BAdler

Personally, I don't think so. I don't want to talk about any expansion details at this point, because we haven't announced anything, but once we do I don't mind talking through some of the details with you guys.

Depot rebuild is still going on. Taking a while because these depots have never been built before. It is currently uploading the last major depot. Once it is finished I can make the build live for 1.05. Those of you downloading data are not getting 1.05. You are just getting shuffled data from the depots changing. Once the depot creation/upload is complete it should go back to normal.

Hey, CaptSpaz. That is the only real side effect of changing out the depots. Until the depots are rebuilt (they are rebuilding now), you will download both builds. Hopefully the rebuilt depots will be finished in the next 30 minutes or so. Once the rebuild is complete the download size should go back to normal.

Build 567 is going to be the 1.05 build. If you already have those files, you shouldn't need to download any additional stuff.

This change is happening right now. 1.05 should be uploaded shortly and (if everything goes as planned) you will be able to play soon.

QA said that this should be fixed for 1.05. Not sure if the fix is retroactive, though.

Just put out another update to beta. Only issue is a reduction in Petrified bonus damage. It has been lowered from x4 to x2.

Well, I'm predicting some future impatience! Good to know that the patch is coming soon. No beta this time? Or did I manage to miss it? We have had the beta running for about a week. We have a slight change we are going to make (nerfing Petrified from X4 damage to X2 damage), but otherwise what is up for the beta is pretty much it.

Hello, everyone. We are currently planning on releasing 1.05 tomorrow. As part of the 1.05 patch I am going to be making some (somewhat) significant changes to the Pillars of Eternity depot structure in Steam. A depot is a collection of files that we can assign to different packages. When you purchase a game off of Steam you are actually purchasing a specific package that is a collection of depots. The depots contain information about where to place the files from the Steam servers to your local machine. The reason for this change is because we originally set up our depots so that there was a base depot, and a depot for each OS. Depending on your OS, you would receive the base depot and the depot for your OS. We thought this would work out, but due to differences in the Mac build it is difficult to maintain and will become more difficult with more content being added. The solution is to move the files that were in the base depot to the OS-specific depots. This should be a one time thing as this new structure will scale well in the future. We have done testing on our new depot structures, but due to how Steam works, we won't know if everything is perfect until we push the changes live (which we are coinciding with 1.05). The practical effect is that you shouldn't notice much of anything change. The depots just tell Steam what to download and where to put it. Since the new depots aren't changing any of that, you shouldn't have additional data to download (past the normal patch data). It is possible that Mac may try to download additional data for a 30 - 40 minute period in the morning (until the full changeover is complete), but we will try to minimize that. Thanks for your (future) patience.

It's only allowed when you first recruit them. I think Anaeme is referring to their attributes like Might, Reflex, etc.. You can't change their base attributes, you basically get them at level 1 with enough XP to level up to your PCs level, whereas before it automatically levelled them from 1 up to your PCs level. And because their base attributes are already decided before level 1, you can't alter them. It would be great if we could though - I believe this feature has been added to make the companions more viable for harder difficulties by giving you the option to change their build, and therefore also giving the option to alter their stats would feed into this. I can't see this happening. Letting people level them up in a specific way is much different than letting players completely reroll their companions.

What do you mean by "up to full strength"? Do ciphers start at 1/2 max focus at the start of the battle? I don't think so. There was a fix to Greater Focus, though. You may be seeing that.

Could be as soon as today. Once we get official word one way or the other I will let you guys know.

Please take the discussion regarding Baladas and his issue tracking posts to another thread. I would like to keep these comments more focused on the issues relating to 1.05 so the devs can quickly find and fix them. If these comments devolve into bickering the devs will have a more difficult time finding problems in the beta. Thanks.

The latest beta patch (564) is now available on Steam. Thanks for all of the hard work. We really appreciate everything you guys do for the game.

We have a fix for this we just checked in. I will put up a new beta tomorrow that should have this fixed.

Just a heads-up that a new beta patch is available. Fixed a few issues that were introduced in the previous beta patch.

It was fixed.

Can you give us more exact numbers? I don't have the numbers in front of me, but if you do all of the content before Twin Elms you should end up around level 8 or 9 instead of max level.

It should be more clear now. You will passively detect traps that are four levels below your Mechanics score. You will still need to search for traps that are within four levels, though.

I'm interested in this as well! Hope it is possible. Also I think the cipher focus nerf is a bit harsh. Maybe it could be a bit less lowered. If you've optimized your cipher build for the fact that he will start with 1/2 of his focus, the build will probably suck when suddenly starting only with 1/4 focus. I guess this nerf will force me to begin a new savegame. Currently, It will only work for newly recruited companions.

There are too many fixes for me to list them all. If you have a question about a specific one, please ask. Most systems changes are retroactive. For example, if we changed a spell it will appear changed when you use it next. Most completed quests (or quests that are already in a broken state) will not be fixed automatically and it requires us to make a retroactive fix. Depending on the problem we may or may not be able to make that retroactive fix available.

It's in the Options menu, under the Game tab I believe. Ah, that's probably the last place I would have looked for it. We are going to put together a short video showing off the new features and how to access them. This will go out when we send out our next backer update.

I am really sorry to hear that, Osvir. I know that is a pretty big blow, but I hope it won't stop you from working on your game. You probably already know this (and I am not trying to rub salt in the wounds), but backing up your data is essential when you are working on larger projects. Starting this practice now will prevent future heartaches and frustrations. I use Git and Github for my own personal projects. It is cheap (about 7 dollars a month) and pretty easy to use. It also lets you share your work with collaborators in a quick and easy way.

I know that most of you know this, but I will reiterate... Making games is hard. Making complex RPGs is even harder. Take it from a person that has worked on a few different styles of games, these sprawling RPGs are insanely complex in comparison. Systems are weaved into a bunch of other systems and even the tiniest change can cause a wave of instability throughout the game. The thing that lots of people forget is that a game is a special piece of software. What I mean is that we can plan out a game completely - all of the design, art, programming, audio, etc. - and it can be executed perfectly... and the game may still be horrible. Proper planning and designing are essential in making great games, but it won't get you there alone. Lots of our ideas sound great on paper, but in practice they fall flat. Making great games require myriad adjustments and changes. Sometimes these changes are minor and don't require adjustments to a previously implemented system. Those are the best kind of changes. Other times you need to make sweeping changes to a system that have long term, rippling repercussions. We try to avoid those types of changes, but sometimes it is the only way to make something fun. As a real world example, there were some classes in PoE that went through some pretty drastic changes from their original designs. This happened because, once we started using the classes in an actual game environment, we found they weren't as fun or useful as we wanted. We could have left the original designs in place (and maybe it would have given us a more polished experience), but it might have made a game that wasn't as fun. All of this isn't to say that the project's management team is without blame. Far from it. None of these decisions are made in a vacuum and for every planned feature we change, we should be taking it out of something else - either a time buffer or another feature (or, if you are lucky, you can get more budget/time). That means if we want to revamp one of our classes, the responsible thing to do would be to see how much it will cost (in resources and time) to implement these changes and pull that from something else. It is a constant push and pull and I will be the first to admit that I can always do better in this department. Overall, I was very pleased with what we accomplished on the limited budget and resources. Nowadays games of this size have budgets anywhere from three to ten times what our team was working with. The important thing is to take the lessons learned from PoE and move it forward into our future projects. Much easier said than done, though.

This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount. To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost. That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.