To get the most out of DA:I I'd recommend getting out of the Hinterlands and picking up companions or following the plot ASAP. If you've rescued Mother J then there's no reason for you to stay.

And when you put together a custom chant you can give it a custom name.

Wait, how many potential party members have you killed?!

The cool thing about Pillars is that you can actually max out all kinds of attributes and use them in conversations. For example might lets you intimidate fools, resolve allows you to keep your cool when lying, and so on.

As a paladin you actually pick from about five different orders who champion different things. For example there's the Bleak Walkers who are all about ending conflict quickly by being super brutal. Of course if you want to just throw all that out you can pick an order and then take a talent that lets you ignore the…

Their crowd control abilities are good fun. I made a defensive frontline crowd controller in the beta version and it was a fun build but, um, not exactly optimal. Turns out they're more effective if you just let them be squishy.

It took me ages to get started too. First I rolled up an Aumua barbarian and then abandoned her as too cliched. Then I picked an Death Godlike fighter focused on single target damage but worried that she might be too passive. My third and final choice was an Orlan monk which I blabber about above.

I'm playing an Orlan Monk. I built her as an interrupter because the most influential dude on the Obsidian forums keeps banging on about how underpowered interrupts are. Anyway I nearly maxed out perception and dexterity and gave her a bunch of might. I then picked interrupting blows and swift strikes. She hits really…

That's the IE experience! It's been a little while but I think the original Baldur's Gate only let you get to level ten or so before its expansion. (btw I think PoE's cap is actually 12.)

Incidentally it's also a very fitting choice for this this week's What Are You Playing because its got a terrific and varied art style. There are the Choose Your Own Adventure sections which are illustrated with mock woodcuts, the portraits which are digitally painted and the gorguous 2D hand touched-up backgrounds.…

I've been playing for eight or ten hours now and aside from one inspect icon that didn't work as intended it's been bug free. I reckon it's about as polished an experience as any game is at launch.

Oh, turns out this is still the greatest theme music to a TV series ever.

Mal Webb has a great song about that: http://malwebb.customer.net…

(I'm guessing that the woman who told you a year was testing to see if you'd stick around if sex was off the table for so long.)

Not me! But only because China Mieville used it in one of his novels.

I love KOTOR 2 but it may have the most tedious opening dungeon in any RPG ever. Even the much lambasted opening of BG2 doesn't have such drab visual design or such boring quests (go get this item to fix that machine). If Kreia and Atton didn't make their first appearances it would be a complete waste of time.

The other thing on your side is that Dontnod are the devs and Square is just the publisher. I guess it's not impossible that they leaned on Dontnod to throw in a plug but it doesn't seem especially likely.

It's worth remembering that Samara is a psychotic mass murderer too. She single-mindedly hunts down and punishes (often by death) people who contravene her code without any regard for any principles that aren't a part of her code.

The last prerelease beta build for Pillars of Eternity just came out so I'll be putting some more hours into that as per my routine. It's been really cool to watch the game steadily get better. The improvements to combat (toning down flashy effects, improving visual feedback, tuning abilities and so on) have been…

kthxbai is more Neeson's style.