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It would be really cool if, inside every tavern, there was a table where our characters could sit. Say, if you walk near the 'sitting place' with any party member, they would automatically find a place to sit. And these places could always be near the innkeeper, so you can ask for the services while sitting. Don't know if it would be that easy to implement though.

This is not quite as easy as it sounds, you cannot just render the hat over the hair or it might clip through. You can probably cut the hair mesh using the hat surface as a clipping plane, but that's annoying to implement and might still look weird in some cases. It can be really easy actually. Just don't make them bald. Use a generic hair for every hat, or maybe two generic ones: a short and a long one. That's it. Better than instantly losing all your hair when wearing a hat.

1. Allow to change hair after doing your character and don't make them bald when wearing a hat... seem to be pretty easy solutions, which I don't know why were not implemented in PoE 1.

The art is just the better thing about PoE game, almost unanimous. They really should spend their time enhancing the other not so unanimous stuff... Personally, I think the art design is simply perfect, from the main color palette (they seem to have gone with the combination of brown - wood, leather - and turquoise - adra -, which has a nice 'classic' feel) to the small details, like the 2D over-painted levels, the character portraits and the small icons for the itens. I love all the small details like how all the potions are distinctively different, the traps displaying their effect in a round circle above a bear trap, the realistic designs for weapons and clothes. Even staring at the crafting itens in the stash is pleasing, just for the detailed icons of all the ingredients. I have been playing the game for a while now and I am still mesmerized by how perfect it looks. No need for improving at all (yeah except for the Ui scaling maybe, but that is probably fixed with UI customization)

Second this! Although I think that additional content to make the world more dynamic or alive can also be some kind of concern for completionist players, who would think they're always "missing something" if they didn't get back to that dungeon etc. They would have to make this extra content very forgettable and uninportant for the story I suppose, but still fun of course!

I would love to see more banter between companions as a stretch goal, or just overall reactivity (I mean, even more than what is already planned at US$ 2.2 mi). The final goal should be that every companion has significant interactions with every other one. Like, every party composition will have the same amount of interactions. And reactivity means loads of dialogue options depending on character's background and reputations, which takes time... and money... maybe stretch goal money?

I have strong reasons to believe it will be a pale elf. First of all, it is the only PoE exclusive subrace that haven't been covered yet in both games. Counting both games, I think we already have island and coastal aumaua, hearth and wild orlan, a boreal dwarf, ocean and savannah folk and a godlike. I know there was no mountain dwarfs either, but that's more like a different name for regular dwarfs (like meadow folk and wood elves). Second, The White that Wends is south, right? Maybe it is somewhat close to the Deadfire Archipelago. By the lore, pale elves seem to be known as isolated and with cold, stoic personalities. I would love to see the narrative designers explore that, maybe a pale elf that is naturally cold and uptight, but has a hidden sense of humour and a drive to try and be more open and expressive than his peers, I don't know...

Adding the cloth map and the mousepad as add-ons would be nice, as they are already making those for the CE. I would probably buy the mousepad. ps: Loved that they added the guidebook today! Will buy it along with my pledge (as soon as January pay enters...)

Do slacker-backers get them as well?

Does anyone else think it is kind of disappointing to have 3 returning companions? I don't know, I guess I would like to know more new ones, and with the current number of total companions, it seems there will be just 4 new ones (and we already know 3 of them), =s. Also, it is not like everyone was excited to have Pallegina back in the sequel...

Organizing the inventory and the stash already demands more work than IE games, because of the food consumables and tools, traps, scrolls etc. I think discounting ammo was a good move by the developers to balance it a little.

That's great! If there's one thread I wish the devs were reading, it would be this one. Interesting and evolving characters are what make memorable RPG's! Anyway... The OP was very on-point in the first post. The companions should feel more reactive in the present as well, talking about it, discussing the main plot, quests, their personal quests, other companions' personal quests, maybe even some minor tasks with a funny line or another. It doesn't have to be an important interjection. Even the smallest of the fetch quests can become an opportunity for small talk between companions that highlight their personalities... In fact, it would be nice to see companions talking to each other in those interjections, instead of simply each one contributing with their commentary like in a line (of course that takes more time and care). It doesn't mean they can't talk about their past though, just find a better balance. Regarding the number of available companions, if they would engage in banter between each other, relatively frequently in the game, this means that with every new companion the devs announce as a stretch goal, they'll have to write conversations between he/she and every other companion. It's an ascending-curve progression of man-power needed for each companion added. It's understandable that the number of companions is small, if that's the goal they wanna reach. Personally, I would be happy with 7-8 companions and maybe just increase more development time if it's needed for more banters, dialogue trees etc, (although the release date is already established as Q1 2018 =s). I'm not sure if I'm a big fan of having 3 returning companions though. If the goal is to have a limited roster, I think it would be nicer if we discovered some new personalities instead of revisiting the old ones (having they appear as cameos would be enough for me). I hope I bite my tongue and they do some interesting and umpredictable developments for the returning companions though.

The physical box of the first kickstarter campaign was indeed DRM free. It doesn't have anything to do with GOG, it is just an old school DVD with the complete game in it. I pledged for it at the time and as I mentioned in another thread I am very glad we got a digital copy along with it, because now I play only the digital copy. The reason being: they never made a compatible DVD for the expansion. If the DVD of the physical pledge for PoE 2: Deadfire is DRM free like for PoE, I recommend not pledging for it if you plan to play the expansion in the future. That's because we'll not get a digital copy along with the physical one this time, so you'll be stuck with a DVD, with a very poor post launch support (the patches in the backer portal always took a huge amount of time to be updated) and even worse, you very probably won't be able to play the expansion. That is if Obsidian take the same measures as before, which I doubt. They'll probably make the physical box a disc with a Steam/GOG key on it, I don't know... p.s.: Have they released a White March DRM free DVD which I never heard of, by chance?

With sub-classes and multiclassing, folks will certainly find some OP combinations... and then we'll have a long period of "balancing things out" after release... I just hope I won't have to wait as long as I did to play the "finished" version of PoE 1...

Yeah, same here! Loved the Guidebook vol.1, but it was hard to buy in my country. Maybe add some other stuff as add-ons, like the mousepad and the cloth map as well. That would be neat.

Same here! Loved the Guidebook vol.1. I hope the hard-cover vol.2 will be available as an add-on at Fig!

The boxed copy of the Kickstarter campaign was actually DRM-free, not linked with Steam nor GOG. There is no hint if the Physical Box reaward for the Fig campaign is DRM-free or linked with Steam or GOG. They probably don't know yet.

Can someone clear something out for me? Wh... why do people buy the boxed edition in the first place? It doesn't come with any digital format (is that correct?). If I remember correctly, for the first Kickstarter campaign, there was a free digital download for every boxed edition only because the game's release got delayed or something. And thank God it did, because today I play only through my digital copy, as the boxed one got almost no support post-release (where do we download the patches? is the last update available at all?). Also, the expansion didn't come out in any retail version, so if we only got a single boxed copy in the first place, we simply wouldn't be able to play the expansion. So, honestly, I think it would be worth to get a boxed copy for Pillars 2 only if under the guarantee of full post-release support (including an expansion DVD). Of course, considering that the boxed copy will be DRM-free like in the Pillars 1 kickstarter campaign. Also, my first boxed copy for Pillars 1 came all messed up because of the poor packaging. Then I asked for a second one and it came all squashed again! It was absurd. So I just gave up. So I hope there is no Paradox deal this time...

I don't believe a bunch of geeks' eagerness to play a Pillars game will rush them. They'll have their schedule Hahah, you're right. I work as a market analyst, so I'm used to people's opinion in forums and social network being transformed into numbers and reports that represent the "consumer sentiment" etc. But I guess Obsidian is not that big a company (nor that kind o' company) to consider fan demand for their schedule. Anyway, my point is. If we really want PoE2 to be as best as it can be, it will take some time. And if the inevitable hype (for you guys, I'm imune to hype XD) will start building as soon as the first official teaser is out, then I think it's better if it drops later in development, closer to release date (which should be more than just one year from now, seriously). Enjoy the dark, folks. Think all these Josh's teases are actually from a pen&paper project he's making or whatever, and go get distracted (I worry about your health, that's all, XD).

Let's not start rushing them, please. A masterpiece takes a good amount of time and care to be made, y'all know that. I'd rather wait 4 more years if that's what it takes. There's a bunch of other games to play and things to do, there's not even enough time to play them all, nor least waiting impatiently for any...

If it is 'easy' to change colors on photoshop, than Obsidian could have hired an intern to do so. I'm with the OP on this. The art in the portraits are generally very beautiful, but the way they are presented honestly feels very lazy to me. First of all, it is only a few of them which have alternate colors/versions, like the hooded woman and the female nature Godlike. Why is it just a few of them? Couldn't they dedicate some time to make at least one alternate color/version for every of them, even if the total number of different portraits got cut out? The easiest solution would be to make the side arrows swap between different portraits and then add up & down arrows to choose between different colors/versions of the same portrait. When the first portraits were getting revealed during the Kickstarter campaign, when we could see they were making look-alike portraits with subtle differences in color and details, I actually thought that was the obvious way to present them in-game. It just feels totally randomized the way they are now organized: "So, here are three similar female nature Godlike that look almost the same, then a single Heart Orlan portrait obligatory for anyone who wants to play as an Heart Orlan, then a fan-made portrait that was added to the official roster without much blending with the style, then a whole variety of human portraits..."

Haven't played the game enough to know much of the context, but isn't that a surname? You will probably stumble across a bunch of those anglo saxon derived names and terms, I think invented by Mr. Sawyer.

Yeah, GOG offers too many options for the same damn thing! It is unnecessarily complicated. But thanks! I just think I'll stop using GOG Galaxy, =s. I was trying it just for the time tracking...

I'm new to GOG, and I might be missing something really obvious, but these patch updates are confusing me. So I have the 3.02 version of Pillars and both parts of The White March installed. I was manually downloading the 3.02 > 3.03 patch updates (15mb for main game, 3mb for each of the expansion parts) on regular GOG. Then I opened GOG Galaxy and a download of 2.3Gb started automatically. The dumb questions: 1- Am I downloading the same thing in both regular GOG and GOG galaxy? If so, how come the big difference in size? 2- Does GOG Galaxy's update work for the game in general or just when I launch it with GOG Galaxy? 3- Do I need to download and install the updates for the main game and each part of the expansion separately? In any specific order? Sorry if these questions have already been answered elsewhere and if its a little bit off topic. Thanks

With the game approaching its final version in the next patch or two (hopefully), are there any plans on making an updated manual explaining all the mechanics? One can consider that the game has some relatively deep and complex mechanics, and with the original manual from the physical version now obsolete, we should be able to get a digital final version of the manual so we don't need to rely just on tooltips to learn the mechanics.