Peanuckle

Interesting. I've always enjoyed card games, but there's not a large gaming population near me so I probably won't buy them myself.

Huh. How to explain... Killf*ck Soulsh*tter was a very angry boy. He got angry at his brothers, he got angry at his sisters, he got angry at his anger. He got so angry that he would claw at himself because if he hit other people he'd get in trouble. One day he realized that he was hurting himself for no good reason, so he beat up his brothers and sisters and when his parents came to punish him, he beat them up too. Of course, he couldn't beat up everyone, so he had to run from the village. In the wild, he found the freedom he'd always wanted. He could stub his toe, get angry and beat up anything he wanted and nobody would stop him. He'd tear up bushes, rip up saplings and he even punched a deer in the face! Everything changed when he found a discarded, rusty sword and killed a boar. Beating things up just wasn't enough anymore. He eventually tried going into a town to see what he could trade for with all the animal skins he had, but one thing led to another (his self-made clothes were perfectly fine no matter what some stuck up prissy said!) and he couldn't really stick around for long. He gathered a few things, spun in place a few times and headed off in the direction he faced. He eventually wandered across a caravan headed out west and considered fighting them, but they took one look at him and said very nice words, so he decided to hitch a ride instead of hiking through the mountains. Things got weird from there. (low INT barbarian. Such fun.)

The Engwithan's clearly thought so, bit Iovara shows that not everybody agreed with that. That's the very problem with the robot council controlling the world; it's the Engwithan idea of what is right and proper for a society, and everything else be damned. Iovara came after, IIRC. She didn't see what the world was like without the gods. The entirety of the Engwithan people did this. Think of how hard it is to convince a society of anything. This would be like 100% of America voting for one party. Except they're electing to commit mass suicide. The state of the world had to be absolutely horrendous for them to even consider it. No, the Engwithans had to THINK it was. There have been real-world societies in the past that decided every body else was evil and they needed to conquer/destroy the entirety of the rest of the world to make it less of a hell-hole, they just didn't have the ability to actually do it. I don't recall for certain whether or not their was any implication that giving up their souls to make the gods had to be a 100% voluntary act from every single member of the society; but, judging by what Thaos has been up to with the machines in the modern world, it appears exactly the opposite, ie the machines can do their thing and rip your soul out regardless of what you think or want, indeed without you even knowning they exist. What I'm saying here is that we know that the Engwithans, as a whole, died to make the gods; do we know for certain that every single Engwithan was okay with that? If you judge the state of the real world by what the Pope thought of it in 1120, you'd come to the same kind of conclusion. My point is that we don't actually know what the world was like; we have one picture of it from a group that was clearly not unbiased, and the robot's they made have been continuing that perspective for two thousand years. I think the machines support my point. The introduction to them (coming out of Cilant Lis) shows a group of willing cultists. Thaos has to psyche them up to give in to the device. Also, if they were capable of ripping souls from everyone, then why didn't everyone in the Dyrwood just drop dead, rather than having their children born soulless? I think it's more likely that the machines intercepted the souls, but aren't capable of taking them from unwilling persons. The machine in the city (can't remember the district) would seem to contradict this, but I think it's a different sort of device. It's much larger than the others, being several stories tall, and it turned the population into zombies rather than motionless bodies. The ability to cause varying effects would be useful to Thaos. Furthermore, when you read Thaos' soul after killing him, there's a scene where a vast number of people are gathered in front of the device. Thaos looks at a woman holding her child, and she nods at him. The people are there willingly dying to do this.

The Engwithan's clearly thought so, bit Iovara shows that not everybody agreed with that. That's the very problem with the robot council controlling the world; it's the Engwithan idea of what is right and proper for a society, and everything else be damned. Iovara came after, IIRC. She didn't see what the world was like without the gods. The entirety of the Engwithan people did this. Think of how hard it is to convince a society of anything. This would be like 100% of America voting for one party. Except they're electing to commit mass suicide. The state of the world had to be absolutely horrendous for them to even consider it. People will always argue about things after the fact, enjoying the benefits of hindsight and the naivety of not having lived through it. I think the fact that the most advanced culture in the world unanimously agreed to kill themselves and create gods means that we ought to seriously consider that Thaos might have had a legitimate point.

That's a pretty interesting hook, but it almost feels contrived to have Durance and GM know each other before joining your party. I mean, what are the odds of that? I like the bit about how GM sees people by their souls. It's a neat bit of mysticism and helps explain why she acts the way she does. Seeing newborn souls enter the world must be a real experience.

I hadn't even thought of it. But it makes sense. I like it. RL references are fun.

There's plenty of white female characters who are modeled after celebrities. It's a common practice.

The Engwithan people decided, en masse, that it would be better to sacrifice their entire civilization than let the world go on as it had been. I can only assume that the pre-god world was a real sh*thole. I'd have really appreciated some extended dialogue with Thaos. What sort of proof can he offer? Are his genocides and crimes outweighed by the improvement of life and the number of lives saved? Are more people alive thanks to him than would be otherwise? Is it right to kill a thousand to save a million? These questions are hinted at, but never really brought up. They'd have been much more interesting to me than the "awakening" plotline.

I wonder if the child will figure significantly in a sequel. Raise it as your own, train him/her(?) to fight, etc. Could be a cool legacy character.

Open up with a musket volley, draw sabers and charge. Even if it's not optimal gameplay, I love it.

Before I read this thread I didn't even know the PC wasn't getting good rest. Totally went over my head. I think that Awakenings are absurdly easy. Maerwald got his by staring at a fire. The PC got his by seeing Thaos. The world needs some kind of Lethe to wipe the memories away, because it's far too easy to remember previous lives.

Durance, the hideously disfigured man (pox, burn scars, battle scars) full of bitterness and misplaced anger towards his goddess, who greets your character with the express desire to test and torment you until your "soul is shards in a bag of meat?" You want to romance that guy?

The Unreal 4 engine isn't suited to the isometric RPG style of games. Wouldn't mind playing a first-person view of Pillars, though. Could be fun.

Obsidian makes a novel, entertaining setup, then the publisher comes in and is all "No, don't do any of that, just repeat these cliches because they appeal to the lowest common denominator!" I can see it.

I do the same thing. After my first playthrough, I went nuts creating different characters until I finally forced myself to start playing. Once I advanced a little ways in I got attached and kept going. Of course, I've got a handful of chargen programs for other games that let me keep rolling up characters. I can't stop. I don't even play those games. Send help.

My biggest beef with the stronghold was that the defenses didn't really do anything. Enemy attackers just appeared in the middle of the fortress or field, and you had a regular battle. I'd have liked the gates to have HP that attackers had to get through, while you rain fire on them from above. Actually defend the fortress.

An amulet, cape, ten rings, ten toe rings, another ring someplace else, earrings, eyebrow studs, gold teeth, tattoos, subdermal implants... You gotta draw the line somewhere.

Something this thread made me wonder: Do you think that Thaos was right? He claims that before the Engwithan gods were made, the world was a vicious place where atrocity and depravity reigned. The presence of the gods stabilizes things and suppresses the worst of humanity. Thaos admits to performing hideous crimes to protect this secret. Genocide, destroying nations and more. What I would've liked to see is some actual evidence as to whether or not he was justified. Graphs, numbers, statistics about lives lost vs. lives saved. How damaging were the atrocities that the Engwithan people sacrificed themselves to stop? Are there more people living because of Thao's machinations? Are those numbers sufficient justification, or is killing a thousand to save a million still wrong? Is protecting the secret of the gods worth the brutal inquisitions he launched against people who's only crime was curiosity? We only have his testimony about the nature of the world before the gods, but considering that an entire advanced civilization sacrificed themselves for this, I'm inclined to believe that the pre-god world was a pretty cruddy place. But is global peace worth atrocity on a smaller level? If our only metric is number of lives saved, do we ignore issues that might be more important? Are there any issues that are more important? What sort of solution might you have come up with to deal with the pre-god situation? I hope these sorts of questions come up in the sequel, since the character now knows the truth.

Well, if you're a min-maxer who can't stand the named companions, you can sacrifice them all for their buffs and make your character even more OP.

I figured that all godlikes were rare, and that we only see so many of the "regular" types because of reward characters.

I think crowdfunding is great. I got the game for 25 bucks, when it was full-price at release. Even if Obsidian is raking in money hand over fist it's still a terrific deal for me. Everyone wins because the cost is spread out over so many people. I think they ought to capitalize on the success of Pillars and make a sequel or two before starting a new project. They'll still have all the lore and code fresh in their minds so they won't have to reference archives and get caught back up to speed like they would if they took a break for something else.

My first playthrough, on easy-mode, I had 42,000 when I made it to Twin Elms. It's a rough start, but pretty soon you've got more money than you know what to do with.

Well, let's take a look at some ways this could be interpreted. "Are there a lot of younger and newer people that are involved in designing and creating this game ? It would explain a lot about how refreshing the gameplay is while maintaining the standards of quality we're used to from Obsidian games." "Are there a lot of younger and newer people that are involved in designing and creating this game ? It would explain a lot about how Obsidian was able to reach out to a modern audience with a game based on an older engine." "Are there a lot of younger and newer people that are involved in designing and creating this game ? It would explain how they managed to capitalize on newer devices like Kickstarter in order to create a game that many publishers would find too risky to develop." And so on. Yes, you could interpret his comment negatively. But there's plenty of other ways to do it as well. Please try to take posts at face value, and don't read too deeply into them. As we can all see, making unfounded assumptions (how do you even read tone out of such a short statement?) leads to a spiral of negativity and zero help for the new person.

On one hand, I can see why people would immediately jump to the conclusion that he's being mean. On the other, the immediate inquisition and lack of helpfulness is kinda frightening. I went to the staff page and clicked a bunch of random names: Most of them seem to have been around to work on older IE games, suggesting that they're mostly in the early 30's (at youngest) to mid 40's (at oldest). So, no. Not a lot of younger and newer people were involved in ths game. At least not by my exceptionally small sample size and questionable research standards.

I think the real difficulty comes from not being able to cast protection spells before combat begins. Enemies will open up with domination/confusion, but you can't get the protection up in time. Such an arbitrary limitation that buffs can't be cast before combat anyways. Artificial difficulty is the worst difficulty.