Andraste

At no point during my life did I wake up one morning and think "I have decided to be sexually attracted to men." Nor could I decide to be attracted to women if I wanted to. (In my increasingly distant youth I kissed a few girls because they wanted to kiss me and I wanted to give them a fair shot, but unlike Katy Perry I did not like it.) People can choose how to act on their feelings, but not which feelings they have. I assume this is how it works for most people, straight or gay or bi or whatever.

It may be worth noting that there's already another quest in the game about actual, indisputable cannibalism - as in kith eating kith - in the game that has nothing to do with the Huana. It's about a group of Vailian (IIRC) sailors who were stranded on a remote island and survived by eating each other. So if Obsidian is depicting the Huana as cannibals, they aren't the only group being shown that way.

I'm always confused by why people complain that recent BioWare romances are '<3 dialogue <3 dialogue <3 dialogue sex.' It's not really more true of their recent games than it was of the older ones - maybe less, in fact. The romances with Zevran and Morrigan have the sex scenes early and the emotional connection develops afterwards. You can turn down sex with Alistair and Dorian but still continue the romance. All the DA2 and DAI romances have cut scenes and development that happens after any sex that occurs, and the romances with Solas and Josephine don't even have sex scenes in the first place. Seven out of the ten Andromeda romances have a fade to black, when there's even implied sex at all. Meanwhile, Anomen barely spoke to me after we slept together (until the expansion came out, anyway) and you could only bang the various Jade Empire love interests at the end of the game.

Actually, given what Dragon Age: Inquisition has revealed about the ancient elves, I suspect that franchise wouldn't work for them either. Plenty of shades of grey to be had there.

We don't actually know which characters are romanceable and by whom, so I think it's too early to tell which demographic is getting shafted. (Or not getting shafted, as the case may be.)

We can only hope! (Most of my favourite game romances end in tragedy.)

Praise Eothas! My Cipher will no longer be terrible, and that Druid/Ranger multiclass I want to make out of my first character is looking like it might actually be viable now. (Probably not a combination for power gamers regardless of how Might and Resolve work, but I love the roleplaying possibilities and at least she'll be able to do damage with weapons this way.)

I don't approve of all the mechanical changes, but I don't think that 'dumbing the game down' is why most of them are being made. Arguably the Health/Endurance split is being taken out because it confused lots of more casual players, but the rest of the alterations seem to have other reasons behind them. I suspect that the need to balance multiclass characters is the source of a lot of it. Based on the beta, I dare say there will be some changes I love, and some I dislike. So far: love the new rest system because I thought the way the last game handled resting was dumb and this is a much better use of food. Hate the replacement of Might with Strength because I'm going to have to completely change the way several of my characters work, and I liked them they way they were. To be honest I have never much liked Vancian casting, and I found Wizards, Priests and Druids over-powered in the first game so I'm fine with the changes they've made there. In the beta, I found myself having to think about when and how I used my spells a lot more than I do in the first game. More than once I ran out of casts early on and had to struggle through the rest of a fight, something that never happened to me in the first PoE, so I'm not sure that per-encounter spells actually make things easier.

Now, now, maybe there are TWO alexis13s on the board, and both of them like to assert that Obsidian are dumbing down Deadfire. Let's not leap to any hasty conclusions.

Iron Bull is pansexual and Josephine is bisexual. (I know some people hate the pan vs. bi discourse, but this is what their respective writers say, so.)

I will agree to this only if there is also a toggle to switch off any and all references to heterosexuality. Equality, right? As it is, a toggle for avoiding lesbian, gay and bi characters makes about as much sense as a toggle for avoiding people who like strawberry icecream.

I am also confused about why anyone would dig up a thread that was lasted posted to in August in order to suggest this. Of course, necromancy is just one of the many things that make PoE unsuitable for kids.

Yaaaaaaay! (April 3rd is perfect for me since I wanted to do one last perfect run of PoE 1, and I have a few other games to wrap up before I get to it.)

Nope. (Not on the character whose staff went missing, or on the Mercenary Wizard in the party.) I did have a couple of buffs up, though - Blessing and Holy Meditation, I think.

During the fight with the desert wurms in the new version of the beta, my Watcher's quarterstaff became invisible. He seemed to perform his animations correctly, but the staff itself was gone. It came back after I reloaded (because I died like a chump, not because of the invisible quarterstaff) and this problem has not recurred so far. In case it's relevant, the character is a Contemplative and had Swift Strikes active. He's a male Savannah human, it was a fine quarterstaff, he was wearing fine leather armor. Suffering some kind of debuff from the delemgan, too. (Sorry, I know that this is a pretty useless bug report. I'll let you know if it happens again and maybe I'll have some actual repro steps then.)

I fixed these, though the fixes may not be included in the next release. Yaaaaaaay! Thank you - the $20 I spent on the beta is now completely justified. (Not that I'm not enjoying it, and not that you probably wouldn't have changed this stuff eventually anyway, but it's nice to know that I helped in some small way.)

There don't appear to be any in the beta yet (or if there are I didn't find them) but the slot is called the Grimoire/Trinket slot (or words to that effect) so they should be in the finished game.

1. Why is the neck slot at the bottom of the character model in the inventory? The neck is at the top! 2. At the moment, it seems that you have to put things into the stash in order to pass them to other party members. We should be able to drag something from one character's inventory to another's without putting it somewhere else first. (Maybe there's a way to do this, but if so I have not found it.)

My first Watcher is definitely taking Eder and Pallegina - they never left her side during the first game, so I'm looking forward to adventuring with them again. Third companion will prooooobably be Xoti if priests are half as useful as they were in POE1. Then I'll rotate through Aloth, Maia, Serafen and Takehu until I find the one that fits my party set-up best.

I am also wondering this, because I got that dialogue at the end of The Bronze Beneath the Lake and suggested that they work with the Knights, but I still got the ending slide where the Dozens threw the Knights out of the city. I'm wondering if the wiki is wrong and there's some other variable involved, or if it's just bugged?

Yep. They charged my card yesterday.

Despite knowing virtually nothing about him, I voted for Tekēhu because he's two of my favourite classes combined in one. (Since this poll was made it's been confirmed on Reddit that he's a Chanter/Druid.)

The most interesting thing I learned was that Tekehu is indeed a Chanter/Druid. (Also how to spell Tekehu. Can't get my keyboard to make the proper mark over the second 'e' though.)

You're saying 'gender balance' like it's a good thing. What else would you expect from an Evol Feminist? Nothing, I guess, although I would like to at least expect the common decency not to ram their poisonous political agenda into a discussion about gaming. *shrug* Someone else brought it up, and I can never resist poking people who get triggered by the existence of feminist gamers. There is. There are six male companions in POE1, and five female ones. (And two of those are in the expansions; it's five vs. three in the base game.) Dragon Age: Origins has five male companions and three female ones, plus a male dog as a golem that used to be a woman as DLC. DA2 is the closest to an even ratio - four male companions and four female in the base game, but there's a fifth male companion available as DLC. Dragon Age: Inquisition has six male companions and three female. (There are two female advisors and one male, but it's still seven men and five women in the Inquisitor's inner circle.) The difference in numbers doesn't look like much, but the thing is that almost every cRPG has about the same ratio, if not even more tipped in the direction of male companions. I think Tyranny is the only one I can think of where it goes the other way. (Is this a big problem in the overall scheme of things? It is not. Would I still like to see it change? Yes, I would. I want to see more female characters in video games in general.)

Since BG the only games I played were Pillars and Tyranny, so I don't know nothing about Dragon Age or any other game. But you shurely can't complain about Pillars being not feminist enough. Joking aside, I don't have any Serious Feminist Issues with Pillars of Eternity. Like you say, it's a game with a lot of great female characters that treats women as people and has plenty of them that are important to the story and the world. Probably the only thing I would change on that score if I really were in charge of the game would be keeping Calisca alive to give us another female companion - and that's only because there's a long-term pattern of male companions outnumbering female companions in cRPGs that I would like to see shift.