Arhiippa

Right click Pillars of Eternity in your Steam library, choose properties and under the local files tab you'll find "browse local files" button. I'm obviously assuming you have PoE on Steam.

No I'm not. The idea is to retreat from the front line away from your attackers, not two metres back so they can still hit you. Like you can in the IE games. But that extra space might let you use another character to step in and force the enemy to let the retreating character retreat or give room to any other tactical options that would let you achieve your aim of letting that character to escape melee. But that will only apply if there are some tactical tools to use in such a situation. But just letting characters just walk away from an attacking enemy without any repercussions or consideration surely isn't the only possible way to achieve viable tactical withdrawals?

No, you need to make a tactical retreat when your units are in melee and have taken damage. The moment you move at all in melee combat, you suffer an instant disengagement attack that has no animation. Therefore it's usually a bad tactical decision to move at all, once in melee. Well, that is my point. Controlled withdrawal should be a reasonable option, but right now it isn't. I still don't want it to be too easy, but it should be a viable option. The rogue already has an ability that let's it escape engagement without attacks, perhaps other such abilities or other tactical options could make engagement a worthwhile consideration instead of a tactical dead-end.

While I'm not happy with the current feel of combat, I'm still hopeful for the engagement mechanic to show it's worth. Right now the problem is that it isn't balanced to reward tactical play. If the movement speed of the enemies was slower and there were options for dealing with engagement, it might be possible to make a tactical retreat a viable option and that would open up many tactical possibilities. I still don't think it should be too easy to just run away from melee, but right now it's usually completely undoable.

This. Not only is the balancing work very much unfinished, but the encounter design within the beta content is unlikely to be very representative of the whole game. While one can get a feel for the system from the beta, the limited scope of the encounters doesn't really give a broad enough picture of the tactical possibilities to make definitive judgments about the merits of different armors. Hard to be sure, but I don't think there is anything wrong with the armor system that isn't fixable with better balancing and more varied encounter design.

It seems that I'm going against the grain here, but I like many of the design decisions that seem to really annoy many people here. I don't see any problem with characters being faster with no or light armor. The nude ranged characters are overpowered only until they run into an opponent that can exploit their nudity and butcher them from afar or corner them in melee. This is purely a balance issue, although both in encounter design and number balancing for the armors. It's not like archers were as heavily armored as heavy infantry or cavalry in real life either. Armor for a ranged character is a risk management issue. As long as there enough reasonable threats that can hurt the ranged characters it will be a risk/reward assesment on whether to maximize DPS or be prepared for unseen difficulties. Percentages for bonuses is a good thing, because they can easily scale with characters abilities to utilize the bonuses. I want to able see the final results easily in clear numbers, but like Sensuki suggested that information can be shown in the inventory. Seeing the percentages in the item description lets me make a quick ballpark estimate on how it would effect my different characters without testing it individually, whereas just seeing rounded integers calculated from the percentages wouldn't give me the same information. Not saying all bonuses should be percentage bonuses, but for those that are, I want to know what exactly the bonus is and what effect it will have on a given character build. The reload penalty for moving is reasonable I think and like the penalties for heavy armor, they could be mitigated with talents or abilities to create those running archers or tumbling knights. Movement should come at the expense of concentrating on other things, unless the character is very adept at doing certain things on the move. Yes, there is much balancing work to be done and some heavy tweaking is still needed, but I see a good possibility that this system will be fun to play with and passably realistic (within it's context), which I would love after years of AD&D/D&D. I'll need to play more to give any exact suggestions though.

After about two hours of playing the beta I'm starting to like it. Graphics, music and writing are mostly very good, although the characters models in character creation are quite ugly, but since I won't be looking at them too closely during the game it's not a big problem. At first I thought the combat was very hard and too fast, but after playing a bit more I'm starting to change my mind. Thus far this beta seems very promising and it will probably get much better when the worst bugs are taken care of. Right now it's a bit hard to be sure which negative aspects are caused by bugs and which are actual balance or design issues.

I voted FOR. While I see a point in rewarding player for challenging fights, I don't see why the player should be encouraged to become an extinction machine and killing everything that moves within the vicinity of civilization. There are much better and subtler ways to reward and encourage exploration. I wouldn't mind a system that tracks character's actions and gives slight bonuses to abilities that the characters have used a lot, though. Not huge ones, but just enough to give the feeling, that they have honed their skills by using them consistently.

I think good = sacrifice is an oversimplification, but I do like the idea of some good decisions being costly in game terms. What I want to see in this game is a world that reacts believably to your actions. Some times people who are too nice get taken advantage of, some times evil people get to be filthy rich and respected, because they can manipulate the system better than people with more scruples, sometimes those same evil people slip up and have to face the consequences, sometimes not. I don't want to know I'll get similarly rewarded regardless of what I do. I want to think about the consequences of my actions and then choose what is most important to me. As long as the tangible rewards aren't so unbalanced as to make an altruistic character completely unplayable, I'm fine with different choices having different, and not necessary equal in any way, rewards. As long as my decisions have a noticeable effect on the world, I'm happy. The effect doesn't always have to be what I expected, as long as it is consistent within the gameworld. And when I say noticeable, I don't mean that the gameworld should shudder every time I save a kitten, often it is enough that the characters present notice. Besides, the choices shouldn't be between good and evil, those are just naive simplifications that don't usually describe reality very well at all. I'd rather see choices between different ways of approaching or valuing situations without such naive labels. Like choices between whether to respect other people's culture or intervene when seeing something I don't like. And then making me deal with the consequences either way. Maybe I'd save someone from slavery just to see that that person had accepted his/her station and now has no home or tribe and hates me for it. Or me trying to be respectful to the degree that I end up implicitly accepting something heinous until it's too late to intervene. But for these kinds of things the world has to be well written enough that I have at least some chance to evaluate and anticipate the results of my actions, so the results won't feel contrived. If the writing is good enough and the world responsive enough, I don't really care for balance in rewards, just consistency of cause and effect within the world.

I'd like this to be optional. For my own games, I'd probably want to have NPCs gain some experience while waiting, but not 100%. Luckily, all Obsidian has to do, is to implement this in a way that lets modders can offer a way to set the percentage exactly where you feel it should be.

BG style works fine for me, but it would be nice to be able to have different character's inventories open at the same time.

I for one would definitely like to see dialog options integrated into combat, but only in a very simple way. Since the system is realtime with pause the pausing part itself wouldn't be a problem as long as the dialog options could be handled from the combat interface. Just having options like demand surrender/ask for parlay/surrender would be great and they could easily be handled as actions that take some time to perform and either succeed or not depending on how the battle is going, how diplomatic/intimidating the character speaking is and what are the exact circumstances. Now, if there is no common language/the enemy is an ooze/the enemy just isn't afraid of you/the enemy wants you dead, this clearly wouldn't work and the time would be wasted, so just spamming surrender wouldn't be much of a tactic. This would however make possible all kinds of roleplaying opportunities like leaving some parts of a mob alive for interrogation or surrendering to city guards rather than making a bad situation worse or halting a fight that is going badly and dangerously for both parties. This wouldn't necessarily mean that every situation had any use for these options, but just having the possibility with some enemies would make combat more varied and interesting. In the same vein, I would also appreciate it if there would be weapons/combat options that were non-lethal. That would give a generally well-meaning party the possibility to use combat as a solution in situations where they had to get around someone that didn't deserve to die. I would gladly accept that non-lethal combat would be less efficient than lethal methods and it would be my choice whether it would be worth the risk. And now to the kill XP issue. I definitely like the idea of getting rid of general kill XP and replacing it with well thought out quest XP rewards. That said, I don't see why there couldn't be room for kill XP in certain situations when appropriate. I still don't see any reason for kill XP from the point of view of exploring. Shouldn't the exploring be it's own reward? Finding all those interesting places and the secrets in all the nooks and crannies, and yes, finding wolves and all kinds of aggressive creatures and then deciding whether fighting through them is worth the risk. The reward for fighting will be that you get to explore further instead of fleeing to the security of civilization with your tail between your legs. Besides, from my perspective, if my reaction to seeing a pack of wolves near my group is "****!", that sounds like a somewhat reasonable approximation of what my character is feeling... EDIT: tl;dr: Simple diplomatic and non-lethal options in combat, YAY! Kill XP, not necessary.

Considering that there will be subraces for every race, it would be kind of weird for those subraces to all have the same stats, so I'm guessing there will be human subraces with some bonuses and maybe one baseline vanilla subrace.

Generally those kinds of quests are at best useless filler and at worst forced grinding, so I won't be missing them. That being said, I can sort of see a place for them to flesh out the world if they are used right. I probably wouldn't bother to do any random FedEx- or gathering-quests, but there will be big cities in the game and big cities will need messengers and such continuously, so it would fit the gameworld quite well for at least some of those kinds of jobs to be open to the characters. Still, I'd rather see the time and energy spent on something more interesting.

True. If and when Kicking It Forward starts to kick in, the effect will be even bigger, but I do see a slight risk there. If Kicking It Forward will increase the chance of projects getting funded in a big way, it might start to draw in more of questionable projects.

Hard for me to pick one, but I love it when there is room for the player to really consider his options instead of just following directions. Any quest that lets the player feel like his/her choices and/or skill really affected how the quest plays out will make me happy. It's good if there are different ways of solving a quest with different character builds, but for me, it's even better if I, as a player, have to use my brain. Slightly off topic, but in some ways I miss the parser from old adventure games, cause that allowed for the player to use his/her own creativity in finding the solutions to puzzles and the right questions to ask.

OP has a point. While it might be reasonable to concentrate on resolutions of the current generation considering the limited budget and timeframe, Obsidian should at least plan for higher DPI. The DPI options at release-time depending, of course, on how much it would affect the art budget. Anyway, I'm sure Obsidian will either provide higher DPI options as an optional download themselves or release high resolution assets for modders to finalize. They seem to care about these kinds of things. (I'm thinking about KOTOR2 and the cinematic+sound upgrades.) EDIT: Better scaling could make the point somewhat less important down the road, but still.

Justin Bell did a good job on the promo and seems to have a really good perspective on the project, so I'm quite happy with him having the responsibility. Especially since in this project he has the ability to seek feedback from the community if there is need, instead of waiting to hear what people think after the game is finished. Although I don't believe he will need to.

I'd wager, that the effect of the later large successes has been much smaller than what DFA had, but they may have helped stabilize the situation. One big hit is nice, but having multiple big examples within quite a short timeframe has probably changed how people perceive crowdfunding in this field for good. If that hasn't happened already, it will for sure when these games come out. Assuming of course, that they get finished. But I would be pretty interested in seeing the stats around other big projects too. EDIT: Oh, and Kicking It Forward has the potential to cause another huge shift.

I'll probably play one of the spellcasting classes on my first playthrough, but if the system allows for a swashbuckler-type fighter (regardless of which actual class is best for the build), that is deadly by the virtue of his skill/wit more than brute strength and uses his agility/wit to avoid damage instead of absorbing it, I might change my mind. But it will largely depend how they implement armor and damage. Sidenote: I really like the D20 implementation of AGOT by Guardians of Order, where strength is really useful, but not necessary, to build a REALLY deadly melee combatant.

Considering how familiar Obsidian is with this type of game, they might even make it in time, but if they don't, I'll wait impatiently yet happily for a polished and complete game. Also, I think it's quite possible that Obsidian isn't going to show the game at E3 even if they had something worth showing, since preparing for E3 would be a distraction from making the game.

While I don't believe in any gods in this world, I don't really see much point in any hardcore atheist options in a world where supernatural abilities and agents are an obvious part of the world. I'm not saying there is no way to write them in an interesting manner, but they probably wouldn't be a good use of the writers time compared to other options. Whereas having the option not to worship or even respect any gods, is an option that one should definitely have. Although in a game like DA3, where the characters history is predetermined and religion is integral to the plot, it's completely reasonable to skip anything even resembling atheism altogether, since it wouldn't serve the theme of the game.

In many games I find random encounters/monsters more of a hassle than enjoyable, but considering the people making this game, I'll take even generic combat encounters gladly. Admittedly that's mostly because I trust that if those kinds of encounters were there, there would be a good reason beyond "let's throw random monsters at them" behind them.

Good journal can make a huge difference in playability and immersion. I really hate it when journal automatically picks up important quest details too obviously and thus underlines what is important. On the other hand, if important details are not recorded or too hard to find, it can be really difficult to continue playing after a longer break. One way to balance this, which I don't remember having seen before, would be a possibility to highlight interesting parts of dialogs or books and then transcribe those to the player's journal (after the discussion). That way one could have a comprehensive journal in-game without the game making all the choices between important and superfluous information. If the personal journal would be easy to organize and allowed annotations and perhaps linking different quotes, it would feel personal and be useful at the same time. Of course, this system wouldn't be practical on a console and demands that players actually read the dialog and text carefully, but if there ever is a project where this kind of system would be feasible and serve the gameplay, I think P:E could be it. I'll be perfectly fine with a more traditional journal system too, but I can just imagine how nice it would be to find a ring of obelisks or a dungeon door in the wilderness and think: "Hey, that one guy told me about something like this. I knew it would be worth writing down!" That way just being able to pick up on important details would became part of the gameplay. Even a version where one could mark a sentence/paragraph important in a dialog/book, would let the journal have gameplay possibilities. And it should go without saying, that one should be able to make notes on the map too. EDIT: I would still like to see a collection of lore in my journal, like in PS:T, with pictures.

Tampere, Finland