The Sharmat

Caldera doesn't say what happens to fragments of souls that are lost, does Thaos explicitly say they can never be reincorporated into new souls It's more from supplementary material like the bestiary, the guide, and various Q&As. But yes Thaos mentions how without the Gods all you have is a wheel endlessly spinning, eventually grinding every soul into dust. He seems to think it's inevitable and empty, and the fiction of the Gods he created is necessary to give people some semblance of a meaningful life while they can get it.

It usually does. The game deals with special cases because the normal case is boring and RPG heros have to see weird stuff. Of course by my reasoning putting lost souls to rest is at best a mercy killing and at worst murder, because you've subsumed their identity and it will in all likelihood never return. So it's a bit bleak. And yeah sure, if the coma is irreversible and they're not experiencing anything and never will, who gives a crap? You are now aware (if you somehow weren't already) that animancy is just organ harvesting and psychiatric medicine in fantasy form. Edit: Come to think of it, anyone else find it weird that a soul seems to carry absolutely nothing that is inherent to a person in this setting? It animates the body, and apparently retains a record of memories even if you normally can't access them, but it seems to inform absolutely nothing about who a person actually IS. Aloth and Iselmyr are totally different people in every way conceivable. Personality seems to have little to nothing to do with the soul, beyond that a very mangled one prevents a normal personality from forming. Basically, if all a soul is is a vague identityless animating force and sharing a soul between generations doesn't mean the people in question have anything else to do with each other...what good IS a soul?

Sawyer claims to have thought long and hard over the actual metaphysics of the setting in ways that are not revealed to the player and may never be fully revealed. The questions raised at the end of Pillars 1 as to what the gods actually spend their time doing besides getting worshiped and screwing with each other are currently unanswered, though. Or how and why the Engwithans chose to make any specific god or assign their attributes. Rymrgand's existence goes against entropy only if viewed as part of a closed system where Rymrgand and a finite subset of particles around him are all that exist. He does not however live in a closed system, so presumably much like real biological life, this is only a temporary local reversal that in the great scheme of things actually increases entropy due to the waste heat its processes generate that will never be recovered. Just replace electrons and protons with whatever an individual particle of essence is and energy with whatever the soul's equivalent is.

Do we know that for certain? I looked around for any official sources but couldn't find much. If so it seems a bit silly. Either that's an absolute tonne of unused souls floating about, or Eora's heading for a population crash and/or a hollowborn crisis it can't fix by turning off Engwithan machines. It's what Caldara and other animancers seem to believe is the case, yes. Thaos too, who is probably far more well versed in animancy than any of them. And yes, eventually it will probably lead to a natural occurrence of hollowborn. But the whole process seems very, very slow. It may even take geological time. Silly and wasteful, yes. But you might as well ask why in our own universe the very physical processes that give rise to our existence will inevitably result in a uniform wasteland of individual particles randomly teleporting infinitesimally small distances spaced out every few meters.

To be fair GRRM's stuff is made much more explicit by the show than GRRM ever wrote himself. I'll PM you wormerine.

Souls are essence, at all points in their existence. And if they carry all the memory and experience of past lives (including apparently fragments from other souls that might have merged with them), what good is it if in 99.999999% of cases they're never accessed or used. Not to mention that usually these things are lost over time to fragmentation. The Watcher just has an unusually strong soul. Simoc is working with someone that is currently alive, not a mindless bit of essence with some memories that may eventually but probably not be accessed by someone they inhabit down the road a thousand years later.

Yeah the AI scripting is why I hope the summoned weapons are still good. It's really fun playing a melee wizard in PoE 1 but casting the same buffs at the start of every fight manually becomes a pain.

If you are greatly experiences with those games and feel you were good at them, if you like reading and will hover over every attribute, skill description, buff, debuff, item, etc etc to know what they actually mean in terms of math; play Path of the Damned. Otherwise, if you're just good at this kind of game but aren't that into the systems and prefer to wing it, play hard. Dropping stats to 3 is just for certain super minmaxed builds. It's never remotely necessary even with solo challenge runs. Talents and equipment matter more than stats in this game.

You're right and wrong. It does exactly what you say, fracturing larger souls to create new ones. But it also eventually fractures them enough that they're no longer viable, leading first to serious abnormalities that cause insanity and other side effects, and eventually just reducing them to ambient bits of essence that are no longer viable to be reincarnated and end up fuel for Wizard and Chanter fireworks. Of course like Neotemplar says this is a really fantasy view of entropy the way its presented. In reality the universe as we know it only works because of entropy. A universe without it is utterly unimaginable and would certainly contain nothing like biological life, planets, stars, and all that good stuff. Rymrgand's portfolio is focused on being a God of decay and death, which is ultimately what entropy leads to, but before that, entropy does literally everything else in existence.

I think it's rare for a widely known game to have a particularly good one either, sadly. Seems like the Japanese put more effort into soundtracks for their AAA titles. But maybe that's just my personal tastes. A shame either way, since I prefer the way western devs handle RPGs in every other respect.

I do not know; neither do I know what reason you could have to debase someone's writing as "masturbatory fantasies". Because it's basically what it is? The series is pretty terrible, and I've never been able to get into the Witcher games because I've had the misfortune to read the books before the games came out. I'm still not seeing any elaboration on what makes the series terrible or "masturbatory fantasies". They are infantile wish fulfillment fantasies with one dimensional characters, and every girl falling for Geralt. It's only prominent because the fantasy genre didn't really exist in Poland when the first stories came out in the late 80s So you didn't actually read the books, you just played an hour of the Witcher 1?

Yen is not terrible. She can be a bit unempathetic but she acts on pretty solid logic. She has good reasons for doing things she does. Yeah but she's kind of a giant **** to everybody while she does it. She treats Geralt terribly throughout the game and it's played as some sort of epic troubled romance, but she's just really mean to him all the time. When she accused him of cheating on her when he was amnesiac and being lied to, I decided she was pretty terrible and I hated her. There's some light ribbing here and there but I really don't think it goes further than that. I think people just aren't used to NPCs talking back to them without the option to hit them with a sword to punish them for it. The quest with the djinn totally missed the point. Djinns can't force someone to fall in love in this setting. That was never what happened.

So if the voice acting added nothing to your enjoyment, absolutely nothing at all...how can you say it's good?

I hope we'll find out.

Right now I've loaded her up with weapons like starcaller that proc direct damage spells on crits, durganized her chassis, and always buff her with stuff like hastening exhortation. Her recovery becomes crazy like this and she absolutely tears up people's backlines once she's ninja-vanished into it. Casters all end up as little gibblets.

Not necessarily. Listening is slow and reading by yourself is much faster. So I always read and skip ahead even if the VO isn't done yet. I just don't have the time to sit and listen all the time, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the VO. If i was good VO, you'd want to listen to it just to hear it, even if you'd already read the dialogue, unless you simple have almost no free time of course. It should be pleasing to the ear and offer information not easily dropped just through text, or else what's the point of even having it?

Is there a meaningful difference between being purpose built with forethought vs. crafted by a statistical process?

Yeah he'd have to kill you for what you know. And even if he didn't want to, your character is going to be bat**** insane soon since I doubt the awakened identity would agree with such a course of action. But nonstandard gameovers are great and every game should have them.

They're not destroyed. They're just returned closer to a previous state. Very likely all these souls were part of greater souls at some point. Besides, I hesitate to call it murder. They don't normally retain any kind of identity in their post-death state for long.

I think you haven't tried using Kalakoth's Freezing Rake on a group of Torn Bannerman that you just landed a Gaze of Adragan on, fast huge aoe that hits for 250-300+ in one hit on probably one of the strongest human opponents in the game. Still petrify from opened up this combo which makes you right in a way that debuff is strong here but then if you had no way to deal massive damage quick in big aoe to cash out on short petrify (even if it lands its often like 2-3 sec on some targets) That's a couple of very high level spells and at that point you're probably going to need a fair bit of buffing and debuffing to get a lot of them petrified. Which is fine, the game has great tactical depth and powerful combos should require set up. But starting the game at PotD and even hard and I gotta say, fireball is pretty underwhelming.

I was referring more to the prose than the dialogue. I think it talks a lot while not saying very much in certain places, and often becomes more bloated than flowery (Ironically a common criticism of Pillars I've seen, though Pillars' prose is far more straightforward). But this can be a very subjective thing. By contrast, Annah's romance is quite understated, and even Deionarra's declarations of love and borderline obsession suit the story well. Those trappings are still a massive part of the game and they perform quite poorly. If a system is in a game and you're better off minimizing your engagement with it, it's a bad system. Basically every part of PST but the dialogue and the atmosphere is mediocre to bad. I'd also criticize the story elements to be honest. It's a game, not a novel. The fact that there's not really any reason to play as anything but a max Wis/ high Int/ high Cha character unless you want to miss the vast majority of the plot is a huge flaw in an interactive medium. All that said, don't get me wrong, I loved the game. It's just a very flawed gem, not the pinnacle of what a story driven game could or should be. I don't think we've reached that point yet. It's still a young medium. That said I'd argue that Mask of the Betrayer and possibly even KOTOR 2 (patched, of course) do what PST did as well or better. Perhaps the excel was inside us all along

Humans evolved to procreate like any other organism, doesn't mean they don't genuinely fall in love with the people they're doing that sort of thing with. Just because he was designed to want to protect people doesn't mean it's no longer moral for him to do so. I'm not sure it's a meaningful distinction at all. Dubious. Unless we're to believe that souls, the wheel and soul entropy weren't a thing until after the Engwithans created the gods, these things would happen anyway. That Rymrgand has been labelled as the god in charge of soul entropy doesn't mean he wants is or even makes it happen. This isn't an implication, it's his stated intent. It's the nature of what he was. He didn't invent decay, but he is designed as the embodiment of it and when given the opportunity to remove souls from the cycle forever in Sun in Shadow, he takes it. I suppose once could argue that the fact that he was designed to behave that way removes some culpability, but I don't personally believe that, and if you did, then you're essentially arguing there's no such thing as responsibility or morality in the first place. Which is fine and has a certain logic to it, but again, not gonna see a lot of takers probably. RE: The age of the Gods. Given what we know now I'd say that what that really means is just that the "older" Gods are the ones whose depictions and mode of worship have changed the least over time, at least in the regions described in the guidebook.

If you're skipping voice acting then the voice acting and/or writing is bad.

Haha. I must say, it really was. I would have lynched you for that couple years ago, but after replaying BGs... well, they can be endearing but It can get really awkward. If I'd played Baldur's Gate 1/2 when they first came out I'd probably feel differently but playing them for the first time as an adult...nah. I get the appeal of the games, but the writing doesn't seem like one of them to me. PST on the otherhand is overwrought and clunky at times, but still very good though, even playing it for the first time long after it was released.

Both of the things you describe are bland in different ways, to me. Don't put words in peoples' mouths. Yes, there were one or two stand out tracks, but on the whole PoE's music only got stuck in my head through raw repetition rather than most of the tracks being memorable or making me feel something. Though again, Shadow of the Sun and one or two other tracks are an exception.