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I am uploading the backer betas to Steam right now. Just need to do some last minute testing, but everything seemed okay in our initial tests. Hopefully will be up within the hour. EDIT: What Adam said.

Hey, everyone. No update this week. We have been in the middle of doing some build deliveries to Paradox so our team focus was on delivering those builds. I spoke with Adam and we both agreed that we want to get a beta out (on all three platforms) early next week. On the plus side, we have been doing lots of optimizations over this past week. Memory usage should be significantly lower when we give the beta to you guys.

Thanks for the suggestions. I am going to bring these up in our brainstorming meetings.

http://imgur.com/6co63bG

Hey, everyone. We will be giving a panel at PAX East that is similar to the one we gave at PAX South. Are there any specific things that you would like to see in a panel of that format? I can't promise that we will be able to fulfill every request, but it will give us some good ideas when we are brainstorming. Thanks.

Most of the posters and threads are great, but I have been noticing that the tone of posts overall had become somewhat snarky. We love feedback (even critical feedback), but sometimes the feedback ends up going a bit too far. While developers, in general, have pretty thick skin, nobody likes to be in an atmosphere where they feel that they (or others) are being attacked. I don't mean discussions about various features or assets, but outright rudeness at times when discussing opinions. Heck, just in the past couple of weeks I have seen threads where posters were calling developers incompetent and uncaring. I have seen posters at each other's throats quite often in the past. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, it isn't something that is going to encourage devs and posters to come to the board (or even take the criticism seriously). In short, I would ask that you keep the feedback, bugs, and opinions coming, but just think before you post. Rule number one: don't be a jerk.

This will probably be the last backer beta that we do. Not sure how long we will keep everything open, though. We still need to talk about the particulars.

Hey, folks. Not going to put out the update this week. Too much stuff trying to finalize the PAX demo we are going to be streaming with our panel. Sorry about getting your hopes up. That said, make sure you check out the panel on Saturday at 12:30. We are going to show off a few areas that you haven't seen before and then do a question and answer session. I think the stream is being shown on the front page of the PAX South site and on the front page of Twitch.

The truly honest answer is not because the dev team is ignoring you (by you I mean backers, not specifically you). We see things like that and it gets put onto a list that we are constantly reprioritizing based on what we feel is most important to the player experience. I know there are many people that would disagree with how we prioritizing some of the items, but the reality is that there is a TON of stuff that needs to get done and not a lot of people to do it. Sometimes things will get left out until we feel comfortable with some of the core features/UI/gameplay. For example, our UI is done by Kaz (Art/Design) and Brian (Programming). All of the UI in the entire game is done by those two folks and we have an enormous amount of it. Keep in mind that every decision we make has consequences that ripple throughout the game. We could take Brian and Kaz off what they are doing, but then we would be getting fixes to the combat log, HUD, extra portraits, etc.. It is always a give and take. The Stronghold UI definitely needs some extra love, but it is just lower on the list of items right now. I'll promise you, though, that some of that screen will get revised over the next two months before launch.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that scene was specially scripted for the trailer. We do have weather in the game, but nothing like rain storms that will appear and disappear in an area. It would be cool to something like that for the future, though.

Hey, Dinari. We have locked all of the physical upgrades at this point so you most likely will be unable to upgrade directly from the site. If you email support@obsidian.net we can see what we can do for you, though.

We are going to be adding in a slew of additional portraits before launch. I can't say how many just yet, but we are trying to add as many as we can.

Hey, guys. We are doing some things to try and address people's feedback about the NPCs in the city. For example, adding patrollers. We will also make sure the ambient walla is added so the area feels more crowded.

Audio was not properly mixed in that build. That is why some sounds were REALLY loud and some were quiet. They should be completely mixed by the end of this week, though.

This will not happen for the released game, but we will talk about it for patches. It isn't a simple thing for us to implement, so we have to be careful with it.

I have to talk to Adam and Josh, but we can try to aim for Wednesday or Thursday.

Most likely won't happen before release, but we can review that option for patches and the expansion.

They are still in the middle of doing the mixing. We didn't have much of a script today so I am not surprised that some of the sounds were way too low or way too high. Luckily, these are easy fixes for us.

It will probably just be patches that players can download from the Backer Portal or the Obsidian site.

Yup. Each redeemable item can have a separate platform.

If you are a backer and choose the GOG version it will be the exact same as the Steam version (minus DRM). All backers get the same version (plus or minus some in-game items/pets depending on your tier). How it works is that you will go to the Backer Portal to choose where you would like to redeem the game from. You will then be given a key that you can use to redeem a copy of the game from whatever platform you have selected. All digital rewards that are not games are downloaded from the Backer Portal directly, not Steam or GOG.

It should be available at the same time (barring unforeseen problems). It is running pretty well right now. Any ETA on the beta? Some time next week is our target. Can't be more specific than that right now.

They grabbed those from the new GOG SKU that came out.

That price though So, on the GOG editions. My Slacker Backer would probably get me the normal Hero Edition, but what about some of the bonuses I backed separately (like the guide), will those be downloadable from the backer portal? Or are you upgrading me to the Champion Edition? All of the digital rewards that were backed/purchased can be redeemed through our Backer Portal. For example, if your digital tier has the digital soundtrack, you will be able to download all of the tracks from the Backer Portal when we have pushed those changes live.

Hi Brandon, while I am very glad to hear you have more portraits planned, and I do appreciate variations of existing portraits, there are some races that are still widely under-represented. For example, dwarves and the sand-skinned aumaua (can't recall what they're called off the top of my mind). Are there plans to add portraits for those, if not by release, in the first post-release patch? Another unrelated thing I wanted to ask—currently all characters in PoE move simultaneously when an order is issued, which creates the infamous "army of clones" effect. The IE games worked around this by applying a random 1–10ms delay from when the order is issued to when characters execute it. Is something similar planned for PoE? Thanks! The portraits are something we want to do, but it takes a long time to do them well and we have lots of subraces that need to be represented. We will definitely try our best to get as much in as possible, but I can't promise that all subrace/gender options will be represented. For the moving thing, I don't see why we couldn't do something like that at some point. I am not sure where it fits into the overall bug fixing plan, though. I will make sure to talk it over with some folks.