h3st

Like in D&D then? Making regular items costs a bit of raw goods, less than buying it—and similarly for making magical equipment, except that costs XP too? : ) Golden Frobnicator recipe: * 300 foo * 32 bar * 1 baz * 1700 XP cost

For some of us it's more important whether the game will run at all than what it looks like. I don't care about computer games if they don't work on Linux. Unity works on Linux. I think the Unreal engine might too? Crysis seems like it isn't usable yet. That said, I'm also not a fan of spending lots of money on hardware, so I'm willing to accept some potato graphics. But PoE already looks prettier than WL2, from what I've seen.

That sounds like it would work for a roll-to-succeed system, but doesn't PoE run more on a X level of skill Y needed system? I.e. if it's a skill check for level 5 and you've got 4, you'll fail 100% of the time, but with 5 or more you'll succeed 100% of the time?

Do people move for the day/light cycle? I'd expect fewer, maybe other people in the streets at night.

I don't worry because Adam Brennecke already told me what I want to hear: Native 64 bit linux version.

If the mountain won't come to Muhammed … you could start running everywhere when afk? : )

Kind of grating how he keeps pronouncing "dyr" as "drai" (or "dry" for you anglos). Maybe I should get into the backer beta and make videos pronouncing dyrford as dyrefjord and dyrwood as dyreskogen ;D

Romance is a euphemism for sex. I know people who've played through games several times just to be able to sex everyone that they can sex.

Are those fjordings :3

We can emulate 16 bit and commodore64 and run stuff on toasters too, but that doesn't change the fact that by now (desktop) linux users are just used to native 64 bit. I understand windows users still wind up with 32bit folders because proprietary software can be stuck in the past. Having to import superfluous 32bit libs for proprietary software just grinds our gears, man. It's very nice that Obsidian will be delivering 64bit. 32bit stuff belong in a museum, along with software written in COBOL.

You can always look up variants of that name. 'Hrodger' should fit nicely. I'm being told that it's old germanic. You could make it a bit more noble, like Hrothgar.

You're in luck, the game has already been implemented. (Typing that accidentally made me lose quite another game.)

Yeah, and the Arbeiters incident to some degree shows how anarchism is susceptible to being overrun by a group of thugs—sort of like how we've now hijacked a thread about a certain game mechanic and turned it into a political discussion.

I'm not pretending it's apolitical, I'm pretending it's a very simple morality system that nearly everyone will agree is stupid and not suited for real-world discussions. If someone becomes a deep conservative because of the dungeons & dragons morality compass, I'd be willing to bet that person would never be able to partake a philosophical or political discussion above a child's level anyway.

The one good thing I can say about an alignment system like DnD's is that it is on its face stupid & simple. I hope nobody thinks it's a good representation of philosophy and morality. What it does supply is a morality compass that pretty much fits with a kinda campy high fantasy setting. Everyone thinks it's kinda daft, but it's also a sort of safeguard against DMs that would like to push their personal philosophy. Imagine teenagers: angry communists, angsty kids who tried to read Nietzsche, modern christian-conservatives (not that they'd play), etc. The alignment system provides a sort of safety valve where people who just want to engage in some shared fantasy and play a game can leave out real philosophy and politics and the bickering that follows. You don't really need to discuss whether some lord's quest is moral or not, because you can just cast a spell and find out if he's capital-e Evil or not. It's a simplifying game mechanism. It's sorta similar to how DnD (at least version 3, which was the last I tried) provides a mechanic (and roll) for nearly everything. Other games might prefer a «use your head» approach, and that's fine—if you've got an experienced and intelligent GM. To use a bike analogy: We might want to be doing some fun biking through the woods, racing downhill or a nice trip to town, but others might prefer training wheels, a huge helmet and elbow protectors, or even a tricycle. So if you want to play a political game, that's fine. But some people find that it tastes more like getting the game creator's politics rammed down their throats, and might prefer an overtly unrealistically simple morality compass. It might not be any better for your personal philosophical inclinations, but at least you can imagine that nobody really means that stuff.

I never even noticed any anti-communist bias. I never played Dragonfall though. You encounter a orkish Communist policlub calling themselves the Arbeiters. Turns out they're just a bunch of thugs spouting vaguely Marxist dialog lines. You can express sympathy for them but the dialog lines read like whoever wrote them had a manager standing behind their back going "Write them! Write them or you'll never work in this town again!" Isn't Shadowrun supposed to be cyberpunk, i.e. vaguely dystopic? Given that, and that authoritarian thugs have spouted vaguely Marxist rhetoric in real life, it seems to fit in the setting fine. And the other group you can help there is a bunch of loopy mages who are letting spirits wreck the buildings for poops & giggles … the Arbeiters might be thugs, but at least it sounded like people were able to use the building under their rule. I can't say I encountered any «good guys» in Dragonfall the way you might in a classic high fantasy setting. This, however, I agree with completely. They're keen to show off nasty people using various ideologies for their own ends, but when it comes to the anarchists, somehow stuff's just peachy keen. Ah, at least I can think of them as turdbags for blocking all the bike lanes …

Obligatory Scunthorpe test. (Scun+thorpe)

From the recent video it looked to me like pressing the stash button enables just shoving everything on the current corpse into it.

Yeah, it's not about managing which loot comes from which corpse (unless maybe there's some theft issue), it's just about making it easier to clean out a murder scene. If there are a buncha bodies in close proximity on the floor, I want to See if there's anything interesting to assign to any character Dump the rest in a bag so I can sell it off later [digression] [/digression] The intent is to decrease the amount of micro-managing and clickery required for cleaning up uninteresting loot for lazy gamers like me.

I know it's way too late to suggest changes now, but maybe it's something that can be included in a patch: A loot area, the way it works in Wasteland 2. From the stream I got the impression looting corpses in an area requires clicking every corpse. I liked the way it worked in WL2, where, well, I'll show ya: Here there are a bunch of dead honey badgers, and they get sort of character icons in the loot screen, reducing the amount of clicking (and tiny wait times as characters walk from one corpse to another) required to clean up. Thankfully the loot screen in PoE has a stash icon, otherwise I'd have to recommend the "distribute all" button too—micromanaging what each character has in their pockets can be tedious. (Yes, my other characters are named Ulyaoth, Chattur'Gha and Xel'Lotath)

Those two UIs have different goals, though: One is a game world UI. I want to see as much of the map as possible, but with some allowances made: status information of characters, maybe a minimap. Preferably no buttons for inventory, pause, character sheet, etc; keyboard shortcuts are better since they don't take up screen estate. The other is an inventory screen. Now you're not interacting with the world any more; you're organizing your inventory. It's a different mode. Hopefully nothing is moving in the game world, because now we can't see it! Similarly the character sheet, journal and other modes should be full-screen—just like the world interaction mode, i.e. "normal mode". So what I want is for each mode to use the available screen estate as best possible. Having half the screen taken up by the inventory or character sheet 100% of the time would be annoying. Having it taken up by doodles and looking at the game world through a straw is not my cup of tea. Though one aside, and that's textual interfaces. If the text box is allowed to take the full width of the screen at any resolution, there are two possible situations: The font size is unchanged. This results in low readability—lines really shouldn't be longer than 80-100 characters before they break to the next line. The font size scales. That would result in having to walk back a few steps to make the text appear at a reasonable size. So text boxes should be artificially small and not take up the entire screen, even though dialogue is a mode of its own. I do like some frills, like the ligatures. So if I can turn off the thingy in the middle, the way the UI looks now seems fine to me—one small set of status icons to the bottom left, and an action log in the bottom right. The NWN screenshot (if that's what it is) does show at least one horrible idea though: A text box and a map with a transparent background. I know people like terminals with transparency because it looks cool (been there done that), but it really doesn't help readability. Beyond that I suspect it doesn't look very good because of the potato quality of the graphics. (Inb4 some emacs lover comes chiming in about how modes are evil)

Yeah, I was being facetious, comparing the (in-game) killing of other sentients to lab rat behaviour. Having even the slightest of in-game justification (getting to some item, strapped for cash, Joe "Random" Buttmunch asked you to kill someone you've never seen before … ) helps. I find XP-for-death is often accompanied by grinding, which I see as just boring. If you want to try a skinner box game, try Cookie Clicker, or more satirically, Cow Clicker. The horrifying thing is that these games that involve no skill or critical thinking, just a few clicks and waiting, can actually be sort of … entertaining isn't the word, but they do give an insight into why those rats keep pushing those levers. We are the rat in the machine.

You think the game world is ugly? : (

Not sure how many portraits are currently available. In the last update post BAdler answered some questions about portraits; there was a question whether they're aiming for a minimum of portraits per race & sex combination, but it wasn't answered. From what I've seen of the backer beta, I get the impression there are already more options than in W2.

Huh, I thought the solid UI debate was over some sort of transparency/opacity thing. But it's about whether part of the screen should be obscured by a bit of static graphic just because? Sounds about as useful as building a wooden frame around the inside of your monitor. But then I use a window manager which doesn't even have titlebars for its windows and I've hidden a lot of my browser's bars, so I guess I'm sort of the odd one out. As long as the information you need to play the game is easy to make out and buttons are easy to use, why would you want to hide more of the viewportal into the game world? You could accomplish that just by lowering your screen resolution. : )