Arsene Lupin

People play games like this for the combat?

Good lord. Does no one read books any more?

From what they've said, the first expansion is almost certainly bound to disappoint (almost) everyone. They're apparently rushing its development and are comparing it to TotSC in terms of scope and size. TotSC was super small, and added 3-4 maps and 5-6 (very short, very simple) sidequests.

I dunno... Defiance Bay felt pretty empty and lifeless to me. Hardly any background "city" noises like Amn, and very, very, very few NPCs littered about (most of whom weren't actual NPCs)... and I don't think any of them would move around at all. I wonder if it's due to limitations of unity? Being unable to display more than X number of characters at a time?

Obsidian really hasn't been very transparent with regard to their development budget. Ideally, a Crowdfunded game never has to face the hurdle that games published the traditional way do--they don't have to sell a certain number of copies in order to recoup the development investment, because that development was paid for in advance. But in practice things can be pretty messy. Larian Studios -has- been fairly transparent, and some of the things that Swen Vincke has said about Divinity: Original Sin are a little scary. Basically, yeah, they used the crowdfunding campaign to help draw in additional investors--and to secure loans. And they sunk all of their capital into the game. The release date for Divinity: Original Sin was actually determined by Larian waiting until the last possible moment they would need to repay those loans. Thankfully, DOS was a roaring success and Larian was able to repay its loans and expand... but that could very easily have not been the case. Pillars of Eternity has clearly be successful... but we don't really know what it cost for Obsidian to develop it; nor do we know whether or not it has been sufficiently successful to justify further games of a similar nature. Nor do we know if Obsidian even -wants- to develop more games of a similar nature, or would rather keep trying to appeal to the mass audiences they got with FNV, KOTOR2, and South Park.

I guess I'm not remember Magic Missile completely accurately. I remember that it was a missile that you shot from your fingertips, so I assumed the max number was 10. But I guess it's really just 5? Oh well. I also have a vague memory of, as you leveled up, the MM spell would attack multiple enemies in certain circumstances--so a 1v1 spell eventually evolved into a 1vMany spell. That was really cool. (Though I could be thinking of another D&D spell--I was never a D&D kid--no friends and all that--so my only experience with the spells is from the various CRPGs. And I guess maybe some of you are right (depending on the wizard build) and all spells remain viable in the late-game... but I'm not really seeing it, myself. I feel like I'm just wasting my time casting level 1 spells, when level 2 and level 3 spells are the only ones doing any appreciable damage (even if they all have really annoying friendly-fire issues). I'm not about to say that the magic in D&D was perfect, or that the MM spell was perfect, but I do think that having a spell that becomes more impressive both visually and mechanically is an incredibly cool idea, and it's a shame that PoE doesn't even try to do something similar. And what's really annoying is that there is an upgraded missile spell... but it's visually identical to the level 1 version. Also: IMHO only ever being able to shoot three missiles at a time just feels wrong. And stupid. I just can't respect my wizard for that, ya' know? The shadow of D&D is just too long. I definitely agree. And PoE seems like it would really benefit (even moreso than a D&D game) from noncombat spells. Things like being able to teleport to special maps/areas, to summon creatures to "scout" ahead--and maybe even deal a little damage before the main party arrives. Or--and this seems like it's the biggest missed opportunity--to affect the disposition of NPCs. IE a spell that could increase an NPC's susceptibility to rational dialog (at the cost of decreasing his or her susceptibility to aggressive dialog) and so forth... or a spell that has a chance of generating a minor disposition boost with a faction (which, to be balanced, could only be used on specific NPCs within a faction, and only one time) with a "critical failure" chance of a major disposition hit. And so on.

After playing so much Bloodborne lately, I can only read that as "placenta."

I don't like Durance. I find his character irritating and his story uninteresting.

And I think the Magic Missile spell is a good example of what I don't like about magic in Eternity. (For those who don't know, Magic Missile is a D&D level 1 spell that most wizards or sorcerers start out with). The Magic Missile spell was awesome in the old IE games because it scaled with your level--the higher your level, the more missiles you could shoot, the more missiles you could shoot the more damage you could do. It was great. That made the Magic Missile spell useful even at high-levels. It was also a great visual indicator of character growth. When I hit level 2 in Baldur's Gate, for example, I don't feel like I'm getting stronger because I can do slightly more damage and have slightly better stats--I feel stronger because instead of shooting out one dinky missile, I shoot two. And then hours later when my wizard is blasting 10 missiles from each fingertip--that feels truly badass. Which brings me to Pillars of Eternity. None of the magic (that I've seen so far) scales with the player, so low-level spells very quickly lose relevance. There are also no visual or mechanical changes to the spells... and that's really disappointing to me. I love Pillars of Eternity, don't get me wrong: it's almost everything I'd hoped it would be. But I always play a wizard/sorcerer character in games like this, so it's disappointing to see that Pillars of Eternity is yet another in a long list of CRPGs that simply fails to (even try to) reach the same level as the old IE games.

He says, "either" instead of "neither." So either (haha) spellcheck has failed us all once again, or whoever wrote it out doesn't know the expression (and should be politely informed ASAP). http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=420555738

That's not quite true. Look at Shadowrun Returns for a good example of how to make do with a small number of portraits--you take the portrait, and then simply re-work the colors so that you can have multiple variations of the same portrait with different skin tones and hair colors.

After getting the key to the Elder Archives from Grima, you can open the door to the Elder Archives with it--but if you close the door again after opening it, you will no longer be able to open it (or interact with it at all). After encountering this bug once (and getting trapped inside the Archives) I reloaded the autosave and repeated my actions (get key, unlock door, open door, close door) and the bug occurred again.

Yeah. I remember pointing out this as a problem with the backer beta back when it first started. There are far too few portraits, and they're not properly segregated--a male orlan, for example, shouldn't be able to use the portrait of a female elf. Sadly, as was the case with Wasteland 2, the portraits in the beta were all the portraits in the release version. Clearly, Obisidian has a number of talented artists: instead of having them do little sketches for each and every Bestiary entry, I think we'd all have been better served with more portraits. That is absolutely not true. There may seem to be a lot of portraits, but that's only because they're all lumped together--every race and gender in one big pool. If you want to play as a female Orlan, for example, you have only 3 choices; if you want to play as a female Wild Orlan, you've only 1.

It's possible. On several occasions Obsidian has said that they want the expansion to be about the same size as TotSC... which was really, really small. And if that's the scale they want, they could very well have it done within a week or two.

First thing I did today after downloading the patch was to check the map--and, huzzah! It's functional now--but I quickly noticed something else that greatly improves my experience with the game: the maximum zoom levels have been increased. I read through all of the patch notes yesterday and didn't see any mention of the camera--so is this a feature change or bugfix that they forgot to include in the 1.03 notes, or is this in and of itself a bug (either a bug that prevented me from zooming in pre-1.03, or a bug that enables me to zoom in more post-1.03)? My maximum zoom went from this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=419906936 To this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=419906814

I've played for 50 hours and encountered only one bug (certain SFX not triggering properly). Comparing that to my experience with KOTOR2 (ran into a game-breaking bug requiring I start over from the beginning... twice, among other issues) and New Vegas (which is so buggy I've never been able to go more than 10 hours with a save being irrevocably broken), I don't find the need to be very critical of Eternity. Insofar as I have seen, it is--by far--the most stable game they've ever produced.

I remember the same sort of thing in Divinity: Original Sin. I'd see someone posting, "This game is terrible because it forces you to play like X," and I'd go, "Huh, I've never even tried to play that way in 50+ hours." It's like... some gamers can't quite think properly.

I find it funny that anyone would be "offended" by this quest, considering "killing children" is a HUGE part of the story of this game. I mean, how do you miss learning about the Hollowborn? The Wichts? All the talk about abortion?

One of the nice things about Unity is that it scales really, really well. Personally, though, I'd rather see Obisidian/InXile/Whoever build a NEW engine from scratch specifically for IE-style games. Obisidian managed to do great things with Unity, but you can really feel the limitations of the engine.

Self-censorship ain't the same thing as censorship. Decrying someone for exercising the former is just as bad as excusing those who enforce the latter. That said, the "majority" of gamers likely don't care one whit about all this "SJW" nonsense, mostly because most of the proponents sound like 14-year-olds.

You mean *more* reaction. There are some special dialog choices that appear in some dialogues, but there are plenty of places where the absence of such options is keenly felt. IE even in the tutorial, you can have an Aedyran player character ask about Aedyr like he or she knows nothing about it.

Maybe: something like "Backer NPC discussions." But I still think these are two distinctly separate discussions.

Maybe it's because I'm not terribly imaginative when it comes to names, but I like to look at the actual name of the race to come up with lore-friendly names. For example: The Aumaua--I get kind of a Hawaiian/Japanese vibe from the name, so I think lots of dipthongs and phonetic spellings. Which produces names like, "Kua Nin," "Sarua," "Raua'Tain," etc., etc. Then for the Orlans I fixate on the "Or" or the "Ln" sounds, and think of "foresty" words like squirrel or acorn. Which produces names like "Orsinne," "Oruebb," "Erstoln," "Maerln," etc., etc. Culture can also inform name choices. I look to the real-life analogs for inspiration. IE Old Vailia = Spain, Aedryr = Britain, Dyrwood = English Colonies, Glanfathans = Native Americans, etc., etc.

There aren't a whole lot of (new) features I feel the game desperately needs. The map screen certainly needs a major overhaul, but that's more of fixing an existing feature, and and AA-slider is in the works, so I'm happy. What I would like would be a zoom level slider--I'd like to be able to set the closest zoom level just a little bit closer. I'd also like to be able to scale the central UI buttons, as they're too small for me. And for classes with a lot of spells, it'd be real handy if we could set 2-4 as "favorites" in order to more quickly cast them, ala Baldur's Gate.

I haven't encountered any bugs yet (40 hours in) but I'm tempted to just stop playing until the patch. But that's a slippery slope for me. I stopped playing DOS a few months ago when Swen started teasing us (I swear that's all he's been doing since November: teasing) about a big content/polish patch for Spring.