PrimeJunta

Wait, what? I thought you hated Pillars. What prompted you to back this one?

That's the problem right there. The priest was more valuable at buffing/countering than fighting, so he ended up doing little fighting despite being built for the job.

I did (priest of Berath). It was fun in the early game. Mid to late game I was too busy casting to be able to do much fighting, plus the lack of martial talents made for an unsatisfactory combatant. Overall it was one of the less fun builds I tried.

I'd firmly oppose that. The less open worldy the better. The hub-based "small sandbox" approach is exactly how it should be. A game with a strong focus on storytelling needs a pretty linear level and world design. Real open worlds are for real sandbox games - something Pillars isn't and hopefully won't ever become. BG2. The game opened up immediately after you were out of Irenicus's dungeon. The meat of the game is the wide-open Act 2, with some of the quests possibly way over your level. I have issues with BG2's structure -- specifically: the game throws all those quests at you at once, and doesn't give any hints at all about which ones are easier than others; in fact the best "starter" quests require you to go out of your way to discover them -- but I think those issues would be easy to fix. I.e., I would like a short, linear start followed by a big, open structure laid out in such a way that I don't innocently walk into a dragon's jaws first thing (but that lets me do that if I want to), and then a short, tight endgame.

I don't really care for more/deeper companion content. Pillars 1 was fine; there was enough that I could relate to the companions, the banter between them was great, they had their personal agendas and stories, but it didn't take over the whole thing BioWare style. I would prefer that they kept it that way; companion interaction and stories should be a side dish, not the main course. What would I like to see? Well, some of it has already been promised in the Figstarter: a nice visual facelift, exorcism of the loading time demon, more customisable companions (multiclassing!), a fresh setting that's a bit different from the usual European pseudo-Medieval (okay, in this case, pseudo-Renaissance) thing. So that's all good. If they pull that off and give us more of the same while avoiding the mistakes made with Pillars 1 (hollow stronghold, out-of-whack megadungeon, empty-ish Act 3, animu backer NPCs all over the place), I'll be a happy panda. I'll be really happy if: (1) Better encounters. There were very few in Pillars 1 that made proper use of the environment or otherwise came close to IE game standards. These got progressively better in the expansions, however, so I'm optimistic: if they're all WM2 quality but a bit better paced (not every map has to have a mob every two steps), that'll be fantastic. (2) Better factions. In Pillars, the act 2 Knights/Dozens/Doemenel thing just suddenly ... ended. It felt tacked-on and superficial, and (ending slides aside) your choices there didn't make any difference to the rest of the game. They did say this is a goal; I hope they manage it. If they get anywhere near the kind of faction reactivity they had in FO:NV that'll be fantastic. (3) More open world. Pillars is a sequence of small sandboxes. I would like to be able to move more freely during the mid-game, even at the risk of attempting to take on too high-level content too early (I like that as a challenge). (4) Better thought-out loot. At this time, Pillars plus WM1 has a pretty good loot system: there are tons of items with unique properties you can use as a basis for builds (just ask @Boeroer!), and the crafting system lets you tweak and upgrade them so you can keep them. The handful of soulbound items introduced in WM are extra-cool and flashy but not so outrageously powerful they eclipse the rest of it. WM2 however goes overboard with the soulbounds: towards the end everybody was rocking them, and the best ones were just objectively better than anything else, which took the lustre off my wacky builds built around Hellwax Mold-cloned Spelltongues or what have you. So, I hope Pillars 2 will attempt to hit something like that balance: enough unique items to make for creative builds, seasoned with just a handful of extra-cool soulbound items. (5) Something surprising. I love it when a game throws a curveball at me, whether it's in story, lore, or mechanically. Because I can't know what that is, I can't suggest it.

Well, the stretch goal companion's name is pronounced Hottie... (okay it's probably really pronouned Shottie but I couldn't resist)

Companions are always higher-level than hirelings. That more than makes up for any sub-optimal stat distribution. Pallegina specifically is a solid and versatile companion. Her relatively even stat spread means you can build her as tank/support or as damage/alpha-striker. Seriously, this is one area where I think Pillars got it exactly right: enough companions with sufficiently versatile stat spreads that you can make any number of different parties with them, and Adventurers' Hall if you want to hog-wild with minmaxing. Please don't change it.

I've played this with several successful parties that have no fighter, no priest, or neither. Fighter in particular is easy to replace -- a monk, rogue, paladin, or barbarian will play that role just fine. A priest can be effectively replaced by two paladins, a paladin + druid, or items, especially scrolls. In fact I prefer to play without a priest, since that lets me pump up offense a notch which makes fights go faster.

Hey was that countdown timer there all the time? 23 hours and a bit to go to... something

^ It wouldn't surprise me at all.

Once we're done with the Watcher's story, I'd like them to take a crack at doing Storm of Zehir right. There was a ton of cool stuff there, mostly let down by the engine: the awful combat and the extremely frequent and tedious loading times. The combat part is already sorted, loading times could be fixed by engine improvements and clever level design, and they could go hog-wild with a fully party-based open-world design with economy mechanics and quests all over the place.

It's more likely IMO they'll do their totes-not-Skyrim in a different franchise, at most a spin-off. Once that little matter of finding $100 mil to do it is sorted out obv.

Beautiful hand-painted 2D backgrounds are a big <cough> pillar of the series' identity. No way they'll change that.

I did play the game all the way through with Durance once. Usually I dump him pretty quickly, and don't replace him with another priest. The only priest spell I really miss is Suppress Affliction, and that's sorted once I find a ring with it. The Prayer Against * spells rule in some boss battles, but that's easily addressed with scrolls. I will do a complete playthrough with a PC priest one of these days though...

Looks pretty cool. Need more information.

Aye. That coexistence/cooperation thing though, I'm far more optimistic about it. I find people only really become idiots in large groups; person to person the vast majority find ways to get by. I'm something of a Buddhist, my wife is Catholic, I have friends, family, and coworkers who are Lutheran, Muslim, Jewish, Baha'i, Hindu, nonreligious, even antireligious, and range politically from small-l libertarian to, well, me (I'm Communist politically), and somehow we manage to get along just fine -- and the friction that happens is rarely about the "big" things like religion or politics, and mostly about little everyday stuff. I think of it as a scaling problem. We'll just need to find a way to make that work at the global scale, when we no longer see the other face to face.

Nah, I'll pass. I've been through many, many such discussions over the years, and they never really go anywhere -- I was a regular on alt.atheism in the 1990's. I also haven't been really invested in the question for over fifteen years or so. I'm not all that interested anymore in what people believe; I'm more interested in the question of how people with different beliefs find ways to coexist and cooperate. That's a far more pressing question in my opinion, and likelier to lead to constructive outcomes.

That's the problem right there. The Bible isn't evidence for God, any more than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is evidence for God (or, if you will, the Iliad is evidence for Aphrodite). It's evidence that people believed in God, and about the kinds of things people believed about God. That's not the same thing at all.

Aesthetics and visual range. In a pitch-black dungeon you'd only be able to see as far as your light source reaches. This would have significant repercussions on encounter design, as you wouldn't be able to see how many of them lurk in the darkness. You could have enemy parties with light sources too of course.

That is bulls... How would you reload? See, the reason behind it was just making the pistol shoot only once at the beginning of a battle. Like a pirate. Arr? Since we're in the "and a pony" mood... Bandoliers. You wear one that holds six pistols. You shoot them in rapid succession, boom boom boom boom boom boom, but can't reload and will have to switch to a melee weapon after you're done. A single one-handed pistol couldn't be reloaded; instead, once you've let off the shot, you use it off-hand as a club. Perhaps not very effective, but badass. Definitely badass. Edit:

It's the recoil, man. Those things kick like a mule.

I would like a pitch black dungeon. It would need to be supported though -- there are torches, but we'd also want spells and items which emit light, or infra/ultravision etc. Perhaps death godlikes use some other sense than sight to "see" and are immune to darkness.

Methodological naturalism can disprove a deity which acts measurably on the world though. It can't disprove a deity which sits passively outside the world of course, a neo-Platonist Prime Mover for example. But a God who answers prayers (or bestows punishments) to some measurable effect? Can be (and has been) disproved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Kind of a shame to put all that work into the Pillars ending, when only about 10% of the players will see that.

And in Pillars, it doesn't, and it's not a big deal. Right?