Bulkbu

Must have been a lot of work to make. Well done

I find the D:OS inventory a great solution, it only misses a search bar and an auto-sort button. Its close to Sensuki's great suggestion, but I find a "per character" inventory with an encumbrance system more appealing. Having your mages carry all the books, scrolls, and magical crafting mats, and your warrior ores and all the heavy stuff you found adds greatly to the atmosphere I find. Edit: I just noticed that Sensukis stash could just as well work for each character individually and the character portraits next to the grid even enhance ease of use.

My post might have been a little misleading. When I said "it doesn't make sense" its not only about realism and simulation. Its about the concept of experience in RPGs in general. The exp-system is there to represent that your characters learn from their experiences and adventures. You successfully bluff in a conversation? You learned what might work with what kind of person. You slay a horde of goblins? You mastered your ways of combat. There are games which use the "learning-by-doing"-idea of leveling indiviual abilities by repeatedly using them. With such systems you will only be good at what you decided to do and use. But in a game with an exp-pool which represents the over all development of your characters, only getting experience when handing in quests is just broken. You could argue that the quest's exp includes everything you did on your way to completing the task (like fighting monsters, climbing walls, arguing with ogres and so on), but everything outside of the quest's path will reward you nothing. This mechanic not only is quenstionable gameplay-wise but non-sensical on a theoretical level. Edit: And to be honest, there are very few games using the "quests-only" exp system for a good reason. What the majority of people does isn't always the right thing, but in this case I feel like PoE is in a bad spot.

If I have to engange in a random brawl somewhere in the metro I'm certainly wiser afterwards (given some selfreflexive thinking). If I go on the "quest" to buy some groceries for my girlfriend however, experience is very limited. Sure, "game mechanics" are different in real life, but I would argue that as closer a RPGs ruleset comes to what makes sense in the real world, the better. It just doesn't make sense to not gain anything from fighting for your life.

I must agree. I find the "classical" stats better, not because of nostalia but because they define what a character is and is not without the need of an ambiguous discussion of what the attributes even mean or entail. Attributes should give your character character and should make a distinct difference

- Rework the attributes. Make attributes have weight and effect your character in very different ways. "There are only viable builds" isn't an argument in a cRPG. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Willpower, Intelligence, Charisma/Perception make way more sense and allow for building individual characters. Making those stats requirements for equipment, dialogue and quests not only makes sense because its a "classical" approach, but because its intuitive and logical. You want to play a character who likes to steal stuff but likes diplomacy over fighting? Go for dexterity and charisma. You want to roleplay a insanely stupid but strong dwarven warrior? Low intelligence, high strength and constitution. - Rework armour. Heavy armour: a lot of protection, high movement penalties, very fast fatigue, makes spellcasting very difficult. Medium armour: solid protection, medium movement penalties, relatively fast fatigue, allows spellcasting, but its difficult. Leather armour: a little protection, slight movement penalties, minor fatigue, spellcasting with minor handicaps Cloth armour: almost no protection, no movement penalties, no additional fatique, no penalties on spellcasting - Polish combat. Better pathfinding, pacing, balancing etc - Killing monsters/exploration awards experience. Doesn't have to be a lot, but no experience reward at all feels illogical. Your characters get better and more experienced with every fight! - Rework the UI. Aesthetically fine, but who has come up with this? Even the IE games' UI was more convenient to use - Polish animations/movement speed. Characters seem to float sometimes. They should move slower in general - Rework inventory system. A simple grid stash for every character managable through tab selection would do. Current solution is suboptimal to say the least.

Combination of the above totally ruins the wilderness exploration feel Oddly enough it makes it feel more like an Icewind Dale 2 map. Icewind Dale 2 did a lot of things way worse than the BGs/IWD so it's not a good example to follow in many cases. You remind me of how weird I find the general tendency of finding people who praise Icewind Dale 2. In my opinion, Icewind Dale 2 is by far the worst game out of the Baldurs Gate/Icewind Dale games. The UI is inferior, skill icons lack quality, the maps and level design are inferior, the atmosphere is not even close as good and even the highly praised combat is not as fun as in Baldurs Gate 2 to me.

I have done a lot of modding to games after I played and enjoyed them for a while. And for me, I can say for sure that once you have delved deeply into the theory behind a game, it completely kills the fun aspect of actually playing it because you begin to deconstruct and reflect on aspects you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Beta testing is, in a way, actively becoming part of the development process. Some people will still enjoy the finished product, others will have lost all interest by the time the game officially launches.

It will all boil down to how easily (and how fast) bugs and balancing problems can be fixed. Still, I wonder how a small and unknown developer like "Larian Studios" could create an outstanding crpg (Divinity:Original Sin) with a kickstarter funding of 940k, yet a giant with veterans of the industry, such as Obsidian, struggles coming up with a superb product even though they had 4 times the budget. The 2D artwork is truely amazing in PoE (except for the skill icons and symbols), the writing and dialogues (for what I have seen) are really good as well, but in almost all other areas problems are looming large. Yes, yes, it's a beta. Let's see how 1.0 will look like on release day.

Putting the languages you named together makes sense, since they are all found together in a relatively small area and have certain common characteristics. My problem with throwing languages together which aren't related at all, only makes sense when the games' world is extremely large. In a sense, you portray an "international" community if you mix latin, english, norse, and all kinds of other ancient languages such as mayan tongue with "itxl" affixes. In Baldurs Gate, for example, you had a feeling for how much time it takes to travel by foot from one city to the other. In an environment like that, a multicultural melting pot doesn't appear convincing to me. Many different races, make sense, yes, but here the problem is that every race has a different place on the fictive planet on which PoE is staged from where they come. Why would they all come together? Why would they have travelled half around the world to hang out in the places the player appears? Maybe I'm overly critical here, but most fantasy universes offer better explanations and background than what I've seen so far.

Don't you also think that the world they created is really hard to relate to? Every fantasy world is inherently foreign but in PoE's case names of countries, states, towns and folks feel so overly "made up". If you compare the naming of races and their background to Baldurs Gate, the Black Eye games, or even Lord of the Rings, things come accross as if a 12 year old boy had come up with them while playing with Lego. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against going against "high fantasy" conventions, but as PoE's universe is discribed at the moment it just doesn't feel right from a linguistic point of view. Also, the new races feel a little out of place. One looks like Na'vi, the other looks like demonspawn. That's were I question the intrinsic logic of PoE's races. Wouldn't Godlike always be outcasts of society (considering in-group, out-group thinking which is likely to be also found in a fictive world as well)? Wouldn't this have a massive impact on how every single dialog in the game unfolds? All the little bugs, too few character portraits and gameplay mechanics which have to be polished don't make me worry. But the points described above really make me sad since they're so important to make a RPG feel authentic.