AwesomeOcelot

The Vega 20 leak presents a non-gaming GPU not a refresh.

Portal wasn't a mod, the gameplay prototype wasn't Portal. Valve pumped a lot of money into CS, TF, and DoD, they wouldn't have been successful without Valve. Also many mod developers turned their own mods into pay for stand alone titles. Why shouldn't they charge for their work, why should people get mods for free? You should just be grateful that some modders are willing to work for free. Paid mods aren't bad, and platforms taking a cut isn't bad, many mod hosts charge or get ad revenue. The problem was that Bethesda, who rely on modders to make their games good because they have a talent deficit, wanted to take a cut for something that enhances their product, they wanted to take away money from modders who they benefit from.

Reddit and The Register, not the best places to go to get a reasonable perspective on breaking tech news.

Yes. I've been using mule kick in most combat though.

UI still highlights but can't interact with it, can't move screen across map, animation stops.

I get an extra animal companion that spawns from the edge of the screen and only follows me around, doesn't do anything else. Also my animal companion lost its name and is now just called "Bear Companion".

Has happened with the drakes on the Poko Kohara island and the Adra animats in the 2nd level dungeon. Some of the enemies become non-interact-able, either idling animation or following me around. It's only happened twice on the same playthrough and I've been unable to recreate after loading a save.

Pillars wasn't publisher funded, Obsidian didn't have to answer to Paradox at all but you're correct in what Tim meant about not wanting to deal with publishers, he doesn't want to be in the producer or executive role, he wants to be only on the developer side.

Maybe they decided to develop separate UI for different platforms like a sensible developer.

Main problem with DLC is just value for money. DLC should be proportionate to the game, so if the content is equivalent to 10% of the game, why is the DLC 25% of the cost of the game? Especially when it's using the same engine, same dev tools, 80% of the assets. Single player games shouldn't have weapon and cosmetic pack DLC you pay for, bundle that into expansion class DLC or release it for free. Mini-expansions that are also proportionately priced are fine. Season passes are insanity, clearly anti-consumer, not only do they include bull**** DLC like weapon packs, but you're buying a future product no one has seen let alone reviewed. DLC expansions in the middle of single play campaigns are bad for pacing, frustrating for players who have already competed the main campaign, often mess up balance, and sometimes the way they are shoehorned into an already existing plot is clumsy. Mutli-player games should only have cosmetic DLC, any other DLC inevitably leads to fragmentation or pay to win, even if the dev cares about balance they constantly get it wrong, then have to nerf something that often makes it unplayable, something people paid money for. The reason things like cosmetics are fine here is you're paying for the service, but without a flat rate fee, which would be an alternative to DLC.

Unity isn't great with multi monitor support. The solution is kind of hacky, although it should be easy enough to allow players to position the UI and render the scene on a user specified part of the virtual screen, allowing people to then span the whole thing across monitors. Basically it should be a command line option overriding Unity resolution selection, a ini user specified resolution, a user specified scene render resolution and position, and moveable UI. It's an minority use case, but I wish Obsidian would just dedicate a tiny slice of time to seeing if they could leave in a hidden experimental mode that's not supported or guaranteed to work at all. Saying that I plan to ditch my multi display setup and go with a 1440p ultrawide or large 4K when I can afford to, after having multi display for 19 years.

That is false, there's several maps that make up the background for PoE, and with Deadfire there's even more lighting effects on the background. It's not just a flat image, you couldn't draw a 2D image and place it into PoE.

My 5820K isn't a Xeon and doesn't have a iGPU, it had a reasonable price/performance for a 6 core 12 thread CPU 3 1/2 years before Ryzen. Problem is Intel hasn't progressed much from there.

Intel has the the CPUs that can beat Ryzen, they just have to cut prices to compete. Intel did stop pushing desktop performance for years and AMD haven't caught up with Ryzen apart from overtaking them in parallelism, it's a bit disappointing. Intel have the capacity to increase cores and threads, they have been very slow to do so because they had no competition, did not want to compete with enterprise, and the market is not growing for desktop. AMD is in a good position because Intel could take over a year to respond, AMD could own the desktop giving it the marketshare it needs for software to support their features and standards. I haven't considered buying an AMD CPU since 2004 when I bought one of the first AMD64 CPU.

Unity engine doesn't make a difference, they would need to create a SDK because they're not using generic Unity assets. Also the Unity engine is heavily extended, so what you can download is not the same as the engine Pillars is running on.

I had 2 Seagate Barracudas that lasted over 8 years of quite heavy use but then Seagate and Samsung drives only lasting a year, so I switched to WD and I haven't had any problems with 5 drives. I've owned 2 Hitachi drives and they didn't die, they became obsolete, they weren't the best in terms of performance though.

You can't maintain 30+fps @ 1080p on a 960m on nightmare graphics in Doom 2016. Doom 2016 is an incredibly well built game, it is very well optimized, the 4GB version of the 960m can run 30+fps @ 1080p on high settings which is incredible. Pillars of Eternity is not very well optimized at all, they've already promised to do all the graphical upgrades while keeping the recommended specs the same for Deadfire, which should tell you all you need to know about that.

Modding support isn't their focus, it might never be. For maps they seem to be making a lot of "from scratch" stuff, instead of using tool-sets and scripting. Also there's technology like their dialogue system they just don't want to share as it's a competitive advantage. They could do a lot more for modding UI, characters, and gameplay though.

The tech support forum is not official Obsidian support. If it's been over 5 working days since you emailed Obsidian, email them again. The Lenovo Y700 has up to a 960m GPU, it could have something lower depending on model. The 960m's equivalent discrete GPU is the 750 Ti in the budget range, that card gets quite large frame dips at 1080p in Pillars. Try running the game's graphic quality setting lower and perhaps at 1280x720p.

They need more per encounter spells, just to balance the classes and give people something to do in smaller encounters. This also makes sense with 5 party members.

I hate that every game has crafting and it's powerful enough that you can't just ignore it. Crafting has its place in Elder Scrolls or Don't Starve, but PoE and Mankind Divided didn't need it. Adding another system to design and balance, it's just not the best use of a devs time. It could easily be replaced by chef, mage, and blacksmith vendors plus quests for unique and powerful effects. Crafting is just a mindless trend in development, a feature box to tick, the only reason PoE had it is because all the other RPGs do, and they only have it because WoW and Oblivion sold tens of millions.

Yeah, but Kickstarter also offered Amazon payments which works like a dream. I haven't been given the option for Amazon payments from KickStarter for over a year. It does work like a dream, I have paypal, amazon payments, and google checkout (RIP?) accounts but they charge more for their services so less money goes to the developer.

KickStarter isn't perfect with its credit card processing either, that's why Obsidian had a paypal option for PoE (which was also setup a while after the campaign started). Fig has a few benefits over KickStarter that make it a better option for Obsidian, which should help them get more funds which benefits all backers.

Technically your CPU doesn't meet the minimum specs of the original PoE, and it'll be 10 years old by the time PoE2 is released.

DX:MD is extremely lazy and weak compared to DX:HR. The much larger hub didn't contain much larger meaningful content. The main plot and missions weren't great. The new additions to gameplay didn't make the game more fun. Characters are introduced in a graphic novel instead of the game, most of the characters aren't interesting or you don't interact with them much at all. DX: MD is half a game with a lot of filler. There's also a lot of anti-consumer stuff in it, buying praxis kits, use-once pre-order items, a pre-order mission. People counter with "well you don't need any of that", that's just another point against it, it's ripping people off, and it's also indicative to how unbalanced the game is, everything is given out like candy. I enjoyed some of the side mission content, but there wasn't that much of it, the engine is improved, the verticality of levels is good. What were they expecting when they do that? When I look back at HR, I can think of so many moments and characters, segments of gameplay, I can't do that with MD.