you are at sea crew will consume food. It might be possible that if you are in Neketaka, you even don't pay wages (though I am not sure - if that's the case, then I never noticed that), but as it is the major city, the crew might be on shore leave there.

So you are proposing that an RPG won't sell well, if it doesn't have multiplayer? PoE1 sold really well, and was singleplayer. So what was the problem with PoE2? Smaller crowdfunding profile? People not liking PoE2 that much? Critics not liking PoE2 that much? Setting that doesn't play on nostalgia? People who bought PoE1 didn't actually like it? Or didn't complete it, and didn't buy the sequel? The colour and humor of DoS is more markatable, then grim, serious and lore heavy focus of PoE?

There is a lot of assuming here. For example an interesting stat would be how many people who purchased div2 used multiplayer feature, and/or adventure creator. Even if your claim were to be true, copying the other successful title, doesn't automatically lead to success. Better to carve your own niche, rather that trying to get some moment which goes to the other, time consuming popular title.

According to @Boeroer the lot drop Bug was addressed. Dont know about this one. If I run intro such enemy soon i will let you know.

Yup. After recent patches it runs ok for me, but summons stop action for about a second when game loads the model.

“Below expectations” is the industry’s motto. Unless Epic is paying really, really well.

Casting abilities take time, so characters acting between "character 1 initiated cast" and "character1 finished cast" can interupt it.