Elgyn

I would like some more Orlan portraits, and I would like all the races/sexes to get portraits with the hairstyle that has both sides shaved. I'm not sure what you call that cut, but it's odd they don't have a single portrait with that style.

Eh, it didn't seem that conflicting to me, but it's early and I could just be reading it wrong. What I took away from it was 'Well, we have this big expansion of four acts in the works, but we know people are going to want new content now to keep the game fresh, so we are just going to release two acts now, and two acts later instead.' Something along those lines.

Health can only be recovered by resting. This game is closer to BG1 in leveling than many other RPGs. Since you only have a dozen levels through the entire game, you get a couple levels early rather quickly so you can actually survive the game, and then they spread them out so you have some sort of progression during the other Act's. IIRC, the xp needed to go from 4-5 is about equal to what you needed from 1/2/and 3 together. After that they start tacking on an extra 1000xp needed into the formula to level up. I like it though, it makes the selections seem more important than something like NWN2 where you had 20 levels to get all the toys, or other RPGs where you have hundreds of levels to get everything known to man. That could be personal taste however. Don't worry, you will get a ton of stuff to do once you get into the city.

I don't mind having to be in stealth mode to notice traps, and I don't mind stealth + fast mode being the kind of baseline exploration/dungeon crawling tactic. I do mind that I can't just put one person into stealth to position them after my front line engages or is engaged upon. That all-or-nothing part of stealth really just doesn't feel natural to me at the moment.

I honestly don't think they are too strong, I just think a couple (more of the basic melee types) just don't have enough interactivity to have the tools to equal them in pure strength that a player can pull off. That kind of sounds wishy-washy, so I guess what I'm trying to say is I think they have kits that allow players to properly eek out more power potential than several of the other classes are capable of, even if they received increased number tweaks. Instead of taking the MMO route of pulling everyone down to a baseline bar, I'd rather see Obsidian introduce some tweaks and abilities to bring the weaker classes (Maybe it's just me but Ranger seems to stiiiiiiink) up to the same power level as to the top tier classes.

This actually shocks me because I was so sure it was Virgil's voice actor putting on a little non-Virgil accent for the game. Then again, I may just be wanting to have Arcanum flashbacks because every time I start the game I think of Arcanum for a split-second when the string section kicks in for the loading screen.