White March companions at lvl 1, seriously?

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Every day I find a new reason to deeply regret ever having gotten this DLC. First of all, the ENTIRE first part of White March is recommended for parties at least at level 7, so what the hell??? I finished this tedious game and only finally got WM 1&2 when it was on sale this year, which tbqh I never would've gotten had I realized that this is only add on content and not an actual expansion, made worse by the fact there's a point in the campaign where there's no turning back and so I had to reload from hours of progress earlier just so I could leave and go exploring DLC content.

For not just that fact alone I would highly not recommend ever buying this content.

It also doesn't make any sense that lvl 11-12 content--Craigholdt--is placed seemingly before going to White March. That itself would be a benefit because at least then it would feel more like something for people who've beat the game there's no way in hell I'm ever playing this game from the start again. Now I am finding out the companion is at level 1.

Why? Why is Zahua at level 1? I feel totally cheated right now. I am literally never going to experience playing with this campanion, and if that's any indication it means Devil of Caroc is probably also going to be stupidly locked behind content that requires a minimum of like lvl 10 characters to get someone who starts at lvl 1. How does that make any sense? Who on Earth even designed this thing?

Is there even any kind of mod or cheat for me to cheat like hell and just force the new companions into being lvl 11?

[Du-Vu]

If they're not at the same level as the rest of your companions, that's a bug. Quit, reload, verify file integrity, the usual things. Depending on what antivirus you use you may want to try whitelisting your Pillars and Saved Games folders.

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

Originally posted by BlackSun:

First of all, the ENTIRE first part of White March is recommended for parties at least at level 7, so what the hell???

And? It was never advertized as post-end content.

You learn about Stalwart around level 4-5. You can pay the village a visit. Many players do that around level 6-8. At higher levels you get a content scaling offer. You may choose to travel back and forth freely. You are not forced to complete the DLC immediately.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

I finished this tedious game and

Nothing about PoE is tedious. Unless you insist on attacking everyone and everything on sight. Depending on chosen difficulty mode, the game can be completed with resting less than 10 times and killing a lot less than 100 opponents.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

I realized that this is only add on content and not an actual expansion,

Define "DLC" and "expansion". The White March 1&2 expand the game content in a variety of ways.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

made worse by the fact there's a point in the campaign where there's no turning back and so I had to reload from hours of progress earlier just so I could leave and go exploring DLC content.

If you've kept the PRE-ENDGAME autosave, the entire world remains open to you.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

It also doesn't make any sense that lvl 11-12 content--Craigholdt--is placed seemingly before going to White March.

There is no "before" or "after" except for part 2 of the White March. You unlock Stalwart and Crägholdt at the same time, because you may be level 12 already when you do that. Where you go first is up to you. You stewart gives some background about Crägholdt and warns appropriately. And still you may take a look, retreat and return later.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

Why? Why is Zahua at level 1?

Auto-levelling of companions turned off perhaps? All story companions start with the same XP than your Watcher when they join your party for the first time - but whether you need to level them up depends on your game settings.

If they start with 0 XP for you, something about your game installation may be broken.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by Du-Vu:

If they're not at the same level as the rest of your companions, that's a bug. Quit, reload, verify file integrity, the usual things. Depending on what antivirus you use you may want to try whitelisting your Pillars and Saved Games folders.

Wait, it is supposed to be at my level? This is yet another bug?

Originally posted by D'amarr from Darshiva:

Originally posted by BlackSun:

First of all, the ENTIRE first part of White March is recommended for parties at least at level 7, so what the hell???

And? It was never advertized as post-end content.

You learn about Stalwart around level 4-5. You can pay the village a visit. Many players do that around level 6-8. At higher levels you get a content scaling offer. You may choose to travel back and forth freely. You are not forced to complete the DLC immediately.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

I finished this tedious game and

Nothing about PoE is tedious. Unless you insist on attacking everyone and everything on sight. Depending on chosen difficulty mode, the game can be completed with resting less than 10 times and killing a lot less than 100 opponents.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

I realized that this is only add on content and not an actual expansion,

Define "DLC" and "expansion". The White March 1&2 expand the game content in a variety of ways.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

made worse by the fact there's a point in the campaign where there's no turning back and so I had to reload from hours of progress earlier just so I could leave and go exploring DLC content.

If you've kept the PRE-ENDGAME autosave, the entire world remains open to you.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

It also doesn't make any sense that lvl 11-12 content--Craigholdt--is placed seemingly before going to White March.

There is no "before" or "after" except for part 2 of the White March. You unlock Stalwart and Crägholdt at the same time, because you may be level 12 already when you do that. Where you go first is up to you. You stewart gives some background about Crägholdt and warns appropriately. And still you may take a look, retreat and return later.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

Why? Why is Zahua at level 1?

Auto-levelling of companions turned off perhaps? All story companions start with the same XP than your Watcher when they join your party for the first time - but whether you need to level them up depends on your game settings.

If they start with 0 XP for you, something about your game installation may be broken.

Expansion: like Broodwars. An entire new and separate addition of content. Addition: just more components within the base game itself.

Yes, the combat is incredibly tedious to me, as is a whole lot of the dry reading.

Does the content scale your companion? Because if not it's completely irrelevant.

You can't "travel back and forth freely" because you have to clear the entire village of high level ogres the minute you set foot in it.

If the game is bugged I'll check that tonight, as this has been the most buggy game I've played this whole decade second only to FNV.

The pre-endgame is where I started from and it's still a large amount of content I played through, though nowhere near as terrible as the many, many hours I had to replay due to a variety of other bugs in this game. I've already addressed part of why this is terrible which includes the save bug where you have 3 minute long load screens when you do anything at all caused by having lots of save files, and you NEED lots of save files because of how broken the game is.

[Du-Vu]

It's an RPG and RPGs are buggy, but if it's as bugged as all that, though, something else might be wrong. This game's mostly pretty stable at this point.

Check the AV thing, that has more to do with various AV programs throwing false positives on Unity game files. Comes up with other games.

[JCourtney]

"Yes, the combat is incredibly tedious to me, as is a whole lot of the dry reading."

Just put the game on story mode and be done with it? I mean jesus it sounds like you're playing the wrong kind of game.

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

Originally posted by BlackSun:

Expansion: like Broodwars. An entire new and separate addition of content. Addition: just more components within the base game itself.

You can throw in the name of any other game, but that doesn't mandate anything about how it must be done in PoE. Expansions of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale are integrated into the base game, too, for example.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

Yes, the combat is incredibly tedious to me, as is a whole lot of the dry reading.

Nothing is known about your combat strategies and tactics. Perhaps you are the reason why it becomes tedious. PoE isn't text heavy. Unless you interact with the kickstarter backer NPCs (and read their short stories which are unrelated to the game). No idea what you consider "dry". It could be that you are used to completely different games.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

Does the content scale your companion? Because if not it's completely irrelevant.

I don't understand that question. Please expand on it.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

You can't "travel back and forth freely" because you have to clear the entire village of high level ogres the minute you set foot in it.

You don't have to. You can leave Stalwart and return as often as you like until Dazir, the leader, is slain.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

The pre-endgame is where I started from and it's still a large amount of content I played through,

There is not much content after the PRE-ENDGAME save. Only the three small areas of the final dungeon of a very short Act 4. Breith Eaman and Sun in Shadow.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

I've already addressed part of why this is terrible which includes the save bug where you have 3 minute long load screens when you do anything at all caused by having lots of save files, and you NEED lots of save files because of how broken the game is.

The PC version is in a very fine state. I've been part of the project as a pre-purchaser and have experienced the v1/v2/v3 series including multiple playthroughs. Savegames for this game don't cause any issues unless you use Steam Cloud with slow networking access. Load times are a side-effect of how Unity engine is used for this game and the many files that are accessed for each area. No big issue.

[Du-Vu]

Unless this is one of the console versions.

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

Which is why I explicitly refer to the PC version. The Switch version is said to be severely broken, for example. The guy's playing (and achievements unlocking) predates the Switch version - on the other hand. An unbelievable amount of negativity in the review.

[psychotron666]

Had to reload hours of gameplay.

Uh okay, the point of no return makes an auto save before the final dungeon. Hardly hours of gameplay.

What a shock that the main quest ends the game, that's never happened before

[Du-Vu]

^^Meant that as more of a question for the OP, sorry.

[JCourtney]

It wouldn't surprise me if the OP has the game installed on a hard drive.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by Du-Vu:

It's an RPG and RPGs are buggy, but if it's as bugged as all that, though, something else might be wrong. This game's mostly pretty stable at this point.

Check the AV thing, that has more to do with various AV programs throwing false positives on Unity game files. Comes up with other games.

False. Quantifiably and indisputably false. One of the most egregious of these is the well known (and afaik completely unfixed) bug where all quests and quest markers reset but without reseting quest progress themselves, which means it leaves pretty much the entire game completely and utterly broken. It is by far the most catastrophic bug I have ever actually witnessed in any game. Like, I know that Obsidian is pretty much infamous for making buggy games, but just..Jesus. And I mean at least in the other games I could forgive or overlook them because I otherwise enjoyed the game enough to get past that (like FNV which frankly wasn't all that great either and only an okay game which people just called so phenomenal because they were comparing it to the absolute trash that's all the Bethesda "fallout" games).

Another bug which may have preceeded the broken quests one is the when you're supposed to go battle some ♥♥♥♥ duke who's trying to claim Caed Nua and there's angry peasants in front of your keep. To this day I can hear the sound effects of the yelling peasants every time I visit Caed Nua. I think it was right around then that all the quests reset but without resetting my progress which also left that triggered sound effect never resetting. This is just the kind of quality of life bug I expect to have to put up with from Obsidian, like okay this is broken whatever I'll just deal with phantom peasants yelling.

But then there's completely stupid and infuriating ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like where I actually had to go all the way back down to a save from something ridiculous like 6 or 7 on the Endless Paths beneath Caed Nua and playing all that stupid ♥♥♥♥ again because at some point something broke without me finding out about it until I was at level 14. This is not a quality of life thing. This is a "I want my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ life back" kind of thing I am not willing to put up with and PoE has done this numerous times.

Originally posted by D'amarr from Darshiva:

snip'd

>you are the reason it's dry and tedious
Oh yeah great retort man. NO U. Brilliant!

Yeah how about the text itself is tedious and dry for starters. It might be or like interesting if you're like an undergrad linguistics major with a minor in creative writing or something, but to me the writing was just not very exciting or interesting at all. It was dry and tedious. Like I said before I use this game as my gold standard of what not to do when writing in vidya, and one of the most crucial of these is the central cardinal rule of creative writing: show don't tell. If I am subjected to this game and this forum for long enough I'm sure I'll get angry enough to outline exactly everything that was wrong and stupid about it including the entire central plot, treatment of animancy, as well as idiotic details which even fans pointed out was atrocious like "you mean the gods aren't real!?" remark, but I'm in no mood for it at this point.

Suffice to say the writing was dry, dull, tedious, and boring af more often than not. The voice acting was all over the place which quite frankly I have never understood why in the ♥♥♥♥ people insist on either putting it in games or asking for it in games and can only assume it's because a large part of the market is a bunch of illiterates who need things read to them. I HATE having ♥♥♥♥ where every single thing is voice acted, especially if it's done poorly. Mass Effect was the absolute worst offender of this I've ever encountered, like, who the f'ing hell even asks for a codex or log data being read to them? I mean just, why?? So having all these instances of irritating or bad voice actors on top of dry witless verbiage for lore did not amuse me.

And yes, I did read every single bit of lore I came across. Some of it was bad poetry, but a lot of it was just the definition of "♥♥♥♥ no one cares about" because they decided to go into autistically deep detail (which normally I can appreciate) about the background lore, but in such a way as it was more like listening to dry notes taken during meetings among the staff. As a matter of fact, the overwhelming sensation I came away with was that the people they had on staff were not only not on the same page more often than not but that a lot of the writing team and people involved in this thing had been openly in conflict with each other. This is the best explanation I could come up with for what went wrong with PoE's writing and it would most thoroughly explain it.

In terms of dryness, it's like this unbelievably tedious and boring as ♥♥♥♥ effort of the writing staff lecturing us about fantasy history about Wales when the Welsh were dancing around in loincloths and smashing rocks togetherbefore the 1960s and boring my tits off with pointless dry writing giving me dates, details, cultural notes etc. because clearly no one had any clue exactly how to SHOW the culture and history of this place.

Speaking of a complete failure to show anything--and I can go LONG in depth about all this believe me this is just only an abstract of my problems with it--yes the backer NPCs was one part of a very big problem. Godlikes are supposed to be these super rare things, right? So what do they do? They spam these things ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everywhere because imho backers are a cancer whose donations are yes appreciated but should be kept in their relard corner far away from content. I have seen numerous games have immersion and storytelling screwed up by appeasing backers, and it's quite telling that one of the absolute worst games I've ever played that had backer funding got the most glowing praise from those fukcwits because each one of them got their atmosphere destroying NPC spammed everywhere, whereas in other games where I have seen backers savage the game it often ended up being ones I thought were absolutely fantastic joys to play like Tides of Numenera.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all this however is that I actually minded the backer NPC stories perhaps the least. The ended up being succinct little vignettes that were interesting more often than not, and quite frankly the golden NPC tales were usually miles more entertaining than a majority of the lore texts I found. This was, imho, just a complete and utter failure to properly build a world.

Now all that I just said is only about the writing being dull and tedious. That doesn't even touch on the combat, which granted I simply had more of an issue with because I just absolutely f'ing hate RTwP combat. I forgave Planescape for it because Planescape actually managed to be one of the most captivating worlds and stories every penned to CRT monitor, and because at least the spells looked cool enough I forgave its notoriously subpar combat. Because PoE revolved more around combat I could not overlook this as well, and because I wasn't a fan of the writing or the story could not overlook it at all. The combat was almost always tedious as ♥♥♥♥ to me.

No, it's not whatever insipid git gud remark you're probably already going to leave because you never bothered reading the reply, which is loosely the same as the average party composition and involves Hiravias, me (a druid Orlan funny enough; I would not have done this if I'd known there was a druid Orlan companion going in), and Aloth as caster AoE dmg, Pelegina and Eder on tank duties, and Durance just because I happened to genuinely like Durance--and that's another thing, I didn't like most of the companions either. Originally I had Kana instead of Pelegina but he annoyed the absolute ♥♥♥♥ out of me so much I had numerous times considered executing him by firing squad. Man I really wanted to execute him. He was on quasi-tanking duties before I mercifully was granted my stoic bird woman. I never even bothered with anyone else because I either found them too late to be useful or they annoyed me too much. This is more a personal taste issue though as I can tell some people would really be fond of Hiravias or Sagani or even Kana Rua.

I also just wasn't ever as impressed with the spellcasting as I was with Planescape for some reason. Never could figure out why. That's like so much of the game: it looks all shiny and like it's supposed to be good on the surface but it just never came together for me. I never got the feeling of any kind of great vision anyone had for this game. It somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts which I never fully understood why that was, but like with everything else this is just how I felt about the spells. Like even Tyranny for the same reason as I just said just felt somehow more "substantial" or full in terms of spell effects. Visually the looked great and spellcasting felt good in Tyranny; it never did in PoE. It just felt...lifeless? Grey? Washed out? Tedious.

I think that possibly what really added into all that was the bugs though. There's nothing quite like sitting there staring at a static screen for three and a half solid minutes to really get you excited about a game, especially when it does this literally every time you enter a room, every time you go to another forest, enter a forest, go to different section of the city, enter a doorway, have to enter another doorway to go down into a cellar, I mean it just never f'ing ends. This massively dragged playing that game down to a crawl for me and saps even more energy and fun out of the whole game, making the whole process one of the most tedious, dry, boring experiences I ever had.

Like I said, this is one of only two games I played that I actively was angry about having finished it. I am to this day still angry at the game for wasting my life.

>It could be that you are used to completely different games.
Some things are a matter of personal taste. As previously noted I prefer TB over RT and massively prefer both over RTwP. CRPGs are one of my top favorite genres. I've already beaten Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Ember, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Planescape Torment, Wasteland 2, all 3 Shadowrun games, Tides of Numenera,etc, many of which I've beaten multiple times, as well as quite a few I started and either didn't get into yet like Arcanum, Divinity: Original Sin, Age of Decadence, and Stellar tactics among others, or am super into like Atom RPG and simply haven't finished yet. I have or have tried probably most CRPGs ever made, including some crpg-esque but not CRPGs like Hard West which I adored. So on the one hand, yes, I recognize that tastes differ, since for example I never really got into D:OS partly because I disliked the cheesy goofy atmosphere, humour, and aesthetic, in spite of the fact I prefer turn based combat, whereas I really loved Tyranny despite strongly disliking RTwP.

So in short, no, that is patently untrue. I am quite used to crpgs. This is not at all me being used to different games.

>You don't have to. You can leave Stalwart and return as often as you like until Dazir, the leader, is slain.
I am talking about how the minute you enter Stalwart it is under attack by ogres. That is simply not playable as a level 1 or level 2 character and moreover you're talking almost like you expect someone new to the game to know exactly where to go and what to do. Fact of the matter is, you simply cannot go into that area and recruit Zahua off a fresh game without having leveled up a lot, and come to think of it I'm not even sure you can get there without first having to get into lots of combat encounters anyway.

>There is not much content after the PRE-ENDGAME save. Only the three small areas of the final dungeon of a very short Act 4. Breith Eaman and Sun in Shadow.
There is still enough to annoy me. Considering how much time I spent having to replay content due to the games numerous bugs (I probably lost a total of at least 16 hours minimum of my life already just having to redo things I already did) I'm in no mood to replay one more minute of content I've already cleared.

>The PC version is in a very fine state.
Very clearly false.
>I've been part of the project as a pre-purchaser and have experienced the v1/v2/v3 series including multiple playthroughs.
So you're biased?
>Savegames for this game don't cause any issues
Patently false. In fact this is a very well known issue, both since immediately at release
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72764-quick-saving-and-loading-times-increased-greatly-after-20~-hours/
As well as even many years later
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/89374-loading-times-are-becoming-impossible/
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/96349-loading-times-are-disgusting/
he's complaining about only 20 second load times, that's cute. How cute and naive
In fact apparently this not only was not just a well known problem that was never fixed for PoE 1, but they even managed to keep this wonderful feature to become a huge problem for PoE II!
https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/2828702373013037664/

> unless you use Steam Cloud with slow networking access.
and I don't ever use cloud saves for anything at all either. At this point you are just straight up lying. I find it hard to believe anyone who claims to have been so heavily involved with this game to be completely ignorant of an extremely well known issue with not just PoE but also with PoE II: Deadfire.

>Load times are a side-effect of how Unity engine is used for this game and the many files that are accessed for each area.
>No big issue.
>No big issue.
>No big issue.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/1744483505462496838/
https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/3kej6u/i_cant_stand_the_load_times_anymore_i_give_up/

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Okay now I am sufficiently angry after having thought about and started writing all that
Oh sweet summer child, you have not even begun to see my final form in complaining about this game.

Originally posted by JCourtney:

It wouldn't surprise me if the OP has the game installed on a hard drive.

Of course I have it installed on a hard drive. It's a crpg from 2015, not a muh shiny cinematic grafix from 2019. Are you seriously going to sit there and try and argue it's totally okay if a crpg from 2015 becomes borderline unplayable if it's not installed on an SSD?

Originally posted by Du-Vu:

Unless this is one of the console versions.

Negative. I don't play any of those heathen console games, only clean burning PC games with PC gaming accessories.

Originally posted by psychotron666:

Had to reload hours of gameplay.

Uh okay, the point of no return makes an auto save before the final dungeon. Hardly hours of gameplay.

What a shock that the main quest ends the game, that's never happened before

Keep in mind how long the load times bloat the game too. And like I said earlier, I sacrificed many, many aggravating hours of my life I'm never going to get back already due to the numerous issues this game has. I am utterly unwilling to sacrifice any more having to replay content. On the plus side, I already beat the game so I'm literally never going to have to go back through those sections again. I am permanently done with this game when or if I ever beat the WM content.

Christ just thinking about this game makes me slowly starting to get infuriated again.

[JCourtney]

Yes. 100%. Having anything that needs to access on a hard drive is just cancerous at this point in time. Hard drives are literally painful for anything but cold storage at this point. God forbid you still have your OS installed on one. Why in hell in 2019 would you not be running your OS and games off a SSD. Even a cheap one is 10x faster than a 7200 rpm physical disk.

Haha. I mean for Chirst Sake no wonder you're so pissed off. You probably have 100 hours in loading times.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by JCourtney:

Yes. 100%. Having anything that needs to access on a hard drive is just cancerous at this point in time. Hard drives are literally painful for anything but cold storage at this point. God forbid you still have your OS installed on one. Why in hell in 2019 would you not be running your OS and games off a SSD. Even a cheap one is 10x faster than a 7200 rpm physical disk.

Haha. I mean for Chirst Sake no wonder you're so pissed off. You probably have 100 hours in loading times.

Seriously? That's your excuse? SSDs cost a lot more money than hard drives, and besides which a lot of people have older computers. Again, this is an old crpg. You're literally hitting Valve mod/employee tier, in fact do you actually work for Valve? "Oh no don't blame our absolutely broken as all ♥♥♥♥ piece of software, try to deflect blame onto end user hardware instead." Guess what if you can't run a game off a hard drive it's a broken piece of ♥♥♥♥ unoptimized piece of crap. This is doubly true if it's a low intensity game like a crpg and triply so if it's also an older game.

Note how I don't actually have anything like these kinds of problems with all my other games, including way more hardware intensive games. The problem is PoE. The problem has always been PoE and the fact that Obsidian in general can't code their games for ♥♥♥♥.