Humanoid

Depends, if you don't collect the return value from a printf function, does it count as a bug?

Yeah, all buffs like that, and so do debuffs. Which leads to odd situations like being poisoned with 1hp left, if you take one step you die, if you sleep for 8 hours, you wake up at full health ....with the poison still on.

To add insult to, er, insult, the policy now is that since we have IE8, Firefox is no longer required. So IE8 for anything and everything now.

Vendors will fill you up to a different maximum depending on the vendor, however there's no need to run yourself down to zero supplies before restocking, the price will be charged per unit. The price per unit is different for each shop, but honestly, supplies are so cheap regardless that it doesn't matter by the time you have access to multiple vendors. e.g. One vendor might sell at 10g each to a maximum of 6, another at 15g each to a maximum of 10. At zero supplies you can buy from the first and end up with 6, paying 60g, or buy from the second and end up with 10 for 150g. Optimally you'd buy the 6 first, then go to the other vendor and top up to 10, paying a pro-rata additional 60g, thus saving 30g compared to buying from the second merchant alone. In practice though that's such a piddling amount of money that it's not worth anyone's time. Just buy from whereever you are at the time, and if you need to max out for whatever reason, go to the itinerant merchant during act 1, to Seahaven during act 2, and to the inn outside Karthal after that.

Stretch goals are always going to be a weird thing when you only have one pot of money that all pledges come into. Unless the particular goal costs $1 or less to fulfil ($1 being the minimum pledge size), then you're necessarily taking away from main budget to fund that stretch goal. e.g. you've raised $99, that's $99 to use for the main feature. Someone pledges $1, now you've hit a stretch goal that costs $20 to implement and now you've only got $80 instead of $99 to implement the core feature. But then, how much would it have been if you hadn't advertised that stretch goal in the first place? Would you have raised $90 total and come out ahead, or $70 and so lose out? And when I say 'lose out' or 'come out ahead', it's not just the developers who feel the result, but people who were uninterested in that particular goal. The requirement to solve that would obviously be to have multiple pots and have them collect in parallel. But it's not really a realistic suggestion. For one, the only way to do it would be to run concurrent Kickstarter campaigns (which is probably against their rules) or run your own campaign independent of Kickstarter (which even the biggest names have struggled to launch initially). And moreover you'd probably end up with less money as a result of backer confusion anyway. Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going here. But I do know when the PE Kickstarter was running, I was like "please please people stop posting comments onto the KS project page so they won't keep having to allocate more budget to making a dungeon that I'll never bother tackling." It's a selfish desire of course, but yeah, stretch goals do that.

Yeah, the experience thing is pretty weird. Death or even unconsciousness, sure. But being stunned for one round denies you XP? Also the weird 5% bonus for dealing the killing blow - it's led to some OCD manipulation from me to make sure the numbers are as even as possible. I get irritated when they don't all level at more or less the same time.

That's entirely not what I said. If a game has a stretch goal for, say, other platforms, I'll contribute more. The unfortunate implication is that a developer like this, who's promised cross-platform support from the start, might end up with less money because they included it by default instead of making it a stretch goal. Maybe sometime a developer needs to be cynical and not disclose that information on the initial pitch perhaps.

Maybe because of the megaambush just prior to him. Act 2 really ought to just have been an appendix to Act 1 - hell throw it into Act 1 and move the hard gating to after that point. It was, after all, just one dungeon to Act 1's four dungeons (five if you count the tutorial). It'd add a feeling of freedom to Act 1 having two cities, and solve most of the trainer placement issues.

There's a blog post on the sidebar of these forums explaining exactly what's going on with the distribution options.

Winter Games is a better game than any Summer Olympics titles was or ever will be. The real life thing, no so much.

Heh, I mostly just assumed it'd be the same as MM6/7 and never checked it either. Only just got to The Crag last night. Dang, this place is a maze. I've complained before about placement of certain expert trainers in Seahaven instead of Sorpigal, but placing your master trainers here might arguably be crueller. I know they're *trying* to invoke the spirit of the past games, but a bit more of a fair progression here would be helpful in balancing.

I find it interesting that debates like these tend to immediately turn to discussions about soldiers and command and other military-related things. The game description tells you straight up you can be a villainous thief (or hell, villainous bard - not sure how that works, be a rock 'n' roll star?). And that's almost certainly what I'll be playing regardless of what gender options are made available in the final product. If it's a good game, then playing it this way ought to be a completely different experience to those players who choose to have their characters enlist in the army. About as big, if not moreso, than, oh, being a woman. In either case it's making more-or-less a whole second game in the same shell. I might find myself supporting an inverse stretch goal here. At 1 million, remove the feature to be anything but one 'class', and tell a nice focused, character-driven story like The Witcher. I'm somewhat afraid the supposed choice of path otherwise will merely be showing different icons on your hotbar, and that as a thief they'll still be expecting you to, in the words of their blurb, "lead the charge in enormous, open field battles and sieges." Now *that* would be a blow against realism.

The guy in the wagon will always fill you up to 9, this I can guarantee. I just can't quite recall whether it's a flat fee or a variable one depending on your current supplies - I was pretty confident it did take them into the account, but Keyrock is making me doubt myself. The inn in Seahaven will fill you up to 13 days, the inn outside Karthal something higher, and the inns in Karthal and the Crag... well, who knows, it's lower than that last one so they're irrelevant.

Moving the camera is an available but useless option in this game, purely aesthetic, so no up and down. As for rations, I was under the impression that the price is per unit that varies, but you only pay for the units to take you up to the maximum. So technically it's most efficient to buy from cheapest then top up from the more costly ones. But really, the price difference is so trivial it may as well not have been a mechanic. For what it's worth though, the largest supply amount you can get is from the inn outside Karthal. Not in town itself, just in the area around it. You can get there during act two, but there are a number of tough encounters around it, so it's probably not worth it.

Well I say that because until October last year, I was still stuck using IE6 for work... Although in the last year or so if it, they belatedly added Firefox - version 13 mind - as an alternative browser. But work-related applications still needed IE6. Since then the desktops have migrated to Win7. Which means an upgrade of Internet Explorer .....to version 8. Yeah.

Some bloke? You just have to zoom close enough into a portrait of Seagal to make sure his double chin and hairline are cropped from the final image.

Yeah, but in the manner of the small Nico parts in the various Broken Sword games and no more. I'm actually not a fan of playing stories from multiple sides, as it tends to break up one's sense of character ownership. The Banner Saga had this problem recently, as do many strategy games where the campaign consists of playing one side up to a point in the story, then playing the other - indeed it's much worse in those situations where the different parties you play are enemies because you're then actively undermining yourself. But I digress - I just want to say I'm not sure that this stretch goal would be a positive development. Smarter perhaps would be to establish the character and have them be the player character of an independent second game in the series.

The Witcher is a nice example because Geralt is static in much greater of a fashion than simply being a guy. I mean, he's a Witcher, not a spice merchant or a doctor (or, y'know, a thief or a bard). And despite the huge choice you make in The Witcher 2, both choices reflect the same personality, and are pragmatic in very similar ways, as opposed to when other games have completely divergent (in terms of character personality) good vs evil choice, or paragon vs renegade choice, or whatever. So apart from relatively minor alterations to fighting style, your Geralt in the end is the same Geralt everyone else who plays the game gets, for better or worse. This is a static character. Being the child of a blacksmith, then being able to do whatever you want, and be whoever you choose, is not a static character. Now I'm not saying their decision is the wrong one. It is a lot of hard work to add the option, making sure the game world reacts in a believable way. But it's also hard to make the game world react differently to a popular bard than to a decorated soldier - or are they going to handwave that away and have everyone treat you like a generic commoner? So perhaps yes, those resources are better spent elsewhere. But don't try to play the Bioware-esque 'artistic integrity' card, because the honest answer is just a matter of resourcing.

When I saw those screenshots I thought it was meant to be an ironic poke at Keyrock's post immediately preceding the pics. But I guess in that context they're somewhat overdressed.

Yeah, but in those cases they're likely using Internet Explorer ....6.

Not that I've tried it, but I think the main thing holding back a very magic-heavy party is not so much encounter balance, but money. Magic is an expensive business. But still, as you get into Act 3, cash stops being a real concern. I'd also envisage a lot more rest abuse, and therefore probably also the hassle of having to go back to town now and then to restock supplies while mid-dungeon.

So part of the reason why the game runs so poorly, and draws so much power (I notice my PC heating up quite a bit more than most games). It has some insane overmodelling, with some floor tiles (y'know, flat surfaces) apparently consisting of up to 1200 polygons. One thousand two hundred. That's worse than the worst of Bethesda's notorious modelling excesses. (Give them that kind of polygon budget and they'll at least manage to make a boulder) But yeah, insanity.

I turned them off when I noticed it was mostly them trolling me. "Hey, did you hear something? Oh, no it was nothing." Nothing on the alert meter, it's just something that happens anywhere, anytime. Also "Ow, that hurt" - zero damage received.

Yep, that's the point where I called it a day as well - controlled about a starting faction's worth of territory. Just be aware that it's extremely likely that you'll get dogpiled soon after declaring independence, the game is hard coded to make all leaders have extremely low opinions of newbie rulers. Early days of independence will likely consist of days and days of defending sieges.