SKull

1: You don`t have to do anything. If something makes sense to you you`ll probably do that alot. But that doesn`t mean it`s the only way of doing things. 2: Non tanks are squishy. It`s an RPG, not WOW. They`re supposed to be squishy. Have you forgotten archers oneshotting mages in BG? 3: There is no aggro. There is an engagement system you haven`t understood. 4: I also prefer turn based but not everyone agrees. Pausing the game works too although it`s easy to forget things, at least at first. 5: The spell system is a bit confusing for for me as well at the moment. But then it`s a new game. Learning the game is part of the fun, spells included. 6: No need to reinvent the wheel I agree. But there are copyright considerations and all sorts of stuff. And just because something is different doesn`t necessarily make it bad.

I would recommend not moving around in party formation when you`re exploring. If you move out with the tank on his own so the tank engages everything first the enemies seem to lock on to the tank a bit better. Then either move the ranged up in support carefully or flee back to the ranged with the tank, depending on circumstances, to minimize loose mobs hitting your ranged characters. This seems to work fairly well most of the time. At least enough to get past fights, although it`s still a little unpredictable and sometimes an odd ranged character gets knocked out.

What has worked for me so far is to not overthink things when there are hard fights. In the courtyard, which is pretty rough I guess, I sent Eder in to aggro as much as possible, used the priest to cast the endurance spells on Eder to keep him up while my two mages (Main is a mage) used fan of flames on all of it, Eder included. It`s a sort of brute force approach I suppose but that`s what I`ve been doing. Trying to angle my spells in seems to just result in missing a lot of the enemies and therefore making the fights longer. Better to just wing it and hope the enemies die before Eder:) And the entire keep was doable on hard with four characters at level 4 in this way, although I did have to return to town a couple times to buy camping supplies. Of course I didn`t really have to do that at all because you can rest at the priest. But I didn`t know about that and got to him almost at the end of clearing the whole thing.

Americans are the only ones who obsess over this race stuff tbh. Nobody in Europe gives a toss. Skin color doesn`t determine who you are. Your actions do. And the Romans were that way too which was why they had black generals and even one or two black emperors. Nobody cared because it doesn`t matter. Only in the USA does it matter for some weird reason. And apparently it matters to everyone, whether they`re black or white. Weird people... Emperor Eliogabalus. Third most useless emperor in Roman history and black. Who cares!?! He was a perv and a moron so that`s why nobody likes him.

Water skiing?

I`ve bought it without being a backer and so will two other people I know. And if the game is good and bug free it will sell a lot more. There`s a long neglected market for in depth CRPGs and they don`t even have to be all that original. A lot of people miss the infinity games. The only problem I can see with PoE is that it`s not being marketed as heavily as it could be so many people might miss it. But they will buy it in a trickle over the next few years as they find out about the game I am sure.

Except this thread is full of a bunch of people saying BG2 isn't actually that hard. Yes once you learn the rules it`s not. I was replying to the OP though, and not everyone else, as I`m sure you noticed.

Oh enjoy! Too bad there`s not much in the way of replayability there. But by Helm it`s fun the first time around.

I`m playing Crusader Kings II and Sunless Sea.

The thing I think newer gamers miss sometimes is that games like BGII came at the end of a ca 30 year process of developing a nuanced game world called AD&D, which was supposed to be hard. BGII was not the beginning of anything but rather the ending of something pretty amazing. Nothing like it exists now and no game like it could even get the funding for production these days. My first experience with AD&D was playing tabletop RPGs with my buddies back in the 80s. And we died all the time at first because everything was new. Learning how to play it was half the fun and socializing was the other half. Nobody usually expected to finish anything. It was just a game world and you could use it as you liked, either playing pre-written modules or writing your own. Most of the actual stuff you ended up doing while playing was not scripted at all, but more or less improv RP/horseplay mixed with dice rolls, sometimes while actually being drunk. And it was fun. What CRPGs have almost completely lost is the largely unscripted nature of these earlier generations of RPG games. The original Baldur`s Gate is probably the best of them simply because it had a relatively open world and tons of places to explore which you didn`t need to even visit if you didn`t want to. It gave you a decent amount of freedom to do things when you wanted to, and not simply because there was nothing left to do or (Horror!) because the game scripted you to go there. From this perspective BGII was a huge step in the wrong direction, although in other ways it was much better. When people started translating AD&D to CRPGs in the 1990s it was not up for discussion that all the rules and all the difficulty of AD&D had to be translated first. Not as some novel addition to annoy people but as a crucial part of the AD&D experience. If BGII hadn`t been hard to the point of frustration it wouldn`t have been an AD&D game, and it would never have dared say "based on AD&D" on the box to begin with. It`s just that simple. And like you said yourself it gets easier as you practise and learn the rules of the game. And that is what gaming is about. Or at least what it used to be about. I`m not so sure anymore what people imagine gaming is about, considering that all I seem to hear is moaning that games are too hard. Even when games are ridiculously easy you`ll find someone who thinks it is too hard and is complaining about it. For an ancient gamer like myself this is very confusing. Games are supposed to be hard. Not because I`m so awesome but because without a challenge there`s no point. Finishing BGII feels like something of an achievement precisely because it is hard. Make it easier and there`s no achievement. And if there`s no ahievement, what`s the point? And that is the problem with single player games over the last decade+. They`re all much too easy, almost without exception. And I don`t expect PoE to be any exception sadly.

Nothing like six sweaty barbarians sharing a bed to get some quality R&R between killing orcs and zombies. I always wondered how it is possible to walk around in the middle of nowhere in full plate armor for weeks and weeks without getting blisters or chafing, and not just the lack of toilet breaks and realistic sleeping arrangements. I guess realism just has to stop somewhere. Vendors have never worked well in CRGPs though and are just sort of wrong whichever way you do them. Either too poor, too rich, have nothing to sell which you need or too much so you don`t need combat to find upgrades etc. I like the idea of diminishing returns on vendoring myself, to reflect inflation as you offload 148 orcish short swords in the local town over the course of the game. I`ve seen this in a PC game once, but I can`t remember which one it was. That makes sense to me and might help prevent even realistically poor vendors from going broke by buying all the ridiculous trash the player drags back with him. On the reverse side you don`t want gold, or whatever the currency is, to become pointless either. As long as there`s an economy for the player to operate in vendors are fine with me though. What I don`t like is when some vendors will buy certain things while others will not. Baldur`s Gate had a lot of this, and selling arrows was a whole thing because you had to remember which people would buy them. You miss a turn because there`s something in your eye!

Definition is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ It`s a relatively vague term, and increasingly so as games become more complex. The quality of gameplay depends entirely on genre and what particular game we`re talking about. If you`re playing a racing game, bad gameplay would be inappropriate textures you could drive through, unresponsive vehicles etc. Annoying music would not be bad gameplay. Bad gameplay in an old platform game might be things like impossible jumps, platforms that you fall through because of bad programming or spontaneous reversal of movement controls without warning. But what might bad gameplay be in Obilivion and Skyrim? I would argue that the ending of Oblivion is an Oscar winning example of awful gameplay. Instead of the expansive and engaging world you have just been playing in you`re now stuck clearing portal after portal after portal until you just quit in disgust or develop an ulcer. It was bad enough the first time. But obviously because the game was so large you needed loads and loads of these bad portals to make the ending proportionate to the game. It was barbaric torture and therefore terrible gameplay. More or less the same thing can be said about the dragons in Skyrim; big and impressive, the first five times or so. After that they became a video gaming equivalent of seagull parents divebombing you during nesting season; annoying and loud but not much of a threat. Which begs the question of why they are there at all. Having a major selling point of the game be entirely pointless and trivial the way the dragons were in Skyrim qualifies as bad game play too, quite apart from the discussion of skills etc already on this page. In general though, gameplay in an RPG sense is perhaps the hardest to pin down. i think this explains why there is so much confusion among developers these days on how to do just basic things like loot, skills, character development, inventories and customization. You`d think this stuff would have been sorted by now but it keeps getting tinkered with, and what`s worse slashed altogether in the case of Bioware. The basics of it is in risk-reward relations, both of an individual fight or quest line and for the game as a whole. If a fight is seriously hard the players need some suitable reward for surviving it. And if it`s very easy some pennies or some trash. If you tinker with this by making gear and other treasure too hard to find, like in Diablo III on inferno (When it launched. I haven`t played it since) then you make the game, or at least the part of the game concerned with gear, pointless. If you make it too easy to find so the problem becomes what to do with it all (WoW after TBC) that also makes the gear part of the game pointless. This equals bad gameplay. Removing the inventory altogether like Bioware have done might technically not produce bad gameplay, but instead it changes the genre so the game is no longer really an RPG. To anyone who likes RPGs therefore, removing inventories also gives bad gameplay. The second primary gameplay element in an RPG is character development. It needs to be deep, in the sense that you could put all your points in strength but you`d be a moron and a klutz as a trade off. Any RPG that doesn`t force such tradeoffs on the player is a bad RPG. If you allow the player to be great at everything, like Oblivion and Skyrim did, that is bad gameplay, because it negates the process of character development altogether. What`s the point if you`re just gonna end up with a heroic cookie cutter guy anyway? Not letting players assign their skills and attributes, like Diablo III did, is also of course terrible game play. It`s no longer doing what an RPG game is supposed to be doing. Most RPG games made since about 2008 are amazingly shallow in some or all of these aspects. They look deep to the confused but are in fact just wide. Lots of places to go, absolutely nothing to do once you get there. Above all a game might have some bad gameplay but not be altogether bad, which is the case with Oblivion and Skyrim in my view. There is good gameplay as well in both of those games. It`s just that the bad gameplay is either so totally unecessary or sabotaging the RPG genre that it makes them pretty bad RPG games. Again, if you like RPGs they are not the best games in the world for these reasons. If you want an example of a game that has only bad gameplay and no good gameplay, try either Big Rigs ("Driving" "Simulator" (Sorry, but both of those words are lies when describing Big Rigs)), Custer`s Revenge (Technically a shoot`em up, where your goal is to rape tied up native American women) or the political activism game called Ethnic Cleansing, an FPS game in which the goal is to shoot black people and Jews before they can take over the world. Here`s a video in case you don`t believe me. My point is that games that are entirely bad are rare. That`s not what we`re talking about when we say that TES has bad gameplay. PS: And don`t give me the pseudo evolutionary waffle some people seem to buy into please. RPGs have degenrated, not evolved. You don`t evolve platform games by removing the platforms and giving the player a jet pack. You abolish the platformer genre. And it`s the same with all the "conveniences" forced on RPG fans over the last decade or so. Don`t worry now. Just 69 more portals to go and you`re done! Is there a Mrs Jones in this apartment? Doing a Carl Lewis long jump act instead of pressing a button as instructed.

Thanks for that link. He`s a smart guy and says it very well. What he says about the joy of discovery is so spot on. To my mind it`s the most important aspect of any game, regardless of genre. And it should not be sabotaged for players by hand holding. Even if it`s just something like a puzzle game or a chess simulator it still applies because you want to move to the next puzzle or the next CPU opponent to see it and find out if you can beat it. If you are constantly telling the player exactly what to do, including with quest markers, you`re removing discovery as an element of the game. I can remember occasionally being semi annoyed at having to draw game maps on grid paper to avoid getting lost back in the 80s and 90s, pre auto map days. But at the same time, the first time I managed to beat a game BECAUSE I had had the patience to do this (Dungeon Master) it was a very good feeling. When player intelligence (Knowing where things are, where you are in the game world and what you`re supposed to be doing there) is increased because of player activity rather than developer activity it makes for a much more satisfying gaming experience. Developers used to hide subtle clues about the finer points of playing the game, and usually you missed most of them. They didn`t pause your game to give you step by step instructions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNNp2Y6YTM

Quest markers should be banned in RPGs since they make games feel automatic, as if you don`t really need to be there. An ape could probably be trained to run after quest markers. For me though the Elder Scrolls games have always felt a bit bland because there`s so little structure. And the further you get the more depressingly bland the games feel. The gameplay in both Oblivion and Skyrim is just awful trash as well, once the fun of exploration passes. In the first one you have to clear endless, almost identical portals until you pass out from boredom and in Skyrim you have to kill way too many impressive looking but feeble dragons. At some point in my first playthrough of Elder Scrolls games I go from fascinated with the expansive game world to incredibly bored, and I never touch the game again. And this was what happened to me when I played Daggerfall back in 1994 already, which allegedly had a game world size the equivalent of Britain. Clearly, TES has more problems than just handholding and casualization. Somewhere between the overexpansive wash of TES and the constraining tunnel vision procedure of Diablo III lies the perfect RPG. You need to be allowed to freely explore (Baldur`s Gate), but there also needs to be something worthwhile there when you actually do explore or it`s going to feel pointless (TES, I would argue). There needs to be a compelling story but there also needs to be the freedom to influence that story or even sabotage it if you want. There needs to be gear but not so little it`s pointless (Dragon Age II) or so much it makes gear too easy to acquire and therefore also pointless (World of Warcraft, post TBC). There needs to be scope for character development and customization, but not so much that you are forced to jump around like a moron to get your acrobatics skill up (Oblivion) or so little you feel like you`re playing an arcade game rather than and RPG(Diablo III, Dragon Age II). And of course you need convincing combat, interesting characters and dialogue and a developed game world. I can see why it`s hard to get all this stuff right. And that is perhaps why it`s apparently so hard to reach the levels of the best RPGs like Torment and Fallout. The development of those games was just so meticulous and well thought out, and the freedom of the developers apparently much greater than today, that you almost have to repeat the same development process from scratch to get to the same place. Imitation just won`t do. Sadly, imitate is all most developers seem to do these days. Maybe that`s the real contamination from the console market. Older PC games felt hand made. Modern PC games feel mass produced, like console games have always felt. That`s the big change for me.

Fourth along on the top row, is...can it be a broach of purest Green? No in all seriousness these are splendid and remind one of the fantastic illustrations for Betrayal at Krondor, but obviously more detailed, intriguing and pleasant. Personally I somewhat loathe nondescript loot and items, it is nice to see such a small detail handled with such care. The portraits are fine, but could we possibly have a few ugly ones by any chance, lived in and weathered etcetera? It`s more of a splat.

Personally I always preferred BG to BG II specifically for this reason. It`s not so much because it staggered the quests to have BG be so open, although it did, but the sense of being allowed to explore for yourself. There`s obviously a balance which needs to be struck between linear and non-linear, but most games are far too linear for my taste. And sadly this included BG II, although it`s better in that respect than IW and IW II were. I just think that particularly in RPG games it makes a lot of sense for things to be at least somewhat non-linear and to reward exploration a bit. The longer I can delay going on the Jon Irenicus bus the better.

I don`t understand how racism/homophobia relates to orcs, but whatever. As usual though I get hung up on all the propaganda terms being hurled around as if they mean something, so a few definitions: Racism : Racially discriminatory policy. That`s what the -ism means. Anything that ends with -ism is a doctrine of political control, so really only governments or companies are ever racist if we use the word correctly. If you hate other people as individuals just because of their skin color you could also use it in a way, as long as it`s a principle, but it is more accurate to say racial hatred. I would even argue that the race issue is being used deliberately to stifle free speech. For example, if you criticize Obama you are automatically racist, even though he is half white and not a very black looking man at all. It`s a way to slander any opposition and has little to do with reality. If you criticize Israel you`re also a racist, even though Judaism is not a race but a religion. Inserting this issue everywhere is destroying language, whatever else people imagine it is in aid of. Homophobia = An irrational fear of men/women, depending on gender. Even more specifically: to have an irrational fear of things which are the same as you. But you can dislike homosexual activities without having an irrational fear of men or women, so this word is nonsensical. Again it is used to slander people and to stop the conversation, just like the word "racist" is. I wish people would be more interested in what words actually mean, and not just use them because everybody else keeps repeating them without thinking. And either way freedom of speech is more important than any of this. If you`re not free to be a "racist" or a "homophobe" then you`re not free period. If you`re not free you`re a slave. So we should all celebrate both "racism" and "homophobia" as free speech exercises, no matter how offensive we find it or how ignorant it is. But as long as there`s no crime or violence involved people should be more relaxed. You can`t put people in prison because they hurt your feelings, sorry. And if there is a crime the person who committed it will be sent to prison for that crime, and not for being verbally offensive. If people don`t wake up to this soon we could be risking tyranny. A tyranny of good intentions maybe, but a tyranny nonetheless. And that`s all I have to say about this to all the righteously indignant people you always run across whenever these issues arise. And now, can we get back to orcs please....

Irenicus dungeon is filled with goblins Weren't those kobolds? OK, I don't remember any goblins and orcs in BG1 and I didn't miss them. Half orc was a playable race in BG wasn`t it?

I might agree with this were elves and dwarves not present in the setting. The fact that they are renders the point absurd. Taking a stand against Tolkien would be well and good, but including elves as an obligatory part of high fantasy robs that stand of any credibility. Do you think elves rob the setting of any creativity or respectability? If the answer is "no", then you are excercising an entirely arbitrary judgment of what is good Tolkien and what is bad Tolkien. Which is fine, but entirely subjective. Claiming an objective disparity between the "credibility" of elves and that of orcs is ridiculous. Orcs and Goblins are two great examples of elements that virtually always encourage lazy, derivative and just plain bad writing. Obsidian is putting together a world where culture(and the budding nationalism appropriate to the renaissance era) are the defining features of people much more so than simply race. If they brought in Orcs(which I don't believe they ever will) they'd just be the same old Mongol/Hun/Tartar knockoffs they always are. People you can immediately identify as the "bad guys" and slaughter without the slightest thought or intellectual excercise and who don't require any investment in building their culture, language or way of life before the player gets to hack away at them. They've already managed to avoid silliness like having their nativist elves live in treehouses or in nomadic clans, and their dwarves pull on a much more interesting angle as explorers, seafarers and fronteirsmen(which itself is informed by the real history of Vikings as intelligent explorers and traders and not just axe-wielding berserk raiders) rather than the incredibly well-trodden, boring "mountain dwelling smiths with Scottish accents and Babylonian arcitecture" . They're got a good thing going. The problem the way I see it is lack of detail from Tolkien, who was the one who popularized orcs in the first place. Even though I read LotR several times before the movies came out I always had a hard time visualizing some things, and orcs were among them. Excepting the quite detailed description of Griznakh when he carries off Merry and Pippin, there was almost a complete lack of a physical description of orcs. Griznakh was described as short, squat and with black skin as well as fangs and claws. He also had long, hairy, sinewy and terrifyingly strong arms. But since it was mentioned that he had some of these characteristics we can assume that other orcs did not, or at least less so. The orc chieftain in Moria was described as "huge" and "almost man high". So we know that orcs were smaller than humans. We also know that they were evil, chaotic, violent and that they descended from corrupted elves. They also had their own language, several dialects and built ugly but functional buildings. Some of these thing could be said of post WWII architects and politicians though, so it`s not so much to go on really:) But that`s it. The rest is up to creative people to fill out in interesting ways. Yet it almost never happens. When I read the book I always pictured them as more reptile-like than they were later presented in WoW/Wathammer and in Peter Jackson`s movies. In fact, these are the two reigning versions of orcs today. Either American Indians meet The Incredible Hulk or poor personal hygiene, skin conditions, deformities and bad teeth. Jackson`s orcs also have the worst tailors in the Universe. This was probably because I had played quite a lot of Dragonlance tabletop RPGs in the 80s, where the bad guys were draconians, spawned from the eggs of good dragons. So when reading Tolkien I just lost the wings on those and kept the rest. So as a result I have never liked either of the popular orc versions developed since. Just trying to find a picture anywhere on the net of an orc looking anything like the way Griznakh was described is basically impossible. They all have huge bulging arms so the sinewy arms are out. Almost all of them have green skin, so the black skin is out. They usually have regular hands, so the claws are out. And none of them usually have hairy arms so that`s out. There`s an almost total lack of creativity when it comes to developing orcs any further than Blizzard and Jackson have done. Usually new games/movies just copy one of these interpretations uncritically, as if it`s the only way to do it. And the same goes for elves and dwarves really. I`m glad Obsidian seems to want to steer clear of things unless they can put their own stamp on it. I`m not sure which I loathe the most; hippie elves, Scottish dwarves or barbarian orcs. It`s all terribly generic and it has been for years. Lose the wings and this was basically how I pictured orcs for a decade, before Warcraft and Warhammer.

Dwarves traditionally have bonus to constitution/endurance/saving throws and resistance to cold. If you want them to be extra strong as well you`d have to lose some of this I think, and I`m not sure if this makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile orcs/half orcs, ogres/half ogres had a strength bonus, elves and hobbits/gnomes etc traditionally have one for dexterity. I agree re the gauntlets of hill giant strength items though, and especially when the drops are fixed like they were in BG. You knew that you needed to get to the ogre on the bridge asap to get those gauntlets so you could give it to your intentionally feeble fighter. I do think hard to find potions and other consumables, increasing str/dex/con/int whatever, are a decent idea which gives you an option to enhance the characters slightly as you go. Just not a single item taking you from 6 to 18/00.

I`m not too sure about this tbh. If you mean that there should be some sort of hook at the start to get people engaged then I agree if we`re talking about having something interesting happen. But if it`s just gonna be some random article of flash I don`t. Personally I thought Fallout had a great start. It was supposed to be a journey into the unknown right, so if someone inside Vault 13 had known too much about the outside world to set the stage it would have broken the immersion. I like it when games set the premises and the player is forced to learn the ropes all over again with new games. If all games are the same they get boring right? And Torment was actually off-putting to a lot of people when it was released because there was so much text and so much dialogue. I don`t think either Torment or Fallout could have been produced today because they`re not streamlined enough, and not hand holding enough to new players. And there were too many words to have the sort of hook you`re really risking inflicting on us. I`d rather things are a bit confusing than dull me.

To be fair though this is the failure of the fantasy genre to get elves, or to portray them as complex creatures, at least from Tolkien`s perspective. If you read Silmarillion for example, the elves there are about as different from run of the mill fantasy elves in games as you can imagine. If you could do elves like that they would certainly not be boring. Jon Irenicus is probably the closest I`ve seen to getting there in any computer game at least, and he was also not boring. When this becomes a problem with any race or class it is because there`s no proper vision. Orcs are the same, and usually incredibly dull and generic. But Tolkien`s orcs were not dull and generic, but had complexity, both within each character and socially. It`s all down to the writing, and you can make all this stuff very interesting or very dull.

By golly this is looking awesome! Just pretty please make sure not to rush anything. I know I`ll happily wait a month or two if it means a better game at the end:. Hell, I`ll even do situps while waiting if you want me to:)

Partly true, but some things about the formations were very useful as well. Being able to turn the party around quickly to get fighters etc on the front line was done very well in the infinity games. If I remember correctly you could also adjust the spacing of each formation too, so you had a lot more variation than the few basic formation indicates. Even though this sort of stuff had been developed in RTS games originally, from the first ones like Dune and C&C on, BG was to my knowledge the first game to adapt the concept in a CRPG, and it helped revolutionize the genre as much as the story telling and actual combat did. Previous to BG the best CRPG I am aware of was the Krynn trilogy SSI made, and while they seemed good at the time they are now almost unplayable because so many of the innovations and adaptations made by Black Isle we take for granted are entirely missing. But like all this stuff it develops slowly, and was much better in the later infinity games than in BG. Obviously it will be implemented in its most refined form in PoE, and not identical to the earliest incarnation in BG. . Champions of Krynn, 1990. The first CRPG with graphics that wasn`t entirely horrible, and the best one until BG was released:) Dune, 1992. The grand daddy of Starcraft, Command and Conquer and Baldur`s Gate unit selection and formations:)

I don`t understand why people always ask for this. I can`t think of a single MMORPG I like, and the only one I`ve enjoyed at any point is WoW, which has now turned crap like all the others. I do enjoy SP CRPGs though and would prefer to do so without having it infested with MMORPG people spamming me with baloney. If someone can make a good MMORPG I`ll play it if I feel like it, but please don`t force the genres you like on everyone else. I don`t come along to force your games to be turn based strategy just because I like that do I?