Atheosis

Thanks! A fantasy Earth, in the same way that Tolkein's Shire is intended to be England, even though there are no hobbits in the real England. Science fiction frequently features other planets, but fantasy usually takes place on a slightly different Earth -- one that has elves and/or dwarves and/or dragons and other creatures not found on the real Earth, one where magic works or where praying to a god or gods gives a priest magic spells. High fantasy fiction generally takes place in what are called secondary worlds. I'm kind of amazed that this concept is new to you.

Please no. You guys got it right the first time. Focus on actual content instead of catering to people who lack the ability to imagine voices when they read.

I tried it in a certain battle on a rooftop where many enemies cast Charm and, for a 6th level spell, it's surprisingly useless. It doesn't help that you can either cast the anti-Charm spell or the anti-Fear spell (there's simply no time for both unless you brought two Priests) and the Fear aura negates about half of that bonus right off. Worked like a charm for me. Not sure what to tell you.

More likely it's around 300-350k. I fully expect the game to hit a million eventually but I doubt it goes much over.

Seconded. The imagination-challenged who need every freaking line voiced really should be playing other kinds of games.

I think you might have OCD... I think you might not know what OCD is... I think you might not know what joke is...

Or you can just petrify her for 20 seconds and then destroy her.

I think you might have OCD...

I name thee nitpicker!!!

Why would you pay money for portraits when there are tons of them for free on the internet?

One cast of Gaze of Adragan and I think I got her down in 5-6 seconds. It was kind of underwhelming really. If you don't use a spell like that though she's beyond stupid in terms of the damage she puts out.

I just used the petrify spell on it and then hacked it too pieces. That was on my second go. On my first go I got my squishies too close and she obliterated my entire party with her aoe attacks in a few seconds.

Agreed. It doesn't make it outstanding either. No one said PoE wasn't fun. Big difference between a good/fun RPG and outstanding/long-lasting classic Youre really reaching daemonjax. There's a big spectrum between Chess (near-infinite possibilities) and binary tactics (PoE) youre choosing to ignore You didn't play BG2? You walk into a room and get ambushed by 6 orc arches firing from the sides, unreachable unless you fin the secret doors. Wow, a clever use of environment and secrets! PoE even has the supposed advantage that any party composition can detected traps and unlock doors, so why not explore this? No, instead you can't detect nor disarm traps mid-combat. I don't recall BG2 encounters being anything remarkable. "Bunch of monsters in a room, kill them!" would sum up 90% of them.

You guys are clueless and have awfully low RPG standards , and I'm gonna show you why. 1) PoE has no encounter design like I said During most battles you just send a tank to engage their melee fighters and have the rest of the party attack them. You rarely face anything that requires a different tactic. There's no swarm of weak enemies to overwhelm your tank, no ogres doing a pincer attack inside a tight corridor, no archers in hard-to-reach places , battles inside traps, NOTHING! The only ambush you'll face the entire game is in the tutorial! Battles in PoE are memorable due to their context (a lone powerful bear early in game, a big dragon, another big dragon, assaulting a fortress) and not for actual interesting fights. Most of them are just frontal fights with a straightforward approach , which brings us to point two below... 2) laughable "tactical" combat a) either you are in open areas where you must protect your squishy characters, or b) you are in tight areas where you block the chokepoint with your tank, while the rest of the party chugs spells and ranged attacks The peak of this amazing "tactical" combat are teleporting phantoms and burrowing beetles (which are essentially the same thing, yeah) EDIT: And guys, I am pleasantly surprised by PoE overall . Its far better than I thought it would be . You are really destroying the modern criteria for these games with such remarks. *yawn*

Why do you feel the need to spread your bs on a forum of a game you clearly hate? Go do something else with your life.

Yeah that's not how that works. No matter what they do there is no way they are going to make everyone happy.

The best defense is the prayer spell that gives +50 defense against such effects. You need to cast that on your entire party as soon as combat starts. If you don't have a priest or you don't have that level of spell yet it can be really tough.

What people are saying about their culture doesn't fit the way they are presented in game at all. They aren't anything like Sagani or Inuit tribes. They seem to be wholly more advanced than that.

People will complain about anything...

I wholly disagree. Best crpg story in years for me, and I found the setting a breath of fresh air in the genre of high fantasy.

It's hardly fair to put cliches as a Forgotten Realms' fault, though. FR was always meant to be extremely generic fantasy setting for having fun adventuring, and that's kinda supposes clicheing (is it even a legit word?..) to no end Except that that already existed with Greyhawk. What they did wit Forgotten Realms was create an unwieldy monstrosity of every fantasy cliche you can think of to the point that its generic nature became wholly distorted into a kind of caricature of a fantasy world rather than a proper, living and breathing fantasy world. I mean when you compare it to D&D worlds like Eberron or Athas the lack of any kind of vision or theme to Toril becomes really obvious. It's just a grotesque fantasy smoothie with every fantasy idea ever thrown in, so that the final taste is an incredibly strong flavor of nothing.

What's funny about this to me is that standard fantasy gods are usually not all that different than the gods of Eora in the sense that they usually are not the creators of the world but were created by a greater and more distant god (or in some cases are nothing but ascended mortals). So in essence they are just more powerful beings who have no true divinity in the sense that we might conceive of it from a real world religious perspective. Which ultimately just brings up the question of what exactly defines a god. To me the gods of Eora are pretty much just as much gods as the gods of most other fantasy settings, only with a more peculiar origin. Which is to say they really aren't gods, but simply very powerful beings who manipulate and control those weaker themselves due to exaggerated ideals and concepts that are integral to their "divine" identities.

You'll never satisfy everyone no matter how you design difficulty in a game, but the xp issues, especially in regard to bounties, are real and easily addressable.

I don't know that I'd call the DnD Forgotten Realms and thus Baldur's Gate setting "bland", though as you rightly point out, different strokes for different folks. Whether one actually liked the FR setting, one thing it had going for it was a massive amount of pre-existing depth going for it that the creators of BG didn't have to create when they were designing BG1/2. All they had to do was create their game within that pre-existing toybox, which perhaps might have meant that its developers could spend more time on the story and less on creating the environment where the story would take place. Just a thought. I wouldn't call a huge catalog of fantasy cliches "pre-existing depth". I actually kind of find it amusing that in one go a game design company made a more interesting world than the most popular D&D world of all time. You can choose to not accept it as depth, but it is. There's no denying that it exists, whether you like the content or not. And I'm not entirely sure that I'd call PoE's world more interesting. Matter of taste. Yeah if you like cliches stacked on top of each other miles deep Forgotten Realms is probably grand...

Fixed? What is there to fix?