Prime-Mover

I wasn't clear in my post. I was referring especially to moving trees, grass and bushes. These are the things I originally thought seemed very cool during the kickstarter video above, and the things that are severely lacking in the more outdoorsy areas, making them seem very static. I understand and accept that in the end it's all about resource management, and these effects just didn't make the cut. I just wanted to know what the specific explanation was.

In Project Eternity's backer update #49, they show off a scene with a good deal of dynamic environment. But when playing the game, I don't recall seing anything even close to that level. E.g. I don't recall ever seeing moving trees, grass or bushes at all. I may simply have missed it, but the environments in general appear very static to me. Sure, there's a few leaves falling, but in general, everything appears very glued on. So, does anyone what the official explanation is for why they didn't include much of it? As it stands now, it's not really as far from the BG1 standard in this regard as I had expected.

Just because you can easily outsmart something that wasn't a focus of the development doesn't mean that it's an exploit. Dice Poker in The Witcher 1 and 2 is incredibly easy, I win those almost every time, am I exploiting because I think I'm safe on three twos and I know the dumb AI will resign? I don't think so. Creating smart AI is pretty hard, so encounter design should take into account that the player will probably be able to control the situation quite easily, and make it more difficult in other ways. What? I don't deliberately gimp my character? Don't worry bro, Pillars of Eternity barely has any resource management for you to rest spam and avoid, so it must be the game for you Not really the point I was making, but ok. Beyond that, I actually do find myself conserving spells compared to IE, and I prefer the PoE resting system to the IE one, namely because I am not inclined to deliberately gimping myself by avoiding the optimal strategy, i.e. rest spamming. I have other issues with PoE, and overall, I have fonder memories of IE combat as a whole, but not for that reason.

Rest spamming is exploiting. It doesn't count, as it completely bypasses the strategical resource management aspect of the game ... kind of like a gold cheat in an RTS. It certainly doesn't completely bypass resource management, it simply makes it a less significant challenge, compared to not rest-spamming. But again, as pointed out many times now, according to your logic, not deliberately gimping your character is thus the equivelent of exploitation/cheating, which is absurd. You have simply not presented any argument beyond simply denoting it as an exploit, to support your case.

Weak willed. Personally I don't like the P:E camping supply system because after a certain point in the game you almost never even have to use camping supplies and when you do there's always another one available in the current area or the area next to it. A campsite system would have been better IMO (but the rest spammers would have hated it). Weak willed? Well, with a sufficient amount of will, you can gimp yourself sufficiently to avoid taking advantage of the flaws in PoE's system. Play with one char, unarmored, no weapons, no supplies. I'm sure you'll find it a challenge.

I don't agree that it's essentially the same, since there's a cost associated with rest spamming in PoE i.e. the hassle of tracking back ot the inn etc. I thus almost never find myself inclined to do it. That's a benefit of the design.

It wasn't a "problem" until Obsidian (Josh Sawyer) decided to answer to some crazy Twitter person. If we take their word for it (and read the interview with Feargus), the twitter mayhem only made them aware of the problem, and didn't cause it.

There was some post made in the forums by someone claiming to be transgender who claimed to be honestly offended by it. Can't really point to it, but the search function should help you out.

First of all, seriously wtf with regards to the last comment? People have presented fairly well thought out reasons why the fact that the game is a fantasy setting, does not undermind the relevance of the issues presented in the game. Instead of calling people names, man the f*ck up, and show that your arguments are strong enough in their own right, instead of boarding up your opinions by comments like that. There are moral issues to be considered in all apsects of life, and actually considering them, does not require that one is in a particular high stakes context like war. In fact, the severity of the context means that many people block out the moral aspect of the situation to protect themselves, and just keep on doing what they do and focus on the mission/orders. You must have experienced this yourself, or among your mates, that some people go to lengths to avoid looking at these issues because of the dramatic situation. Further, actually being in such a dire situation, is no precondition at all for engaging with issues of morality. There are litteraly thousands of academics working in ethics departments around the world who are experts on the issue, who deal with moral problems on a day to day basis, but who have lived uneventful lives compared to a combat veterans, and dare I say it, compared to most ordinary people (they are a boring bunch). So unless you are going to discredit that whole field, I imagine we can agree that moral issues can be approached via the imagination. It's cool that you didn't pause to consider any of the issues in this game, e.g. perhaps you didn't even consider for a moment whether killing a certain person vs. letting some family-line die out (no spoiler) to be worth a second's thought. It would have been a completely differnet experience for me, if I had just randomly pushed one dialogue option or the other, but I certainly don't want to pretend like this is the only way to enjoy the game. However, if you could show people like me the same courtesy and respect, that would be just fine.

Wait, if I'm allowed to consume some other content if it offends me, why is Obsidian then not allowed to change the content if it offends them? If Obsidian was offended they should have said that. No one vetted the backer content that was submitted? Bull****. Of course they vetted content. The backer content was submitted and they had no problem with it. It was only after some loser posted on twitter that this was an issue. And again, if you have a problem with content, go elsewhere. You are speculating here, and you fail to provide reason for why you believe they are beging disingenuous. That fact that you are mad does not constitute evidence, thank christ.

Wait, if I'm allowed to consume some other content if it offends me, why is Obsidian then not allowed to change the content if it offends them?

How? Why? I can see no reason as to why that statement would be true. Based on personal experience, I imagine it's because those choices have 1) already been made before the heat of combat, to some extent, and 2) pre-buff is usually - at least in IE - a matter of casting the same 4-5 spells prior to every, single, encounter, with only small variations when meeting abnormal encounters, e.g. Firkraag, and the like. This means, that for many, pre-buffing is just the same chore over and over again, i.e. very tedious. The reason is that battle-buffing and pre-buffing encourages to different playstyles (at least for me). With pre-buff, you buff prior to encounters. This gives you the advantage of being able to get more buffs in (protect from evil, stoneskin, true sight, mirror image, improved invis etc), instead of using critical time during the encounter, while you and/or your partymembers are getting killed. However, because you are buffing before encounters, a lot of the time you don't know what you are facing. Therefore, so you don't prepare to be optimized for that particular encounter. You prepare/buff to be optimized for all possible encounters. And for most people, that means a tried and true generalist buffinglist, which will need to be activated each, and every time. PeE buffing is - at least with regards to my playstyle and skill - a bit different. Instead of picking the generally best buffs which I know will be fine against almost all encounters, I now wait for the encounter to begin before deciding the optimal buffs, based on that particular encounter. However, due to time constraints, there's much fewer buffs to chose from. But, since I actually know who and how many I am fighting, I can chose the optimal buffs for that particular situation, which is - again - different from encounter to encounter. This - depending on what we mean by the term - seems much more tactically engaging. IMXP, and according to my playstyle and skill, that makes buffing a more engaging tactical element, than the standard IE pre-buffing scheme. That being said, from following this discussion, I've actually begun to come around to the idea of pre-buffing, if it can be made less of a chore. I liked DA:O's system, though I have an aversion to the whole manapool notion.

According to the nexus, it is updated almost daily, the last update being only a few hours ago. So unless there's something I'm missing, it seems to be in very active development.

I don't see what about manipulating souls should make morality go out the window. Mind elaborating? As I see it, being able to manipulate souls rather introduces new moral considerations, which can't as easily be drawn out in a non-fantasy or non-scifi setting.

Why is the setting relevant in this regard? The moral choices you make, would hopefully make you think, whether you're deciding whether kill a guy names Xanzitorp, who happens to be a wizard, or some guy names Joe, who drives a taxi? Are you unfamiliar with the genre? You kill people (lots, and lots of people) to take their stuff and gain power. The moral dimension is pretty much not present at all, and you specifically don't turn fantasy game 'morality' on random taxi drivers named Joe. That gets you arrested for murder. If you were to take the main 'moral lessons' of this game to heart, it would be that feral (badly behaved) children (soulless children with animal souls) should be killed out of hand rather than taught to behave, and religious people should be murdered on sight, because they (exemplified in Waedwen, Durance and Thaos) cause nothing but suffering. So really, I'd caution Fearghus and the developers of this game to avoid morality discussions at all, and treat the game for what it is: casual entertainment. I honestly doubt you would question whether a backer of this game is familiar with the genre. So I can only interpret the first sentence as a an expression of mild hostility. Please refrain from doing that in the future. On point: The fact that certain issues in the game are treated fairly callously, or forces you to make choices which are morally controversial, does not mean that the game and the developers, aren't trying to make you think about these issues and choices. In some cases they want you to consider: "hey, was that guy really a bad dude", or they want you to go "WTF" when seeing how certain norms are almost universally accepted in the world.

Why is the setting relevant in this regard? The moral choices you make, would hopefully make you think, whether you're deciding whether kill a guy names Xanzitorp, who happens to be a wizard, or some guy names Joe, who drives a taxi?

I don't think so, not necessarily. That would be a useful trait for a scientist. It's also incredibly easy to claim, however, and incredibly pointless - you'll have a hard time finding anyone who doesn't think their own political opinions are based on reason. It's about as useful a concept to claim for your opinions as "common sense". I'm being pedantic here, obviously. Just fun and games. But whether it's useful or not doesn't really come into it, since I'm disputing that it even makes sense to claim to be "fanatic for reason". It seems more like unintentional poetry, than anything. At least if one by it means to be uncritical in one's persuit of open mindedness, reason, and rationality. If one cares about reason, one should also openminded about one's persuits, which contradicts fanaticism. I imagine what he/she meant was being zealous for reason, which seems much less contradictory.

What if I'm a fanatic for reason? A contradiction in terms it seems.

I would settle for a mere definition at this point, from some of those who position themselves with regards to them.

Love this thread already

Just went from liking it to just loving it tonight. Won't give any spoilers, but after my fourth restart, trying to find the right char, and having clocked 43 hours according to steam, the story has finally hooked me in a big way. For a long time I really wanted to love it, and I could clearly see that all the ingredients were there in terms of gameplay, art and story. But I still felt I had to work at it. But today, while questing and killing Beetles, Spiders and Bears outside of Dyrwood, it all just clicked. Haven't felt this way about a game since BG2. Thanks Obsidian! ps. Rødgrød med fløde

Alright, then it's perfectly reasonable for everyone to stick to the obvious interpretation that you were being derisive in your original comment. And you are thus being rude, despite your claim otherwise. Cheers

Alright, I'll bite. What did you mean by "It would explain a lot" then?

Wait, wat? Who's censoring you?

No, not always. When a criticism is backed by measurements, statistics and proofs, it is objective. When it's backed by feelings, it's subjective. An example would be, let's say, a workload control software that gets installed in a company. The objective of the software is finding how much real work any given employee does per week. Then let's say that one employee finds a flaw in the way the calculations of the hours are made, and realizes the system is not fulfulling its objectives; then he makes several tests to be sure his observations are not casual, and presents those tests as proof, with certain suggestions to improve/fix the system. That's objective criticism. Then there's another employee who keeps sending emails all day, in which he repeats again and again that the system is flawed, because the previous system was "better" and this one "doesn't work", and it's "unecessarily complicated"; and he keeps saying all of that without giving even one piece of verifiable data proving why he thinks that. Maybe he only criticizes the system because he doesn't want to learn to use it (and maybe because he doesn't know how to cheat the new system to hide the time he wastes browsing the internet). That's subjective criticism. I don't agree with this objective/subjective criticism distinction here. Surely criticism can be objective, even if it's not backed by empirical evidence. Often gut feeling and intuition is right on the money. Intuitions can e.g. be picking up on objectively good or bad features of the game. And evidence can be flawed, and thus contradict objective fact. And in an informal discussion board setting such as this, empirical evidence is just really too much to ask for most of the time. So it's rather a matter of trying to voice our intuitions, and hopefully provide reasons for why they reflect the objective state of the world. That aside, I agree that many of the posts in here lack basic humility. Some dude will make a short post, making some objective conclusion, like "this game sucks because feature x", and stating it as objective fact, rather than personal preference. Showing no signs of even considering that whatever he considers a failure of design, is really just PEBCAK.