DozingDragon

I know I’m a bit late in responding to this, but Arcane Assault was in the game since launch, I even documented it here.

I think so? They have 20 "episodes" of the story posted, but it is labeled as "Season 1," so I am not sure if it is the whole thing. I have not listened to any of the "episodes," as I am really not interested in using the Bound app.

Did I miss an announcement about this coming out? It looks like the story is on the “Bound” app.

A lot of revival or "core" gamer franchises seem to have struggled with achieving sales with their sequels. Look at Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, and Dishonored 2. While those games are not necessarily CRPGs, they all reviewed relatively well, and I suspect they all targeted a similar demographic to PoE and Deadfire. Sure, you have some closer analogies with P:KM and D:OS 2, but the higher sales of those games were not predicted, and they simply demonstrate the unpredictability of the market especially when you look at the former examples. So yeah, sales expectations may have been higher for Deadfire based off of PoE's market performance, but what I am more interested in is what project the owners at Obsidian think they could have done instead of Deadfire that would have achieved better guaranteed sales. Commercial success is a fickle thing, and I think agonizing over one entry's less than stellar but profitable market performance is a bit goofy. Look at the Elder Scrolls, which also started out as a literal D&D derivative product. If I recall correctly, Daggerfall was a modest commercial success, but I believe both Battlespire and Redguard bombed in terms of sales. Well, the subsequent entry, Morrowind, for good or ill had incredible sales, perhaps due to a captive console market that was hungry for any RPG experience, but it nonetheless had the same folks behind it who made the previous commercial failures. If I were in Obsidian's position, I would just try to figure out what the strengths of Deadfire were, lean into them, while at the same time evolving the presentation to of those strengths to reach a broader audience. Maybe that means prioritizing turn-based gameplay to make the game more accessible to the console market, or perhaps it means something more drastic.

You might to be able to get by if you rely heavily on your companion characters to take care of the combat. You can invest your skill points to buff your companions, so that sort of build is probably viable. The only problem might be getting through the tutorial area without a companion, but that is a relatively small segment of the game.

Oh yeah, the effects from all the science weapons without any significant investment are great by themselves. Hopefully there might be some more added later on.

They are not unlockable, but IIRC you can have your appearance changed on the Groundbreaker after you finish a quest at the clinic. As far as DLC goes, who knows at this point.

Shrinking reduces enemy damage and it also increases the amount of damage enemies take. In practice, the increased damage seems to be enough to almost counteract the extra plasma armor mantisaurs have.

I encountered the same issue.

With Science 100, the cost for Tinkering science weapons caps at 200 bits per level, so it ends up being very cheap to have all five weapons at max level. The Shrink Ray has very low base damage, but the shrinking effect causes enemies to take substantially more damage, and with Pistols maxed out, Science maxed out, the Science Weapon Perks, and Vicar Max’s perk, you will be able to crit against Shrunken Enemies for tons of damage without really needing to aim at all. While needing to continuously fire the Shrink Ray felt weird at first, you never really need to reload, and the beam has a huge amount of range and hitscan.

I agree, custom map markers would be a huge quality of life improvement.

Just wait until he finds out about the Engwithan Salami Slicing Scheme angle of it.

The bug was the Guardian showing up after getting the assist from the dragon. This is documented in the patch notes somewhere.

You always fight the Guardian if you take the Independent/Anarchist route. So you can free the dragon and sail to Ukaizo without a faction and still fight the Guardian.

I would be very surprised to see Obsidian drop this IP entirely. Previously, a separate holding company held the rights to the Pillars IP, but that company was rolled back in to Obsidian before Microsoft completed its acquisition of Obsidian. Now that’s partly just due diligence on Microsoft’s part, but it is a decent reminder that the Pillars IP does have real value. Josh is still working on refining the Pillars tabletop system, even though Deadfire has reached the end of its support cycle. There are also rumors that one of Obsidian’s unannounced projects is going to be a Skyrim-like game, which could end up using the Pillars IP. One last thing: I recall Josh making some very vague allusions to making more games like Deadfire in the future during the Deadfire postmortem, but that he personally wants to take a break from making games like this for a while. So it might be a while before we see a third game, but that’s probably for the best.