DozingDragon

So it looks like it's set in Aedyr, right? Broken crown of Woedica (with a sword through it?), mentions of an empire, and oaths.

Oh, they seemed to struggle a lot to actually get their offering circulars out initially. You can check out their initial filings, amended filings, and correspondence with the SEC here.

I remember feeling like it was a red flag when Fig seemed to be surprised when the SEC came knocking regarding the sale of securities.

I think the only Pillars project that has a guaranteed future at this point is a final version of the tabletop rpg. It’s possible that the rumored Skyrim-type game that’s being developed will use Eora as a setting, but frankly they could just be creating a new setting for that as well. And despite his protestations, the project Josh Sawyer is currently working on (which might be a text heavy mystery rpg set in a monastery with influences from The Name of the Rose and Cadafel) will probably have to wrap up before another Pillars game happens. Regardless, I suspect that any future game will be dependent on how BG3 does, and how receptive Microsoft would be to funding a slightly different take on Pillars that includes multiplayer to support their gamepass program.

The lack of documentation for some things in this game is frustrating at times. I am pretty sure that the lower difficulty settings do alter either the player’s or NPC stats in some way, but I cannot remember where I saw it laid out. Maybe it was in some patch notes?

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.