Rahelron

I want to play the game too! Please see the attachment XD

Do we already have information about this? I know we will be able to import our characters from PoE I, but do we know how? I'm asking this because I've just noticed that PoE I does not seem to automatically produce an "endgame" save file when you beat the game. I was used to use that file in other games in order to import information about my character and my choices in the sequel. Thanks a lot.

I think I see what you mean here. As consequences get more nuanced, if there isn't a way in the game to investigate the nuances, then the game hasn't gotten more interesting to play. Or, to put it another way, when the plot thickens, the game play needs to thicken by an equal amount. To use a silly example, if you played Pacman and got poignant ending slides that varied depending on the order that you ate the ghosts, that wouldn't make the game better because you have no way to make an informed decision in the game. Choices aren't meaningful if you end up making them randomly. Is that point you are making? Yes, more or less, and I strongly think that writing complex plots doesn't automatically bring to more meaningful stories... most of the times the result is the opposite. The choice between Yennefer and Triss in the witcher 3 is one of the most difficult and meaningful decisions you have to make, affects the ending a lot, is a great roleplaying device... and all of this is achieved by the developers without hiding any information or putting unexpected plot twists in the end. You know exactly what choices you have: you can choose either one of the other and you know what type of person they are, what your choice will bring to. There is no "screw up dialogue line" that, if chosen, brings disaster upon your playthrough. You can screw up of course, but it is something that happens only if you actively try to pursue a path that you know is wrong (trying to have them both). I would say that is a good way to handle choices in games.

Personally, I'm not concernet by party sizes

Most wanted stretchgoals: 1 - Romance 2 - New modular stronghold with mor building and decoration options 3 - New dialogue interface with animated portraits like in Diablo III 4 - Advanced diplomacy system to solve quests without fighitng 5 - Expand upon the magic Mallett/Rope/Crowbar trilogy, build more complicated interactions requiring more objects and some thought from the player 6 - A more dynamic faction system (Tyranny is a good starting point)

I want romance. Come on baby, light my Deadfire. Put romance in a stretchgoal and I will raise my pledge. You have to do it right though. No last minute feature implemented just to shut up nerds like me who won't stop bitching about free love in CRPGs.

Mmmm... You are right. But I still don't like this trend in RPGs: 1.0 RPG quests: you are hired by the good guy in order to kill the bad guy. You do that and everyone lives happily ever after 2.0 RPG quests: you are hired by someone who tells you to be the good guy, in order to kill the supposed bad guy. You set off to do that, but you learn that things are different and the real bad guy is the one who hired you. You kill him and everyone lives happily ever after. 3.0 RPG quests: two different factions try to earn your support, but there are no good or bad guys. You have to choose the lesser evil based on your personal beliefs. At the end you achieve your goal, but there is always a bittersweet side to it. 4.0 RPG quests: two or more factions try to earn your support, there are no good and no bad guys and you also don't know what are the exact plans of each faction. You struggle to understand what's going on while the quest progresses and in the end you kill a final enemy hoping you did the right thing. At the end of the game you learn that it was more complex than you thought (don't you say...) and that your actions brought unexpected consequences. Ok, I know that quest structures from the 80s and 90s are boring nowadays and that writers are always trying to come up with something new in order to keep things fresh. I also know that moral grey areas help in creating more viable paths paths for the player: if there was a clearly good path players would feel compelled to always follow that one. There's another side to this story though: this trend has led to quests that are more complex to navigate through, less predictable, and not necessarly more meaningful. I personally don't feel that the twist ending in the Grieving Mother's quest-line gave me a lesson about life or conveyed some deep message. I just tried to give her a fresh start and she ended up almost mentally impaired (maybe I did something wrong).

You're the one who's asking to know the consequences of your choices before you make them. If that's what you want, then pointing out that you can just read a walkthrough is perfectly reasonable. Most of us do not want that. We want the game to surprise, frustrate, delight, acknowledge your character-building choices, reward going off the beaten path, and so on and so forth. I wasn't saying that. Let me explain myself with an example. You are playing a side quest with no connections to the main plot, in which you are asked to support one of two people that want to become the next ruler of kingdom X. One of them likes order and has connections with the nobles of the city, the game hints at the fact that he doesn't give a damn about the people and he would exploit the poor and rule with an iron fist. The other one is Robin Hood, the very sympathetic outlaw that wants the good of his people. You choose the latter and help him raise to the throne in a peaceful way. When you leave the city everything seems to be going fine. You finish the game and during the slideshow at the end you learn that Robin Hood has let outlaws into the city and poor people are now living in constant fear of robberies, rapes and other cool stuff. Ok, from a strictly logical point of view the plot works: Robin Hood was an outlaw after all. I have some question though: is this what the player wanted to achieve? Was the player presented with enough information to assess the situation properly? Was this twist necessary for the main plot?

I agree with you, since this is not my mindset either. I agree with you on this both and I'm advocating for branching paths as much as you are. The only thing I don't agree with is the "(intended or not)" part. One of the core elements of RPGs is player agency within the game world, but having your actions always reach unintended results destroys agency because it transforms the game into a twist ending roulette where you might as well click randomly on dialogue options, since they don't tell anything about what you might achieve by choosing one or the other. No problem with that. Are you really suggesting me to read spoilers in order to be able to play the game in a meaningful way? In general, when you have to exit the game in order to find the information you need to play the game, than the game is doing something wrong. I agree with you in general terms, but I would say that if developers created a path that allowed the player to avoid a siege unsing diplomacy than they should create a diplomacy related scene that should substitute the battle and should be equally interesting to play. If, on the other hand, avoiding the battle consisted just in a diplomacy check done through a dialogue option, than I would not consider it a legit path... I would just consider it a gimmick to let pacifist players get their achievement at the end of the game.

I wasn't saying that. I was saying that the paths that the game lays in front of you should follow some rules: Be clear: I should be able to assess the paths I can choose from the very first playthough, wihout finding myself in a situation that I don't like just because I wasn't able to assess the choices I had properly. Be comparable (in content and magnitude of results): if I choose a path I should always loose something while gaining something else. Both what I loose and what I gain should be exclusive, there should not be a path able to let me access more content than the other or achieve better results in the end. If there was such "perfect path" (i.e. the "follow Saemon havarian" path in BG2 or the "no one left behind" path in ME2) there would also be a perfect set of choices to make in order to achieve it, but it would be very difficult for a player to do everything right on his first (and, in my case, only) playthrough. Should avoid twist endings and unexpected consequences when possible: Why? Because one of the biggest selling points of RPGs is that they allow you to influence the world and mold it to your will. Twist endings hurt this feature, because they destroy player agency within the world. This is not a problem if you can play through a game multiple times: since you already know the twist you take a different path in order to achieve the end status you want. For single players though, it is really frustrating. Be accessible: no meaningful path should be hidden from the player using puzzles or easter eggs. This is what enrages me the most. An example: the winter palace quest in Dragon Age 3. Is it clear? - NO No, because in order to access the different endings you have to find specific objects in the palace, but you can't find them all in a single playthrough because you can't gain all the keys you need to access all rooms. The problem is that you don't know what ending you will be able achieve choosing to enter a room and not another, so you can find yourself in the place of not being able to access the ending you want because you didn't know what room you had to go into to find the items you needed. Are the paths comparable? - YES Yes, they are, because no content is locked unless you go through a specific path and there's no clear "better ending". Are there unexpected consequences? - YES Yes, lots. One can argue that all the endings are bad minus one or two. And you don't know how you choice of ruler will affect Orlais until the very end. It's like rolling a dice and seeing how it goes. Are the paths accessible? - NO There are lots of endings you can achieve, but they are never laid down before you. You are told that you can choose one out of three people in order to be the new emperor, but in truth there are many more paths available that are effectively hidden from you. RPGs are not puzzle games and even puzzle games let you know what you have to do, what they don't tell you is how to achieve it. I hope I explained myself better this time.

This is a very personal need I have, I don't know if it applies to any other member of this forum, but'ill express it anyways. I've noticed that some of the new features that will be introduced in Deadfire (like for example the enhanced reactivity, berath's blessing and so on) can be effectively enjoyed only if the player does multiple playthroughs. Please Obsidian, try also to focus on those that will be able to play through your game just once. This requests comes from the fact that I'm in a moment of my life that allows me to set aside only a few hours per week to play games. It literally took me more than a year to go through the 103 hours I needed to finish Pillars of Eternity, and this doesn't count the expansions, that I've never played even though I bought them. I can't afford to play through a game multiple times to see all the weath of choices, features and reactivity that appear only with multiple playthroughs. I'm not saying that PoE should stop focusing on choices, consequences and interactivity. In fact this is the very reason why I play RPG games. I mean that Deadfire should present those choices, consequences and interactivity in a way that is enjoyable even in a single playthrough. I'll make some examples in order to explain mysef better: At the end of PoE I didn't like the endings I got for many of my companions (particularly for Aloth and the Grieving Mother, but also for others). The bad thing is that I wasn't able to see them coming and act accordingly when I had the chance. When I made the decisions that brought me to the endings I got, I wasn't able to understand their possible impacts. This wouldn't have been a problem years ago: I would have played through the game once more just to achieve the "perfect ending", but doing that has become a problem for me now. I personally don't like this trend of giving unexpected consequences to the actions of players that RPGs seem to like so much these days. Sometimes unforseeable results are useful to pass the message that "life does not always go as expected", but when overdone it just adds frustration to players. I hope that this kind of consequences will be toned down a bit in the next chapter, in favor of choices that let the player know the effects they will cause on the end state of the world and the end state of the characters involved. I also don't look forward to having all the "enhanced reactivity" based on the race, class and background of the main character. This is another thing that is enjoyable only thrugh multiple playthroughs, and let me say that I don't consider it meaningful in general. Having some dedicated dialogue choices, or some NPCs that react to you in a particular way just because your rac or class e is XY is a gimmick that is great at the beginning, but grows old quickly. Finally, I do not like when games cut content away from the player just because of a choice he makes during the campaign. IMPORTANT: when I talk about cutting content away I mean removing content from the playthrough without giving something else in return. For example: I hate how Baldur's Gate II punishes the player for making the right choice when it prevents the player from playing through the part in the underwater city if he refuses to follow Saemon Havarian in the return trip from Spellhold. Saemon is clearly not to be trusted, every single smart person should choose to use the portal instead of asking a men who already betrayed him once to help him again. The problem is that doing that the player looses on experience, unique loot and a whole subplot without getting anything in return. By comparison, the Witcher 2 cuts away a whole zone in chapter 2 depending on player's choices, but it also gives the player access to another, exclusive zone. This is a branching path that doesn't punish the player, impacts the story in a meaningful way and is enjoyable even in a single playthrough because the player doesn't feel to loose something without something else in return. Those were just three examples, but there could be more. I think that in order to make a game enjoyable in a single playthrough it should: Let the player understand the consequences of the choices he is making, throwing at him unforseeable results ONLY when it is absolutely necessary for the plot. Do not hide meaningful story content behind difficult puzzles or in easter eggs. Those are exactly the things that players usually miss in the first playthrough and having to restart the game just to access to an important plot point that you missed the first time is frustrating as hell. Focus on features that expand what the player can do in the world and do not cut content away without giving something else in return, forcing him to restart the game if he wants to experience what he lost. Thoughts? Thanks a lot.

I would like to ask for Monkey Island type puzzles in the next PoE. I really believe that the future of point and click adventures is to be merged with CRPGs. ------------------------------------------------------------ Let's say I have to grab a precious artifact to use it to progress through the main story. What happens right now in CRPGs is that the priest guarding that artifact gives you a quest, you complete it and that's it. What a badass CRPG should do is letting you choose between: - Killing the priest - Stealing the artifact with your sneaking skills - Finding (by yourself, without suggestions) something that the priest wants and that you can exchange for the artifact. The last point is the key of my reasoning: during dialogue the priest should give you hints about what he wants (you shhould be able to figure it by yourself, he shouldn't ask directly). The thing he wants shouldn't be something lootable from the corpse of a boss in a dungeon, it should be something that you would need to build or exchange for something else. Key points atre as follow: - You should figure the solution by yourself - You shouldn't get to the solution by killing & looting - You should need to be creative to find the solution ------------------------------------------------------------- I think this would add a whole new dimension to CRPGs.

Since I gave a lot of **** to Dragon Age Inquisition, because it deserved it, I think it is fair to give some love to Pillars of Eternity. Why? Because it deserves it of course. Every time I stopped playing DAI I never felt the urge to come back to it, I just wondered how much time would have taken me to get to the end. When I play PoE I always leave it with a smile, thinking about what I will do during the next play session. So thank you obsidian: - Thank you for requiring me to find a grapple to be able to climb a wall. - Thank you for making me switch to worse weapons (but with the right elemental damage) to defeat some enemies. - Thank you for making your quests interesting and not just a matter of going to the next chekpoint. - Thank you for creating rightly sized zones and for not filling them with useless fetch quests. - Thank you for providing me with more than one way to traverse dungeons - Thank you for putting into the game those narrated scripted events. Thanks a lot for all of that and more.

Does Steam Chart take into account game key redemptions from those that have backed the game on kickstarter? Or does it only comprise real sales? I hope for the second of course.

You have to take reviewers like IGN into account. Those kind of sites will probably give a lower score because of reasons like graphics not being on par with AAA games or the lack of full voiced characters. They will say that this game is for a niche market and niche market games rarely go over 80 on big sites. You also have to take hardcore reviewers into account. Those people have very clear ideas about what they want and are pretty rough towards games that don't meet their requirements. Some of them will get diasppointed for some obscure reason and will give ****ty ratings that will lower the average score substantially. I think this game will stay comfortably over 80, but won't go beyond 90.