Very much so. In fact, I find the area maps almost useless, they’re so dark. I’ve tried mucking with the gamma and other display settings, no luck. I hope they fix that.
Me too. Gamma changes didn’t seem to improve it at all. The Infinity games were usually like this, so I guess they did get the feel of the old games well. 
Thanks! I wouldn’t have figured that out on my own. 
E: Yeah, the game is really dark for me, too. I thought is was the lighting in my apartment! I’m also playing on a (6 month old) Mac laptop and the game keeps crashing on me, which bites.
What bug is this? I’m not seeing anything on the official forums about it. I’m at the point where I’m going to Raedric’s castle, wondering if I should try to avoid that for now (not sure if I can avoid it, I think I’ve done all the other quests in Gilded whatever)
It’s not part of the main questline IIRC, so you can just skip it for now. Start making your way to the Defiance Bay instead - or that’s what I’d do, anyways. If you are overleveled for the place when they finally fix the bug you can switch to Hard for the duration if you want (or Normal if you are playing on Easy).
So how hard is this game? I beat Baldur’s gate and Torment back in the day but I’m more interested in the story and lore. Don’t know if I have the patience anymore for games that makes every single fight an exercise in frustration.
Not particularly hard. I didn’t like Divinity for that reason; fights are only part of the game for me, and when I have to re-do every single one of them 6 times before I win it’s no fun.
I’m playing on “normal” and the fights are fine. There’s one level easier as well.
Man, just… thank you.
Easy should be easy enough, and there’s tons and tons of story and lore to go around. Also you can finish a lot of quests without combat and get almost the same rewards. There’s still a lot of combat but the easier fights (which on Easy should be almost all of them) go really fast in the Real-Time with Pause system.
Just to add: you don’t get xp from killing monsters, only from getting quests, I believe. So yeah you could play the game with minimal combat and get about the same xp. You’d miss out on all that sweet loot though 
You get really small amounts of xp from killing monsters, but it only shows it in the already overcrowded combat log so it is really easy to miss. Killing one enemy is like 50-200 xp while doing one quest nets you maybe 2000-6000 xp, sometimes very quickly and easily.
The combat is not too bad. Most fights while exploring the map are winnable without having to get fancy, once you’ve got other party members backing you up. Occasionally, you get a fight that requires some strategizing, particularly with the engagement rules they now have. But the trickiest battle I’ve been in so far has been doable using the good old fashioned bottleneck technique – the character who engages in the forced dialogue runs as soon as everybody attacks to where the rest of the party is waiting behind an open door. The enemies can then only attack maybe two at a time, and the rest are gathered to suck up AoE attacks and summons dropped in their midsts.
I’ll be in trouble if they do a fight where I’m actually required to micromanage every combatant every round.
So here’s a downright broken trick : each blunderbuss shot sends out 8 pellets that each are treated as a separate attack. Ciphers have a lvl 2 talent that gives +2 focus per successful attack. Y’all do the math :).
Oh? I was misinformed then. Thanks!
It seems to be inconsistent now that I checked it again. Not sure which enemies give xp and which don’t. Kinda funny - last time I claimed (on another forum) you don’t get xp from killing stuff then went and checked and saw them give xp, this time I claimed they give you xp but then the next fight in-game I did I don’t see any kill xp notifications.
I believe you only get XP up until the point you’ve killed 12 of them, and thus have completed their entry in the Bestiary. You also get a bonus on that 12th kill.
Each time you kill before that point you’ll see a “XX/YY xp” show in the info window. The YY I believe is the maximum XP total you can accumulate for that monster. After that, you don’t get any addtional XP.
Oh, and Shadows suck without a cleric. It’s kind of too bad that:
I didn’t come across the NPC cleric until after I went through the temple of Eothas. Would have made that a bit easier.
Yes, that sounds about right. It means if you spend time in the Endless Paths you aren’t getting much xp but there’s obviously loot in there. Easier for Obsidian to plan the encounters when you can’t grind for xp and when people who do all the optional stuff only get the extra quest xp and not tons of xp for all the extra skeletons and oozes and trolls and whatnots they kill on the way. This way people are roughly the same level at any given point of the plot.
That makes sense, xp for bestiary entries. I haven’t tried the Endless Paths yet, but speaking of loot, I did try defending the keep against skeletons. The game gives you the battle, you finish it and then they reset the room back to normal. I missed all that loot! heh
I guess no monsters ever respawn is that right?
It also makes sense from a strict roleplaying logic : you can only fight so many wolves before you know precisely what a wolf can and will do in combat. After that it’s not experience building up, it’s just a pest-killing job :). And of course, from a game design P.O.V. it lets diplomats and pacifists go all the way through the game without penalties from not having slaughtered the ecosystem. Like, all of it.
There’s even a cheevo for that !
Anyone done Raedric’s Keep yet? Care to spoiler your tactics? I’m finding it pretty difficult.
[spoiler] I entered the keep via the vines on the north west corner of the map. Found some robes and put them on. But I was discovered by a priestess who claimed that there were intruders around. They attacked and holy molly, the whole kepe descended on me. Something like 5 paladins, 6 or 7 guards, 4 priests and several acolytes.
I think I might win this battle if I play it balls ot the wall and use all my abilities, but I’m playing on hard and I have already used up a rest (several of my guys were exhausted after climbing the vines), so no way would I have enough powers left to take on Raedric. Any better ways in?
[/spoiler]