Ineth

It increases accuracy of your cannons Thanks. I didn't do that, so that might explain why it always took so many turns until I finally managed to sink the other ship. Well, if you invest in some combat speed upgrades, you won't have to press the 1 key quite as often before you can board... Oh yes. Ideally, you'd just choose a move, and then both your action and the opponen'ts action would play out without additional key presses, and then it would prompt you for your next move.

Yes, loading and saving is considerably faster for me in PoE2 compared to PoE1 (on the same computer). In other respects, performance in worse in PoE2 though (framerate/stuttering issues).

Yeah, I've also encountered a few magnifying glass icons like that.

I too haven't found the ship-to-ship combat very satisfying so far. So now I tend to just keep clicking "full speed ahead" until I can board the other ship, and then fight it out using normal party combat. My ship sustains little to no damage this way. Why hold for a turn?

Not if they really didn't promise that the skipped paychecks would be repayed. Avellone nowhere insunuates that the employees had a legal right to be repayed - he simply recounts that he considered it the morally right thing to do, and was shocked how the other owners reacted. Well, the Codex guys are specifically asking him about individual people... Also, he had positive things to say about all four of the people you listed (including Fenstermaker) so I don't see it as malicious that he's talking about them. Maybe he could have been (again), who knows? I don't think it's that unusual in the game industry for project-specific leadership positions to be filled with new hires. Anyway, in that post Avellone isn't complaining that he really wanted Ziets as Narrative Lead and didn't get his way. He's giving it as an example of how decisions were made, i.e. how time was wasted because Feargus had already made up his mind but wasn't up-front about it. I just listed it separately, because I thought some people might find it interesting that a PoE1 main story written by Ziets was a possibility at one point...

Wanted to check in on Deadfire hype, and got sucked into this instead... Ain't nobody got time to read the whole RPG Codex thread, but I've searched for posts by Avellone and think I managed to catch most of them. Even though we all like Obsidian's games here, I don't think we should pretend that there can't possibly be anything wrong with how the saussage is made, and I find the immediately-jumping-to-the-defense-of-the-company-and-denouncing-the-whistleblower fanboy bite reflex exhibited by some here, a bit premature. Below is a summary of what I've seen Chris Avellone claiming, with some comments. (Orange italic text is paraphrased from Avellone's posts. I didn't bother writing "He claims that..." or "allegedly" each time; consider that implied.) Please do point it out if I misinterpreted something or missed anything important. Unethical business practices Employees sacrificed their pay checks when the company was in danger of going bankrupt, but later when the company had enough money again, Feargus and some of the other owners didn't want to pay them back (or even discuss it). [forum post] Yikes. Accounting and finances were very non-transparent, with Feargus keeping tight control and outsourcing such work to personal friends of his who worked off-site. [forum post, forum post] Feargus's wife was on the payroll, and Avellone couldn't find out what (if anything) she was doing for the company. [forum post] Kinda weird. Codex commenters are going wild with speculations about tax evasion or fraud, but it could also be innocuous. Feargus wanted to bring his young children on as employees, and had to be dissuaded from doing so by the other owners. [forum post] Obsidian employees that were funded (?) by Paradox to work on Tyranny, were diverted to work on Pillars of Eternity instead, without compensation. [interview] Uh oh. I wonder if this is news to Paradox, or if the two companies have already found an amicable settlement in the meantime. The management failed to reevaluate the company's listed value ever since its founding, so owners selling their shares would not have gotten their rightful portion of the true market value. Avellone tried to start the process of a reevaluation in accordance with the company's bylaws, but was blocked and then de-ownered before that could happen. [forum post] This is where the story turns to corporate intrigues of the kind we expect to see on TV shows like Suits or Billions, not in beloved mid-size gaming studios... Feargus "de-ownered" Avellone, without payout and without Avellone having a choice in the matter. [forum post, forum post, forum post] This is the accusation where I get the strongest feeling that Avellone isn't telling us the whole story. In particular, he hasn't yet explained how the de-ownering was even possible. Did they have something on him, that they could use as leverage to force him to sign his ownership away? Was he somehow tricked? Did the ownership contract have a loophole (and if so, didn't he get a lawyer to look it over back when he first signed it)? Still, I'm inclined to believe Avellone that he believes he was cheated here, even if turns out to have been *legally* sound. During the de-ownering, the other owners exploited Avellone's family situation (sick mother and debt) to try and make him accept an unreasonably restrictive non-disclosure and non-compete that would have prevented him from working on other cRPGs. [forum post, ...] Presumably, signing those agreements would have gotten him a (partial) payout after all? The "exploit his family situation" part is obviously his subjective interpretation, and may not have been the other owner's actual intention. Still, yikes. Bad management Obsidian changes publishers so often because publishers "don’t want to deal with Obsidian’s upper management twice in a row". [forum post] "If Obsidian does well, however, that often doesn’t trickle down to the employees." [forum post] Whenever the company had money, Feargus tended to spend it freely without consulting the other owners. [forum post] Obsidian rarely gave bonuses, and their payscale was "on the low end of the industry". [forum posts] People were given titles such as "Creative Lead" based on politics rather than what work they were actually doing. [forum post] Feargus'es management style was dictatorial when he held all the cards, and when he didn't (because they became dependent on publishers) he "didn’t take to it well" and caused the company to unnecessarily loose contracts with unprofessional behavior. [forum post, forum post] Feargus'es and Chris Parker's management style tended to waste people's time, e.g. by pretending to let others evaluate options or find solutions when in fact they had already made up their mind. [forum post] Owners who disagreed with Feargus too forcefully would get threatened with de-ownering. [forum post, forum post] Chris Jones just cares about his payout and "consumes resources with no benefit to a project". [forum post, forum post] Darren Monahan is employee-friendly and probably a good guy, but an "abject coward" who is afraid of Feargus and falls in line with him when it comes to voting etc. [forum post] Hoo-boy. Avellone gets really personal here, ranting about the remaining Obsidian owners. On the one hand, bad-mouthing former colleagues/partners like this is not a good look, even if it's true. On the other hand, it did take Avellone quite a long time, and achievement of financial security, and prodding by the RPG Codex, for this to finally bubble up, so maybe it's healthy for him to get it all out in the open. I imagine he's mostly sincere with these claims, even though they'll of course be clouded by his subjective viewpoint. Office drama George Ziets was proposed as narrative lead for PoE1 by Avellone and others, but Feargus overruled them and gave the job to Eric Fenstermaker instead. [forum post, forum post] Eric Fenstermaker drove away other talented writers, including John Gonzalez who left after Eric refused to work with him. [forum post] The relationship between Avellone and Eric Fenstermaker soured due to how the cuts to Avellone's PoE1 companions (Durance and Grieving Mother) were handled. [interview, forum post, Eric's response, forum post] A shame really, since Avellone and Fenstermaker are both talented writers. Beyond that, Avellone seems to think highly of Anthony Davis [forum post] and Brian Mitsoda [forum post], doesn't have a problem with Josh Sawyer [forum post], and claims to still be on good terms with many who work or worked at Obsidian and that it's just the upper management that he has a real problem with.

Obsidian made the mistake of adding some anime vibes to their latest companion concept, and it emboldened the weeaboos to crawl out of the woodwork and infest the Pillars fan community with anime culture. I recommend fumigation.

Josh Sawyer also gave this answer this on the reddit AMA: Q: Are you guys planning to make some more lighthearted quests/encounters for Deadfire? PoE was quite grim from the moment you enter Gilded Vale all the way to the end and was pretty depressing at times! A: Yeah, we're trying to lighten the mood a little overall. That means more humor in reply lines, more humor in quest NPCs and companions, and just funnier situations along the way. It's still not going to be a barrel of laughs, but there should be more variation.

Not any crazier than wearing Munacra Arret...

I think he was always intended as not-Drizzt.

Would "Cadegund" make sense as an Aedyran/Dyrwoodan name? Consider that when she was introduced in the first kickstarter, much of the setting (including the languages of Eora) hadn't been properly developed yet. Edér was still called Edair, and Zahua was still called Forton.

Maybe the fact that you built them as tanks, is the problem. Defensive builds naturally feel less active than offensive builds. Try the Lady of Pain fighter build (0-recovery variant, with Charge ability): It's one of the strongest damage-dealing builds I've seen, and it's fun to play. At mid levels, it always felt great when her Frenzy+Consecrated Ground combo kicked in, and I usually positioned as many of my other characters as possible near her so that they would be affected by the Consecrated Ground. At high levels, opening combat by one-shotting an enemy or two with Charge, felt viscerally satisfying. And it's the only character I played for whom I cared to regularly craft consumables (Potion of Deleterious Alacrity of Motion FTW!).

Pledges tend to come in fastest near the start and end of these crowd-funding campaigns: (source) (source) So I suspect that Deadfire will actually reach some of those new stretchgoals. Probably not the $5M one, but who knows...

If it is as morhilane described, I think it can actually make Wizards less repetitive than in PoE1. In PoE1, Wizards (after a certain level) spam their few low-level per-encounter spells in almost every single battle, simply because they're "free" - even if they might not be the most ideal thing to cast in any specific situation. If all their spells become per-encounter, Wizards will be able to actually cast whichever spell is most ideal in any given situation (based on the types of enemies and the battlefield situation), or even alternate between similarly good choices just for the fun of it, without having to waste per-rest slots.

Ah, you're right.