LuccA

I mean... Pillars of Eternity is a single player game, I don't understand why some people get so competitive, or ambitious, there's no rankings or anything... Min/maxing? Companion NPC stat distribution? Level cap removal? Epic levels???!!! This is no MMO. What is the problem with a more grounded game? Why do you have to become a God and instant kill every enemy? This isn't either fun or challenging (maybe Tyranny will be more your cup of tea) Also, the companion NPCs were written, they are fixed characters and their stats are part of their creation, like it or not. Just make your own party member if you want to min/max.

Oh, sh*t. What I feared the most has already started, so close to development announcement... Please, don't ask them to remake Baldur's Gate 2, in any feature. That's my only suggestion, and it goes for the future Kickstarter campaign: please don't compromise with megalomaniac or nostalgia-driven Stretch Goals. Concentrate on improving Eora's lore and giving us a meaningful, original story and we'll all be fine.

Damn, still waiting for the "final version of the game" here to start playing. Will it take too much? (might as well wait for a GOG sale for the expansion at this pont actually)

So... flawed in so many ways? Or just unbalanced soulbound weapons (in your opinion)? The thread title is over-the-top

Thanks, man! Will definetly check it out after WM2 releases and I finish my first playthrough. Keep it up!

I'm not sure if I'm a big fan of taking a single character through a 2-3 games epic journey. It seems that the character is too much of a trouble-magnet or something. I know sometimes that makes sense, like having to deal with the consequences of the previous game, but if you play "2 or 3 epic journeys" with the same character, and every NPC in the world is asking you for help, it just seems like you're the centre of the world, like the biggest hero that ever existed. For that reason, I think I would prefer playing PoE2 with a different character, but in a connected story, maybe even with some NPCs from PoE1. Am I the only one who doesn't like being the game world's living legend or something like that?

It worries me that there are lots of people expecting a PoE2 as worthy as BG2, when comparing to the respective prequels. I mean, it's not a bad thing to expect, but it might offer the same kind of limitation/pressure that some kickstarter campaign promises did, i.e. the stronghold. Now that the engine and most of the rules are settled (although they will probably upgrade to the new Unity, and that may offer the same obstacles all over again), it is very likely that PoE 2 will be better. However, I'm concerned that the devs might surrender to this kind of pressure: "BG2 had more weird and out-of-the-ordinary locations, so we will have to do that in PoE2"; "In BG2, the player could reach near god-like levels, so we are doing that in PoE2"; "BG2 had a charismatic villain, so we have to top that", and so on. I would be happier if the devs left all those expectations out of the table, took only PoE1 as reference, and began to think of an amazing story to tell us.

Well, because someone wants to stick with a party of pre-made NPCs, out of attachment or to improve their abilities, which shouldn't be an unespected thing. The point is: a single-player game should force you to play with variation of strategies and play-styles so you can get past it. Instead of having the player meta-game his way so he can find some fun, like "well, let's see how a party of godlike shapeshifting druids will perform!". This can be done in replays, like how achievements work, and replay-value shoudn't be prioritized over the first-playthrough-value (getting back to the topic's main theme). To have to get past dozens of trash mobs in your first playthough is like playing chess, or tennis, or any 1x1 game, against the same adversary over and over again, without any of you improving. It loses it's fun and becomes a huge let down to keep playing the game. If getting hired adventurers and changing your party composition every so often is the only way we can avoid repetitiveness in the game, then we should be forced to do so, by 'having temporary NPC' parts or something like that. Of course, making the encounters more varied and challenging overall is and easier and more efficient solution, so you would be able to have fun and be increasingly challenged with the same party thoughout the whole game. Annoying is indeed a subjective thing, but repetitiveness is not. Obsidian made things more difficult for themselves with the mega-dungeon for example, which honestly I think was a ****ty idea. It's no easy task to make a 17 level dungeon interesting all along, impossible considering the time and budget for PoE's development. Indeed you do. PoE's combat needs more (forced) variation. If it's on party movement, or positioning, or different strategies, personally I haven't played it for a long time to discuss (personally I don't dislike Josh's measures to avoid exploitation of the game's system). But any discussion should be supported, and with logical replies instead of hate-driven ones.

The complaints are not on the difficulty of micromanaging, but on how annoying and repetitive it is. One thing does not exclude the other. The combat can be easy and still demand a lot of thoughtless work. Sensuki made a thread discussing how the combat can become easy and repetitive after you got the hang of the micromanaging: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/83050-a-query-on-combat-gameplay/, which I think is getting unreasonably bashed by the community. The lackluster combat is a considerable flaw it seems, and we SHOULD encourage discussing solutions to make PoE a better game.

I'm also still waiting. Haven't got past the prologue and been avoiding spoilers since. I'm not waiting for the expansions though, but for the exp. balancing. It seems very frustrating by the coments, since game launch. The first playthrough should be memorable. It's the one that allows the most immersion, so it shoudn't be spoiled by lack of polish. The most playthroughs, the more meta the experience becomes (it doesn't mean less fun though, it depends on the style of the player. Personaly, I value immersion more than anything).

I would also like to know if there are any plans to make the expansion 'updatable' for the physical game samehow.

My regular boxed copy arrived in a very poor condition, wrapped in a single bubble wrap and a plastic bag. I posted some pics in another thread. It is just ridiculous! I emailed Paradox and they told me that their logistics partner, Shipwire, probably made a mistake, since they specifically asked for the box to be packed in a cardboard box, for protection. Anyway, they said they would send a replacement, now with a cardboard package. The replacement arrived a few days ago, with the same plastic bag package of the first! It's insane!! The total lack of organization!... They would say it was probably a mistake from Shipwire again... By chance, the second box was in a better shape (still a few damages), and I just can't bother to ask for a third one. I still can't state anything about the game itself, because I haven't played it. I'll probably wait until the second part of the expansion is done and patched to have my first playthrough with the best version of the game possible. Lucky I'm patient with those things. Still plenty of games I wanna play until then (and not much free time). But maybe I'm doing that so I can avoid being so upset about the game as I was about the way the kickstarter was held, from beggining to end.

Is there any information if the expansion will be available somehow for the disc game? Maybe as a downloadable uptade in the site or even another disc? I know it is not necessary, since everyone has at least one digital copy of the game, but I was just wondering if the physical goods will cover only the base game.

I got my physical box two days ago, 3 months and 2 weeks after the game's release, but that's not the point. I'm patient and I was pretty happy with the fact that this game was being done in the first place. Also, I won't be able to play it for real when my university's project is finished in september, but anyway... My brother got the game back home (I'm studying abroad) and he sent me the pictures of the box's condition: I'm still looking forward for this game's expansion and sequels. For the little I played of my digital copy, it looks sublime and I'm grateful for Obsidian. But having the physical game was part of the reason I backed it, and it is completely spoiled right now. I just really hope the lesson's learned for the subsequent games.

The only thing left to know is if our character will have a motivation to go to the expansion areas while in the beggining of the main game, to get the new companions. I've heard somewhere that the party will go to the new areas after being recognized as brave adventurers for the deeds in the main game. So if we want to take the new companions to the base storyline from the beggining, it would be nice to have a motivation for roleplay stand point, at least another than the metagaming reason of getting the new companions. Maybe if we end up in the White March by accident somehow, so we can get out of there with the help of the new companions (and comeback later when leveled up, for the expansin storyline) or if it's another place in which we can find answers to our state in the beggining of the game. I don't know. It's a nice challenge, and I'm curious to see what the devs will come up with.

Well, you seem to be very resistent to changing your mind too. Faerunner argued that there is not much difference between 'artificial romance' and roleplaying and showed some really good points actually. From a certain perspective, roleplaying a character trying to conquer a dungeon or killing monsters can sound just as silly as roleplaying someone who's romancing another character (personally, I don't think it is). These were not 'extreme examples', it was just thinking about it with an open mind. Maybe sometimes the lines between roleplay and feelings from the actual player to a certain character can get blurred. I agree that that should be avoidable. I don't understand much of the human's psyche to claim why exactly (if it can jeopardize the development of social interactions in the real world) nor to claim that that was the OP's case. I hope not. I agree with you that there is no place for a romance DLC in PoE, for the points you discussed. But romances can, for instance, be part of adventure stories without seeming over-imposed. If it can add to the story and character's arc, I see no harm in it (if it were to appear in PoE 2 for example). The problem is: integrating a romance to the main story would probably sacrifice some of the player's choices; and giving the player too many choices regarding romance usually takes out it's importance to the story (and it might seem like a pick-your-favorite situation). Yeah, actually, it would most certainly divide crowds. Maybe the devs should avoid it, I don't know...

Would be nice to include a download section in the site's homepage

"The Devil of Caroc" a verb? Personally, I think "Grieving Mother" is sillier. Also, Zahua sounds better than Forton, fits better in the world as they said.. I agree with you that it seems too Torment-esque of a character though. It is a huge challenge to write a character like this without seeming overly pretentious or out of place. The fact that it is a possessed bronze armor should not just be a stylistic choice, but it should justify and complement the caracter's arc/personality. I'm also hoping that the expansion doesn't work exclusively as extra content, but as an improvement of the base game. The new companions should interact with the player, as well as NPCs and other companions, in the main story. This expansion is a huge opportunity to add more reactivity into the game and improve on the more unpolished features such as the stronghold. That would be great even if done in part II. [nitpicking!] It seemed odd to me that a bronze armor could be a sneaky assassin. How does it enter stealth? Also, in the new trailer, there's blood coming out of the construct [/nitpicking!]

The same happened to me. They said it was a logistics error when converting the address from the Obsidian account to their shipping system. The worse part is that there is a slight chance that the game arrives somehow (according to Paradox's support) and so I should wait until the estimated delivery date before asking for a resend. Probably be getting my copy by the end of month...

Just got an email from Paradox saying my boxex copy (regular) is being shipped. My address in the email is cut though (it is complete in my account), leaving out important information such as building number. Did anyone have this problem? Any idea how I should procede?

Great suggestions! Specially for the stealth system and the stronghold. The cone + circle detection area is to differentiate sneaking from behind, right? It's a simple measure and it would open more gameplay options to approaching encounters. As for the crafting specialist and recipe, I think that's borrowing too much from The Witcher. The devs already pointed that the unrestricted system is to make crafting more usable and convenient. I agree that there should be some kind of restriction though, maybe linked with survival and lore skills (is there any?)

Also waiting for physical stuff for first playthrough here. Haven't gone past Gilded Vale for now. It's getting hard to avoid spoilers =P. The bright side is that the more we wait to play, the more polished the game will be.

I made a thread about the differences of font size in-game, I guess around a month ago. Honestly, I seemed like the only one complaining about it. Anyway, I would like to bring some clearer evidence on the matter and extend it to a discussion about the whole UI in the game. First of all, I play the game on a notebook, resolution 1366 x 768. I've seen gameplay on higher resolution monitors and the UI scaling seems OK there. So the issue I'm going to point out might be restrict to notebook gamers only. So, when I first started the game, the UI seemed OK, including during character creation. But then, the first in-game screen that appeared was this: It seemed odd that 2/3 of the game screen was being covered by the dialogue window. Also, the dialogue font size seemed too big comparing to the font size I saw in character creation's UI, the loading screen and all the rest of the game text. I know the bar at the top of the dialogue box is draggable, but with the standard font size, that means just a few lines of dialogue appear, so the player have to scroll down every time. Moreover, some of the 'wooden structure' of the dialogue box (e.g. bottom and side bars) seemed to block the screen unnecessarily. Then I tried turning down the font size in the options to 85%, which made the dialogue text way more confortable to read and suiting to the game's style (closer to classic IE games): But that made some of the other text way too small to read, mainly character sheet and scripted interactions: After messing around with UI some more, I noticed some other things: - Turning up font size (115% in the print) cause overlapping text in the character's sheet - This small issue in the cyclopedia - Text boxes popping up above the screen appear to have bigger font size, contrasting with the rest of in-game text, like dialogue (font size 100% in the print) Here is some text from the item description above next to the "Done" button located in the bottom right corner of the character creation screen, both scrapped from prints with scale maintained (font size set to 100%): Here is a comparison of the same "Done" button with the "Accept" button from a box that pops if you try to finish character creation with unassigned attribute points left (same size as the loading box after dying, stronghold warning etc.) and some UI elements that I think are relatively too small: I know it can be a personal thing and I'm just being over bothered by it or too perfectionist. That's why I made this thread, to know what you guys think! Personally, I think the standard dialogue text (and the dialogue box as a whole) is way too big in the 1366 x 768 resolution. The same happens for the popping textboxes. I would suggest to make them smaller, or at least approximate the font size from different UI texts some more, so they can be customized to a more satisfying result. [EDIT] It would be better if the scrapped images I posted were in the same scale as the prints, but it seems that the image uploading system does not concern with maintaining the original size.

They already adressed how the game discs would be delivered considerably later than the other goods. But it seems that the regular boxed copy will be the "game disc" in that regard, while CE box (mostly already delivered I think) is the "other goods". I guess it is better this way. Also because the empty space existing in the CE box is enough for a whole regular boxed copy, it seems from some unboxing videos I saw. Some communication in the forums would be nice though, about what version of the game is being distributed with the goods, or about any time of delivery prediction

Did anyone receive the regular boxed copy yet?