Fardragon

Rhinoceros companion.

According to Steam I have sunk 136 hours into PoE.

Steam can easily keep track of people who make a habit of playing games for 1:59 and then returning them...

The reason so many BG1 companions are raving mad is because they only had a very small amount of dialogue and VO each, so the had to be able to make a quick impression. PoE companions had a significantly larger proportion of development resources dedicated to them, so are much more realistic and rounded. This set the tone for the games. The BG series has a lot of humour and silliness (Xvart rock bands?). It was quite close to the tone of my actual PnP games in that respect. PoE has a much more serious tone. Neither of these is a bad thing, but it's quite important to maintain a consistent tone. The place where BG companions do win out is their unique abilities that aren't available to players, some of which where actually useful and fun. This made up for thier non-min-maxed attributes. There is a bit of this in PoE, but the fox is functionally indistinguishable from any other animal companion, shapeshifting is redundant at high level, and the bird-lady's power is blink-or-you-miss-it trivial. The thing PoE does right is you can easily ditch any companions you don't like and replace them with your own. The thing with NWN2 OC wasn't so much that the companions where awful (although they where), it was that you couldn't ditch them.

I would love an RPG set on Barsoom (or similar world)!

The same reason kids of my parents' generation used to boo and hiss at the kissy bits in movies. It gets in the way of the action.

The way I would do it is this: each random encounter would start with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook interface. You sense something up ahead. Do you want to: 1. Try and determine what it is [lore/survival] 2. Try to find an alternative route [survival] (uses best in team) 3. Try to sneak past [stealth] (checks for each team member, make sure Eder doesn't step on a twig) 4. Approach cautiously 5. Charge!!

Durance is just as deluded as the rest of Magran's followers. Why not take advantage of them?

Conclusion: both games are lowest-common-denominator crap, but Witcher 3 conned more people into thinking it was high art.

I'm all for this, especially if tied to Survival and/or Stealth skills.

Quite right, I have no expectation that Sword Coast Legends will be a decent single player game.

Really ? I didn't really notice him being much of that, particularly arrogant and egotistical. I suppose it helps you never really meet some 'nice' people in the games. Interesting though. I suppose you might be right about him being an adolescent idea of a badass, but I am not sure what an adult one would be - Man with No Name ? John Steed

What do you hate about Geralt ? He is a rude, crude, obnoxious, arrogant, egotistical ****. He is a sheltered adolescent's idea of a badass, and it's a very long time since I was an adolescent.

Remind me not to buy either of them.

To be fair, Gromnir, all that "immature power fantasy with shallow combat and gratuitous blood and sex" criticism applies just as much to DA:I. But I still managed to enjoy my Inquisition power fantasy, because it didn't force my character to behave like an obnoxious adolescent.

I see party AI as a quality of life issue. The game has a lot of easy, repetitive, boring fights in between the significant encounters. Some of them I just blast through with auto attack, but that feels a bit unsatisfactory. I don't think anyone expects AI that can compete with direct player control in difficult fights. The is also the issue of "Baldur's Gate has it".

I think it's a good thing for your choice of attributes to reflect how you want to play the character. I think the big problem with the PoE atributes is it's adoption of a 3-18 scale, which was originally intended to be rolled randomly on 3d6 to simulate a normal distribution. Now, if there was an option for randomly rolled attributes (no re-rolling or reallocation of points) they would work better.

I haven't played Witcher 3 because I hated Witcher 2. I don't mind being forced to play a fixed character, so long as it's not a character I hate.

I would prefer to see accuracy with spells, ranged, and melee weapons separated out.

I don't really see Leg Ends of the Sword Coast as a NWN successor. It looks more like a Diabolo clone with a DM mode to me. But I'm pretty sure the OP is just trolling. I mean, how could anyone fail to understand that you make the toolkit first, then use it to make the game, you can't make a toolkit OUT OF a game?! Or suggest NWN is anything like as good a single player game as Baldur's Gate (at least without specifically citing MotB)? I think the rumoured Pathfinder game (after the card game has generated interest and revenue) is more likely to aim to be a "spiritual successor to NWN", although what I would really like to see is a D20 toolkit flexable enough to use for any setting (e.g. my personal favourite, Space Opera).

Araghh!!!!!! "Impactful" is such an awful corporate-speak neologism. I think the game would be improved by making skills more significant. However, they are already very unbalanced, so care would have to be taken to make things better rather than worse.

Agreed, Con is the biggest problem, but they should never just look at one stat in isolation - if they are going to change one, they should re-evaluate them all. How about, instead of accuracy, Perception boosting critical hit chance or multiplier? How about Con giving a small DR multiplier, or reducing the speed penalty for armour?

If it's enough to notice, it's enough to cause the problems listed above. If it's not enough to notice, then it's a straight up nerf to the stat. Perception used to boost accuracy in the beta. Has the reason that was removed gone away?

You mean apart from the Wasteland series? Why would Obsidian do a post nuclear holocaust RPG when there are so many other apocalypses, so many other Science Fiction settings, completely untouched? How about a revival of Dark Sun? How about something in the vein of Planet of the Apes or Waterworld, how about something on a different planet entirely?

I wouldn't really compare Obsidian to Blizzard games at all - they are making different types of games. I have been happy with the value of products I have bought from both companies. In everything, price doesn't necessarily equate to quality, which is why further research is always required. However, if something is cheap, you do have to ask yourself how it is being paid for? At best, the creator has lousy business sense. Trying to get back on topic, I doubt part 1 will end with a sealed door and a "to be continued" sign. I suspect it will be more like Raederic's Hold. You complete the part 1 sidequest, then in part 2 the consequences come back to haunt you. I can see exactly why they are doing it in two parts: they are afraid that if they leave it too long before releasing new content people will have forgotten about PoE and moved on to other games. But they don't want to do what certain other companies do and release DLC that is trivial in size and scope.