Althernai

I've just tried deleting all save files not from the last day or two (after copying them to an unrelated directory, of course) and it makes no difference for loading or area transitions. It might speed up saving just a little bit (hard to tell since it's relatively quick in the first place). The only place where it makes a notable impact is in the time it takes for the "Continue" button to become available when first loading the game. I have something similar to that. I just wrote a quick app that loads a file into RAM and times it. Loading the largest assetbundle (~304mb) takes about 0.17 seconds. Whatever the problem is I'm pretty sure your storage device ain't the bottleneck. Right -- the storage is not the bottleneck, the game is doing something else... but I don't understand what. The CPU can't be the bottleneck either: mine is not the fastest, but it is not five times slower than the best ones out there so even if it is running some compression, it shouldn't be so slow.

If that is the case, then I'm pretty sure it's a bug. Here are my specs: Crucial MX100 512GB (SSD) Core i7-2720QM (2.2 GHz) Radeon 6770M 8 GB RAM Windows 7 64-bit The save file is around 3MB in size. I timed it and it takes around 15 seconds to load and around 5 seconds to save. Area transitions likewise take around 15 seconds. Unless it is doing some heavy compression/decompression under the hood, I don't understand what can be taking so long. Also, if I click through the opening screens on startup, it takes around 3 seconds merely to load the list of saves. The SSD is operating properly in all other contexts (e.g. a cold boot of Windows takes about the same time as loading a PoE game, maybe even a little less) so I think there is something wrong here.

First, there is a well-known conflict of interest involving the bigger review sites and big publishers: the revenue of the review sites comes mainly from the advertisement of games... and the people most likely to pay serious money for such advertisement are the big publishers. Thus, if you want to know why Mediocre AAA Game X got 9/10, well, this is by far the most likely reason (despite the very loud protestations to the contrary). If you really want a mainstream opinion on a big-budget game, you are much better off with a mainstream magazine. For example, the best published analysis of Mass Effect 3 that I've seen came from, surprisingly enough, Forbes. Second, the PoE review on Gamespot is actually pretty reasonable. In fact, if you think about it, the surprising thing is that PoE did so well among reviewers that this 8/10 is on the lower side of the spectrum because the game deliberately did without or downplayed many things that the reviewers usually focus on. You won't find the latest 3D graphics here. The voice acting is sporadic and the amount of text to read is truly massive. The combat requires micromanagement, pausing and understanding a fairly complex rule system (one that doesn't revolve around "aggro"). It's basically the antithesis of everything that has become the norm in the past decade. "Homage" is actually a kind way to put it, I would have have gone with "throwback" or "atavism". Of course, we (the backers) explicitly asked for these things and we more or less got what we wanted, but it's rather weird (in a good way) that most of the media is so pleased with it.

Off the top of my head, there are at least two obvious exploits. The first is the trick I mentioned above: the fighter stands in a position that's not quite blocking the choke point, but from which he can easily do so when the enemies come close enough. This is actually quite generic. The second is that one character in heavy armor blocks the door while the rest of the party engages the enemy (who by your logic are now obliged to use ranged weapons) in melee. You can of course try to refine the algorithm (at the very least check whether the rest are on the near or far side of the fighter blocking the door), but there will always be exploits. As I said, it's a difficult computational problem.

I think you are asking a bit more of the AI than any AI is currently capable of. Chokepoints and the closely related pathfinding are things that are very easy for a human being to understand, but are actually very difficult to program. Think about how you would algorithmically describe a chokepoint. What would you do if the fighter holding it moves forward just a little bit? From the perspective of the pathfinding algorithms, the enemy now has an unimpeded path at the "soft" targets behind... but of course the moment they come into weapon range for the casters and archers, the fighter can just move back. It's a really difficult problem. The game does try a variety of tricks (ranged attacks, AoE spells, teleportation, etc.) to get at the people behind the tank, but since you can do most of the same (except maybe teleportation) and you do it better, it's not that effective. The one thing I haven't seen so far was an attempt at a "fortress" type setup with ranged enemies stuck (so they can't come at you) in a place that is not easily reachable by melee, but again, most people will simply beat them at the ranged games just as easily.

Yes, that size is consistent with the hotfix. It's big because Steam simply replaces all modified files.

Really? I had three options and I chose the one that said something like "Wael is the god of obscuring as well as revealing. Do you really think this is strange?" and she believed me (with Honest 1 and Deceptive 1, in case that matters).

This is not really specific to Wizards -- Druids and Priest share the exact same mechanic (and they don't suffer from only having 4 spells available at a time).

Kolsc is not inside the keep, he's the guy in Guilded Vale who first gives you the quest to take out Raedric. Did you go to the Hold before getting the quest? Also, at the point when you meet him, Raedric is some mix of paranoid and psychotic so it's not necessarily a plot hole that he assumes you've met with Kolsc.

I think this thread would have made a lot more sense if instead of focusing on Fan of Flames (which is actually a reasonable spell given that it's cone like and does nothing but damage), the question was framed as "Why are the single target, pure damage spells so weak?" They don't really have much of a benefit beyond being single target and occasionally having a decent range. For example, consider the Magic Missile wannabe at level 1: it has 3 missiles each doing 14-26 Crush damage (base), but it attacks Deflection (good luck with that) and DR is applied separately to each of the three instances. You can try to use it to interrupt a spellcaster (realistically, that's the only enemy type that will take any serious damage from it anyway), but honestly, it's way too specific a usage to be worth the grimoire slot.

It's not much of a spoiler anyway since much of the loot is random. I found a magic cloak in that location instead.

You can't afford to buy every item you see in the shops, but you're not poor. I'm currently in Act 2 and I have something like 26,000. Note that this is without selling any "blue" items and I have more than one stash page of them. I suspect if I sold all of them, I'd have twice as much, but I don't feel the need to just yet.

First, it's not 99% of situations. If enemies have mingled with your group or your tank is holding them at a choke point, FoF is usually not the way to go and this happens quite often. Second, yes, the single target, pure damage Wizard spells are pretty bad. I'm not sure what the reasoning behind this was; I guess they just don't want you to play a Wizard that way.

I guess you need Grieving Mother or a Cipher PC to get the best resolution? I didn't have either so I had Aelys sent to the Sanitarium. This is my least favorite quest in the game so far -- the Skaen temple is a long and brutal slog and there appears to be no way to truly save the girl in the party configuration that I had. Also, I think I screwed up the order: I picked the lock on the Skull Key door and so only found the note from the tanner much later. Then, when I came out in the back of his shop, he attacked me and I had to kill him (which was actually the best part of the quest... that lying scum so had it coming). Oh well, I'll do it right on a replay.

Yeah, you have to scroll way, way up on that blank, empty map before you see something. I don't understand why they did it that way -- it would have been a lot more logical to start all the way at the top than all the way at the bottom.

Wait, what? They said that thay didn't took a dime from Paradox. Are you saying that was another lie? Obsidian look worse and worse every day now. You are conflating statements regarding two different situations it a way that leads you to an erroneous conclusion: $1M/month is for Obsidian as a whole whereas $4M is for PoE alone. PoE is not the only game Obsidian is working on; at the very least, there is also Armored Warfare and the Pathfinder card game. Thus, they are necessarily spending more money than the $4M obtained through Kickstarter for PoE. I believe that due to the delay, the cost of PoE did exceed the Kickstarter funds, but not by much (probably something of order $1M) and Obsidian paid it out of their general budget. Note that even with this excess, the cost of PoE is an order of magnitude less than AAA games.

In my experience, you only need to Scout 100% of the time in dungeons and that's mainly because they have traps (which somehow insta-knockout even a very high Endurance character). In the wilderness and in towns, the hidden items are usually near something out of place (e.g. a campsite in the forest), though it might still help to Scout if you are expecting enemies. Also, those items are usually nothing special -- the most common useful one is a Camp Supply and the most common expensive one is a random Fine weapon or something of the sort.

I've also noticed this. It doesn't appear to do any harm, but is quite strange.

They make huge games with complex rule systems. This combination makes their games virtually impossible to fully validate before the release. It's not specific to Obsidian: if you look at, say Bioware and the Baldur's Gate series, there was plenty of broken quests and item glitches there too. In fact, IIRC, even after all of the patches, there was a mod called Baldurdash or something like that which fixed a slew of bugs that Bioware didn't consider important enough to bother with.

You don't get any XP from killing enemies per se, you get it from updating the bestiary. This means that once you have killed some number of wolves, killing more won't give you any XP (but each sub-type has its own bestiary entry so Young Wolf and Wolf are different).

This is not Obsidian -- it's Steam. I just downloaded 1.03 from GOG and it's only 83MB whereas the Steam version (of the patch, not the hotfix) was over 800MB. The upside of Steam is that you get your patches faster. The downside is that the downloads are huge because they're not taking the time to package and test a diff-only version.

It does a good job of presenting the facts, but it is extremely biased starting from the very title. There is one thing in this situation that I find to be really heartening: when given all of the facts, an overwhelming majority stands against the bullies of Twitter. This is true both in the relatively open comments section of PC gamer and in the restricted Kickstarter comments area (where you can only post if you backed the game years ago). I tried counting the unique perspectives in the latter and while there are some people who support the decision to change the poem, they are significantly outnumbered (something like 2:1 or maybe even 3:1) by those who are disappointed. The reaction to PC gamer's biased article is likewise mostly negative (though here it is harder to say how many of those names are unique). Let the bullies of Twitter have their Pyrrhic victory -- the main thing they have accomplished is expose just how vile and petty they are and demonstrate how few people actually support them. Also, now that everybody knows the context, the new poem is funnier than the old one. As a completely unrelated bonus, it also has better scansion.

Fan of Flames is your best spell (particularly if you've already installed patch 1.03 which nerfs the other two decent level 1 spells). Aloth should have it and if you do not, copy it from his grimoire (it only costs 100 pands). If you follow the main plotline just a little bit further, you should be able to pick up a Fighter NPC who will make your life a great deal easier.

To be clear, it got as much as BG2 EE which was a re-release of BG2 many years after the original. The original BG2 sold over a million copies in the initial run and more than 2 million altogether. Still, if those are the figures for PoE after the first week, then it's doing pretty well.

I like the XP system. In the IE games, if the goal of a quest was to retrieve an item from a dungeon, you could, in principle, sneak most (or even all) the way through the dungeon, take the item and leave... but this was a suboptimal way to play because killing every enemy gave you XP whereas sneaking did not. In fact, if you wanted to get all of the XP, the way to play was to kill anything with a red circle and then some. I've played games before which tried to avoid this by not giving any at all XP for combat, but that was also somewhat unsatisfying. PoE's beastiary system strikes a good balance.