Regggler

Getting you into serious trouble for the background would so damn awesome that I'd have to think long and hard about switching from a living lands scientist to a deadfire slave.

Intuitively, I'd expect they would limit multiclassing so it does not interfere with writing. "Rarrgh, barbarian Aloth smash!" But hey, choice is good. I'm all for free multiclassing.

'end him rightly'.. and so on Ha, nice. But now I can't get the image of Edér throwing pommels out of my head...

... that is pretty radical I personally enjoy text-heavy RPGs. My personal fear is that a focus on "Show, don't tell" basically leads to Mass Effect. I know, I know, the whole thing is not that black and white, and I'm all for using the medium to its capacity. I do feel that Pillars 1 did well in this regard, however, and struck exactly the right balance for me. Your mileage may vary, of course. Back to the crazy ideas: Make every soul reading a mini-dungeon where you wander through the person's soul. Depending on the person, scenery could range from happy sunlit forests with fluffy bunnies to non-euclidean torture chambers à la "The Cell". Sometimes at the same time.

I think it makes sense for there to be the same gods in different places, just with slightly different interpretations. In D&D cosmology, belief forms the gods / the powers. If you get enough people to believe in Banjo the Clown, God of Puppets, he will spring into existence. Hence, a massive number of gods results, since every culture and their mom "create" their own pantheon on the fly, and every pantheon is subject to continuous change. In Pillars, this doesn't work. In a sense, the gods are much more tangible, because they were created "as is". While they can change, they do so in a way much more like regular people when compared to D&D. As @Pinsalinj said, there won't be any new gods without a major rediscovery of Engwithan technology and magic either. Hence, if Abydon pops over to the Deadfire, he'll still be the crafter.

I like it. Anything that gets me utility spells

I understand the desire for the "standard party" archetype and the restrictions it suffers due to a reduced party size. Usually I do want a fighter, mage, rogue, cleric party. In Pillars 1, however, I mostly chose the companions I found most fun / interesting at that moment. Admittedly, I always included at least one tank, but I often omitted the priest or wizard, and I hardly ever used a rogue. This did change my approach to encounters a bit, but it was quite fun to try different things, and it worked reasonably well. Admittedly, I only played on hard. I guess it would be different on PotD. So all in all, I trust the reduced party size will be fine. Personally, I'd like a party size equal to the number of available companions, but I'm aware that this probably can't be done in an IE-like game in a manner that's fun to play and still gives each character their deserved spotlight.

I'd totally be fine with having to mouse over the dialogue interface to scroll text, and mouse into the scenery to scroll that.

Do you feel it is necessary for all wands, rods, and scepters to do stuff like that by default? Pillars 1 did for example have the disorienting and marking affixes. Or things like Gyrd Háewanes Sténes, for that matter.

Oh Eothas, yes please. However, since you can zoom and pan in pause mode already, I doubt the two are related.

Bonus points for the beholder joke I'm not sure we use the word "measurable" in the same way. For me, it means that you can assign something a value, deterministically, without possibility of interpretation, and without ambiguity. By this definition, none of your examples are measurable. How would you rigorously measure how educated someone sounds? Or how "translated" something sounds? If it were possible to measure that, then near-perfect automatic translation would actually be feasible. Don't get me wrong, though, I wholeheartedly agree that shortcomings in those categories are very, very noticeable. They are very good examples of what a translation should strive to avoid in my opinion. I get the rhythm thing, and it especially screws with my immersion if NPCs suddenly "switch personalities" due to translation issues.

Eh, I don't know, 2-3 buffs with only one character, or one buff per character can be plenty tedium for me if I do it often enough. To quote the great philosopher Bender, "With my mighty robot powers, I can get sick of things much quicker."

The problem is that there is no hard measure of how certain expressions are received. While there are translations that are just non-negotiably wrong, what association or feeling a word may invoke cannot be measured. In this case, it very much depends on the receiver. That is what I mean by "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

@Heijoushin: Thanks for starting this thread, you raise an issue close to my heart! I'm a fan of utility spells out of combat, because I love being able to use my casters for more than just magical guns. Invisibility, Sleep, Control Weather, ... I think the farther removed from the formula "do X damage to Y targets" a spell is, the more interesting it gets. Now, I'm well aware that this kind of utility magic is the domain of pen and paper RPGs. However, parts of that do work in CRPGs (see BG, D:OS), and I love to see this in games. Prebuffing: I don't have a problem with the concept itself (@Yougottawanna makes a good point concerning immersion), but doing the same "click these 10 buttons before a fight" gets tedious quickly. Give me the ability to define spell macros, and I'll love prebuffing. Especially daily buffs can feel nicely powerful for higher level casters. Without macros though, I prefer the PoE 1 approach.

Yeah, class balance is a good thing. Specifically implementing wizard duels seem counterproductive to balance. However, class specific stuff is a ton of fun, and it's fair if everyone gets nice things. Lets say caster duels for wizards, clerics, druids, ciphers. Holier-than-thou competitions for paladins. And of course, rap battles for chanters. That said, I'm guessing that class specific things are a bit of a burden burden to implement and balance, with relatively little impact since some people might never even see the content. So if there are surplus resources, by all means. If not, then I guess the cost-benefit analysis is probably not in favour of wizard duels. On a less serious note, as someone who mainly plays wizards: Screw other classes, gimme wizard content!

To the people who liked BG's ambush mechanic: What would happen to me in BG was casters run out of spells => rest => get ambushed => either win or reload => rest again => repeat until you successfully rest, ad nauseam. Did you enjoy playing this "just one good night's sleep" minigame? Just my opinion, of course, but I really, really did not. Camping supplies (sorry, resting supplies) can be made ineffective through backtracking, ambush mechanics through save scumming. So they have the same problem: their effectivity only depends on the players threshold for annoyance. I can't think of a solution for this, unfortunately.

The devs are aware of the issue. IIRC, their approach is the following (sorry, can't remember where/when they stated this): - main quests give more XP than side quests - side quests tend to have more interesting item rewards than main quests Doesn't make balancing trivial, but I feel this could be a reasonable middle ground.

@Lord_Mord Less content in my language? Sure, that's true, but if everyone were fine with the original language, why would that be a problem? I feel that in principle, a work's original language always is to be preferred, and I'm simply thankful that I speak one foreign language well enough to be able to enjoy the originals. Now for people who struggle with English (or just can't be bothered), I'm in favour of localizations of course, since this opens up the medium to a larger audience. I'm part of this group for every language on earth except two, after all. And crappy localization is a significant annoyance. However: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or in the ear of the listener in this case. What sounds crappy to one person may be fine for another.

The more I read/think about localizations in general, the happier I become my English is good enough to play the original. Thank you, every English teacher I've ever had.

What about "Maximally efficient strike!", "The Karach sings true.", ...

Just my 2 cents: I had no issue with the PoE soundtrack whatsoever. I'm actually quite fond of it.

I'd prefer it if zooming and, to an extent, scrolling simply stayed enabled in conversations. For the same reasons, though.

By that definition, I'd be fine with the "same as PoE 1" option. Thanks for the clarification! Now we just need an expression for boring, repetitive fights. Hm, "utter-trash mob"? "Double-plus ungood mob"?

... is everyone talking about the same definition of "trash mob"? I mean I like RPG combat as much as the next dude, but PoE 1 had a couple of "select everyone, then click once on an enemy, wait for its death, repeat until you win" fights. Those, I really could do without. Oh, and the Xaurip Liberation Army? Surely you mean the Army for the Liberation of Xaurips!

Total freedom of improvisation and non-preconfigured cause and effect in a CRPG? Best application of the singularity ever!