Gromnir

My favorite Ridley Scott film. It really needed the longer Director's Cut treatment in order for the story to breath and the production design to shine. what impressed us most 'bout kingdom is how much we liked it in spite o' a mediocre performance from orlando bloom. HA! Good Fun!

not our favorite actor, but we like damon well enough. in our opinion, he were the best actor in the departed, which is saying quite a bit. am slight annoyed that he took credit for writing good will hunting. am understanding that the affleck and damon script for hunting had gun battles and multiple car chases. HA! Good Fun!

am gonna need save the link to this post. do you know how many times Gromnir has observed that player needs must be considered in light o' the fact that game development is zero sum? people rare consider what they needs must surrender to get their needs fulfilled? HA! Good Fun!

am glad eric is more patient than Gromnir. typical questions from the interview is loaded or skewed or misleading, and how many questions ask eric to comment on josh, adam or chrisA comments? after the third such question, we would sent the list o' interrogatories back to the "interviewer." "Josh Sawyer has been the public face of Pillars of Eternity, on Internet forums, social media and in interviews. As such, in-depth public discussion has tended to focus on the game's system design and its setting - the things Josh was responsible for." terrible starting point. during development josh and other developers obvious weren't gonna answer specific story questions, and when they did, it typical caused more problems. limited attempts by developers pre-release to explain animancy in the poe world were comical bad, regardless if josh or other developers offered incites. after game release, most questions directed at josh has been mechanical, but he has also answered more than a few o' the broad stroke narrative queries. folks at sa ask josh what were durance and grieving mother s'posed to be and why were chrisA run outta town rather than letting him do gm and durance as intended? gosh. am wondering why questions like that didn't get answered, eh? on a side note, am wishing that developers would have the following epiphany much earlier: "The bigger thing we did to help develop an emotional core to the story, which I felt was more successful, was in working the themes into the designs of the companion arcs and quests. The degree of success varied from character to character, but when I did a full play-through of the game late in development, I found myself enjoying the game's story most when I was seeing the deeper layers of these characters exposed, and their worldviews challenged. Sagani's finale might be my favorite - I found that scene to be very moving." the protagonist o' a crpg is a terrible focus for a story. the more control you give the player over his own character, the more difficult you make it to tell the crpg protagonist story. try and write a compelling and evocative story in which the main character is male or female and race is unfixed. the protagonist o' the hypothetical story can be good or bad or serious or snarky and he/she has the capacity to change aspects o' character in different parts o' the story? who the heck is Gromnir writing 'bout? the protagonist is too vague to be the foundation o' a decent crpg story. the joinable companions should be the focus o' developing the story o' a crpg. the companions can grow, and player choices can change the ways in which they grow, but the motivations and personality o' the joinables is not so dynamic as to hinder quality writing. the essential qualities o' the companions (and major npcs such as the game's Ultimate Bad Guy) is known qualities that a writer can use as a foundation for story development. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/76919-least-liked-companions/?p=1705421 eventual the developers o' crpgs is gonna realize that the protagonist is ill-suited to driving crpg story. am also gonna note that we often disagree with what the interviewer considers "recurring criticisms" and "well-regarded" content o' poe. again, am pleased that eric were more patient than Gromnir. HA! Good Fun!

if you are lucky enough to get mebec's morningstar, you can have your hearth orlan priest o' eothas cast dire blessing 'fore battles lay down some serious pain. is any number o' builds that would benefit from a 2-h weapon that stuns on crits and gets 3 dr bypass... on top o' wilder slaying. but again, is requiring luck as it is an azzuro item... and given the increased number o' new potential stronghold encounters, the likelihood o' an azzuro encounter post wm2 has decreased. HA! Good Fun!

ack. how could we forget geena davis and jeff goldblum's the fly? is kinda the perfect title for remake. 1958 special effects makes the original less than scary to modern audiences. while 1986 effects look dated today, they were a huge leap forward compared to the original. we would love to see a remake of outland. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_32 were set in space, but it were for all intents and purposes a late 70s western with all the brutality and ambiguous morality that went along with such films. nevertheless, given how bad the special effects is by modern standards, it is difficult for audiences to appreciate and am thinking that the western-sci fi fusion would do better in 2016 than it did in 1981. HA! Good Fun! ps outland were not exact a remake o' high noon, but it clear were inspired by the gary cooper film.

they are, and they already did. is an upcoming version, and there were a 1925 and 1959 version... all based on a late 1800s novel. stephen boyd's death scene is one o' our favorite movie scenes... evar. HA! Good Fun!

which is saying very little... and also ignores that it ain't a remake o' a film. honest, one wonders if a sign o' impending apocalypse is ten years w/o hollywood attempting to do yet another three musketeers. converse, it is surprising just how many times cyrano de bergerac has been done well. the jose ferrer, gérard depardieu and steve martin vehicles were all great... and even the recent animated quasi-remake (megamind) was funny. HA! Good Fun!

$130 for the collector's edition o' an expansion to a 16-year-old game? we do always chuckle when we see the cloth map included in these things. such stuff were once a staple... but why? HA! Good Fun!

the departed is an excellent entry. but airplane were a parody o' a genre o' films. is kinda like not another teen movie. airplane weren't a remake o' a particular film. HA! Good Fun!

not a bad example, though again, we excluded movies based on source material that weren't movies... so no dr. jekyll & mr. hyde, the hunchback of notre dame, or any o' the dozens o' shakespeare works... including a different teen movie, 10 things i hate about you. after all, how many times has the three musketeers been made? hamlet? is not remakes o' movies so much as movies using same source material. eddie murphy's the nutty professor were actual funny... and am admitting we were never a fan o' jerry lewis. we weren't so much a fan o' his dr. doolittle, but it were successful. wanna have sherman set the wayback machine to 1938 (?) and one can at least argue that the adventures of robin hood was a remake o' the douglas fairbanks version. but again, am working our brain pretty hard to find exceptions. HA! Good Fun!

am gonna admit that am not enthusiastic, but it ain't like we were dying to see the first ghostbusters neither... and am having difficulty thinking o' a straight-up remake that made us anything other than dismissive. hell, if we had been alive at the time, am certain we woulda' gone all movie-snob and scoffed at the magnificent seven... as we is current doing for the 2016 remake of the magnificent seven. specific where a remake is o' a movie rather than using the same source material (e.g. ben-hur, moby ****) we can think o' only three additional film remakes we liked: ocean's eleven, 3:10 to yuma, and the thomas crown affair. am suspecting we can come up with other positive examples if we rack our brain, but is far easier to come up with fails than successes. HA! Good Fun!

is not just one game. is, at the very least, all the ie games that have any significant optional side content. iwds were very much linear, but in bg, bg2, and ps:t, you could have vast different level progression. am also gonna observe that you do not seem to realize that your initial observation 'bout a single game being no dispositive can be applied equal well to poe's scheme... "is just a matter of setting the numbers right." 'least that were the developer's pitch. HA! Good Fun!

Would you care to elaborate? It seems that if the level difference between a completionist and a critical-path player at any given moment is smaller than currently, and that's what an exponential level table would achieve, the problem is at least partially solved. not much to elaborate. d&d 2e had an exponential scheme, but in bg2 you could quite easily over-level. is a real world example wherein the exponential curve didn't solve the problem. HA! Good Fun! ps last week we were looking at a bgee save in mild anticipation o' siege o' dragonspear. apparently we had hit the totsc xp cap right around our completion o' the cloakwood mines.

Cipher is actually quite decent once you have a couple of the level 2 abilities. At least I find it quite efficient to mow down enemies with. I found it good for stunning enemies (forget the ability) so the rest of my party can go to work on them, but overall I didn't enjoy playing the character for some reason. is few things more straightforward in poe than a dps fighter with few active abilities. you will be relative durable (unlike the rogue) and you will be able to dish out serious pain simple by stabbing, smashing or slicing enemies with your weapons. that being said, you do control a party and not just one character, so... HA! Good Fun!

poe is different... and in a good way. is many games that punish you severely for choosing the wrong attribute spread at the start. that is not so much the case with poe. there is gonna be advantages for playing a fighter with higher dex or perception than con or might. there is even reasons to put points into intellect. for a dps fighter... well, honestly, we typical just use eder for our dps fighter and he is amazing in the role. nevertheless, we prefer 2-h weapons for big damage and for overcoming dr. estoc is a good choice, but there is fantastic 2-h swords available early in the game, and a very nice pike for sale. if you are making this character an off-tank, we wouldn't worry too much about shield talents as you can be extreme durable even with a 2-handed weapon. a dps fighter with the defender ability and the new wm overbearing guard is comical devastating as your disengagement attacks have higher accuracy, damage and they affect those hit with prone. wm has improved enemy ai so that the bad guys try and ignore your tank and go straight for your squishies. good. the defender fighter with overbearing guard makes kibble outta such foes. confident aim is a good early choice. as am skipping the shield, we would take unbending, wary defender and rapid recovery, and we would likely go with a pale elf for the elemental dr... and 'cause is no way in hell Gromnir is ever gonna play a "godlike." serious, could the obsidians have chosen a worse name for their plane-touched race? oh, for a dps fighter we do kinda like survival to be level 10... or level 8 with one o' the +2 survival items. am pretty sure 10 survival gets you the second tier o' the racial accuracy resting bonus. get 4 in lore and the rest in athletics? whatever. but again, poe is a bit different than other crpgs. do not feel as if you need the right attributes or talents or abilities. is very few useless builds. you actual gotta work hard to have a true fail build. do complete different from our suggestions and you are likely gonna have an effective build and it may be more fun than what Gromnir suggested... particular as our build has few activated abilities. just have fun with it and don't obsess over the numbers or the ubiquitous optimal build suggestions. also, there is now respec available via pretty much every merchant, so for some gold you can change your build if you discover you built poorly. HA! Good Fun!

Beem awhile since I read it, but I believe the answer is yes. This is a perfect casting. perfect casting would be burt lancaster, if he were still alive. am not recalling any ****sucker from wednesday, but ian is more than flexible enough, and you can almost hear ice cracking when mcshane monologues. also a bit sweary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSkOyhmt_-g HA! Good Fun! ps our actual first choice(s) for the role, other than burt lancaster, woulda' been harrison ford, liam nesson or mel gibson. not 'cause they is better actors than mcshane, but rather 'cause they can do tough and grizzled, and they typical play good guys.

You could always turn on the increased xp multiplier at level 8 or whatever. This would require a lot of experience to reach the next level, but you would effectively stall your character growth when they started to feel too op. Or you could not, and just complain about it. actually, we choose the most obvious and simple solution: we voluntarily stall leveling on our own. particularly now that we has played the game multiple times, a clumsy mechanic for decreasing all xp awards is far less surgical, far less responsive, than is simple choosing when to actual level-up and how far to level. 'course, w/o foreknowledge, a manual correction as the one we apply is of questionable value... which is why for future games, obsidian should consider reducing optional quest/task xp awards, or they need work on improving their scaling scheme. am typical in favor o' simplicity, but that doesn't always seem popular. nevertheless, the question remains as to why the obsidians were so complete caught off-guard by the actual rate o' completionist leveling. HA! Good Fun!

am not a fan o' straight-up reduction in xp %. early in the game we rare feel op. is only late in the game that we encounter an issue. simple reduction in % xp rewards can cause new problems. some folks advocate exponential schemes, but bg and bg2 had those and they were as bad or worse than poe insofar as overleveling is concerned. matt516 had excellent observations 'bout the seeming broken leveling curve o' poe, am just not certain why what were so obvious to him and others were missed by obsidian. ... this is one o' the few poe flaws that surprised us... kinda. during the beta, Gromnir and others observed that regardless o' whether you used more rational quest/objective xp or idiotic per kill schemes or whatever, if you had a large % o' the game be optional to the critical path, then you were gonna need to severe dilute xp awards beyond the crit path elsewise you were gonna see xp bloat. got the same issue for gear and gold and other aspects. more optional content results in more relative power for the completionist. if the game is gonna be beatable by players who do only the critical path, then offering awards beyond the crit path is gonna tend to result in bloat making game get progressive easier for the completionist. duh. the thing is, the developers were so freaking confident that they had a scheme for dealing with the optional content issue. is not that the problem were unknown. this were discussed. developers mentioned that with the tools they had available they were able to look at total xp awards possible for various portions o' the game. add or remove quest that provides 3000 more xp in chapter 2 or some local portion o' chap 2 would not be problematic for the developers even if it were a late-game change. the developers were even dismissive o' any difficulties that might arise from adding the admitted token bestiary/exploration/trap xp awards 'cause they were so certain o' the range o' possible xp awards and they could make adjustments almost on the fly. the developers were comple unconcerned with xp bloat. *shrug* in any event, the ideal and future solution does not appear to have changed from Gromnir's pov: drastically reduce xp awards for optional content. players is already gonna benefit from a power-up due to increased gold and gear awards from optional quests. provide significant xp awards for optional content makes prohibitive difficult to balance a game for critical path players and completionists alike. alternatively, the developers gotta make some serious improvements to the current scaling scheme. HA! Good Fun!

Yeah, priests are optimal but I find the micro to be tedious myself. yeah, obsidian did a nice job o' providing three very different support classes. paladins, as 'posed to priests, were intended to be durable and low-maintenance. 'course since the beta, paladins has assumed more roles. can play paladins as very respectable tanks or strikers in addition to being support. ... am also admitting that am getting fatigued micromanaging our current caster-heavy party. pause and cast. pause and cast. *groan* still, am addicted to our priests. am not sure we can give up on priests entirely. HA! Good Fun!

postscript-- writers o' novels might be wrong for illustrative purposes. we woulda' likely contrasted faulkner and hemingway, particularly as they hated each other. faulkner speaking o' hemingway: "he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." hemingway response: "poor faulkner. does he really think big emotions come from big words?" while we admire hemingway and faulkner equal and for complete different reasons, is noteworthy that faulkner movie treatments is actual far more similar to hemingway style than either would likely admit. is few authors who is as highly descriptive as were faulkner, but when doing movie scripts, he took a more minimalist approach. a crpg is not visual media to the degree such as is a movie, but a crpg also has gameplay, and most crpgs is even more dialogue driven than is movies. that being said, none is more worthy than joyce when illustrating the beauty o' language "a few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. he watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. it was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. it was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. it lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." -last paragraph from the dead is not a problem o' exposition, but is rare that a character speaking thus would be anything other than unnatural. as evocative as were joyce at his best, am doubting a game would benefit from more than a little o' such prose. honestly, how would such stuff fit in the ordinary dialogue-heavy text o' a game? there is a few instances o' narration in poe, but the text o' poe is most often dialogue. ... perhaps you should be looking more to shakespeare and miller than joyce and hemingway for inspiration. nobody could monologue likes shakespeare, but is actual typical only a handful o' lengthy shakespeare monologues in a five act play. and lord knows that it would be near impossible to have multiple options available to the would-be monologuer. HA! Good Fun!

complete aside: we thought dina meyer were all kinda hot in starship troopers, but given how little o' heinlein's starship troopers is in paul verhoeven's starship troopers, am wondering why the producers even bothered to get the movie rights to the novel. HA! Good Fun!

quibble: we wouldn't put joyce at the opposite end o' the spectrum from hemingway. early joyce is most frequent categorized as minimalist realism, yes? that being said, given that poe were a new game in an unfamiliar setting, we expected exposition. is tough to present lore in a crpg w/o resorting to at least some exposition... particular as poe is a collaborative writers effort. a single author can use a half-dozen chapters and +100 pages o' text to slowly present essential information 'bout the setting. is much more difficult to artful develop the setting or characters in a crpg when you got multiple writers and individual encounters is functional insular and discreet. considering the joinables is often purposeful tangential to the main plot, one wonders how you produce meaningful character development w/o resorting to exposition. how many genuine dialogue encounters does each joinable get? do an entire character development arc with so few opportunities has gotta be challenging... and far different from movie or novel character development. one additional observation: use joinable npcs for expositive lore dumps might be a mistake. am getting that is natural to use durance to explain the magran (sp?) but is clumsy and leads to excessive exposition. the problem is compounded as you make joinable companion character development a quest. the player, seeking to advance the durance quest is motivated to read through all available dialogue options in the hope that at least one such dialogue choice will open up the route for advancement o' the joinables quest. this means that our initial exposure to a joinable is frequent extreme heavy with exposition that provides a considerable 'mount o' lore that only tangential develops the character. we often read through the durance lore dumps multiple times during the course o' the game to see if a new option has become available. tedious and unnecessary. if you are gonna use joinables to dump lore through exposition, then find some clever way to indicate to the player the dialog options that is essential for quest advancement, and which dialogues is only existing for your lore dump. HA! Good Fun!

we actual feel like we are gimping our self when we don't have at least two priests. with one priest, the single cleric is constant buffing or debuffing, but with two priests our party typical becomes functional immune to whatever is our current foe's most devastating attack, and we achieve excessive party accuracy... after which we wade into combat with a melee weapon or simple spam overkill burn spells. am thinking most folks don't realize how effective is priests from an offensive pov 'cause they is constant buffing. and battles with 90% o' vessels becomes silly simple. painful interdiction + holy radiance remove any fear o' a zombie apocalypse. world war z is a 5-minute movie. HA! Good Fun! ps nice find on the synergy. next time we go w/o a priest, we will definitely use.

am playing a potd run o' poe. we stopped playing poe before wm1 were released. we resumed once wm2 were available. we wanted to give the poe expansion a fair shake, and we didn't think that were possible if we played the two halves many months apart. poe is a good game for Gromnir, but we sympathize with those less cheerful 'bout embracing their inner ocd. fight dragons in bg2 were, 'less you managed to cheese 'em with a dozen traps or a chromatic orb exploit, a protracted sequence essential orders to your party. we typical had bg2 dragon battles set to pause on spell cast. that meant that we effective were pausing every half-second or so. Gromnir liked bg2 dragon battles. people liked bg2 dragon battles, and lich battles, and opponent adventurer battles, but the thing is that while there were more such complex battles in bg2 compared to bg1, the bg2 battles that required considerable attention were typically punctuation rather than every word o' the bg2 story. we could fight a half-dozen trash mobs in bg2 before sudden finding us faced with a dragon. ... almost every poe trash mob has us micromanaging at a level similar to bg2 dragon battles. yeah, am actual impressed by a few o' the new wm battles-- they challenge our established tactics. even so, poe, particularly on potd, can become an endurance challenge. in the future, when we play poe, we likely will drop the difficulty as our most recent potd run is becoming exhausting. as an aside, am happy we waited to play wm. the first "wilderness" maps that is available in wm 1 is saturated with grindtastic combats that ain't particular clever. the end location o' wm 1 is fantastic, but am suspecting that we woulda' been disappointed with wm if we had only had wm1 available to us. wm 2 has less 'o the seeming filler nonsense... though am not sure why developers keep needing learn this lesson. regardless o' people says 10 or 15 years removed, the stuff folks liked most in totsc when it were released were durlag's tower... and bg2 were best when it offered larger set-pieces such as cult of the eyeless and de'arnise keep. am wishing developers would learn. HA! Good Fun!