Yellow Rabbit

Seeing as literally no one stands to gain anything from what Avellone is doing right now (himself least of all), it likely is just long overdue emotions venting. Codex seems to be an appropriate place for that. Don't know why people bother searching for bits of rationale in the drunken neighbor's rants in the low-end bar down the street. That said, his Obs's mismanagement allegations sound believable as hell, lack of proof notwithstanding. I have a creeping suspicion that every mid-to-large gamedev studio is a hot boiling mess from legal and financial standpoints anyway, or haven't shell out a decent game ever. Creative chaos and all that.

You've got to be kidding me... This kind of a poll on a friggin' Obsidian board?! ...I don't think Ydwins's going to fit either of those archetypes, though. They're mostly used in romantic context anyway and we're not going to have plenty of that. Are we?

Позолоченная Долина. That's very literal. And gives really strong "Silicon Valley" vibe. And has a lot of potential flavorey counterparts along the lines of "Златой Дол" which are common to fantasy texts, don't know why they didn't roll with something like that. BTW, I thought localization was dealt with mostly by Paradox last time around. Was it?

Just wanted to throw in my five cents on the matter of translating names and terms: it's always a sore point for translator. Literal translation usually sounds silly, so you have to either detach from original meaning to make it sound (somewhat) acceptable or just transliterate it. And even if you want to do the former, coming up with cool names doesn't always work out as well as you'd like, sometimes ending up silly and inaccurate at the same time (especially if you're dealing with Japanese and their habit of making words up from random kanji on the spot). I've seen a few cases where people had to resort to Latin and Greek in translation where there was none in the original just to make words sound good and preserve the meaning. Kinda dirty move, though, and certainly frowned at amongst professionals. That said, I have no idea how bad PoE1's German localzation really is as I don't speak German, and I definitely can understand your feelings, but please cut some slack to translators as well. ...Not if they really used machine translation in your case, though. That's just lazy. Come to think of it, Russian localization of PoE1 was surprisingly (VERY much so) well done. Guys transliterated some names (Dyrwood=Дирвуд) and localized the others (Defiance Bay = Бухта Непокорности), and they definetely haven't even seen the game they were translating, let alone play it, but overall it was... readable. Which is rare for our official game translations, so... Yeah.

It's kinda funny how J.Sawyer just grazed possibility of romantic feelings in his companions relationship talk and people immediatly went "Yay, Romances, LGBT-gays-bioware-sux, what-can-change-the-nature-of-a-romance" conundrum. Honestly, if I'd be in his place, I'd just tuned the system so any resemblance of PC's romantic relationship with any companion could be reached only somewhere near the end of the game and went off without any real resolution. Just to screw with this trend of romantics being somehow blessing of the RPGs in the eyes of some vocal groups of people. P.S. Sorry for my broken language, non-native speaker here.

While that much is true, I can easily imagine PoE team after several years of designing, writing, testing, tweaking and balancing game systems somewhere around this point yelling "Dammit, people, give me something to work on without friggin' Pillars or bloody Eternity in the name!!!" So... maybe a little break is in order? Anyway, absence of Alpha Protocol sequel/spiritual successor in the poll makes me a sad panda. So I went with WoD game.

By the way, does anyone know how NV started? Was it Bethesda who offered Obsidian to make Fallout "spin-off" or was it the other way around? If it is the former I'm afraid we're not getting to see Fallout 4 1/2. I don't think Bethesda will make the same offer again considering how obvious the span in RPGshness and quality overall between 3 and NV turned out to be.

One particular way I used to make peace between rail nomads in both WL2 original and DC didn't require typing anything in manually. I'm not sure about the other ways to do this quest, though. @GhostofAnakin Could you elaborate on how you're doing this quest? As far as I remember special dialog options there aren't "instawin the quest" kind, so there's that. Edit: ninjaed by Fenixp. What he said works.

Oh. Nevermind then. I misintepreted your words for the notion that PoE took NWN as source of inspiration while it's just combat feel they have in common which is similar in all D&D based RTwP games.

No, seriously, what does it mean? Your phrasing is a little confusing. BG, IWD and NWN started primarily with Planescape: Torment? This is not true. Torment started because Black Isle/Interplay had Baldur's Gate's engine, Planescape license they needed to utilize and MCA willing to work on two projects at once for giggles. PoE started primarily with P:T? This is not true either. PoE took inspiration from IE games in general, and Torment is the one from which it took the least of all. As a matter of fact, I can't think of anything Planescape: Torment "primarily started" up until inXile's Tides of Numenera pitch and, maybe, Mask of the Betrayer back in the days. Also, NWN is certainly redundant in your list. It being D&D based modding toolkit with RTwP combat and OC pure **** doesn't mean PoE related to it somehow.

It looks like Unity 5 has memory leak after all. Game uses around 2 Gb RAM at startup but then starts to occupy more and more progressively. FPS drops and random ctds occur when memory usage makes it into swap. I'm just restarting the game every hour or so to avoid it, works fine so far. Although I probably shouldn't ask my laptop with 4 Gb RAM and mobile GeForce 820M graphic card what it thinks about me...

Bump

I think you over-simplifying things a little by not taking into consideration different kinds of games there are. Obsidian's previous titles were all pretty much AAA games with cinematic-like design for which full VO is crucial (otherwise "cinematic" point would be lost). I take it devs are aware that they're making game of a different kind now, and they should be totally aware if from these boards alone that VO in PoE right now is more of a hindrance than anything else.

Any map of the stronghold, not any map in general. Sorry, I guess I am a bit dense today. Any map of the Stronghold? What does that mean? Minus two loading screens from entering Brighthollow and its second floor, mostly. Nothing else.

Since no one for whatever reason answered your question yet, I'll try: I believe "completionist" means player who explored every single area there is, killed every single enemy he was able to find, took and completed every single quest/task. Read every single book/piece of lore too, but that one is kinda irrelevant to current discussion. Here you go

Yeah, you're right. It's just not that many AAA RPGs around to think about, so I got it backwards. Regarding PoE's modability, I recall sometime in early development mr. Sawyer stated that explicit mod support isn't going to happen. They won't obfuscate their code, could externalize some chunks of game data as long as it remains convenient to them (more likely "pops up in the head of our lead programming guy") and will answer questions about data formats if asked, but that's all. It is kinda what we have now, so fair is fair. Adding something like, say, ddillon suggested now would certainly be cool, but require some substantial changes to resources storage architecture. I don't believe such "fat" features can be fitted in devs' current post-release support schedule without thrashing it, and it's likely not in their top priority list for an expansion either. Maybe in a sequel, especially if devs are going to move on Unity 5 with it.

As far as I know, Infinity engine did literally nothing to support modding. Like, at all. It took dedicated fans and people among the devs of an engine willing to answer questions when asked to create modding scene there. I agree that times have changed and explicit mod support is a feature that supposed to go without saying... in AAA projects, which PoE isn't. Externalizing data should be enough. Unforunately, Obsidian didn't do that, or at least not so much.

Well, there are things with way better usefulness/cost balance than VO, that much is for sure. I'd say PoE could do with less of it.

Ok, I'll try to be short on limerick topic to not provoke barakav to show his worst yet again: "suddenly jumping at the command of crazy people" looks pretty much like an exaggeration to me. SJW loonies ar well capable of making problems for business entities due to all that political correctness stupidity going on. It doesn't look unreasonoble to me to get rid of a little backer written poem which ISN'T DAMN WORTH MINDING WHATSOEVER to remove such risks for your company from the table before they shoot. Providing you have permission of backer who wrote it, of course, which Obs asked for politely enough according to Firedorn. Everything would be calm and quiet if not for overreaction of some... members of the community. As for Sawyer's communicating qualities... I agree in general that he might not be the best person to design succesor to IE games due to his unpopular opinions about pros and cons of those, but neither he's the worst one. And let's face the fact that community criticism isn't all that often worthy of answering to rather than dismissing out of hand, especially if the only answer possible is "well, I want to try to do things differently and I estimate that it'll work out well". Community's harsh and not every person has inch thick carapace on his nerves even being project lead in game development. Long story short, I see why people would question his actions, but I don't agree that he deserves the bile addressed to him personally so often.

Why is that some people (hey, Luckmann!) fixated on mr. Sawyer as the Ultimate Enemy Of All Things Breathing so much? I mean, is there some particular comprehensible reason for it or it's just, like, irrational?

It's just matter of telling usual marketing crap from genuine attempt to recreate an atmosphere of IE games.

Why? "Because they're recent" isn't an answer because reasons stated by Amentep in the first answer to your thread.

Logic behind comparisons steted in OP: Q: Why do you keep comparing PoE to BG1? A: Well, I need to compare it to something, and BG1 qualifies better than anything else. Clear enough?

Nuh-uh. The difference between good and bad writing is in the person reading it more often than not. Not much to be learned there.