JerekKruger

If you think that Obsidian could have produced anything similar to the minis you found pictures of for the price then yes, you need to think more about it. The minis you posted are all made by companies that (primarily at least) make minis. That means they own their own all the machines to cast them and employ a bunch of sculpters (well, these days often it's done using some sort of CAD, but let's call them sculpters anyway) to make the prototypes. Obsidian doesn't. No matter, Obsidian could just subcontract one of these companies right? Well possibly, but whilst the sculpters are working on the prototypes for Obsidian's limited run collectables they aren't working on something that company is going to be able to sell commercially, so they'll need to charge Obsidian a lot to make it worth their while. Now remember the purpose of Obsidian offering these minis to backers isn't to provide backers with sweet collectables: it's to raise more funds for developing Deadfire. So even if Obsidian could produce better minis for the $25 price tag they had attached to them (and I'm not sure they could given what I explained above), much of that $25 is not going to go to doing so. So the fact that $25 can buy you ~6 decently painted good quality commercial minis really doesn't say much about what to expect from Obsidian's $25 collectable minis.

What confusion? At no point did Obs indicate that they are planning to increase lvl cap. The only thing is the recent Brandon Adler response to question during stream that they might look intro xp distribution once all DLCs are out, to account for extra xp. Indeed. Not knowing whether something is going to happen in the future is not confusion. Confusion would be if Obsidian had said "we going to raise the level cap" in one place and said "we not going to raise the level cap" in another. As for why they may not raise it, it almost certainly has nothing to do with lack of money. As others have said the difficult (and costly) part of raising the cap is coming up with new abilities, but the latest beta patch has a bunch of new abilities for Rangers so clearly they aren't so cash strapped as to be unable to do so. I suspect it's a matter of balancing. The classes are far less balanced than they were in PoE1 at this stage, and whether or not you care about that Obsidian do. Adding new abilities with be levels throws the balance out of whack even more, so if guess that's why Obsidian don't want to do so. It could also be a case of the being nowhere to go from here. At max level a priest can summon an incarnation of their god. What exactly can you do to top that for a level 10 spell?

Depending on how you feel about it you could simply use the console to give yourself the breastplate at the appropriate time. You'll lose access to achievements of course, but it's a lot easier than modding it.

I think some abilities for Fighters and/or Paladins based around having a shield equipped would be cool, however I agree with Boeroer that general full attacks shouldn't trigger a bash attack from shields as doing so would take away from the current unique bashing shields.

I don't think the answer implies the existence of a disc though, but it would have been better if Obsidian either edited the question or made it clear in the answer that there wouldn't be discs. I agree that it's misleading.

Easy: suppose you hit both a beast and a wilder. You then get +1 Accuracy vs. Beasts when attacking Wilders, and +1 Accuracy vs. Wilders when attacking Beasts. It's great!

Read that carefully: the answer states that the purchaser "will receive their digital code in the box", it doesn't say the box will contain discs (the question does, but the question was, presumably, not written by Obsidian).

My sentiments exactly!

I'm glad to hear Deadfire helped you through a rough patch. I've found games a very useful tool for helping me through rough patches in the past: sometimes you just need something to distract you from the here and now for a bit and they do that well. As others have said you should definitely seek help from others (ideally a professional who is emotionally detached from your life, but do reach out to friends and family too if you think it'll help) but I suspect you already know that

That presupposes I consider the mess that is The Elder Scrolls character system to be a good example of a classless system. Obviously I don't, I consider it to be pile of garbage

Ideally this: But otherwise this:

As someone who used to be a pretty decent painter of miniatures (collected and played Warhammer for years) I've long ago learnt that "hand painted miniature" doesn't mean much, but yeah, this is particularly bad. It almost looks like the painter was actively trying to do a bad job.

I would very much like to see some form of blood based plate added to Deadfire. I've been watching Raven Darkholme's Twitch play through of BG2 as a solo Sorcerer. Once he reached a high enough level to learn the spell "Finger of Death" there were a surprising number of such wrong sounding phrases :D

Good point regarding THQ Nordic. I had assumed disc versions would simply be Steam versions that complete the original installation from the disc rather than downloading from Steam. After that, patching would still be handled by Steam. Of course if they aren't tied to Steam that would indeed be a headache for Obsidian to manage.

I'm not saying VE were behind the decision not to give physical tier backers actual DVDs (like you say, that precedes their involvement) but that they might have been behind the decision to have a physical edition for sale at release. At least some of the disappointment seems to stem from this fact.

Pure speculation on my part, but one possibility is the decision came from Versus Evil's. Perhaps VE decided they wanted to have a physical copy available but, having agreed a deal with Obsidian based on the costings from the original Fig campaign, didn't want to extend that physical version to those who backed at a "physical tier".

This. I long ago stopped wanting physical discs but I can still understand why people who do want them are annoyed by this, particularly given there are physical discs available for sale on Amazon, PoE1's physical tier came with discs, and the art work for Deadfire's tier showed a box with discs in it. Given there's an actual DVD copy of Deadfire for sale on Amazon I'm not sure it is a stretch.

I tend to agree. The relationship system doesn't add much (for me at least) and the introduction of the companion/sidekick divide has just made some players disgruntled. They should have simply called all non-mercenary joinable NPCs "companions" and simply varied the amount of content each one had behind the scenes (as was done in BG2 and PoE).

Don't you remember that time when Josh said, officially, that Obsidian were going to put all of their resources into upgrading Ydwin to a full companion with more content than any other companion and with a romance mini-game rivalling most dating simulators?

Could you point out where I claimed there weren't open world games in the past? If not, could you explain how the existence of open world games in the past is relevant?

I really hope it won't be since (i) open world games are boring (to me) and (ii) most CRPGs these days seem to be at least semi open world.

But what if I want 12 party members

I broadly agree, but ideally if I hit the cap with a decent chunk of content remaining I want most of that content to be challenging for a max level character. I like there to be some under levelled content remaining as it's nice to have the game emphasise the fact my character has grown powerful by having them fight enemies that were previously challenging and easily defeat them, but I want most of the content I do at max level to be challenging still. I think this is where both Deadfire and Pillars fall down a bit: if you're completionist you'll hit max level long before you exhaust all the sub max level content the game has to offer, and you'll find yourself fighting a lot of enemies that pose no challenge whatsoever. But yeah, I also prefer it if I spend a significant amount of time at max level so that I get to enjoy my completed character. This man is a wise individual :D

I'm 6'6" which is 199cm in Euro Dollars.