The Sharmat

Will Hiravias' question finally be answered?

I have to see Pallegina as the straight man there rather than Maia. Although I guess she doesn't dislike singing as much as I previously thought given she can multiclass chatner now.

I agree with OP and it's the same issue with getting deceptive rep from successfully lying. That said, sailors were notorious drunkards and blabbermouths. So it's not hard to imagine how the story got out. Loose lips sink ships.

I'm still sticking with my OG character, who's a zealous priestess of Magran, making Durance redundant, and thus, worthless. If MCA ever wants to come back with some gunpowder and bearded anger, well enough, but I'm going into Deadfire with the same fire and arquebus character I started with in Pillars. Realistically, since Durance chose an extreme ascetic heterodox sect for his worship of Magran, that should actually put them in conflict, not make him redundant. But I understand that there's very few class based checks with Durance even if you yourself worship Magran.

I can't imagine playing it on console does anything but make it harder, at that. Consider that honorary Path of the Damned, Mangamina.

If you want your backstory to matter besides a few occasional offhand references over the course of the game, the scope by necessity has to be narrowed so the writers can actually make each choice have an impact. Given that this is a previous life and not even the character you're playing (and indeed, may be a very different person. The kind of concept that's interesting to roleplay) I thought it was an excellent compromise and one of the best bits of writing in the game. I mean, being able to say I was the Living Lands' Walter White at the start of the game may be funny and I suppose if I want to write a bunch of fanfic on deviantart about it the game won't step on my toes with its content, but it's way less engaging than, say, realizing that in a past life my character sold their little sister to Thaos because he was too weak to do otherwise and its haunted their soul since and caused all manner of violent backlash.

See the title. Are there any good streams of the backer beta outside the Dev streams? I'd like to see one where the player is familiar with Pillars 1 and has a decent amount of system mastery, or at least basic competence and an ability to read. Most of the streams I've seen have inept people constantly wiping on normal or breezing their way through easy difficulty and never having any idea what they're doing. Not very informative as regards the new systems.

Blood and Wine doesn't make much sense anyway. I hope Obsidian's finale for Pillars is in keeping with what's come before. Going for a totally different tone is fine in a side story but not when it's the ultimate chapter. But point taken about expansions.

To an extent. But it's also the only one that actually (in a limited area and a limited period of time) goes against the entropy that's grinding every soul to little useless specks. Given the course of things in Eora, at one point all these souls may well have been part of much larger souls in the first place. And it's not like you don't regularly get entirely new people on the wheel of reincarnation. It's just usually they're lesser people, not greater.

I for one would love for Obsidian to have 100 million dollars and eight years to develop a fully voice acted game that sacrificed none of the scope but it's just not gonna happen.

That’s rare but interesting opinion. Than again I am witcher fan (as read original books a while back) so the game about Geralt and something he would actually care about is more interesting to me than politics he wouldn’t give a crap about. I am the same, but Geralt getting thrust into political situations where all he wants to do is be with his family is standard in the books. The Witcher 3 fails imo because it tries to do too many things. Is it a sequel to Witcher 2? Is it a sequel to the books? Or is it its own game? It tries all three and inevitably fails at all of them. Witcher 2 may lack my favorite characters from the books, unlike Witcher 3, but it succeeds at being a fantastic RPG due to its focused scope and great deal of reactivity, perhaps the most of any game ever made in the genre. Just because Yennefer finally shows up in Witcher 3 doesn't mean I can't objectively see that Witcher 2 is better crafted from a story perspective. I just hope Deadfire doesn't suffer from the same pitfalls. Rushed expansion with a big drop in quality, which is fairly forgettable and worth skipping except it wraps up story, so it’s a must play? No thank you. Expansions are there to expand content. They don’t have enough content to carry entire finale. The Ascension mod made it bit better though. And an epic ending for the watcher doesn't really fit tbh. Or at least my watcher isn't. He's more of an investigator than a 'Fear me mortals!' kind of guy. Disagree that expansions don't have enough content to carry a finale. DAO:A and TW3B&W have enough content to make a proper ending. Neither of those expansions are finales. One is a stand alone story, the other is a bunch of poorly thought out fanservice. I'm with wormerine on this.

Without Iovara the entire motive for chasing Thaos has to be rewritten. It's also one of the only instances where a chosen backstory leads to decent reactivity in the game, and sadly, in the genre in general.

Lady Webb's content is really more about humanizing Thaos than Lady Webb herself, I think. Also I'm pretty sure I've had Hiravias outright argue with Iovara but that may depend on choices up to that point.

Witcher 2 was the best game in the series. Witcher 3 is an example of how not to continue a story.

True, but if you're just trying to get out of Act 1 as fast as possible on PotD and skip most sidequests they're real sons of bitches.

This is the exception in human history, not the rule. Only the modern versions of Abrahamic religions, some of the Dharmic religions, and the faiths they influenced work this way. Almost every known religion in antiquity had far weaker/more limited Gods.

Strongly disagree. I want continuity of protagonist between all parts of my trilogy. I want to be able to play *MY* character the *whole way through*. If the third part is suddenly entirely different from the first two, then I suddenly don't give a damn about the third part. All the time and effort I invested in that character suddenly no longer matters? The series suddenly no longer matters, in my head. When has that ever mattered? Every trilogy that made a big deal about save importing has completely whiffed on making it matter. I mean I like the idea but I don't understand being so attached to it when so far every attempt has failed.

It took me a couple playthroughs to even realize there was an ultimate decision about Iselmyr from Aloth, since the triggers are easy to miss.

What does the "Base class here" mean? I'd normally assume it was the class they start as but it's listed twice in some places. The Ni thought maybe Pallegina multiclasses differently depending on her endings...but that doesn't explain Maia.

Is the bar for imported decisions having impact so low that people are actually praising how Mass Effect did it now? But anyway yeah, they've said these decisions will have an effect and matter. But I've heard all that before, many times. So expect nothing and maybe get pleasantly surprised is my advice.

Was Divinity's voice acting that bad? Usually what I imagine in my head isn't better than what a good actor can deliver so even if I've already read the dialogue I'll listen to the voice overs, unless the voice work is just crap.

Are they? Honestly I just saw that bit from Carrie Patel as struggling to find an easy negative characteristic of Edér's off the top of her head. If Edér has a weakness as a character, it's that he lacks moral weaknesses. But that can be overrated. Not everyone has to be a super morally grey figure. Edér's just a genuinely good guy. I mean, I wouldn't object to them hitting that harder. It would make sense. He's a rural fellow about to hit a very cosmopolitan place far from home. That should cause some culture shock. But I'm not yet convinced they're going to make a big deal of it.

Yes, I completely agree. And POE's player character should remain completely unvoiced. A voiced player character in an RPG only works if the roleplaying amounts to different interpretations of a standard character, not making decisions for a completely customized ones. At times that added a lot to the Witcher, at other times the writers clearly struggled to make choices work. An RPG like POE has a different problem. In trying to allow as much choice as possible, you can easily stretch your resources so thin that no choice is particularly deep or meaningful in regards to what it says about the characters. Hopefully they have the resources to at least put in a few good examples. POE could be lacking in that regard, outside of some of the backstory stuff with Thaos and Iovara.

Edér is one to try to subdue his personal pains with humor. He cares about what's happening and the fate of his brother immensely. But the acting can be a bit subtle at times. Which fits the character completely. But if it doesn't come through to you, it is what it is. He's not really particularly racist either, especially by the standards of the setting. They certainly could have hit that heavier if they wanted it to be a big part of his character instead of a one-off poor choice of words around Hiravias. Honestly, would have added extra depth to his character. But I don't blame them for not wanting to touch the idea of a sympathetic character with deeply ingrained racist views with a thousand foot pole. It's a tough concept to write and I can only imagine what the reaction would be by the audience when relatively minor stuff like Edér's faux pas or Mass Effect's Ashley and her suspicion towards aliens gets them up in arms.

Seems logical. Perhaps the further back in time you go (in this case, very far back indeed) the more the standard humanoid races were demi-god giants simply because so little entropy had acted on the available essence of the world. Lingering legends about maegfolc could be poorly remembered history or even the rare sighting of an unusually static soul.