Should we consider Path of the Damned balance, or should we play the beta on lower difficulties to help the team with feedback?
Josh Sawyer: All difficulty feedback is good. If you want to play the game on Path of the Damned and you find that there's something wrong with it, in your opinion, that's good feedback to have; if you want to play the game on Story mode and you don't feel that it's working well, then give us feedback on that.
We cannot internally test and balance literally all these things on our own, there's just too much stuff to cover. So, getting feedback from people — because a lot of this is based on feeling; Path of the Damned is supposed to be the most difficult challenge, but how difficult should that really be? We've found even with Path of the Damned players there's a huge spectrum of tolerance for how they play; some people have done Triple Crown solo, they've done The Ultimate, which is a single character going through and doing all of the challenges on Path of the Damned with everything enabled.
So, getting your feedback on any and all levels of difficulty is good for us. We appreciate it.
Brian Heins: It's always one of those weird experiences that, no matter how good the Q&A team is or how many testers we have, the second a game goes live it gets more eyes on it and time spent testing it than the entirety of development.
[JS mentions that the speed of the build they're playing on stream has been slowed down compared to the current beta build. Specifically, melee attacks have had their Recovery increased, and spells with longer cast times have had their Recovery reduced.]
Is it intended that Chants work when shifted?
JS: They're not specifically excluded from the — in the case where, for example, a Shifter can't cast spells while shifted, but a Chanter who is shifted continues—for a multiclass character—continues to get their chants. That's not specifically excluded, so that is fair game.
Now, you can't use your Invocations. But that's a reasonable price to pay, I think.
BH: And we'll let you guys imagine what a spiritshifted bear chanting sounds like.
Have the long cast times been addressed yet?
JS: I think some of the spells that have longer cast times have been reduced. But I think one of the reasons that spells feel especially long cast in the Backer Beta version people are playing right now is that base attack speeds and recoveries for normal weapon attacks are so fast that, by comparison, the spells feel insanely slow. I
believe, and you can certainly tell me your own opinion on this, I believe that with the changes we've made to standard attack Recovery that the cast times will not feel crazy long.
That being said, i do feel personally that some of the Priest spells, especially, are a little too long for what they do. Especially if they're buffs or counters; those sort of things feel like they should be a little bit quicker because they're usually reactions. So, there are some cast times that we do want to actually make faster.
One thing we're also being very careful about is the speed of any summons. Summons are incredibly powerful. We like them being powerful. I think people who play summoners also like them being powerful, but we need there to be a fairly good trade-off for doing that; for us, right now, that's the longer cast time. Is it too long? Possibly. We will consider bring down summoning cast times in the future, but it's something we have to be very careful about because summons—they can really get crazy really fast. We like including them because they're a fun thing, but we gotta be careful with them.
Is the game going to be fully voiced attack like Divinity: Original Sin 2, or is it going to be like Pillars 1?
JS: We're going to have a lot more voice acting than Pillars 1. Can't say right now that it's going to be fully voiced, but we are committing to doing much, much,
much more voice acting; far more characters voiced, far more lines of dialogue. That is something we are absolutely committing to.
BH: Right now, playing development builds, we use text-to-speech generation to do temp VO lines, which is very entertaining in a lot of areas.
Has movement speed been reduced?
JS: For the next update, yes, it's been reduced by 15%, I believe, so combat movement speed is 15% lower. Which might not sound like that much, but movement speed, for whatever reason, is very sensitive to adjustment even by a very small amount. 15% actually makes the characters feel quite a bit slower.
That being said, many of the characters in the Backer Beta felt incredibly fast, so I really think it takes them to down into a much more manageable range. Overall, I would say the pace of combat in the next Backer Beta is going to feel much better. Doesn't mean we can't still tune it, but I do think it's going to be in a much better place.
BH: Plus, with the addition of the walk toggle, you can strut around as much as you want to.
JS: There is also the walk toggle. By the way, you will have to bind the walk toggle yourself so that people don't accidentally bump it and go
"Why are all my characters walking?" But, yes, the walk toggle will be in.
Will Might be replaced with Strength in the next beta update?
JS: Yes, because we want your feedback on it. Like I said in the blog post I made on my blog the other day, that's not a done deal. We want to try it. I know there are possibly better solutions to these problems; I know they have problems of their own. I'm not trying to say that it's perfect or it's final, but I do want to see how it affects how people build their characters and how they play them.
Where did the decision to not include Slow speed come from?
JS: Basically, we wound up with three speeds: a Slow, a Normal and a Fast, and we found that a lot of people just defaulted to playing on the Slow speed. And so, we...things were not setup the way they were supposed to be on the Backer Beta but, in the next update, the speed of everything should be about the speed that Slow was in Pillars 1. In Pillars 1 Slow speed moved everything to about two-thirds the normal combat speed. That is what I wanted everything to be set to for the Backer Beta, there were just some data errors and things like that. And also the movement speed had not been adjusted. So, now, yes, 15% is not 33% but, like I said, movement speed is much more sensitive to adjustments like that. The other combat speeds and Recovery time have all been adjusted down so, hopefully, what you will find in the next Backer Beta update is that the speed of combat is comparable to Slow. My hope, and maybe this won't work, is that you will not need Slow speed because the normal pace of combat is slow, and you will use Fast mode when you want to — like if it's just,
"Oh, this is a simple fight",
"I'm way overleveled for this",
"I just about have it wrapped up" — you can hit Fast toggle and just fly through it.
BH: And one of the nice things about the change of just reducing the overall pacing of combat: you don't get the awkward, slow motion attacks that Slow mode got in base game.
JS: Yeah, that is the other thing. Slow mode actually slows animation down, whereas making Recovery time longer makes the time between attacks longer and slows the overall pace of things happpening down, but the attacks themselves still happen at a — you know, they can still be animated and look normal, not like everything is in slow-mo.
What was the reason for reducing party size down to five from six?
JS: We found that in Pillars 1, even though we were making a game that was trying to be a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games, we tried to give many more active abilities to all party members. In the Infinity Engine games quite often, except for at very high levels, most martial classes didn't have a whole lot to do in terms of micromanagement. You had to position them, you had to switch targets, you had to do things like that, maybe use potions, but otherwise there wasn't a lot of management of active abilities.
When we moved to six characters that
all had active abilities to do, it became a lot more time consuming to manage, and it also made combat fairly difficult to read because you also had — whereas a Fighter normally might be doing just standard attacks through most of a fight in Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate, in Pillars of Eternity they're zipping across the screen or they're yanking people around, and it made things a little more visually confusing.
With five characters all being active characters, we wanted to ensure that the pace of combat was not really crazy or overwhelming. Personally, I find that with all the stuff your characters can do there's still plenty to manage. I never feel like I don't have enough to do in a fight. With five characters it's a lot going on.
Does the telemetry tell what kind of characters and stats they are using? If yes what is the current most popular combination or single class?
JS: We are still sorting that data. That's the thing: having telemetrics allows us to get data, but then we have to sort all that out and try to look for the significant things.
BH: People don't understand it is a whole separate issue.
JS: Yeah. Hey, we have the data! Okay, now how do we look at it and make sense of it?
A few things that we've found: lots of people like making Meadow folk, tons of people like making Devoted, tons of people like making Assassins. I am not surprised by any of these things. I think the least popular last time I looked, and I was personally disappointed, was female dwarves. I like playing female dwarves, and I was surprised after the first few days of Backer Beta no one had made a female dwarf. I have seen some people make some since then.
But we're actually sorting through a lot of that data now. There's a lot of really interesting stuff in there. Showing what powers people use and what they don't use, where people have total party wipes, there's all sorts of stuff.
Also, the data doesn't tell the whole story. It's a tool we can use. Maybe in an update we can share some of the telemetry because I think you guys would also find it very interesting. But it's very nice to actually have hard data on that as opposed to just what people tell us, because sometimes we people tell us is not...that's even less of a full picture of what's going on.
[They talk about the work that's gone into improving the visual effects of spell animations and how it's helped to improve the level of polish. Specifically, Adam Brennecke introduced faders. They wanted stronger visual effects in Pillars 1, but that comes at the cost of visual clarity in combat. They've made rendering changes to make the effects stand out less than Pillars 1, and it really helps that now the effects will fade when paused. Their first implementation of the fader system involved having it be attached to your cursor: anything it hovered over would fade out.]
Will multiclassing affect dialogue like in Pillars 1?
JS: Well, you didn't have multiclassing in Pillars 1. Do you mean will you be able to pick options from both classes? Yes. If you are playing a Paladin/Druid then, if there are options for a Paladin or options for a Druid, you will be able to get both of them.
BH: There's also dialogue options based on subclasses, as well. There's one early on in the Backer Beta checking for the Trickster subclass.
JS: Yeah. It depends. We just try to make sure there's broad coverage so that whether you're playing the pure class, a sub class — that you're going to get some reactivity to the choices you've made. Sometimes it'll be broad like "Any Fighter", sometimes it'll be like "Only Unbroken", or "Only Tricksters" or things like that.
[JS mentions that there's going to be a Death Godlike named Handsome Eliam[
sp?] in your crew. They don't like him because he looks like a Death Godlike.]
How often will party members converse with each other and the Watcher? Is there a lot of dialogue between party members?
JS:
Yes. [
Said in a tone of voice that suggests it was exhausting to do it] I'm saying that because I've spent the past few days filling in Pallegina line requests and, dude, I think she had 200 LRs. I've already filled in 60 or 70 and I have over a hundred left to go.
So, party members talk
a lot; they chime into conversations a lot. NPCs do react to them chiming into conversations when it makes sense, so instead of it always feeling like the companion is just whispering to you, sometimes the NPC will be like,
"What the hell are you talking about? Screw off." So, there's a lot.
Is the lack of dismemberment and decapitation in death animation an artistic decision, or a question of budget?
JS: We're not adverse to any of those things. I mean,
Fallout: New Vegas. Gibs everywhere.
Pillars 1 was an M game; I except this also will be an M game, but it does require technology to do good dismemberment and gore, and that's not currently on the schedule to do more than we have. We do now have elemental gibs and different color gibs for different creatures. Actually, my favorite are the skeletal gibs, because those just send a bunch of bones flying all over the place.
So, we have improved that for Deadfire, but doing things for like kith—the player races—doing decapitation and dismemberment for them, because they wear outfits and stuff like that, that actually gets much more complicated. It's much easier to do it on "monsters".
So, yeah, it's nothing sort of philosophical. It's just how much time to do everything we want to do.
BH: It's also we end up using our kith rigs for a lot of creatures. Delemgan and Adragan use our kith rigs, we would need to do custom dismemberment and decapitations for them, as well.
BH: Have you mentioned about the injury changes?
JS: No. Just because we're talking so much about the Strength and Might and Resolve changes, something I haven't talked about online is: Brian and I and Bobby Null talked about feedback that we received from people about traps and how gnarly they are. Well, there are a few things. One, how nasty they are to party members, and the second is how devastating they can be to enemies.
There are a few things we're doing. One is four injuries will still kill a character. Flat out. The only exception to that is in story mode, because...you're playing on story mode. We assume that you just kinda want it to be really easy. Don't think that's a weird assumption. So, if you get four injuries, whether it's from traps or other sources, your character will die.
The second thing is because the penalties from an injury, in addition to the max health loss, are usually significant, not trivial, we removed the max health penalty on most injuries—unless that was the main point of the injury. What were the injuries that we kept it on?
BH: Things like Maimed, Severe Wound, the major and critical injuries, and...there's one other...Frail, I think.
JS: Yeah. The ones that feel like the main effect of this should feel like my max health is lower. We also lowered it from 25% to 15% reduction. We want to motivate people to be careful, but we also don't want to really motivate people to Rest spam. We want their decision to Rest to be based off of what food bonuses am I losing by resting? And for a lot of people, especially if a front line character has a max health 25% loss, or two of those, that's too large of a deficit to not rest. So, we're not trying to encourage that. We're doing this to see if this changes the feeling of the balance of, "Oh, I have an injury, I can keep pressing on" or "No, I have to rest right now".
Is there — there was something else?
BH: Traps.
JS: Oh, I'm sorry, and then player traps. Player traps are still very strong, but they don't give injuries to enemies. They weren't really ever supposed to give injuries to enemies. They give Afflictions, and they do damage, and they sometimes do quite a lot of damage, but they won't just auto-kill an enemy if you manage to get them to run over four traps in a row. That was not intended.
BH: We recently made this change: one of the player traps you can find is Caltrops, which I love, when you place it down on the enemy characters it basically will spawn a field of caltrops that, as they walk around through it, they take Raw damage with each step. So, keep luring them to run around in a circle, and they'll take tons and tons of Raw damage. It's a great trap to use against enemies.
Buff food bonuses +5 HP is weak and pointless.
JS: Yes, that's a bad food item. We have about four tiers of food items in terms of quality. The most basic food items are hardtack and water; those don't give you any bonuses, all they do is remove injuries from the characters. Then there are the base ingredients, which are things that might give you more hit points, they might give you a point of Penetration, they might give you extra damage and things like that.
Then there are meals, and there are two quality levels of meals: basic meals that combine more of those bonuses to gether, and then there are really high quality meals that give you a ton of bonuses concurrently. If you need to rest a lot, for one reason or another, you're probably going to burn through all of your good food; or you're not using your good food, and you're going to wind up using the stuff that doesn't give you very good bonuses. You can do that, but you're playing without the advantage of that stuff.
BH: It's also there because, as other systems come online that will have more money sinks involved, you may be at a point where you really want to just have something really cheap to get rid of injuries as you're saving money to purchase a large ticket item that you're trying to find enough money for.
So, even though that 5 HP isn't a lot, it's better than water. Which does nothing.
Does the team have a definitive idea on general talents? If they're going to be separated from class or mixed in the tree?
JS: Both, really, is the idea. The idea is if it makes sense for a "passive" talent-like ability to be in a class's tree as the thing you can take as a passive ability it can stay there, and then also we will have a pool of talents that all classes can pick from, but you're spending a different resource—you're spending a talent point on it.
For example, if you are playing a Fighter, and you get to 2nd level and you go, "I want to buy Weapon and Shield style" as an ability, a passive ability, then you can buy it as a passive ability. Weapon and Shield style will also be in the talent tree. You won't take it twice, it'll count as you having taken it, but then the Fighter can take something else in that tree. They can take one of the other passive talents.
If you're playing a more active Fighter, then you wouldn't take Weapon and Shield style from the passive side; you would take Knockdown, or Disciplined Barrage or whatever, and then you would take Weapon and Shield as a talent, or take something else as a talent. The idea is that the classes where it feels like this class could be played more passively, especially when players express interest in playing them more passively, we like to offer that option for them. So, if you want to build a very passive character, you still can do that. But you can't double up on bonuses. Can't take the same thing twice. It just gives you a broader set of things that you can pick from.
BH: Currently there's two classes that have very similar defense bonuses, and if you multiclass then you get both of them getting double up. That's one of things we'll be fixing with the talent changes. You wouldn't be able to get the same talent giving you the bonus twice.
Any idea of what the min specs for PC will be?
JS: We're trying to keep them very close to what the first game was. Adam Brennecke would be able to answer that question better than I could. Steven, where are we with min spec stuff, do you know?
Steven King: It's still his goal. We're not quite there. Still optimizing. But, yeah, his goal is the same in specs as Pillars 1.
JS: So, we're not quite there but that is still our goal. Steven is our main QA dude, and so he's been working on the min spec stuff for awhile. It is a process. As we add more features and do things like that, the game does slow down, then we have to optimize; then we add more features and the game slows down, and we have to optimize again.
[BH asks JS if he's talked about the grimoires they're going to add; JS says he's talked a little about it, and prompts BH to elaborate]
BH: Part of the next update, when you start as a Wizard character — so, in the current version of the beta, the grimoire you start with as a Wizard is the level 1 grimoire that has two spells in it. I've actually updated that so you will have a better variety of spells available to your character, plus our mercenary Wizard is going to start with five different grimoires in their inventory automatically, focused around each of the subclasses—the Evoker, Illusionist, Enchanter, that sort of thing. You can see as a Wizard, as you get more grimoires and add them to your quick slots and swap between them, the versatility you really have as a character. That will hopefully give you a better sense of what we're going with with the grimoire changes from the base game.
How did you arrive at the idea to use a multiclassing system like from 2E AD&D? Do you think it's better in general than picking classes as you go?
JS: As with most design decisions, it's kind of trade-offs. What do you want to get out of this system? 3E style multiclassing gives you tons of options. It gives you ultimate — well, maybe not ultimate flexibility. A classless system would give you that. But for a class-based system, a 3E style multiclassing system, which is what we were initially pursuing, would give you ultimate flexibility, but it also is, like, ultimate trap option. There's lots and lots of ways you can build really fundamentally bad characters. For all the talk about how you can build potentially bad characters or non-optimal characters with our Attribute array, holy moly, with true pick levels as you go multiclassing, it's really, really easy to build bad characters that way.
We also had discussions about why do people multiclass. One of the big reasons is to have a sense of character identity. I am this thing, I picked this class because that's part of the idea of what my character is, or I picked these two classes because this is the idea of what my character is. When you get to
three classes it's kinda hard, unless you're playing 1E AD&D Bard, to figure out what the vibe of your character really is; usually when we see the sort of build types people go for, it's not really about a character concept, it's just kind of a building concept. I want this one ability, or I want these two abilities, so I'm going to take a level of this and three levels of that. Which...again, that is cool for the tinkerer and the builder, but it comes with a lot of potential problems, so that's why we went with the 2E style.
Although, unlike 2E, we are more or less unlimited in the combinations that you can do; the exceptions being certain Paladin and Priest combinations that don't work mechanically, and from a roleplaying sense, because the Dispositions that are favored by one are disfavored by another. So, yeah, that's bad.
BH: But even with those few restrictions the number of combinations you can put together — we're showing just a couple of them with this video, but there's a lot of really interesting variations between multiclass choices and subclasses among those classes that have a lot of interesting gameplay choices between them. As we do more of these we're going to show off more of those changes.
Will inventory icons have better visual quality?
JS: It depends on the icons. Some of the icons that are in the Backer Beta right now are Pillars 1 icons and they haven't been replaced yet. So...probably? Many of them are going to be improved because they're going to be replaced.
Will you see a lot decision you made in Pillars 1 work in Pillars 2, kind like Mass Effect trilogy? If so, do I need me PoE1 save to make it work?
JS: Yes. Hopefully. We've done a lot of work to try to get that reactivity in there. If you have an end game save from Pillars 1, you can import that directly into Pillars 2 and it will use all of your decisions verbatim. You cannot edit them. That is the choice you make for importing your save.
Also, we will allow you to pick from a list of presets: this is my "Goody Two-Shoes" ending, this is my "I'm a complete incompetent weirdo, I messed everything up", or "I am a crazy psycho person", so you'll be able to pick from some premade ones.
Also, you will be able to, much like the Dragon Age website, set end game states and then save them out with a file name. You can then pick that as a preset, or, if you really want, give them to friends. You can upload them and other people can download them because they're just simple text files. If you say "These are my crazy, psychotic choices" and you want other people to check it out and play with it, they can do that.
You might have answered already but is the party reduced to five member or is it for the beta?
JS: Party size is reduced to five. Deadfire party limit is five, excluding animal companions.
If I import my save as a Moon Godlike Druid, what are my Race/Class options going into Pillars 2?
JS: Unlimited. Importing a game versus starting a new game doesn't have any effect on what your available options are. If you want to follow your own internal gamer bushido and continue playing as a Moon Godlike Druid you can do that. But we changed a lot of things, so maybe you're like, I didn't have the option of multiclassing in the first game, so I want to be a Moon Godlike Druid/Fighter, or Druid/Paladin, or whatever you want.
And rather than put restrictions on what you can do with your imported save, that's up to you. It doesn't really make any difference mechanically or balance wise, so if you want to keep playing as the same character and just essentially recreate them, you can do that; if you want to change your stuff, you can do that too.
And, yes, it does make sense in the context of the story.
Itemization and Enchanting.
JS: I don't know when we're planning on putting Enchanting in for the Backer Beta.
BH: It's a couple months away.
JS: Okay, so, it'll be awhile before you folks have a chance to experiment with it, but our approach for item enchanting and upgrading is much different. Not much different in terms of user interface or things like that, but it's much different in terms of our approach to it.
The goal with our unique items is that we want them to feel unique, and we also had a goal with enchanting that people could feel like they could extend the capabilities of their weapons and armor and things like that. The problem was that when those two things came together as we implemented them it felt like a lot of the unique items started feeling more generic because you had a common list of enchantments you could put on the unique items, and they just kept kind of being recycled.
So, it's actually, as I'm sure Brian can attest to, a huge amount of additional work the new way we're doing it.
BH: Just a bit.
JS: Enchantments are not necessarily unique to each individual item, but they are close to unique to individual items. You might see an enchantment appear on two or three different weapons that you can actually put on it or upgrade it, but not on every single weapon. Think of each unique weapon as whatever it is when you get it, and also as an item that can grow in a way that feels true to the unique properties of the weapon. For example, what's the Bardatto's mace? Do you remember what that's called?
BH: Oh, uh....Bardatto's Luxury.
JS: Bardatto's Luxury. There's this banking family, you can get this mace, I'm not going to spoil the quest for that, but you can get this mace called Bardatto's Luxury. It's this like fancy golden mace. I think it has two upgrades: one is called Death, and the other is called Taxes. I think they're exclusive upgrade paths, and they each do different things, but they're mechanically and thematically resonant with what the vibe of this mace from this banking family is.
I've given examples, too, of the common, like, this is a Flaming Sword. You can't just make any sort of flaming sword. But if you have a Flaming Sword, you can make it like a Flaming Burst weapon, or you can do some other fire thing with it.
That is the approach we're taking with Enchanting, which is a lot different in approach. The way that you'll use it will be very similar, but we're still working through the best ways to communicate, for example, because so many of these things are unique, to let you know, "Hey, this weapon actually has something that you can now enchant on it".
BH: The other nice part about it is as these items go through our pipeline, our VFX artists and character artists can actually, since they know what enchantments will be on the weapon, make them look tailored to that weapon. Because there's not going to be ten thousand flaming swords, they can make the visual effects for the sword on fire look really good on the model for the sword that will be on fire.
Do native aumaua have their own version of the Maori haka?
JS: While there are language elements that we take from
<gets distracted by the gameplay>
So, there are aspects of — I should say that the Huana language and the Rauataian language both take elements of Maori and Japanese, but culturally, those are are not direct analogues. We try to be careful to not completely directly copy a culture. Especially because we don't have lots of Maori people at Obsidian, so if we misinterpret things — that can not go well. We take certain things, but we also try to combine them or mix them with other things or add in our own elements to make them their own thing. So, the Huana aumaua don't have anything like a haka, but their language does, in many ways, feel like Maori.
How are the romances coming along?
BH: I'm not on the narrative team, but I can say from the blog posts that they put every week, they're having a great deal of fun writing the various romantic interactions between the player and the companions.
JS: Yes. Maybe a little too much fun. They are coming along. As a reminder, there are both — oh, I shouldn't say both. There are romances in Deadfire, but there are also other sorts of serious relationships; strong bonds of camaraderie or friendship for people who have fought together for long periods of time and things like that. There are also rivalries and people that get really pissed at each other, and those can resolve in a variety of ways; either violently or passive aggressively or amicably.
I do want to emphasize our goal with the relationship system was not to just do romances, and not to exclude romances, but to make them one of several types of relationships that we're defining for the companions and the player. I will say that some of the inter-companion relationships are actually really, really cool, and so I'm actually as excited about the relationship between companions as the ones between the player and the companions.
How will multiclassing for companions work?
JS: I actually addressed this last time so I don't want to go through it a ton of times again, but there are technical issues that will make it a little difficult for us to do true unlimited multiclassing and respeccing with companions. Right now we have something in where it's basically three main sort of multiclassing options for every character, or rather, there's a base class and two multiclass options. That's what we're currently using. That can expand in the future. I don't want to get everyone's hopes crazy up, nor do I want to say it's impossible, but it is — we basically did an analysis of how expensive it would be to rework the character creation and leveling up system to handle that, and it was not a small amount of work. So, before I say, "Yeah, we're definitely going to do it", I have to caution you that we might not have the time to do that. At least at launch. That's how that is currently.
Can you sail back to Defiance Bay?
JS: You cannot sail back to Defiance Bay.
<laughs> You have business in Deadfire.
Major differences you'll see in the culture and feel in the Deadfire compared to the Dyrwood?
JS: I think that—I hope that people sense a difference between the cultures in Tikiwara in the Backer Beta. The Huana culture is much less fued oriented. There's a lot of surly rural vs city folks stuff that goes on in the Dyrwood; people are really surly and angry, and curmudgeonly. The Huana are — their whole society is just structured differently. Tribes aren't necessarily attached to one location for more than a few years. They move around a lot. They also have a less centralized cultured. Nekataka has a queen and a prince and they are sort of in charge but, as the hints from our original teaser campaign might've suggested, it's not quite like a king in the sense that you might find—or a duc—in the Eastern Reach.
The huana are much more decentralized, much more independent, and their society is also structured with a caste system. They have three castes, they treat those castes very seriously in terms of how they divide their work responsibilities, and just cultural responsibilities, and they often have a lot of culture misunderstandings — or rather, the Vailians have misunderstandings with them, they have misunderstandings with the Vailians.
There's actually a quest early on in one of our first towns where this woman...well, slight spoilers, but this aumaua woman gets into a brawl with a guy who loses at a game of cards, and she takes his money. You can go to here and say, like,
"Hey, you took a lot of this guy's money. He doesn't really have any money left". And she's like,
"...So what? The Vailian governor will take care of him." No...the Vailian governor's not going to take care of this dude. She's like,
"What in the heck? You don't take care of your own people? That doesn't make any sense."
So, they're really much more organized around small communities that are very tightly knit. We've really tried to make it feel much different than the Dyrwood.
BH: Even with a lot of the UI design. If you bring up the character sheet, Steven, just the overall feel of how we designed the UI reflects the different nature of the Deadfire.
JS: Yeah, that's another aspect, too. When we looked at reskinning our UI between the different Infinity Engine games we tended to reskin them even if we didn't completely change their layout. Because we use skeuomorphic user interfaces, the material and the feel of that stuff is very important. I mean, that's why we use it: to give you a feel of something tactile and real.
We actually looked at a lot of Balinese wood carving, you know, again taking specific Pacific island culture as an element that we wanted to incorporate in all this. All the trim pieces Matt Hansen and Mitch looked at Balinese wood carving and maybe Javanese and a few other things, and then incorporated those to reinforce that feeling as well.
Additionally, we couldn't replicate it exactly because it would be really hard to read, but if you look at the sort of edges of the pages it's not actually supposed to be parchment, it's supposed to be palm leaf manuscripts. That was a method of making written texts in the South Pacific area for a very long time; where people would take palms flat, dry them, and then write on them and then tie them together at the corners like that.
We're trying to get more of those elements across.
Are the developers aware of the reasons behind the no-brainer choices for Chanter invocations? For example, Penetration.
JS: Yes. Anything that grants Pen in your current build is extremely important. Because of the changes that we've made to Penetration for the future—which is to make it a stepped progression—those will still be very valuable, but they will be less valuable.
We are finalizing Graze plans. Your friend Graze is more or less going to be coming back. I don't want to say anything that is like 100% commitment on that. We had reasons for removing Graze that were largely based on player feedback; however, the reasons behind that player feedback were largely removed with the Penetration system, so that actually had solved problem that didn't exist anymore. So, we are probably going to bring Graze back in a more significant way than you currently see it in the Backer Beta. I think that will make the things that grant Graze — well, one, if it's widespread then those things are going to grant something else, but you are going to find that grazes are more common.
One thing we have to be careful of, one of the main things with Graze, there were two real problems: one was that people said when I graze with standard attacks it feels crappy because the DR system reduces the damage down to like 2 or 3 points and who gives a...like, who cares? That's kinda just noise. And then the other one was hard CC, if it grazed, was incredibly powerful. If you just managed to wing someone with a hard CC effect, even if it only had half duration, that was a major, major impact on that character.
There are a few things I can say. I've changed the Graze range again. We actually went farther in the opposite direction than I thought we had. Graze in Pillars 1 was about a 35 point range; we had moved it to a 15 point range, which is really small, so I bumped that back up to a 25 point range. We are talking about bringing Graze back more commonly...again, I don't want to commit to a specific solution until we've really hammered it out, but...Grazes will be more common. Possibly much more common.
Sorry for that rambling thing. I just want to be careful about not getting people...I don't want to hurt your expectations.
Do characters need inventory anymore? If we have a giant bag now below it seems really aggravating to leave inventory in each characters pack and hunt for it such as playing in export mode? Or can expert mode disable the giant stash and go back to POE1 There are a few things I think are not clear in the inventory right now, such as when you have an item on your cursor you can click on the portrait of another character to go directly to their inventory. Right now, I think a lot of people look at it as, oh, I have to drag it into the Stash and then drag it out of the Stash. You don't have to do that. But because the portraits don't light up I think they're not letting you know, hey, you can actually put this on this other character.
Personal inventory is honestly more of a feeling thing than a necessity thing. We have a big ol' stash. Some people really like the feeling of having a personal inventory. Some people might say that's irrational. Lots of stuff in this game is irrational. We do a lot of things, honestly, for feeling, and some people like the feeling of having a personal inventory.
We're not trying to make it harder to navigate. If you have ideas about how to make it easier to navigate that retains the personal inventory, totally open to hearing that. It could be that we just make it a little easier to move from character to character down there, but that's really why.
