VincentNZ

I was never much of a min/maxer, but the Ranger I used as PC in the first runs, was doing exactly what it said on the tin. Stationary single target DPS. He was hitting hard regularly and the DPS was further increased with the pet, which should not be underestimated. Plus of course you can use the pet to tank slackers. Further although medium armour is usually badly balanced, the ranger can take a bit more damage than a mage who can fill the same DPS role, and be a decent melee combatant. Now if you are really into the game mechanics the hybrid classes often are a bit underwhelming and with multiclassing this is even more so the case. Why choose a class that is good in two things, when you can have a multiclass that exceeds at those two disciplines. I would say that a rogue/fighter will deliver the same ranged DPS, while being very good in melee as well as being able to take a beating. Same with a mage/fighter. And yeah the 5 man party really enhances the "need" for multi-classing especially with only one healer around. It also makes the game more complicated when you have to think about two classes per character. Personally, I like subclasses and multi-classes for the PC and predefined companions, but I met Aloth as a mage and Eder as a fighter. The sheer thought of leveling them as something absurd like Druid or Cypher makes my head ache. On the other hand, since there is no Durance and we only have one Cleric, multi-classing means that you can actually live without that NPC, whereas Durance was definitely a must for me in PoE1.

On my first playthrough I had the ranger companion bug, where my wolf just bugged out and could not respawn. If I had not looked it up on the net, I would not have restarted the game immediately and would have had a crippled PC for hours. If you just can not get past a certain quest, NPC or area and you can not seem to figure out why that is the case, you should definitely look up the details, just in case you hit a gamebreaker, plotstopper or just missed a certain hint on how to solve the issue or a crucial gameplayfeature. If it is just for story I would be very cautious with getting info as it might be too much and spoil some of your experience. However, I will look up the wiki a lot to brush up my knowledge on the first game so that I grasp again what I did in the previous game, because I can not, for the hell of it, remember what exactly I did.

This is the first thing in the entire POE development that set off alarms for me. If you've played The Secret of Monkey Island HD, you know that voice-acting dialog written for text can kill otherwise good writing. Text has an...eveness of tone that allows you to have enormous range without telegraphing or playing it up. Voice tends to double down on the dominant emotion - sad-tinged stories become SAD, jokes become FUNNY, etc. Of course this can change with the talent involved, but the announced actors primarily work in anime and aren't renowned for naturalistic dialog, so if the issue exists at the script level it's going to come across in the voice acting. Most every game I played has a seperate audio slider for voice/music/effects, so I'd be surprised if they didn't do that here. What is the "owner" level? Obsidian's choice, or more specifically the CEO's level? I think, while your opinion is valid, you should not be too worried about it. Doing VO after most of the work was done is only very rarely a bad decision. You should not worry that we have dialogue texts like Skyrim. PoE is still very dialogue-driven. However it does seem that the delay was at least partly due to the increased VO, which is an unusual move as it is rather costly and not the best selling point for a game. So I guess you could either see it as a free gift from Obsidian to show how much they care. Or something to offset the time they need to deal with glaring issues. :D

They aren't just successors in term of mechanics/concepts, unlike the FF games, the Elder Scrolls games share the same world and follow each other chronologically. Arena to Oblivion is just 44 years apart. Skyrim is 201 years after Oblivion. Only in the absolute loosest sense. For all it has to do with Morrowind Oblivion might as well be a Final Fantasy game, cracks about St. Jiub in one line of dialogue aside. Loosest sense? There is a few recurring NPCs across game (Uriel Septim, Hesleth, etc). You visit dungeons/areas in Skyrim, Morrowind and Oblivion that you could visit in Arena. You start Oblivion in the same prison/dungeon you started in Arena, goblins included. The games refer to the events of the previous games and some hint to future games too. The lore stays the same across all the games as well and each new game is just further on the same timeline. Final Fantasy games have no link between each others outside names of spells, creatures and some terms coming back but not for the same thing (example: Esper). Yeah, but it is only a shared world, which gives them a lot of freedom for each game. I mean in BG and PoE we play the same character as before, with a certain backstory. In TES we play a different character each time, often in a whole different part of the world and the games are only loosely connected via references. Oblivion could have played in another world entirely, it is the game mechanics and their freedom that draws most attraction. Point is, in PoE we will likely see mroe than references to the first game. However I am pretty sure they will make it easy enough for newcomers so that they do not get overwhelmed and if it works like BG2 it is very welcome.

That is a surprise. Nothing that makes me totally exciting, but a nice touch. I too was rather impressed with the VO of the first game and thought it was very well acted out.

That assumption is untrue. Going back to early 80s (I’m old...) some video game trilogies required completion of game 1 in order to continue in game 2. Other trilogies did not. It all depends on the developer.First of all Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy: it consists of 8 parts, which were distributed via 3 books. None of those are sequels, as none of them are stand alone books. A better comparison would be an episodic TellTale release. PoE1 is a stand-alone game with a complete story arc. Deadfire hopefully will be the same. While they share protagonist, they don’t share the same story arc. Even if there will be a bigger storyline it’s clear that devs think one game at the time. Making each game stand on its own is a better business model. Games age quickly and if you tell someone they need to play couple games before they try the new release they are unlikely to dive in. Release multiple standalone connected instalments and they might go back though. You expand your audience instead of shrinking it as time goes by. I don’t know 80s game, but I certainly feel that in 90s sequels were aimed more at people who played 1st nstalments rather than trying to gain new crowds - stories would jump right into the action, characters weren’t reintroduced, games lacked tutorials assuming you know what to do, difficulty would be steep as devs assumed you are familiar with basics. It is always a matter of how it has been done, I never played the first BG until 2014 or so, because BG2 told everything really well alongside, so that I could even relate to deaths of characters of the first game, like Khalid and Dynaheir. But you are right, older sequels tend to throw you right in there, and tell the story alongside. And of course there are different kinds of sequels. While Oblivion is a sequel to Morrowind, it is more a successor mechanic wise than story.

I am still not sure if sidekicks will be all that deep as we expect them to be. I mean in BG2 there were a few characters I would identify as sidekicks as well, like Mazzy and Cernd but they all were part of a pretty deep sidequest. I think Cernd had a miscallenous task attached as well. I have only played through BG1 once, but I recall there being a few more characters that were not much more than templates. I have to say though I only used the ones that I had access to in BG2 as well, so I do not know much about interaction. From what I read on the sidekicks, they could really be not much more than that...

This. It hurts you slightly more if you dump it but you get a lot less by raising it. This does annoy me a bit, I liked the fact that every attribute did something for everyone and you did not really waste points there, especially since PoE always had a lot of enemies in fights. This really made me choose a barbarian, although I think I never went above 16 intelligence either. I really hate creating "dumb" characters for min/max reasons, and in BG2 I could never play a Paladin since they had high restrictions on and demands on all attributes but intelligence. In the end it does not matter, we are not playing Fallout, where a low intellect PC really has an effect on the storyline.

Hmm I doubt it, although I would surely like this, since it should have come out a week ago. :D I would suggest it is something along the lines of a BTS video that sheds more light on the story maybe? I think the poster below you is on point, maybe cast members talking about their roles in this game.

Nah not overly, concerned since it is still a singleplayer experience and min-maxing is a highly individual player thing. I knever knew about the Kensai/Mage thing, until the enhanced BGs came out. I mean the design concept of the multi-classes is clear. To give each character an additional route to go after so that you are not so dependent on certain companions. If there had been an option to dual-class Aloth as a priest, there would have been less need to have Durance in the party. Multi/dual-classes give flexibility for the cost of effectiveness. Naturally there will be awkward choices as well, since some abilities of different classes do not synergize well. I guess a barbarian/chanter is not a very good option. And in the end everything will likely be still viable and playable without much hassle, even on a hard difficulty level, while ingenious people will soon come up with a build to solo everything in the game.

By the faction and companion screenshots I hope they explain the motives and backgrounds of all factions and persons you meet somewhere in a handy journal, because there is no way to keep remembering what each individual organization, companion, god etc. is all about. It is clear that I also have to read back into the first game to get some story and world background. Does anybody know a site that does a good rundown of the lore?

I think the alignment system worked well enough in the BG games. As has been said, it was mostly a framework in which some characters operated and that made social interaction a bit more comprehensible. In Pillars I often wondered why someone reacted in a certain way, or why Pallagina objected to this, while Eder was rather cool with it. Also the game did lack evil characters, everybody seemed rather neutral and by that I mean that they flipped from lawful to criminal, from subjectively good, to totally indifferent to having little problem with objectively hurtful decisions. Also there were little consequences. In BG2 with a certain reputation you could not recruit some companions and some companions would start fighting because they did not get along. Whole questchains were locked because of how you react to the world. In PoE people might not like your actions, but companions especially mostly did not care. With rather few options in PoE 2 I would guess this has not changed either. So I doubt this will get revisited.

https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/A_Servant_of_Death This is something that puzzles me, I am pretty sure I did all side quests in my playthrough, and after finishing I noticed the steam achievment for finishing all god-related quests, that I never got. Then I recalled that these must have been obtainable from these stone pillars where every god was represented. I certainly looked at all of them since they had something to do with the main quest and you could dothem a favour when dealing with Thaos soul in a certain way. Now I read up on these quests, and some sound vaguely familiar, but one some I am totally dark. Did you have to do something in particular to get all the quests? On topic on the acts and how long they might take, I would not overinterpret that savegame. They are probably testing a lot of stuff and that might include shipping around the archipelago for hours and fighting battles there without doing any "real content". I guess this will be quite the timesink.

I would love to take part in those surveys, but strangely enough, I have no idea what I did in the first Pillars 18 months ago. I could guess, but that wold hardly be accurate. :D

17+ I do not know what it entails, but I was surprised how high it is. This is the american system, right? I guess that the use of alcohol and sexual themes are the deciding factors here. Here the rating will very likely be 16. Crazy how Fallout 4, Doom and PoE2 share the same rating.

That trailer really told me nothing new. Shame on me for signing onto this forum. :D And man, does anybody else think the characters are too big for the screens? Looks like a bunch of Yao Mings...

They need to have another one so you can be quite settled on this subject. As to what it might include, I would say nothing more content wise, but all the balance and game mechanic changes they came up with plus the crushed bugs addressed. This is their last chance to get some more telemetry on their changes before the release. Prominent feature would be them going back to the PoE 1 Might/resolve mehcanic, or if they scrapped that again, the heavily adjusted version. So if you want to have a deep look at the mechanics of PoE II, and some insight of how to play efficiently then the Beta will be for you. If it is for getting to see more content of the game before release, my guess is that you will be disappointed. Edit: Wormerine beat me to it. :D

I immediately went for Tali'Zorah in ME2 because she was obviously a reboot of Aerie from BG2. Just as you can find similarities with many other ME companions. The stories of the characters are deep, that is true, but the interaction with them is not. It all boils down to picking the flirt dialogue option. The emotional immersion, that PoE and BG achieved with textboxes, is here staged with cinematic shots, similar to a movie. Here the game really tells you what to think.

Nah, Dragon Age Origins and ME2+3 was all about the bonking. I do not know about the successors to DAO or Andromeda, but there it was all about Morrigan. Although I will give him that this was a well-written romance with an interesting character. ME 1 had few options because of the small number of companions relative to M2 and M3. For the successors it is all about romantic freedom, if that freedom means picking the hottest male/female from a flipchart. The romance thing really was priorised over deep characters and interaction with them. I mean by the third game you exactly knew what to choose if you wanted to screw. And as far as consequences go, I do not really know if companions would actually leave, but their loyalty certainly did not change. At a certain point they just swapped emotional immersion through characters (Aerie, Morrigan and the like) with drawing you in by a cinematic portrayal and rather cheap tricks to get the ultimate reward: Sex.

Athkatla. Very immersive. Yeah, in my recent playthrough of BG2 I was in awe how impressive Athkathla felt. And it was all audio work. I can still distinctly remember someone yelling "Anomen, Anomen!" in the background. At least that is what I figured and thought that guy must be really famous for his looks. :D Yeah the ambient sounds were on point in BG2 even in the landscape, where calm sounds of wildlife were the standard. I am not against ambient music, but it often tends to be too loud and makes you overhear the sound effects. It can also be very repetitive if there are only a few music pieces. So I would definitely want sliders that account for an ambient sound level, and that both sound and music can be heared.

You must have a very interesting workplace. I tell you working in the university let's you see all types of social interaction like it was played fast forward. :D In this game you are basically forced together with random dudes that you need to interact with in a very condensed timeframe. So naturally relationships do evolve faster than one would expect. I just hope they will not go along the "everybody is your best buddy"-ME way, but leave room for all the hate, bickering, romance, empathy, distrust or even total indifference to each other and the surrounding events. I think Tyranny went in a better direction than PoE which was rather shallow interaction wise. Everybody has an opinion even if that includes "I do not care." So I would like to see a deeper system in Deadfire and stuff like this can even be widened on the world. There are important characters, locations and factions all over the place, interaction could make the game more alive. On the topic of sexuality specifically, ME went the wrong route here as well, by making the ultimate goal to bonk the hottest person on the Normandy. I hope Deadfire does include more depth in their romance.

Don’t want to be too picky but “challenge after challenge” sounds like a game definition to me. Remove challenge and what you get is bunch of pointess colourful vomit on the screen. Still, sorry to hear that you don’t enjoy changes to the ruleset. I never considered the first game to be challenge after challenge, and I am sure this will be the case with Deadfire as well. Generally you could avoid situations mentioned with the basic tactical choices. The rest can be done with setting to a comfortable difficulty level. However I think frustration can happen even in a game that offers little challenge and I guess this is what he meant. A six second cast interrupted repeatedly by a ranged enemy you can not really get to or draw aggro can be defined as frustrating. This is a game mechanic issue though. I would still estimate though that it will work out similarily to the first game.

As someone said before, very wisely indeed, sexuality and love is something that is deeply rooted in everybody's life, so it would indeed be unusual not to include it. It is just the natural development from idle banter and party interactions with each other. Yet if it is not included, it is nothing people will riot about. However as everybody has a valid yet personal opinion this stuff can be tricky to pursue. I certainly do not need or want every aspect of human/dwarven/orlan etc. sexuality in my game, but I can recall the huge outcry when Siege of Dragonspear hit. If you guys remember there was a character, not even important to the storyline, who told you that she was born as a guy but was now living as a woman. Or the other way around, can not remember, but the internet went nuts over a half-sentence. Stupid. However if something similar was part of the main story, the PC or party member, and it is talked about a lot, I would object how relevant this is made out to be. And so everyone has a certain expectation and it can indeed be a hot topic. I would trather prefer a traditional approach similar to BG2 and deeper companion interaction instead of a Mass Effect or even DA:O social interaction which is solely focused around bonking the hottest piece you can find.

I thought the rest system was something new and intriguing although it had its flaws. The per encounter/rest mechanic annoyed me at times, but the health/endurance mechanic made sense to me. One has to say though that I played either on normal or hard and Eder would, at times, be at 50% health because I did not think I needed to rest. I believe I rested so little in the first part of the game that I thought I could get that achievement. With the system mostly gone, you still need some type of economy for fights, and I think it should apply to all classes, that is why I liked the old system. Just limiting the spells like BG did is just restricting certain very powerful classes, while melee could just keep on hacking away. So as long as they replace an economy with another one I am fine with it, they should just make sure they drop all the dead weight from the previous mechanic though.

Just to share a an anecdote I had with dwarfs: I used to play Lord of the Rings Online and they naturally had a larger portion of roleplaying people. So you got somewhat used to people talking in chat in character. I then went on a raid or something with a few randoms and this dwarf fellow had a really squeaky voice and I thought his Teamspeak must have been messed up until somebody told me that this guy was actually roleplaying a female dwarf. I never looked at dwarves in the same way. :D