Sensuki

I want them to be on all the time. I have suggested they implement a selection circle feedback slider so you can control when you see the circles a few times, although I imagine if it has been added to the feature list it's pretty far down. Going to keep bringing it up though. Same with changing NPC selection circle color, Bester was able to change it from green to blue with colorblind mode disabled pretty easily.

I only noticed today that you could resize the dialogue window up and down, is it possible to make it so that if you click the draggable top panel that it will also resize it back to default?

Are you sure that's not a foregone conclusion there buddy?

CTDs. Haven't been able to go in there at all this patch.

Yeah, forgot about that. The party will have better (magical) gear in the full game too, so if anything it's probably too easy on normal

No one has been able to enter that area I don't think.

Well there's also character level, whether you hire an adventurer and looted gear to consider. Shevek says he kills Medreth's group, gets the reward from Nyfre, levels up and buys a 6th party member. Many of us do it with the stock party, stock gear and no extra adventurer - and then on Hard you can't single pull beetles like that. Some of us try to play 'optimally' as well. Shevek could lose less health if he used per-encounter abilities every encounter, but he prefers to just auto-attack because it requires less effort. So there's naturally a difference in pausing there too. You can't really just stand there an auto attack on Hard either. Against beetle groups (they're pretty easy) it will work, but against spiders, Elder Lions, Medreth, the Drake Egg dudes, and the super encounter in the Dyrford Crossing you will die in a few seconds if you don't try. The thing is that it's not that it's really that difficult, it's just that the incoming damage is very high and encounters are over in usually less than 12-15 seconds. IE encounters are longer than that.

In Shevek's video the Monk wasn't there on Normal difficulty, does that always happen?

I pretty much supported it blindly. I believed what the developers were telling me. It's like when they said that the round system in the IE game was bad. I was like "Hah, yeah that is dumb" but after actually having compared the combat in the IE games and PE, the flow of the IE combat is so much better than PE, due to the way the per-unit round system works - it's actually insanely well implemented. So, well done Bioware - I took that system for granted the whole time. Melee Engagement has been broken the whole time, in the first version (v257) you could actually move around a little bit in combat, the Engagement attacks didn't trigger until you were a certain range away, so it was kind of unclear how they worked. They changed it in v301 to be more "snappy" and by that, it means that if you move a single pixel at all when you're in melee, you get hit with a disengagement attack. It's invisible, there's no cooldown on it, and the character that it procced for can also drop an attack on top of it at the same time. There are still several bugs with it, and it is very badly exploitable at the moment. I knew things were wrong with the combat in v278, and I knew that it didn't really feel like playing an Infinity Engine game, so that's why I went back and did my IWD play through. Going back and playing Icewind Dale wad so much more enjoyable and fun than the Pillars of Eternity combat and during my playthrough I realized what was felt different between the games and what Pillars of Eternity was doing wrong. I doubt that many others here have A/B compared PE and an IE game to how they feel, some people are probably talking about experiences they had years and years ago. In several of my suggestion videos and bug reports I A/B compare features in PE and the IE games to showcase how they are different and what PE does wrong. That caused me to make a mod removing the Engagement system to see what it felt like without it, and yep - it's much better. Combat flows much more like an Infinity Engine game. I sent my mod to Cubiq and he agreed. Captain Shrek also said it felt more like playing Icewind Dale as well, and he's not even necessarily against the Engagement system. I know from experience that AoOs in Neverwinter Nights and NWN2 were laughably bad, and here is no different, if not even worse. It caused me to think about what is wrong with the system at a conceptual level and that's because it's a turn-based mechanic that has been ported over into real-time, and it's not really a good turn-based mechanic either, because I think that split action points for movement and non-movement actions a superior system. The Engagement system without the disengagement attacks is essentially an MMO Aggro mechanic, and I don't like those either, and both of these systems prevent me from doing things I enjoy doing in combat and they severely limit tactical movement in combat. I gravitate towards such games outside of RPGs - FPS, RTS, MOBA. There aren't many RTwP RPGs that I know of - there's a 90s X-COM game I think, Darklands, the IE games, Bioware's Aurora engine games, DAO, the Kotor series, NWN2, 7.62mm High Caliber and the Dungeon Siege series (at least the earlier ones anyway, I've only played the first one). Maybe some JRPGs too. RPGs usually have better character progression than other games but usually they have worse combat. Out of those the ones that have the best combat are the IE games and 7.62mm High Caliber. DS1 was okay, but it had more stagnant combat than the IE games which is probably one of the reasons why I didn't like it. I think the key to making the PE combat more fun is to open up movement in melee. Combined with proper AI targeting and fixing the interaction with attacking moving units, I think it will make the game feel a lot better. It already does with my mod. Some people will be against this because they like stagnant stand-still combat, but I think this is what set the Infinity Engine game combat apart from the non-isometric titles that weren't using an RTS-y engine. I also don't think that if the system was changed to how I see it working that combat would be any different for them, because they are not affected by disengagement attacks because unless you abuse it like in my video, the player will never score them against the AI. Some people are opposing it for ideological or conservative reasons.

The circles have actually been made thinner with each version. Even when they were really thick (v257) spell FX still obscures both characers and selection circles in combat, it's really annoying.

Will probably have something on that soonish, but the fact is it's like anything really - religion or politics for instance, fair chance that once you made your mind up originally you're not going to change it. Keep trolling nipsen No, because it has serious problems even at the design level. Josh said (in a quote from about a year ago) that if they can't get it working properly they will probably cut it. Why waste even more time on a broken system when you can spend that time on better things ?

It's got nothing to do with a party. The game is real time, enemies can chase you, enemies can still target you with stuff and enemies can hit you with ranged weapons. Better interaction with moving targets is needed though, like in WC3. Like I said classes could be given abilities to maintain stickiness. The current system is just plain wrong as it implies that movement and actions should come from the same resource pool due to cargo cult turn-based AP design - news flash - real-time is not like that, and there are also better implementations of actions in TB as well.

Bull****. The point I have been making is that because the player can do those things, encounters should be designed with those facts in mind, as they often were in many of the IE game encounters. I enjoyed the modded IWD fights where I literally had to swap aggro because none of my party could withstand the damage output from Yxunomei or Belhifet alone. It's no less dirty than you're luring of single enemies tactic, either.

When you move characters to the top edge of the screen, they disappear and their selection circles disappear. This wasn't possible in the IE games, however this is probably caused here due to the lower camera angle. Any chance of this being rectified?

There's nothing good about the system in the first place. It is flawed at the design level.

Ah ... this water might be temporarily here for the beta

I am. I have already offered alternatives. It won't affect the way you play because enemies will still act the same way. If you want to just stand there and auto attack, that's your perogative.

In 720p it does it for both edges of the screen. 1080 is left side and bottom

This image shows that portraits that are selected by the player are significantly blurred in 720p and below. You can see the difference between the BB Rogue and by PC portrait pretty easily. Other 2D elements also suffer from blur/detail loss as well. I have been told this is an NGUI problem?

PE was meant to require a bit more player input by default. On hard though it only requires pausing and re-issuing of commands and doesn't really promote making many tactical decisions other than what ability to use. Once you've entered the fray, you're locked in. If Melee Engagement was removed and per-hit damage tuned down, then it would be much better, and feel a bit more like an IE game. Then I would actually be able to apply mid-combat tactics, rather than just standing there assigning actions. Currently there's not enough time to make use of most of the party buffs, and the game pretty much always promotes doing raw damage all of the time because if you don't, you'll lose the health attrition war very quickly (on Hard difficulty). That is boring.

Here is a side by side comparison of the item description page from PE BB v257 (left) and BB v333 (right) You can see that the v257 one was smaller, however the text is sharp, clear and pretty much perfect The 2D image in v333 looks like it has been upscaled, and the text itself is a mess. There are issues with line spacing, letters are randomly blurry, and letters appear to have some issues with being 'squashed' vertically. Is this a byproduct of the new v333 UI scaling or something? The nice sharp text and 2D elements we used to have were much better.

As you can see here the Deflection text is cut off in the item description of the Fine Arquebus

Blade of grass sticking out of rock here, not a big deal but a couple of brushstrokes of Photoshop would probably fix it.

The Persistent Lion Corpse in the Stormwall Gorge at this location does not have any loot. Near the Top Centre.

Save/Load fixed it.