Fardragon

...with lasers, spaceships, and power armor. How would you bite people through your power armour helmet? Laser teeth.

Yeah, stilettos are silly. My Orlan barbarian prefers kinky boots with platform soles.

Um... no. It seems you completely misunderstand me. I judge other fantasy RPG components on their believabilty. That ties into the whole 'immersion' thing (a horribly overused term, and one I am even loath to use, but it fits here. And please don't confuse this with 'realism'). As for satisfying, that also applies to other RPG elements, especially the story. If that's not satisfying, I may not complete the game - and if I do I certainly won't recommend it. Same with writing - and that covers romances, btw. Have I ever said "I don't like the way this dungeon was designed or how this dragon attacked me, it was unsatisfying "? Yes, I have. The former, many times. The latter, not exactly in that fashion, but I've complained about the battle with a particular dragon (to adhere to the example) on at least one occasion, stating I found it not fun and very unsatisfying because of the way the encounter was designed as well as the fact that the creature's difficulty relied pretty much solely on an overstuffed health bar. Yes, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, although I'm not sure you're disagreeing with what I'm actually trying to say (and if I'm unclear, I take full responsibility for that and extend my apologies). Oh.,,,my bad ? I was told you never complain about dragons in RPG...which dragon fight did you find unrealistic If there are dragons in EVERY SINGLE BALDY RPG, then yes, I am going to complain about them. Sometimes it's nice to play an RPG without dragons.

Trent knows where you live... (He used to work for Baskin Robbins)

So basically you are bottle necked when it comes to choosing weapons. Cause say there is a soulbound rapier yet it doesnt soulbind to fighters, no fighter will ever use a rapier, cause you will be limiting yourself if you do. No, you can create a rapier fighter, but if you find a soulbound greatsword your fighter can still use it because his rapier skills apply to any soulbound weapon. The reason for doing it this way is simple: there won't be many soulbound weapons in the game (my guess is four). Chances are, there is no soulbound rapier.

I think they said the WORD COUNT was longer. I suspect there is a lot of NPC companion dialogue, which wouldn't really contribute to the completion time. I also suspect that if you looked at the PoE word count it would have more than BG1+TotSC+ToB.

That's for mobile devices. The masterrace versions are $19.99 each. I'd wait for either Christmas or the inevitable pre-SoD sale. The PC version has already been on sale for half price (or less) several times.

And him not working at Bethesda would be the best thing for anyone who likes good CRPGs.

The UI changes are to support modding and tablet touch screens. I don't think anyone disputes that the old interface looked prettier in low res.

I think "people like" is a sweeping generalisation. I've played a number of games with "player housing" and I've never found any enjoyment in any of them. If I'm playing a computer game, I want to be out adventuring. If I want to play house, my real world house needs plenty doing to it.

So perhaps the real issue is when strongholds try to be resource management minigames (as PoE tried to do, and NWN2). The stronghold in DA:I is fairly unobtrusive and doesn't really require any resource management.

I don't like "Stronghold" content myself*. It belongs in RTS games. I don't remember many epic fantasy stories where the action is interrupted for weeks on end whilst the protagonist builds a house. I think developers sometimes listen too much to whiny forumites who insist that this feature or that feature must be included because it's in Other Game. They would be better off designing to suit themselves, then leaving it to the market to decide if the end product is any good or not. *I don't include the strongholds in BG2. They are really class specific sidequests, not an RTS plug in.

You can pick up BGEE for very much less than that, and I'm sure they will be selling it off for peanuts before they release SoD, to try and boost expansion sales. My main concern is the quality of the writing. Some of the new content for BG2 was decidedly badly written. But I don't think it will suck as much as Sword Coast Legends at least.

Wands and Sceptres do less damage than a hunting bow, and have pretty much no chance of getting past DR. Rods do a tiny bit more damage than a hunting bow, but have the rate of fire of a war bow, which does considerably more damage. With the Dangerous Implements talent they do about the same damage as bows, at the cost of self damage and an extra talent.

It's pretty much copied from Final Fantasy 7.

Why didn't they just make it so you can choose any class to soulbind it to? Sounds very limiting. Because the abilities that are unlocked are specifically tied to the class it is soulbound to. For example, a Barbarian might unlock a boost to Carnage AoE, whereas a Paladin might get a boost to Flames of Devotion damage.

I thought TftD had quite a large difficulty jump from the first game, and I found the tech tree less intuitive. The lobsters where cool though.

To stack, or not to stack, that is the question.

Both have a huge budget, and hence required to appeal to a lowest-common-denominator mass audience...

I don't use it, it's boring.

I've been thinking about this, and it actually makes perfect sense that the PoE races aren't mentally very different to each other. In PoE the "kith" races all draw from the same pool of souls! This is particularly apparent for an awakened soul, like the PC, who would have memories of being each race, and hence would tend to loose any strong cultural identity. It's apparent that "beasts" draw upon a separate pool of souls, which explains why attaching one to a kith body always results in a monster. It also explains why dragons are beasts - that's the kind of soul they have, regardless of how intelligent they may be. Based on the functioning of "slaying" weapons one can hypothesise that there are also separate pools of souls for Primordials and Wilders. Vessels and Spirits are defined by the state of the soul, rather than which family it belongs too.

People are people because they are all homo sapiens sapiens. If homo neanderthalis hadn't died out around 40000 years ago and homo floresienis 12000 years ago we might have a better understanding of how different "people" can be.

Dark Sun. Muls. Four handed Thri-kreen. Which is a good example of what I mean by "start from the special ability". Not fantasy, but I like the Mass Effect races. Which is why I am so pissed off that they only ever let you play as a human.

As already pointed out, whilst you might find them tedious, others like them. It's not like you would actually be giving anything up to max out Survival on a party member, so what you have is an entirely optional gameplay element. If you have any other ideas about how you could make Survival give tangible benefits, I'm sure we would all love to hear them.

Put points into Survival, all wilderness encounters become avoidable, so you have no chance of encountering a trash mob.