Luckmann

I always assumed that like many rural villages, what we see in-game is only the city centre, while there are cottages around the woods and houses along the roads that we simply don't get to see, all which are formally belonging to the municipality/town/whatevertheycallithere of Dyrford. Also, there's a bridge there, it's a crossing, which might be enough to warrant it being marked on a map.

That's what she said. Actually I'm the opposite, I'm hoping it's going to be more like BG where (although there way ways around this) you had to pick up NPCs, all with their own personality and story. This was one of the reasons I didn't like IWD, as you had to create your whole party (and there was no inter-party interaction) - it takes me long enough to decide how I want my main PC to be, never mind 6! Is Pillars of Eternity going to be more like BG in this regard? Sorry, I haven't been reading the Dev diaries, if this has already been stated It is "both"; there's (a measly) 8 CNPC:s that you can recruit as you travel, or you can choose to create soulless automatons at the Adventurer's Hall in exchange for gold. I think the intent is to have it be more like BG1 than IWD/2, with the Adventurer's Hall there to placate those that want to create their own full group and act as an excuse whenever someone brings up the fact that there's only 8 CNPC:s in the entire game and virtually no wiggle room for roleplay in terms of party makeup.

Why? There's a million of them on the internet already. Use some of those. We need more portraits of the unique races. I waiting for the second Aumaua female portrait, and first Wild Orlan portrait. I don't think we need female elf number 6972. Because those millions of elven portraits on the internet doesn't fit the art style of PoE. I'm not a fan of elves overall, but people playing them has as much of a right to get a good portrait that fits into the game as I have to get a dongheadless deathlike portrait. With that kind of argument I could just as well tell you to just take a picture of a persian cat and superimpose over a generic halfling portrait. Boom, wild orlan! What are you complaining about, it's soooo easy to make a wild orlan portrait. Looks terrible. Doesn't fit the art style and style of PoE. Usable as a cop-out for shirking out on quality portraits. Takes time to implement and test. How about no?

And let's just try to forget the mess that was BG2.

What consolization? From what I have seen, this game's stealth system is far more complex than that of the IE games. They could have simply had a dice roll determine whether you were invisible like in the old games, but instead they made a stealth system that takes into account how close you are to the enemy, how much you move and how many people are sneaking. And that breaks for the entire party as soon as you enter combat, no ifs, buts or whys. Aside from scouting (which I've praised PoE for actually making relevant for the first time since forever) stealth is tactically useless, and to even make use of it, you practically have to fight the system to do things that should be completely reasonable. Unfortunately, "fight the system to enjoy the game" isn't that uncommon in PoE so far (Issues with Engagement, "Combat Only" abilities, Party No-Combat Stealth, etc). Yeah, you can't do that in PoE, either. So it's not really tactical deployment of stealther characters and so on, but also teamwork between scouter/ranged. In BG2 at this very moment (Spellhold in the background, hoooo!) I quite often sneak up with my Assassin, mage initiate with abilities, the enemies scramble, my assassin runs to the side to avoid the attacking enemies, and as the free-for-all melee starts, he creeps up behind the opponents and start giving out Colombian neck ties. I was with you up until you said "refactoring"... but either way, that's actually honey for my ears. It won't save the initial impression of the game (during which I'll be playing a stealther, no less) but it's still nice to hear.

Honestly, I didn't even realize that those were supposed to be Aumaua until just this second. I've harped on the importance of a seamless consistent art style before, and I can't stress enough what a huge difference it makes. If my portrait doesn't fit in next to the CNPC:s, I'm going to end up clawing my eyes out.

I really cannot imagine that the loading screen images have that big of an impact on loading, no matter the rig, provided you meet the minimum system reqs. I would very much prefer it if the game used the high-res uncompressed (or at least least-compressed) versions, or at least came with the option to turn them on. Just throw them in with the rest of the files, at least, so that even if you can't make a neat little button in the Options menu saying "Activate Space-Age Loading Screen Wizardry: Warning, Gargantuan Increase in Loading Screen TIme", we can simply flick something small in the game files to fix it. Please? D: I'm by no means a graphics whore, but I am really bothered by things that aren't as good as they can be, or where. I have a much easier time putting up with games that are actually terrible, than I have with games that are flawed but with good fundamentals. And oh boy is PoE giving me an ulcer sometimes. Just because it's "just a loading screen", doesn't mean it shouldn't aspire to be the best little loading screen that could, the best darn loading screen it can be. If it's "just a loading screen", people won't mind the fraction of a split second it'd add to load this up on their toasters, and I wouldn't have to casually sip pepto through a straw.

So... Resolve dump stat 2015?

Unless they're going to try for that backwards compatibility thing I've always wanted, that'll never ever fix PoE. At this rate, we should be happy if PoE2 doesn't pull a Dragon Age 2.

Wow, that's absolutely, 100% terrible on so many levels. Seriously Obsidian, what the hell? Playing a rogue in Baldur's Gate 2 (specifically an Assassin) it's harrowing to consider Party Stealth/Combat Unstealthing in PoE and it's adverse effects on tactical stealthing and deployment. The number of times I find myself and my rogues holding off joining combat just so we can set up an ambush or line up a backstab to initiate combat is beyond count by now, and not being able to do it in PoE is going to feel awkward as all hell. I'm starting to understand why there's no rogue CNPC in the game - they're just keeping their fingers crossed as few as possible are going to play rogues or have rogues in their groups. Silly people, expecting rogues to behave roguelike.

And still, we see oddly console-ish changes like party stealth. I wonder if there's such a thing as symptomatic consolization. People have become so into the aspect of dumbing things down for consoles that it comes naturally to restrict function rather than expand on it.

Awwww.

The list of maps in the game code says 170 maps in total. There are 13 Wilderness Areas That's actually way more than I expected. By that do you mean 13 overland Wilderness Areas or is it just areas tagged as "Wilderness" in some capacity, including caves?

Dexterity and Perception are so broken (for different reasons) that any discussion on attributes in the current build is purely academic, philosophic and conceptual at best. I'm not sure I like it anyway, but that's part of the problem, isn't it? I can't actually know that for certain.

I love that chanters were recognized as being very well-balanced and fun to play, and were nerfed into the ground, and monks were widely recognized as being wildly overpowered, yet were (mostly? completely?) untouched. On a power scale, I'd definitely rate Rangers lowest whilst Rogues are almost right there with them. In terms of mechanics, I still feel that the Paladin needs a lot of work, while many (most?) others primarily needs tweaking, sans perhaps the Ranger.

Afaik, no, you can't talk to your party-members outside of interjections and so on, and obviously that doesn't apply to the Backer Beta NPC:s, because those are essentially faceless, soulless, shallow Adventurer Mart Hall automatons created for the purpose of testing the game. I expect it to be pretty much the same with the recruitable CNPC:s, except that they have character. More BG2 than PS:T in terms of PC-CNPC interaction(s).

I disagree. I really like the idea of starting up the game and going through character creation with this. Now, to be sure, this requires that the game actually keeps playing this when going from the starting menu to character creation, which I just realized it may not, but I much prefer it to the ear-grating bombastic nature of the BG2 theme that hits you when booting up. I'd rather have something nice to listen to that lulls me into the game during my initial forays into the game, and then stays calmly out of the way when I feel like I'm just in a hurry to load my game or whatever.

Just to be clear here, when you say 110 or 150 maps, are we talking individual maps, or locations? Because BG2 re-used a lot of maps (mostly houses and such) for a large number of locations, and I'm not sure if PoE does or not, but the distinction is important, I think. 150 maps or so sounds huge to me. Just for reference, does anyone know the individual map count for BG2? Preferably not counting ToB, because that's just cheating. Really, we should probably compare with BG1, actually, because if sequels to PoE are mechanically and artistically consistent, I could see a lot of maps re-used. I always thought it was odd that the IE games were happy to re-use maps (both straight copy-paste and as blueprints) inside of a game, but never really pulled on assets between games. But... uh.. I'm rambling. What I wanted to say was good job! :3

Hearing about the "mysterious hoodie" portraits makes me sad, because godlikes can't wear hoods or helmets. D: I'd love to be a hooded deathlike.

Super disappointed to hear the class is crippled. I loved that you could have a bard-like character that could stand at the front and still be effective. Made for a really interesting melee option. I don't understand what the point is of obsidian stressing build diversity and playing classes anyway you want and then turn around and cripple a class, making it worthless to try and play certain ways. Sawyer is an extremely conservative person, and it has affected the development of the game throughout. PoE was built very restrictively rather than openly, mostly as a way to curtail ways to play the game "wrong". Combat Only abilities to prevent abuse and ease programming, Engagement to prevent movement and player battlefield control, no area transition in combat to prevent you from abusing it even though you could have legitimate reasons to attempt to flee, etc. It's only natural that the approach is to nerf the powerful rather than buff the weak. The chanter really was the sweet spot other classes should aspire to, but it's no surprise it was toned down for that very reason.

I'd like a male deathlike that doesn't look like a donghead.

So would making console versions of the game. I suspect you don't actually understand what Obsidian is trying to do here. Okay, let's move it back a bit. Not going for consolization has nothing to do with not wanting "these type of players". Let's not imply Obsidian doesn't want it to have appeal past the target audience. Unfortunately. If you're going to graphics-whore, let's at least be honest about it and not cherry-pick the worst pictures from builds that doesn't even exist any more. It's funny because Stun asked you if you had actually played the beta; you completely ignore the question and pull out an outdated imagecrop from ... Orcs.com (?) ... and "argue" around it. What utter nonsense.

It's just not that beneficial to buff outside of combat in PoE anyway. Even under the best of circumstances, it gives you a momentary boost while eating up the same amount of Per Day abilities anyway, at the added cost of expending the time of your quite limited buffs. There is simply no reason for "Combat Only" to exist in regards to buffing, it's a non-argument. The only real argument I've seen so far (not raised in this thread) is that the Cipher supposedly has/had a power (the name escapes me at the moment) that charmed enemies, and it could be abused in such a way that the Cipher initiated combat by charming an opponent, and then the other opponents swarmed it and ignored the Cipher, so the Cipher could just stand there well away from the others and laugh, using enemies to tank eachother from the get-go. But if that's the argument brought forth, I'd like to ask why the hell they don't make the AI smarter than that. They should aggro you from beyond the fog of war and hesitate to hit their own people to begin with. The average opponent's propensity for violence against one of their own that had been charmed always struck me as hilarious(ly bad) in the IE games already, so fix that quick-like, instead.

Well now you actually have to attack the enemy animal companion now, and they're not really that tough either. When your companion (or vice versa) goes down you get like -20 to Accuracy so if you're a low level character you're basically dead weight. I have not played extensively with the Ranger yet but they still seem like the flat out worst class. The ability progression table has been improved though. Still sounds better than what we had before. Also that is a good idea to fix people not caring if your party members go down or not. Party should receive a -5 accuracy Morale penalty per each party member down. That's actually not that bad of an idea. A -5 Morale Penalty that affected a range of things (not just necessarily Accuracy, imo) would utterly murder the whole "I'm just going to let him pass out, instead of keeping him up" issue.

Which game file? I've got the v392 version still floating around the hard drive, so we could do a side-by-side comparison.