Tigranes

That's because you gave an objection, it was refuted substantively, and now you have a different objection. Anyway, personal attacks are not kosher guys.

Why not, if it's not just a crude "addicts vs drug dealer" kind of thing.

For Project Eternity, search all posts by J.E. Sawyer and you've got most of them. If you want to get absolutely everything, he also posts often as rope kid on somethingawful, and responds on his formspring account (J.E. Sawyer). He also has a blog with intermittent updates.

Good information, several things I didn't know about there. All in all sounds like nothing that's worth my money, if I'm already used to modded BG. There aren't many game-breaking or annoying bugs left at this point, the gameplay benefits from mods like Sword Coast Strategems are phenomenal. New areas are nice and so are new characters (since I assume there's more to them than just romance), but for $18? Nah, there's a lot of small things that sound nice but overall I doubt I'll sit there feeling that not only is it different and new enough to be worth $18, it makes up for any mods that become incompatible. I'd have been open to small DLCs for new areas and quests, I guess, but that's not much a business model for them. World map, UI, cutscenes, music - they're all beautiful in the old BG, so if they improve them, good, but it doesn't add to the value proposition for me. I don't know if any of them are finalised yet, but the UI (mockup?) I saw recently looked like a load of crap. Sure there's a lot of crap mods, but I can choose what I want, and they're free. I imagine the whole package adds up for people who can't be bothered with mods or have lost their old versions and are weighing this one up with GOG, maybe.

Original BG with mods is far, far better. They made an uglier world map, uglier UI, a few minor improvements that mods do already, and basically no significant improvements that mods don't do already, unless you're really hunkering for their version of additional romances. (I don't know if they'll be any better than mods that add romances.) It's worth looking into to play on tablets, I guess, but otherwise I can't see any value.

A concept art / screenshot that actually looks good, as opposed to the mehs we've seen. Maybe more about souls if possible. Otherwise, I feel like we have seen plenty. They've still got 2 years to go on this thing and they've already given so much detail, if they were to give more it would probably end up being changed over the course of development.

I loved the two 'China 'em evil bastards' jabs in the first debate by Romney. If that's the style he's going for, then the second debate will be trickier, because he'll have to tread the fine line between differentiating sufficiently from Obama and declaring how he'll go tough on China etc, and avoiding sounding like some warmonger crying about how China is the new Soviet Union. The major problem I had with Obama's performance was that his primary line of attack was "Romney if you do everything you say you'll do today that's great but you won't do it and it can't work", which is far too difficult to parse through when you're watching TV and Romney is right back in your face. Combine that with Obama's refusal to defend his record and focus on the 'future', and all that remains is: (1) the Romney narrative on how everything was screwed up last 4 years; (2) the debate over whether the Romney Plan for the next 4 years works or not, is real or not, etc. There's a critical lack of a focus on Obama and his own vision, which will have to come out whether retrospectively or prescriptively.

See, that's what I HATED about Durlag's. I never got any further than the 2nd dungeon level because all the "walk into each room one step at a time and wait for the red outline to appear" makes those maps so incredibly tedious. Making the player nervous is fine. Making the player bored is unforgiveable. The traps in Durlag's did the latter. I agree partly with this. It would be preferable if the mega-dungeon was treated as an eco-system of its' own, rather than purely a monster lair. It doesn't quite make sense for every area to be littered with booby traps and monsters. After all, why would the inhabitants of these places put these traps all over the place? Any careless moves by the inhabitants of the dungeon would cause them to hurt themselves or their allies. It would be better if these so called dangerous areas were placed in strategic areas. For instance, at the entrance of each main areas or narrow chokepoints guarded by sentries. This would minimize the annoyance factor. But Durlag's Tower had excellent lore reasons to have so many traps. Durlag's story of paranoia, loss and suffering would not have any resonance if his tower was just a series of monsters to kill, or series of expositions to read. It's not the stupid cutscene with the Death Knight killing the annoying tourists that sets the scene. It's when you go into level 2 for the first time, walk down the corridors as normal, and then have half the party zapped and blasted to death. The dangerous, nervous navigation around the labyrinthine dungeons, even as all the traps expend your potions and consumables, corresponds to the nervous wreck Durlag himself was reduced to as he resorted to ever more paranoid means to try and 'protect' his clan. The traps, of course, are only ever a big deal in levels 2 and 3, as for variety's sake you get the elemental rooms, the chess battle and other novelties in 4 & 5. That's what sets it apart from the Watcher's Keep, which was a good dungeon in its own right, but the middle levels were mostly just puzzles - I didn't feel like I was delving deeper into a dangerous dungeon like I did with Durlag's Tower, I felt like I was just on an adventuring romp solving fun puzzle games. Now, could you find better ways of doing what Durlag's Tower did than loading 2 floors full of traps? Perhaps - and that's fine with me.

I like to use alternative weapons, but often I know that I won't be able to use some great weapons that way. E.g. I'm rolling a new party in Icewind Dale now and I know that by and large, sword users get the most interesting weapons. I'll still go with halberds or something and see how it goes, but I'm sure it's partly a circle - devs know most players like swords and that's part of their imagination of a 'cool fantasy warrior'.

No idea how difficult it would be to code in. One thing I can think of with click-to-attack is, well, given the combat rules, the speed of your attack would be exactly the same no matter how fast you clicked, or whether you left it to auto-click. So.... what you'd actually be doing is replacing 50 clicks with 1 click, but not actually changing anythinjg about your guy attacking (unless you wanted to attack less frequently). Another thing is the perspective. KOTOR provided such 'action' controls, as did NWN, but that's because the 'default' camera view was tilted a lot closer to a 3rd person over-the-shoulder cam. Anyway, yeah, I guess the main thing is if all you did was keep IE-style in everything then just added WASD controls, sure, you could, but only very few people would actually appreciate it.

Anything like Durlag's Tower will do me. Full of traps that actually make you afraid to search the next room for fear of chunky death. And a mini C&C arc where the choices you made on how to get past the various barriers in the earlier levels has a big impact on the final confrontation / resolution.

Thread title fixed, the universe will live on another day.

I have zero problem with what the OP says, if the developers do indeed have such a hidden agenda. It would be a perfectly valid critique to make; being a minority doesn't automatically shield you from anything. My problem is that there's been nothing to indicate they think anything along those lines, unless you have an exceptionally paranoid, or imaginative, reading. There's nothing to come clean about, as far as I can see.

Given the probable Celtic influence, it's going to be closest to Durwood.

Wanted to replay TW2 for the Enhanced Edition, but the beginning is so slow. Maybe switch to Icewind Dale, which is, well, just as pretty with better gameplay.

Good creators never listen to everything their boss says, because their boss, they aren't the creators.

I'm a backer, so the beta should be in my hands sooner or later. Excited.

Bad timing & to me it just reads like a vaguer, paler shadow of the PE / W2 pitches at the moment because of that. Still, JA2/ROA/etc is enough of a pull for me, I'll wait for more detail and probably drop in the $15 pledge.

Is it not acceptable when camping in a clearing of a forest/cave/dungeon filled with <insert monster type here> that some of them may regroup? Again this is a red herring. Why do you focus on the return journey being slightly tedious? It doesn't matter as long as the player can potentially get something enriching out of that return journey. Consider the following scenario Party finds a campsite just outside the entrance to a dark cave Party camps and decides to explore the cave They get a ways through but run out of spells, while also thinking that maybe they could use some different spells to what they have currently. So they make the decision to go back to the campsite, rest and memorize new spells On the return journey back to the point in the cave they encounter a rare monster because it's now night time and when they entered the cave previously, it was day. It drops a rare piece of loot. The player now feels thankful that they went back and rested, not only did they get new spells but they got a shiny treasure too. How in the world would that experience not be fun? I like the idea in general, but there are ways in which that experience could be unfun. Someone is not very good or is having a bad day combat-wise and needs to rest 2 or 3 times, or risk just not making headway; then it doesn't help that he uses half the spells he just regained fighting that newly spawned monster. The problem with cooldowns post-battle, though, is that it's just like unlimited rest-anywhere, except (1) takes longer, as you have to wait, and (2) is staggered across abilities, which makes it slightly better. It constrains my ability to control the pace at which I might like to play - I might want to smash through this dungeon real quick tonight, and find myself sitting round and waiting, which might eventually add up to even more tedium than running back to rest; or I might want to take my time and scout really slowly, in which case I may find that every battle all the cooldowns reset and I don't feel a sense of progressive challenge. It's hard to see what positive things cooldowns bring to the table, rather than what flaws of resting it avoids.

First one seemed generic fantasy bada-boom, liked the second and third more. All in all does the job of recalling IE games and general high fantasy. Given the attention to different cultures and subdivisions within races in the setting, it will be great to see such variation in musical styles and instruments as well in the full game, so that each culture has its own musical signature.

Thanks Tale. I've been too busy for this the last week. Hope to catch up on the devposts here and elsewhere.

Basically, exponentially higher costs (and I mean, more than twice it would cost for a PC-only version), the need to design everything from the ground up with consoles in mind that restricts many design decisions, controller differences, user interface differences, graphics differences, increased chances of bugs and technical problems, the need to pay licensing fees to console manufacturers and jump through their bureaucratic processes, etc. If you could do it without such prohibitions, sure, bring on the consoles. But that's the reality of making console versions, which has been proven time and again by countless developer testimonies and actual game performances.

Excellent.

It's not immediately terrible to put in level scaling, but it usually opens the doors of hell. As Infinitron says, I think the best way to do it is scale encounters, doing things like adding an archer to an all-melee encounter or bumping one or two spell levels (max) for the caster. Do it more than a small level range, or do it for enemies so that a single bandit can go from zero to hero, and you have a stupid, nonsensical world. The weird thing is, if you have really limited level-scaling, then players can barely notice it's there (it was hard to notice in BG2, and not that easy to notice in FNV also), and you don't really get the effect you intended (which, I assume, is protect players from too difficult encounters). Crank it up, and you can't avoid getting idiotic situations. It's really tricky to balance level scaling so that you achieve a good curve for everyone and keep the world reasonably realistic. Which begs the question, if level scaling isn't a quick & easy solution, why not just take that time to create a proper hand-crafted world, with extremely limited scaling ranges at most? Disappointing news and I don't want Obsidian to kowtow to the community for every little design feature, but that also puts the onus on them to make the right decisions. Finally, the way this kind of news is trickling forth via Kickstarter comments or twitter comments is.... an interesting strategy. You'd think they'd want to give themselves the chance to clarify what they mean by putting it in the updates, instead of these little comments where you really can't tell how things will end up.

As I recall, the IE games were pretty consistent in ensuring this. In BG2 Irenicus' dungeon, every Kobold would drop a shortbow or dagger / short sword depending on what they were using to fight, and sometimes, a low-level scroll, some gold or gems; no armour, obviously. In BG1, you could guarantee that just about every bandit dropped leather armour in addition to their weapon. If a kobold was shooting fire arrows at you, or you saw an enemy cleric using scrolls or wands, you could be sure that if you killed them before they expended it all, you'd get your hands on the things. Obviously, IWD had semi-random lists on barrels and such. I'm fine with loot tables, as long as we have sensible loot for enemies like above.