Sensuki

Brandon will probably go to work early in the morning and give a pre-9am backer update. Beta is probably already pre-loaded onto steam - that's the only reason I can think of as to why the auto-attack bugfix might not be included in the beta, because they probably uploaded the files last week.

By the way here are some of the cases where it wasn't working: Sometimes when Adam right clicked to attack the character walked up the enemy and didn't attack. Characters didn't auto attack after casting a spell, and characters didn't auto attack after getting a kill. I actually play DotA with auto-attack turned off, so this won't be an issue for me. But it will still be annoying, and I'm not going to record my RPGCodex Let's Play until the auto-attack bugfix is patched in. I wonder whether Adam was aware of the bug when he went in and did his first Gamescom playthrough, didn't seem like it. He didn't have trouble on any consecutive playthroughs really, it was just that first one.

FYI here are the portrait caps that I got yesterday:

bump!

My point is more that the uninformed player/streamer will get a negative impression of the beta from it. We are aware of the bug, and we know it has already been fixed and the fix is coming, but even though the beta is meant for bug testing, first impressions are lasting.

I personally hope they delay the release a few hours to get the auto attack bugfix in. Not getting that into the build could be very damaging.

I personally hope they delay the release a few hours to get the auto attack bugfix in. Not getting that into the build could be very damaging.

I don't like the modular portraits. To be able to do those they have to sacrifice a bit of quality of the final versions. The portraits is probably the only area of the game that doesn't have a consistent art style. Well they kinda do, within loose boundaries. Great portraits so far: The Godlike portraits, Kaz's early portraits, Polina's Kana Rua. Others are okay/average. Havent seen high enough res versions of some of the backer portraits to give a judgement yet.

^ Agreed

Well losing freaking sucks most of the time. Sometimes I've lost a game, but I did some awesome plays / had some fun battles / kills etc and you still kinda feel down about losing but at least you got something out of it. Other times you just get smashed and it's just crap and you just want it to be over already so you can start a new game fresh. I actually think the MMR system and score keeping makes it more hostile than it used to be. Back in DotA 1 there were no wins / losses etc for it because it was a custom game. Granted there were also no penalties for quitting early, so a lot of games would end after first blood, the guy who died would leave, and then others would leave, gg. Even still, ~2004-2008 DotA 1 era was one of the best times MP online wise for me. People are worried about losing MMR. If there's that one guy who's playing a hero he's never played before and he's feeding 0-10 in a ranked mmr game or something, everyone's going to be pretty annoyed about it. Especially considering it's a considerable time investment (~40 mins average). Back in DotA 1 I was less angry about losing because it didn't mean anything. This is one of the downsides about using an MMR calibration system.

That's not what I was implying at all. It's a pretty common thing for someone to try to play DotA, get destroyed in their first few games and then just give up and there's a lot of people that have written posts writing off the community as a whole from a very bitter and shallow viewpoint indicating that they have had a terrible experience trying to get into it. On top of that they are using that negative experience as "evidence" that the moba crowd as a whole would not be interested in Pillars of Eternity.

Brandon Adler will be up early on Monday

I think it's a bit double sided. If you are terrible a team multiplayer game and someone is flaming you for it - most people get defensive and abuse back, whereas if you take a different approach such as "I'm sorry, what can I do better?" most of the time that improves the situation, not always, but quite often. People will give you suggestions and help you along. Whereas if you are too proud to admit that you are playing badly/don't know what you're doing and can't take a bit of crap, then it just becomes an abuse war.

That's pretty much my point - people who play MOBAs should be able to deal with the combat, and it's also the largest PC market out there. Some people have said MOBAs are more like an ARPG - no they aren't. Most of Valve's Dota 2 mechanics are derived from the Warcraft 3 engine, which is an RTS. The DotA community is better as a whole, yes, but if you make your team lose in a DotA game, you are going to get abused - that's just how it is.

There's obviously a lot of people in here who've tried to play DotA (or equivalent), got destroyed, rage quit and have a bad opinion about the game style and community.

It's not going to get re-done. There's not enough 2D Art time.

The D:OS ambient voices are fkn obnoxious to me. I honestly prefer just floating text. The Witcher 2 also had some over the top ambient voices, but TW1 was fine.

I think that's a very short sighted view of the MOBA audience, and more representative of the absolute trash-bag tiers of the games. I'm not the best DotA player, I think my MMR is somewhere in the 3700s, I don't play it very often, but even in the "trenches", a 5-0 at the start of the game is not GG, and anyone with any gumption will try and come back from that. Usually there's one defeatist blaring over the mic, sometimes that's even me, but a negative attitude will only make it worse. So it's better to try and take command and come back. As I've previously mentioned, the MOBA genre has a large fanbase, and while not everyone will be interested in a single-player RPG, some people will because they enjoy that style of combat, and also enjoy SP games for relaxation. The other side of the coin is that you can try and target the RPG crowd for the story and whatnot, but if the combat mechanics aren't their cup of tea, that might be a problem. @NWN_babaYaga I am not talking about changing anything in the game. I am talking about the "marketing drive". There will be a marketing campaign for PE leading up to release, and I think some targeted marketing towards the MOBA crowd would be a good idea to try and find the 'new' PE audience of non-IE players, as I believe that is one of Obsidian's goals.

I was just putting that information there for Infinitron. Do you play MOBAs? Obsidian have made it clear that they want to try and attract new gamers to this game, even though it is being designed for it's core audience. I think a lot of modern RPG players play the game for the story, and a lot of modern RPGs are action-combat games. I think not trying to grab some of the MOBA crowd with the marketing budget would be throwing money away.

MOBAs have between 20-60 Million players between them, but sure.

More than one attack animation per weapon type would be greatly appreciated. Agreed. The IE games had three different types and most weapons used at least two of them.

It's been an issue for all enemies so far I think, except for (oddly enough) the Black Ooze.

I assure you that there are boatloads of people who play single-player and Multiplayer I've probably played more multiplayer over the last 6 years than single-player, but I've always played both and as I'm growing older, I'm playing less multiplayer, but that's mostly due to the fact that most competitive MP games these days are crap.

We were just having a discussion over at the RPGCodex and I've been noticing that Josh has been posting that the Con-goers at Gamescom haven't really been applying tactics while playing Pillars of Eternity - just using select all and auto attacking. Personally I think if you (Obsidian) want to sell this game to new gamers, you need to find the right audience and in my opinion - that is the MOBA crowd, the people that are interested in tactical real-time combat and micromanagement. I think that one bridge to cross would be the difference in art style between the popular games like DotA 2 (and even worse, League of Legends) but the MOBA crowd has the most players out of any genre in PC gaming at the moment, so if even a fraction of the players were interested, you'd be doing alright. Most MOBAs revolve around the control of a single unit in a real-time combat, although DotA has several heroes that have pets and can summon units (along with items that grant summons too) - Nature's Prophet can summon treants, Lone Druid has a Dire Bear, Meepo replicates himself, Phantom Lancer and Naga Siren have illusions, Chen and Enchantress can dominate creeps. Many heroes use the Manta style to create illusions, the Necromonicon to summon two powerful Skeleton Warriors or the Helm of the Dominator to dominate a creep. I personally think DotA players would be your best shot (I say this because League of Legends is a more casual MOBA and I don't think it has as many (if any) heroes that use summons), but going for both markets would be wise. So if you (and Paradox) were going to be doing any targeted marketing - those communities is where I would focus my efforts. Of all of my friends that I've managed to get interested in the game - it's the people that used to play the Infinity Engine games like I did, and the guys that play DotA 2.

$10 says the girl who did the IGN First Look is doing VO for PE.