Peanuckle

Well that was a lot of fun. Frustrating at some points, but I've logged a little over 45 hours of game-time and that's well worth the money I put into it. Great work, Obsidian. Overall, I'm happy with it. There are some nasty bugs, but the console commands let me work around them and patches will take care of those in time. I enjoyed the mechanics and gameplay, though I think some rudimentary AI (setting combat behaviors perhaps) would've gone a long way towards not dying as often as I did. I think the story could've been stronger if it didn't split its plot between your soul going mad, and Thaos' soul harvesting. The former is almost a side-note; you get some hallucinations, but it mostly serves as an impetus to pursue Thaos. It kinda feels like they tried to mix some Planescape: Torment in with Baldur's Gate and didn't quite get the levels right. The personal quest just didn't feel as compelling to me as the threat to the country - soulless infants are serious business. I was really wowed by the subject matter there. Especially with the various instances where you could see families taking care of still children. I think that was a really strong point, and it pulled me into the game more than anything else. That was what motivated me, rather than fixing my soul, to the point where the latter could've been dropped entirely and I wouldn't have noticed anything. In fact, the whole "you're going insane" plot was basically carried in a few text-boxes that you could completely ignore. I think it would have been stronger if there were periodic hallucinations, where instead of a purple haze and text, the game transitions to a scene from one of your past lives that you play out, only to come back to reality and see that your actions had real effects. Maybe you hurt someone, or destroyed something valuable. It'd give you more of a reason to get the problem fixed, I think. As it stands you can pretend it's not happening and just focus on saving the children. I didn't complete everything, though. Didn't finish the Endless Paths because of the 13th-floor door bug, never finished Durance's quest (it never seemed to advance even after I went through all the dialogue trees) and I never finished the Eskimo-knockoff's quest because she kinda irritated me. I was also kinda saddened by just how poorly my epilogue went; it felt like I got the worst endings for a lot of things, despite trying to be a good person and do the right thing. I must've put my faith in the wrong people, or maybe you just can't change some things after all. I enjoyed the more direct consequences for my actions. Having assassins come after me and people I spent time with was a nice touch (I was actually shocked and dismayed to see Seral's body in the streets after I paid her enough money for her to start a new life). But I didn't notice a whole lot of results from guiding characters down one path or another (telling Aloth to accept or dominate his other personality, wiping the Grieving Mother's memories or not). Maybe I'll notice more differences when I do a new playthrough with different choices. There's a whole lot of material and worldbuilding here, and I'm hopeful that Obsidian found this to be enough of a success to create a sequel or two for it. I'd love to keep playing in this setting.

Well, a significant portion of 77,000 people earned that reward, so of course we're going to be inundated with yellow-name NPCs. I just consider them background and move on. It would've been amazing if they were game-relevant (minor quest givers, dialogue with their stories, etc) but there's just too many to do that with. It'd be a whole game's worth of content.

I've recruited Sagani and went to the cliffs. Just after talking to the spirit there and getting a lead on where to find Persoq, Sagani starts a conversation with me and asks how my search for Thaos is coming along. I have no idea who this is. I think that she's referencing a questline I haven't started yet. Also, when first meeting Hiravais (when he's eating the deer) I have an option to say that I'm the duc's gamewarden, though I haven't even met the duc yet. There seems to be a lot of dialogue options tied to quests that are showing up even if you haven't completed those quests.

I think the crafting system is an improvement over BG's. I suppose there's a sense of "this is rare and powerful" to be had, but all that's happening is that you go on a fetch-quest and give the stuff to an NPC, then wait to receive goodies. That sort of system exists in Pillars as well; there's at least two quests to get a special item. However, I think being able to custom-make your own items is useful and entertaining. I like having options and not being restricted to a few key builds. In BG2, once you got certain items there was no point in fiddling with anything else. The treasure-hunt just stopped. In Pillars, you can tweak your character all number of ways and have novel strategies. Having lots of different options is better than having "the one true sword" IMO.

You can find a regular white wyrm pet in the 2nd level of the Endless Paths. One of the cracked eggs in one of the northern corners. I kinda wish pets could grow and become useful, like in Dungeon Siege 2. But having that little guy fly around is still pretty cool.

For those who want to keep playing and aren't worried about achievements, you can work around this issue by using the command console. press the tilde key (~) then press Enter to open the console. Type irolls20s and press enter to activate cheat/debug mode. Then open the console again, type ManageParty and press enter. This cheat will let you manage your party anywhere as if you were in the stronghold. You can move the ranger character out of your party and continue as normal. I also ran into this bug, but before I knew about the console. What I did was strip my ranger down and send her to her death. Same result, but I had to hire a new adventurer.

Kinda solved my own problem with the cheat codes. Activate cheat mode (hit ~, enter) and type "ManageParty." It'll bring up the management screen as though you were in your stronghold. You can then move the bugged character out of the party. They'll still be in your roster of recruitable people, and you'll disable achievements, but you'll be able to play the game.

So I had a glitch where the game gave me a *NAME ERROR* character, no picture or anything, stuck inside the terrain. I used the console to manage my party and dismiss them, letting me continue the game. If I save and load, the console will be deactivated, right? Will that let me continue to earn achievements, or is that game achievement-nullified forever?

First off, I love this game. Worth every dollar I backed it with. However, once I started delving into the Endless Paths, I started hitting the wall of bugs. I got the "ranger companion in terrain" bug, and since I couldn't dismiss the ranger outside my stronghold, I decided to kill her. Stripped her down and sent her into monsters. Problem solved. However, after I moved to another level, a blank character square appeared in my party roster. The character was inside the terrain, and now I can't leave the area OR get it kill OR dismiss it. So that's two saves borked, maybe more, and I'm concerned that the game is just going to give me glitched characters at any moment for no reason, stopping me in my tracks. Here's a link to the .zip. Hope mediafire is okay because I don't have a dropbox. https://www.mediafire.com/?aifwy05to4d6f5w It's my understanding that there's a cheat mode, though at this point it might be a debug mode. Is there a command to remove characters from the party?