Sensuki

I am playing a Female Island Aumaua Monk and she is better than my Fighter as a Tank when unarmored/unarmed vs the Dyrford Beetles because she can act more often and remove her wounds. The Fighter, even in Plate mail takes heaps of damage, and doesn't act very often. Here are my attributes btw 18 Might 18 Con 19 Dex 8 Per 10 Int 7 Res Currently though Resolve and Perception are absolute trash attributes, so this character has a more powerful attribute array than the BB Fighter.

I've been playing through the IE games recently, and the IE games have faster paced combat, but it's more auto-attacking than actually using active abilities. You can kill a whole room of Orcs in Icewind Dale in a few seconds, but an encounter vs 3 beetles in PE lasts a lot longer than that due to the amount of damage required to kill things. You can wipe out whole rooms with one fireball, or a lucky Horror spell and a few nukes in quick succession. The slowness of recovery time in heavy armor is magnified by how passive the combat idle animations are. This is something I've brought up before though (such as in my recent RPGCodex interview)

Most of this morning I dedicated my time to looking for bugs / glitches / performance issues, and I'm starting to play through the game now. Playing on Hard difficulty, since I noticed that PoD enemies have +50% stats (no thanks, with the sub-par BB party). So far here are some basic points about combat: The combat is more active than the Infinity Engine games due to the amount of ability use required. This was one of Josh Sawyer's aims for combat and I believe that the goal has been achieved. The party doesn't do so good when split up, unlike the IE games where you could take your best couple of characters and aside from a support spell or two, plow through the majority of areas with your main damage dealers. The party composition in PE required teamwork from the party members to overcome the encounters. I think this makes sense. The speed of actions in combat is actually way slower than I am used to, because I played the IE games on 40 FPS. Characters wearing heavier armors have a really long recovery time. Currently I don't think the values are balanced properly, and I think an attribute that reduces recovery time would be very fitting here. My unarmored / unarmed Monk was faring a lot better than my Fighter was, due to being able to hit more often and get rid of his wounds. I think for some people combat feels "too fast" because you are required to micro manage your characters a lot more. The actions the characters take are actually slower than the IE games (barring the spell casters), but pretty much every character has active abilities that you kinda need to use every encounter, so you are doing more, even though the pace is slower. And lastly, the adventuring days are way too short. I survived all of the beetles in the Dyrford Crossing exterior, but by that time, I needed to rest. In the Infinity Engine games, adventuring days were way longer due to strategical healing resources - Priest healing spells, scrolls and healing/regen potions. Currently in PE, you can do one small wilderness area before you need to rest. In my opinion this an incorrect adventuring day pace. Combat encounters have a pretty good feel, they're lethal and you have to pay attention - but you can only do a few of them before you have to end an adventuring day, and you still have a crap load of other resources left. I used up hardly any encounter or daily spells during my encounters, because there was simply not enough time to use them. Due to the long recovery times of characters, piled with the lethality of the trash mob encounters with the beetles, I was left with not much Health left on a few characters, but plenty of daily resources remaining. I think the problem here is the Stamina to Health ratio. I think in order to make the length of the adventuring day "feel" more IE, the amount of stamina damage converted to health damage needs to be decreased - so that while encounters can be lethal, you can last a lot more of them throughout the adventuring day, and take on a lot more encounters and actually feel like you're getting to use all of your class abilities/dailies so you can actually get the feeling of being low on other strategical resources, as well as Health. I think the direction here would be to reduce the stamina damage to health ratios, and reduce the amount of camping supplies you get. So you can survive a longer adventuring day, but get fewer resting resources. That way the pace isn't broken up so much. On top of that, enemy units (and player units) move very fast in combat, whereas only hasted units moved quickly in the IE games. Due to this "run" feature, positioning is all over the place. Especially considering how small some of the maps are.

The only difference is a higher minimum and a higher maximum. That's it really.

The Knock Down ability still does it after you pause during the middle of a fight. An enemy used knock down on me, I paused and it looped 3 times. Then I used Knock down on my Fighter, didn't pause, but the sound looped 3 times.

Yeah most of the UI elements lag the game. It's the same in Wasteland 2 as well.

Here in my screenshot, you can see that the Adventuring party looking for the infant killer's feet are not being occluded properly in the grass http://www.upload.ee/thumb/4216740/Untitled.png Hyperlink because it's a 5mb lossless image.

You can go and find the strings if you want to be really useful. located in: X:\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity - Public Beta\PillarsOfEternity_Data\data\localized\en\text

Under PillarsOfEternity_Data\data\localized\en\text\quests 01_defiance_bay_coppleane should be 01_defiance_bay_copperlane Under F:\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity - Public Beta\PillarsOfEternity_Data\data\localized\en\text\quests\critical_path Act_4 should probably be Act_3 ?

In gui.stringtable <Entry> <ID>50</ID> <DefaultText>Wil</DefaultText> <FemaleText /> </Entry> Will should probably be Will? right?

The main character permanently dying is supposed to end the game.

You can, you just remap the arrow keys to WASD.

Yeah that was a bit disappointing. Hopefully there'll be some more.

Why not? Because that's silly. The portraits are external to the Unity files so you can always add them back in as a custom one.

Implementing sliders to control the scroll speeds for various methods would be nice (a different one for each)

You also shouldn't be allowed to select a male portrait as a female and vice versa

In the IE games, mousing over character portrait showed Name and Health Numbers.

There was a tooltip delay in the IE games. They should implement a slider to control the speed of tooltips, just like in the IE games. I personally prefer a bit of delay, but I always reduced the delay slightly from the IE stock delay.

ROFL

I didn't take this photo, but it appears that unit occlusion is not working properly, at least for party members. In this photo, the player has colorblind mode on. I will test this on my own a bit later.

This is a known issue, it was blatantly obvious in the Gamescom videos Apparently it's already been fixed by the Gameplay Programmer, but it's not been put into the Steam build yet - maybe tomorrow?

UPDATE I found what causes the FPS issue, it happens when you move a character to a different square in the formation menu. The FPS drops and never comes back. It's not a memory leak, my RAM doesn't change from 4.86GB used when in this area

Can everyone please check their Unity output_log.txt file which is located in X:\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity - Public Beta\PillarsOfEternity_Data This is a Unity game's default log file that likely records try catch errors and a bunch of other stuff I have made a few videos but I am experiencing an issue which I got in Shadowrun Returns as well: (Filename: Line: 1617) HandleD3DDeviceLost HandleD3DDeviceLost: still lost Skipped frame because GfxDevice is in invalid state (device lost) I have literally thousands of lines of this in my log file: http://www.upload.ee/files/4216677/output_log.txt.html Here is a thread I created about this same issue over a year ago in the Widget's and Bytes section of Pillars of Eternity, warning the devs of this bug: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64194-unity-engine-audio-issues-when-loading-assets-from-hdd/

Yep, just as I suspected I'm getting a similar error to what I was getting in Shadowrun Returns which shows up in the Unity output_log.txt (Filename: Line: 1617) HandleD3DDeviceLost HandleD3DDeviceLost: still lost Skipped frame because GfxDevice is in invalid state (device lost) Hairbrained Schemes were never able to (at least in the original Shadowrun Returns) fix this issue, but they were able to decouple it from the sound also micro-stuttering in the original. I have not personally played Dragonfall. Here is my output_log.txt file http://www.upload.ee/files/4216677/output_log.txt.html

Possible Memory Leak in the Dyrford Area, or caused by opening the Formations menu Windows 7 SP1 x64 Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93 GHz 16GB DDR3 1600 MHz AMD HD7970 3GB Can anyone else run FRAPS or similar, and just stand around in the Dyrford at the start of the game / open the formations tab and see if you also get severely declining FPS ?