PsychoBlonde
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Posts posted by PsychoBlonde
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I also don't get why Eothas destroying the Wheel is supposed to be such a big deal. Yeah, okay, it mediates the essence cycle that feeds the gods power and enables kith to reincarnate.
EXCEPT . . . the Engwithans created the Wheel et al. So they had a perfectly functioning soul cycle with ZERO divine intervention or celestial machinery in the past SOMEHOW. Xoti's quest seems to indicate that the Adra works as a soul battery just fine if someone goes around and manually picks up the souls. But, still, there must have been SOME kind of automatic natural process in the prehistoric past for the Engwithans even to EXIST in the FIRST PLACE. If the soul cycle CAN'T run on its own, no one would have ever existed in the FIRST place.You could argue that, due to their mining and use of adra, the Engwithans borked up the natural process so they HAD to create a machine to do it. But this isn't ever mentioned, so it kinda leads me to believe that whoever wrote all this hooey just never considered that angle, otherwise they would have at least hung a lampshade over it.
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HUGE ENDING SPOILERS OMG SO MANY SPOILERS YOU WERE WARNED!!!!!
So, I'm at Ondra's Spire at the end with Tekehu, and he's complaining that the ancient Huana covenant with Ngati (aka Ondra) was misused by the Engwithans to create the storm around Ukaizo.
Uh, hang on just a sec . . .
The Engwithans CREATED the gods. It's not POSSIBLE that they could have "misused" any godly gifts because they FRIGGIN CREATED THE GODS. Saying they "misused" the gift of the gods is like saying that I'm not allowed to use my own backscratcher to scratch my knee. You could make any number of complaints about their conduct, but HOW did the Huana have a pact with Ondra BEFORE ONDRA EXISTED?!
Okay, I realize it's all kinda vague, but this is SCREWY.
Of course, it could just be that Tekehu doesn't really understand what's going on, after all, he wasn't at Sun in Shadow to witness Thaos' confession of how the Engwithans created the gods, so in Tekehu's mind the Engwithans are responsible for screwing up what the gods actually wanted. I wouldn't rule THAT out.-
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This is a live game bug.
CONTAINS A SPOILER (I couldn't figure out how to do spoiler tags)
I just finished freeing the dragon in the Watershaper's Guild by siphoning its soul. When I spoke to Queen Onekazu afterwards, she gave me a quest to treat with the Wahaki. During that discussion, she mentioned that I "dealt peacefully with them on Motare o Koze." Only problem--I haven't BEEN to Motare o Koze yet!
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Try hitting Cntrl-H to hide the HUD and hitting it again to unhide it. I've been having problems with my HUD not showing new party members as they join me.
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Not downloading for me on GOG either, apparently backers don't get access to the game on GOG by the looks of things. Looking at the news comments on GOG it seems to be the backer version.
You generated a GOG claim code from the backer portal and redeemed it on GOG, correct?
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AIEEEEEEE it's 1303 EST RELEASE TEH GAEM PLZTHX SO EXCITE
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You don't understand, I caffeinated so now I can't sleep!
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Noooooooo approximately 12 hours?! Boooooo.
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You'll get it via the backer portal once the game releases
He/she should be able to get the key right away.
Aha! I didn't realize the keys were already generated, I was looking at the orders page and seeing the "pending".
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maybe its me and I am blind and excuse me if I am. But I thought the game releases tomorow. Where do I find my steam key, if I backed it through fig.
You'll get it via the backer portal once the game releases, supposed to be tonight at midnight. I don't see the Fig badge on your account here, so you may need to go and redeem your pledge on the backer portal. https://eternity.obsidian.net/account/orders
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I just want to say thanks on behalf of people like me who like swag but can't stand scavenger hunts.
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This is probably going to sound silly, but why is there ONE shade of "blond" hair and EIGHT shades of RED? It's basically impossible to make a decent looking medium-brown, I keep winding up with a ghastly peach monstrosity.
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Lady Webb, Iovara and Thaos were the only characters holding the story together. They could've been written better (and Lady Webb desperately needed a portrait), but the game would've been much worse off without them.
I think these characters were all (mostly) fine, what was missing was more interaction with their *followers* and the downstream results of their *actions* so that the player could really grasp and understand their former self's *conflict* and inability to choose between Iovara and Thaos. Former Me just felt wishy-washy and indecisive to me, because regardless of whether Thaos was actually correct about people NEEDING gods, his METHODS were so horrific that he couldn't be anything but a bad guy by anybody's lights. But all of the events were so far in the past that there wasn't really an opportunity for you to see various aspects of their different creeds having effects on people in different ways. The conflict between Iovara and Thaos specifically was far too abstract. Heck, aside from talking to Durance you don't even really get to see that much of "What does it MEAN to worship a god in this world or, conversely, NOT worship one". Religion per se was mostly a sideline for people and their concerns and conflicts were personal.
The question of whether the gods are "real" or not is actually a DISTRACTION--the ultimate theme of the game is about dealing with uncertainty and the terrible thing about Thaos was his utter certainty and total rejection of any uncertainty. The problem is that Iovara as written is ALSO certain, so, as others have mentioned, the PLAYER is not forced to either confront uncertainty (as the other characters are) or decide to submit to Thaos' version as a way to avoid that--the player is given two very certain versions to choose between at the last moment. Iovara may have said "I can't prove this to you", but your experiences with Caed Nua, Thaos, and the various Engwithan machines has already demonstrated that the Engwithans wwere certainly CAPABLE of soul manipulation on the scale necessary to create a "god". So her version has a good amount of evidence FOR it and NO evidence AGAINST it--and then Thaos just comes right out and admits it at the end. So instead of the finale being "choose benevolent uncertainty or horrible certainty", it was "choose the good certainty or the bad certainty". So that didn't work out very well.
You did sort of have the option to defy whatever god you promised the souls to, but this felt more like a **** move than anything because, "real" or not, the gods certainly do have POWER and you'd be inflicting the wrath of the god YOU picked on a bunch of people who had no part in the decision and did nothing wrong.
I think what would have made this more interesting would have been if you did decide to defy the gods and just release the souls instead of submitting to ANY divine plan, you would have one last dream where the god informed you of how pissed off they were and you got to discuss the issue with them and try to convince them to change their mind. That was one of the coolest parts of The White March, when you can talk to Ondra and even possibly convince her that it's better to allow Abydon to return. Think about if you'd been *able* to talk to that god at the end and say, look, YOU need to confront this idea of uncertainty TOO and not just go around issuing demands and smashing everyone who disagrees with you just because you can, look at my companions, they managed to come to terms with it, and look at what Thaos almost did from his absolute refusal to allow any doubt to exist. And then you get a kind of mixed-bag ending slide about "well, you succeeded in your goal but it didn't magically fix everything and there were still a lot of problems and people doing really dumb stuff and being really frustrated because the gods were silent and nobody knew what to do now". The way the final choice was actually framed, it wasn't a matter of "you restore faith in the gods or people now live in uncertainty", it was "you restore faith in the gods OR the gods commit a lot of nasty jackassery, suck it". By all means leave the "gods are jackasses" option in there if you don't convince them or if you're just nastily confrontational. That's suitable. But it would have been good to at least give you the opportunity to try so that the central theme of uncertainty wasn't replaced at the last moment by "are the gods real or not"? Who cares if the gods are "real" or if they were "made" when THEY PLAINLY EXIST AND HAVE POWER AND DEFYING THEM IS GOING TO GET A BUNCH OF PEOPLE HURT. But . . . if instead you can REASON with even the GODS . . . what does THAT mean?
That, potentially, would have been very powerful and would have wrapped the overall story really well and you'd still be left with the question of "did I make the right decision?" and have no choice but to live with the uncertainty . . . just like everyone else.
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Well, as of now I can't even get the beta to launch on my PC. Let me check--my latest save may just be out of date so I have to start a new game.
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This is more of an overview, so it won't go very deep on any particular feature. Also some "wish list" type stuff.
Likes:
- I LOVE how food and resting now interacts. It gives an actual purpose to food in the game without having a stupid "hunger" bar that you have to keep topped up. And it means that you don't have to carry around otherwise pointless "camping supplies". However, I found edible food in some . . . odd places.
- OMG SO PRETTY
- I like how the NPCs have a schedule, although frankly this makes it bizarre how trader NPC's still stay "open" all night. If the nameless peons are going to go sleep at night, so should everyone else (except guards maybe). It would also be very cool if monsters had a day/night cycle (maybe even make some that are "active" at night and sleep during the day!). This would make stealthing be more time-of-day dependent.
- Overland travel is really cool. Or, maybe I should call it "overwater", hee. Anyway, I like this aspect a lot. The map does feel a tad static, though. I'd really rather have it that you can only see things that you can interact with on the overland map when you get within a certain distance of them (perhaps modified by your Survival skill?). This would give more of an exploration feel to it, I think. Also, it's not really clear why you can't walk over some areas of the map. I get that there are mountains there, but there aren't any cues to indicate that they're IMPASSIBLE mountains. Ditto for rivers and so forth--it needs to be more obvious where you can and can't go. Also, I think it would be EXTREMELY cool if the overland map had a day/night cycle and weather, particularly if the weather affected, say, your travel speed.
- Stealth--I like how much you can sneak past the fights. However, I think I broke a quest by sneaking. I snuck past almost all the fights in the Engwithan ruins
Dislikes:
- Combat. Did not find this fun AT ALL. Granted, I was still kind of getting used to how the game worked--I generally don't like starting with mid-level characters. I had the same problem with the Pillars 1 beta. But in this case, I wound up actually re-making my character as a stealth build so that I could avoid absolutely as much combat as was physically possible, no joke. I REALLY wish you'd given us a LOT more cash in the beta so that we could actually spend some time actually OUTFITTING our characters and maybe hire some mercenaries if we didn't like our party loadout. I really tried using class abilities but it felt like they never landed at all, in fact, I couldn't even tell in most cases if they just weren't going off or what. I'd order, say, my fighter to knock down an enemy, and they'd never fall down. Order the rogue to blind and enemy, and nothing ever happened. Some visual or auditory cues (special animations?) to show when the special abilities are actually used would be very nice. It also really felt like 100% of the enemies would just make a beeline for the priest in every. single. fight. Even when I didn't have him cast any spells! Two seconds into the fight, oh look, priest is mortally injured AGAIN. None of the weapon proficiency modes seemed worth turning on, either. Also, something like 80% of every combat was just NO PEN NO PEN NO PEN NO PEN. WHY are my characters so awful that they can't do ANY damage?! I didn't even BUILD four of them. If I have to switch weapon types for LITERALLY EVERY ENEMY then every character should have 3 weapon sets as the default so that I can make sure all of them have a piercing, blunt, and slashing weapon set, because from what I can tell this is mandatory if they're even going to do their TINY amounts of damage. This also makes weapon specialization silly, because the weapons you use are always going to be based on what can actually land on the enemy you're fighting. If you want to make weapon specialization meaningful, make it so that if you're using a specialized weapon you get a BIG bonus to penetration so that even if you're going up against an enemy that normally resists that damage type, you can at least do SOME damage.
- Leveling up. Found this confusing. The class abilities page felt really narrow and uni-directional for the non-spellcaster classes.
- Not remotely enough skill points. In Pillars 1 you could pick between having a variety of skills or having few, high skills. Now you can't even do that, you're pretty much forced to distribute the skills among your party members. Playing a "skilled character" is completely off the table now. You might as well just make the skills a feature of the class with the way it's set up now, because you're going to have 1 skill per character ANYWAY. How does it make any sense that you can't even do stealth AND trapping on a rogue, you have to pick ONE?! Also, I don't get why some skills are separate. It just seems like unnecessary duplication to have, say, Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate when you get ONE skill point to spend. It's like saying "hey, even if you WANTED to invest in persuasion, you're still going to fail 2/3 of the time regardless of your investment because you won't have the right skill!"
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I made a rogue/wizard, read the school descriptions, and thought, humm, sounds like most of the self-buffs will be in Transmuting since that makes changes to yourself and others . . . NOPE all the self-buffs are enchanting, transmuting is stuff like . . . summoning a cloud of freezing crystals (shouldn't that be conjuring?)
Frankly, I think they could drop one or more schools entirely, there are too many for the number of spells they have.
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Instead of a video, I'd rather have a playable intro where you can briefly wander around Cad Nua and talk to people, do some minor "tutorial" quests, and incidentally get a brief overview of What Hath Come Before.
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Wait... We are talking No Penalty right? I'm confused now lol
I think it's "No Penetration"--it's what happens when a character hits but does no damage through armor.
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I didn't notice different colors in the text popup, they're always white. The text scroll only has different colors when it's the character TALKING, not for their combat actions.
It's important to me because I consider playing at speed part of the difficulty of combat, so I hate pausing unless I'm passing out orders.
The combat overall could be a LOT better at giving you information without making you pause the game and scroll through tons of text to try and figure out *what's going on*. -
All of your characters shout pretty much nonstop throughout combat, so it's pretty much impossible to tell what any of them are saying or whether it's important or just grunting.
Please reduce incidence and length of combat barks, or at least eliminate all of them that are just "HYAH" or similar zero-information noise. -
The "No pen!" popup damage alerts should include the NAME of the character getting the alert. Or Have NO PEN flash over their character portrait. Heck, just have their damage numbers/alerts flash over their character portrait! It's REALLY HARD to tell which character isn't getting through and the text scrolling is hard to read and this is PRETTY DARN CRITICAL.
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Maybe it's just me, but I really feel that there ought to be a stat or perk or SOMETHING that gives you more skill points (or, conversely, fewer.) The characters just feel absolutely STARVED of skills in the beta and there's nothing much you can do about that I could find in the beta.
I've always enjoyed playing heavily skill-based characters, but with static skill allotment this is basically impossible--you wind up having to play a silly game where you give each party member 2 skills for them to "cover". You don't even get the system from Pillars 1 where you could pick between having more lower-level skills or one or two high ones--now everybody has the same amount of NOT ENOUGH SKILLS so you might as well just max a couple and call it a day. I find this annoying.
What might be interesting would be to have stat thresholds that give you skill bonuses, so if you do a character with spread-out stat points, you're going to have a lot of small +1 skills that will effectively make you a much more "skilled" character than one that is heavily invested in a few stats. So, something like this:
Strength
10 +1 Athletics
11 +1 Intimidate
12 +2 (total) Athletics
13 +2 (total) Intimidate
Constitution
10 +1 Survival
11 +2 Survival12 +3 Survival
13 +4 Survival
Dexterity10 +1 Sleight of Hand
11 +1 Stealth12 +2 Sleight of Hand
13 +2 Stealth
Perception
10 +1 Insight
11 +1 Alchemy
12 +2 Insight
13 +2 AlchemyIntellect
10 +1 Mechanics
11 +1 Metaphysics12 +2 Mechanics
13 +2 MetaphysicsResolve
10 +1 Bluff
11 +1 Diplomacy
12 +2 Bluff
13 +2 Diplomacy
It might potentially make more "balanced" builds more interesting to play for role-playing purposes.
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Okay, I'm confused
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted
Honestly, I think the best ending is the one where you tell Eothas you want to fight and he just explodes you and moves on. Really, there was NO POINT for you to even be there, you could have just shacked up in a tavern for the duration and Eothas could have FedEx'd your soul back to you once he was done with it.
I kind of wish that you COULD convince him to end the world just because that's the only option where YOU DECIDE SOMETHING, even if it's stupid and it sucks.