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I mean, that would depend on hats being balanced around appearance. The inconvenience of an ugly hat would be a very subjective matter, and thus a very silly thing to balance around, and I have no reason to suspect Obsidian attempted that here. I can't say I've noticed this ever being a consideration in RPG design. Maybe the Monk Head Wrappings in Demon Souls, but that blocks half your screen, it's not merely 'ugly'.

And how is hat hiding representative of this trend? Did it replace some more involved, intricate hat-visibility system? Exactly what is being lost here?

Would it be acceptable if 'scroll of the invisible hat' were an item purchasable from a vendor? Seems pretty mundane as far as magic is concerned. What if it were an ability? Given how people can learn to make their entire selves invisible by special training or just chug a potion you'd think it would be a mere parlor trick to apply this to just the hat. I could see it being in high demand in the adventuring world as well, 'blindsided much? now you can enjoy the benefits of peripheral vision while wearing your favorite frog helmet!' Maybe the hide hat button should be moved from the character interface to the abilities, and the character would do some hand gestures and go 'humlamumlabumla' before the hat disappears. Just so everything makes sense and the kids don't get any funny ideas. Wouldn't want them to get self-absorbed and start blowing things out of proportion.

Nioh, which reminds me, maybe I should try it

Well, I wasn't expecting some bopper way out of her depth, with nightmares and hallucinations, with no support from the people surrounding her, to just go 'just gotta look at the bright side I guess' and then skip along like nothing. I mean that's fine, I wouldn't want cartoon evil, they're all just a very similar shade of light grey.

Sure why not

I felt cheated with Xoti. I tried so hard to break her. I kept telling her to embrace her duty and go with the darkness without offering any respite. At one point you can tell her something like 'maybe it will help if you kill someone close to us'. Nothing came of it. I would gladly have fed her bird-face just to see what would happen. I postponed letting her empty her lantern until it was the last thing I could do before Ukaizo, until I was sure nothing would ever happen. I wanted that silly puppy to turn into something feral. I mean, I got an end of game card that said there was corpses popping up where she traveled, but that's a cop out. She could have had a proper branching character quest. Don't address it and she withers and collapses. Help her come to terms with her role as a shepherd, and she stays the naive apple-pie baking girl next door with a quirky hobby. Egg her on to feed the reaper, and she snaps and becomes someone else, something else, ruthless and uncontrollable. The whole companion interaction system feels a bit underutilized in that they all align too well. When I first came across Rust, the assassin in Delvers' Row, I was sure he was going to be a companion. 'Oh boy Eder isn't going to like this guy' I thought. We have all these factions vying for influence and power, undermining and exploiting each other in this resource-rich but underdeveloped region, but in this world there is not a single companion that actually revels in the game of it all, it should attract people like that like flies to ****. Every companion is duty and honor-bound, some 'I'm trying to do good but its hard cause the world is just so complex' variation, can I have just one jaded conniving scumbag please. It could have been Serafen, but he's a house cat, all redeeming qualities and no sign of the life he has supposedly lived. Captain Roughhouse over here is feeling a little lonely with his merry band of gullible stooges.

Ok, I have no experience with that particular class, but lets say I take you on your word and your class was nerfed into oblivion. Lets also say it's considerably weaker than any other class in the game. Suppose the game launched at 1.1, you got it immediately, and picked Arcane Knight. 30 hours in you realize that beyond being just initially weak, it is never going to get any stronger. You start a new game and pick a fighter, and he just pounds through everything your Arcane Knight struggled with, and you just sunk your first 30 hours into a dead end. Would you then still be here proclaiming that games should not be overhauled post launch? That they should be left in an unbalanced state. That it is your responsibility to break out the modding tools to make Arcane Knight a powerful and enjoyable class? Suppose Obsidian then released 1.2 as first post launch patch, and now you can load your abandoned save and the Arcane Knight is a powerhouse. You'd still come storming in here to ask what the hell people are thinking, overhauling post launch? Maybe Obsidian got overzealous and left Arcane Knight in the trenches, but since they a) have balance as a goal, and b) they are still balancing, that can still be redeemed. POTD players might be a minority of the playerbase, but that doesn't mean that only POTD players wants or expects the game to be balanced. It certainly doesn't mean that the majority of non-POTD players or non-forum members automatically rally under your banner, resulting in your position making up the majority. EDIT: Post went up unfinished, haven't got time to finish it now

Can confirm. Was particularly noticeable since I rushed it on a new run and it downed my flimsy PC and hit the rest of the team for 1/3 of their HP Doesn't seem to show up in the combat log either.

Doesn't seem easier at all, really. Typing out a thought I've had many times for many years now didn't take much effort. The effort spent was also constant. To record a clip and then edit out the pauses would require effort proportional to the size of the clip, and would probably take well over the recording time. What you would be left with afterwards is the viewport skipping all over, since people tend to move the viewport during pauses. To set up the AI to fully beat encounters would at the very least be making 'replays' dependent on a very specific way of playing the game, or as far as I am concerned, merely watching the game play itself, which I have little interest in. I'm not an engine programmer by trade, and I'm not familiar with the specific internals of the Unity engine or how Obsidian hooked their systems into it, but this is generally not something you'd need to completely gut and stitch back together the engine over. Aye, certainly. While I personally would probably not utilize this to anything beyond my own amusement and satisfaction, I don't think its use would be merely a frivolous edgecase either. They are pushing this title to consoles next, and those are platforms that are recording the last N minutes as a default. PS4 has a dedicated share button on the controller, because, well, it's a big deal these days. Zachtronics certainly did well by considering the 'shareability' of their games, while raw footage of someone actually playing those games would to the uninitiated probably range somewhere from uninteresting to impenetrable.

It works like this: When everything is good and dead after a while of meticulous pausing and clicking, a replay button pops up, and pressing it will play out the whole battle in real time from combat start. There's a game that did something like this (haven't played it myself), Battlestar Galactica Deadlock I enjoy the Zachtronics games very much, and leaning back after you're done to just watch the thing you just built run is very satisfying. The later games even lets you save your machine running as an animated gif, a feature that's very popular. Got out by the skin of your teeth, had a creative approach, pulled off something insane? Now revel in the spectacle of it all unfolding. Pull out the recording software if you're feeling particularly social, for something easily digestible stripped of aforementioned pausing and clicking. Fluff, sure, but killer fluff if you ask me.