Crucis

1. I think that Isometric 2D is vastly better than 3D. Personal taste, of course. 2. Cut scenes: I wouldn't mind some of these. They were used in the BG and IWD games, as I recall. That said, the style of telling the story through pictures on scrolls can be rather effective as well. And can seem very in character with the genre, IMO. 3. Fully voice acting. Not just no, but heII no. I have nothing against voice actors, except that the cost is so high that it would drain resources away from more critical parts of the project. 4. Customizing of looks. Sounds good in theory, but it seems to me that when you get right down to it, how the character looks in the inventory isn't as important as the game play. Now, if you're talking about customizing how the paperdoll appears in-game, again sounds good in theory. But it seems to me like that's a LOT of work for very little actual reward. 5. Tactics. Personally, I think that combat tactics scripting is a waste of time. I want to personally control each of my characters' actions, not have them running according to scripts and turning the game into some sort of movie. I want to PLAY the game, not program it and watch it.

I was assuming that the company of mercs you meet at the Dozens HQ might have been backers.

What it all comes down to is this for me. Every dollar and every man-hour spent on anything MP related is a dollar or man hour not spent on improving the actual game. And even if there was a kick starter put together to pay for the money side of such a project, I'd personally still object to it because the man hours required to do the work would be man hours not spend on improving the actual game. My opinion is that if you're so hot to trot to play a multiplayer game, then go find one that is MP. And leave PoE alone so that its devs con concentrate on making it the best solo game it can be.

No. No grenades in the modern sense of the word. However, IIRC, in either BG and/or IWD, there were fantasy style "grenade" like items. They were things like potions of explosions and there was a lesser one with a much smaller radius, which were arguably like Molotov ****tails. This sort of thing doesn't seem so horrible, particularly the lesser one. IIRC, the potion of explosion was not unlike a single use fireball.

No one's forcing you to use Chill Fog.

But wouldnt that money be recouped by people buying the game due to multiplayer? So basically it would pay for itself. The only factor implementing multiplayer would take up would be time. It'd take time away from improving single player by implementing multiplayer. But the thing is that adding MP does NOT add any new content (be it new areas, etc. or tweaks to classes and items, etc.). And if you don't add any new content, then you're not going to get a lot of the existing customers to pay for MP. Also, the game was intended from the start to be a solo game, not an MP game. And the people who contributed to the kickstarter campaign did so under that assumption. IMO, I think that it'd be better if the game stayed true to its solo gaming roots, rather than waste resources on something that adds no new content to the overall package.

I'm with those who oppose adding MP to PoE. Every dollar spent on MP is a dollar that isn't being spent on improving the game itself. And that's the biggest reason for opposing MP, perhaps in the end, the only reason that matters.

Humor doesn't have to be silly. And frankly, I'd be thrilled with the idea of stamping out all trace of silliness. I don't find silliness and outright stupidity to be funny.

I see this as a negative, not a positive. I like NPC's to be playing from the same rulebook as my characters, and NOT get special abilities.

We just seem to disagree. I also think NWN was a better single player game than baldurs. I dont see why POE wouldnt be the next toolkit Good lord, not a chance in hell. When I first saw NWN all those years ago, I swore to never buy it, because its graphics looked ugly and I didn't want a D&D game that didn't support a large party of 6. And quite frankly, I had no interest in 3D. I love the 2D isometric PoV and have no interest in playing a D&D game like it was a first person shooter. None whatsoever. In multiplayer the party size was not an issue, and in singleplayer it did not bother me to have only a single henchman. Saying nwn was like a first person shooter, tells me yeah, you skipped playing it, thats ok if the iso graphics are that important to you, but comparing 2nd edition d&d rules, to a shooter, because your party is smaller... huh? Party size matters hugely to me. To me, D&D is about parties, not solo or duo "parties". And yeah, I will compared a 3D, solo D&D game to a first person shooter and have no problem doing so.

Sorry, but I, for one, am glad that there are no moron companions in the game like Minsc. I never enjoyed him in BG1/2 in the least. I don't find "stupid" to be funny, just stupid.

We just seem to disagree. I also think NWN was a better single player game than baldurs. I dont see why POE wouldnt be the next toolkit Good lord, not a chance in hell. When I first saw NWN all those years ago, I swore to never buy it, because its graphics looked ugly and I didn't want a D&D game that didn't support a large party of 6. And quite frankly, I had no interest in 3D. I love the 2D isometric PoV and have no interest in playing a D&D game like it was a first person shooter. None whatsoever.

For POTD, I don't know. But for regular modes, IMO, Arcane Veil and the Hardened version are absolutely worth it. There's always going to be times when some enemy slips by your front line somehow and your wizzy has to defend himself in melee. And throwing up an Arcane Veil ASAP has always seemed to make a huge difference in their survivability. Plus, it's a per-Encounter ability rather than a per-rest one, so you don't need to expend a spell to use it, and can use it once for every battle without resting between. Definitely worth it.

Luckmann, it doesn't really matter whether it's "good enough" or not. There are MANY other bonuses that are fixed values. There's nothing special about one handed wielding in this regard, nor should it get any special treatment either.

Ah, yeah, you probably confused it with the +12 Accuracy you get for simply one-handing stuff, not the Style Talent. The +12 Accuracy ranges from crazy good (early-game) to meh-ish (late-game). It should've been 8+(1*LVL). And it's the very thing that makes the One-Handed Weapon Style useless for duelists, since they'll just not get as many grazes as anyone else, while tanks with their penalty to Accuracy will have lots and lots more. Or maybe the +12 Accuracy for 1-hand wielding should have been part of the 1H style in the first place. It does seem to make the 1H style moot, if thinks of it as only for 1H wielders with no shield. And I have a hard time seeing a +12 bonus as weak at any part of the game, though I agree that early on, a +12 bonus is proportionally stronger than later in the game. But the same is true for nearly any bonus, accuracy or deflection, etc. And adding a graze to hit conversion on top of the +12 doesn't seem all that impressive. If it had been a hit to graze conversion, it might have been more impressive. Still, it does make one question whether it's right that the 1H weapon style should be allowed for shield users. Or for that matter whether the +12 acc bonus should have been in the 1H style (assuming that it was limited to single weapon/no shield users).

In all the stuff I've read about Eora and its cultures and people, I seem to recall that they say that there's plenty of tension between peoples of different cultures, races, nations, etc. And yet, very little of this seems to show up in the game. Oh, there's talk of some Purge in the recent past. And IIRC there's one of the Crucible Knights who has something bad to say about Orlans. But that's about all I can recall. For such a supposedly adult content game, you'd think that there'd be more dialog content that showed this tension more clearly and more often. For example, I thought that god-likes were supposed to be hated and feared. Shouldn't there be dialogs where a GL PC has to deal with that hatred and fear from people he talks to? I mean, if your PC is a Death GL or a Fire GL, shouldn't that kid in Copperlane, Gordy, I think, be afraid of you on sight? Or maybe there should be a town, or a district in Defiance Bay that was a ghetto for GL's. Or on the flip side, maybe the devs should just walk back all the background material saying that this tension existed and say that people get along generally well (at least sorta-kinda). Either way, it seems like the background material is at odds with the way that things are shown in-game regarding relations between people of different races, religions, nations, etc.

Yes, you're just impatient. Patience is a virtue.

One thing interesting I got from the RpgCodex link was this: "The expansion starts out in a village called Stalwart which is besieged by ogres. " Anyone recall that the City Crier in Defiance Bay was talking about Stalwart being besieged by Ogres? I did. And I was wondering what it was all about since pretty much everything the town crier seemed to talk about related to things the PC either did or could end up doing later.

I'd prefer people who knew that it's "would have" or "would've", not the non-existent "would of".

Nice video clip in that article. Doesn't reveal a whole lot, but enough to wet the appetite. New companions: I hope that for starters this means that it'll provide companions for the classes that didn't have companions, i.e. rogue, monk, and barbarian. As for the location, I foresee a trip to a cold, wintery sort of place in the mountains. Don't forget to pack your long johns. Also, it seems to me that with a higher level cap, it seems to me that the final battle of PoE ... heck, the entire final act of PoE after you pass the point of no return (those who have completed the game already know what point I'm talking about) ... will have to be made a lot harder to accommodate/challenge a party that's a few levels higher. And I sure hope that they include a "Hold Position" action/button like existed in the old IE games.

Actually, my experience with driving flight was that it's not quite that limited. I think that there's a fairly narrow arc behind the initial target where driving flight can hit additional targets, rather than 100% directly on the extended line of flight of the shot.

Nobear, there is a priest buffing spell that IIRC, increase your defenses against charm/dominate/confuse spells, just as there's another one that increases defenses against paralyze, stunning, etc. As I recall, they're fairly effective, but not perfectly so. Still worth using, I'd think, particularly in certain battles where charm spells are going to be flying around like crazy.

Fae, I guess to me, it's the reverse. Without the accent, all the rest falls flat on its face. It's like having an excellent actor in a movie who generally does a good job of portraying the character well and delivers the lines skillfully, but has to work with otherwise bad material. The voice actress who did Sagani may have done her job in a professional manner and delivered the lines well. But without the accent, it's maybe like a really profession actor delivering lines well but is in really bad costumes. (I'm sorry if my attempts at analogies may not be working, but I hope you get the point I'm trying to make.) Or put another way, one might have thought that Kevin Costner when he played Robin Hood back in the 90's delivered his lines professionally. But without a good english accent, to many people Costner seemed utterly out of place as Robin Hood, no matter how well (or not) he might have done otherwise.

May I ask where you're from? I feel that that's an interesting notion of Central Europe. --- Even if the voice actor did an Inuit accent, I seriously doubt that more than a tiny percentage of people would recognise it as such. It also wouldn't evoke any specifically north-pole-y feeling, if no one knew what it was. They could have used someone with a Maya or Ethiopian accent, and very few people would know the difference to Inuit. It wouldn't matter what specific accent it is, only that it's distinct from any of the well-known ones. To me, "western Europe" is the area comprising the old Cold War era NATO countries. And "eastern Europe" is the portion of the old Soviet Union that is west of the Urals. (That seems like a pretty text book definition, since the eastern edge of the continent of Europe ends at the Urals, IIRC.) And that leaves what's in between those two as "central" Europe. As for the accent of Sagani, it doesn't much matter to me what her accent was so long as it was NOT a bland Dyrwoodan (aka bland American) accent. It just bugs the heck out of me that her accent (or lack thereof) is as bland as bland can be, and sounded like she was a local Dyrwoodan, not a foreigner from a remote land and an isolated culture. Hey, if the local Dyrwoodan accent had been exotic, then having a bland Nassituq accent would have been different, but that wasn't the case.

My experience to date is that it's hard to nearly impossible to avoid being charmed/dominated/confused if the enemy chooses to target you with such a spell because of the graze/hit/crit mechanic. Now this isn't to say that investing in the attributes that enhance Will saves isn't good, since it's better to be merely Grazed with a charm than Crit, since the Graze/Hit/Crit mechanic affects the duration of the spell effect on your character. But often the best way to deal with getting charmed is to just have a cipher in the part who can hit charmed team mates with a mental binding.