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PrimeJunta

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Everything posted by PrimeJunta

  1. You absolutely need to file a bug report. This is important.
  2. Well, 12 and 24 aren't ideal either. In a base-10 system you would want to go with 10 and 20, or if you want to be able to neatly subdivide, 8/16 or 16/32 would've been cleaner. I do think it's strange that it's an odd number though, since the division into day and night "naturally" splits the cycle into daylight hours and nighttime hours.
  3. While entirely true in theory, it's a pretty fine line, honestly, and it's very hard to separate propaganda from not-propaganda in media, in regards to this standpoint. But as for how could they otherwise? It's actually not that complicated. I routinely take stances which are not my own, for the sake of argument. Sometimes I even lose. That's still reflecting your worldview. You're just taking a different point of view on it. Consider Ivan Karamazov. He's a rationalist who rejects God, entirely unlike the deeply devout Dostoevsky. He's sympathetically portrayed. Yet it would be pretty ludicrous to claim that therefore The Brothers Karamazov doesn't reflect his philosophical and religious convictions, or that The Brothers Karamazov is Orthodox propaganda. It's neither: it is a great and complex book which springs from Dostoevsky's struggles with his faith, his demons, and his world.
  4. Not everything which reflects an author's worldview is propaganda, you know. Most things do. How could they otherwise?
  5. Assuming the sun also rises tomorrow morning isn't an act of faith, it's a reasonable assumption. If there was incontrovertible evidence of an actual deity, faith wouldn't be necessary. As to the rest of it... I kinda thought the opposite. In most cRPG's, clerics, priests, and believers are portrayed in one of a handful of paper-thin clichés -- there's the Awful Good paladin, the muhaha evil cultist of a bloody blood god, and... well, the heal-bot where faith is entirely written out of the equation. Pillars on the other hand had Edér, a complex, nuanced character with deep faith in his god and religion, struggling with a massive internal conflict brought on by it; Durance who feels that his god has betrayed him -- or vice versa -- and coming to terms with it; Hiravias who has wrestled with not one, but two gods. They all ring true to me -- other than the fantasy dimensions, these are the kinds of things believers wrestle with. A cookie-cutter atheistic fairy-tale would've just portrayed believers as buffoons, villains, or ignoramuses, and had them all go "YISSS! I am liberated from mah superstition!" with the big reveal. Pillars wasn't like that at all.
  6. You do it by running two games in parallel with identical builds, one in Trial of Iron and one without, and rehearsing each battle in the "normal" version until you find a bombproof strategy, then you execute it in the "real" game. You have to be good at the game, of course, but basically you just need patience. I've played a bit of a way into the game solo, and those hard fights are totally beatable with some experimentation and careful use of consumables; I've no doubt that this achievement is totally doable. It's so not my thing though. I'll give it a week before someone beats it, tops.
  7. Yeah on PotD it's pretty rare to have just one very dangerous foe, and even in those cases (dragons) you need to find some way to keep the minions out of your hair while you're killing it -- or, alternatively, keep it out of your hair while you're killing the minions so you can finish up by focusing on it, which is often the way to go. I can only think of a handful of fights where you would want to prioritise single-target.
  8. Also Pallegina is legally male, which is why she was allowed to join the Brotherhood of Five Suns. I get the impression that she's a little pissed off about that actually.
  9. I'd put the chances of that happening at somewhere around the snowballs-in-hell ballpark, but then I'm pretty sure you know that and just wanted to vent. Which is okay, that's what forums are for.
  10. Question @jinzen: why do you insist on playing a game you dislike? I mean sure, you dropped some money on it, but doesn't it just add to the aggravation to waste time on it? I know I sometimes buy games I end up not liking and they just sit there in my library all forlorn-like, but I can't say how it would help to force myself to play them.
  11. You might like a paladin more, but that's totally viable although you might have to compromise on the warhammer. I'd suggest a priest of Eothas. Pump Resolve and have reasonable Constitution (for decent Deflection and hit points). Then take the Hope Eternal ability (+10 Accuracy with flails and morning stars), Weapon and Shield style, and, for extra tankiness, Cautious Attack when you get it, and give him the heaviest armour available. There's also a very nice flail you can get quite early, so keep an eye out for it. You won't out-tank a paladin or out-damage a fighter, but you will be a relatively competent off-tank who also does a bit of damage, in addition to being a fantastic support caster of course. If you want a more martial build, then yeah definitely go with a paladin. They have lots more active abilities than in D&D, including the best single-target heals and revives, some of the best single-target buffs, and really excellent auras. For extra badness build the paladin around Flames of Devotion and pick abilities which trigger when he defeats enemies, then use Flames of Devotion to finish off weakened ones.
  12. And this is precisely why it is great. If you don't 'get' that, I doubt you'll 'get' T:ToN either.
  13. Merchants aren't implemented in the beta, but they will be. There is combat, a fair bit of it actually if you go picking fights. (And yes there are swords.) Noncombat skills are crazy powerful though, I had more fun with a Slick Jack who Wields a Silver Tongue than a Strong Glaive who <does something or other>. It's not all Persuasion though, Quick Fingers, various Lore skills, Smashing, Intimidation etc. also get a workout. What's more, apparent fail states are often kind of interesting and sometimes lead to unexpected good things. There's one especially cool example at least in the beta which I won't spoil here. The game is really enjoyable to just play and see how it pans out, without worrying about finding the 'correct' or 'best' solution, because it's not always what you think it is. Still, this is very much a story-based game. The meat is in the dialog, Meres, and quests, and how they pan out; combat etc. is more of a side dish.
  14. It is promising. Not without its problems (although some of them will certainly be addressed in the beta), but when it comes to narrative reactivity I'm confident it's going to be the best we've seen in years. The new beta build is much stabler. It's barely bugged out on me at all. The first one was pretty bad, combat especially was nearly unplayable and it had fairly horrid performance issues, which have all been addressed in the patched version. Give it another whirl, I think you might like it. It does spoil a lot of the real game though.
  15. If the main hall has changed it hasn't changed much. I just played it and there were four phantoms and a bunch of shadows. They may have removed one straggler who liked to hang out by the throne if the fight took place near the entrance as it usually does.
  16. I've been playing the T:ToN beta. Lack of interactivity is not one of its problems. There is a lot of text, but there's a crazy number of ways situations can be resolved. It's extremely non-linear and reactive. As to the "flashbacks" (they're called 'meres' by the way), they also work really well. By and large they're mini-stories which would've required a lot of resources to develop as full gameplay. As CYOA interludes they expand the depth and breadth of the game in ways that just couldn't have been done without, like, five or ten times the budget. They're well thought-out and overall well written, and they all reveal something significant about who or what you—or someone else—are. Planescape: Torment rewarded reading. T:ToN perhaps even more so. If you don't like to read, it most definitely isn't the game for you. However, it is not an interactive novel: the way the text is structured could not have been presented as a book, film, or any other medium. It is a game, right down to the parts where you read something, reflect on it, and choose what to do. In a way those parts are a throwback to the glory days of Infocom text adventures, although much easier. That's also why it is going to have a pretty selective appeal, and I'm sure a lot of players will simply give up on it, simply because interactive fiction is almost dead, and therefore unfamiliar and off-putting to them.
  17. I can make up ex post facto rationalisations as well. They did say it's the rumbling rot and can be cured with springberries though, and that was that. It is true though that whenever my soul wants to resolve unfinished business, I get the runs also. Stupid souls.
  18. Yeah I always wondered about that. Game starts off with you have dysentery basically and then goes "NVM you're a Watcher actually."
  19. Eothas has flail and morning star. Also different foci. There are some nice flails though, including one that you can get really early so it's not all bad.
  20. I vote -1 on sabres and pistols since they're in the same weapon group. No other priest would get the option to stack +6 and +10 ACC on both their weapons; it wouldn't be fair.
  21. BTW isn't there a way to get to Madhmr Bridge from the west also? That way you won't bump into that pesky xaurip. Could be I'm misremembering...
  22. Huh, good question. I always assumed it was the place where they made all the gods, as the machinery involved was so bleeping huge and clearly reusable so I thought it wouldn't have made sense to build it more than once. Also Thaos of the flashbacks was a missionary for all the gods, even if he personally served Woedica. I thought the trouble with Eothas and Magran was a new development and the gods weren't originally intended to be antagonistic to each other even though they performed different and sometimes opposing functions. I wonder what originally got Woedica dethroned though? Could that have brought on the collapse of the Engwithan civilisation?
  23. Yes, you're right, of course. I was thinking in terms of our cultural North and South. Hard to get my head out of that mode...
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