Arsene Lupin

Goddammit, mods. I made this thread, and no matter what a handful of posters may have said, it is NOT about the "controversial limerick." I don't give a rat's ass that some people were offended by something in the game (though you'd think all the ABORTION in the game would rile up people more) and I do not like being misrepresented as someone who DOES. So called "offensive" content can be vital and necessary in any work of media because it forces people out of their comfort zones and to reexamine their beliefs.

Found him. He's just northeast of the Salty Mast. Here, for anyone else looking for him:

One of the bandits in Act I drops a Tattered Note, which reads: "I need you to deliver our haul for Curnd to sell. He will not speak to you unless you know the words: 'Yc Nybeon Eyldfeon.' He's only found in the Gift after dark." I'm assuming "the Gift" refers to the Ondra's Gift district of Defiance Bay. I've been wandering around at night, searching for Curnd, with no luck. Is he hiding somewhere, or is the Tattered Note simply a red herring (or possibly an Easter Egg, re: Cernd)?

Wow. I really didn't expect this topic to take off quite the way it has. Anyway.... ManifestedISO, and many others Don't click on 'em, it's easy. Their presence alone is immersion-breaking. Especially considering how many are Godlikes--and that problem doesn't go away no matter how you try to ignore or avoid them. The fact that many of them have lore-unfriendly names is likewise impossible to avoid, as you cannot tell which NPC is a backer NPC and which is not. At this point, the quality (or lack thereof) of the actual text is only of peripheral concern. Hiro Protagonist II My NPC has been written by Obsidian. Any complaints about the NPC's story, you'll have to take it up with the Obsidian writers. That's kind of what I'm doing, isn't it? Smoker I literally think every 5th npc is a backer npc Feels like a lot more than that. I'm only in act 2, but I've only encountered maybe a dozen or so named NPCs... and four or five times as many Gold NPCs. Stratosj People seem to be just looking for stuff to complain about. I'm not really a big fan of masturbatory adulation, so yeah, I'm not going to ignore things I think are bad. You know why Pillars of Eternity 2 is going to end up being better than Pillars of Eternity? Because of the criticism. All of it. MikeTheRed I completely don't get why anyone is complaining about this. And I don't get why you think it's more acceptable to complain about people complaining about this. MikeTheRed I bet these same people get really angry when they see someone enjoying a book they don't like. You're the one getting angry that people are criticizing a (very small) aspect of a game you like. If the shoe fits, Cinderella. Rumpelstilskin FWIW, my NPC was completely changed by Obsidian. He was supposed to have a multiple-option dialog with attribute and inventory checks, and then a small scripted event. Even with the Mary Sue characters, if even a fifth of the Gold NPCs had actual dialog options, I probably wouldn't mind them very much. For what it's worth, the relevation just makes the implementation of the Gold NPCs even weirder. vsanders Subject would have been better phrased as "I want an option to hide/remove..." There is clearly not a consensus on this issue. I never implied that there was a consensus. I used the plural pronoun because I know that many other gamers share my opinion. If I had thought that every one of us, unanimously, disliked the Gold NPCs and wanted to remove them, then I wouldn't have suggested it be an option to hide/remove in the first place. Bryy It brings up the actually very valid point within the concept of crowdfunder-made content of what constitutes offensive content and how should the company regulate their crowdfunded content. Whether or not the content is offensive or not is irrelevant. The topic at hand is not bigotry or offensiveness or political-correctedness or social-justice-warriors or whatever other nonsense--it's about keeping an RPG setting internally consistent and believable. It's about immersion. AncientToaster This topic was on Gamefaqs, I can only assume that it was the same person. That kind of dismissive attitude is not helpful. At all. Guess what? There are literally millions of people on the Internet... there are hundreds of thousands of people playing Pillars of Eternity... When you see two or more people espousing the same opinion online, and assume that they are secretly the same person, you are acting in a profoundly foolish manner. And for the record, I am active on GameFAQs. I have not seen a thread like this there. But my username there, as here, is Arsene Lupin. Srex Sure, I understand what you guys are saying, even if I don't agree. I think they probably were in a sticky situation where they didn't want the people who pledged for an npc to feel shorted, but they also wanted the NPCs to integrate well into the game. Very well said.

Pillars of Eternity is a really, really fantastic game, you know? But part of it kind of sucks: the backer NPCs. You know the ones: all of the yellow-bar NPCs whose souls you can peer into, and read a short story about. They are almost uniformly terrible. The writing is usually pretty poor, the characters frequently being cast in the mold of Mary Sue, with names that fail to fit into the setting (and frequently don't even try to fit in). The stories themselves, though once in a while decently written and interesting, never contribute anything to the setting or world of the game. Oh: and most of them are the super-rare Godlikes. I swear: there are more Godlikes in the Dyrwood than humans, elves, dwarves, aumaua and sentient kittens combined. So there really, really needs to be an option to remove/hide these NPCs, or a mod to excise them entirely. I feel that their presence serves as an active detriment to the overall experience of the game--not cool.

Ulgh.... all my time with the Infinity Engine games just make it worse. I keep opening up the map to try and get my bearings, and every time I do so it's completely pointless. The dungeons/interior environments are particularly bad. Took me forever to fully explore Raedric's hold because I couldn't tell the difference between complete blank blackness on the map, and the actual map (obscured by FoW) on the screen. ~__~

^--A respec option can cheapen gameplay by removing the "weight" of our choices. IE if you can change a stat/build/skill/whatever whenever you want, then there's no reason to really deliberate on the initial decision--because whatever you do, you can later undo. So I think unlimited respecs are... seldom a good idea. But limited respecs would be nice. Something like Dark Souls 2. I ended up starting a new character after 10 hours because I invested a lot of points into Might, in an effort to increase the damage output and AoE of my mage. Only to eventually discover that bigger AoEs are more difficult to use, and instead of the smart/perceptive dialog options that I'd want to be open to my character, I was instead only able to see the Might-based bullying/threatening options. Which wasn't cool. I'd inadvertently made a muscle-wizard. ~__~ So, yeah: a respec can devalue character creation decisions... but if that cheapening saves me 10 hours, I think it's well-worth the sacrifice.

In Act 1 and early in Act 2, a short dialog will trigger after a rest with Sagani. The first page of this conversation is: The problem with this dialog arises in her final line. The last page of dialog is: Again, this conversation will trigger upon a rest in either Act 1 or Act 2. I don't know when "Thaos" is revealed in the game, but I know that I sure as hell shouldn't know who he is this early. Sagani's dialog, therefore, contains major spoilers--as it reveals both the name of my foe and the (eventual?) overall arc of the narrative (IE hunting down this Thaos as though he were an Irenicus). Not cool. This dialog needs to be locked until that "X" point in the story has been reached. And the same for any other companion dialogs/interruptions that contain spoilers. We shouldn't have to worry about speaking to our companions for fear of spoilers... like I said, it's not cool.

It baffles me that so many people think that ANY discussion of a "sex scene" is relevant to an isometric game--it can't be done. It is, therefore, not a valid fear. Or hope, for that matter.

Yeah: Like I stated, those screenshots were taken with gamma/brightness at the maximum setting.

Most Unity-based games I've seen have UI scaling, so one would think it wouldn't be too difficult. Pillars certainly has some text scaling, which is great, but the icons need to scale, too. On my 27" 1080p display, the main UI icons are just way too damned small. This is what the UI looks like now: Notice how each UI icon is about 1/4 the size of the portrait icons? Yeah: they're super tiny. Ideally, I'd want the icons to be about this big: Now doesn't that UI look much easier to navigate?

Instead of showing an actual map of an area, the map button simply displays a zoomed out image of the current area. See: http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/539644405488400023/0488435011E39A5024A38B29E18C553C04D7EA61/ Notice my party in the lower-right corner of the scree: the area around them (their field of view) is distinctly brighter than the rest of the map. This is because the fog-of-war is displayed on the map screen. In daylight, this simply makes the maps darker than they should be, and therefore slightly more difficult to use. It's annoying, but it's not a huge problem. But it becomes a huge problem at night. Nighttime + fog-of-war = one big, useless map. See: http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/539644405488400772/188935F9E0159DEB792CB78903A370992D9DAFC6/ Can you tell what that is? I sure can't. And that's with the gamma turned all the way up in the settings menu. This needs to be fixed: if at all possible; as soon as possible.

I went with Steam because I find the client convenient and I like how it tracks how long you've spent playing a game.

^--I agree. While I like the writing, it does tend to err a bit on the flowery side. In general, fewer adjectives are better than more.

The most pressing problem is the lack of UI-scaling. Other than that, yes, we definitely need a speed slider for mouse-camera movement.

I've noticed a lot of very... passionate... and frequently infuriating discussion of "romance" in Pillars of Eternity. Specifically people arguing that the omission is a net positive, or a net negative. Many people seem to associate romance only with the recent slew of Bioware RPGs, that emphasize player-empowerment to such an extreme degree that many players found themselves turned off to the concept of in-game romances altogether. The one time I sunk into one such discussion, I pointed out my "ideal" system for party interaction: Ideally, I envision a game where over time, via dialog trees, you can build a relationship with all of your party members--and that relationship is slowly defined over time into one of many options. IE, you could become friends, rivals, lovers, or simply maintain a professional "co-worker"-like relationship. But that's a really difficult ideal to realize. So then I had another thought: what if the best way to handle romances is not to do a romance at all? IE, to have nothing explicitly romantic? I would point to the two more recent Persona games as a good example of this. Using various conversations spread throughout the game, players could develop a relationship with an NPC, but the nature of that relationship is sufficiently vague that the player can decide its nature for his or herself.

So: what do you want to see in the next big Infinity-Engine style game from Obsidian? Be it the sequel or one of the two expansions? (Probably the sequel: from what Obsidian has said, the expansions are likely to be -very- small in scope). - I'm pretty damned happy with Pillars of Eternity, so my wishlist really doesn't include all that much--and I'm fairly confident everything I do want will be delivered. So, er, anyway, here's my list. - More party banter/dialog. Along that line: maybe have a "relationship" style quest w/ lots of dialog--not necessarily romantic in nature. More terrain diversity (IE deserts, tundra, steppes, etc.). More awesome fantasy weather like Biawics(sp?). More party diversity (with so many awesome races to choose from, PoE has too many white male party members). A respec option. More and more powerful magic spells! - ...So what do you want to see added to the next game?

About two years later--and I got that great RPG! Sadly no UI scaling. Makes me so sad--the UI icons are sooooooooooo small.

Will the keys be released via email or will they show up somewhere in the backer portal? And shouldn't the people who backed the game have gotten their keys BEFORE the random mooks who bought it on Steam recently?

When Obsidian announced that Pillars of Eternity would be delayed into 2015, I thought it was good news: the initial November/December 2014 release window seemed perilously soon for a game that, as evidenced by the first few builds of the backer beta back in August and September demonstrated, still needed a bit of work. Well, now that we're at (or beyond) that initial release window, I thought it would be a good opportunity to dive back into the latest build of the beta and see what's changed--or what hasn't. And, sadly, it seems to me that very little has changed. In fact, the only difference that was immediately discernible to me was the addition of the FFXII-style attack "strings." To be fair, there was a lot to love in the initial build of PoE--and those fantastic elements are just as good now as they were then. But there were also several aspects of the game that needed to be improved, and I can't see that Obsidian has made any real effort to fix things. Combat speed is still too rushed for a game that is trying to emulate the more tactical aspects of an old Infinity Engine dice-emulator. Terrain layer transparency still has a nasty tendency to make people look like floating torso while standing in tall grass. But most troubling of all: the experience system is unchanged. It is still the counter-intuitive mess today it was back when everyone was raising so much fuss about it months ago. These forums have been home to a TON of feedback from fans, and as far as I can tell Obsidian has listened to very little of it. The beta now seems systemically identical to the original beta, and that... is not really a good thing in my estimation. I'm curious, for those of you who have been dipping your toes into the Beta (so to speak) from the beginning: what do you think of the progress Obsidian has made with the Beta since then?

I wouldn't be so quick to blame Sawyer for the impotent magic system here. The broken experience mechanics? Sure. But not the magic. Why? Asymmetrical class systems (as exemplified in the classic Infinity Engine games) are, for whatever reason, very much a thing of the past. All the games with class systems these days--from Mass Effect to Dragon Age to Borderlands to The Elder Scrolls to Kingdoms of Amalur to whatever and etc., etc. all use symmetrical class systems. The basic idea between a symmetrical class system is to even out the classes, so that a player never feels that he or she is missing out on something really cool just because he or she chose a certain class. This is usually accomplished by homogenizing DPS values and equalizing abilities. The end result is that each class feels samey--which is the intent. I would also caution very strongly against counting on mods to fix this, or any other major issue with the game (like experience). I would point to Skyrim and Dragon Age Origins as games with poor magic systems and varying degrees of mods attempting to fix things--but failed to do so. To get a solid asymmetrical class system in a game, the developer really has to do it.

Well, you're also starting at level 5 with 5 characters in the beta. It might be easier with a learning curve, both in terms of level (complexity) and number of characters. Not really. Many people popped their CRPG cherry with BG2, where you start in Château Irenicus with a party of five-six level seven adventurers. If you had a couple of fighters then it was pretty manageable. That was back when people read the 1 inch thick player manual before playing a game. Like hell. BG2 was my first RPG, and I've since played all the greats, and have only ever read the lore bits in the manuals.

At this point I think the most necessary update is simply "improved visibility in tall grass." Until that's fixed, I find myself loathe to go back to the beta again. Especially considering how backwards the experience system works.

Not sure what the deal is, but I rely on the "recent news" list in the game's library page to see when a game (particularly a beta/EA game) has been patched. Like, right now, because there's no news list, I can't see when the game was last patched--and therefore have to assume that it has not been patched since I last played in 1 month ago.

Any action that produces experience should reward the player with Experience. This is not a difficult concept. If you fight a guy and win, you become more experienced at fighting. If you fight a guy and win and then go talk to another guy who paid you to fight the first guy, that dialog does not make you more experienced at fighting. Pillars of Eternity seems to have some difficulty with obtuse, counter-intuitive game systems. Like they're trying to re-invent the wheel in the shape of a hexagon. Yeah, the new iteration will do the same job as the old, but it's far from optimal.