Tigranes

Play Oblivion as a cautionary tale about how ridiculously broken this kind of scaling can be - and how to do it better, like they attempted (but were not entirely successful) in Skyrim. Are you talking about ES4? Oblivion is ES4. What you're talking about is level scaling, and it has actually become very common in RPGs the last 10 years. The problem is that it is often done in a really terrible way. If enemies just linearly scale with you all the way, for example, then what's the point of becoming more powerful? So you end up seeing roadside bandits in Oblivion sporting Daedric armour, or being able to beat FF8 late game bosses at level 1.

Both of you move on. Please. No snarky replies, no need to have the last word, no need to clarify yourself, just move on. Nobody wants to see more.

Moon Godlike has been the obvious pick as best race since release, sadly. Anameforobsidian isn't quite accurate - people complained, mostly correctly, that the other godlikes were shortchanged, but moon godlike has always been far ahead of every other bonus. No helmet in the game comes close to Silver Tide's benefit, especially since the latter is had from the first minute instead of waiting for the loot. ST is especially a must pick for Solo characters.

Gromnir, yes, my disappointment was that TOB was downscaled to an expansion, rather than being a full game. As an expansion it was a metric ton better than almost any expansion pack out there.

They won't, it's far too near release and content will be locked.

Oh, I agree ToB was a disappointment in those ways, but Ascension I thought was a big improvement on the release version. Anyway, sure, it can well be that you don't jive with his work.

Gaider's very boilerplate, but I still rate things like Ascension, and even HK-47, cliche-filled one-dimensional internet meme he is, is at least funny, i.e. cliche done right. In an industry where 90% of writers write things that you literally forget the second after you read them, and 90% of designers just get different things wrong rather than doing anything right... We all love Avellone, but he is known to be very positive in public about other games. He'd recommend anything, and basically has in the past. Well that's the thing. They now have a lot of quality BG1/2 modders like Avenger (Rogue Rebalancing mod, etc), and original Bioware big guns like Gaider. So are they turning? They started off with a horrible BGEE that made the game worse in many ways, and eventually by the 3rd (!) EE they could claim to at least improve a few things while making others worse. Are we going to see Dragonspear finally prove that they can create decent original content, and then get even stronger with these veterans on board? I guess we'll know soon enough. Or others will, I can't bring myself to buy BG:EE just to play Dragonspear unless everyone tells me it's amazing...

It's good news, Gaider is an OK writer and a good designer, and Brent Knowles is cool. Who knows if SoD will be any good, but having started as a pointless cashgrab company they're getting an interesting team together and clearly looking to produce solid RPGs in the future.

They've got both now, it seems.

Very nice environments. They look very good, in fact, sometimes taking a leaf from IWD. The UI, like every other Beamdog release, looks horrible, and its only redeeming feature is the few ease-of-use additions. Does their UI designer like to dress in green pants and red tops? Do they think gigantic icons that don't fit properly in their slots or bright red highlighting in a black-dominated dialogue box or any of the rest of it looks good? The best parts of that UI are the parts where they just copied the old one. Writing is mediocre but that was never a huge point for BG. Combat is impossible to tell since they just Select All -> Attack all the enemies. Yeah. So jury still out on one of the most important parts.

I doubt it for POE1, but I'd love to see it for POE2, and in more games in general. That's also a way to more easily allow extreme difficulties so that people who want a challenge can get it.

That's belief/ morality/ tradition; not rationality. They didn't do an in depth analysis of the pro and cons before coming up with those rules, they do it because their parents did it or the Flying Spaghetti Monster('s representative(s)) 'told' them to. Belief is not a synonym for rationality, and it doesn't matter how hard the person believes or whether you put airquotes around it. To go back to the original, meting out summary justice would be an emotional response, understandable perhaps even justifiable too, but there's no need for airquoting "rational" at all as it isn't even a slightly accurate usage and there are accurate terms available. Simple fact is that it is highly unlikely anyone would be able to make rational decisions in that situation, and the simple fact of having reasons for an action does not alone make it rational or logical. That's why you're getting flak for using 'rational', it simply isn't the right word for what you mean. What you're talking about is the mess of subjective stuff that goes on in people's minds involving belief, tradition, morality, emotion etc, they're all the enemy of rationality because rationality is at its heart an objective logical approach that is immiscible with subjectives like tradition, belief, emotion etc. You realise humans living in the non-West 500 years ago weren't brain-dead drooling morons that go 'hurrrr I stone this lady I've known for ten years cos whatever? Hurrrr okaaaay', right? Obviously they weren't rational, because in most cases they didn't consider western modern Reason very, well, reasonable. One can hardly argue they sat there and pulled a Habermas public sphere. But I like this fancy fairy tale where subjectivity and objectivity are neatly dividable (something refuted by every serious historian of those concepts).

Every decision made during development is a decision about / mindful of balance. It's not like the original design somehow had nothing to do with it. Anyway, it's an inelegant solution to an inelegant problem. More generally, per-rest/per-enc does need a major overhaul, in the sense that both sides of the coin need to be overhauled. It's far too difficult to design per-rest properly in a CRPG, and the only silver lining is that people can set their own challenge - people who just want to lob spells every 3 seconds can rest every 2 minutes, people who enjoy attrition and scarcity won't. Per-encs are typically balanced out with cooldowns, which leads to a braindead 'click all the buttons when they light up' gameplay, but there're many ways to have smart, interesting per-encs with supporting mechanics that force tactical decisions (a robust casting time/interrupt system, spell maintenance / upkeep costs, etc).

I liked the widespread cynicism. Of course, everybody was cynical and ruthless in AOD because that's the kind of dog eat dog world it was, where it makes no sense to adhere to 21st century politeness. I'd expect the tone to be different come this new setting.

It works pretty well, every time a US politician eats the disgusting 'American food' I feel sympathy for them.

Rubio's going to benefit from suddenly looking like the most sane and reasonable of people next to Cruz and Trump. I personally think the guy's charismatic and often says reasonable things, but also tends to say things that end up being surprisingly nuts. Today's biggest winner I suspect will end up being him, even more than Cruz. I still think Clinton will win the whole thing, but if she does so, it's good that she has to beat off a very serious challenge from Sanders, and it'll also be good if she has to beat Rubio to it rather than Trump. Make it a more meaningful race.

What in the world is that font size and offset? Is that possible in vanilla?

there is battle fatigue It's so easy to shrug that off, and attrition over different maps is not really important, what matters is attrition your party suffers as you navigate a single dungeon - too often RPGs feel like you fight one battle, rest for 16 hours, and then you knock on the door next to you and say "you ready to fight now?" What health/endurance, campingt supplies, etc. do is encourage a way of playing where the level design matters, the conservation of resources matters, and there's an added strategic level. I appreciate that. Now, if somebody still wants to spam rests after every battle, they'll find a way - and that's cool, it's their choice.

Yeah, the point is that you have meaningful attrition, not just drink a potion and it's like the previous fight never happened.

Durance is triggered by time with party, not with special locations. I'm not sure if the time is measured in real playing time or indices like travel. Most companions don't need to be with you at a particular moment, though there are caveats: e.g. you need to get on with Aloth's quest before end of Chapter 2.

Agreed.

It may be 'staggering money' but 4m is a tiny, tiny budget in game development terms, so every little bit helps. Nobody expected the NPCs to be such a problem to design in later. Anyway, at the end of the day, look, there are these random townspeople that you'll never click on by mistake, & some tombstones in a couple of places you'll never click on by mistake. If that's a "severe blow" to anything - and if you somehow know this before trying the game - then ah well.

It's more historical, geographical or completely unordinary or fictional origins. Scepters, falchions, scimitars, katanas, chakrams, mauls, talons, scythes, kukri ... Unordinary for whom? All those weapons you mentioned were normal common weapons. Except the scythe maybe. That u ed to be mostly a harvest tool D&D filed as 'Exotic' everything not from White People Land... and some other miscellany.

People tend to be bad at remembering such kinds of durations in seconds. That goes for me, too, but I'm pretty sure mine are under 10 seconds. Not using SSD for POE, 4gb ram.

I'm OK with +1/+2/+3. I wouldn't want all the weapons to basically do the same damage and only differ in conditionals, for example. There just needs to be a reason to look forward to shops / loot more, rather than making a beeline for the crafting ingredients store. Maybe things like Exceptional ingredients, there's only one or two and you have to disassemble existing uniques to get more. Maybe it means you can't craft Quality and have to pick up existing Quality weapons. Or, as I say, just keep the existing system, and focus on having some more weird and wacky uniques in the world.