Yonjuro

Yes. The best weapon in BG1 was probably Spiderbane, a 2 handed sword +2 that granted free action. You didn't find it until Cloakwood. There was also a war hammer +2 that did electrical damage and a long sword +2 that did cold damage both of which were available as soon as you could take down the owners of these weapons (Bassilus and Greywolf). If you had found Carsomyr in the spider cave or taken Celestial Fury from Greywolf (by using ranged weapons, presumably ) the game would have suddenly gotten really easy. If you had weapons like this in BG1 what would you have expected to see in BG2? If anything, powerful items are too easy to find in PoE. None of them look great because there are so many of them. If you found Spiderbane in PoE it would be no big deal. In BG1, it was a very big deal if you had a PC who could use it (or had Minsc in your party). Conversely, if you had found Hiro's Mantle in BG1 - that would have been a keeper. In BG1 you had the cloak of Balduran (+1 to armor class and saving throws and 25% (?) magic resistance, a unique item) and a Cloak of Protection +2 (+2 armor class +2 to saving throws - there was one of these in the game).

I agree. Religious beliefs often get a free pass when it comes to criticism so it's a convenient excuse for the indefensible. I think that politicians on the right have seen this property of religion as a great thing to get in on. It hasn't been good for our government but, if anything, it has been worse for the religions. I know several people a generation or so younger than I am who left their religion entirely because of the stance on gay rights. I used to live in state with blue laws (MA). Our neighbor to the north (NH) had alcohol for sale on Sundays. Somebody apparently did the calculation about the lost tax revenue and put a "buffer zone" near the border - towns in northern MA that were allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays. I'll just leave that here without comment.

It wasn't until this very moment that I realize that the game does, in fact, need a giant pudding spoon as a weapon that inflicts stirred status on diseased puddings. If I wasn't too lazy... err, I mean busy... I would mod that in.

As a thought experiment, what happens in the real world when someone tells a religious person that their one of their religious beliefs, even a relatively minor one, is false/nonsensical etc. and backs up the statement with verifiable facts? Do they say, "That is an excellent point you bring up, I will stop wasting my time with that belief and get on with life" or do they tend to get upset? I have quite a bit of experience with talking with people who are dealing with these issues with regards to Protestantism. Sometimes folks respond with a sense of betrayal--- but more often it's just a distancing from the church. There's even a fair share of "Well, it isn't true, but it still does good things" kinds of sentiment. It's weird that every NPC in my party was personally hurt in a self-doubt kind of way like this. Are you in Western Europe (or some other place with reasonable views about religion)? The reason I ask is that, in the U.S., we've had the "unholy" union of religion and politics since about 1980. The result is a toxic mixture of totalitarian irrationality that we need to fix (it's funny how when politics and religion get mixed together, you never end up with more peaceful politicians and more rational religious people - anyway, the good thing about intolerant people is that they eventually stop tolerating each other, so it tends to be self-limiting). I see what you mean. I think that it (possibly unintentionally) reflects the political situation in the U.S.

I know - where's the "none of the above" option?

Hehe....me too. Although I've kept him in my 1st-started party, but I refuse to talk to him again, except when he occasionally has initiated it. Plus he's glitched, for me anyway, since I asked about his staff before I had a dream/his quest updated, or something. Other player chr. games I've made, I've made my own Priest when I want one. I dropped Durance in my first play through. As I usually do for my first play through, I tried to roll a character that I could identify with and make the role playing decisions as close to "what would I do in this situation" as possible. So, Durance brings the cray-cray and I thought, yeah, I don't want this piece of work behind my back. When I saw his unhappy end, "yeah, saw that coming." So, really, he's a well written character. In my second play through I'm taking him (and Grieving Mother and Hiravias, neither of which I recruited the first time) for the story - but yeah, not someone I want watching my back in RL. Speaking of that, the two characters I would want watching my back in RL were Sagani and Eder. Both seemed like they would be trustworthy people (not likely to be distracted by something shiny (Kana), no multiple personality disorder (Aloth) etc.).

Isn't that exactly what Pallegina is supposed to seem like?

Well, they were created by humans to control everybody's behavior. That seems like a breach of good taste if nothing else, no? ( <--understated for humorous effect). As a thought experiment, what happens in the real world when someone tells a religious person that their one of their religious beliefs, even a relatively minor one, is false/nonsensical etc. and backs up the statement with verifiable facts? Do they say, "That is an excellent point you bring up, I will stop wasting my time with that belief and get on with life" or do they tend to get upset? Again, let's look at real life. A lot of people care more about their religious beliefs than they do about other human beings. Just this year, a couple was convicted of letting their own child die of an easily preventable illness because their religion forbids a certain type of medical care. Agreed, but also very believable. People aren't always rational about these things.

There is a cipher in Oldsong (a map in Twin Elms) that will examine the item.

In addition to what others have said: 1. When you level up, take talents labeled 'Passive' for all of your party members - they will help you all of the time and you will have fewer things to think about. 2. Overuse the space bar. As you are learning how the game works, pause and assess the situation in combat very often and don't rush to unpause. As you get better at it, you won't need to pause as often or for as long, but pause early and often until then. 3. No, really, as a beginner, pause more, then take a deep breath and consider your options - the game will probably become a lot more fun when you aren't reloading from party wipes as often. In the end, you may just not like the game, but if you try the things people have posted here, you will probably find that there is a lot to like about the combat once you get the hang of it.

1. Roll a completely random character. 2. Beat the game. 3. Umm, ..., profit! ?

My problem with the FF videos (and I'm a woman saying this) is that she has openly admitted that she hasn't played all of the games she reviews. I would agree with you completely if she were doing game reviews. The trope videos, as I understand them, are trying to identify recurring patterns over a large number of games. What makes you think she is upset? She is doing cultural criticism - looking at games to find patterns and pointing them out. If anything, it would be better to hire people who had never seen the games to objectively look for examples of the tropes: 1. Provide a standard to identify the various tropes that a disinterested person could follow to identify examples of the tropes 2. Get a bunch of people to count the tropes in various games and cross check that different annotators give the same answers by having several people do the annotations 3. Update the annotator guidelines if the people don't agree and redo the annotations with new people when necessary 4. Crunch the numbers That would give a clearer signal than somebody who plays the games and is emotionally invested in them. It would make a good kickstarter project for someone wanting to uncover the truth about these tropes whatever that truth turns out to be.

Very well said. The FF videos could be part of a useful discussion of the specific examples but several people seem to think they are an attack on games that they like (hint: they aren't; no, they just aren't) and react with hostile, idiotic responses that don't make a credible attempt to argue the points they disagree with. The video responses to the FF videos are beyond ridiculous - one ad hominem (err, ad feminem?) fallacy rant after another ("AS is a lying liar and no one should listen to anything she says!!!!111oneone!!!"). There are several videos from people who haven't watched (or haven't understood) the FF videos, things like "Haha, I can play a female character in legends of whatever 12, checkmate Anita Sarkeesian!!!111oneone(two!!)!!!"

The major issue for me is that steam has sooooo many steam exclusive games so even if you want to go with GoG you cant as long as that remains true steam will be the go to network simply because there is no choice for many games Sure - there is more to this decision than DRM for a lot of people and, as I make a point of saying whenever this comes up, DRM might not be the most important factor to everyone. I would point out that if you always bought non-exclusive games from a different source and told Steam you were doing that, it might help DRM go away faster. If everybody did that tomorrow DRM would vanish the day after tomorrow. (I assume that DRM will go away eventually when enough people get bitten by it; it's just that sooner would be better).

Agreed. Let's assume for the sake of discussion that neither Steam nor Gog will ever tell you that you magically don't have the rights the games you've purchased nor will a publisher or developer. But, if there is nobody paying to keep a license server running, for whatever reason, a DRM game stops working. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that that never happens: That might be a safe bet but it isn't the bet we're making at all. The bet is whether a game (or large library of games) will continue to run for as long as you want them to under terms you can live with. Suppose Steam and Gog both get bought out by... I don't know... Sony. Suppose you don't like the terms of your new Sony overlords who, say, want you to keep an active credit card on file and, also say, for the sake of argument, that you don't trust them to guard your information from hackers (for no particular reason, maybe you're just paranoid or something). If you have non-DRM games you take them (or rather, you already have them) and go elsewhere. If you have DRM games, you're pretty much out of luck. It's not the end of the world, but it may be the end of your game library.

I don't recall whining - perhaps you're thinking of someone else. That was directed at those actually bitching. Sorry for not making that clear. No problem. I agree. That is the real difference. Note that a company buying another company at a bankruptcy sale doesn't necessarily need to honor the agreements of the previous license holder.

Ok, sure, Apple knew they had competition and acted accordingly. Having enough market share allowed them to negotiate successfully. Heh... it's odd that Amazon, with a much smaller market share of digital music buyers at the time, managed to negotiate DRM-free music from the beginning. Apple didn't give a sh*t about DRM until they started losing business. Let's not pretend they didn't have the clout to make it happen from the get-go if they had wanted to. Let's not miss the point arguing about who did what and for what reason. The point of that example wasn't why Apple did what they did. The point was what happened to anybody who bought the DRM music (and what will happen in the future to anybody who thinks that they own a DRM game). Not at all. The situation is that you paid for Pillars of Eternity and you can continue to play it for as long as Steam continues to exist and they, or whoever ends up owning them, decides to allow to you to do so (perhaps for a nominal monthly fee or whatever ends up happening). Of course, should the need arise, you can purchase a non DRM copy at that point so, you don't really lose much (unless you have a lot of games in your Steam library that you want to continue playing). (Or, maybe you'll get lucky and Gog will win, buy Steam and make deals with all of the game companies allowing them to un-DRM everything.) Certainly. I don't recall whining - perhaps you're thinking of someone else.

Off topic: There is a workaround for the Raedric's Hold crash - search for it in the tech. support sub-forum if you're interested. It worked for me.

Ok, sure, Apple knew they had competition and acted accordingly. Having enough market share allowed them to negotiate successfully. This is entirely about DRM. If you choose Steam when Gog is an option you are telling Steam, loud and clear, that the features are more important to you than DRM. That's fine, maybe the features are more important to you and nobody is calling you a bad person for doing that (or, at least, I'm not). If Gog improves their service and keeps out DRM, it will be a no brainer to choose Gog. Likewise, if Steam starts feeling the competition from Gog (or someone else) they will most likely drop the DRM and they will become the obvious choice if they still have an advantage in their feature set. That's a reason to choose Gog when there is an option even though they aren't as far along with their feature set. Obviously, YMMV and you should do whatever works for you. For me, DRM needs to die ASAP and throwing money at something means it never dies.

Im curious as to why you hate steam so much care to elaborate, personally I dont buy from GoG simply because my credit card cant be used on foreign websites, I actually like GoG a lot Speaking for myself, I don't hate Steam, but DRM needs to die. Here's a real life example: Apple, to their credit, stopped allowing DRM in the iTunes store as soon as they had enough customers to make that demand. People who have iTunes music from before that, have some of their collection under DRM and and newer titles not under DRM. There are other online music services and there are other online backup services. If you take your iTunes music collection and put it on one of those other services (e.g., Google Play), only your non-DRM titles will go to the new service. The DRM titles stay at iTunes until the end of time (or until the end of Apple or until you forget what happened to some of your music etc.). The same is true of DRM games. If you decide to use a new service for your game library (or to keep them locally or do whatever you want to do with them) DRM-free games are the only ones you can do that with - it's almost like they're your property. You get do whatever you can legally do with them. DRM restricts you from doing things that you are legally entitled to do. That is all DRM does as far as I can tell.

... "In a software project like this, you have a large team...." I don't think you understand what is the point of this thread. It is about releasing a product that is not done and pretending that it is. Releasing new features, icons, glossary entries in first week shows that they know full well they are selling unfinished product. Going further with that thought they also knew there were bugs. They made a concious decision of selling broken product and they should apologise. I understand completely; I just don't agree. You seem to think that you've just constructed a logical argument. You haven't. Adding features doesn't mean that they knew about the specific bugs that you are seeing. They may have decided that launching the game without all of the glossary entries etc. was better than waiting a week to launch (and, if you were on the forums pre-launch, I think you would have found that many people would have agreed with that decision).You don't know what bugs, if any, they were aware of prior to release. Yes, it's very clear what you think. You think that bugs, which don't show up for everybody, did show up during testing and Obsidian made a decision to release the game without fixing them. You think this even though you have no evidence of it. You are imagining a series of events that happened at Obsidian during development when, in fact, these events have only happened in your imagination. Feel free to be offended at your imaginary events if you want but you will probably live a happier life if you don't make up reasons to be offended. Finally, as a thought experiment: how many games do you think have never been patched because they had no bugs in their initial release? Think of a number that answers that question. Then look up the actual number.

I get the pleasure of knowing I'm mature and rational enough to wait a couple of weeks for some patches. What's mature and rational about defending someone who treats you with disrespect? Obsidian (and many, many other devs) obviously hold a certain amount of disregard towards their own customers by essentially making them unpaid beta testers for their products, rather than actually polishing them before release (or, at minimum, warning people that the product in question is buggy). Yes, there are bugs. No, nobody is treating you disrespectfully. You are looking at the situation and imagining something that isn't happening. Nobody is sitting around at Obsidian counting your money and laughing at you. I know that you think they are, but they aren't. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can stop being offended at something that hasn't happened So, you think that these bugs happened to the in-house testers and they ignored them and released the game anyway because they wished to treat you disrespectfully even though you have evidence that there are people in this thread who have played the game and not been affected by the bugs? Does that still sound rational when you actually say that out loud and include all of the information that you know now?

In a software project like this, you have a large team. When a bug is reported there are people who know the particular subsystems that cause the bug and they are the people who will fix it. The people looking at balance issues or writing glossary entries are different people. If they didn't put those things into the patch, it doesn't mean that the patch would happen faster. If the latter group of people worked on the bugs, the patch also wouldn't happen faster because the people who know the subsystems would have to help them instead of fixing the problems. The developers can't fix a bug that the QA testers never saw. I have seen two bugs in my game, the chanter traps bug and the Raedric's Hold bug. The other bugs that have been game breaking for you didn't happen to me at all. If I was a QA tester for Obsidian, I would not have reported those bugs because I never saw them. Seriously, take a deep breath and think. It wasn't some nefarious plot to make off with your money; it was due to problems that didn't happen during testing. If bugs are going to raise your blood pressure, you really should wait for a few patches before you buy a game. You will live a happier life that way.

Game development is more like real time systems development with a very large state to keep track of. This isn't a solved problem in computer science. That is, it isn't isomorphic to compilers, databases, operating systems or networks (or even real time systems as it is currently). If it were the same as one of those problems, game developers would buy the equivalent of, say, a relational database that solves all of their hard problems, write the game on top of it and there wouldn't be any strange bugs. Some day, somebody will solve the problem and game engines will exist that make development much easier. Until then, difficult bugs will be a fact of life and, if they infuriate you, you will need to wait until a month or two after release to buy a game.

It is. They have already said it will be fixed in the patch. (It turns out that some of the chanters' chants are implemented as traps and aren't getting garbage collected after combat causing very slow saves and loads).