MReed

Based on what the game offers you, it seems likely that they all (or > 95%) /did/ all die to create the gods. Assuming that there were some survivors, they either deliberately did not reproduce and allowed themselves to die naturally (to preserve the secret of the gods origins) or bred with non-Engwithan's and didn't pass on the knowledge / culture / etc. to their children, which has the same effect.

There were numerous discussions in the past about "Eliminating combat XP will cause players to actively avoid all combat due to lack of rewards" and... That didn't happen, obviously.

Because the character's class and background tie in with their background story -- Durance's story wouldn't make any sense if he wasn't a priest, for example. There is a valid argument to be made for having all companions start at level 1 (but with enough XP to level up immediately to the correct level), but allowing the player to chose a different class / race combination would definitely break the story.

Yeah, there are a (fairly few) examples of combats where your custom formation is ignored in favor of using one of the standard formations (normally, the "two man abreast" style, in the order that the portraits appear at the bottom left). The most obvious example of this is the "Keep Defense" fights. The good news is that PoE does this alot less often than other games -- but it is still very annoying each and every time it happens. Note that this is totally different from an ambush scenario: if you are ambushed by teleporting enemies, then yes, enemies may appear on all sides creating a difficult tactical problem, and that's OK. My complaint (and I assume the OPs as well) is when the party is repositioned automatically to make a cutscene "look good", followed by automatically initiating combat at the end of the cutscene.

Yeah, that's how it would've worked in IE games (aside from IWD2, or has my memory totally abandoned me?), but why in the name of Eothas would they give you a soloing XP bonus in that case? I'm pretty sure that the displayed award is divided by 6 regardless of how many people are in the party. That's the amount of XP that is awarded to each character, plus the XP bonus (+10% / character less than 6). So, if a quest awards 1200 xp, then the nominal award / character is 200 XP(1200/6). If there is only one character in the party at that time, then that character gets a 50% XP bonus, for a total of 300 XP. If there were 3 characters in the party, the XP bonus would be 30%, so each would get 260 XP, an so forth. In the Infinity Engine games (with a 1200 XP award), the solo character would get 1200 XP, a party of 3 would get 400 XP (each), and a party of 6 would get 200 XP (each). Major quest awards in the IE games awarded XP on an explicitly per character basis -- in that scenario, you would get multiple "XXXX has received YYY XP" lines, and in these situations the solo player would get 1/6th the XP as a person playing with a full party. Note that I haven't actually tested it in the game, but I'm fairly confident that this is how it works. The goal of this system is, I assume, to slow the progression of solo players in order to increase difficulty and reduce the amount of time that the player spends at maximum level.

Well, you could just not turn them in (or reject the quest in the first place).... Note that this isn't a critical path quest -- you can still advance in the game if you don't help the Crucible Knights.

You obviously weren't reading the NWN forums when the game came out, then -- there were absolute howls of protests about this back in the day. And this came up during the Kickstarter process, when the developers were at pain to tell everyone there would be no point in the game where a player that wished to play solo would be required to have a companion (for critical path quests only, of course). On the topic of the OP -- my fundamental issue is that I never really connected with any of the problems that the companions needed were trying to resolve, with the partial exception of Grieving Mother (but that character's quest ties more closely with the main quest than do any of the others). Generally, I felt that the companions had far too few interjections in side quests -- had they spoken up with their feelings on some of the decisions that you can make, it would go a /long/ way towards making them feel "real" to me.

Deceptive 2 looks to be the cut-off then -- if you have deceptive 2, then your honesty rep doesn't matter, she won't believe you. For those playing without tags, this an example of a reactive response -- the [Deceptive: 2] indicator appears in the response text, not the choice text.

I played the bulk of the side content, using only the supplied NPCs, added in the order that you are expected to add them, and I hit the cap just about the time that I hit the "point of no return" (around an hour before). I /didn't/ do any of the bounties quests, though, nor did I do any of the Dozens quests (in Act II). It seems about right to me -- I suspect that the bounties are the major source of people complaining about to much XP. The solution is obvious -- the bounties shouldn't award XP.... Joking, just joking, gee...

I'm pretty sure you can't get Grieving Mother without starting Act II either. But yeah, I agree -- there are a number of continuity errors revolving around companions, especially in regards to player initiated conversations.

Actually, since he can't access his account page (because he has forgotten his password and no longer has access to the original e-mail address) that would be a problem... However, an e-mail to support@obsidian.net would likely do the trick as well.

Assuming that you are entitled to a key (almost certainly the case), then yeah, you should open a support ticket -- all game keys for all platforms should be available at this point. I'd review the sticky message at the top of the forums to ensure that you are following the correct procedure to claim your key first, just to be on the safe side.

That's a neat page -- thanks for linking to it, Sensuki. And I'm glad to PoE /finally/ break into the top 10.

I would assume because he hasn't requested it -- as far as I know, the only way to get the Kickstarter badge is to post a request in the appropriate thread.

To further clarify -- even with perma-death turned on, characters still have health and stamina and they still drain at the same rate (varies by class between -1 health / -4 stamina to -1 / -7 -- the wiki has the correct numbers). When stamina hits zero, the character is down for the remainder of that combat, but will get back up at the end, with full stamina. Therefore, if no stamina recovery ability / items are used, a fully healed character will need to "die" at least 5 times before they die for real (4 times to exhaust health, plus 1 additional time with the "Maimed" status). If you don't have perma-death turned on, it works the same way, except that the character won't die for real if they hit zero health while maimed.

Very nice -- and I had no clue that the situation in Obsidian was quite that grim at the time of the Kickstarter. There is a big difference between "Well, we are looking at having to layoff bunches of folks due to lack of projects in the pipeline, so why don't we give Kickstarter a shot" (which I thought was the situation) and "Well, we can do a Kickstarter or we can close up shop".

Actually, if you did that you wouldn't have collision detection (you would be able to walk anywhere on the map, including through walls and ceilings). But that's a fairly easy problem to solve, even in a 2D drawing program, and any 3D authoring tool that has been used for games previously will almost certainly have a way to generate this information for you automatically -- many games require that collision detection with static objects be precomputed for performance reasons). And note that it would even be possible to use a 2D drawing program to generate each layer in turn -- draw the 2D image from scratch, save it, then modify the colors to indicate heights at each point, save that separately, then modify the colors to reflect lighting, save that separately, and so forth. Of course, the colors in the height map aren't going to bear any resemblance to the colors in the base image... My estimate is that it would take a skilled developer, with previous experience in designing export filters for "off-the-shelf" 3D modeling tools for game development somewhere between 120 - 480 man hours to generate the required export filters to support PoE area creation. That's a hefty time investment for someone to make as a hobby, and the skillset required is significantly exceeds what is possessed by the "average" modder. But if enough people play it, then sooner or later someone will do the required work.

To generate a new map for PoE (at a very high level): 1) Generate an appropriate image in a 3D drawing tool 2) Render it to a bitmap (this is the image that you'll see in the game) 3) Using non-off-the-shelf programs, extract the required information from the drawing tool required for a PoE map 4) Combine the information from #2 and #3 in a PoE specific way, to generate the area definition file 5) Add the other information that is required for a PoE area (location of 3D objects [both props and NPCs]), containers, entrances and exits. #1 and #2 have been done many times in the past. Nothing similar to step #3 has been done by anyone (outside of Obsidian), simply because there has never been a need to do so -- the last game with a 2D background layered with 3D information was (as far as I know) the Infinity Engine games, and those maps required significantly less data. With that being said, all of the information required to complete step #3 exists in the 3D drawing program (because generating most of it is required to generate the 2D render and the remainder is required by many other games, so data entry / generation options already exist that can be leveraged). There is no reason to believe that this problem is unsolvable. Step #4 and #5 are typical modding problems -- every game that doesn't come with modding tools run into problems like these and they are invariable overcome. The fact that the formats used by Obsidian are based on standard formats from Unity makes life easier, as does the fact that Obsidian has promised to work with modders to create appropriate tools. Therefore, the only question is "Will there be at least one person who is passionate enough about the game to go through the (quite significant) development effort required to complete step #2?" The probability that the answer will be "Yes" scales fairly well with the games popularity, so "Will the game be a hit?" is likely to have the same answer. My feeling (and, I suspect, the feeling of many of those who believe new areas will not be created in mods) is that the game won't be a hit. This doesn't mean it won't be profitable or even that a sequel won't be written -- but it was always intended as a niche game and I suspect that Obsidian has alienated their core audience (via various controversial changes) to generate enough negative feedback during the first 30 days after release to ensure that sales will be capped in the 250k - 500k range (including kickstarter & slacker backer sales). That doesn't mean that an area creator definitely won't be created -- after all, there are a number of passionate people with a high level of technical skill already trying to mod the game -- but it reduces the likelihood significantly. To put concrete numbers on it, my feeling is that there is a ~10% chance of at least one mod containing a new area appearing within 12 months of release, and a 25% likelihood within 12 months after the release of PoE 2.

Actually, you are thinking /within/ the box -- the system that you are suggesting is very similar to the system that Obsidian originally proposed (~ 2 years ago). I opposed it then as I do now -- this system will inevitably result in (some) players finishing an encounter and then just stand there doing absolutely nothing at all until the cool downs expire. This is far, far worse than the "problem" you are trying to fix. It isn't clear whether the forum protests where the driving force behind its removal, but I suspect it was a factor.

Because it isn't interesting. As several people pointed out, if there are (say, 75% of the time) interesting things that only happen if you fail a quest, then matters would be different. People don't mind, for example, quest lines where you can help the paladins or the thieves, because there is interesting content either way. The point of playing games, after all, is to see and do interesting things, and we are all strongly conditioned to believe that failure results in less interesting game play.

Then you are imagining things. Counter-cites: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-10-08-obsidian-promises-mod-support-for-project-eternity (Oct 8th, 2012) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/323119 (Kickstarter update #16, Oct 6, 2012) https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64794-interview-with-josh-sawyer-pcworld-update-69-modding/ (Dec 10th, 2013 -- link goes to a forum post specifically discussing mod support / lack thereof): http://www.examiner.com/article/e3-2014-obsidian-s-pillars-of-eternity-strives-to-be-another-classic-pc-rpg?cid=rss (June 24, 2014): And I know that there is at least one more major interview out there discussing modding, because I remember the long discussion that it spawned on the forums when they described how hard it would be to create a new map. For the record: it is very difficult, due to the fact that maps in PoE have 7 (?) layers of data beyond the image that you see, while Infinity Engine games (which have very, very few map mods made for them) had only one. So, if you bought into this game expecting extensive mod support, then you were the one seeing what you wanted to see -- Obsidian has consistently stated that there position on mods is "We aren't going to go out of our way to make it harder, but we aren't going to spend any money on making it easier". You may disagree with this position (lots of people do), but if there are backers who backed this game because they expected mod support and are disappointed now I have zero sympathy for them.

Someone who is already a beta tester can *purchase* a extra beta key and e-mail it to you. In the vast majority of cases, they will expect you to send them the money for the beta key money first, as you might expect, but in theory they could give you a key as a gift. And, obviously, the cost for the beta key would be over and beyond the cost of the game itself. So, yeah, possible in theory, but in practice...

Actually, I have seen people complaining about this -- on this very forum, no less. Either in this thread or the one linked to in the first post, the OP complained about feeling rushed to complete companion quests by the countdown timer. This was, of course, in context with the very high content density in Chapter 2/3 in BG2, but nevertheless, people do complain about this even in BG2.

Found the cite: https://eternity.obsidian.net/news/update-16-reward-updates-combat-with-tim-mods-and-the-mega-dungeon-grows But all Nexus offers is a place to upload and download files -- there is nothing to indicate that Obsidian will provide a standard installer, or even a way to merge multiple mods together. I would expect, at least at first, that modding will be limited to "Copy these files to the override folder" and "If you use more than one mod at a time, neither may work, and your game may not work either" type of situation.

It costs money to use resting supplies as well, but yes, resting at the inn is more expensive (but you get a buff that lasts until the next time you rest if your do).