Fenwick

Can anyone explain how the card pool works in quest mode? If I decide to switch characters, do I have to loot my old character to return those cards to the pool of available cards that I can find?

Unfortunately, my issue is a card reward bug (rather than power selection), and cycling through the characters doesn't do anything.

After finishing a quest, Ezren cannot select his Arcane Spell reward for level 26, no matter what I do. Selecting him does nothing, and the entire rewards page is unresponsive. Quitting, going the vault, etc. nothing resets as it always goes back to the quest rewards page. iOS 10.1.1 iPad 2 VER 704-20161116 PFID 13011EB7D64C6BCD Quest Mode (rewards screen - legendary difficulty) Valerios, Lem, Ezren, Kyra, Seelah, Merisiel Attached are the rewards screens, in the second one, I cannot proceed as selecting anything, including Ezren himself, does nothing.

This is where PoE exceeds the expectations. It looks better than any of the IE games. A lot better. Period. And this isn't fanboyism. I've not seen or heard of a single person, on any forum, who has looked at the IE games, then looked at PoE and came to any conclusion other than: PoE looks more beautiful. And the lies continue: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70418-is-it-me-or-baldurs-gate-look-better-than-poe/ While I think that Stun's post is full of hyperbole, gauging whether or not something looks better than another is a rather subjective thing. However, I think that the generally accepted opinion of the game is that it looks great and is fairly stunning. If we can't at least agree on that, then I don't think we'll meet anywhere in the middle.

The truly consumer-friendly option would be to simply not base reviews on pre-release code. If more sites followed that policy, embargoes would be irrelevant. Of course, most won't do it because they want day 1 site traffic. Well this isn't technically pre-release code, I assume that the keys given to reviewers is the "gold" version. Generally, the main reason publishers want to delay reviews until the release date in order to protect pre-orders against a low metacritic score. I don't really like release date embargoes, in general. I think they're generally bad for the consumer.

So there's is a release date embargo? Wasn't there just a huge crapstorm in the gaming community recently about enforced release date embargoes? Well I guess Kotaku won't be doing an early access review of it.

Is there a PoE review watch thread somewhere? Now that the game is in the wild, I'm curious to read the first impressions and reviews of the game. A game like this has been a long time coming. This is a particular itch that I've wanted needed to scratch for a very long time. Last year's Divinity: Original Sin helped, but didn't quite get me there. Thanks to Obsidian for helping me with my obsession!

My experience in the BB is that Constitution is a dump stat for most characters.

Respecs tend to only appear in games like RPGs where there is a good chance that early choices can cripple or harm a character's development. RPGs, in particular, often require an abundance of knowledge and system mastery at the beginning of the game (when your character is created) rather than the end. In fact, some of the choices you make at the beginning of an RPG when you have the least knowledge have the most impact on the game (class, race, stats, alignment, etc.). This is actually the opposite of how many games work today (e.g., introduce a mechanic, let the player explore that mechanic. Introduce another mechanic, let the player explore that new mechanic, etc.). While I'm not suggesting that players have the ability to change their class or race, respecs help alleviate this issue by allowing players to effectively make new decisions after they've had time to actually know their ramifications. I know that respecs are not popular choice, especially among grognards. And there is definitely something to be said about permanency and consequence that helps put the "RP" in "RPG". However, not everyone has the time to devote endless hours in restarting a character and exploring viable options in an already large game. The long path in developing a particular "build" can have the opposite effect that redneckdevil implied: when character choice is permanent, and a large amount of time is required for a build to mature, players will tend to go on the internet to find the best build and copy it rather than devote hours to exploring whether or not a particular build is viable. A good example of this is Diablo II, where most of the work (read: hours) was done by a select few, and copied by everyone else reading a forum. Sawyer has explained that he would like everything to be "viable", but that doesn't necessarily mean that at higher difficulty levels that building a party of 18 CON characters with terrible skills is going to work, regardless of your playing ability. I'm an RPG veteran. I completed the backer beta on Hard and played a bit on Path of the Damned. The beta is fairly short, but I quickly found some of my earlier choices and assumptions in this limited area to be wrong as far as what I was trying to achieve with a particular character. Why? Because I wasn't familiar with the system. After experience with the game, I quickly realized that I had made an incorrect choice, but I didn't have enough information at that time to recognize it. I personally would support some kind of respec, but with an associated cost as to make it non-trivial. In this way, there is still some consequence in character choices without forcing a player to restart a game with a character they feel isn't built the way they really want. Of course, once the game ships, someone will inevitably create a trainer that will allow you to respec, but it's unfortunate that one will have to go to some dark corner of the internet to download a 3rd party EXE to do it (talk about breaking narrative). Of course it's not a necessity that a player make all the "right" choices, but for some of us, that's one of the reasons we enjoy these types of games.