Gairnulf

If the stash is only one-way accessible during rest at an inn, and two-way accessible in the stronghold, that will actually be nice, imo. As if you're sending part of your inventory back.

Steak, what do you think about the HUD UI, do you find it convenient, would you resize something, move some elements around, etc?

Why? Which one should I post it in? EDIT: Oh darn, I wanted it in General Discussion actually. Moderators, please transfer it

Carry weight has its problems, like the so-called "inventory tetris" when you try to arrange items among party npcs so that no one is encumbered. Still, I prefer those problems to a gamey solution like the stash. And I don't see logic in such kind of "problem solving" on the developers' part because, you know what also becomes a problem for example, waiting for the party to cross a cleared out area from one end to the other. That is a tedious half minute sometimes, but I don't see any developer implementing a gamey kind of teleportation to "fix the problem". I don't think the stash is in line with PoE's "philosophy" and sounds like some element taken out from Diablo, where the philosophy boils down to "make it as convenient as possible for the player to transport his asina from the hub to the dungeon, get the xp, and bring the loot back, because that's really awesome".

I saw this idea and really liked it. I hope Obsidian does a marathon PoE stream, showing gameplay, discussing the development process and different aspects of the game on the day before launch. I think it may really boost sales in the last hours before the official launch, and would be very interesting for everyone, regardless of how much they knew about the game prior to the marathon stream.

Yes. There's actually a how-to thread in the beta discussion forum, but I've never tried it.

My thoughts exactly, plus I've recently tested it. The two main differences I can see between IE games and PoE in terms of how combat actions are taken are, first, that the hit/talent actions take 2 seconds to cool down and casting takes 3 seconds in PoE whereas in the IE games all actions had a bit longer cooldown (or so it seems when I test out combat in BG, I may try to record the times), and for casting it was different for each spell, and second, it is my feeling (haven't experimented to prove it), that in the IE games there was a larger number of hit animations being played per one battle, but more were misses and few were hits, which made combat seem as if it's taking longer, and presented important information (about hits) at a slower pace to the player, while in PoE there is a large percentage of grazes (hits which cause negligible amounts of damage but can pile up over a long battle) and relatively few misses. Of course these percentages and the frequencies of grazes/misses will vary from one battle to another, depending on party gear and enemies. Don't forget guys, we are seeing very little of the final game's content here. Anyway, my conclusion, as I've written in other threads, is that the devs should double the animation speeds and cooldown times, provide a better-than-current solution for the UI that will show the player whose turn it will be next, and combat will become much easier for a player to understand, also pausing will not be required as it de facto is right now. As for how to make combat more interesting, by means of adding character talents, or game mechanics such as engagement, I can't really make suggestions, as I have too little experience with PoE and other combat systems, and this is a really complicated matter for me to be certain of any proposed solution. I have enough faith in the developers to try out whatever they consider is good, and when I know more, I will possibly make suggestions then.

What's important for me is to be able to think about my items as of items, not as of objects in table cells.

The No Stash playthrough sounds like a great idea. The idea that I have limitless inventory space is repulsive, that's worse than even Dragon Age's inventory. As for accessing the stash from everywhere, that's true in the beta, although the design's intention seems to be, and the devs have mentioned that, it should only be accessible while resting. Not that it makes much more sense that way, but at least it would stop it from being a limitless inventory by both item number (which by itself is stupid) and item weight. Inconvenient as that is at times, I liked the inventory management I had to do in BG, and also loved the specialized containers which appeared in BGII:ToB (or maybe even in just BGII, can't remember), like the scrolls boxes or the gem purses, which only took items of the specified type. The universal Bag of holding felt a bit like a cheat though, and from what I've seen of PoE its setting doesn't present magic at such an everyday level of life as to make Bags of holding look normal.

This thing about the strong sales reminded me of an argument I saw in, *ahem*, another forum, that if a certain game doesn't make it "obvious enough" from its box art that you can play with a female PC, "many women may not know and may not even consider buying it", although in that instance it was phrased almost as a threat Seriously though, when I watched the tech demonstration video, the animations did look very cool, yet if they are too short it would actually make the game look less realistic. Adding realism to visuals in a game is kind of a slippery slope - you have to pay roughly equal amounts of attention to the realism of visuals of every part of the game, which means adding a proportional amount of detail to one aspect increases the amount of work needed exponentially, otherwise you risk having very detailed trees but people asking "why doesn't the wind force and direction ever change?", "why doesn't the wind get stronger during rain". Or you can have detailed and varied faces but instead of appreciacion you have people asking "why so few hairs", or "why no facial animations", etc. Or you add domestic animals in villages, and someone comes up with the question "we have such details as varied wind force and direction, but the horses only have one idle animation of beating with their hoof on the ground, why are they so overlooked, and the dogs have only two animations of barking...". So I can understand part of the reasons they removed those animations has to be that they saved themselves a big amount of other work they would otherwise have had on the visuals, which indirectly follows from the foilage animations but would have been needed to keep the visual style consistent, instead of looking like they paid a great amount of attention to one thing and neglected visual detail in other areas. Btw, I really like the small animations in the water, the dandelions' seeds flying through the air in Dyrwood crossing, or the fireflies seen in the twitch video. I think that's just enough environment animation to make the environments feel alive.

No carry weight, just slots limitation per-character. Actually, even that's not a limitation because you get an unlimited inventory called "Stash" which you can drop stuff into from anywhere, but can only access it while resting (resting requires a resource called camping supplies, 1 set of camping supplies per rest, unless at an inn). I don't like this system, to be honest.

Not sure if sjw or exploitation.

Me too, preferably with a well-spoken slightly introspective female player to whom reading comprehension and gameplay exploration come naturally. Who was that young lady they had before, the Gamescom edition, she was pleasant and easy on the ears. You ableist female voice objectifier

In light of the twitch stream this discussion looks so funny

Ithink they are not animted for a good reason. Doesn't distract the player's from what's important - the characters, or enemies coming out of the bushes.

While watching he twitch stream again, a few minor things came to my mind. I'm putting them up here without any categorization. 1. Clicking sound when choosing a dialogue option. I'd rather not have a sound for this. It's heared often enough that it gets annoying (I'm just speaking for myself of course), and it's inconsistent with the UX, for example, if I have a sound for clicking a dialogue option, why not a sound for dragging. The resizable UI elements? Not that I want the latter sound, not at all 2. Containers' (dead bodies, drawers, etc) interface pops up somewhere around the container, because of the whole HUD not having a solid background and being positioned in line at the bottom of the screen. Not my preferred HUD as I've said before but anyway. Something that makes the containers' interface even harder to use IMO is this interface's layout. Let's see how it was in the IE games, and I should say I consider that very convenient to use: lootable items are listed in two columns, with no more than 4 items visible at the same time. To see items further down the list you had to scroll down. The list is always on the same place of the screen. How it is in PoE: all items are shown immediately in a few rows, instead of columns, no scrolling involved. For me this translates as muscle memory from the interface being always on the same place is lost, that's one, and two - being unable to reach the next item of interest through scrolling means more hand movement and aiming with the mouse, which, in my opinion, is harder overall for the player, compared to mouse wheel scrolling, which almost everyone uses in the IE games, ever since mice began having mandatory wheels. The advantage that the player theoretically has with this layout, that you can take any piece of loot without looking at the others, is nullified by the fact that you can't force-show the tooltip, so you have to wait for each item, or just use the handy Take All button. This takes me to the next issue I have with the current container layout - having the Take All button always there, combined with the lack of information about the items, incentivizes the player to use the Take All button without actually looking at what he's taking, and I think that's a practice both the players and the developers would want to avoid. 3. I saw Brandon say that they have not added all the music yet, so I'll use the opportunity to plead from the bottom of my soul, and I doubt there is anyone who has played the backer beta who wouldn't support me - please, please change the default combat music for something else. I don't care if it's the Pokemon theme, as long as it's not this. The rhythm of the current combat music is the worst thing I can imagine pop up suddenly when combat starts. 4. Something I've mentioned before - please add white and gray as selectable colors for hair, clothes colors, etc.

Thanks, I hadn't noticed I could turn the circles off actually There's also a little bug associated with hiding the HUD, suddenly after you hide the HUD you can't marquee-select and you can't click on doors/containers, and when you hover the mouse over anything (doors, containers, characters), there is no hover effect. I've reported it in the bugs subforum.

From what I've seen on twitch streams, when you get far enough from enemies, your living character(s) exit "combat mode" and simultaneously, whoever was left unconscious at the field of thenlast battle you ran away from just materializes next to you, but woth very little health left (inadvisable to go back and fight). I don't think the game ever locks you inside an area where it's impossible to escape back to base. As soon as you are out of combat, fast travel becomes available, and you can return to your fortress or to someplace else where you can buy potions. That's how I think the game works all the time, at least I haven't seen evidence to the contrary.

JFSOCC reminded me about something - I would really like, if not a color wheel for choosing character colors, at least more possible colors added, including white and gray. I really wanted to have my padded jacks look authentic while playing the beta. I know it's a minor request, but it's also a minor effort to add those colors.

I couldn't agree more with the OP, and I'd also add, as I've explained in more detail elsewhere, that the halos with the little lines representing action cooldown don't present clearly enough information to the player about who is about to preform an action next.

Things that made an impression on me from the stream: 1. Although he made made me laugh a couple of times, in the future we can completely dispense with so-called "video games personas", and I doubt anyone will miss them. Or was it a "video game personality"? Was this really his personality, or a persona? I don't want to know. Anyway, from what I've seen, this is a community of mature and civilized people, and putting a guy who screams improvised attempts at humor half the time... ok, I won't go into personal remarks, maybe this was meant to appeal to kids, if kids are the game's target audience. 2. Still, if we take the "persona" for a good representative of the average gamer out there, it has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, that combat needs to become more manageable, feature lockdown or no. 3. All the time while I was playing the Backer beta I thought those backer NPC are working this way only until the final release... I have no idea why should I get a wall of text upon clicking on an npc, all the more when the wall of text is completely unrelated to what's happening in the game. What the hell is this? They are NPC, not books, right? IMO it's unacceptable for the backer NPCs to remain like that in the final release. And to think I was sorry I was too late to have my own NPC... It looked like such a good idea when I learned about it, that I regretted being late, and to see it realized like this, is just unfortunate. 4. After watching 2 hours of gameplay, I am even more convinced that the characters should walk by default instead of run, but I guess this isn't something Obsidian would discuss at this stage. 4.1 Apparently we won't be seeing any significant updates to the HUD UI layout either. 5. Putting those things aside, I was very satisfied to watch how the writing and technology present the story to the player. Combined with voiced party NPC, music, and mostly with fixed combat animation speeds, I get a stable <incline intensifying> feeling.

The only thing I saw in yesterday's twitch video that hinted at changes to the UI was in the lines of "we're looking into ways to provide better feedback", and I think it was meant mostly about the message log. Brandon (Adler, BAdler) denied any chance for a completely customizeable UI. I was relieved to at least see they've reduced the line height in the message log in the build they were playing, so it will stil be possible to see about 4 lines of text in it when its size is the shortest possible (right now it's just 2 lines, due to too much distance between lines). It's overall disappointing for me, not so much for the HUD UI, but because they will leave intact the current system with the halos above characters' heads and the recovery timers, which both seem very out of place for me and I am positive they can easily be improved - in ways I've suggested in another thread.

That was cool, were you lying in ambush for someone to mention religion somewhere on the internet, with that paragraph ready, or it just came to your mind? What does anyone's religion have to do with anything discussed on this forum anyway?

Hi, Was wondering about anyone who is a "Slacker Backer" (Couldn't find a more insulting name?), if I want to upgrade my pledge now pre-order is happening... how would I do it? Thanks, Go to http://eternity.obsidian.net/backer/index (assuming you are logged into your eternity.obsidian.net account), click "Buy Addons" on the lower right