Karkarov

That's why I like my default response to all conversations in BG. "EAT COLD STEEL!!!" Hard to misinterpret my intent on that one.

I think it's pretty funny then, that it could possibly upset people like this lol I wish Spoony would learn to move on and realize that we have plenty of other games which are just emotionally rewarding to choose from Of course, I'm guessing the video is years old so maybe he has... hopefully. Uh you should watch his video series. Ultima is more than a "video game" to him, for legitimately good reasons too.

This isn't Dark Souls, I shouldn't be guessing about the intent of the Merchant from the Old Rebpublic who is trying to convince me to help them sink a Principi vessel. Some vague and open ended dialog is fine, basing your entire game around it? I hope your game isn't very dialog or story heavy, otherwise it will make little to no sense. Case in point, no one made rave reviews of Hotline Miami because of the story. It was the gameplay and the soundtrack that sold it. You can't maintain a tight solid narrative, and have large amounts of open ended dialog with unclear meaning at the same time. Deadfire is a story driven RPG, it needs a tight solid narrative.

I don't smoke weed ever, and I seriously doubt it makes the game itself better in any way. You are probably just too busy being high to notice the game plays the same sober too. So no, I don't smoke weed while playing pillars.

Lol the paladin thing? No. It wasn't the writing, or the voice acting. It was the question itself. The entire Ultima series had a long series of games, and dealing with learning about "virtue" was a big focus of it. One of your primary allies throughout the whole series was also the Paladin Dupre, who had tragically sacrificed his own life in the previous game to advance your quest. So the question was basically a giant fat insult to all long term fans of the series. It horribly disrespected the lore, and one of the key characters of the games. Spoony took it very poorly cause if you watch his videos he explains why the Ultima series had a very big emotional place in his life. So to him this was literally taking a dump on one of the most important pieces of his childhood.

I love that dudes videos on the Ultima series. Not sure how full voice over leads to that level of bad writing though. I think you proved what SonicMage, and I also in another thread, said..... It is easy to misinterpret written words, especially when the meaning is subtle. Specifically, I think he was joking, and if he wasn't his written word was vague enough that to at least some people it looked like he was.

You also just hit on another subtle reason why VO is generally better than no VO. You can easily misinterpret a written statement if the language is not plainly clear. For example, simple statements like "Good god!" The person saying it could be expressing shock, or frustration, or even making reference to an attractive person they see. To some extent you can figure it out if you know the rest of the conversation, but that takes work and you could still potentially get it wrong. That is also just a two word statement, imagine if the writer is trying to capture a long but subtle conversation where the meaning is not implicit in the words themselves? With VO you will immediately be able to tell the intent of the speaker because of tone of their voice, because tone is actually a huge part of conversation.

That's fair, except you are overlooking one obvious thing. This was done as a big announcement to encourage more sales and bring attention to the game. If one of them had a "beefier" role as a faction leader.... why would you advertise their role as a sidekick and not mention the more critical faction leader role? Unless of course Rekke and Ydwin, who both easily get as much publicity from Obsidian as any known companion, have been upgraded.

That some dude is Ray Stevenson, specifically that pic is based on his role as Dagonet in the 2004 movie King Aurthur.

Except the people with high quality streams that have no issue reading the text still do it too.

Actually I was thinking about this after my earlier post and realized the ultimate irony. If no one likes VO, and it isn't helpful, why does every streamer read aloud unvoiced dialog or little documents they find in games? Even streamers playing Baldur's Gate 2, or Planescape Torment do it. Oh well you say the answer is obvious, it is more exciting for the viewer. I reply by saying, exactly.

Well don't forget your friend the spoony bard, so counting yourself you are at your 5 limit.

Yes, they appear to be younger now and they have also changed Ydwin portraits 2 times by now... uh... a lot of work for a sidekick don't you think? I kind of agree this is very strange. For one thing we know there was a major push to make Ydwin a full companion, and there has been multiple points on the forums where people were confused about the difference between a sidekick and companion and said things like "why even use a sidekick if you have full companions or full custom?" It was like they were a so so middle ground. Meanwhile Obsidian is using this as a big announcement and to push more sales, which it seems to have worked. We don't know how well it has worked, but it has definitely had a positive effect. So if Critical Roles inclusion is such a big deal, and good enough to be an actual selling point for the game... why would you give a smaller sidekick role to two of them? Also why is there so much focus on Rekke and Ydwin who both have actually had almost as much coverage as full companions at this point. In fact, didn't Ydwin get a full on character reveal, before some of the "full companions"? If this were Denmark I would definitely be smelling the fish market, if you feel me.

Didn't say it had full VO, I said the majority of it was. Every scene that is important to the story (which is a crap ton of scenes) is fully voiced. Additionally I am willing to bet Persona 5 has considerably more dialog in it than either Deadfire or Divinity Original Sin 2. It also has it's VO in two languages, and only by professional voice actors. I am willing to bet Divinity and Deadfire both are English only, and have at least a couple "people from the company" doing VO. So the odds are incredibly high that Persona 5 probably has a VO budget that dwarfs both Deadfire and Divinity Original Sin 2 regardless of it not being 100% VO. Forget about the fact that at least 25% of the music in the game also has actual vocals in it by professional musicians. I somehow doubt Deadfire or Divinity have more than 1 maybe 2 tracks with vocals, or maybe none, not sure. In fact VO was probably the most expensive part of Persona 5's development budget, if it wasn't it was certainly in the top 3. So I would say it is not a good game to use as an example of "less VO is good". As for budget, there is no doubt the budget of Divinity Original Sin 2 was much higher than Deadfire, the game was basically at beta level before they even started their fundraising campaign. The kickstarter money was pure extra funds, and even if the funding had somehow flopped the game still would have released. Just probably without full VO and a few other bells and whistles.

To be honest I can't speak to how Armentai does it specifically, but making one of these portraits into a watercolor variant that comes anywhere close to matching what is in game is serious work. The portrait I use for my avatar here took no less than 11 layers, multiple small hand adjustments with paint brush tools, more color corrections than I want to recount, and tons of putting it in game then coming back out and tweaking it "just a bit more" until it had that perfect match. The one I did yesterday I feel I did "in a hurry" and it still took me around 3.5 hours. These are not made by slapping down a water color filter, adding some transparency, then plopping the parchment texture into the background. EDIT: Oh yeah someone did request the water color variant I did yesterday in PM, and I gave them links but may as well put them here too just in case anyone else wants them.

I definitely agree on point 1, games I feel are worth the money are few and far between these days. I think it looks worse than it really is simply because of volume though, in the past you didn't see 10-20 games a month released. Number 2 isn't my argument, it is an argument people opposed to full VO have made. I also agree, it is pretty much impossible to prove it was a waste of money, or could have been spent better. Which is why it is a pretty weak argument.

Fair point, but no one crapped on Andromeda because of the full VO, more like the bad writing (not sure how lack of VO would fix that?), the bad story, the bland characters, the insane uncanny valley facial animations, etc etc. And please, no one in their right mind doesn't consider Witcher 3, or Divinity Orginal Sin 2, or even Persona 5 RPG's. Meanwhile, when someone says "a decision you made was poor" it is not on the person who made the decision to argue why it is not a poor decision. It is on the person saying it was a poor decision after the fact to argue why it was poor. So the burden of proof is not on obsidian, it is 100% on the people claiming full VO was a bad idea because the funds could have spent better elsewhere. Yet I see no evidence to show that, and instead of providing evidence, you just claimed you don't have to prove your point it is my responsibility to prove you wrong. So in the land of logical debate that means you have no actual evidence to back up your argument, therefore, I don't have to do anything as you have provided no evidence to disprove. Also seriously? Do some of you actually think full VO is something they came up with last week? They announced it last week sure, but you don't fully voice your game on a whim 3 weeks from launch. This decision happened months ago, if not over a year ago, and likely was implemented before the last beta patch. Which by the way is multiple versions behind Obsidians current build, and will certainly be even farther behind the release build. This is because they are spending the last month on bug fixing, and maybe last minute balance tweaks. Full VO being a feature in the lull as you described it is nothing but a hype announcement meant to renew interest in the game and drive more sales. Which apparently it did. If anything that indicates Obsidian's project management is doing a pretty good job to time this info drop to maximum effect.

That's gonna look too dark. I concur. I am bored I will take a crack at it and post later. EDIT: Okay here is what I slapped together. I admit it is not my best work but meh. If you would like the images just let me know and I will post them.

Well first one correction, you mean Original Sin 2 AND Persona 5, cause I promise you Persona 5 does not have even half the budget of say Witcher 3, maybe not even a quarter. That said, you are right, it does not tell the whole story. But it does make my point, people like VO in their video games, even RPG's. This is not a "bioware" thing, or a "console fanboy" thing. Looking at the top rated RPG's for the last 5 years you will see almost all of them had full VO, or really close to it. If it was not considered an important feature, or worse considered a detriment, all the top rated RPG's wouldn't have it. A lot of users on niche forums, which is what this is, live in a bubble and refuse to ever consider the big picture. My post is not to say full VO or death, or even that Deadfire can compete with those games (though I promise you I will like it more than Original Sin 2). I am just pointing out that full VO is basically a staple of most video games these days, even RPG's. Suggesting it is a mistake is living in denial of modern gaming standards, and more to the point, no one has any proof to indicate the money could have been spent better elsewhere.

They haven't specifically said, (or maybe they have?) but I am thinking it might be a no. We know for example Pallegina has a set knightly order based on pillars 1 choices, and knightly order is your subclass. So they may do the same for all the companions, which I think is fine as long as they all have unique stuff. Would suck if only the priests and paladin companions got special snowflake subclasses.

No, they didn't need to read any interview from anyone. Common sense says people like full VO. Amazon has an audio books section, and it isn't small. This implies there is a large subset of people who actually don't like reading and would rather get their book in the form of narration. Let's look at big RPG releases over the last few years... Last year according to IGN (you can say what you want, they are one of the most visited gaming sites on the internet) the winner of best RPG 2017 was Persona 5. Gee that game is like 90% voiced. What was the runner up? Oh Divinity Original Sin 2.... 100% voiced. Hmm. What about 2016? Dark Souls 3.... yeah fully voiced.... not a ton of dialog though give you that. Runner up? Final Fantasy 15, yeah like 95% voiced. You know what, this must be a fluke, lets check 2015, surely we will get a reasonable result. Winner of RPG of the year? Witcher 3, fully voiced. Runner up? Fallout 4, fully voiced again. Maybe it is just me but I am noticing a pattern. Looks like most major RPG releases have full VO, or really close to it.

I would agree with you except that this morning I was kicked in the head until I was dead nuyahahahahahaha. Of course that is all good, because we all know the only good surfacer is a dead surfacer, but I just wish someone could get me outta this hellhole. If you haven't noticed yet, a game doesn't need full VO to have repetitious annoying voices in it.

Blackjackets main draw is they can switch any weapon extremely fast, and also have an extra weapon slot. So a blackjacket can actually carry more weapons than any other character (if you give them the extra weapon slot perk), and as a result can always have a weapon effective against the enemy type in all encounters. Of course thanks to Sawyer drawing attention to it people have also realized you can just spam guns this way too by carrying like 4 blunderbuss and quick swapping them.

That assumption is untrue. Going back to early 80s (I’m old...) some video game trilogies required completion of game 1 in order to continue in game 2. Other trilogies did not. It all depends on the developer. I would love to hear some examples of what these games that required you to beat game 1 to play game 2 were? I have also been playing video games since the early 80's and can't think of a single one. I can think of loads that let you import your game, and loads that made no sense if you didn't play the earlier games, but not even 1 that REQUIRED you to play the early games.

I really wish I could put on those rose tinted glasses so many in these forums wear when it comes to Baldur's Gate. I really do. Yes, it was a great RPG at the time, I loved it at the time in fact, especially BG2. But claiming it's writing was full of personality, charm, and wit? No, it wasn't. It was serviceable, but nothing special. It certainly was not "significantly better written" than any of the Dragon Age games except maybe the second one. Also it was going for an epic fantasy feel, it takes place on the sword coast of forgotten realms, and your dad was the god of murder. Don't mistake a couple Daryl, Daryl, and my other brother Daryl jokes for a "Princess Bride" theme. I loved the show Thundercats when I was a kid. That doesn't mean that as an adult I can't go back and notice how bad the writing was, and point out the stupid things like how they were literally from Plant Wayoutback. It is okay to admit flaws in things you thought were great when you were younger. Yet so many Obsidian fans refuse to look at Baldur's Gate, or god forbid Planescape Torment, with anything remotely resembling a critical eye.