Revan91

I remember him saying something about Kana's singing voice, but it was more a joke (or at least, a non-completely serious sentence) than an indication of him being bisexual.

Also, I don't understand how Morrigan would be a lesbian turned straight. Actually, even punks with a tattoo-filled body and a tough she-warrior don't have to be necessarily gay for whatever reasons, but I could understand the association with lesbians since they're often depicted that way in the media (short hair, tough/strong attitude, kind of masculine attributes, etc). But Morrigan, I wouldn't really consider her masculine. Wait, how is Hiravias bisexual? He frequently makes sexual jokes with most of the women he met. Have I lost something? Also, no one is arguing that there shouldn't exist gay people in these kind of fantasy games, just that they should make sense and not be made just to pander to SJW, and should be represented in somewhat realistic ways and numbers (aka, if you have six companions and four are gay/bi you're doing it wrong). I won't speak about Thedas because it's a shallow setting, but PoE draws much from real world history (see Waidwen, for example) and has a coherent setting with believable factions and characters. Having a setting where people purge other citizens just because of their deity, where people think that it's fine to kill others that have wronged you in some way and in general the mentality is, let's say, more in line with 16th century than modern times and then having its people being more open-minded than today's society about gays just because of political correctness doesn't really make much sense.

It would probably be wiser to just ignore anyone who unironically uses words such as "cishet", "cisgendered able-bodied man", "allistic" and other made-up, meaningless labels.

Cass seemed straight to me, you could even flirt with her if you were a guy. Lily was a very old woman with some kind of mental illness, I wouldn't really say she was LGBT or whatever. Lily was a physically male character who took on a female persona, so basically trans. Cass iirc admits to being bi at some point. Are you sure about Lily? She has a male body because that's the standard body-type for supermutants, I don't think there even is a female version. And I wouldn't call her trans, she's just mentally ill and is no longer sexually active and not interested in men nor women. I don't know about Cass, but I don't think you could really flirt with her if you were a female PC. Maybe I'm just misremembering, I don't know, but I never considered anyone gay aside from Arcade and Veronica in the base game. Still, the representation of non-straight party characters versus real demographics wasn't exactly realistic, but even if Cass was bi the game never even got close to BW levels of pandering, so it's fine.

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority? (Spoilers: it's none of them.) Dragon Age 2. And DA:O was 50/50. If we're only counting LOVE INTERESTS then DAO was 50/50 and DA2 was 80/20 ... but that's not what you said. There is no BioWare game in which the majority of characters you can interact with are lesbian, gay or bisexual. There are a heck of a lot of characters in Dragon Age 2 who aren't love interests, and most of the ones that have a stated preference are straight. Even a majority of the companions are heterosexual in DA2 - it's Bethany, Caver, Aveline, Varric and Sebastian vs. Anders, Fenris, Isabela and Merrill. (I guess you could count temporary companion Tallis and have it balance out at 50/50, but she's only available for one DLC.) Across the whole Dragon Age franchise - counting novels, comics and The Last Court as well as all three games - there are forty-nine LGBT characters with speaking parts, including a few that aren't important enough to have names and some that are only ambiguously gay. Given that the whole franchise has well over five hundred characters, I don't think that's disproportionate at all. (If anyone is wondering why I bothered to count them, it's because when people on the internet complain that there are too many LGBT Dragon Age characters I like to have some actual numbers to put things in perspective.) This is a thread aboout romance, we're talking about romanceable characters in BW games, not side characters whose sexual orientation is left unknown. Is the fifth LI a dlc character? I never played that and so I only know of the base games one and think those are the ones that really count, but if you want to add her to the list ok, it doesn't really change anything. And the reason why there's less homophobia than the real world is because the game is written by "progressive" designers/writers that want to pander that small part of their audience which is susceptible to these things. It has nothing to do with setting consistency. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for settings were everyone hate gays or whatever, I just don't like that sort of pandering BioWare likes to do, and I think when you want to treat these issues you should deal with them with more respect and intelligence than just making everyone bisexual and/or politically correct, which is just the easy and dumb way.

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority? (Spoilers: it's none of them.) In Dragon Age II they were all bisexual. Also, Inquisition had two gays and two bisexual. The straight characters were four, just like the non-straight (three of those were only available for females PCs, though). That's not a correct representation of sexual orientations, since more than 95% of the world population is straight. I'll also add that having a setting based on medieval Europe where people think it's ok to kill others because of their faith or social class but somehow everyone is more open-minded than contemporary real world people about being sexual orientation/identity is also ****ty fanfiction-tier writing. Cass seemed straight to me, you could even flirt with her if you were a guy. Lily was a very old woman with some kind of mental illness, I wouldn't really say she was LGBT or whatever.

Simply this. By the way, only Veronica and Arcade were gay in NV, iirc. Not exactly realistic that 33% of your human companions are non-straight but they never felt forced or made that way just for pandering reasons, as a lot of post-2010 BioWare characters. Tyranny with its cast of all-bisexual people was much worse, and it didn't help the fact that the writing itself was definetely less than stellar. In the first game both Maneha and Iselmyr were gay and that was before they announced romances. Maneha was also quite a weak character imo, although that has nothing to do with her being gay (but the banter with Kana in which she say she doesn't want to be his wing-man was pure cringe, and definetely out of place in a 16th century-inspired setting). I never found anything suggesting Iselmyr was gay, though.

WTF even is a cisgendered able-bodied man? I guess you are one of those people who likes to create new labels for every meaningless thing. I'm sorry they closed the BioWare forums, but I'm sure you can find what you want in their FB fanpage and in their terrible games and romances.

Update isn't bad: deeper companions relationships is a good thing and that's what they promised. Luckily Josh isn't really a romance-supporter, so we should be save from BioWare-style retarded romances in this game and their checkbox approach to them (an option for everyone, yay! even if it makes no sense whatsoever in the setting/game, who cares about consistency aniway).

Enhancing reactivity doesn't ruin your single playthrough, it just enhances the experience of others that are willing to play the game more than once and are able to get a somewhat different experience. PoE's reactivity wasn't really great, improving on the sequel is only fair.

The megadungeon in PoE ended up being too big for its own good. If it had like five levels instead of 15 it would've been a lot better, some floors just had very little going on for them and were only filled with trash mobs. Durgan's Battery in TWM was definetely better. Hopefully (and it seems one of their goals, as they've stated in some interviews) they'll also focus on open areas that can be completed with multiple approaches, like Raedric's Hold and the Abbey in TWM2. Those were very nice.

While I think mages and other vancian casters could've used some fixes, getting rid of the vancian magic system entirely doesn't seem the correct way to approach the problem. Maybe they could've got more per encounter abilities and the like, while still keeping per rest spells. As I said in another thread, PoE 3.0 was pretty good. Don't change something that already works, Josh/Obsidian.

How can people have problem understanding the health/stamina bars? It's pretty easy to figure out how it works. To Josh and Obsidian: don't change something that works. You spent more than a year patching and balancing PoE and the end result in 3.0 was great. Let's start from there, instead of changing the health/stamina systems, the vancian casting and other things.

Hopefully, Tyranny will have little to no influence over PoE2, aside from wiki-style hyperlinks in conversations. Cooldowns have no place in PoE, area design was terrible with very small maps filled only with monsters to kill and NPCs to talk to (nothing even remotely resembling Raedric's Castle or the Abbey in TWM2 design-wise), combat was bad systems-wise and encounter design even worse, with basically the same enemies to kill through the entire game.

If they do a DLC/expansion for PoE2 as well I hope they place it after the ending MotB-style. Having to load an older save to go on new adventures and then refinishing the game to have the "true ending" that takes into account all the new stuff (but you still have to kill the same enemies and view the same content you already played through) is kinda meh.

Yup. It's pretty much like in the concept art piece posted by Suen.

I guess still excited and full of regret? From the kickstarter: People REALLY wished to see the feet of the statue. Yeah, they probably regretted adding so many levels themselves, but they should've realised during the KS campaign that it was too much and commit to do something less enourmous. The dungeon would've been much better if it had 5 well-designed levels instead of what we got.

Josh Sawyer, playing Tolkien... This is the very reason Pillars of Eternity (PoE) was such a disappointment. And here we go again. I was extremely disappointed with PoE solely due to this reason. Rather than an RPG, which was supposed to be a spiritual successor to IE games, we were given a semi-Welsh, semi-English history of lamelands to read. Everything including the combat, areas, NPC's (bar Durance, Mother and maybe Eder) was incredibly dull, comparing those lifeless cities to the cities in BG2 is just painful. I was expecting Avellone to step in and clean up this mess, exactly like he did with Neverwinter Nights 2. Remember the kalach-cha, vanilla NWN2, that is Sawyer right there with Avellone saving the merchandise in MotB. Now that he left Obsidian, it seems like we are stuck with this. I will not be so cruel, PoE was OK, but only that. Thousands of people did not donate money so that Josh Sawyer could play Tolkien. Instead of coming up with better story writing, fixing issues with the combat and talent system, and focusing on ambience, someone is working on his runes. Amazing! I am not impressed. At least learn something from Tyranny! Tyranny felt quite experimental and incomplete, yet I would take it over PoE any day. Yeah sure, you're completely right! Except JES worked on NWN2 only in its later stage of production and therefore had very little to do with it, and MCA only wrote two companions in MotB while the story was made by Ziets. You're one of the many people who think MCA did all the good things that worked on Obsidian game and Sawyer is responsible for everything that went wrong, which is not only wrong but also disrespectful to the plenty other designers that worked on their games and helped shaped them. Avellone had a key role in Torment, KotOR II, Alpha Protocol and the New Vegas dlcs (except Honest Hearts), of which P:T was terrific and KotOR II could've been a masterpiece if it was finished, but other people like Gonzalez, Ziets, Saunders, Fenstermaker, Stout and others had bigger roles on the other Obsidian games. Beyond that, I do think that the focus on balancing everything for more than 1.5 years was probably too much (3.0 is better than the base game, but after that patching the game to change a 0.x % damage of some skill and other stuff was excessive) and some of the language stuff was weird. Then again many of the things you're criticizing in PoE were developed by other designers, not Sawyer (he's mainly responsible for the systems and the setting, iirc). PoE was good imho, although BG2 is obviously the better game, and the sequel team should definetely try to improve on the reactivity, the companions (I liked most of their personalities/backgrounds but they were not developed enough, extremely unreactive to your actions and had little interaction with each other, the player and the NPCs), the encounter design, since PoE had too many trash mobs. The White March was a step in the right direction: area and encounter design was better, the dungeon (Durgan's Battery) was superior to the boring Od Nua's endless levels (15 levels, wtf where they thinking?) and the writing was good, so I'm hopeful for the sequel.

PoE is superior in basically every way, especially after the patches and the expansion. Tyranny's gameplay, ui, encounter and area design are just way weaker than PoE's. The world's background is fairly interesting and reactivity is better than Eternity (though not as good as AP or NV), but that doesn't make up for the incredibly small maps with nothing to do besides killing enemies, combat which is the dumbed down version of PoE, with less companions, no friendly fire, cooldowns but it's still more chaotic and confusing and also it poses no challenge to the player since it's just too easy (at least at Hard), you face the same groups of enemies for the entirety of the game with almost no variance whatsoever and it gets annoying soon, and Act 2 is a goddamned slog (Act 3 only starts with interesting premises again but after one hour you've finished the game). Also, from the game marketed as the one where "evil won" I expected something more impressive in that regard and less politically correct bullsh1t. Kyros' laws promote equality between genders, races, give the same opportunities to the rich and the poor... it doesn't make sense in a supposedly evil faction, even without considering the fact that the game was supposed to take place in a Bronze Age inspired setting and not in a 21th century inspired one. In the end, the Bronze Age inspiration turned out in having javelins as a weapon, everything else has nothing to do with Ancient Greece or whatever they claimed was their source for the game, and in fact the Tiers' population has the mindset of 20/21th century americans in many aspects of their lives, which doesn't make sense. Pillars on the other hand had a lot darker setting, with real nasty things going on such as the Waidwen's Legacy, the controversity surrounding animancy, the Purges against Eothas' followers, racism and hatred against orlans, Glanfathan, outsiders, and a lot of other things that made the world felt more grounded, real and believable.

Considering the questions in this survey, they're also obviously considering doing a Pathfinder RPG as well. I'm kinda neutral to it because I don't know Pathfinder and never played it and would be interested only because of Obsidian's name, but frankly I'd rather have them exploring other settings than yet another generic high fantasy. I mean, it might be good and enjoyable (Forgotten Realms are as dull and generic as it gets and still BG2, Mask of the Betrayer and other titles were great, although no thanks to FR), but I would like to see Sawyer's historical project and maybe some modern/contemporary settings or a sci-fi first, something a bit more unusual at least when it comes to RPGs.

God no, that would be terrible. I didn't backed PoE to see them doing a console port, inXile is behaving like **** and has lost its credibility in the meantime, Obsidian should be wiser. Regardless, there's nothing good to come out of a console port, only the potential for bad things to happen. Also, Obsidian games are RTwP which is more difficult (and ****tier) to play without mouse and keyboard than TB gameplay, which already sucks with a gamepad. And last but not least, the market on console for these kind of games is small: Larian with D:OS has been the most successful rpg of this kind to come out recently and has stated that its game sold more than 1.5 mil overall, of those 1.1 m were sold on Steam and I guess they sold another 100k at least on GOG and other digital resellers, leaving both consoles combined at about 300k or 400k at best (1/4 of the PC version alone).

Damn, that would be depressing. Hopefully, though, MCA will start something of his own and work as a lead designer on something, instead of the minor things he's doing right now. And Fenstermaker will keep working with Obsidian, or, if he has indeed left the studio, he will continue to work on some proper rpgs, not Bethesda, BioWare or those kind of companies.

https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/782827626012418048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Avellone has just tweeted that Fenstermaker may have left Obsidian, is that true? Whatever people think about PoE's plot, I think he's a solid narrative designer, so it would be sad it that turn out to be true. Also, who would take his place as PoE2's lead narrative designer? Can any developer shed some light over this matter?

I don't really think there's the need to include more silly characters. The tone of PoE never bothered me and it was right in the context of the Hollowborn curse and the difficulties faced by the people of the Dyrwood. Times were bad for a lot of folks, so it would've been weird to have many NPCs act in funny ways. Sure, some funny moments are good and don't necessarily ruin the game or its more serious tone (see The Witchers, that managed to mix good humuor and funny parts with the darker atmosphere that permeates the world), but I don't want too much sillyness in Obsidian's games. Also, Maneha was probably the most silly character in PoE and she was hardly a fan favorite, while Durance was one of the most loved (alongside Eder who has some funny lines and is not totally serious but has a serious and somewhat tragic background and questline). Other than that, Josh seems to have focused on the right things in his slides and I agree with most of his points, so PoE2 should shape up very nicely. I hope his talk will be available soon, should be interesting.

The game is releasing in early 2017 (unless they delay it again), the deal with Techland was only signed like two months ago. If the idea of the porting was started by Techland, then it would mean that they'll port the game in less than a year, while also finishing to polish the game, adding the last quests and contents, working on the beta, etc. It doesn't seem likely to me, they probably begin with the port earlier and are saying it's done with Techland's money to calm down the backers who don't like this move because they wanted a CRPG. Also, this porting will affect the PC version of the game, if only because their will to release the game simultaneously on PC and consoles is probably the cause of the last couple delays: if the console port is ready in early 2017 and they started working on it only recently, then the PC version would definetely be ready even sooner, maybe even now. Besides, it will affect the UI (WL2 had a different UI in its DC version) and some other minor tweaks here and there, if we're lucky (but the point is, even if it doesn't affect the PC version at all, it doesn't add anything to it either, so it's waste of their resources that doesn't benefit backers in any way). Also, console gamers usually don't like very complex games (tbh, a lot of PC gamers don't like them as well, but there is more market for those games on the PC), and by complexity I mean the systems and combat but also the quest and world design (quest compass, easy solutions to every problem, no "punishments" for making bad choices), so if they want the game to be successful on console they need to take that into account of course.