gkathellar

The whole game is 22 GB, probably you are downloading from the wrong link. Last patch is something like 7-10 MB (the main patch) plus various updated DLC updateds you reach something like 160-165 MB , so check better what you are downloading IIRC Humble doesn't do patching properly, and forces a complete reinstall.

QFT. It might even be okay if the Watcher were a defined character with a set personal arc - stories about futility in games can work if the narrative is character-driven. But because the Watcher is an almost completely blank slate, we have a plot-driven story in which you don't get to meaningfully impact the plot. Yes, and it would've been useful to a lot of people's understanding if the information had been discussed more than a handful of times, and had been an essential part of the game's narrative fabric rather than being thrown at you occasionally. People learn through repetition, which is why presenting the same information many times but with different framing and slight expansion is a standard narrative technique. And this is why we can’t have nice things: people who insist on having everything spoon-fed to them. I'm trying really hard not to interpret your point as, "the people who had a problem with this aspect of Deadfire are stupid and lazy," because that seems like setting up a strawman, but I'm not sure what else to take away from it. Would Deadfire be an inferior game if it spent more time exploring the intentions of the main antagonist (and thus making them easier to follow)? Would its worthiness necessarily be decreased if its accessibility were increased? My experience has been that just the opposite is true, and that when a piece of fiction's ground floor is harder to reach, that generally imposes a limit on its emotional and intellectual depth. Repetition + elaboration is a pretty typical storytelling technique that allows the audience member to engage with a point repeatedly, learning more each time and spending more time thinking about it and developing an opinion on it. This also reinforces that the information is important and that it should occupy the audience member's mental space, and teaches them to recognize references to it by way of certain symbols and cues. In longer works of fiction, the process becomes more important, as there's more ground to cover and more material to process. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I think a big part of good writing is the management of audience expectations, and if you're trying to tell your audience something and they're not hearing you, that's a sign that you could be managing their expectations better. Better communication can be done in all sorts of ways, of course. Big, memorable setpieces can minimize the need for repetition, although it's still useful to reinforce things. But the most straightforward approach for a dialogue-heavy game like Pillars is probably having conversations with different characters about the same or similar subjects, allowing for both the expansion of those characters and the elaboration of a subject at the same time. This is something I noticed very recently while replaying Jade Empire (for the fourth time, if that matters). Most information is given to you twice, and plot-relevant information many more times than that, but almost always with enough variation that your knowledge of the subject matter is expanded with each reiteration, and the presentation doesn't feel repetitious. Certainly I didn't notice the repetition on any of my prior three playthroughs (although I was younger and not as savvy), so anecdotally, that suggests it did its job quite well. This was hardly unusual - two memorable examples spring to mind in PS:T, which practically deluged you with its core questions, and Bastion, which managed a lot of its revelations by having Rucks repeat himself while elaborating or admitting some bit of willful omission. If you want, I can say, "people internalize information by repetition," instead of "people learn by repetition." That's not actually a different thing - learning is a continuous process of internalization, analysis, synthesis, refinement, and transformation - but I can say it that way.

Ooh, ooh, and after we beat Eothas, we can turn the statue into a giant god-fighting mecha!

Evasive roll - L3 Binding roots - L5 Evasive Fire - L5 Driving Flight - L5 .... And when I wrote about rogue, I mean their role in the party Evasive Roll is just Escape but 2 PL late And yeah, Rogue is The Single-Target Damage & Control Class, just as Ranger is The Pet Class. They do different things, but ranger takes a long time to get its non pet-effects.

Rogues doesn't has any AOE abilities, when ranger has full attack AOE with same price as crippling strike. ... at PL 8. You may notice that I specifically mentioned PL 7 as a break point for when the ranger becomes more interesting (which is bad design, imo - it'd be an improvement if rangers got more of their non-pet effects earlier, and got some strong pet effects later). That big tree full of debuffs, teleportation and invisibility notwithstanding, of course.

Rangers have lots of good abilities, but I wouldn't say they're particularly interesting, at least not until PL 7. Not particularly uninteresting, either - certainly Wounding Shot spam is no more boring than FoD spam, and they have the added micro of the pet in any case. But yeah, until PL 7-8, you're pretty much a less-complicated rogue with a pet.

More content for my favorite god and my favorite waifu sidekick? Calloo callay, oh frabjous day!

Resting and/or more svef.

And if that doesn't have a Galawain theme I will be miffed. The only available theme is Wael and it's invisible and inscrutable to everyone! Just like the backer physical goods! /badumtsss

Yes, and it would've been useful to a lot of people's understanding if the information had been discussed more than a handful of times, and had been an essential part of the game's narrative fabric rather than being thrown at you occasionally. People learn through repetition, which is why presenting the same information many times but with different framing and slight expansion is a standard narrative technique. Just going by this board (and I expect, since this board skews towards obsessive analysis, it's probably better here than average), a lot of people didn't take away what you did about Eothas' plans (obviously anecdotal, but for the purposes of this discussion and how much I care about it, that's good enough). If those plans weren't clearly communicated, that's a problem with the writing regardless of whether you, personally, followed it all without problems. I did in fact put that paragraph in parentheses because it got off topic while contemplating your larger point. Luckily, this isn't debate club, so my Internet Argument Points are safe. Snark aside, I thought I specifically said that while the means and motives were clear, the intended consequences were the part that could be taken as vague (in fact, I did say that, but I suppose I should've devoted more than a passing line to the point). Forgive me if I was vague, I'll rephrase. Eothas' plan can be construed as something like this: Step 1: Possess Adra statue Step 2: Break the wheel Step 3: ??? Step 4: Self-determination? So yeah, I think it's understandable how people could look at that and think, "wow that's a pretty vague plan." It's not the sole correct reading, but it's a reading. (Mind you, this is all a very "I think I can safely say I speak for others when I say," line of reasoning I've presented, so it's intrinsically specious on those grounds. It is what it is.)

And if that doesn't have a Galawain theme I will be miffed.

This is actually an issue where the enemy ship captain's corpse fails to spawn before the battle ends, thus preventing the item from ending up in the goodies.

You've been tricked. Easily over 90% of unique weapons had something you COULDN'T enchant yourself. Facts. PoE1's unique items were not necessarily compelling, but they were unique.

Some of this is, again, a writing issue. The accounting you gave is all very nice, but for many people that was not the takeaway. Gromnir's earlier point is applicable: huge exposition dumps are actually a pretty bad way of explaining these things. (There's also the fact that, moralizations aside, Eothas' plan as you describe it pretty much comes down to, "smash things without asking anyone's opinion, and let the little people sort it out." While the plan and motives there are pretty clear, the intended outcome is vague at best and infuriatingly disinterested in the specifics of mortal existence at worst. Maybe that's intentional: as Iovara said, Eothas is an ideal, and an ideal decoupled from reality is a grotesque thing.)

I understand Josh's position, and even agree with a good part of it, but I feel like dismissing his critics on the grounds that they were really just expecting a monomyth story and it's not his fault their expectations are all wrong is uh ... fat-headed? Haters gonna have some good points. Well, no, for two reasons (and I swear, I'll bring this back to Eothas). First: the Lady of Pain is not a character. The Lady of Pain is intended to be something more like gravity, or electromagnetism, and the fact that she has a face still worked against the Planescape's writers constantly and was something they had to constantly push back against (largely successfully, of course, but it still doesn't stop every third dummy from asking, "what if I beat up the lady of pain?"). She doesn't talk. She doesn't pay attention to anything or anyone in particular. Anyone who considers Her Serenity an enemy is either posturing or getting ready to jump off of a figurative cliff (Aoskar, I'm looking at you), not because she's got the biggest guns but because doing so is behavior analogous to an engineer who refuses to account for conservation of angular momentum on account of his political opposition to it. Second: the Lady of Pain is virtually never the driving force of a story. She's not an antagonist, or a protagonist. Her Serenity not a force for law or chaos, good or evil, or even really neutrality in the Planes, so much as she is a necessary conceit for Sigil, and by extension the entire setting, to function. She passes by, she looks mysterious, and if someone is really stupid they occasionally walk into the ocean that is Her Serenity and drown, but they are still pretty much entirely the architect of their own story. Even in Die, Vecna, Die!, her lone stint as a quest-giver, her reaction is mostly one of an immune system gauging its (inevitably successful) response, and the plot is actually driven by Godsmen being stupid and a lich getting too big for his britches. Eothas, on the other hand, is a character. He talks, he thinks, he has ambitions, ideas, motives, and standards. He moves the plot in general, not through passive presence but through intentional action, and a huge cross-section of what's happening on the sidelines is at least partially driven by his presence. The PC is specifically pursuing him, and has several brief exchanges with him even before the final confrontation. That doesn't mean you should be able to punch Eothas in the nose, but because he's for most intents and purposes a person, it's not unreasonable to reflexively assume that you will have the opportunity to respond to him as a person. Better communication with the player could have solved this problem. It's all well and good that Josh has an artistic vision, but I feel the game does a pretty mediocre job of getting across that you can't and shouldn't expect to fight or even meaningfully oppose the Shining God, and that you are present solely in an investigative capacity. A big part of successful storytelling is about managing audience expectations, and for better or worse, managing audience expectations as they relate to the aesthetic, formal, and thematic layers of the genre the story is placed in - a challenge which I think is even greater for games, because they have additional mechanical and presentational layers of genre to contend with. That's really difficult to do, and I have all the respect in the world for efforts to do so in a creative or interesting fashion, but artists don't get an exemption from critique, or even criticism, just because they tried real hard to do something clever (not even if they succeeded, really). If players arrived at the final conflict with Eothas expecting a big fight because that's what the game had given them some reason to expect, and Deadfire both failed to deliver on their expectations and failed to disabuse them of their expectations in a way that satisfied them, that's a problem with Deadfire. tl;dr I have concerns about saying peoples' complaints are a result of their wrong expectations and not how the game managed their expectations, as execution is everything. Well Eothas does have a chunk of your soul that you're wanting back so as not to die, so there's a measure of motivation stemming from that. Not to mention Berath who stuck a kill switch in your chest and tells you not to make her use it. That’s kinda sorta motivating also. Or, for those of us who play nice guys, there’s all the death and destruction to stop. But other than those three things, there’s no agency, drive, or motivation at all. I think what this fails to address is the ways that audience motivation, which is extrinsic to a narrative, is not necessarily identical to character motivation, which is intrinsic to the narrative. I'm going to get almost tautological for a moment, and point out life-or-death situations are compelling in real life because they're mandatory - if you could just leave, they wouldn't be life-or-death situations. The prospect and fear of death is a great intrinsic motive for a character, but since the audience member can put down the book, quit the game, or turn off the film at any time, their investment in the character's intrinsic motives needs to be earned. Deadfire doesn't neglect to do that, but I could definitely see how its efforts would not be strong enough for a lot of people.

Hey man, Blessed Harvest is almost worth all of your patron spells being awful! I mean it isn't, to be clear. But almost!

Infuse w/Vital Essence will dispel Confusion, so while the DoC breastplate and Modwyr are pretty good for a warlock, they're non-essential. Not actually necessarily helpful, though, since it's not reliable.

Exactly. The built-in console will disable achievements and has a bit of a learning curve. This one has an actual GUI and will allow you to make the same changes without the penalty. The only thing to keep in mind is that you probably want to uninstall it (takes 5-10 seconds, as it un/installs via injector) before patching the game, or your .exe can get messed up.

I would strongly advise just using this.

Mind = blown

The Engwithan gods are representations of their cultural values turned up to 11. Iovara has a line at the end of the first game that explains this (paraphrasing her: “anything taken to an extreme becomes grotesque”). Every mythology has a creation myth and an “end of the world” myth. Rymrgand is the latter. "Myth" being the key word here. Just because people believe it doesn't make it true. Rymrgand may well believe that his eventual victory is inevitable, but that doesn't make it true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe Yeah, but what does that have to do with Rymrgand? Entropy existed before him, it will exist long after his death (which will predate the heat death of the universe by a long time). Entropy isn't dependent on his existence, he's merely a charlatan who claims that it does. Does Rymrgand ever claim to be the cause of entropy? He very clearly enjoys entropy, and works in the interests of advancing it along his own inscrutable timeline, but I don't think there's any indication that he pretends to be its source.

Not really? I don't get that feeling even on PotD. If anything, melee characters have a much easier time of the early levels, just because they have a few more ability uses to start with.

It really isn't, except in the sense that if you're absolutely committed to the ranger class and absolutely committed to not having a pet, Ghost Heart is the only way to do that. But that's not exactly sound build advice, since a ranger without a pet is just a crappy rogue. Like it or not, Ranger is the pet class, and if you want to play a non-pet build, you should roll a different class. The main reason to pick Ghost Heart is that it's actually pretty good! In a party setting, the Ghost Heart's pet is a decent harasser. In a solo setting, the Ghost Heart's pet is an engagement-proof green circle on the field that requires a negligible drip-feed of Bond to maintain. And this is without going into Ghost Heart/Cipher, which is a big goofy pile of shenanigans. I was pondering something like that - good to hear that it works okay! What pet did you go with, incidentally?

FTFY. I agree with you, to be clear. I just feel like this is a detail that the game does a decent job of emphasizing that gets overlooked.

If you had something like "PoE Wizards: The Game," in which grimoire switching was a fundamental mechanic, it'd work. But as is, yeah, it's just an extra detail in a game where there's already a huge amount of information to absorb. It ends up as little other than a thing that some high-end builds or play strategies utilize.