harrumph

I'm about 30 hours into the game, and the way the skills have shaken out has really surprised me. My character's a rogue, and I decided to roll with the stealth/mechanics focus—classic! Turns out, as far as I can tell, that stealth is completely pointless. All of my party members, even those with no stealth skill at all, can sneak well enough to position themselves properly for a strong opening salvo when combat starts. All of them can sneak well enough to avoid unwanted combat during overland travel. None of them can sneak well enough to avoid combat in tight spaces indoors. My general impression is that you want exactly one character with high mechanics, at least one with high lore, at least one with high athletics, and then you can put everybody's leftover points in athletics and survival. Athletics (surprisingly for somebody who's played a lot of CRPGs) seems to be the king of skills; it clearly gets checked very often in events, and investing a few points for all characters keeps everybody on their feet longer. I'm playing without metagame information in conversations/events, though, so I might be missing out on lots of opportunities to put other skills to work. There also might be some skill stuff I just don't know about—is the chance of finding hidden loot (purple-highlighted containers) connected to stealth? I figured it was a perception thing, but my stealthy PC, with middling perception, seems to find them all. What have other people found?

Probably not. Game companies are too cheap to hire real translators (in fairness, good translators are quite expensive), so they do "computer-assisted translation," which is actually more like human-assisted machine translation. Basically a slightly more sophisticated version of Google Translate with somebody who (ostensibly) speaks both languages correcting anything egregiously bad the program spits out. I was offered a job at a games publisher here in Berlin translating from German to English using such software—all I had to do was translate a few sample paragraphs; we didn't even speak German in the interview (I didn't take the job). My German is pretty good, but I'm not fluent and certainly not capable of translating colloquial speech correctly.