Gallenger

The timeline doesn't fit - the PC would have to be quite young in order for it to work out that Wiadwen was the PC. Furthermore none of your past lives make any mention of Wiadwen, and there are times when you can *see* Wiadwen in visions and it doesn't trigger anything or awaken you further. But I wouldn't say it's totally out of the question with a bit of fudgery here and there lol.

I ultimately went with Rymrgand's choice (entropy). I don't know Hylea's choice isn't *that* off base - she's a God after all, God's perspective on things is a little unusual lol. Grieving mother will likewise encourage you to take her advice and attempt to restore the souls to the hollowborn. Her point of "but if you bring just one child back" she's talking about the beauty that would create - because there are people all over the Dyrwood that are concealing their hollowborn children, and if they suddenly turned into normal kids all of a sudden, they'd be overjoyed. Not to mention what would become of the feral packs of kids wondering around in the wilderness (wichts lol). I saw it as a pretty good turn for your traditional "good" option. Because you are literally bringing people back to life - or massively increasing their quality of life, on a fairly large scale. 1. If it works, you *would* create a lot of happiness in the world, and people would be extremely pleased. 2. If it doesn't work, there are more souls in the machines than there are living hollowborn, so they'll return to the cycle anyways. 3. Any side effects (kids growing up with weird soul problems) could be outweighed by a few normal kids existing. I ultimately picked Rymrgand's choice, because I liked Rymrgand. He offered the souls a way out of the cycle to live with him in his nirvana of wintery-happiness. He likewise mentions that you're not sure how the souls will behave, since they've been out of the cycle for so long, and furthermore, who knows if the machine(s) have done messed up things to them - best just to remove them from the cycle altogether. The mystery choice is just as well - because nobody will know where this large conglomeration of souls has gone, and boy will they seek it - since ultimate power will lie there lol. That's the kinda thing Wael would really get off on lol.

The only bug that got me was the crashing in Raedric's hold which was NBD - and I was so traumatized by KOTOR 1 with crashing on area transition that I save *every* time I change areas regardless of auto-save lol it's just a terrible habit now because the initial release of that game on PC crashed *frequently* on area transitions - and I didn't have internet at the time so I just had to deal with it lol. I'll admit the other 2 major bugs were pure luck that I avoided them - I simply never had to reload in a recruitment zone, and I never attempted to equip by double clicking, because that's just weird lol. I also got the Durance conversation bug that kept me from completing his questline, but meh, not a huge problem considering there are "enhanced" editions of games with conversation bugs still (I'm looking at you Anomen). The game is quite playable. I finished it with relatively little cause for concern. I should also note that comparing a 1980's Nintendo game to a game of this size is simply stupidity. Just watch a speed run of Ocarina of Time sometime - and there are plenty of people who would go to bat for that game as the best game ever made, and it's literally laden with bugs of all sorts.

Go into your keep, and talk to the statue lady she'll tell you whats up

There are several instances of sentient life being used for crafting purposes - ogre blood is another example, dragon eggs, dragon scales...

I didn't use exclusively firearms when I ran through the game, there are some pretty nice crossbows, and I didn't mind one person using a traditional bow (sagani) - but I did have just about the whole party using ranged weapons (sometimes even my main tank) at the start of encounters - because it was a handy method of laying down the boom on one mob prior to really starting the fight - it's a particularly helpful tactic for ciphers because the early ranged damage can give you a pretty nice buff to your focus pool.

I was pretty nervous about eder - I thought he was going to turn into the perpetually whiny NPC that seems to have been made obligatory in games recently - but he ended up being one of my favorites hands down. I really didn't have any issues with any of the NPCs all were lots of fun and I found myself really enjoying just getting to talk to them - I honestly didn't expect so much NPC interaction lol.

Reminds me of the good ol days playing hardcore mode diablo 2 - where you could disconnect your modem to stop from dying lol.

Well the other interesting point to be hide - sorry for disregarding you OP - is that if the soul trapping machines were active during the Saint's War (which I assume they were), that means that the "soul" entity-thing of Eothas may've been captured by the machine itself - unless the godhammer destroyed the soul construct entirely. Obviously that works for Woedica's God rebirthing bit, since she'd be absorbing the power of a dead God - or the player's post-final battle choices may have had a HUGE impact on the game world, being as you may've unleashed the soul of a dead God into the world, destroyed it, hidden it, or whatever have you.

I think it's a symptom of playing so many old shooters, but I'm pretty handy at remembering where stuff is the first time I see it - but I was still surprised that I wasn't able to make my own markers.

Only an hour? That's a lot of stuff you've done there in an hour. I'll admit the start of the game does take a bit to get going - and your motivations early on aren't super clear because you've got these powers now and then you're kinda left to your own devices for a time.

There's a list somewhere of who all can be taken prisoner - my first prisoner was Mr Wayfarer too lol. I wanted to see who all I could toss down there, because sometimes the dialogue is pretty funny lol. "Remember it'd get awfully lonely down here if you killed me" was perhaps my favorite. I liked the idea, because I generally approached the game with a character who attempted not to kill people unless it was absolutely necessary and giving me the option of tossing them in the clank made me happy.

I think their inventory resets every time you reload the zone - at least the vendor shops do (every time i left stronghold and came back everything was reset even if it was only a day or so).

The problem trashmyego is because the patching process has to not ruin save games or people would freak out and bring torches and pitch forks - whenever you have to preserve existing save games in a patch it complicates matters significantly. So, it makes releasing small patches a bit at a time a lot less viable - and big patches, that you're sure won't wreck existing save games, the much better option.

It doesn't get much worse tbh - I think I topped out around 15 seconds - this is a known bug atm, because certain things that aren't supposed to be persistent end up being persistent (certain chanter trap spells and so forth). It should be cleaned up in a day or so or whenever the next patch is released.

You may have to wait a bit - I'm not sure if you can trigger being "liked" enough by the archivist in the ducal palace until act 3.

Here is how I thought of it. 1. Thaos and the leaden key exist to prevent anybody from figuring out that the Gods aren't organic as such - they're still Gods, they were just created by mortals at some point or another. 2. As such the leaden key seeks to prevent people from messing with things, looking too deeply, and so forth. As such, they hate animancy and want to hinder it whenever it gets close to the knowledge that would necessarily imply how to alter gods and souls etc. 3. The reason Woedica comes in at all is because she was the queen of the Gods. I'm fairly sure that the whole point of that is that the leaden key not only wants to protect the status quo with the Gods as it is, but wants to restore Woedica as ruler of the Gods - because that's how the Engwithans set it up to begin with - the Gods themselves independently stripped Woedica of her power, and that obviously upsets the status quo (not to mention that Woedica's portfolio, if you will, is very much geared towards maintaining the current order of things and so forth). Regarding Eothas/Wiadwen, he's just a substory, it doesn't necessarily mean anything at all. There's a potential "thing" that it was somehow orchestrated by Woedica to create an excuse for the hallowborn epidemic, but that's never really substantiated by first hand evidence. It could just be a coincidence or Eothas could've acted alone, or Eothas may've had nothing to do with it all. As far as the hollowborn epidemic, it was there purely to restore Woedica, and perhaps the Leaden Key needed some sort of cataclysm (the saint's war) to justify the following epidemic, because in the lore these machines that gather/trap souls have been running for a *while* prior to the start of the story - 10 years or more in some cases (since that's when the first hollowborn started appearing according to the story). The hollowborn are a symptom of the overall plot to restore Woedica - because their gathering of souls has depleted the overall amount of free souls to the point where new children don't have any souls to pick up. The rest of it - having to do with animancers and so forth - is just a bonus externality as far as the leaden key is concerned. That's how I understood it anyways lol.

I completed the game after a solid and fun 63 hours - and the only bug that impacted me was the occasional crashing in the Hold, but that wasn't so bad considering crashing isn't world ending lol. Also save and load times bloating at the end, but it wasn't near what old games were anyways so it didn't bother me lol. The game is quite playable unless you end up being extremely unlucky.

I didn't hear this too often, but I did hear it EVERY time somebody used one of the healing talents (field medic or whatever it's called) "IT'S NOT WORKING!" and at the start of the game it was *really* confusing to me, because I assumed that it hadn't worked lol.

I'm a thespian extraordinaire

I may be misremembering where the bounty was lol, but yeah I don't think eder's quest gets in the way - I seemed to remember them being over by the campfire but I'm prolly wrong lol. Part of the hazard of not sleeping for 3 days to beat the game! lol.

You don't have to finish eder's story first HOWEVER, if you've got the "looters" spawned at the camp fire for eder, it may be that she won't spawn in on top of them.

what duke said, however, if you're not in act III yet you won't be able to access any of these areas.

However if you don't complete Durance's quest -the ending card you get for him - that was some heavy stuff lol. I got *mostly* positive outcomes so perhaps i just lucked out. To be honest, the biggest "change" that could be made to the game, I think, that'd make it a bit better story-wise, would be to stretch out some of the Defiance bay content so that the player has to somehow become involved in the animancy debate without having any concrete information. This is hinted at and brought up a bunch, but the player is never really pressed to think about, or take a side in the wiadwen's legacy debate - until you have definitive proof as to what is going on. I dunno, I think it'd just be cool if they tried to draw the player into that, and make certain conclusions about what is going on (of course you can do that organically on your own to a degree) then the mid-game reveal would be a lot more powerful. But on the whole that's just a minor thing. I don't know if it was a bug or what, but after the defiance bay riots I started to see and hear a *lot* more freaky stuff as my watcher. Lots of souls hanging out in bars that didn't belong (they were purple and hazy like so souls), and around town, I also got that creepy whispering sound track a *lot* more often. I don't know if it was my game wigging out or by design, but it did really make me *feel* like my PC was starting to lose his marbles lol. Another thing that got me curious is that sagrel, in my game, didn't die in the riot - she was still just chilling by that fountain - and she had some pretty interesting quips about the riots lol. So I wonder why she lived in mine? lol.

I got 63 hours out of the game, Josh Sawyer promised me 60 - I could've added a few more hours if I'd completed a few more quests and read through all the supplementary material in my journal. Not to mention touching souls 1. The end game can't be a giant tremendous dungeon crawl because: A.) you're trapped there, you literally can't get out. You don't want your players to be absolutely boned and stuck down there if they are unable to complete the game due to a very long, difficult, dungeon crawl leading into the final confrontation. B.) this fits in similar length to *most* end game scenarios - Fallout 1, Arcanum, Baldurs Gate 1's "maze" - the only difference being the fight outside the church, etc etc. Even Torment's endgame is fairly similar in length and nature. You want the anticipation of the final confrontation to build, but you don't want to wear your trapped players down to the point where they can't finish the game. 2. The Thaos fight is meant to be hard, and there are plenty of things in the bodies that give you some ability to ward this off - I had no idea what I was in for going into the final fight, and the only thing that knocked out several of my party members was actual damage being dealt - purely because I saw them handing me all these resistence items and I assumed it would behoove me to use them, given that it was the end of the game - no reason to give me all that if it'd be useless, unless the devs are just evil people who were trying to lead me to certain death lol. 3. The ending slides are what I expected - what more could they have done? The only thing I'd like perhaps would be screenshots of how the places have changed or maybe more robust cards - a la fallout 1 perhaps with the images showing somewhat clearly what happened a bit better. They also said, playing only crit-path you could probably complete the game in 14 hours with a bit of luck and so forth, they wanted to provide options to people based on how much or how little side-questing they wanted to do. Maybe I just approached the game with a more pessimistic outlook. They had a, by modern standards, very small budget. I suspected the game would be roughly the same size and length of BG1 (without ToTSC) - and I was, I think, about on target I think, similar levels of content and so forth. I was very pleased with what I got out of it, and Obsidian should be commended for what they made with, by industry standards, such an infinitesimally small budget, there have been legit terrible RPGs made in the last few years with budgets well over a factor of ten from what Obsidian had to work with. Not to mention the actual length of the game - A complete play through of Mass Effect 1 for example is decidedly shorter than what I got out of this game, and it goes without saying that they spent well over 5 million on that game lol. On the whole I'm very pleased - I was really worried to be honest going into the ending "don't screw this up" was an insidious little worm in the back of my mind - and they did not. Plus it seems the title cards aren't bugged out! It seems like my choices actually mattered which gives it an edge on several previous interplay releases - where the ending cards are still bugged to this day (were never fixed lol).