Striped_Wolf

This is something you notice when you look at footage of other ppl playing. When playing yourself, youll most likely be fully occupied with pausing, giving orders and watching action counters to notice the animations repeat themselves. And even if you did look closely at the action, all the different abilities you are going to active all the time will make combat look varied enough. Sound effects are much more important for this type of game imo. Sound effects is what brings the "oomph" to the table.

Seems to me that the main issue is having the base health/deflection templates tied to the classes rather than the attributes... Having the stats based purely on attributes would create more versatility in the character creation. The attribute point pool at character creation should be the sole balancing factor here imo. In my view attributes should translate into stats, and class into talent pool. That way I can shape my character into whatever role I want it to fill, regardless of class.

Could be all sorts of reason for this. Perhaps its a storage room of some sort. Hay bales or watherver. The opening allows for effective transfer. There are wooden doors that can be closed along the inside wall. Perhaps theres even a winch that can be folded out. The wagon outside supports this theory.

Well, without the npcs, its basically just a large picture you are panning. My experience with betas in general is also that the final product is always less choppy, for various reasons.

The dream sequences from BG2 were even better imo. Irenicus was such a disturbing dude.

To be fair, the Candlekeep walls looked absolutely terrible compared to this De Arnise keep from BG2 however, was very well made.

Yeah that is a problem because it means you have the time to position yourself and really exploit predictable AI mechanics. If enemies spotted you before you spotted them they would attack you while still on the move, it would make the encounter more 'reactive' in nature, initially at least. The AI reevaluating targets in the middle of the fight would be great, if it could somehow take the engagement mechanics into account.

Random targeting by the AI could be interesting, but even then a warrior up front will 'soak up' any passers by with his engagement radius (which seems realistic). Another thing I thought of is to give some enemies larger sight range than your own party, allowing them to come at you from beyond the fog of war, thus preventing you from scouting & taking your time setting up an optimal formation before the attack is initiated. Perhaps even make the AI sight range randomized so that every playthrough turned out differently encounter wise.

Perhaps these spells would need a rebalancing then. On the other hand, a wizard probably shouldnt be as capable as a Fighter at Fighting. Thats why it is called Wizard - A person who has spent most of his life studying the arcane rather than working out... Right? Even if a heavy armor would allow the wizard to take a only a few hits more than otherwise, it could be worth it, depending on the build. Perhaps its not the intention to allow for Wizards to become all out frontline brawlers.

How about Wizard protective spells? Some of them: Wizard's Double – Creates a duplicate of the caster to distract enemies, granting the caster a high Deflection bonus against a single attack. Spirit Shield – Surrounds the caster with a shield of spirit energy, granting an increased Damage Threshold and a Concentration bonus. Fire Shield – Increases the freeze damage threshold of the caster and inflicts burn damage to any enemy that hits the caster. Ironskin – increases the caster's damage threshold for 10 attacks. Llengrath's Displaced Image – Increases deflection and reflexes of the caster. Citzal's Martial Power – Caster temporarily sacrifices arcane power for martial might. Wizard gains bonuses to Deflection, Accuracy, Might, Constitution and Dexterity, but becomes unable to cast spells or switch grimoires for the duration of the spell. They look good on paper atleast. And the Fighter dont get any of those.

Holy crap that looks good. Echoing footsteps and character voices sure would be sweet in the larger halls. Any word on sound effects like that?

No I do understand what you mean, TrueMenace: you want to be able to backstab as much as possible from the get go. In fact it was. Im speaking from my own perspective here. And I didnt necessarily *open* the combat with it, but in most fights I used it only once when breaking stealth since that was, in most cases, enough for me. Sure I couldve cheesed more, but cheesing isnt really my thing The way I see it, now you have an option. First you pick backstab. Later you can choose to specialize in that type of combat by picking Shadowing Beyond, or you could pick other talents beacuse maybe 1 backstab per encounter is enough for your specific build. In fact, the character I have planned is of the gun-toting survivor type. Shadowing Beyond feels a bit too 'magical' for my taste and wont suit this character. Backstab will fit nicely though, and I will probably need Escape aswell.

My backstab experience with the IE games was exactly that: You do it once from stealth and thats it. You *could* restealth using different tricks, but the backstab at the start of combat was the main thing about backstabbing, and it was often pretty great. Then they introduced the shadow dancer thief kit which seems to resemble more a rogue with the Shadowing Beyond ability, but with reduced backstab multiplier as a tradeoff. In this game you even got sneak attacks when visible so I dont really see any problem.

Oh. Well it doesnt look very ancient then... Looks more like a glitch to me. And it only seems to be present with the "st" combination. Anyway, thanks for clarifying

Others have probably noticed this aswell, but there seems to be some glitch with the ingame font. Whenever there is a lowercase "st" in the game text, there is this odd link above the letters. Really annoying Searched the forums briefly but couldnt find anything on the topic.

I would guess it was done to alter a gameplay mechanic that the devs didnt find that great. I believe it also ties in with the lore as you say, but I doubt that was the primary reason.

The chunks should be larger and heavier. In its current state it looks odd that the enemy just disappear and 3 small meatballs go off into the air. Would look and feel much better if the sum of the chunks sort of equaled to the mass of the enemy. Should not be too hard to scale the fx based on size of the UI halo by the feet. This, coupled with more gravity to the fx would do the trick. I also think that creatures not made out of flesh should be immune to gibbing. Its common sense.

Dynamic lighting layer, fireballs reflecting correctly off of walls. Looks amazing. I also read through some heated discussion about some sort of blur effect at the edges of the screen. Havent noticed the effect on any of the youtube footage Ive watched though.

Be that as it may, in BG unconsciousness was not a de-taunt.

I also like the new system better. It feels strategically more interesting to me, and ties together with the Rest mechanic in a more meaningful way. At the same time, it makes the game less frustrating. When someoine died in BG I either: A) Removed the dead npc from the party, or B) Reloaded the game, often loosing a lot of progress since I suck at quicksaving. Because lets face it: Picking up all the dropped equipment, ammo and potions and distributing it among your already encumbered companions was really, really tiresome.

Well, to be fair the action *does* stop when you pause The 'problem' with keeping sound effects intact is that the current actions will become silent when you unpause the game instead, since theyve already finished... On the other hand, that didnt bother me much in BG.

5. Is there supposed to be a "godlike" bodytype? There was none present on my screen, are they meant to be the same size as humans? If I understand correctly you first pick the Godlike option, then you go back and pick the race you want to be part of. This changes the body type.

What does the AI do when you are knocked over by endurance loss - do they continue hitting you until you actually die or do they switch tagrets?

I also think this is an important feature to help bring the world alive. Even if it only happens once in a while. Although, I wouldnt be surprised if there are some waylaid encounters scripted in, even if not completely 'random'.

Agreed. The current gibbing graphics look off. Needs to be squelchier with larger gobs...