Yonjuro

dunno. is the reality actual better? robin is a fully developed character, I think the reality is better if two things happen. First, the main story and the companion/sidekick independent quests need to be compelling. If they are, the companion quests need to be really good or they will be more of a distraction and the sidekicks could even be preferable. If the main/side quests aren't compelling, well, game over - literally and figuratively. Second, since the sidekicks don't have a lot of writing behind them, the writing needs to be good. Looking back at BG2, a lot of people liked Minsc, Mazzy, Keldorn, Edwin etc. I did, and it took me several tries to find anything I liked in Icewind Dale. There is a big difference between zero character development and a small but well done bit of character development. Minsc is a minor cultural icon and he consists of a set of combat barks maybe 2-3 dozen (?) banters and minimal, but well done, voice acting by Jim Cummings.

That's not true. Jaheira has this awesome quest in which she is cursed/poisoned and will actually die unless you resolve it in time. She also runs into more harpers and... There is more going on with her in this game than just a possible romance. I agree. It is not true. Someone else said this, not me.

Kinda funny to use Mazzy as an example of a sidekick, considering she is involved in 3 quests in BG2, the most of all the companions. While Jaheira/Viconia just have romance related stuff outside their initial recruiting... I think it reflects the amount of developer time that went into both characters. Jaheira's story was more complicated and expensive (in terms of developer time) to write. Jaheira's content lasted for the whole game whether your character romanced her or not.

Yes, she had special abilities consistent with her paladin wannabe status; haste, a strength buff (setting her strength to 18/00) and a party buff to remove/prevent fear. A very useful and memorable character built on a budget.

The example that Josh Sawyer used to explain sidekicks was Mazzy from BG2. Unlike, say, Jaheira, who had a complex story that spanned most of the game, Mazzy was involved in the Umar Hills story where you meet her and help her avenge her companions. She had one additional quest to help her sister that triggered later. She also had banters with the PC and several other party members that could trigger throughout the game and a few other interactions with NPCs in the world. I thought Mazzy (and Keldorn as another example, or Edwin, if you like to keep things evil) was a good (or, err, evil in Edwin's case) character even though her story was less complex than Jaheira or Viconia. A simple, well written story coupled with good voice acting (Jennifer Hale voiced Mazzy) can go a long way. We don't know exactly what to expect in Deadfire, but if we got a character like Mazzy, I would be ok with that.

Looks great. For whatever it's worth, "blooper reel Katrina" makes better videos than "carefully edited Katrina."

For the benefit of the younger people on this board: Avellone is giving you a tutorial on exactly what not to do if you leave a job and ever want to get another one.

Up voted for "more holy than the Popes socks. "

THIS. That is correct.. There is no such thing as an "evil" company in the gaming industry. That's just a paranoid mindset that the community has made up because people are angry when things do not go their way. I have seen the term "Evil corporation" often on Steam forums. I know people can and have given me many reasons why they "think" evil companies exist within the gaming industry but none of them have been really valid outside of bias, personal feelings or grudges getting involved. On the outside of that it's business, whether it's ridiculous dlc or whatever, it's as is, a choice for people to make. Vote with thy wallet and stuff. Yes. They don't have meetings at EA where they try to figure out new ways to ruin everything for everybody. On the other hand, what's best for EA has turned out to not be the best for customers of the now rotting corpse of Bioware. So, yes, vote with your wallet. Don't buy the latest AAA shiny crap unless you want more shiny crap.

With the costs of triple-A gaming they want to maximise profits and so sell it to as many people as possible, and another product is a rival to that even if it is your own product. That's yet another reason why a game will never get greenlit by a company even if it would do really well, because it may impact on another of their product (add to this, if you are the head of X game development cycle and you hear that a colleague in your company is proposing Y game that could threaten yours, what would you do?). That's a good point and it's especially true when an acquired company is run as a separate division. The other divisions still view them as competition. On the other hand, if the acquired company is better integrated into the company that purchased them, this happens: Doing a successful acquisition is like sewing together an elephant and a giraffe to get a tall animal that can pick things up with its nose. Even if you really want it to work, it probably won't go well (unless you have a really good surgeon on staff).

It isn't obvious, but here is the rough idea: If you are running a large company and a small competitor is making similar stuff better than you are, you have four choices. 1. Buy them and sell their stuff instead of yours. (e.g. Google buying YouTube and shutting down Google Video) 2. Buy them and let their stuff rot, just to get rid of the competition. (e.g., (not exactly an acquisition, but) Microsoft hired the senior developers of the Mach micro kernel, stuck them in the playpen known as Microsoft Research and did nothing with Mach) 3. Lose in the marketplace. (e.g Yahoo vs. Google). 4. Make better stuff and out compete them (eg. .... hmm drawing a blank here, I'm sure this must happen sometimes) 4a. Use an effective monopoly position to kill them in spite of their stuff being better (e.g. The U.S. v. Microsoft anti-trust court case) Whether a company chooses option 1 or 2 probably depends partly on the attitudes of the decision makers (are they trying to get paid to make the best stuff or are they trying to make money) and partly on how entrenched the products are vs. how much the acquisition costs. That is, if a small company is cheap to buy and shutting down a project and marketing a different product is very expensive, it is rational for the larger company to kill the smaller one (even though it hurts consumers of the products). Overall, isn't necessarily an evil company doing nefarious things, they might buy a company, spend time looking at all of the options they now have, and make the best decision they can. The issue is that what is best for a single company isn't what's best for everybody. This why there are antitrust laws in many countries. and why it might be better if there were stronger ones (but carefully, because it is difficult to get things exactly right and not overdo it). Finally, note that there are a lot of other reasons for acquisitions and there are a lot of reasons why a company might complete an acquisition and shutter the acquired company later. The above is just to give you the gist of one situation.

Not really. Either stage directions or different font would do the trick. I think your point may be "we don't need no steeenking voice acting" (even for characters with multiple personalities), and I am sympathetic to that view, but I will try to be really precise to make sure I am getting my point across. In the Maerwald dialog, the VO solves a problem - communicating that Maerwald is channeling multiple personalities (as you point out, there may be other solutions for that problem). In some other dialogs, such as the hanging animancer, where the dialog also goes on for a long time, the voice isn't solving a specific problem. That's the distinction I am trying to make. As someone who prefers minimal voice acting (mainly because listening is slower than reading but also for the other reasons mentioned in earlier posts). Still, VO can make a game better if it is done well and I think the the former is a better use of the VO budget than the latter. To elaborate on that, VO comes with two costs: money for the devs and time for the players (fortunately, these costs are correlated) . Using the VO budget wisely means thinking about what problem each voiced line is intended to solve (including character development, emotional impact of specific lines, cases like Maerwald where the VO is communicating something other than the words of the text) and doing the VO when the benefits justify the costs. To bring this tangent back to the topic at hand, the stretch goal of doubling the VO budget wasn't hugely exciting to me. By being ruthless with the VO budget, the devs are also being ruthless with things that take more of my time as a player.

Do you mean pausing the text to match the voice? I would rather have the option to skip the voice rather than slow down the text (or both options, but things can get complicated if there are too many UI options). Sure - it could probably have been streamlined a bit more. My point about the Maerwald dialog is that the VO illustrates the multiple personalities which would be difficult to do without the VO.

I agree with this comment almost 100%. The 'almost' is because the voice over for Maerwald's lines (where he is channeling more than one personality) in PoE1 added something to the encounter and it would have been difficult to achieve without VO. That seems like a good use of VO to me. For me, VO can be especially annoying when there is a longer dialog that is critical to the story (that is, something where your character's reactions affect the story so that, on play throughs after the first one, it isn't possible to just skip over everything). The voicing will be out of sync with the lines as you read them until you finish reading and skip the rest of the VO or, it takes a lot longer than it needs to to get through the dialog. Either option is distracting. A command that allowed me to mute the voice for the remainder of a single dialog would fix this issue for me and would allow VO fans to have the VO that they like. For others who feel the same way about VO, would that work for you? How about it Obsidian devs?

or kill something.

Also, a Google search for "1 pound in kilograms", or most other unit conversions, will activate the Google calculator and do the conversion.

You make some good points. There was a lot to like in Pillars but it didn't quite click in a lot of subtle ways. As several others have mentioned, the WM content was good and it improved the pacing of the base game since it gave you options to do a quest in one place or the other. I'm optimistic about Pillars 2 since I think the WM indicates that Obsidian is able to identify the issues and improve.

You are overlooking the "they didn't test it" part. Obsidian will have to test it, in all maps, entering cutscenes, in combat, etc etc. Yes, and interactions with all of the other animations. It's multiplicative. Adding the feature is easy - verifying that it works and fixing all of the bugs is hard (or, rather, time consuming). Anybody with a computer science background who would like to get rich and retire early: fix the "butterfly-flaps-its-wings-on-the-other-side-of-the-world-and-causes-a-hurricane" problem for games with a clever formalism (and/or with static analysis).

I think any game can be improved by adding VA by Jennifer Hale. (That might not be the best idea from a budget perspective though. I have no idea about compensation rates for voice acting. If nothing else, maybe she would like to be involved for some "street cred.")

If you fail to recognize that incompetence can be corrected while stupidity not so easily (sometimes impossible), then may Joe Pesci have mercy on your soul. Also stay away from managing people. You also think incompetence is on par with stupidity, that's why you quickly jumped to defend dev feelings whining about how rude my comment was, good grief! It is not. In the U.S., the difference between incompetence and stupidity is that a stupid person doesn't get hired; an incompetent person has one quarter to fix that condition before getting fired. Calling someone incompetent is the same as calling for someone to be fired. If you are from someplace where the situation is different, you might not have realized that but , by now, if you have been paying attention, you do. No. I have portrayed you as rude, which you have confirmed with your rude reply to me. I have not portrayed the devs as narcissists. You still haven't understood the point. The game was successful. It was critically acclaimed and profitable. Undoubtedly, the employees at Obsidian who worked on the game went for their annual performance reviews and got high marks. Then you come along and and make the ridiculous statement that they are incompetent (in case you've forgotten from two paragraphs ago, in the U.S., that means you recommend firing them). Of course nobody at Obsidian is going to take your attempted insults seriously and it undermines the point you are trying to make. You aren't debating. You are missing the point, getting angry and hurling insults.

You are mistaken incompetence with stupidity. Definition of incompetent 1: not legally qualified 2: inadequate to or unsuitable for a particular purpose 3 : lacking the qualities needed for effective action No, I am not mistaking incompetence for stupidity. We'll use the definition you just provided. Any of the three things you listed, if true, would get somebody fired and, depending on the circumstances, might get the hiring manager fired as well. Yes, that is correct. They will not take you seriously. Yes. Tough luck for you if you want your point to be taken seriously. That wasn't my point. My point was that PoE, despite it's relatively low budget, was a financially successful and critically acclaimed game. You aren't hurting anybody's ego when you throw around the word "incompetent" to describe a successful, and clearly competent, team of people but, rather, are undermining the point you are trying to make.

I like this idea. Note that, unlike D:OS, there may be traps that are impossible to walk around and that adds a complication. What is the right answer? Blunder into the trap when it it is impossible to avoid? Have additional UI that tells the player that there is no route around the trap? Something else?

I chose to see it as incompetence (which can be easily fixed) I don't know if English is your native language but "incompetence" is not something that can be easily fixed (apart from firing the incompetent employees and replacing them). That is why your comment was rude. You may have a point, but there are better ways of expressing it if you want the developers to take you seriously.

That isn't a question. It's a rude comment directed at the developers.

The dwarf sidekick will probably have at least as much character development and quest content and as many lines as Korgan.