Infinitron

He means he doesn't have talent as an artillery engineer.

1 isn't right or wrong, it's more like n/a. It's pretty clear that when that was written Tim Cain had some kind of heavily skill-centric Fallout-like character system in mind. It doesn't make sense to talk about "combat skills" and "non-combat skills" in a D&D-like system where character progression isn't really about "skills" at all.

The location of Ashfall is unclear, possibly because it was invented for Durance's storyline after those original maps were drawn.

Relevant:

Josh talked a lot about hard counters, but I don't recall him ever saying he was against all immunities. One reason for that is that during the game's development, everybody assumed they were the same thing, so they used the terms interchangeably when asking him about it. Personally, I'm willing to believe that he didn't want immunities either, making this a flip-flop, but I don't have any proof.

What's interesting about Raedric is that he has one hell of a huge force at his disposal...which makes you wonder what an Erl might have. It also makes the Duc in Defiance Bay seem rather underprotected in comparison. The game does offer the excuse that most of the Crucible Knights are outside the city. Unless you side with the Doemenels you don't even get to ever meet a Crucible Knight ranked higher than Commander even though there a whole bunch of ranks above that according to their lore book.

Well, ****'s getting Codexian in here now. Yeah, and the market self-regulated so that serious RPG's were only done by lone developers laboring away in their basements, like Spiderweb. The limited cRPG renaissance we're seeing now owes more to happenstance than any self-regulating properties the computer game market may have, and if Obsidian, HBS, and Larian go under, decide to do something else, get bought out, or go after the mass market, I don't see any guarantee that we won't have to wait another ten years – or more – to see anyone take their place. An argument can be made that the main reason for progressive dumbing down of RPGs in the past was that audiences for gaming were getting larger and larger, and developers felt that they had to catch up to that. That continual growth, a kind of Moore's Law of videogame popularity, was what disrupted the "self-regulating aspect" described by mosspit. But what if that growth has now halted? What if there's not ever going to be a game that sells one hundred million copies, outside of the mobile phone fad of the month? What if Call of Duty, GTA and Skyrim sales are as good as it gets? That means the rules have now changed, and what happened to RPGs in the 2000s might not repeat itself. Inb4 Francis Fukuyama

The new Sensuki narrative: After having backstabbed the grognards, Obsidian are now planning to plunge the knife all the way through and make PoE2 a full-blown casual game.

Wait, wait, wait, what happened to no hard counters in PoE? I thought immunities were degenerative gameplay, that only grognards like. Not all immunities are hard counters. See my explanation here: Since I wrote that, the game has also added immunity to afflictions. Since those don't prevent you from inflicting damage, they're obviously not hard counters either.

Hey, wait a minute. What if Story Time doesn't reduce difficulty at all but rather is a difficulty-orthogonal setting that simply reduces the number of encounters in the game outright?

Gee, you guys really want to argue about this, huh? Well, consider the possibility that the new damage and affliction immunities may have made the regular Easy mode no longer as easy as originally intended.

Three words that'll make Tigranes mad: Beamdog. Feature. Parity.

It is the same development time as Part 1.

http://gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/259460/SECOND_PILLARS_OF_ETERNITY_EXPANSION_TO_RELEASE_THISWINTER.php

I suspect there's a correlation between how much you like a certain companion and you much you actually played with them. Be careful of judging the ones you haven't played with much. Kana is probably most likely to be a victim of this due to widespread Chanter-hate. I found him to be a pretty well-done character, full of emotion and with a lot to say. Take him with you to the Brackenbury Asylum and watch what happens.

More like raising a possibility. Exactly. You'd think it'd be wiser to try work within those constraints rather than try in vain to make it like Fallout or Alpha Protocol and get your pitch rejected due to that. Did we miss out on an MCA-led PoE because of this?

https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/665327327300202496 Did Chris Avellone drop out of having a major role on this game because he disagreed fundamentally with its relatively limited degree of choice & consequence? If you've read about the development history of Alpha Protocol, you'll know that's something he cares about a lot. Also: https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/665036284235157504 Calisca and Heodan, we never knew ye.

If you're talking about Blood Legacy then that's not true.

Actually, at the time of the game not one single healthy child has been born in Dyrford for years. (One reason why it's not as outwardly screwed up as Gilded Vale may be that everyone has just completely given up hope and accepted their fate, unlike Gilded Vale where the occasional healthy birth can be attributed to Berath and Raedric's zealotry.)

I would call Pillars of Eternity melancholic.

I think that in case of PoE Josh and others have mostly referred them as flags. But you need to have some sort flagging/keyword system in place if want to have effects/checks/etc. that have conditions on them depending on some specific status in the game. I would guess that they haven't really talked about such system because it's behind the hood mechanic that as itself shouldn't matter for player, but only effects that it has. But I think that "Not communicated well to player" means that game does poor job to indicate what things are effected by keywords system. Like for example there is no straightforward way to tell for sure if something does poison damage or not, but to read trough its description to find out that such is the case. Which makes it harder to know what things don't work against one with poison immunity or such. But he also said they "haven't use keywords that much". That led me to believe they were something separate from the labels we see in the descriptions of items and abilities, which are obviously quite common and seem pretty well communicated to me. In any case, the fact the brings it up now in this context means the game may be about to see an expansion of immunities and resistances based on these specific "keywords". Or if not this game, then the sequel.

I'm not familiar with that usage of the term "keyword". I did do a search for it on the forums before posting this, and all I found was references to the clickable hyperlinks in the game's in-game encyclopedia, and other unrelated contexts.

Did the Infinity Engine games have variety?

Uh yes, Josh mentioned the Keyword system out of the blue, and also mentioned that it already existed, which we didn't know until just now.

Well, if you switch from doing one thing repetitively to doing another thing repetitively to doing yet another thing repetitively, at some point you have to admit that you're no longer doing much repeating.