sparklecat

Good question, yes. Personally, I'm all for giving review copies out to the streamers/LPers to help advertise the game and thus boost sales. What I'm less happy about is that their embargo isn't also ending on release day, since that means that there are what, thousands of people who haven't (and a reasonable proportion of whom won't) bought the game who are going to experience a good chunk of the story, albeit by watching rather than playing, before those of us who've spent literally years following this game's production and contributing to it by playing the beta and offering feedback and suggestions. Some people getting the game in advance to figure out what they're doing and plan their streams, or get their videos put together for the 26th, I'd be fine with. Three days of them streaming it while I'm very excited about the upcoming release and have to wait... well, flaunting their access was a good phrase for what it feels like. It's not a huge deal for me, but yeah, I wish it had been handled differently.

I've seen dialogue options with the "rational" tag as well; maybe that's more what you're looking for.

From the comparisons you were drawing in the video, it sounds like you know 4e D&D fairly well; if I wanted to make something like an illusionist wizard, would I do better going with an actual wizard or a cipher here? The mind-attacking spells thing sounds like cipher might be a better fit, while proper wizards are maybe more evokers?

15GB

I look up lists of recommended names for the setting and race/nationality and find something that feels good, maybe changing a few letters.

Where does it state this? a little dissapointing to have to wait longer for the box without the game in it, to then have to wait even longer for the actual game to also arrive... i mean, i guess its good that we get digital download, but when a big deal was made about things going out to arrive on time meaning game and the rest of the contents would be shipped separately, its just a bit sad that in actual fact euro backers will be waiting doubly long. Are there any in game stuff that was being shipped with the boxed contents that wont be made digitally available on release? (glowing pig for example) as that kind of defeats the purpose of providing them as either a) people will play without them and potentially never use them, or b) people will wait for the stuff to arrive, effectively meaning they got the game late anyway. Dont take this the wrong way, i'm still super excited for the game and everything in it! Agreed; we'll see how it actually turns out in practice, but I'm not going to be too thrilled if I end up getting the stuff weeks after the game's out and delivered to the US backers. Especially as the extra shipping cost was not exactly what I'd consider the price for the slow boat.

Thanks for being so helpful, buddy, and for all the time you're spending on these videos, for that matter.

would like to know this too, I believe one of the developers said that you should be able to choose different platforms for your different keys on the backer portal once they're available, and to just email support if you run into trouble doing so.

If you have a specific build in mind, perhaps I can give you an anecdote? Cheers; high Intellect Rogue and high Perception/Resolve Cipher were two of the possibilities I was considering and concerned wouldn't really work.

Attribute selection doesn't really make your build 'sub-optimal'. What makes a build sub optimal is doing stuff like maxing Intellect but then picking no active abilities that benefit from it - that's stuffing up your build. Your abilities, talents and items will have the biggest impact on how you play the game. I will demonstrate this in my second and third videos. To get the most out of your attributes you should either pick them to support your role or play-style, as you can bend classes to play different ways, or play to the attributes you picked. Awesome; first few times through games, I like to focus on building characters to match a personality rather than for combat, and I will be very happy if the ability/talent selection is wide enough to let me turn whatever weird class and attribute combinations I come up with into something that works at least reasonably well.

How big is the difficulty jump going to hard, would you say? If I build suboptimal characters (say, a high Perception and Resolve Cipher for my PC), do I need to drop the difficulty to compensate?

I was going to go with GOG because I prefer DRM free, but their relatively slow patch releases compared to Steam and the fact that I can't preload with GOG is swaying me towards Steam, especially since I'll have a nice DRM free physical copy eventually anyway.

Pretty much what Anthony Davis said on RPGcodex, then. Streaming of Act 1 allowed on Monday. Indeed the case. Reviews are embargoed until the 26th. Lets Plays and Streamers can start today with limited progress. (Source: In the process of reviewing it myself). Hey, could you (and any other reviewers/streamers that post on these forums and are already playing) do us all a favour as you go through the game and keep an eye out for attribute thresholds - specifically in dialogue - to accomplish goals? Highest needed to pass all dialogue checks for a given attribute, how much you need to pass a reasonable amount if not the most difficult, how much for the easiest checks, that sort of thing. I don't want to end up building my first character with, say, 13 Intellect and then find when I'm already 10+ hours in that you tend to pass the checks at 10, 14, and 18, for example.

That was very helpful; thanks. To delve a little more into the rp side of character building, do you get the sense that there are common thresholds for attributes used in dialogue, i.e. if you take 14 Resolve (or whatever amount) you'll be able to pass the medium difficulty relevant checks, that sort of thing?

I'll agree that two people playing one copy of a game at the same time is pushing it; I was addressing the "buy two copies if you want to play it on two devices" thing/the EULA earlier that was talking about only installing games on one machine. That's just ridiculous.

Food analogies, awesome. Regardless of what the EULA says it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that a person may wish to use software he has licensed on more than one device. That this is expressly prohibited in EULAs just goes to show how anti consumer they are. Your response to this state of affairs shouldn't be to offer a food analogy and leap heroically to the defense of corporations who have strong-armed lawmakers into legislating support for product and service T&Cs that are hostile, unreasonable and unenforceable just so that their profiteering can continue unhindered by pesky things such as by robust consumer rights and protections. Nobody is asking for FREE anything, in fact if it weren't for peoples generosity, giving freely of their own money there wouldn't be a product for Paradox, Obsidian, GoG and Steam to attach a EULA that admonishes and restricts the use of for those very same people. For me i see no differences as piracy. You can licensed a copy does that means you are entitled to share it to your friends, relatives and families? Which probably more than 10 if that's a good example? You licensed a copy then i think it's perfectly acceptable if you are going to use it for yourself not for others. Is there another person in your household? Do you buy a second copy of books for them to read, or movies for them to watch? Ever loaned a friend a book? I'm not licensing the right to read a book when I pay for it; I own that book. And I refuse to view or treat games or movies or anything else in a different light purely because some billionaire somewhere feels they're not quite rich enough yet. As it happens, my copy of PoE comes with an extra digital one so it's not really an issue in this case, but I can guarantee you the only games I'm buying multiple copies of are the ones with multiplayer (and the ones where I wore out the disc playing it so much and had to replace the thing, but hey).

I'm not sure if I'm going to do an LP at this stage - my focus will be on trying to help improve reception and the best way I can do that is to make a comprehensive beginner guide, so that when the game unlocks for everyone, there's something that people can watch to help them understand how things work / how to play. That would be really great; I played the beta a little when it first came out, but then decided I'd rather go into the game fresh once it was properly released. The more I'm hearing of the rather different mechanics to the old IE games, though, the more I'm worrying that I'll be utterly lost come release day.

I really cannot express how upset I'm going to be if I end up getting hit with customs fees twice, or higher import duties as a result of a split shipment. But if Paradox can handle this in such a way that UK shipments don't end up with higher charges as a result, then go ahead and split it up, sure. However, it occurs to me that it's possible a split shipment would also split up the value of what's being shipped and put me under some threshold for taxes as well, which I'd be all for. Overall, I don't think I have enough information here to make an informed choice on what's best, which is why I'd like you lot to consider these questions and provide us with some answers before making your decision.

Just out of curiosity, once other people get their GOG keys for WL2 (I had a Steam copy direct from inXile that I converted the key from): did your install take ridiculously long as well? I've been sitting 40 minutes and it's only half done.

I wrote inXile last night about getting my GOG key from backing PE and they told me that it's in Obsidian's hands, not theirs.

My main concen at this point with the HUD is simply the size of things; icons on character portraits (and spell/ability icons) are too small to easily make out what they are, combat log is too cramped to be able to read what's going on. I don't feel like I can really judge how I feel about placement as long as those are the case, though I will say that I definitely agree on not understanding why the centre element is something we'll be clicking comparatively rarely.

Did they? I would've sworn my mages never got interrupted so long as I kept Stoneskin up. And that I went for the Flail of Ages partially to get past Stoneskin and have a chance at interrupting, for that matter. Obviously it's not that important, but I might fire it up later and play around for curiosity's sake.

I could be completely wrong, but the impression I had was that higher damage done meant a higher chance for the interrupt to occur.

This is just nonsense. How do you get from "no bad builds" to "less variation"? The PoE attribute system as it is designed(Ignoring balancing right now) is meant to add variation by allowing you to create classes that focus on various sub-types. It sounds more like you're trying to squeeze as many clever-sounding words into your comment to distract from the fact that you actually don't have an argument. See this thread. For a choice to matter, something has to be forgone (see: opportunity cost). A character with maximized stats can only perform class functions marginally better than one with minimized attributes. This is what all the fuss over attributes are right now. In many cases, they are distinctions will little difference. This is exacerbated by several attributes having demonstrably poorer values for all classes, and that the usefulness of certain attributes are directly limited by the explicit role intended for certain classes. This sums up to a false choice. It's the illusion of choice. If you been less threatened by vocabulary, you might have gleaned that from my prior comment. That's an argument for number tweaking the attribute modifiers, not for the necessity of allowing bad builds. Your "cost" with no impotent builds is that you do not have enough points to be good at everything; you have to choose.

Use athletics to describe that. As for no bad builds meaning no builds, that's simply incorrect. You can argue that the differences need to be more substantial, but if you think nobody is coming up with different build ideas, you simply haven't been reading closely enough. I'd recommend starting with PrimeJunta's various posts on potential builds s/he has tried or is considering.