injurai

Maybe they should add a "dark souls" style endurance. Change current endurance to just health. And have an real endurance pool by which to spend on avoiding traps, etc. That way you can only percept them passively. No more FULL ON STEALTH ALL THE TIME, and once you trigger a trap. It's up to you how you spend endurance to avoid it. Edit. Also, we need more timing puzzles/guantlets. I know hanging axes are cliche, but I'm sure Obs can thunk up something equally appealing. Maybe an underwater cave with a current full of jelly fish, or a kraken below a bridge that will slap at you (you'll fight it later).

^ @ Jfutral Well, for me it's not about constraints, it's about building up compositional systems that reduce constraints. As of now (read: PoE1) your party's positioning is a pain point. It's all too easy to get locked into a position where it's better to just tough through the fight rather than risk disengage penalties, all because an engagement got setup wrong in the first few seconds. This problem makes moment to moment standard mob encounters potentially uninviting and loathsome. The alternative is to have positioning be entirely free. I wouldn't mind that to much, but it also poses some problems as your encounters will be highly unstructured and now you can't block off enemy units. The next solution is to have complete freedom only between friendly units, but then choke points cease to exist. A solution would be to have some mechanic to deliberately coordinate in a way that gets the players the positioning they need without doing so being nothing but penalties. Perhaps your companions can slip past one another, they just can't stop when there is no space left. But this also poses a problem because kiting becomes trivial, as seen in games like SC2. Which is why I suggest a deliberate mechanic to slip past. It shouldn't be enough just to keep party members on the move.

Same, but I do like the rest and food mechanic. I found food buffs a bit of a chore in PoE and I rarely used it. Longer passive buffs might work really well (does that mean survival won't give you passive rest bonuses now?) I believe so. Weren't they trying to rework the skills, survival might actually be gone. Or reworked for dice-roll sequences.

That was my thought too.

I thought they got rid of health. But maybe that was an earlier incarnation of this system? We don't see health in the E3 video, so which is it...?

In 1 you can change your color pallet from the menu, with no need for dyes.

I honestly can't believe how janky the whole Steam system has become. Not that it at some point wasn't. But reviews should be based on games, and should not be susceptible to publisher policy changes. I've never put huge stock into steam reviews, but I know that some people do...

That's not necessarily true. It's just that their content creation tools may require the full open source of the game, the source of Unity and the Unity dev kit. Also they may not want to distribute their internal tools if it's what gives them their edge in rp content creation.

tiny hands

Pillars of Eternity II: Incredible Curls

I think to avoid dealing with "end conditions" that the expansion could just take place off the main map. Sort of like Toussaint in Blood and Wine. A sort of stand-alone "filler episode" that could take place during or after the critical path.

Seems doable. I guess you really shouldn't be letting yourself rack up injuries in the first place.

I vaguely remember Josh talking about that food mechanic earlier, so hopefully we aren't having him repeat himself. I think I'm warming to this new rest/injury mechanic. There is a soft limit on resting now. Instead of camp supplies it seems food based. Was it mentioned how many injuries can be sustained until death? Last I heard it was just 2. Which seems a bit low. I'd like a little more granularity.

Wow... I hope the console port doesn't get Pillars a bad rap.

How so? Is it like you only get benefits if you have camp supplies, otherwise you incur a penalty or something?

A little variety can be a good thing. This setting is more like the Age of Exploration than the Middle Ages. For example, on Earth the wheellock was a 16th century invention, which is post-medieval. Another way I think PoE really hit a sweet spot. An age were it's still common to see old alongside new. Pillars finds it's heritage in BG1 and IWD1, then rethinks what a magical world might look like moving into a higher age. It opens up a lot more thematically to play with. But while the Age of Sail is well explored by the team, that is more for world building as opposed to anything directly related to the critical path.

Tunic, from this E3

Probably some clean way to cycle through your party, companions spells, and then enemies. Then probably some way to position your party more cleanly. I could imagine engagements/interrupts being rather cumbersome to handle though.

That's really going to hurt PoE 1's sales on consoles. Not much point in playing the first half of a series when the next part is exclusive to a different platform. Even if Paradox doesn't end up publishing the PC/Mac/Linux releases of Deadfire, they might publish console ports. I don't think Obsidian would be opposed to that.

This is a terrible idea.

Much of what draws me to Deadfire is present in Pillars. Is it worth waxing poetics or giving an ode to this particular style of crpg to a forum dedicated to it? I'll try to cut to brass tax because I could write a short book on the matter. I guess Deadfire simply represents a further evolution of something good. Pillars turned out to be a fantastic "carrying of the torch" for a style of game that subsided too early and for too long. Pillars itself represents a sort of "sweet spot" and I mean so across multiple dimensions. It resurrected the infinity-style rpg at the right time. It renovated the underlying systems so as to tailored to the medium; No longer beholden to pnp-based design. Thus Pillars overcame the grognard miasma which ultimately prevented this style of game from rising beyond it's DnD roots. It brought back pre-rendered backgrounds giving us near AAA production values on a barely AA budget, and Deadfire is really pushing these production values to the max. A new IP ripe with all sorts of freedoms that most games never get to see. All of this and much more were done to great effect. Just as Pillars took an honest and constructive look at what came before, Deadfire does the same to Pillars. It's a game by people who love this sort of game, want to work on this sort of game, want to make the ultimate game of this sort and share it with the world. Not a moment goes by in Pillars where I'm not either entirely immersed in the world or find myself sitting back and appreciating the craft that went into it. The beautiful environments, writing, score, or mechanics. It's a game that just grows and grows on you. In many ways this series is the culmination and a repository of the many sage lessons that a generation of fantastic game developers has learned over their careers. At the same time it's a crowd-funded project, so it piggy backs on a communal pool of wisdom and knowledge from passionate fans. Ultimately what seals the deal for me is the world building and the narrative themes. They all shine through because the technical and artistic work is fantastic. As a result there is a payoff from just taking in the world the alone. Not just quest rewards, but that feeling when you as the player feel changes in yourself. Growing knowledgeable about this world that you are virtually inhabiting. This world feels alive. I think I have to agree with you on the grounds of exploration. Many years ago I was in club that explored topics of computer science, and we had a game design sequence. We played around with the Neverwinter Night 2 engine. We talked about the different types of gamers, and what they value. I'm forgetting the categories but I put myself into the explorer category. I just love discovering all aspects of a world. Whether it's macro level lore and culture or seeing how events unfolded (even in-game historic ones), or discovering physical locations. Deadfire seems to be turning exploration up to 11, by literally making it about exploring of course! Deadfire seems to be moving towards a convergence of gameplay systems that I can't really say any other game has quite pulled off before. At the same time, Obsidian is a business and this is a consumer product. Part of what made Pillars so successful is how Obsidian handles themselves. Here we have their first sequel and their first owned IP. It really is something for them to be proud of. One thing that has struck me is just how much goodwill Obsidian produces. Goodwill doesn't just come out of thin air, it's something that has to be strived for, maintained, created, celebrated. It's a way of choosing to operate. Whether it be Feargus, Josh, Adam, or the long list of other great members of the team, there is a passion and excitement that underlies the reality of their hard work. We all have to go through life, and surely game development can be at times thankless, but you can tell that their goodwill bleeds through. Maybe it's because part of developing good rpgs is having respect for the player. Respecting their intelligence, but also their human limitations. Where ever it comes from, this team has it it droves! Lastly. Despite PoE1 being beautiful. The 3d models are rough. The beautiful scenes are static. Combat can be cluttered. For those that aren't drawn in from the eye-appeal alone, they may be missing out. Deadfire looks much easier to sell to people, so I can't wait to use it as a carrot on a stick to help get people into the first game who haven't considered taking the dive into it. Many a times has a sexy sequel made me get into a series I had previously passed on, only for me to fall in love.

Barbarian + Chanter = Songzerker

CC?

Maybe, I should just be eating more food going into battles. But the way I play is more to recover after battles then over preparing when going in. I like just scrapping by and over-preparing can either waste resources or makes encounters too trivial. So I would be welcome to a change to food's role in Deadfire.

Whenever I see terrible writing I always wonder why I'm not making money trying my own hand.