Zansatsu

Interesting post. I don't know how I feel about the system. It would seem they don't want any dump stats so they have tried to make everything important in some way to any aspect of the game you might care about. I hope this approach doesn't end up washing everything out meaning jack of all trades master of none. If you put too much in Strength and intellect you may end up missing a lot with lower dexterity and so on. Perhaps this can be made up in gear? I don't know. I'm sure there are a lot of people who are excited about this, I'm not sure I will. Some of it seems unnecessarily complicated. Anyway I don't have any thoughts on How to improve anything because I'm not sure I like the Idea of spreading the wealth around all over.

Well, the good news about the beta is that 1) it starts you off with camping supplies and 2) You're never far away from the village inn. Here was my playstyle for the first wilderness map: 1)Fight an encounter. 2) Rush back to the tavern to rest. 3) go back and fight another encounter 4) Rush back to the inn to rest. and then in that map's dungeon: 1)fight one encounter 2) set camp 3) fight another oncounter 4) set camp If Josh thought he could eliminate or even reduce rest-spamming with his crap design ideas, he was horribly mistaken. I think rested more in this 3-map-beta than I did in 7 chapters of IWD1. Speaking of resting in inn's, what did you think of the buffs they provided you? How long did they last? Were the buffs different for each class? I believe it was stated that the buffs received from sleeping at inns lasts until you rest again.

I'm not trying to imply Stun you were playing terribly I meant the programmer who did the demo.

Actually how was the combat/spell/ all that? Forget the xp for a minute, was in enjoyable? Was it as punishing and bad as the demos make it look or was he playing terribly?

Well, the good news about the beta is that 1) it starts you off with camping supplies and 2) You're never far away from the village inn. Here was my playstyle for the first wilderness map: 1)Fight an encounter. 2) Rush back to the tavern to rest. 3) go back and fight another encounter 4) Rush back to the inn to rest. and then in that map's dungeon: 1)fight one encounter 2) set camp 3) fight another oncounter 4) set camp If Josh thought he could eliminate or even reduce rest-spamming with his crap design ideas, he was horribly mistaken. I think rested more in this 3-map-beta than I did in 7 chapters of IWD1. What difficulty was it set on? I'm curious to know if the combat seems on par, more difficult, than it's predecessors.

I think it's more fair to say he was leaning towards kill -xp but had an open mind.. I fear the beta will close his mind wide shut and brace the doors with any furniture he can find. My cross to bear was the "rest spot". I definitely prefer kill XP but Im not married to it unless the alternative sucks. I thought objective XP worked in Shadowrun but it really sounds like a stinker in PoE. You guys are worrying me. I want to love this game but I already see myself walking away from it. Maybe I shouldn't play the Beta. You should definitely try it and judge for yourself.

Of course there is a solution. Don't give players kill xp for murdering a quest giver after they have solved his quest peacefully. In other words, let the game emulates what a human DM would do. Or just let the player do that anyway. Who cares what a player does in his own game. I have personally never killed quest givers, simply because I don't powergame, I rollplay. We can't be trusted Helm, can't you see that. We are murderous heathenist dogs. If we so much as smell Kill xp we will be consumed by an uncontrollable urge to kill everything in sight. We will forget all our years of RPing or why we play these games instead of Shooters. We will fly into a lizard brain, shark frenzied, blood orgy of death from which no villager, npc, or poor woodland creature will survive. Oh and if you solve a quest peacefully they could tack serious penalties on going back and killing the people you just negotiated with. GASP!!!! could they do that to discourage double dipping I wonder?

I'm not going to start an argument with you Gillius, I never said they didn't have moments that were tough. If you got beat a ton then you had a different experience than I did. I had very little trouble with most of the combat in BG1. I certainly died and had to reload in a few spots, but I figured it out very quickly, oh and by the way, my heavy armored mele characters did not get one shot.

Maybe so, if that's the case perhaps they could have had the demo preset a bit better.

Is anybody planning to play as a death godlike? Because they look awful.

I haven't seen one yet I like or would use. Not saying they are bad just none of the ones I've seen feel like they would fit any character I would make.

If anything they got more right than most RPGs can hope to.

Ya this argument that the infinity engine games were broken does not compute. They were incredibly fun, classic, and the reason we are all here. If they were as bad and broken as you keep claim (I don't concede that) they wouldn't make everyone's list for top RPGs of all time.

Well see there you go. I've always been a completionist by nature, so have never run into this. I've always enjoyed doing as much as possible in a game and going everywhere. I like clearing sections as I explore. I've never really had the thought, why can't I beat this but instead guess I'm not ready yet. Given those circumstances I get the complaint. OK objective xp I'm fine with it you've changed my mind. I still like the other way better though damn you!!!! Lol.

Alright fair enough. I see why that could bother you. Doesn't bother me but OK.

Just out of curiosity and I'm not trying to argue I'm simply curious why this matters in a single player game and it comes up a lot. Why does it matter in the slightest if a player desides to go around and gain a bunch of xp and lvls from doing side objectives thus making him very powerful and allowing him to complete the story with greater ease? I don't understand why people care about that. What am I missing?

I didn't see that particular post. Also, how about not feeding into the hivemind bull from a few pages back. I haven't said anything about it myself because it is BS and useless to the conversation at hand. Look all you objective XP fanboys come off just as hive minded. I'm light hearted enough about it I made a joke on myself if you look back. There is a lot of smugness going around it's rather irritating. Oh well I guess I'm a casebook example of change aversion. I've also said this before, "YOU GUYS ARE RIGHT!" There is nothing wrong with your Opinion. BMW is a wonderful car but I like Mercedes better, also a great car. This argument comes down to that. Lets be honest this is about balancing, time, money, and Josh doesn't like it. Most RPG, Yes Yes I know you can all rattle off about 5 that don't, give xp in multiple forms, exploration, combat, quests, and so on. We like that system. It isn't a bad system. I'm not going to hate this game, we've all said that before. I'm absolutely excited about it, we've all said that before. I don't think this is the best decision. People do play games with their feelings. If they aren't fans, ILLOGICAL OR NOT, they will have problems with it.

What a dismissive thing to say.

Hear that guys? We don't think like the professor so we are all emotional morons. Our points are invalid, we are basically wrong.

Any time outside of combat, but if they go a different route I don't really care.

He didn't look tough in any of the videos I saw. Either the whole party got raped, like in the first demo, or it was as I linked above, half the party just standing there. But take the pally out of it entirely, looks like the rogue is so fragile mele range seems all but impossible for him. I've played a lot of rogues in games, usually they are designed to do "some" toe to toe fighting even if they aren't "tanky". When Josh said they do a lot of damage but aren't good at taking hits I didn't think he meant THAT BAD. I thought it meant he can't get focused by Multiple enemies or a "Boss". That looks like if he is touched in combat he explodes.

I'm all for strategy, plenty of games have created plenty of challenging and interesting party tactic oriented combat that supports a mele dps character. How does making a mele Dps character viable jump you to they are automatically op/game will be a face roll everybody will just roll mele dps. NOT ONLY THAT, they have said they want you to be able to create any type of party combo you want. You think it's interesting to have a heavy armored Paladin with a sword just stand there doing nothing? You can't really believe that.

So I watched a couple different run throughs of the gamescon demo on different days and I have to say I'm not jazzed by what I saw. My chief concern is that everything seems so dangerous the only strategy I saw implemented was Freezing enemies in place and attacking at range. The Paladin stood there and did nothing in every encounter and the one time she did get attacked by the Ogre she was almost killed in one shot. To me that doesn't seem like interesting combat. If I create a paladin as my main and every creature's attack is so powerful only a tank can stand it so I have to sit there like a bump on a log while my wizard and rogue blow it up at range count me out. I'm all for challenging combat but that is going to turn me away very quickly. I'm going to want to create a mele dps character that GETS TO FIGHT SOME AT MELE RANGE. Not, oh freeze it at range......now cripple it at range, now stun it at range, okay now move in my tank, okay last second mele guys you can move in and swing once oh now it's dead. Yeah not fun.

Either way there is no guarantee whatever is in the chest will be useful. If it is OK but not....bust, waist of time. If there is a guarantee the chest will always be great then you trivialize loot and run into other problems much of which Stun described.

One of my absolute favorite games was Oblivion, and that gave you xp for everything even just jumping around. It never even acured to me until years later when i learned people would just ran around jumping for hours doing nothing else to exploit the system. Is that a flaw in game design or are people just weird for doing that instead of playing the game normal? I don't know. I still loved that game.