Panteleimon

I like realistic armor, but the concept armor of a woman wearing plate that Kazunori Aruga did looked better, let me find it and I'll edit the post. Yeah, and the female models for pretty much EVERY class in all the BG's and IWD's had gigantic boobs (2/3rd's exposed boobs and exposed thighs if you weren't wearing heavy armor) and the whole deal. The only reason nobody remembers that is because the models were TINY. It was ME2/ME3 in miniature, straight off the cover of a bargain bin Forgotten Realms book. I would like to PERSONALLY thank the people who pushed for realistic armor and clothing for the females in PoE and the developers who listened. At least the game won't make me feel like a sad lonely nerd when I play it, and I can actually put the wife onto it without her sighing in disgust at character creation.

So the Darcozzi Paladini are in as a Paladin order, which is enough to make me buy the game twice over. My dreams of creating an ex-Varangian Guard Paladin are assured! But really, it looks ~amazing~, everything I've hoped for. Hope they didn't take it too hard that they got rocked by the beetles, I still had a great time. Went well with a drink.

wrong link this is the right link: http://www.twitch.tv/twitch Thank goodness for that, cheers.

"We will return this Thursday with our two hour Gamescom Show." Am I just being dense? EDIT: Guess so, looks like the Twitch official stream is the way to go, not the paradox one.

Buy what? Produce what? An intellectually rich, thoughtful, complex and challenging game crafted by those who have dedicated their careers to doing so? Money is only the fuel is the point. Nobody is saying that money equals creativity. I'm certainly not. But to confuse budget with some sort of other, mythical, mystical Pure Artist thing that makes the game is ridiculous. Absolutely. Thus, I said: I was interpreting caerdon's comment as relates to "Money a good game does not make" is all. P.S. Only an hour now, Bryy, then you've won.

Buy what? Produce what? An intellectually rich, thoughtful, complex and challenging game crafted by those who have dedicated their careers to doing so? Money is only the fuel is the point.

PoE only gets 20 minutes? Jeez, I was hoping for more than that.

And how exactly is that separate from budget? Especially given the number of "priorities" for PoE that were directly tied to stretch goals, not to mention the existence of the game itself. I understand the spirit of his statement, though. That money can only enable writers, artists and designers and all their vision and ability, not buy it or produce it out of thin air. It doesn't even act as fertilizer.

I assume http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/ Perfect, thanks.

Is there a particular place to watch the best stream possible of the PoE event at 0320 PDT? Just directly through the official twitch guys, or...?

Finding the ingredients needed to have the antidote for Saskia made in The Witcher 2 ("where do I go, who do I talk to? Better start thinking, no compass to lead the way!") , the riddles in Dragon Age, the Peragus number sequences in KOTOR 2 along with pazaak and all the other great puzzles from that game, the endless ones in Baldur's Gate 1&2 and the Icewind Dales, the list goes on. I enjoyed them all, some more than others. And then there's a great set of puzzles, one of the most commonly neglected ones, which are social puzzles. What to say, how to say it, whom to say it to, when to say it, all while still staying true to the character you've set for yourself. And PoE doesn't take the easy way out, it seems. As Mr. Sawyer has said, just because you can qualify for a conversation option with a ability or personality check does not mean it's the right one and going to magically buy you out of the situation you're in. You've got to actually put those social skills and judgement to the test. Those are the puzzles that are rarest in games, I think.

Not to mention the other types, like the plant people. Unless you mean brunettes because of the mist, then I can't help you. Maybe it works like a mood ring.

They've also specifically said that it will be referenced occasionally throughout the game. For a guy who posts as much as you do around here, I'd think you'd take a few minutes to watch one of the zillion demos Mr. Sawyer has walked the media through.

Considering how the stats work in this game I am not sure that is actually a good idea. This is the one game where dumping a stat might actually tank your character. Imagine a 1 int barb? You'd literally be severely mentally retarded. I'm all for an IE-engine appropriate level of freedom here, but one can't expect to play as someone who shouldn't even be able to dress themselves in order to make oneself more muscular.

Nah, that is just how Larian does it. Their games always have a sort of "fairy tale" graphical vibe going on over top of them. I am happy Eternity is going with a more serious look though.... well you know... assuming you don't turn Big Head Mode on. I must have grown up with different Faerie tales, then. But I was born in a small village in Bohemia, so maybe that's why The Witcher rings true so strongly for me in it's style. Though I think not caring for the fantasy genre for it's own sake is also a big factor.

Am I the only guy who thinks that the art direction of Divinity is painfully WoW-esque? It's like looking at Candyland: Online. Or Diablo 3, which suffered terribly from it's emulation of WoW's aesthetic(especially when compared to Diablo 2) . Thank goodness PoE takes itself seriously in it's art direction. I think the only other major RPG studio that DOES take it's art direction seriously is CD Projekt Red. I also don't understand why people have such a hard time wrapping their heads around the difference between Euros(for Divinity) and Dollars(for PoE) .

God no. That would be awful.

Americans don't get the summer off, man. "Holidays" are in 4 months.

I would assume it'll release with the final game or soon after. Can't blame them either, priorities being what they are. I'm very much looking forward to mine, though.

Wait... say what now? Josh just talked about how we'll even have full control over level-up-point-allocation for all party members. Why wouldn't we be able to manage their equipment? Did I miss something? I hope not... No, you didn't. It's just something lost in his translation.

This is equally true - I would argue more true - of elves and dwarves. But Obsidian is including those, and we trust them to do a good job. There rest of your post doesn't make sense to me. You seem to praise Obsidian for doing new, creative things with the races they've chosen to include, but assume that if Obsidian were to include orcs they would not be able to do similar creative things. There's nothing inherent to orcs and goblins that would suddenly make Obsidian incapable of creativity. You're arguing from a double standard. I've never seen anyone do anything interesting with Orcs or Goblins(the ONLY exception for Goblins is, funny as it sounds, Harry Potter) , but I HAVE seen them do interesting things with elves and dwarves, repeatedly. The Witcher is a good example. Sorry but no. Elves and dwarvs sucked in Witcher as well. It doesn't matter if the elves are an ancient civilazation in the magical woods who hold humans in contempt, or an ancient civilazation oppressed by the racist humans, they are still a separate race, that lives propably longer and hasn't good relations with humans. And Witcher dwarfs are as by the book as it comes. To have them be bankers and merchants in addition to miners isn't revolutionary. As for the orc arguement, i have seen them be used in a very good way, in the aforementioned Malazan series. But apart from the physical description (green skin, tusked, slightly bigger than humans), they have absolutely nothing in common with any orc depicted elsewhere, nor are they named orcs. I respect that the Elves and Dwarves in The Witcher are stereotypical, pulled right from the pages of the fairytales that I grew up with(and thus culturally significant to people who share that heritage) and yet depicted VERY seriously and with a straight face. For what it is, which is Grimms Elfenmärchen in a video game, it is well done. Original it is not, but that's not CD Projekt's mission. I can't speak to the Malazan series' depiction of Orcs, but it sounds like they aren't Orcs any more than Aumaua are. I agree wholeheartedly that there is nothing inherently interesting in those fantasy races, but I think when viewed through a lens of cultural richness, some are certainly better than others. The direction PoE has taken Dwarves, for example, towards what seems to be a fair representation of the wandering Nordic colonials and frontiersmen, is genuinely interesting. I don't believe that Orcs, however, will ever escape samurai armor, grunts, stone spears, idol worship or emulation of the Turks, Persians, Mongols or any Oriental culture. And as long as anologues(which shouldn't be direct anyway) of those cultures are populated with Orcs, they'll never be depicted intelligently.

This is equally true - I would argue more true - of elves and dwarves. But Obsidian is including those, and we trust them to do a good job. There rest of your post doesn't make sense to me. You seem to praise Obsidian for doing new, creative things with the races they've chosen to include, but assume that if Obsidian were to include orcs they would not be able to do similar creative things. There's nothing inherent to orcs and goblins that would suddenly make Obsidian incapable of creativity. You're arguing from a double standard. I've never seen anyone do anything interesting with Orcs or Goblins(the ONLY exception for Goblins is, funny as it sounds, Harry Potter) , but I HAVE seen them do interesting things with elves and dwarves, repeatedly. The Witcher is a good example. The fact that it pulls from a deep cultural wealth of Polish/Baltic mythology that is LOADED with elves and dwarves is what gives it substance, whereas Orcs and Goblins as we think of them effectively date from, as others have said, Tolkien's works. The PoE world is being built in a renaissance period. The powerhouses of the time in reality were states like the Dutch Republic, The Hanseatic League, the Italian states, France and the wealthier parts of the H.R.E. The nomadic steppe peoples had been pushed out of the Russias and their time was O-V-E-R. The arab world was FAR past it's prime(it's widely held to have peaked around 1100-1300. This isn't to say that everything in the PoE world must derive from the Earth at that time, but rather that it's not the eternal middle ages seen in pretty much every other fantasy setting. If you cast Orcs as any of those types of civilizations, they'll just be what they always are: low-tech, low-rent tribal militarists with some goofy priest-driven theocratic structure bolted to their seat of gov't. Want to cast them as the monolithic empire with a higher level of development but retaining the same silly themes? Maybe ripping off the Ottomans/Fatimid Egypt and some far eastern culture? Congratulations, you just made the Qunari! Tolkien's Orcs are no better than demons. They're animals. They're inspired by a version of the nomadic steppe peoples that never existed except in the imaginations of historical revisionists of the romantic period who saw those events not as the mass, gradual migrations that they were but rather wholesale demonic invasions by monster people. They are not fertile material for creating an interesting, intelligent, high-performing, thought-provoking race of people. They're always going to be a fantasy re-fit of the Arab, the Hun, the Mongol, the Turk, or the Oriental. Make me a well-written nation of Orcs based on 1600's Holland/Venice and I'll accept that they might be useful for something other than providing guilt-free cannon fodder and a vehicle for bad writing.

Really? That's your argument? I'm pretty sure the main demographic for video games is central europe, north-america and australia. I don't know of any culture there where prearranged marriages or honour killings are part of. Also, what's up with the assumption that every party member should be single in the first place? If you want your realism in a medieval world and not just some 20th century with swords and magic, given the life expectancy, most people are probably married by the time they join your party, especially if they are usually not a full time adventurer. I argue that in most settings it's probably more logical and realistic if your party members are married, so romance makes no sense. Feel free to bring some counterarguments. Speaking as a young married man, I have to say that the inability to cast yourself as a married person(even if your spouse is never depicted in the game and remains abstract) is a little unfortunate. Or as a widow/widower if that's more convenient and economical from a writing standpoint. I don't think this would be applicable because Romance is optional, so I'm battling understand why you would want to be married in a RPG but never meet your wife or have no interaction with her? If this is a reason to not Romance then the solution should be to just not follow any Romance options? As Namutree said, I was envisioning a biographical option more than anything else. I find it a little odd that of all the possible relationship statuses(or lack thereof) you have to choose from in games, married is never one. I'd imagine that a large(decent?) portion of the people playing the game are married, so it's an easy thing to relate to. The letter idea is actually a good one if anybody cared to flesh it out to that point. Anybody who's read letters between spouses knows that they can easily be very touching, and it's economical from a resource standpoint. It's much harder to depict two people FALLING in love(and one would necessarily question why you would even try unless that was the central part of the story you're telling) rather than in a constant state. I don't like romances in games(or literature, for that matter) because I don't think they're well written. That isn't to say that the people who have to write them aren't good writers, but that it's really, really hard to do it well in any medium other than film or non-fiction writing. The only romance I've seen in any game that was worth paying attention to was Jaheira in Baldur's Gate 2 and Throne of Bhaal. It was straight faced enough to be pretty believeable.

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.

Really? That's your argument? I'm pretty sure the main demographic for video games is central europe, north-america and australia. I don't know of any culture there where prearranged marriages or honour killings are part of. Also, what's up with the assumption that every party member should be single in the first place? If you want your realism in a medieval world and not just some 20th century with swords and magic, given the life expectancy, most people are probably married by the time they join your party, especially if they are usually not a full time adventurer. I argue that in most settings it's probably more logical and realistic if your party members are married, so romance makes no sense. Feel free to bring some counterarguments. Speaking as a young married man, I have to say that the inability to cast yourself as a married person(even if your spouse is never depicted in the game and remains abstract) is a little unfortunate. Or as a widow/widower if that's more convenient and economical from a writing standpoint.