Matt516

Update: I also cannot give the letter to Lord Reymont (which is what I actually wanted to do in the first place). Apparently if you've already talked to him in the past without giving him the letter (which I did at the very beginning of Act II), you can't give him the letter in the future. In what world does that make sense? I just wanted to size both of them up before making a decision. Now I literally cannot resolve the quest at all. EDIT: More info again. The "can't give the letter to Lord Reymont" is triggered by telling Abrecan Doemenel that you will get the letter for him. Which, again, doesn't make sense. I should be able to talk to both sides of a conflict before deciding which one I want to support, and I should be able to go back on my word if I decide I want to support the other side.

So I found the thieves before ever speaking to anyone from House Doemenel. Killed them, took the letter. Then I proceeded to do a bunch of other quests. Then I went to talk to the head of the Doemenels. I did not tell him about the letter right away, even though there was a dialogue option to do so. Instead, I asked him about the letter, the thieves, etc. After this conversation tree, I have no option to give him the letter. Zip. Nada. I talk to him, he says "have you procured the letter?", and my only option is "I'm still looking for it", even though I have it. EDIT: A little more info. This appears to happen specifically if you ask Abrecan for an invitation before giving him the letter. This appears to lock the conversation tree out of giving him the letter, even if I already have the letter.

I think that's kind of the point the OP is making.. traps were highly situational at best before 1.05, so nerfing them to make them even less likely to be used seems a bit odd.

Bug from previous patch that caused debuff icons to stick around (often when Suppress Affliction was involved) indefinitely is still happening. For Insect Swarm in my case. Debuff doesn't actually appear to be applied, but the icon will not go away. I was under the impression this had been fixed..

No way to do this atm. Kind of a UI oversight since it doesn't make any sort of sense as an intentional feature. Maybe they'll add that in a future patch?

OP is unclear - has he not done any of the Endless Paths (as well as not having done the companion quests) or has he just not completed the Endless Paths? If it's the former, I would say XP is in a good place. Dunno why you'd expect to reach the level cap without doing the megadungeon.

I've tried to use it to cure Light Fatigue, but it doesn't seem to work. So either it provides too small a bonus to matter or it's bugged. Either way, I've not seen any use for it.

http://tinyurl.com/p3pfvbw

I think there should be another game mode between hard and path of the damned, that implements the stat increase of PotD, but at the creature selection of hard. Currently, the gap between 'hard' and 'path of the damned' is absurd. Surely it'd be much better to have the creature selection of PotD with the stats of Hard? Since PotD is the only difficulty that changes stats, and it kinda screws up a lot of the balance of the game?

It's not that the level cap is too low, it's that there's too much XP in the game. The vast majority of the combat encounters in the game become really really easy once you hit lvl 12 - increasing the cap would just make this problem worse. They need to make it harder to get there instead. I know that may sound like a pedantic distinction - but it's important.

Most of which is the same regardless of which choice you made, it just changes the first sentence you say in that particular part. Yeah - there's no denying that there's an inverse relationship between amount of voice acting and variety in dialogue. That tradeoff may be worth it for some people and some games, but it's definitely a tradeoff.

Yeah - the IE games generally only had the first sentence of a dialogue voiced, or very important moments. I tend to prefer that approach - it lets me get a good idea of how the character sounds and then I can read the rest at my own pace (which is generally faster than spoken) without being distracted. Having VO pop in and out of conversations, bypassing descriptions, etc. is really jarring and takes away from the "reading a book" feel I loved so much in Planescape: Torment. The old dwarf lady conversation in the first town was particularly guilty of this, I thought. It was more of a chore than a joy to go through that dialogue for whatever reason. :/

Probably an error in the spreadsheet.

Also, kudos on the balancing. I know there's bellyaching every time something is nerfed, so I figured I'd provide a bit of opinion from the other side - the game is much more fun for me when things are balanced. I may actually use ciphers now since it won't feel like cheating. Thanks for that.

"Fixed a number of issues with the Winds of Steel quest. This should be a retroactive fix if the quest was already started before working on the second quest with the Dozens or Doemenels, or if the quest was acquired or completed in conjunction with Bronze Beneath the Lake or Changing of the Guard." Am I missing something here? In my game it is *impossible* to acquire or complete any of the 2nd faction quests "in conjunction with one another". Once one is accepted, the other factions will not work with you further. Is this a bug, or intended?

A BG3 that was likely a AAA, fully voiced, 3D game for PC and Console. Yeah, but if that's what they thought they needed to make the game, I don't really see the issue here. The issue is that people who make thing professionally sometimes get, unavoidably, discconected from what people think by the echo chamber of the general games industry at large. Its simply an assumed thing sometimes that because everyone is doing VA that its always the next thing to put resources towards. But in reality as this poll shows, and I am pretty certain a very large sample size would only swing it 10% or so, a assumption that more VA would be good if we only had the money is probably less well founded than may be generally thought. Reviewers rave about VA, other games spend tons of money on it, its a naturally forming self-reinforced misconception. Most people playing RPGs or Indie of various stipes simply don't care that much or only care in very specific instances. Reviewers can rave all they like about it, but the audience in general only raves about very particular VA performances in very particular sequences and they are smart enough to know this(on some level often not entirely consciously formed). We're talking about the guys that brought us Pillars. I'd be with you if it was Atari going "hey, here's $20 million", but it wasn't. Its not about what they think about VA. Its about what they think we think about VA. The prevailing industry meme is that VA will bring in more rubes, oops, I mean broaden your appeal. Obsidian is not immune to prevailing opinion. No one is. They may even think its complete BS but simply feel its the "safer" choice business-wise since there is not really anything solid to hang their hat on. That's really what I'm getting at with this poll. I don't expect Obsidian to look at the poll results and be like "ok, that's what we'll do now!". That would be hilariously idiotic. They're gonna make design decisions based on their own preference structure, which is probably some balance of artistic choices, business concerns, and practical considerations. As well they should. But if our opinion (that of the forum-goers, I mean) does factor into those decisions, I figured it could be helpful to make sure they've got a good idea of what that is.

Kill it! Kill it with fire! *hisses*

Meh. Achievables ashmievables. If anyone wants it they can have mine.

Bump. Just to try to break 100 responses.

Note the assumption baked into the question. The poll is very clearly framed as "IF this is true, then what do you think?". If that's not true (though I don't really see how it could possibly not be true - there's only X dollars to make the game and every dollar spent on Y feature is a dollar that can't be spent on any other feature), then it's a moot point. As I said, I'm not primarily interested in people's opinions on VO in a vacuum, but their opinions on VO GIVEN the financial realities of things. So no, I don't see a problem with the poll. I've actually edited it a few times to remove hyperbolic or biased language, trying to keep only the factual language. If you know something about Obsidian's financials that the rest of us don't know, feel free to tell us though.

Sorry, Luckmann. :/

Howdy all. After seeing BAdler's comment about A) the exorbitant cost of VO and B) potentially increasing the amount of VO in the future... and then seeing the very-nearly-unanimous response of "no, you really don't need to do that", it occurred to me that it's possible Obsidian thinks a lot more people want VO than actually want it. That said, this post is an uber-small sample size. But if... IF most of the community wants the same amount (or less) VO in the sequels.. and BAdler/the rest of Obsidian aren't aware of this... that could be a problem. So I made a poll. I know it'll probably still be a small sample size as well, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give Obsidian a little bit more information. Because if they could save money on VO in the future, and instead use that money to make future games more content-rich and feature-complete... well, that'd just be dandy. So here's my poll. Cast your vote. I want to know what the community thinks. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78909-how-much-would-you-like-to-see-spent-on-voice-acting-in-the-sequel/

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78825-the-reason-why-a-lot-of-va-isnt-voiced/?p=1680668 After I made the post linked above, and observed the conversation that ensued for a while, I started thinking... VO is quite expensive. Like... really expensive. And if we assume that a game development studio has a given amount of money allocated to a game, say X dollars... then it follows that any money spent on VO is by necessity money that can't be spent elsewhere. That's how money works. My own personal preference is that games like this have some VO, but not a huge amount. Think "original BG and Torment" levels of VO, not "BG:EE or modern RPGs" levels. I think a small amount of VO adds a huge amount of characterization and immersion to the world - but that any more than that isn't worth the money it costs. Again, any money spent on VO is money that isn't spent on more talents, areas, quests, characters, QA... etc. So I'd prefer that a PoE expansion or PoE 2 have some VO, but not quite as much as PoE and certainly not more. I'd prefer to see that development money spent elsewhere. That's just my personal preference. And although we could (and probably will, knowing this forum ) have a protracted discussion about the pros and cons of VO, that's not my main purpose in making this post. I just want to see what the community thinks. Because although it's entirely possible that most people want more VO or Obsidian has their own strategy/design goals/marketing research and doesn't really care what a forum poll says... it's also possible that most people don't want more VO and Obsidian doesn't actually realize that. So... although the chances of that second scenario are probably pretty small, I figured I might as well check. Why not? All this can do is give Obsidian more information, which is good for everyone. In the post I linked above, it seemed like the vast majority of public opinion was on the "nah, don't spend more money on VO" side - but then again the people who actually post on the forum are a small subset of the people who read it, so I'm curious what the poll will say. So tell us - what do you think Obsidian should prioritize in the future? More money on VO, or no?

Well whether it's the voice actor's fault or that of the recording equipment, it's still an "audio issue" haha. Either way, the end result (the audio files) has a sibilance problem. Whatever the cause, it *should* be fixable in post. I don't have enough knowledge to say exactly how to do it, but I'm confident enough in my limited knowledge to say that it *can* be done. (anyone whose knowledge exceeds mine, feel free to chime in with agreement or correction)

Any update on this? With the changes to make Ciphers a little less OP, I was hoping to try GM out a bit when the patch hits - but I don't see a sibilance fix mentioned in the 1.05 notes. Is this still happening?