illathid

I'm liking the sword, but I'm finding the AOE a bit of pain to deal with. It means I have to be a lot more careful with my positioning, even in low effort encounters or i’ll be doing a lot of damage to my other melee party members. An enchantment to make the AOE foe only would be really nice.

You're being incredibly misleading here, to the point where I wonder if you're like 20-something and just talking about a time you never knew, based on fragments of articles you read about games. The sequence of events you outline is flatly untrue. I say that as someone who has been playing CRPGs and P&P RPGs since the 1980s (and still plays both). Yes that makes me terribly old. The "mass market"/"casual audience" stuff absolutely never happened. That is a complete fantasy, and basically from MMORPG culture, where MMORPG fans like to claim any change is "dumbing down". In the real history of CRPGs, they've always been extremely diverse in how you got mana, and how much of a true "per rest" resource it was, all the way back into the 1980s. And I say mana because virtually all games used that mechanic, unless they were D&D-derived. Indeed that's been by far the biggest change, far bigger than anything you're talking about - resources other than mana. And a bigger change still than that, and one I note you are not complaining about was making HP-style systems not be "you are damaged until you get a magic heal or sleep at an inn". Again, though, back to the 1980s we had CRPGs where: A) You had a Vancian/D&D-style deal, where you didn't dynamically select spells, but picked a fixed bunch before/after sleeping (D&D rules suggested it was after but games often made it be before). Obviously actual D&D/AD&D games worked on this basis. B) You had games where casters had a mana resource which could only be replenished by actual sleep, hard rests as you put it, and sometimes only in limited places, and perhaps if you were lucky by potions which randomly, rarely dropped. C) You had games like B, but where potions were pretty common, or possible to buy and/or manufacture, and often the real balancing point was the opportunity cost of using potions. D) You had games where mana regenerated continuously at some rate (often very slow), but where the hard-rest requirement was already gone. E) You had games where mana regenerated continuously, and perhaps quite quickly, but where reagents where a huge deal, and spells were more like consumables than anything else. And more! And this was all in the 1980s and very very early 1990s, long before any kind of "casual audience" existed, long before "marketing" and "audience feedback" (beyond angry hand-written letters!) were a thing. We're talking about another era here. Yet you're misrepresenting it as if it were some MMORPG-style player-developer feedback loop. That's ridiculous nonsense. This whole "lel casuals spam spellz like morons" thing is just gibberish, too, and again it reeks of MMORPGs, not actual CRPGs. "Casual" players have no specific way of playing. Some are cautious and barely even cast spells. Others are aggressive and rest frequently, and so on. The generalization you make is actively misleading. Further, on pen and paper games, what you're claiming is completely untrue, and we can walk through pen and paper game history if you like, but that's going to be a long walk. Fortunately I was playing P&P games from 1988 onwards and playing a wide variety of them so I am happy and able to discuss it if required. Your complaints about the impact of the changes are more interesting, some of them being valid, and some being kind of nonsensical. "I just want options" is an utter canard though. What you are asking for would require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire game and encounter-flow. That's not "just wanting options". Here here. The real issue had nothing to do with casuals and mass markets and more to do with how players (especially hardcore players) were actually interacting with these styles of games.

Just had a random thought, since there’s watercolors of every NPC in the game you can talk to, maybe it’d be worth trying to turn those into proper portraits? Could help with the lack of portraits for the PoE specific races.

Found another potential issue with this quest. If you talk to the thugs with serafen in your party after discovering that they robbed Radora, you have two options: accept their deal with the principi or attack them (and get aggressive disposition which is a big no for my Paladin). It feels weird that there's no way to just say no to them but not attack them.

Speaking of maps, I'm loving the major port map style. I kinda wish the whole world map looked like that.

You know Ohio is across lake Erie from Canada right? People from Ohio usually have either an upper midwest or north midlands accent, its quite rare from someone from there to sound "southern". https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/12/02/what-dialect-to-do-you-speak-a-map-of-american-english/?utm_term=.59214250f061

Ah, yeah that's a problem.

Yeah, I noticed the same thing last night.

I am playing this currently, and this is what I went with: Human Aedyran Might - 16 Constitution - 10 Dexterity - 10 Perception - 12 Intelligence - 14 Resolve - 16 I didn't get too much con as you won't get hit a lot all things considered, and constant recovery/lay hands can deal with the hits you do take.

I'm pretty sure there's an option to resize text. maybe double check the options menu?

That actually looks really good. Well done!

awesome work! thx. Thinking of using this for my fanatic. His expression lends it self well to the impartial / stoic goldpact knight side of the build. yeah, this was the portrait I used for my sheildbearer in PoE, so I kept looking to see if anyone had done it. Finally couldn't put off any more so i made it myself. XD

It was my pleasure.

I've tried doing a water color version of the sawyer portrait but it's not turning out well. EDIT: Turns out I just couldn't follow the GIMP method. Photoshop worked much better.

This pretty cool. Well done!

I believe the Scavenger's lantern is a ship only item, so it only shows up on the ship management screen.

Trying to decide currently. I have two characters to bring over but the question is how to change them, if at all, for the new systems. First was a fireball loving muscle-wizard that’s near and dear to my heart, second is sheildbearer Paladin that was a ton of fun.

Hey, maybe its just DTF, no strings attached.

Don't listen to the Witcher 3 stuff. The game is fantastic, easily the best modern rpg. I can't really fathom why some people would talk about banging girls in the game, there's really not much in it. There's just two romance options. I think there's one or two one-offs you can have in side-quests but I can't really remember all too well. It's a 100+ hour game so it's definetly not a focuss in the game by any stretch. The only reason why I can imagine some people having that conversation is because they didn't actually play the game and are still hung up on the cards from Witcher 1. Counterpoint, the entire Witcher series is a terrible juvenile fantasy. Geralt is a terrible rip off character and the writing compares unfavorably with middle school fan fiction.

And yet it is constantly compared. The last 10 articles I read on gaming sites about Pillars 2, had Divinity mentioned in it. Which is also the only reason why I brought it up. I'm not here often enough/read enough to know what people usually do here. Real reviewers? Reviewers shape opinions whether you consider them real or not. Trust me on this. Not to mention this https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/911663832732278784 DOS2 is currently the best selling modern CRPG. To say that DOS2 didn't have any influence at all for the full voice acting decision is a bit asinine. Everyday we stray further from the light of Eothas

Having Spelljamer being explained to you is enough to make most people's head explode What are you talking about? Everyone knows about phlogiston and the crystal spheres.

I am not sure where you are seeing me compare it to Deadfire, I am not. I am merely stating that VO is pretty much a universally desired feature in RPG's if not in modern games in general. Also, those who say VO is bad, or partial VO is better, are an extreme niche group that does not represent the majority people who buy video games, RPG's or otherwise. If there is a comparison between the games I listed and Deadfire, it stopped at them all being RPG's and having a significant amount of VO. By the way, I looked up videos to show just how much VO there is in Persona 5. All "cutscenes" are fully voiced, and there is a guy who made the series covering all but two of the months, and the social links. He did not cover November, December, or the ending. I added up the length of the videos, regardless of them not being complete. It was 35.5 hours, and it isn't even the whole game, which would probably put the real total at around 40 hours. Please just think about that, and the fact that all VO is in two languages, before you claim it doesn't have much VO in it again. It has VO coming out it's rear. Yes, There's likely 40 hours of VO work in P5. But there's just as much unvoiced conversations/content, if not more. So yes, there's a huge amount of voice work in P5, the budget for it is probably more than the entire budget for Deadfire. But it is still a partial VO game. However, no one complained that it was only partially voiced. Using it as an example of a fully voiced game is disingenuous.

count me in...

Didn't say it had full VO, I said the majority of it was. Every scene that is important to the story (which is a crap ton of scenes) is fully voiced. Additionally I am willing to bet Persona 5 has considerably more dialog in it than either Deadfire or Divinity Original Sin 2. It also has it's VO in two languages, and only by professional voice actors. I am willing to bet Divinity and Deadfire both are English only, and have at least a couple "people from the company" doing VO. So the odds are incredibly high that Persona 5 probably has a VO budget that dwarfs both Deadfire and Divinity Original Sin 2 regardless of it not being 100% VO. Forget about the fact that at least 25% of the music in the game also has actual vocals in it by professional musicians. I somehow doubt Deadfire or Divinity have more than 1 maybe 2 tracks with vocals, or maybe none, not sure. In fact VO was probably the most expensive part of Persona 5's development budget, if it wasn't it was certainly in the top 3. So I would say it is not a good game to use as an example of "less VO is good". As for budget, there is no doubt the budget of Divinity Original Sin 2 was much higher than Deadfire, the game was basically at beta level before they even started their fundraising campaign. The kickstarter money was pure extra funds, and even if the funding had somehow flopped the game still would have released. Just probably without full VO and a few other bells and whistles. I had more to say but the forums ate it. I'd argue comparing P5 to deadfire in absolute terms like you are is misguided. It's more fair to look at it proportionally, and most of the P5 is unvoiced so it's really a partial VO game.