Yonjuro

Well, 21 people are excited about Ydwin as a companion or as a sidekick. That's what the poll is telling us so far. The sidekicks are a good idea. A lot of people have been requesting more companions since the original PoE kickstarter. The sidekicks will be similar to the BG2 companions and give more options to build a party.

It looks like the vocal Dwarf lobby did not show up for the poll.

That's how it worked for Pillars 1. I missed the Kickstarter and backed as a "slacker backer" via paypal. When the backer website came online, I upped my pledge and had all of the same options as the KS campaign.

....when the plot thickens, the game play needs to thicken by an equal amount. ... Yes, more or less, and I strongly think that writing complex plots doesn't automatically bring to more meaningful stories... most of the times the result is the opposite. Sure. If the plot is more complex, the writing needs to be up to the task. You need to understand the choice you are making and you need to be able to decide what your character would do in that situation rather than picking something randomly because the writing isn't giving you a clear choice. I don't think that you need to be able to predict the outcome perfectly. E.g., You can side with Kolsc over Raedric and it is a meaningful choice; what happened after was not predictable (at least, I didn't see it coming). I think that is fine. I haven't played it, so I can't really comment further.

I think that's basically right, but the sidekicks are in addition to the mercenary/adventurer hires. There will be the companions with big dialog trees and a connection to the main story (similar to PS:T companions), sidekicks with smaller dialog trees and a quest that is loosely tied (or not tied at all) to the main story (similar to BG and BG2 companions) and adventurers with no dialog and no quests (similar to IWD party members).

That's right. First you rescue her then you consume her soul (along with some fava beans and a nice chianti).

Minimal voicing option. It would be a game option that you can set that will give you the only first line voiced unless there is a good reason for more. The Maerwald conversation is an example of something that would still be fully voiced when the option is set since the voice acting is used to convey information. The 'hanging dwarf' dialog is an example where you would just get the first line. The reason for the option is that the voice distracts from reading (since it is slower) and it gets annoying. This could be easy to implement assuming that voice acting has priorities set already (that is, if lines already have priorities for budgeting purposes, the priorities can be re-purposed for the minimal voicing option).

Not exactly. A third party asked Obsidian to change it. Obsidian then asked the backer to write something else. The backer did not initiate the change.

That's definitely not a non-commital one by any stretch, and actually does a pretty good job of demonstrating how even simple titles can easily lock things into a particular direction where multiclass characterization is concerned. Yes, that's why I went with: Paladin + Rogue = Commando It seems like zealous plus guile (or committed plus covert) and nothing else. The character could be zealous for any cause.

Strategical and tactical complexity aren't the same thing, that's all. ..... You have a very good description of what you mean by strategic vs. tactical complexity. I don't disagree with you, but there are few things I want to poke at: You can have a strategically complex encounter where you are outgunned and outnumbered and where you need contingency plans for when things go wrong. It is largely what you are calling a tactically complex encounter, but it has an element of "planning can help you win" and that element can be arbitrarily complex. Let's look at some extreme endpoints on a continuum though - there are ways to make fights more purely tactical and less strategic that are really uninteresting (or, at least, I think they are uninteresting). One way to make a fight less strategic, is to make it more random. You go through a door, you are teleported to an unseen location and have random enemies. If you restart that encounter, you are teleported to a different random location with different random enemies etc. There is no way to strategically prepare, other than developing a jack of all trades party. There is also not much to learn from this type of encounter over time since the complexity is achieved through randomness. This fight can be made harder by adding enemies, adding hitpoints to enemies etc., a recipe for tedium. On the other hand, you could have an encounter that behaves differently in different play throughs but that follows a strategy. That is, through scouting, you learn who your enemies are. They will act in an intelligent way. Just like you, they may want to kill the squishier party members first and may focus on whichever party members pose the greatest threat to them, given their party makeup. They may use the environment set up an ambush for you, etc. There is still a tactical challenge here, but there is an element of strategy in this encounter that is absent from the first example. So, my point is that it is possible to have tactically complex fights that are uninteresting because they rely on excessive randomness (which is more purely tactical) vs. encounters that are more interesting because the enemies behave strategically. I am probably not telling you anything you didn't already know here, but I wanted to make that distinction.

I think I see what you mean here. As consequences get more nuanced, if there isn't a way in the game to investigate the nuances, then the game hasn't gotten more interesting to play. Or, to put it another way, when the plot thickens, the game play needs to thicken by an equal amount. To use a silly example, if you played Pacman and got poignant ending slides that varied depending on the order that you ate the ghosts, that wouldn't make the game better because you have no way to make an informed decision in the game. Choices aren't meaningful if you end up making them randomly. Is that point you are making?

You don't need to kill any of the Ogres in the cave. Still, I understand the point you are making.

That would of been my favorite ten extra chapters in the three four book series. Probably not. At best, you would have decided that the main story was really annoying because it kept interrupting the interesting bits. Turn it around, if you like; you are reading the Sillmarillion and every few pages you get "Little did Feanor know that some day this would happen" followed by a digression of a large section of LOTR. I enjoyed reading the Silmarillion, but if the story of LOTR was interrupted every few pages with a tangentially related story, however good it was, the LOTR narrative would have been a mess.

Yes. If Tolkien had had Gandalf recite the entire Silmarillion on the way to Moria, LOTR would have been summarily shelved and forgotten. That's not say to say that Durance did anything quite that egregious, just that there is a natural tendency to overdo exposition. Often it's knowing what to leave out that makes a story interesting.

I know what you mean. I liked BG1 a lot. I think it was effective because it gave you enough hooks to hang your imagination on, if that makes sense. In other words, a lot of the game took place in your imagination and the game gave you enough cues to understand what was going on without fleshing out the details as much as some other games. I have vivid memories of BG1 - it's more like that time I went adventuring on the Sword Coast than that time I watched a computer screen and entered commands. I would be happy to see a game in the Pillars universe that worked more like that if Obsidian would be interested in making one. I don't know if people in the game industry consider whether adding detail/realism to a game is always a good idea or whether it is just tacitly assumed that it is.. I suspect there are cases where it is not.

You answered something like that it's not supposed to be a big dps boost. One should use dual wieldung or two handers for that. A shield is suppoed to give you deflection and not dps. So far, so good, but I think you misunderstood: The thing is that bashing shields reduce the dps compared to normal shields! It seems you don't know about that (which is understandable). Bashing doesn't speed up your attacks - so instead of hitting things with your good and sharp sword every 2 seconds, you will alternate between sword's good damage and the low damage of bashing. You will do less dps than a guy who uses a regular shield! Let me put it this way: If you wield sword & shield and attack 10 times with that sword - it does 10 damage - you will do 100 damage in total, right? Now if you attack 5 times with the same sword and 5 times with a shield bash that does 3 damage, you will only do 65 damage (I made the numbers up to make it plain). In the same amount of time (because unlike dual wielding, using a bashing shield doesn't speed up your attacks) you will do less damage compared to a normal shield guy. The worst thing about this is that bashing also costs you enchantment slots. You basically pay for a dps loss. Based on Josh's response, it sounds like this isn't working as intended. Maybe this should be a bug report.

Now you've done it. My therapy dog was triggered by your remarks and had to retreat to a safe space where he blows bubbles and colors in a coloring book.

I think you hit on something here about summoning in POE because the Figurines were so great for this very reason. Summons that can distract npcs at beginning or during a fight are so powerful because it frees up you actual group to devastate the enemy in the mean time. The summons dont have to be particularly powerful themselves. So there has to be some balancing with using them. That's a good point. A summoner who could summon faster would have that advantage. It is similar to the low level 'summon monsters' spells in BG2; they only summoned cannon fodder relative to most of the enemies, but that's often better than the party members being targeted. One way this could work with a chanter summoner would be to have summons available any time, including very weak summons at the start of combat, but to have them get more powerful the longer you build up chants. Of course, that wouldn't satisfy the people who just don't want the chanter to be the summoner, but maybe another class could work that way too.

It is a no brainer that more companions would be nice to have, but you have a fixed amount of money to spend on writing. If you add one companion, you have a new story, and the dialog to support it, that lasts the length of the game. Also, if you have n companions, you have to write n(n-1) inter-companion interactions (so interactions grow proportional to the square of the number of companions). It's a choice between deep companions or more companions rather than between deep companions and more deep companions. I don't have a good sense of the cost of a companion relative to the cost of the game as a whole; I would be interested to know that if anybody with game development experience would like to say something about it. Deeper companions works if they get it right. I would prefer more as to me and my xp with CRPGs they miss on most of them. So I like the replay value. Plus more NPCs fuels my constant restart mode. I see what you mean but it looks like Obsidian has gone with the other option. They will have fewer characters, each with more connection to the story, this time around. More like PS:T than BG1. It might be nice if the adventurers that you can hire from the inns had some personalities to choose from rather than being silent but I have no idea how feasible that would be.

It is a no brainer that more companions would be nice to have, but you have a fixed amount of money to spend on writing. If you add one companion, you have a new story, and the dialog to support it, that lasts the length of the game. Also, if you have n companions, you have to write n(n-1) inter-companion interactions (so interactions grow proportional to the square of the number of companions). It's a choice between deep companions or more companions rather than between deep companions and more deep companions. I don't have a good sense of the cost of a companion relative to the cost of the game as a whole; I would be interested to know that if anybody with game development experience would like to say something about it.

I'm having real trouble parsing what you're trying to say here. I believe the point was that if the reduction from 6 to 5 was based on the assumption that players would use multi-classes (that is, they will have two classes worth of stuff to choose from), then players who don't multi-class will not have a good experience. I'm not agreeing with that point, just trying to clarify it. Well said. I agree. All things being equal, I would prefer 6, but the development team thinks they can make a better game with 5. They think that because they looked at how people were playing PoE, how they want to design encounters for PoE2, what the new class system will look like and.... They didn't roll a six sided die and have it come up 5.

No no no. If you have enough thief traps available, you can 'zero shot' him. It's one whole shot easier.

As I understand it, the design goal of summons was to make them sufficiently weak that don't become the default for everyone. For example, in BG2, you could summon 5 magic resistant skeleton warriors for a very long time. They were also immune to mindflayer psionics making them a no brainer choice for the mindflayer areas where you could just buff them and wait for the level to be cleared. While there were a lot of ways to deal with mindflayers, doing just about anything else in those areas was harder than having the skeletons do it for you. Mages and clerics could both summon skeletons so you could have a lot of them per rest. In PoE, summons are weaker (on purpose), they don't last as long (also on purpose), and the chanter is the main summoner partially because it provides a time interval before the first summon and between summons. So, here is a bad design for a summoner: give a wizard the chanter summoning invocations as spells (or similarly powered summoning spells) and nothing else. Even though you get your first summon faster and can replenish them when they die (until you run out of spells), that would be a very weak character in PoE, right? What would be a good design for a summoner for PoE2:Deadfire that takes the design goals into consideration? That is, it needs to be fun to play and not so over the top powerful that you are shooting yourself in the foot if you aren't using them.

Yes. After the funding period ends on Feb. 24th, Obsidian will put up a backer website and everyone who backed the game will be able to log into the website and enter preferences for Steam or GoG, specify shipping info for any physical goods etc. When the game is released you will get a Steam key (and I will get GoG key because DRM is bad -- but, to each his own). There is a menu item in the Steam app that allows you to redeem the key and have the game added to your library. That's a great answer, Yonjuro. Thanks. I tried to think of the information that would have been useful to know the first time I backed a game.

Yes. After the funding period ends on Feb. 24th, Obsidian will put up a backer website and everyone who backed the game will be able to log into the website and enter preferences for Steam or GoG, specify shipping info for any physical goods etc. When the game is released you will get a Steam key (and I will get GoG key because DRM is bad -- but, to each his own). There is a menu item in the Steam app that allows you to redeem the key and have the game added to your library.