The Gaming Den

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I remember asking this before, but I forgot and/or am too lazy to search back through this thread, so I'll ask again:

I'm doing a clean re-install of Skyrim (as opposed to the last one where I uninstalled the game but didn't do anything else and had lots of stuff still in various folders all over my computer. Hopefully the 6,000+ files I just deleted are all of them...). Anyway, after having lots of CDT errors that caused me to stop playing, does anyone recommend a program that helps clean up your load order and whatnot to prevent that?

If you have mods out of order and that is the issue I use WyreBash, it doesn't help making sure all the files are in the right places or installing, but it can guarantee that you have the right load order, and for that it is really easy to use.

You can find your answers to recovery time (which is equal to the animation time of the attack/spell) on the forums if you want to satisfy your curiousity but youre right they seriously fucked up not explaining this shit in serious detail.

In the same vein are the annoying fucking talents that aren't clear what they will apply to. Does marksman also grant spell accuracy? No. But the wood elf racial does. Guns claim to be two handed so does two handed style work on them? Because the talent doesn't say its melee only. Except it is melee only. This goes against their stated design goal of making this shit transparent so players don't accidentally fuck themselves. It's why Might applies to all damage regardless of source. To keep things simple. I guess whoever was responsible for talents didn't get the memo. Also like Whipstitch said they couldn't resist adding a lot of bullshit talents you'll never take because you only get 6 so why the fuck would anyone want bear's fortitude?!

What really bothers me is this goddamn! enchanting system. Why are the enchants I can add so limited? Only 3 general types and one of each. Why can I only override the quality tier enchants!? Why can't I just fill the enchantment limit with Proof type enchants if that's what I want? That wouldn't be overpowered.

There are some incredibly awesome unique armor models with shit magical effects I want to use for their looks. Why can't I add some of the magical effects of other magical items. If I want Second Chance (and I do) why the fuck can't I just put that on the armor I like? Im paying money, creature parts, plants and gems so let me fucking add it! Its not balance. I can just wear the armor that already has it but Id rather add it to the kewler looking armor but no fuck you. WTF Obsidian? I know you can make a better system than this. You have before!

That said I like the companions (once I cheated to overcome their shitty attribute spreads and talent choices.) personally. Their voice acting has been just fine. In what universe is Durance not Minsc level entertaining? He's not buffoonish like Minsc but the dude is fucking just as awesome crazy. He loathes everything. Even his own god.

I might not have been using Durance because his voice actor makes me cringe, as does most of the voice acting, hence why I made my own six-person party ASAP and gave them no voices.

So, I've just gottent Grieving Mother. Her character is sort of interesting, what little I've seen of her, but her build... Fuuuuck, she's basically unusable as is.

I'm also slightly disappointed that Cipher's interactions with her ammount to better remembering her memories.

Moderators on the Obsidian forum are mocking "munchkins" complaining about poorly built characters.

The depressing part is that Grieving Mother is still probably one of the better regarded canon companions on the Obsidian forums, perhaps justifiably. I mean, yeah, you may as well set those points in Perception on fire for all the good they do her, but Biting Whip is still one of the best talents available to ranged characters and she's still running on an overall favorable resource schedule. That sounds like faint praise, but man, look at the assholes she's competing with for a slot! Eder and Pallegina make OK tanks, but many groups won't bother to field both and some may field neither if the PC is a tank. Meanwhile, Aloth, Hiravius and Sagani are her main competitors in terms of sheer damage potential and frankly they're not built particularly well either. Blunderuss and Mind Blade spam is going to end up in a lot of groups virtually by default.

I only use a party of my own bitches leveled from character creation to not suck dick. Hey fucking Obsidian, if you want me to even hear any of your stupid Companion's story, they need to not suck dick.

Grieving Mother is the one companion I dislike. I can't stand reading her interactions. Rothfuss didn't write a companion for PoE did he? That was just Torment? Because fuck it reads exactly like that over-rated piece of shit. Did someone decide to copy Rothfuss? Ellipses in every other sentence. Nonsense descriptions and bullshit "prose." Why choose one word when you can add two other synonyms one after another to show off you own a thesaurus.

What annoys me about the NPC debate is some people on the forums keep trying to claim BG companions were all also totally shitty. Which is true for some of them. The jokes and totally forgettable ones like Skye, Garrick or Tiax etc. But the most popular ones are the kickass companions some of whom had exceptionally high attributes they needed most and were specially made to be even more powerful. Corran, Minsc (without his stats this guy would have been as well liked as Tiax. Funny for a minute but you wouldn't keep him around.), Imoen(Dual Classed), Edwin, Kagain, Viconia. Those are the npcs most people ended up with at least a few of in their party. Less great ones also had some ways to overcome their weaknesses. Khalid actually makes a decent archer. There were also something like 16 npcs so some being piss weak wasn't a big deal.

The correct response to "stop whining like some dirty rollplayer," is "why are you so determined to keep kicking roleplayers in the balls for wanting to hear your NPC's stories?"

I'll probably grab PoE in forever from now when it's ten bucks. It's obviously never going to be proper turn-based like it should be (did anyone actually think real-time improved the Infinity Engine games, or just sucked every bit of tactical play out of them?), but by then the internet will have finished documenting the bullshit the developers should have, the NPC's will be patched into not shit or the internet will mod them/the cheat engine community will save the day, and the bugs'll be gone. The official community will still presumably be player-hating twats, but hey. When aren't they?

DSMatticus wrote:I'll probably grab PoE in forever from now when it's ten bucks. It's obviously never going to be proper turn-based like it should be (did anyone actually think real-time improved the Infinity Engine games, or just sucked every bit of tactical play out of them?)

It's not impossible the game could be modded to TB. Unlikely but not impossible. How good a TB system could be cobbled together though I don't know.

Sadly yes there are people that can't separate something that was bad in a game they liked. If they liked the game then everything is good and sacred from that game. I shit you not there were people seriously complaining about being able to loot multiple corpses at once so Obsidian made it a toggle. When Torment had a poll for whether the game should be TB or RtwP it was split like 52 to 48% in favor of TB. And that was with the devs stacking the deck in TB's favor.

Shady314 wrote:What annoys me about the NPC debate is some people on the forums keep trying to claim BG companions were all also totally shitty.

The other thing people seem to conveniently forget is that AD&D ability tables mostly featured a few sharp break points surrounding a wide band of numbers that gave you bupkiss. That means even some of the "shitty" characters you mentioned are only a point or two worse than characters with objectively higher numbers--unless you plan to dual class the difference between Imoen (whose stats are so good you suspect she blew the DM) and Skie (who nobody ever uses) is exactly one hit point per level. Hell, even poor Tiax is secretly a special snowflake by table top standards: he has max hitpoints for his class combo, decent AC and his own friggin' special summon ability. FFS, the final roster on my BG1 evil run was Kagain, Edwin, Vicy, Tiax and Faldorn. Most players seem to hate at least 2 people in the group I just listed but it was still more than enough to really stomp some ass.

Whipstitch wrote:Imoen (whose stats are so good you suspect she blew the DM)

The model for Imoen's Baldur's Gate 1 portrait was the wife of the team's lead terrain artist, Dean Andersen. So kinda.

Hey Dean what kind of stats would you say your wife has? Well she is soooo pretty. And super smart. And oh god she is the best with her hands. She can do this one thing for hours.

Strength 9
Dexterity 18
Constitution 16
Intelligence 17
Wisdom 11
Charisma 16

I'm still early enough in my playthrough that I'm saving up funds for all custom companions, because one thing worse than enduring insipid characters in a game is people discussing those characters' role in game canon. I'm curious about a couple of party loadouts, primarily regarding multiple chanters. Staggering the phrase order seems like it would allow 3 chanters to keep busy without overlap, at least until 3rd level phrases become available. My current aim was 3 chanters, 2 paladins (low might/dex orlan) and 1 rogue, to lure enemies in.
Is that shooting oneself in the foot?

There's only two phrases I found myself caring about. Ila Knocked and Aesfluberdegibit uh the fire weapons one. Ila Knocked is amazing. All your ranged users look like theyre on crystal meth reloading in like a second. So I'd say you really only want two chanters max though I did want to try out a chanter with fast runner and boots of speed using the rime phrase and running all around the enemies. Im just waiting till the patch comes because currently that causes serious save/loading lag. A third chanter could be running one of those debuff chants that frighten and their chant aoe can be pretty huge. Frighten lowers enemy accuracy and deflection so having that running constantly is not going to shoot yourself in the foot at all. I bet I could make 6 chanters kick ass even on PotD. They're actually one of the best classes. IMO

You only need I believe 600 coppers for a full level 1 party which should take like 20 minutes. I wouldn't take more than one paladin. You can build them to be almost invincible so one works as well as two.
Anyways the game is quite easy if you aren't playing PotD so expect your paladins alone to trivialize content very quickly to say nothing of your party.

Yeah, difficulty wise, I'm playing on Path of the Damned, and I'm not very far because I have a lot of better things to do, but wholly shit is this game easy. Like, I can only imagine how easy it must be on every other difficulty setting, because from what I read, Path of the Damned gives enemies more HP and/or damage, and makes you fight all the enemies from easy to hard, but hard to easy just have different enemies. So I should be fighting 3 times as many enemies as hard or medium, but I'm barely ever fighting anyone.

Though also, the easy mode AoE effects make it sort of irrelevant if I even ever did start fighting actual large groups.

This game is way the fuck easier than BG/BG II.

Shady314 wrote:Grieving Mother is the one companion I dislike. I can't stand reading her interactions. Rothfuss didn't write a companion for PoE did he? That was just Torment? Because fuck it reads exactly like that over-rated piece of shit. Did someone decide to copy Rothfuss? Ellipses in every other sentence. Nonsense descriptions and bullshit "prose." Why choose one word when you can add two other synonyms one after another to show off you own a thesaurus.

What annoys me about the NPC debate is some people on the forums keep trying to claim BG companions were all also totally shitty. Which is true for some of them. The jokes and totally forgettable ones like Skye, Garrick or Tiax etc. But the most popular ones are the kickass companions some of whom had exceptionally high attributes they needed most and were specially made to be even more powerful. Corran, Minsc (without his stats this guy would have been as well liked as Tiax. Funny for a minute but you wouldn't keep him around.), Imoen(Dual Classed), Edwin, Kagain, Viconia. Those are the npcs most people ended up with at least a few of in their party. Less great ones also had some ways to overcome their weaknesses. Khalid actually makes a decent archer. There were also something like 16 npcs so some being piss weak wasn't a big deal.

Grieving Mother was written by Chris Avellone himself.

Nebuchadnezzar wrote:I'm still early enough in my playthrough that I'm saving up funds for all custom companions, because one thing worse than enduring insipid characters in a game is people discussing those characters' role in game canon. I'm curious about a couple of party loadouts, primarily regarding multiple chanters. Staggering the phrase order seems like it would allow 3 chanters to keep busy without overlap, at least until 3rd level phrases become available. My current aim was 3 chanters, 2 paladins (low might/dex orlan) and 1 rogue, to lure enemies in.
Is that shooting oneself in the foot?

Sort of, because chanters are not very good for this game. Their abilities are okay, and their invocations are okay, but by the time Kana can use invocations, I'm already mopping up the last enemies. Combat is pretty short in PoE. However, if you want to use chanters, Kana Rue is actually pretty decent. Rush to Cad Nue location as early as you can and grab him.

Longes wrote:Grieving Mother was written by Chris Avellone himself.

Then I hope he did a much better for whatever he wrote in Torment.
I know he wasn't copying Cole from DAI but it is unfortunate Grieving Mother has the same "people forgot her including your party members thing." It was stupid with Sidereals in Exalted and it's stupid here too. And the ellipses. Oh god I am not being hyperbolic they are everywhere in her dialogue.

Do you know who wrote Durance or Hiravias? Im loving those two.

Shady314 wrote:

Longes wrote:Grieving Mother was written by Chris Avellone himself.

Then I hope he did a much better for whatever he wrote in Torment.
I know he wasn't copying Cole from DAI but it is unfortunate Grieving Mother has the same "people forgot her including your party members thing." It was stupid with Sidereals in Exalted and it's stupid here too. And the ellipses. Oh god I am not being hyperbolic they are everywhere in her dialogue.

Do you know who wrote Durance or Hiravias? Im loving those two.

Durance was also written by Chris Avelone. No information on Hiravias.

inkle releases Book 3 of Sorcery! for iOS and Android in two weeks. The ports are amazing, and anyone who hadn't played books 1 and 2 yet should do so.

Just got this from the Obsidian boards. Posted by Eric Fenstermaker.

Aloth - Carrie Patel
Durance - Chris Avellone
Edér - Eric Fenstermaker
Grieving Mother - Chris Avellone
Hiravias - Matt MacLean
Kana Rua - Olivia Veras
Pallegina - Josh Sawyer
Sagani - Carrie Patel

I'm glad I'm not the only person who basically hated Eternity. Also were they really ripping people apart for wanting characters to be good at their job? Fuck they built the system specifically for min-maxing, they shouldn't be surprised that people call them out on it. Fuckin' chodes.

I enjoyed the hell out of it. The flaws are real and I do the full-on Tommy Lee Jones implied face palm when people deny that they aren't there, but ultimately the flaws are largely a "Same shit, different year" issue grafted onto a genre I otherwise enjoy.

RelentlessImp wrote:Also were they really ripping people apart for wanting characters to be good at their job? Fuck they built the system specifically for min-maxing, they shouldn't be surprised that people call them out on it. Fuckin' chodes.

Oh no, not really. Not Obsidian staff at least. Just some mods doing "Oh, those munchkins, can't play game like normal people" eye rolls.

Just got finished playing Bastion, finally. Can't say anything that hasn't been said before, but it lives up to the hype.