JerekKruger

That's the second time you're misrepresented what was said. When asked whether it would be possible to mod the game to increase the party size the answer given was "yes, but it will be tricky because of the UI" (I paraphrase of course). You've contorted that into the weird idea that the devs designed the UI first then went "oh derp, this UI doesn't work with a party of six, oh well let's just drop it to five". There's no evidence for this view and it runs counter to the way things are developed (things like UI get designed later specifically to avoid problems like this). There's also a much more plausible explanation: Obsidian decided on a party size of five for other reasons (be it path finding, encounter design, reducing visual overload or simply because 5 is Josh's favourite number) then designed a UI around this (in the same way PoE's UI was designed around a six person party). That this makes modding a larger party size harder shouldn't come as a surprise since on top of changing the game code to allow you to have more people in your party, you'd have to find some way to give access to the extra characters' inventories and character sheets and so on since the UI wouldn't natively do so. I can pretty much guarantee that there would have been the same problems raising the party size of PoE to 7 say.

Here you go: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/91241-josh-sawyer-something-awful-poe2-posts/?p=1879801 Not much information yet.

No name has been given, but Josh has confirmed that there will be a shapeshifting specialised Druid subclass (on SA I believe).

Actually if the classes in Deadfire are fairly similar to those in PoE then I can already envisage a rather cool Paladin/Priest build which is all about damage dealing and not at all about helping others. There are already Paladin builds that take Scion of Flame to boost the damage of Flames of Devotion and Sacred Immolation, often using various items with bound fire spells as well to maximise the benefit. Priests also have a surprisingly large repertoire of very powerful fire based spells. A Paladin/Priest could be made into a very cool frontline flame based combatant, a job I don't think either could do half as well on their own. In particular, if it were possible to get access to both Sacred Immolation and Minor Avatar (both gained at level 13) the combination would be amazing. So, there you go, a Paladin/Priest build that can do something neither class really does by themselves, and in fact abandons the shared aspect of both classes.

Agreed! One of the disappointing things about companions in PoE was that (apart from Durance and GM) as soon as you met them you could burn through all their character dialogue. I think it would be very cool if the amount that each companion was willing to reveal about themselves grew as they travelled with the Watcher and gained his/her trust.

Do you understand the notion of an opinion Lanyon, because I am fairly certain that what kanisatha was expressing there was their opinion. The fact that there is an active community around Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 does not mean that kanisatha is wrong about how they feel about BG2. As for whether PoE will ever have the same following that the BG series has I suspect you might be right, but not for the reasons you assume. After the release of IWD2 there were no more IE-style isometric RPGs (very few isometric RPGs at all in fact). Developers decided that 3D was the way forwards, and fans of the old style had no choice but to turn reply the existing ones and, unsurprisingly, a modding community sprung up to extend replayability. Meanwhile with PoE we've got a sequel on the books, we had Tyranny (which I've yet to play) and we'll have Tides of Numenera. Slightly further afield we have games like Divinity Original Sin and its sequel. If all goes well, fans to more old school RPGs aren't going to find themselves in the position they did in the early 2000s and so aren't going to be forced to replay the same games over and over again. I very much hope that in three or four years time I will be looking forward to PoE3, or another isometric title set in the Eora or even a different IP. I used to be a serial replayer of BG2: playing through it every six months or so with a different character, but I haven't done so in a while now and a large part of why that is is because I've got PoE instead, and despite having played through PoE four or five times it's still a lot fresher than BG2 (the dialogue of which I could quote verbatim in many places).

At least our quest isn't in vain... is it?

Oh that was the subclass I was talking about.

Harsh, but fair. I don't know if it was observation bias, but it always seemed like Khalid was the only character in BG1 to ever lose his morale. Given his personality, I always wondered whether there was a hidden penalty to his morale that made this happen more often.

Sounds good to me

If you do include the ability for lightning to strike characters please include an option to turn it off. It's a cool and funny option, but I suspect the novelty will eventually wear off and having to reload periodically will grow tiresome

Luckily real world history is full of non-European cultures who used armour which we can use as inspiration for realistic looking armour. Also there don't seem to be all that many purely Elven or Dwarven nations or communities (the Pale Elves of the White that Wends are an obvious exception, but they don't seem like a group for whom armour is a top priority), instead Dwarfs and Elves seem to exist alongside Humans, Orlans and, to a lesser extend Aumaua. Given that all kith have essentially the same basic body shape and distribution of vital organs, one would expect the culture they come from to have a bigger impact on the style of armour they wear than their race (e.g. you'd expect an aedyran elf to wear armour more similar to an aedyran human than a vailian elf).

Go look up the famous painting of Emperor Charles V wearing his plate armour. This is perhaps the most powerful and wealthy man in Europe in his time, and what does his armour look like? It looks like fairly normal plate armour of the era, but decorated more intricately. Why doesn't this hugely important individual have armour that, underneath the decoration, is the same as the low ranking knights far beneath him? Because this armour worked: it was the culmination of hundreds, if not thousands of years of first hand experience of what did and didn't work when it came to protecting soldiers on the battlefield. What you describe as badass would have been, at best, pointless additional weight, and possibly have limited mobility of joints or provided enemies with handy levels to grab when fighting in hand-to-hand. And again, you have a strange view of what a run of the mill trooper was wearing. Plate armour was inordinately expensive and the days where a lord or government would provide good quality equipment to their armies were a long way in the future. The vast majority of semi-professional soldiers would have been wearing brigandine or similar armour, and even some of the landed knightly classes might not have been able to afford plate. Also remember, the plate armour we see preserved in museums is rarely typical quality armour, it's almost always high quality examples since cheaper, lower quality armour would usually have been recycled after it became obsolete. So when you see the nice shiny classic Gothic, Italian or Greenwich plate armours you should be thinking "this is the armour of a wealthy individual", not "this is what everyone was wearing at the time". EDIT: here's Charles V in armour - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Karl_V_1605.jpg

I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement that Paladins are Fighter/Priests by default, but accepting this premise for the sake of argument: a Paladin/Priest could be the single best support class there is given that both classes have great support abilities which don't wholly overlap; Paladin/Fighter could be an amazing tank, combing the Paladin's innate superior defences with the Fighters various tank specific talents and abilities; Fighter/Priest could simply be a more traditional D&D style priest i.e. a decent front liner fighter who is also a good spellcaster. Well, many Monk builds already take Apprentice Sneak Attack (which will presumably be removed in favour of actual dual classing) so a Monk/Rogue already seems an obvious choice. A Monk/Fighter would have access to lots of abilities that don't require wounds to activate, which would be a useful addition. Monk/Barbarians speak for themselves if Carnage remains in the game.

Well, it's likely that before the battle begun Alexander formed a plan for it, part of which might have been "focus the attack on the weaker flank". If so, I'd say that's strategy, though the actual execution of that plan is of course tactical.

Nature's far too high level to still get xp from killing dragons

Hah! That's pretty cool. I mean it's obviously an instant reload, but still.

Wait, I played BG1 through loads of times and don't recall thunder storms firing random bolts that could actually hit characters. Did I miss out on this completely?

At least one fan of the IE games disagrees with you, and I suspect I am far from alone. What I wanted was a return to the isometric PoV with beautiful individually designed maps, to tactical real time with pause combat, and to a deep story. These were the things the made IE games great to me, not the individual mechanical elements ported over from tabletop AD&D, and certainly not the arbitrary party size limit.

Urgh! Now I have an image of Edér "petting" himself whilst spiritshifted.

I have a fairly good idea why he did, but I don't want to risk spoiling anything you haven't seen yet.

I ran a Kind Wayfarer build which wielded Tidefall (available fairly early in the game) and the killing was fine. You're not doing single target damage like a druid can but you make up for that by remaining pretty damn tanky, having good support skills and at higher levels by doing very good AoE damage. As for how a Kind Wayfarer is as a tank: all Paladins can be very good tanks. The order is a fairly minimal aspect of the class.

First off, kudos to your girlfriend Gairnulf, those are really nice and exactly the sort of sketch drawings I miss from the old IE games. Second, do we have a concrete reason to assume these sorts of images won't be in Deadfire? I am sure it's something Josh has mentioned before as something he would like to include, and also that the new version of Unity makes it easier to do. I'm guessing if they do include them then it'll also be easier to mod new ones in.

Possibly. It depends on the class and on the creativity of Obsidian I guess. Perhaps it's worth giving some examples of kits in BG2 to give some idea of how this might work. BG2 had the Fighter class, and the generic Fighter had all the abilities of a Fighter with no bonuses or penalties. You could then pick one of three kits: Berserker, Kensai or Mage Slayer (or Hunter, I can't remember). The Berserker got an additional ability that the base Fighter didn't called, unsurprisingly, Berserk, which temporarily gave a buff to combat ability and immunity to various afflictions. In exchange for this, the Berserker was prohibited from raising their proficiency in ranged weapons past the lowest level. The Kensai was a little more complicated. It gained a passive bonus to accuracy and damage every X levels, and a special per rest attack that did huge damage, but in exchange for this it couldn't wear any armour or use several different categories of items. So what does this tell us about subclasses in Deadfire? Possibly nothing of course, but my guess is the following. Each class's base version will be fairly similar to their current incarnation in PoE. Each subclass will then give various bonuses and penalties (for example there's a ranger subclass that doesn't have a pet, but my guess is they'll be better with their ranged weapon as a result). On top of this, I suspect certain class abilities will be off limits to each subclass (the petless ranger won't be able to take pet improving abilities obviously) and perhaps will have some new, subclass unique ability choices to replace those they lose access to (BG2 didn't really have this because most classes didn't get many abilities at all).

I wouldn't try to understand. The extreme anti-5 character party crowd have gone way past explaining why they don't like the reduction and moved onto doom saying.