Yosharian

> Her appearance is maybe the worst. Wow, so ugly. Are you for real. She's as cute as a button. That's a fan edit. This is the actual Ydwin portrait: You think I don't know that? That is the entire point I'm trying to make to this guy... I literally linked to that fan edit in my response to him but clearly he didn't get it. Edit: also, the 'actual' Ydwin portrait doesn't really look any more or less accurate than the one I posted, when compared to the actual in-game model But regardless, you have to be really picky to have your immersion ruined by very slight differences in facial structure in an isometric top-down RPG where the main interactions are through portrait pictures.

Mass Effect, probably. I don't know for sure but I think all the ME romances throughout the series have had on-screen sex scenes. (Andromeda doesn't count, it's not a Mass Effect game, it doesn't exist, *puts fingers in ears and sings gibberish*) Yeah I feel bad for women (or people who wanted a male romance, whatever your gender) players in BG2, the options are... not great.

Haha, you mean Madeleine?

> Her appearance is maybe the worst. Wow, so ugly. Are you for real. She's as cute as a button.

> not even in Bioware games > Straight male tends to have the best looking lady as romance interest and almost always has more potential love interest comparing to others. > most of the time the game was writing with the mindset of having a straight male as protagonist Clearly you haven't played any of the recent Bioware games. I'd definitely agree that this is the case for the Baldur's Gate series, though. > If you change a portrait, you won't change a 3d model, which is set in stone and is even more detailed than in PoE1 That's true but for the majority of the characters this won't make a huge difference. You can pick a portrait that's reasonably similar to the character's in-game model. Maia is an exception since she is green-skinned race, but there are some Aumaua portraits on the net and you could also look for Half-Orc portraits, they might fit. As for Xoti, are you seriously telling me you can't find a decent-looking latina portrait if you look online? Hell, this is another area where girls have it worse because it's much easier to find very attractive female portraits online than it is to find male ones. > Setting pale elf portrait to a char, who obviously has black hair and brown skin is strange and only breaks the immersion. Congrats, you spotted the problem with a portrait I grabbed off my hard drive in a matter of seconds. It was merely an example. > The main motivation of people asking to add her was interest in such type of female character What's your point? This doesn't seem relevant at all the discussion. We're discussing how character aesthetics affects your enjoyment of the game, and I'm pointing out that with a very small amount of work you can customize your NPCs quite a lot. > About Xoti, a human girl, being statistically more attractive to a human male (average player) - it is basic psychology. People feel more attracted towards people, not aliens or strange creatures. We may go for exotic, but are still programmed to get attracted to our kind. This works even on the level of human races, when in most cases a partner is usually found among the same race. I agree with this, maybe you were responding to someone else? Not quite sure I see the relevance here.

It's the challenge of playing on the hardest difficulty. Surely you understand what's appealing about that. Also, once you get used to POTD, the other difficulties are a little too easy. Sure the Steam Achievement is nice, but it's not really the main thing.

That is something I won’t ever understand. I was dying of boredom by hour 10. Vanilla Skyrim is pretty boring at times, yeah. It really isn't, because there aren't that many regulars that are actually active. We are just a small cult, if anything. So it's safe to say that we're like 2% of the Pillars playerbase, most don't even care about commenting on a forum. I've got 826. 300 hours here I have 800+ on Skyrim! How did you deal with the bugs? Even the mods that fix bugs create bugs according to the feedback. I have 50 hours in Skyrim and 30 in the Special Edition. Skyrim is reasonably stable and bug-free if you know how to set it up correctly. Mods do complicate matters. My last setup was reasonably stable. The occasional crash, but nothing too serious. No bugs that I remember. My last mod list (note: do not attempt to replicate this mod list, it is outdated):

This might be the best comment I have ever seen

I've got 826. 300 hours here I have 800+ on Skyrim!

> At this point, straight males seem to be in disadvantage, just compare the pools You don't know anything about what the romances will actually be. This is just supposition. > Xoti - most attractive to average player, she is human, but may be "I-belong-to-God" type, she is also a zealot, maybe to the point of religious fanatism. 'Player'? She's not a 'player'. She's a companion. > may be "I-belong-to-God" type, she is also a zealot, maybe to the point of religious fanatism. She may be X, Y or Z. But you don't know. Also, attractiveness is entirely customizable. The only thing that represents the character in this sense is the portrait, which can be modified. There is even a set of portraits going around which slightly modify the NPCs to make them more appealing aesthetically. So your argument is kind of silly. You could replace Xoti's picture with anything, here, with 120 seconds of clicking this is now Xoti's portrait: Hmm, suddenly your 'average looks' argument seems very silly doesn't it. If this was, for example, a Bioware game like Dragon Age: Inquisition, you'd have an argument, because the 3D models in those games can't be replaced or modified if a player finds them aesthetically unappealing. But this ain't that. > Pallegina - second in rate, but she is godlike, and extremely difficult to get along with, with very complicated set of views. That sounds like a very interesting romance to me. One of my all-time favourite romances in videogaming is Viconia from BG2, who is an absolute hell-hound to deal with, but is also a fascinating character. > Maia is... khmm... of certain constitution... (hell, she is huge). Since your comment here is solely on Maia's looks (which aren't even that bad, good god), it can be safely ignored (see above portrait comments). > Guys begging to add pale elf to companions list prove that the pool is not covering all types of preferences. Wait, what? I haven't seen a single 'guy' 'begging' for a pale elf companion. > still the diversity seems to be greater. Only 'better' based on your subjective opinion, and there's only one more romance option objectively speaking (assuming that all the ones you mentioned are actually romanceable, which we don't even know for sure), hardly a crime against humanity. What, you gonna break down and cry because the girls have ONE more romance option than you? DA:I was way worse in this regard. In BG2 the options for girls were incredibly worse, so I think I can deal with ONE (****ing ONE?) less option, considering there are three, and this isn't even a romance-focused game like Bioware's usual fare. I would be the first to complain if I thought there was some ****ed up agenda at work here (*coughDA:Icough*) but you're just making a big deal out of a bunch of opinionated suppositions.

Agreed. You have people on here and certain other forums bragging about how easy POTD is. Howver, for the majority of us, it's pretty hard, even for a CRPG veteran like myself. Bragging that POTD is easy? Well I haven't done that. Who's been bragging that it's easy? It's not easy, but it isn't incredibly difficult if you know game mechanics. I completely understand people not wanting to play POTD. It gets really easy but that’s more of a balancing issue than straight up “difficulty”. I find beginning of the game just right in Hard, and enjoyably challenging on PoTD, but before long you seriosuly outlevel content, so apart of some end game fights (dragons, bounties) the rest you will get through on autoattack. I feel the problem starts sometime after defiance bay, and gets much worse if you do White March1 around level 7 or so. Yeah it's pretty easy to outlevel a lot of the content. I don't mind that so much, though.

I also don't really like Pillars' combat music (aside from the epic boss combat music).

Agreed. You have people on here and certain other forums bragging about how easy POTD is. Howver, for the majority of us, it's pretty hard, even for a CRPG veteran like myself. Bragging that POTD is easy? Well I haven't done that. Who's been bragging that it's easy? It's not easy, but it isn't incredibly difficult if you know game mechanics. I completely understand people not wanting to play POTD.

There was a bug with werewolfs in BG2: Every time you loaded the game their recovery stacked. (Like the infinite stat stacking bug for PoE at release). I played BGT ( BG1+2+ToB together as one game) and when I was on the werewolf island in Bg1 it was impossible for me to kill the boss. I failed several times, loaded and tried again. After some tries I looked at him and found out that even after hitting him with max possible damage (crit with the best weapon and max strengh) he was completely healed less than half a second later. I gave up and killed him with console command, the only time I have ever cheated in an RPG. The smaller werewolfs are a piece of cake. Huh. Maybe that was it.

Expert mode is a massive ball sack hitting you in the face repeatedly

I'm sorry you appear to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, Tumblr is that way? *points* (Just poking fun, please don't be offended ;-])

First playthrough? No, Veteran. After that, I'll definitely play POTD. POTD isn't that hard if you know what you're doing. My most epic memory from Pillars 1 is trying to defeat a certain dragon on POTD mode the first time I tried it, with scaling turned on. I had no priest on this particular playthrough. It was painful, but very satisfying when I finally downed him. The experience reminded me of the first time I attempted to down the Shadow Dragon in BG2. I was utterly hopeless at the game at the time, having little-to-no game knowledge. I also remember coming up against werewolves and being absolutely dumbfounded at how strong they were: I literally couldn't kill them even with my full party wailing on them (now I know to kill them easily).

Depends how you define bad. What Josh said sounds perfectly fine to me. The game has a respec option so if you make mistakes you can always correct them.

This is a false equivalence. ... No, it's not. It was a polite and reserved manner to hint at the problem. Had he/she used racial, gender or politcal aspects as examples, it would have become clearer but maybe offensive. It is at the core the attitude of making the world as you like it by getting rid of people, in our nice game environment: by changing them, which was criticized. To the rest, I do not really care. They can make ambivalent characters with interchangeable sexuality according to the players behavior, a very efficient kind of game design, or create true characters with restricted sexual orientation, straight, homosexual and bisexual, as the reality is. In the latter case however I would prefer an additional way of creating a preferred "partner" besides the normal companions. The mercenary system is a good way for this. It also simulates reality because why should the player character pick only from the "ugly"companions? They have the personality, great, but lack the body ... To Anders et al., I did not understand the "hype" around him. BTW belonging to a minority does not make one a better human. So there can be jerks in any group. It wasn't a hint, it was a comparison, and it was a false equivalence. Hair colour is not remotely the same as sexuality. I really don't think that drawing a direct one-to-one comparison of hair color and sexuality was the point of that analogy.It clearly was.

This is a false equivalence. ... No, it's not. It was a polite and reserved manner to hint at the problem. Had he/she used racial, gender or politcal aspects as examples, it would have become clearer but maybe offensive. It is at the core the attitude of making the world as you like it by getting rid of people, in our nice game environment: by changing them, which was criticized. To the rest, I do not really care. They can make ambivalent characters with interchangeable sexuality according to the players behavior, a very efficient kind of game design, or create true characters with restricted sexual orientation, straight, homosexual and bisexual, as the reality is. In the latter case however I would prefer an additional way of creating a preferred "partner" besides the normal companions. The mercenary system is a good way for this. It also simulates reality because why should the player character pick only from the "ugly"companions? They have the personality, great, but lack the body ... To Anders et al., I did not understand the "hype" around him. BTW belonging to a minority does not make one a better human. So there can be jerks in any group. It wasn't a hint, it was a comparison, and it was a false equivalence. Hair colour is not remotely the same as sexuality.

Well it's obviously Avellone, he's always up to no good.

Well that doesn't sound like something that'd fly in the current political climate ;-)

> Does it really matter to anyone that their straight or gay romance is gay or straight when someone else plays? I think there are two issues for people here (I say for people because I personally don't care). The first is that writers want to write characters as individuals principally, which can possibly run contrary to arbitrarily making them bisexual in order to 'fit' male, female, gay or straight main characters. In other words a writer wants to write a romance because it feels natural to the character, not because they have to in order to fulfil a quota. Josh has said this several times I believe. The second is that some people feel that making any and all possible romances bisexual erases the visibility of under-represented sexualities. In other words people want representation specifically for gay romanceable NPCs. I guess the feeling is that crow-barring in gay romances isn't true representation. Also, some might say that it's unrealistic. That said I don't claim to fully understand the complaints about this particular feature so take this with a grain of salt. Edit: here, I found something which can probably explain it better than I can: https://www.out.com/popnography/2015/7/13/dorian-dragon-age-inquisition-why-gamings-breakout-gay-character-matters > Prior to Bioware's Dragon Age, games had occasionally featured LGBT characters, but in almost all cases, they were only queer if the player specifically made the choice that they should be. Dorian was the first major example of a character who could only be gay, after decades of characters who could only be straight. > "I suppose this aspect of Dorian will make him controversial in some corners, but I was glad to include it," series creator David Gaider told IGN in 2014. "It made writing Dorian a very personal experience for me, and I'm hopeful that will make him seem like a fully realized character to fans in the end." So you can see several things in this article, firstly that Gaider made a big point of the character's homosexuality being integral to his character rather than something that was simply bolted on for the sake of representation. Secondly you can see that it's a big deal for some people to have representation that is specifically for gay people. Make what you will of the rest of the article but the first half at least is instructive. --- Personally I don't give a flying **** if the character is gay, bi, or whatever, I just care if the character is well-written and aesthetically interesting.

This is a false equivalence. Also, the Anders thing requires a nuanced analysis because one of the things that annoyed a lot of people was that turning him down made you lose companion points with him, no matter how you did it, even if you tried to do it in the nicest way possible or tried to be extremely charismatic about it. It didn't help that Anders was pretty much despised by a lot of players anyway due to him being a whiny bitch. Not a great way to introduce a gay romance to a mainstream audience. I've no doubt 'ew I don't want gays in my games'-people exist, but I don't believe that that exact complaint was the main reason the Anders situation blew up the way it did. Zevran for example existed in DA1 and there wasn't such a big deal made about him.

I think it all comes down to what role health/endurance was supposed to fill. Its biggest advantage over current system was that health was a resource that was drained during each fight - you can heal all you want, but if you tank too much with one character he will run out of health. I thought it was a cool mechanic but the question is: what was it supposed to achieve? What I like about new injury system that it does force resting but only if you fail - let your people get knocked out. If health/endurace's role was to provide some kind of token perma death system and encourage resting if you get some serious not intended beating than injuries are a better way of doing it. However, I did like extra nuance that health added to each combat encounter. The question is: was it intended, and would bigger structure of Deadfire still support it. In PoE there were a lot of save zones - backtracking was save, traveling was save. Not so much in PoE. I don't know if random encounters were scrapped, of if they are still a thing in full release. If they are it makes sense for you team to always be on full or almost full health. PoE1 health was a trash mechanic because even if you played really conservatively you were forced to rest due to running out of health Really unenjoyable mechanic for me