Fardragon

Actually, DOS2 has 74k lines of dialogues with voice over and over 1m words. That's about Dragon Age Inquisition level of voice acting budget. BG2 had 57k lines of dialogues, but around 1 millions words. For comparison, POE1 had 25k line of dialogues with a bit over 6k of them voice acted. It was announced in the FIGstarter that Deafire would get x2 the voice acting budget of POE1, so their VO budget is for ~12k lines. Bottom of the line, DOS2 voice acting budget was 12x larger than POE1's budget and 6x larger than POE2 VO budget. I wasn't talking about the amount of text in total. I was talking about the lengths of individual sections of text. If you look at a section of POE or BG2, and especially T:TON, you will frequently see a "wall of text". If you have a narrator read out a wall of text it rapidly becomes boring and slow. In DOS2 the descriptions are short and snappy, the characters don't go off into longwinded monologues, even when talking about their backstories, and even the journal entries are brief. I wouldn't say one style is better than the other, they are just different, and one is more suited to being spoken aloud than the other.

DOS2 has far less text than PoE (BG/BG2/IWD etc). There are no walls of text anywhere, avarage paragraph length is about 2.5 sentences. Nothing wrong with that, but it's avery different writing style.

Given it's power I found DOS2's camera quite easy to control with a combination of mouse and keyboard. It certianly is a lot easier than NWN2!

You call PoE hardcore?! It has graphics! In colour!! Clearly black an white text adventures are the only hardcore computer games!

By this point, Josh probably knows where Gromnir is from, too. I've still never seen Josh Sawyer and Gromnir in the same room together.

I really, really hate full voice over. Three reasons: 1) I can read much much faster than conversation speed. For example, in Mass Effect Andromada I was bored to tears listening to characters talk endlessly about thier dull backgrounds, in the hope of learning a smidgin of plot-relevent information. 2) Poor voice acting can really put you off characters. In the NWN2 OC I developed a pathalogical hatered of pretty much all the NPCs companions, and I put that down mostly to the voice acting. 3) American accents. I'm British, and I'm sorry but I find some American accents extremely grating (especially whiny teen females). Now each of these issues could be addressed by outstandingly good writing, outstandingly good voice acting, and British-English VO localisation, but keeping the amount of VO low is a far easier to achieve objective.

I don't think there is much additional information to update at this time.

I think there has been a tacit assumption present for a number of years: all geeks like anime (read: Japanese style animation). What we are seeing now is a backlash. No, many geeks do not like Japanese style animation. In fact they hate it, and feel like it is being rammed down their throats. Thus, any hint of large eyes, outsize weapons, spectacles, or short frilly skirts triggers a "burn it with fire" response, even if the artist was not consciously influenced by anime.

I think "does the character look animie" or not is a red herring. Do the spectacles make sense is the real question. Certainly people who could afford them would have worn spectacles in the high renaissance period that PoE is taking it's inspiration from. However, they would only have been used for reading, not for distance vision. The other question is, if we could have had an additional full companion, would we have wanted this one? I would have to say no, on account of she isn't a dwarf.

Aren't these two objectives mutually exclusive?

Just thought I would throw this into the discussion (and then duck back into my bunker and watch the mayhem).

Interesting that you say that. I enjoyed TWM story more than the original too, but I'm having trouble working out why. Better pacing? A lighter touch? It certainly wasn't because I like dungeon crawling. I don't rate Durlag's Tower very highly, and the Endless Paths was tedium incarnate.

So, two years then.

Yes, a Science Fiction Baldur's Gate is basically the game I have wanted for the last twenty years or so. I would via more towards the space opera sub-genre, since if you go to much hard SF you have realism problems in everything from weapon ranges to laser swords to psionics to energy shields to FTL to aliens etc.

They did that, it's called Pillars of Eternity.

It will indevitably be delayed at least a year, so 2019.

I find your excess of faith disturbing.

My feeling is, they will follow the pattern of priests and paladin orders. The subclasses will tend to have minor differences at first, but will be defined by access to unique Abilities and Talents.

If they are drawing on mythology "Hel" is a person, not a place.

There is nothing "strange" about the "missing demons and other entities from Hell". It's a direct consequence of the setting's theology. The souls of the dead are recycled to the wheel, this is established as fact, no belief. No one goes to Heaven or Hell, no matter how good or bad they have been, or which gods they worship. With no Hell there are no demons to punish the wicked. They simply do not exist in this setting. If any "outsiders" showed up in this setting they would be aliens from another planet, not demons out of Hell.

There is no way to design a "perfect" health system. The current PoE system aint broke, I wouldn't waste time trying to fix it. In particular, I would not want to see a system based arround the idea of frequent face-planting.

Wander through a museum and you will see plenty of real world armours that are extraordinarily flamboyant. The reason, of course, is that real world armour was often worn for show or intimidation, rather than protection.

The PnP RPGs I played the most where Traveler and FASA Star Trek. Neather of which had levels or significant character progression. So I would say that "leveling" is not a requirement for an RPG. On NWN2, that was far more linear than PoE, and the optional sidequests where presented in such a way that most players would be likely to do most of them. It was really the Endless Paths that messed up the progression in PoE. Skip that and the bounty quests and the experience rewards are pretty much spot on, with maximum level reached just before the final dungeon (with the bonus of better paced story).

With a ship, buying and selling cargoes at each stop could be an option.

I don't think it works like that. I think the subclasses are more specific, and your order or faith just as an overall effect on your character. Like Priest of Magran may get some spells that a Priest of Wael doesn't, but the same is true in reverse. However, there is nothing mechanically different about them outside some differences in spell selection. They are both still just "priests". A blackjacket fighter literally functions differently on a mechanics level than a normal fighter. They get more weapon slots, they have lower weapon swap times, reduced or possibly no weapon swap penalties, etc etc. I don't see any mention of "etc etc" and we don't know how much, if any, of that stuff is out-of-the-box, and how much are unlocked abilities/talents which must be selected from the list at level-up. So I don't really see the subclass being all that different to a standard fighter.