Magnum Opus

Seems strange. I didn't have to pay COD. I do live in Canada. So i'm thinking maybe its import fees? Unless you do as well in which case i'm baffled. I'm in Canada, yes. I suppose my ultimate gripe here is with the presentation/wording. To my mind, that pledge on the backer page is a contract. I pay X, they deliver on Y and Z. That's the contract. The contract included a shipping charge, so that's what I paid. They don't get to rewrite that contract without my consent -- it was a mutually agreed upon contract, after all, with two parties signing off (they when they took my money, I when I paid it) -- but that's what they did. And not just WTR shipping, too; my description of the product I bought included a physical copy of the game. I got a code card instead. It's a well-made card, but still just a card. It is by no means the physical copy of the game that I ponied up for. Now, I'm happy enough with the game (I've played it to completion once, and begun a few more times with different characters, and fully plan on playing more when the updates have settled and the DLC is complete, and I know I'll be even more impressed with the game than I was the first time around) that I'm not going to DO anything about it, but again... what else do the words "physical copy of the game" mean other than a disk or a flash drive or something physical that you plug into your system to install the game? The words "breach of contract" kind of leap to mind on this one, so to Obsidian, I would just say that watching your language when putting together your offers is absolutely critical. I'm no lawyer, but changing the terms and conditions of contracts you've already accepted payment for... well, is not a best practice in business, let's just say. Tends to foster mistrust, and justifiably. Incidentally, I'm quite happy with the product I received. I don't require the physical disks (though I can easily see how others would), and everything arrived in pristine condition.

I got to pay COD as well in the email I received from the postal service today. Count me down as a third; sent an inquiry to support at Obsidian, a day ago. No response yet. paying more than double what I've already paid for shipping through the campaign pledge strikes me as either a gross underestimation of the actual shipping costs of the final product (in which case, that extra cost should have been absorbed by the company making that promise), or at the VERY least communicating that the costs we've already paid were more in the way of a downpayment on shipping, rather than an accurate final total. Not impressed with the way this whole fulfillment promise has been handled, to be honest. I have yet to see the actual package so I can't comment on what condition it'll be in, but I'm definitely going to wait before buying another Obsidian product. And backing? I think that's a thing of the past, frankly. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I'm having a blast with the BT1 remake as well right now. It seems to be a hybrid of the entire previous trilogy; spells from the second game have made it into this one, the traps are a complete *%$&^ to deal with (in the PC version of the original, traps might have knocked off a point or two, and didn't leave behind many critical effects, IIRC; these ones are nasty pieces of work). There are ranged enemies and weapons, but they don't make a big deal of that, not like in BT2, a couple little bits of lore that I don't remember from the first game, a few messages scattered about, and there doesn't seem to be a "99 limit" on the group size any more, though I've only seen that limit broken on one occasion so far. Am slowly penetrating Mangar's 5th right now. I think it's just as difficult as I remember, which is to say that I'm running away a lot, and half of my party is either Old, Poisoned, Drained, Stoned, or just outright Dead... and usually a combination of all five. It's glorious.

Unfortunately level 42 will still sound old and lame. You are dead to me, sir. Good day.

Hm... not much incentive to switch even there, then, with AI shouldering much of the load for NPCs. I'm thinking that it might boil down, in part, to time management; people managing all characters manually simply won't have as much time to fiddle with grimoires on Wizards as someone who's only controlling the Wizard would. Is more to it than just that, though, obviously. Whatever the reasons, am simply not much a fan of the current Deadfire approach.... not least because it takes the "acquisition of knowledge" aspect away from the wizard profession. Spell hunting was a big thing for me in Pillars 1, along with the odd moral quandary that went along with it (do you get a slew of new, unique, and otherwise unattanable spells, or do you let the wizard confronting you actually destroy the evil immortal skull floating around behind you?). In Deadfire, it's just random: Do you luck out and find a book that has spells you want to use, that you don't already have, and that you're even able to use, or do you just... make do with what you choose at level up, with the bonus spells from your grimoire being just that: bonus. Nice to have, but nothing to worry about?

Overall, I prefer the Pillars 1 model, I think. At least there, hunting for spells provided a bit of interest. Pillars 2 just had me tailoring my spell choices at level up around the grimoire that appeared when my character started the game. Whether they were "unique" grimoires or not, super-expensive or not, all of the books I found simply didn't provide enough utility -- with a subclass, you're can count on at least 1 spell per level that your character can't cast... out of only 4 or 5 spells total, we're talking a full 25%+ of any given book that's unusable by default -- or incentive for me to switch out anything. The real problem I found with restricting spell choices for wizards in each game, though, is that EVERY character in your party has so many spells and spell-like abilities that there's no point to switching grimoires for your wizard character. I either have the spell I want, or I'll get my fighter to do it for me. I'll get my rogue to do it for me. They're all balanced out anyway, so they're all equally valid. Heh. Essentially, I've already got five grimoires with me in this game; my Tome of Help and Harm (aka Priest), my Tome of Martial Masteries (Fighter), my Book of Shadows (Rogue), my Big Book of Forceful Attitude Adjustments (Paladin), my book of Plants and Animals: Not Just for Dinner Anymore (Druid), etc. They're more ambulatory than I usually think of books as being, and they talk back more than most, but really... clicking on each character is me choosing my set of spells already. No point to choosing a set within a set, not when the overall set will have something just as good. Am curious as to how many people who DO switch out grimoires are playing with Party AI enabled. I manage each of my characters without it (does this game have basic auto-attack, BTW? I recall my characters just standing around after their current foe was dispatched, instead of wailing on the OTHER guy that was beating on them already), but for those that DO let the party NPCs do their own thing, I can see how switching would hold at least a little more appeal.

... and the winner in the "Things Which Cannot Be Unseen" category is.... Two Angry Dinosaurs! Dammit.

Being something of a 1) dinosaur, and 2) hermit, I'll admit that this question caught me off guard a bit, not because I find it offensive or anything, but simply because I haven't given the options presented a lot of thought. And this has not so much to do with questions of gender identity but more the degree of roleplaying in which I engage when I play games. I'm one of those "roleplayers" who simply inserts themselves into whatever game they're playing. This is partly because I play games for the escapism they offer; if I can imagine myself off to a world where I CAN affect things for the better, where I CAN make a difference... great. Also, even if it's only for a while, I like to imagine myself being able to burn monsters to a crisp with my fingertips from a few dozen yards away. But, and this holds true even more strongly where the world being portrayed is all the more fantastical/off-beat, in such a fantasy environment, I find that in order to care about the characters and story in such a setting, I need something grounded in reality to make the whole experience more believeable/relatable. At times, my character as myself in the game is that very anchor. I end up caring more about the game world and it's characters, because I'm the one messing everything up for everyone! It's also partly because they games I like most can't be finished in one sitting: Any elaborate character backstory/personality that I come up with at character creation is going to end up forgotten three play sessions into the game. I don't have the determination to maintain a "second personality" that long, so I just use me instead. It's just easier that way. (Incidentally, this is also the reason why I generally prefer the more heroic sorts of fantasy, where there ARE happy endings every once in a while. I'm not going to play a game where everything I touch turns to ash and blows away on a bitter wind. I get enough downers IRL; I don't need my entertainment dumping on me as well.) For these reasons, I suppose -- there may be others, but I haven't examined things that closely, and this post is long enough as it is; these two are the biggies, anyway -- I always use my own sex/gender when playing games, to the point where if a game offers a choice between male and female characters, I'll choose the male 100% of the time. If the game only offers a female character, I simply won't play it. "Being female" is simply too far outside my realm of experience, and getting into that mindset for an experience that's supposed to be more fun than work seems like way too much effort to me. Interesting question, though. Nice. Edit: Long story short: Yes, it matters.

Sad times. The man will be missed, but he leaves one helluva legacy. Safe journey, Leonard.

Will throw my hat in the ring for Kuldahar, even if it was always more a hamlet than a city, or even a village. There were memorable characters in each of its iterations (IWD1 and IWD2) and many of those characters had a connection to the surroundings in the form of quests or just little bits of knowledge that fleshed out the areas you'd be plunderrrrr... wandering into later. Where it really stands out in my mind is in the area that Kirkwall attempted but didn't pull off so well: the passage of time. Kuldahar in IWD2 was still recognizable as the one from IWD1, but there had been new buildings added, old ones removed (or burned down); the characters that we knew from the first ones were still there, only older; and time had just... passed, the way I'd expect. Even the paths were still recognizable, but life had happened as well, both life in the intervening years as well as things that were the result of the material with which the game itself was involved. Was excellently done, IMO, and it's probably the best in-game example I can think of where a place takes on just as many of the trappings of a character as the NPCs. But Baldur's Gate was well done, too, as was Novigrad and, to a lesser extent, Vizima. The latter may have had a more distinctive character, but the completeness of Novigrad is what tips the scale in its direction for me. Thinking back, I find myself partial to Vivec in Morrowind, as well. Phlan, too: the PoR series was the first where I got a decent sense of "place" from a game, and was then allowed to revisit it in a subsequent game (tho Phlan from other entries in the Pool of Radiance series wasn't really recognizable as such: if it wasn't for the name, I wouldn't, for example, have known by the layout of the streets or the landmarks that it was Phlan, as opposed to Zhentil Keep). Detail, completeness, and continuity, I suppose, are my main criteria when it comes to gaming environments. If it's more accurately described as a "level", then it fails at whatever story-related purpose it was supposed to have.

This point speaks to my only real disappointment with TW3: The fact that there's really no continuity between the games regarding Eredin. I should preface this by mentioning that I didn't read the books, didn't read any comics or watch any supplementary material that may or may not have been present regarding the backstory between the games' releases, so I know full well that there are plenty of things that I'm missing, but from that vantage point, the mere fact that we went from calling The Wild Hunt "the Wild Hunt" to the "Aen Elle" and the King of the Wild Hunt being referenced as "Eredin" was a major head-scratcher for me. I knew all about the first game and its sequel -- played them both multiple times and in multiple ways -- but... now who's this Eredin chap they're referring to? He's the King of the Hunt, you say? My goodness, Geralt's getting pretty chummy with a hostile ghost who's living counterpart's been dead for who-knows-how-long... wait, you say those ghosts were just projections of LIVING people? Elves, no less? you don't say! That's it right there. There were far too many instances where they DIDN'T say. Not in the games, anyway. Who is Eredin? How does Geralt know him? Geralt, it was said at the end of TW2, had fully recovered his memory, but no one let ME in on the joke. It was two-thirds of the way through TW3 before someone let it slip, and only in passing, that Geralt had actually ridden WITH the hunt. And Ciri herself had only been alluded to previously, and not by name, but now here she was the focus of the third game with the hunt for Yennifer being little more than a sidelight of the introduction. They did an amazing job preserving the continuity of the world -- Kear Morhen intact from the first game, Vesemir and Lambert and the other Wolf School Witchers all accounted for, and accurately too with no hand-waving rewrites that I could see, but Geralt's relationship with the Hunt and the information about the Hunt which Geralt now knew but I didn't... I think there was a LOT more room for the Hunt itself to have been expanded upon in that game. Particularly at the beginning.

Point of Lore: Sorceresses have no nips unless they're deliberately being "tantalizing". Immershun restored. You are welcome. But Ciri is not a full fledged sorceress. She's only partially Witcher trained (no mutagens) and partially sorceress trained. So.... half-nips, then? Or nips in unusual places? "Floating" nips, as it were? Although... in addition to the Sorceress/Witcher dichotomy, she's also of Elder Blood, isn't she? If so, there's just no telling what happened to them or where her nips ended up. Heavens above, they might even be temporally displaced, and will only appear on her 3/4ths of the way through the game! I'll admit, my curiosity is now piqued. Thank you. (came SO close to writing "peaked" there, but... I restrained myself, due to the seriousness of the topic. You're welcome.)

Point of Lore: Sorceresses have no nips unless they're deliberately being "tantalizing". Immershun restored. You are welcome. Nips. You're welcome, too.

If paid mods are the new reality, then all it really means is that I'm going to be looking to Bethesda themselves for all of those things for which I used to go to the modding communities. Bug fixes to keep major quest lines flowing, a user interface that doesn't make me want to quit out of sheer frustration because I'm only using two buttons on my keyboard to navigate my way though at least five nested menus every time I bring up a character sheet, little things like that. Am personally hoping they're up to the task.

Agreed. Much as I liked the second game, it DID kind of dribble, urinarily-speaking (mindful of language filters, here), all over the items they allowed you to import from the first game. While it might not mean much in the grand scheme of things, that's something I've missed in recent games, where the tendency is to just reboot the character wholesale on one flimsy pretext or another, rather than allowing a character to genuinely transition from one game to a sequel. A divinely bestowed weapon from the first game should simply NOT turn into trash in the second... just because. Part of me hopes they don't even allow for imported items anymore; instead of preserving the character, bringing a bit of lore along with you from game to game to add a little more cohesion or personality to the overall story/setting, all it ends up being is a disappointment. Geralt picked up some pretty hefty artifacts in Loc Muinne; to see them degraded (again) for nothing more than "balance purposes"... ugh. Not looking forward to that, even if none of the weapons in TW2 had much in the way of character to them, certainly nothing like Aerondight. I don't find it silly anymore, though, becoming attached to a virtual anything. If it's something that you worked for, spent time on, learned how to use, enabled your successes or even just postponed your defeats, then it's only natural to care about it, whether it's a character or a sword, virtual or not. The investment of time and effort is what matters.

I tried playing it once, the lack of subtitles in the intro is a pretty big bummer as I, for some reason, had trouble following the dialogue. Yeah, I found that a little off-putting as well. Particularly since the very first thing I did after installing the game, even before starting play, was explicitly turn on the subtitles. Luckily, it was only the actual introduction that was missing them, and that was over quickly enough that I'd forgotten their lack until you mentioned it, and I'm (now) in Chapter 3 (14 hrs in, according to the save log).

The Book of Unwritten Tales. This has been a very pleasant surprise for me. I haven't really touched an adventure game for a while, so at first there was a bit of a re-learning curve -- mostly just shaking off the conventions of RPG-dom -- but I'm having a blast with this game. Still early yet (just gathering Wilbur's companions in Chapter 2), but... wow. Such fun. I haven't laughed out loud at the humour in a game for a long time, but this game's managed it twice already (wondering, wondering about that breathing puffball at the fortune-teller's wagon, only to have it explained in an LOL moment (haha), and capturing the rabbit. Awesome). Graphics are great, characters are interesting, setting is fun, the puzzles I've found are mostly intuitive but some of them have given me pause, and with a good dose of slapstick in there to set it all off. Reminds me more than a little of the old Quest for Glory series with its tone and wit, which is still one of my favourites. Picked up the other two games in the series when I got this one -- on sale at GoG -- and haven't been disappointed in the least.

Will admit to being curious about this one. The halcyon days of my DnD gaming were way back with 2nd and 3rd edition (ie. the IE and NWN series). I didn't even pay attention to what 4th edition was doing rule-wise never mind 5th, so I'm not biased in that respect; for me the rules are more about providing a consistent interaction with the world than anything else, so maybe my metric for what defines a "good" ruleset is different from others' anyway. I played that online Neverwinter F2P MMORPG for a little while before deciding that it was too far removed from the Forgotten Realms setting that I knew for me to feel any nostalgia for the locations, and that the gameplay was like every other MMO I've tried, which is to say fun for a little while but quickly repetitive later on -- hard to really tell where the "DnD" left off and the "MMO" began. I played Dragon Age Origins more than I like to admit, though, so if this game is similar in that regard I know it'll be good enough, at least, maybe good enough that I'll want to explore the underlying ruleset a little more, or even try to reconcile the Realms that I knew from Baldur's Gate and other games of that era to the new Realms, to build the bridge of history within the Realms, so to speak, if there's any bridge to be built between the two. Yes. Curious. Not pre-order curious, but quite possibly purchase-curious.

Yes. Dust of disappearance/invis.sphere (in a pinch), a haste spell or three, a lot of ranged weapons, and an absolutely crucial wall to separate the party from the Corps so that they come at you in singles or doubles instead of waves, and the battle requires more patience than anything else. Also: provoking attacks of opportunity. Not so good against the Drow Elf Lords, but pure magic against the beholders. Is supposed to be a free attack, but IIRC it consumed their attack for the entire round. Still, one beholder sneaking around that corner at the wrong time spelled absolute doom for my entire group on more than one occasion, so congratulations are in order. Good fight.

Haha. That's one thing that I really missed about playing the old Gold Box games: Sometimes they give you the opportunity to really screw yourself over. Room full of Otyugh -- the ones that want to bargain -- is a good example, though there's an even better fight later on in this game (Hint: Throw caution to the wind. Go for the gold!). With enough rules-lawyering they are do-able, even the later one, but... haha. Good luck with them. FWIW, though, the Manual of Bodily Health in PoR DID work, in my version of the game at least, but there were a few oddities associated with it. When I used it on a character, it said that so-and-so "started reading", and that it took a few days of in-game time for the effect of the book to actually kick in. Also, it didn't yield the now-expected +1 con and the associated retroactively allocated hitpoints.... not exactly, anyway. I think I only got 1 HP out of it for my level 8 fighter, and I honestly can't recall with certainty what effect it had on the character's CON. I -think- it had the +1 effect (ie. 18 went to 19), but I'm no longer sure of that. All I really remember is my reaction of "was that IT?!" after seeing what it did. Maybe the CON bonus never appeared... that seems more likely to me now. Anyway... back to our regularly scheduled programming....

Yes. Markie Post Alias was a favourite of mine, too. Alas for my young and impressionable hormones in the middle 80's. I'd just like to chime in as well, though. I've been reading (and enjoying) this little blast from the past immensely. I played these games to death growing up, and then raised them necromantically so that I could play them to dust. After that it was just a simple matter to sweep them up and glue them back together again for a few more playthroughs. At the time, the graphics were great, the adventures better than almost anything else I'd seen, AND they were ADnD, a system which, had my older brother not been the douche that he was, a system I might have had much fun with, tabletop-wise. Alas, douche he was, and so to play tabletop with him was to be relegated to being mugged, beaten, left for dead in a stable, eating grubs for food, and then inevitably dying due to some foul illness I'd contracted from sleeping in amongst the pigs, after it having been determined that the stable was too good for my now-crippled-for-life adventurer. These games actually offered SUCCESS! GLORY! RICHES! So cool. And they were coded simply enough that, even if it didn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, I could import my previous party's equipment with just a little basic hex editing. I loved my Longsword +2 "Flame Tongue" from PoR, as well as the Silver Plate Mail. Sure, there was better around, but... SILVER ARMOR! Thanks for doing this, Endrosz. Looking forward to the next installment(s).

I also greatly enjoyed the first two games in the series, and I'm also indifferent to this news. CDPR haven't let me down yet, so I'm confident they're going to use this extra time to make the game they really want to make, and make it the best game they can. Doesn't mean it will be perfect, doesn't mean that it'll even be the game of the year, just that it'll be the best game they can make it. If it were another company? Yeah... I might see a delay as a bad thing, that they were doing something stupid with the extra time ("stupid" being defined, naturally as "something I don't agree with"), but as a company CDPR have shown me that their heads are in the right place, and that as game developers they're willing to lay it all out there for the games they make. Boils down to trust, is all it is. I trust CDPR to use the extra time in a way that will benefit the game. I will continue to trust them to do so until they show me they're no longer worthy of that trust, until they start doing their own brand of Stupid Things. Developers have lost first my trust, and then even my business by doing too many such things. I'm certain it'll happen again, too, but it hasn't happened with these guys. Not yet. This being the case, I'm not worried about this delay in the slightest. Game will be done when it's done. I can wait.

Gotcha. Thanks bobobo878. Seems more than a little jarring to me, hearing tracks that take me to {Windhelm, Baldur's Gate, etc} when playing an entirely different game. I'd be literally shocked if that's what Bioware was doing these days. Not much surprises me on Youtube anymore, tho.

Question: The previous video has music in it. This music is straight from Baldur's Gate. Does DA:I actually recycle tracks from previous Bioware games, or it just a video thing for the benefit of Youtubers?

Open up your character's Record screen. To the right of their name and race at the top of the screen will be four small, almost decorative-looking ovals. Click the second one of those for your combat stats.