SunBroSolaire

Xoti's accent sounds really fake if you've been around southerners. It's pretty grating for me, I wish they had just gone with accents that the actors were comfortable with.

That's exactly the problem. As soon as you open the romance can of worms, everyone wants fan service and special pandering.

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority? (Spoilers: it's none of them.) In Dragon Age II they were all bisexual.Also, Inquisition had two gays and two bisexual. The straight characters were four, just like the non-straight (three of those were only available for females PCs, though). That's not a correct representation of sexual orientations, since more than 95% of the world population is straight. I'll also add that having a setting based on medieval Europe where people think it's ok to kill others because of their faith or social class but somehow everyone is more open-minded than contemporary real world people about being sexual orientation/identity is also ****ty fanfiction-tier writing. See here's your mistake you seem to think that Dragon Age is based off medieval Europe when it's really not. Neither is Pillars of Eternity. Medieval Europe didn't have magic, gender equality, other races, monsters and literal gods. Both game series have no interest whatsoever in simulation of the real world largely because they take place in their own fictional one. Even if we take that extremely dubious 95% number at face value, you've offered no compelling reason why it should be on Eora. PoE isn't based on medieval Europe, it is based on Age of Discovery era Europe. Very closely and explicitly. And the reason not to include weirdly inflated number of gay characters is because this isn't a cringeworthy tumblr slash fiction. Nobody has a problem with a realistic treatment of the subject, but every time romance is brought up a certain group of people demand that this topic be given grossly undue focus.

No, that's a completely ignorant take on the discussion here. We're talking about representation compared to real demographics.

Cass seemed straight to me, you could even flirt with her if you were a guy. Lily was a very old woman with some kind of mental illness, I wouldn't really say she was LGBT or whatever. Lily was a physically male character who took on a female persona, so basically trans. Cass iirc admits to being bi at some point.

Of course we're only counting the love interest companions. There's usually not much reason to know side characters sexual proclivities so there would be no way to count them.

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority? (Spoilers: it's none of them.) Dragon Age 2. And DA:O was 50/50. Only those two characters were exclusively gay, but Lily and Cass were arguably LGBT. I agree that it didn't feel as forced - part of that was good writing, but part of it was also not having player romances. It was always a background detail.

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles). It's insipid, unrealistic, pandering and forced. There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct. Even Fallout: New Vegas, which I consider to be one of the more sober-minded treatments of this subject in games, has only two out of six humanoid companions who are straight. You and people like you are the reason that so many people don't want romances in this game. Because we know you will push this garbage on the rest of us who just want realistic, well-written characters. I would hope that the new writing team will avoid this kind of tumblr fan fiction, but the quality of writing in Tyranny does not fill me with confidence.

Hahaha that's a funny joke. NB people are the best. Seriously though I read Pallegina as demi or perhaps agender. She (in the absence of Pallegina speaking up on pronouns, I'll gonna use the same ones the game uses) seems to wear femininity grudingly, like an old mask she's never bothered, or dared, to try taking off. Obsidian, please keep tumblr lunacy out of the game please please please

This sounds like a major step down from PoE tbh... More per encounter abilities = more spamming the same things every fight. Pillars of Eternity already had a problem with that, why change it to be worse?

Aloth, Palligina and Eder coming back is cool, but I hope we see mostly new companions! I wouldn't mind seeing Kana and Hiravius again though.

I would love to see them go crazy with the scale on this one. Since they have the engine polished up from PoE, WM 1&2 and Tyranny, all their pipelines are already established, and the setting is semi-established, I'm guessing they'll be able to do much more with their production time than on the first game.

I hate the idea of respec. It will always be present as a cheat. Please not as in game feature.

You get a lot of xp from killing monsters already. There's at least 32 categories of creatures, and (I think) 82 creatures within those categories. Most of those creatures give at least 120 xp for filling out the entry. That's at least 10,000 xp for killing things, which is enough to get you through the first five levels. In reality it's probably more. People act like kill xp is complete gone, when it's still relatively lucrative. Please. You're saying that if you kill every enemy in the entire game, that after ~50 hours you will have been rewarded cumulatively for the Bestiary with a little less XP than you get for one single bounty (~5 minutes of playing, can be completed easily starting around level 6). There is no way you can call that "lucrative" with a straight face. The Bestiary is great. Bestiary XP is dumb.

XP just needs to match the challenge better. Around mid level, quest XP rewards plateau and so instead of the player being pushed to continue going after the appropriate levelled challenges, instead the player is pushed to go after the easiest challenges available. So after level 5 or so you'll be overlevelled for basically every fight, just doing a normal non-completionist run. This could be easily solved by, oh idk, implementing a system where killing monsters rewards XP based on their difficulty. You could call it "Kill XP System". It's so simple and effective, I can't believe nobody thought of it yet!