Enoch

Technically, Josh confirmed LGBT companions. No indication yet as to whether those companions can become romantically interested in the Watcher. And this should surprise no one, by the way. New Vegas was praised in several circles for the mostly understated way it handled Arcade and Veronica's sexuality. Even in Pillars 1, Maneha was very clearly interested in Pallegina, and they were gender-flexible in all the language in establishing character backgrounds and past-life flashbacks (e.g., "he was my lover" and "she was my lover" both being options available to everyone). On a related note, see this tweet from a week or two ago. (Kate is a Narrative Designer on Deadfire.)

​​Why would there be? ​ I mean, if you're going to design unique abilities for multi-class pairings, you shouldn't be calling it "multi-classing" at all-- what you've got there is 55 base classes and no multi-classing options.

That post has led to a rather long series of tweets on Obsidian's mostly-internal (IIRC, they shared it with inXile for Torment) conversation tool. First, this long thread of tips that an individual or organization building such a tool should consider. Then come the fun examples-- several "map view" shots of conversations and scripted interactions. Josh says that he really likes how their tool presents information visually, and how you can "quickly gauge what kind of conversation it is by its shape." He then posts: "one at the end of a critical path story element" "an (in progress) companion hub" "a big quest character with a flashback sequence" "a small scripted interaction" "the biggest scripted interaction (247 notes, 3997 words)" And, lastly, the full view of part of one scripted interaction, with some insights on the Watcher's options in maintaining shipboard discipline. (n.b., in reading all of these, "red are NPC or companion nodes. blue are player responses. dark nodes/replies are "ghosted" (duplicates) from another source.")

Here's a tweet that is probably Deadfire-related: SPOOKY! And here's one that is totally not. Josh swearing at Christmas (nsfw).

Josh had a few Tumblr updates today: A lengthy post on the companion relationships system A tiny one on frog helms And, on the Pillars tabletop RPG system Also, there's this: The Boys are Back Edit: And this.

So, the 3.5-year-old hadn't really had serious candy in any quantity prior to this past week. He'd get a lollipop at the barbershop, and sometimes a bite of the fancier chocolate stuff that mom likes to keep in the house, but not any chocolate-based mass-market candy bars of the kind that folks often hand out to trick-or-treaters. Anyhow, I've always heard people allude to the effect that high quantities of sugar have on little kids, but I hadn't truly seen it until the past couple days. I was amazed at just how quickly he went from eating 3/4ths of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup to (uncharacteristically) sprinting from his room to the kitchen and back while yelling about how fast his racecar was.

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/924098058052235264 Wrinkly Jack Nicholson (upper left, between Josh and the statue) is starting to creep me out.

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/924055239379927040 Based on Josh's caption and the fact that the pic in the upper left is the one character that we know goes on your ship (the former Steward of Caed Nua), I suppose that these are the recruitable crewmembers. Nice to know that we'll be able to keel haul the game's Director when we get angry or frustrated with it.

Also these two: Mentioning how twitpoll length restrictions block him from polling best internal-dev-blog post titles, with the follow-up:

Brief Tweet-thread on ship duels.

Sawyer has indicated that Grimoires cannot be used to bypass spell-school limitations.

Lagufaeth are basically Zoidberg, right?

Josh likes to ride bicycles. A sheet like that can go on your handlebars or armband for reference while riding, without having to unlock a cell phone. He presumably took a car/bus/train to somewhere near Morro Bay (seems unlikely that he biked the 200+ miles from Orange County in a weekend), biked, camped, ate tacos, and took the train home. Sounds like a fun trip-- it's a very scenic area. (Also, Messier's links confused the hell out of me until I realized that they were to the Polish-language google maps.)

Does adding one adjective really merit a "fixed"? "Somewhat improved" seems more appropriate. Anyhow, here's a tweet: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/922288189514977280 It has nothing to do with Deadfire, but it's a Sawyer tweet so it's technically on-topic. I just wanted to post it because I have eaten at Taco Temple in Morro Bay, CA, and it was good.

Pirates are thematic and all, but we all know that if Josh were given truly tyrannical authority, he'd name the difficulties after Medieval Saints, ranked in order of the painfulness of their martyrdom.

One more: "the devs play on a variety of difficulties. i play on hard."

For those interested in the twitpoll mentioned above, there were some updates today, which I posted in the appropriate thread.

Updating his Twitter poll from Monday on whether Deadfire should continue to have both an "Easy" and a "Story Time" difficulty, Josh has some new tweets up today (including a new poll): "we're keeping separate story / easy diffs in #deadfire, but will be renaming easy. for those who play "easy", which name do you prefer? {POLL}" (Options are "Training," "Novice," "Recruit," and "None of the Above.") "if you don't care about easy difficulty, that's fine, but i'd like to name this in such a way that the people who use it like the name." "we're also renaming normal and hard but i, the tyrant, already have names for them that will be revealed in due time."

In that vein, Josh did a Twitter poll on Monday regarding whether to keep both "Easy" and "Story Time" difficulty modes in the game. (In this case, the venue makes sense. Folks hanging around the Obsidian forums--or the subreddit, or the hundreds-of-pages-long SA thread-- months prior to the game's release are probably not the kind of players who use either of those game modes.)

Might want to add Josh's reddit handle. He posts in the projecteternity subreddit occasionally.

Well my little pet theory has been shot down. (Edit: Quote attribution bbcode doesn't seem to be working for me. Both of the below quotes were posted by Josh in the linked thread.) Also:

Because it's expected? They already changed them once, so..... Remember Eder being called Edair during the beta? Well, I don't 'remember' as I wasn't there, but others have said that. Read the second line of my post.

So nobody else is going to call them out on the "Names may be subjected to change" footer at 0:32? I mean, I guess the meaning isn't too far off, but, c'mon. The idiom is "subject to change."

In the Russetwood, in WM1, you find an abandoned camp and an interactable soul that shows you Ninagauth killing his apprentice for stealing his Grimoire. You can then find the Grimoire (including the hilariously overpowered Ninagauth's Shadowflame) near Durgan's Battery. The Deadfire update video on Neketaka includes mention of Arkemyr's mansion.