Tigranes

People say "it's 2015" or "bring the game into the 21st century" like it means something, but I genuinely don't know why that's so great. I mean, 21st century gaming gave us bad sex scenes, railroaded plots, press-X-to-win gameplay and a lot of ugly 3D games, such that many of today's games look worse than IE.

Looks like it's going to be impossible for this particular thread to escape the swamp. Remember guys, our guideline is simple. Criticise anything you want, debate opinions in strong terms if you want. Don't attack people. Calling people idiots, trolls, blathering buffoons, Donald Trump supporters, or whatever else - even if you, in all your wisdom, think it is 100% true for sure - just leads to a kind of forum that nobody wants to read, in the end. Be nice! OK, so that's a bit extreme. Be a little nicer!

The years pass, yet I remain young, naive and foolish. Who can I blame but myself?

Who are these mythical creatures that say "say anything mean about Muslims and you deserve all the terrorism you get"? I mean, there's one guy in HoonDing's picture, I suppose. And who are these mythical creatures that say Christianity is all bad and should be banned? Is this also the mythical universe where all Mexicans rape our women and millions of Americans are secretly terrorist sympathisers who worship Bin Laden in their basement? I mean, you're right, in this imaginary world where all of those things are true, I totally agree with you!

Eager as everybody seems to be to make dramatic pronouncements about the worth of another human being, discussing the game and the arguments is probably more effective. And less excruciating to read. Can we relax a bit?

Couple edits. I'm being more heavy handed than I'd like, but let's, you know, have a place where we can just talk about the game and not people.

I have little issue with posts like Gromnir's. There is no question of 'defending Islam' here. Islam deserves neither defense nor villification. The problem is that thoughtless people who get bug-eyed yelling ITS AN ISLAM INVASION think that everyone who disagrees with them are Islam-loving America-hating "but it's the guns it's got nothing to do with them being Muslim" people. The truth is that both extremes are terrible. Here, let's make it simple. Some killers are Muslim extremists. Other killers are white supremacist / right-wing extremists. Yet other killers have ambiguous or unknown ideological motives, but are clearly extremist in their application. What is the number one thing you want to tackle there? Extremism. You don't get rid of them all by deporting all the Muslims, and you don't get rid of them all by deporting all white people. There is, as Gromnir says, a need to speak clearly, honestly, and reasonably about issues - without being afraid to be 'offensive' to Muslims or Christians or whoever else. And you know what? The first step is to take all the ridiculous blanket "I know the answer [islam/Guns/X] is just terrible" statements and throw them out of the room. We have a problem of lots of individuals going on killing sprees. That's the problem that needs to be solved. You want to focus on the Muslim extremist killers and solve that problem? OK, let's talk about it. And if Islam as a whole needs to be brought to the table so be it. But a lot of people - including people in this thread - just use someone else's death as an excuse to indulge their illogical and contemptible opinions like the wife being ugly or people who go to Saudi to get a wife asking for it. That kind of pollutant is the first thing we need to get rid of to have a proper conversation in this country. Not because it's anti-Islam or anti-guns or whatever, who cares, but because it stops people from figuring out ways to stop attacks in the real world.

Heh. Well, there is already 'Mohamed Badguy' in the NSA slides...

He was last online the night of the 2nd, though he hasn't posted since the 1st, so that might mean he's fine.

I have, in fact, done research, but I don't really need it here, since you're making my point for me.

If you mean the cutoff for counting shootings, the pattern is the same before 9/11, though the specifics depend on the definitions. E.g. one count of lone wolf attacks 1968-2011 in US shows that about half or more were right-wing whites. The specific numbers aren't that important - nobody wants to say Muslim extremists aren't a problem. Because not everyone wants a full gun ban. Gun control sometimes literally means a tighter and more rigorously regulated system for gun sales.

I thought Qistina was the Bruce alt, which is the Numbers alt, which is the Hades alt, who faked his death in order to continue his alting.

The problem here is the so-called "regressive leftists" in America are using this shooting as an opportunity to call for gun control. On the other hand, they refuse to even acknowledge that shooters were Muslims, (given that regressive leftists are also Islam apologists.) So they are being opportunistic and using this opportunity to attack one thing (guns, which they do not like) while ignore the other (Muslims and Islam, which they love to coddle.) That is just pure biased. One is just as ridiculous as the other. Seeing a shooting happen on TV and immediately screaming "GUNS GUNS GUNS" is just as stupid as screaming "MUSLIMS MUSLIMS MUSLIMS". Guns and Islam extremism is obviously part of the phenomenon, but both types of blanket theory need to be thrown out to arrive at real solutions (which may or may not involve some form of gun control and actions against religious extremism, but would need to then go further). After all, we want to get rid of both San Bernardino and Planned Parenthood, both the Timothy McVeighs and the Paris shooters, both shootings in gun-happy America and gun-shy Europe, both shootings by police and shootings by 'lone wolves'.

I'm not even saying these killers weren't Muslim extremists. They may well be. They could be ISIS operatives, or non-affiliated extremists. It wouldn't surprise me. What is so weird is this insistence that as soon as the attack occurs, people just point to the most inconclusive of snippets (Arab name! Beard!) and then think the case is closed.

You can't blame guns for the attack, or Islam for the attack. Both are groundless until we can have some reasoned, evidence-based, investigated approximation of their motives, logistics and process... as opposed to 'hurr look they have Arab sounding names and guy grew a beard'. Yes, I'm saying that a lot of stuff said in this thread so far is just illogical. So if 1 in 10,000 white males shoot, and 1 in 2,000 Muslim shoot, it's clearly Islam that is the problem? Here, let me make another pointless use of numbers: if there are 60 white male shoot-ups, and 10 Muslim ones, maybe we should care more about the former than the latter? Statistics aren't things you can plug in anywhere in any way you prefer. Or what about "dude traveled to Saudi Arabia"? This is almost as bad as "hey this guy has an Arab name". Since when is Saudi Arabia the country you go to for Al-Qaeda / ISIS training? Since when is a Middle Eastern person traveling to the Middle East grounds for suspicion, and since when is a Muslim person being devoutly Muslim a transparent proof of terrorist motive?

"Look, they were Arab and religious, so it must be that they killed because they were Muslim!" Maybe wait to make a more informed judgment. People also yelled out immediately "the attack hit a disability centre, it must have something to do with that", but now it is being reported that it might have been inter-employee conflict rather than the mission of the centre, unliked the PP attack. Its plausible, but then why bring his wife along. And why come decked out for WW3. And just how many co-workers can one person come into conflict with Anybody can sit in a chair and put together various pieces of information in a way to support their theory. You might as well say these people must have been clinically insane, since who goes around on a killing spree while they're 6 months pregnant, and how many co-workers can one person come into conf-... yeah. 'Lone Wolf' attacks in America are predominantly by whites, and before 9/11, right-wing white supremacists were overwhelmingly the source of such shootings and acts of violence. Recent years have seen a noticeable uptick in Muslim extremists. Both of you would prefer to generalise and rush to create big theories to explain all the problems, rather than assess all the facts, contradictory as they are. What happened? Two people went on a shooting spree. Do we know yet what their motivations might be? No, not really. So why pretend that all we need to know is they are Muslim, etc? Fine, by that logic we should also deport all white policemen in the country, since those bastards just cannot stop shooting black people. And we should probably make a national database of all less-educated, lower-income white men, because they've been supplying a steady stream of shooters for at least 50 years! There's obviously a huge problem of Muslim extremist terror, and it needs to be stopped. Maybe that will require doing things that reasonable Muslims do not appreciate. Fine. But try and assess the facts first: a good conclusion is made by accounting for all the contradictory and ambiguous facts and then still finding a way through, rather than ignoring them and throwing huge blankets over the events.

"Look, they were Arab and religious, so it must be that they killed because they were Muslim!" Maybe wait to make a more informed judgment. People also yelled out immediately "the attack hit a disability centre, it must have something to do with that", but now it is being reported that it might have been inter-employee conflict rather than the mission of the centre, unliked the PP attack.

For anybody that enjoyed the game, indieDB is doing a thing where top 5 games getting a vote get some free advertising. If you liked AOD at all, it's basically one guy who quit his job and worked on it for ten bloody years, and now just wants to make enough money to keep making games (which he is quite close to doing), so I wish him best of luck. No registration required, single click. http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-age-of-decadence

Haha. I wish I had time to play some BG2... but never say never, I guess. Just pray that I don't get a job next year!

This is true. That gaping maw is exactly what I visualise when I read his posts, I can't help myself anymore.

Looks beautiful like other IE games, probably the most combat-heavy, but any Icewind Dale game you'd play for the fighting and the winter atmosphere rather than the actual story. The 3rd edition adaptation is actually very good, and makes it fresh. I enjoy it a lot. Most of what Gromnir says iss correct. Anyway, I'd get it if you enjoyed IE combat.

I hope they don't use crowdfunding, but 500k sales doesn't mean 20m for the company, not even close.

Obsidian forums have never banned, and never will ban, anyone for just being critical of Obsidian games. I mean, I'm not sure why some people think it's a good idea to talk for months and months about how they don't enjoy a game, but then, we have people who are similarly obsessed about hawt virtual women or NWN1, so... Now, back on topic? POE2 is probably 99% sure of getting made, all things considered. Hopefully it can afford to have a bigger team and budget, and a considered effort on improving every aspect.

Both IE games and POE had two tiers. First there is recoverable death (normal death in IE, knockdown in POE) which can be rolled back (resurrection spell/trek to town vs. simple end of combat), and then there is irrecoverable death ('chunking'/etc in IE, death in POE). In both cases, you could choose to roleplay death in a number of ways - treat recoverable death as 'true death', reload for both kinds of death, etc. The issue with IE games was that it was such an unnecessarily huge pain in the arse to pick up the dead dude's equipment, go back to a temple, then re-equip the bastard. It was a massive timesink. Permadeath is also quite hard to achieve in IE if you are competent. I ended up Ctrl+R'ing dead characters to save the pointless time-waste (and then throw out some loot to 'pay' for it), and then house-ruling that 3 normal deaths = permadeath. The issue with POE is that the lack of a wounds/injury system and plentiful camping supplies make knockdowns too inconsequential, if you are competent. (If you aren't great at combat, then knockdowns DO start to threaten permadeath, but then the problem is people who want a casual hassle-free combat now get an experience of attrition they don't want, while people who want a challenge don't get it.) What I had imagined when I first heard about stamina/health is that a knocked down character could still be damaged for health by enemies, which would lead to fun scenarios trying to save that guy from being permakilled (a la D&D and the death saving throws).

You are playing the game already and feeling it's too easy. So... put it up? Just put it down again later if it becomes too hard, though it probably won't. Everybody has very different play styles, preferred difficulty, skill level. We won't know any better than you. It always puzzles me that people feel the need to ask.