injurai

Love Steven Pinker. I think you often see horrific "modes" of public engagement by people who are fundamentally well intentioned. But it's really hard to analyze what just is being done wrong, and how to correct it. Typically you just have to wait for people to burn enough bridges that they eventually learn the hard way and grow up. But it does help that people have these countervailing outlooks to help launch them on their way to a better mode of being. Imo, you'll never sort through opposing arguments if you don't know how to properly engage. Watching the Berkley anti-fa just a few days ago is quite eye opening. Typically I'd see protest in history books and think they were largely made of the most well intentioned and noble people. But I'm starting to realize it's always the most spiteful and least productive people, that don't actually want to have the responsibility of ushering a better future. They revel in having a social currency that allows them to make demands.

This would be really cool. Ive been planning on writing some statistical analysis libraries in Rust. So having the raw output of something like PoE would give me a nice domain to build up a statistical knowledge base from.

This is one of those nerdy things that is really cool from a RP perspective, but would probably not be worth implementing "game-wide." Instead though, I could imagine a few quests, maybe a single really long quest-line that involves a dead or near-dead language. Like an in-game Latin that is used be some secret society, occult, or vanished guild. Where you are sent on a treasure quest or trading quest or uncover something. But the quest-line plays out a puzzle that revolves around a translating, decrypting, and "de-riddling" a series of illuminated texts. Something that certainly can dazzle the player by leveraging the hyper-text functionality in a unique and engaging way.

With their improved pathfinding, I'd think something like this would be quite possible. One thing I'd like to see, is more environmental play in encounters. In fact, that would be at the top of my list for PoE3 improvements. Expand on how the environment plays into combat.

The island was for free. We didn't pay anything for that. Obsidian gave it to us as a gift. About the inn. If we do want an inn on our island then we need to contact a backer of that tier. I actually have someone in mind who should be interested, I hope. But mind you, because the island is so small it can only support one structure at most. And a ship does count as a structure in this context. That means, if we want an inn on the Black Isle, then we cannot place our ship there. So then it would be more likely that you meet the Black Isle Bastards on sea. It would be nice if we could get a write up of the variable options that we could pursue. Perhaps with some "guiding" constrains from Obsidian so we aren't shooting in the dark. Inns are cool, but they use a lot of art resources and ultimately tend not to offer much content. If we could have something more custom and thematic I'd say that is the way to go. But I also don't know what I'm talking about because I have no idea what any of my postulating actually pertains to.

Imo, I really like the direction that Obsidian has gone in. Could they clean or tweak things? Yeah, but I like what they gave us in PoE more than anything we tend to see in traditional attribute systems. Even most modern games don't really manage to get attributes right, despite trying to make them user friendly. Bioware and Bethesda are the low hanging fruit to pick on. But even FromSoftware is plagued with dump-stats, though one might argue that is an intended feature for them.

I have no idea how this would work. I can't really imagine myself wanting to spend a significant amount of time playing. I'd rather a PoE based card game me thinks. RTwP works great for PvE. But multiplayer should either be full real-time or turn-based.

Choked on pollen for 14 hours and counting.

What if it's a "Cloak" but it's really a Shoulder Parrot. Which provides some sort of BIB themed attributes and maybe some unique gimmick.

That's were some of the biggest fish are found.

I keep seeing this thread expecting the title to be changed to "I JUST finished Pillars of Eternity" ... One of these days he'll make it.

Finally got my Deadfire badges linked! Also was the Kickstarter badge and "add-on"? Because I definitely backed through KS but I don't have the badge. If it was an Add-on I know I only got the expansions. But otherwise I want my badge!

The problem with really powerful weapons right at the last minute. Is that if you have just the right build, using the ultimate weapon can make the final encounter all of a sudden very very lackluster. Did I mention very? Stuff like the Super Gravity Gun work because you get to just have fun for an entire level built around it. But for games more encounter focused, it can ruin the encounters. All of a sudden you find yourself robbed of the compelling aspect of the game.

Personally leaning towards Hat/Cloak/Armor. I like the idea of donning the BIB getup. But the cloak would have to be more than just a cape with logo. So I'm kind of leaning hat. If armor, maybe...

Avacado's are godly

I think the answer would be that Obsidian needed a way to justify a degree of amicable diversity within the game while preventing factional divisions from reflecting the ethno-national lines that we see in our own world. Since it's the age of sail, they took a power that had chartered expeditions and used it's cultural heritage to manufacture one that would serve as the cultural base for a dark skinned peoples. Obsidian doesn't want to explore that natural results of a more powerful people usurping a lessor power people, when the two peoples happen to vary significantly along phenotypes. Any accidental imperialistic undertones could result in the player "playing out" a role that could be construed as a being politically supremest.

Play the game from the "Non-forced Isometric Perspective Perspective"

It's just unfortunate that pets were so lackluster in the past game. The fact that Rangers can depend on their whole party to put distance between them and the enemies, means pets feel kind of superfluous. They tend to not offer all that much utility, and what they do is pretty limited. I'd like to see far more options for building up pets. Some classes get so many spells, like druids. Rangers just felt sort of lame, and the pets even more so. Even Druids felt lackluster in animal form. But at least that didn't seem to detract from their base. Pets seem to detract from the base Ranger, but pets don't really add all that much imo. So the whole class was one of my least favorites. I actually had to re-roll because I hated Ranger's so much. They were the first class I picked.

You still kind of be. Just because you hit hard does not mean you can be proficient with weapons, nor stand in the front line. So you still get relegated to flinging spells. Just might is the controlling factor of hit power.

Personally I found Pillars much bigger than Baldur's Gate II, with expansions especially. That is not a dig at the latter, mind, I still think it's a better game overall, but I'm not too worried with the size, and as much as I like my RPGs to be sprawly and ambitious there does come a point when they may burn one out, regardless of how good they are. Yeah but the end areas in pillars 1 where absolutely lacking in quality. I'm talking about the elmshore, twin elms areas and city. There was hardly any content at all in those areas and it was over and done with too quickly. That was the biggest fault in the game IMO And they won't be making a second gimped city in Deadfire, so that's solved.

Oh my. Is it too late to add a new stretch goal?

It's interesting that you mention map height. It's not something I consciously realized until now, but my favorite maps were all ones where you navigate primarily in the vertical component. Something about it felt more like I was adventuring through something. Perhaps the limited amount of screen space in the vertical direction has something to do with it.

We are getting sheaths, so that's a win.

I liked the wizards. If they could make them feel more esoteric, I'd love that. But the truth is I don't know what I want and I'd rather be surprised anyways.

hmmm