Panteleimon

First of all, you don't know what his experience level is or if your's outstrips it. Second, he stated his beliefs as you have, you need to stop taking them as personally directed epithets. Third, you seem much more concerned at this point cheerleading MOBAs(and your man hours invested) than speaking about the most readily available pool of bodies for PoE.

Geez, thank you for reminding me of that Seriously, I'm bit in denial about whether I regret my decision to get the key before I learned size of beta or not xP You'll find out. No point regretting it now anyway. Also, Mr. Sawyer did say that there is a dungeon underneath the town itself, so it's possible it's in the beta.

Onion domes are the best thing ever, especially on helmets.

Very cool, I'm glad to hear it!

If you are talking about that picture, I'm pretty sure its Russian. There's a lot of overlap in Byzantine and Russian gear, considering they were Christianized, recruited into the military(it was full of Norse Russians) , traded with, etc by the Byzantines. That's where Cyrillic comes from(St. Cyril was a Byzantine), and why Moscow is known in Orthodox Christanity as the 'third Rome' after the loss of Constantinople. So yeah, the above is an accurate depiction of a Byzantine soldier, or a Russian one.

I would absolutely watch Northernlion play the beta(and the game in general) . I think it's up his alley.

The real world has redwoods, camphors, oaks, sequoias, baobabs, and other big dang trees. I can deal with the wheel. And Europe is full of bridges with very, very large paving stones. That thing was built to last, and probably NOT by the peasants in that village. We see the same thing with Roman aqueducts/roads. And older buildings can often have very large doors. The front door a farmhouse I lived in in Belgium, for example, was giant. That's a mill, where workingmen will be carrying big stuff in/out all day, so it needs a big door. All quips aside, after looking quickly through the village in the stream I don't think you could make the same complaint about any of the other doors in town. The door to the inn is low enough that the godlike paladin was scraping his head as he walked up to it. So I think talking about up-sizing all characters is a pretty silly overreaction to the size of some paving stones and a door. It's also probably impossible.

Anyone know where I can catch the gameplay mentioned in Sawyer's druid tweet? Or maybe that's just on the gamescom floor?

I want Tom Cruise ingame, thx.

Also D:OS was budget 4million dollar (of their own money and 900k of backer money) so yeah.....4 million Euro, just to get it right.

They were pretty in the way considering they were ON the road up north and all along the east side, but you could still get past without wiping out 2/3rds of the local ecosystem. Sounds like a pretty decent balance between "kill kill kill" and...not. At the end of the day it places the emphasis where it belongs, on the quest and journey as a while, not some dang wildlife.

This is false and confirmed as such in the video. You're only prevented from *resting* when hostiles are around. But you can still leave the area, or enter the dungeon within the area, while hostiles are still around. Adam clicked on the entrance of one of the ruins and got the scripted event. The option to pick the lock was there but he chose not to do it. he then walked away and.... engaged in more combat. Jeez dude, I'm saying they're an OBSTACLE, not that you literally can't leave one area for the next while 'in combat'. Stop thinking in such gamey terms.

I'll ask again. Where are you getting this from? Is that dungeon inaccessible until the beetles are slain? Are you prevented from accessing ANY Area transition on the entire map until you've dealt with the beetle threat? As for delayed XP....will the rewards be less if you run away from the beetles and just make a bee-line to the Ogre den? You're prevented from getting from one area to the next until you somehow get past the creatures. KILLING the beetles is not the objective, overcoming them is. Maybe you sneak past, maybe you kill them, maybe both, maybe you take the long way. But rewarding you with XP for the whole quest as you see fit rather than inherently rewarding mindless killing machines and farming is the way I go. You get some neat stuff from killing them maybe, and they simply must be fought o get to, say, a treasure stash in the back end of the spider cave. But the stash is the reward, NOT the simple act that you killed the beetles/spiders/whatever. The real challenge here is the conflict between the villagers and the ogre, and the journey to his cave. The beetles are a component.

They're wild animals, a legit part of the ecosystem. Should they give you xp for killing deer too? Unless some frontiersman comes to you and asks you to kill the beetle colony that's in the middle of his trade route or whatever, I don't see why you should be rewarded for, what, tossing a grenade down a gopher hole. You get the assumably valuable materials from the dead animal and open up areas that might have dungeons, treasure or quests. That's good enough.

And are you a fictional fantasy race? I'm just saying... just because that armor would present obvious problems for you doesn't mean it wouldn't prove inconsequential to elves. That might fly in, say, the LOTR films(not in the books though, as Tolkien's vision for his world was certainly NOT filled with elves in metal bodysuits) . But the brand of fantasy seen in PoE generally applies RL logic and basic physics rules to EVERYBODY, and doesn't give a pass to the magic woods people who can just HAPPEN to wear a bodysuit of metal scales adorned with metre long spikes without making any noise or being encumbered. And I think the gravity and believability of the world benefits from it. There are plenty of exotic, adorned armors that can be pulled from reality, maybe with a little embellishment here and there if appropriate. Look at the Boreal Dwarf art that's been shown around for PoE. The hunter has a standard old bow and is wearing standard old fur clothing. Not a metre-thick fatsuit of fur that makes her look like a giant, no spikes, nothing. Just a hunter out in the forest. Like you could see in the Taiga of Russia or the wilds of Canada. It ties it into the real world and gives it meaning and place.

So, what, a mechanism for kiting? Engagement/disengagement are given weight for important reasons. Why make it easier to circumvent and go back to the good ol' days of shooting Sarevok to bits while he chases your hasted fighter?

I agree absolutely, that was a very disappointing change from BG1 to BG2. The fact that you could(and had to the first time through an area) walk the entire way from one town to the next and actually experience the journey yourself rather than warp from focal point to focal point really gave travel a certain something. And when I walked up to the bridge to Baldur's Gate and was told the city was sealed due to the war scare, it made that feel real in a way that could only come from seeing it myself. I certainly wasn't annoyed that it was cut off at the moment, how could I be? It made total sense in context. It just made me more interested and invested in the main quest and the region. I suppose the BG2 method was more economical from a resource standpoint, stuffing every area with a massive concentration of stuff and cutting out the middle man, but sometimes I just want my walk in the hills to be a Little less 'epic'(or frenetic). On point though, I'd bet Sensuki is right on the money with this.

Don't like it - don't use it. Simple as that. That's not the mindset that this game sprouts from. They're determined to keep a tight grip on any mechanics that could be 'switched off' to make the game less challenging. The same seems to be true of mechanics they feel conflict with the spirit in which the game is being made. I believe the action queue would encourage an RTS, WoW-esque type of gameplay that is simply not how the game is meant to be played. And there is no way that a system like that could be added and NOT affect how the game plays and is meant to be played. It has to be balanced for, and on and on. It's up to the developers to decide how they feel about it. But the reality is that this game is not made to make compromises to any serious degree, so it REALLY is their call.

I think part of this is the apparent lack of Party AI in the game right now. Either it wasn't set up for the gamescom showing or it just isn't included in the beta yet. I am not sure a literal spell queue will be needed unless all spells turn out to be basically instant cast, which many of them seem to be so far. The low level ones essentially seem to be, but the higher level ones have a pretty lengthy casting time, like fireball in today's stream. I'm sure there's IE-appropriate AI(auto attack) coming with the game, but either they believed it would interfere with the 'narrative' of the demo or it simply isn't ready, kind of how the pathfinding they're re-working is in a bit of a rough place. And I agree that an action queue would detract from the IE tradition of the game in a negative way.

Yeah, that's right. I reckon the best place to see it is on the same twitch channel as last time, given that the program times are all laid out and PoE is on the list.

Huh? When was this? Link?

The first picture I posted above is of a Byzantine soldier, and his gear would be current up through ~1450, practically the rough timespace PoE is gunning for(and I love that helmet) . I personally prefer the crusades-era stuff, like this beautiful stuff: But that's not the time period we're dealing with in the game. As to indians and arabs, all I can say is that the cultures in the game aren't inspired by arab or indian culture as far as I can tell, so it would be weird to have them wear the costumes. There's a reason that the Vailians dress like Venetians and Genovans. I would LOVE to see some real Byzantine armor in a game for once though, so I do sympathize. Regardless, my real point is that I'd rather see an elf dressed like any of the guys I've posted and have him be a serious SOB rather than wearing 5000 year old adamantine dragon plate scale armor that just magically doesn't weigh about 500 kilos. When you get your face kicked in by a guy wearing a scale shirt, things start to feel a bit more serious business.

Seems to me reality has plenty exotic armor and weapons to choose from. People have little enough exposure to real armor and are so saturated with "fantasy armor" that I'd bet they get a more alien feeling from the real stuff.

You saw the word boobs once and jumped on what I said, without reading my reasonings. I think I raise a very valid concern, but you have a right not to care about it. I absolutely read your reasoning of wanting to be able to easily differentiate between classes, races and genders readily. But I care more about having respectable, realistic female armor than I do about that. So we're just on different pages, it seems. As to the difference between the female chain and plate armor, I can only say that one hangs off the chest ,the other does not. I look bigger in a muscle T-shirt than I do in modern ceramic armor.

Edited my post to show the contrast between the two models. Actually read my post next time before coming charging in with your social justice warrior hat on. Don't lay that liberal junk on me, I'm just grateful the females in PoE don't all seem to be strippers that got lost on the way to "Sexcon 1410" like they usually are. If that means they have virtually no "feminine" features like protruding boobs, hips or butts while in armor and no cleavage while in casual dress I will be happy as a clam. The fantasy genre has as bad a track record with women as it does with religion, which burns me just as bad. EDIT: In the side by side comparison you posted a couple posts above this, I'd be fine with either. But you do realize that men who are physically fit have larger/wider chests than women, right? We're a lot bigger framed regardless, even.