wanderon

I much prefer seperate classes to the whole homogenized adventurer starts off as a warrior or mage type that can become something different as he goes along. I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the classes to define these classes specifically myself but I do feel that they should be seperate even if they are similar and we should back away from the concept that every class should be able to do everything as an "ease of use" mechanic. Each class needs pros and cons so while fighters, barbarians, and Paladins have some things they can share and do in the same manner they should also have things that only their class can do - in the most simple of terms - Paladins might have holy smite, barbarians - rage, fighters - higher weapon specialization - IMO the more things that seperate them from the other the better as it gives you more reasons to choose one over the other and it also will tend to make them play differently. If I can play essentially the same with a Barbarian as I can with the fighter what incentive is there to complete an additional run as the other? So for my money lets define the classes by giving them as many different (even if somewhat similar) options as possible and in doing so boost the replay possibilities along the way and maybe this game will end up having as long a shelf life as BG does (only 7 more days to BG:EE).

Because the poll maker was only interested in responses that agree with his own ideas not in defining what people in general may think. Because the knicker-knotted commenter is only interested in polls that conform with his own ideas regarding what a poll should be, not in entertaining the notion that it may in fact be a petition. Because poll != petition - petitions do not come with a choice of options - if there are multiple options they should be handled with multiple petitions becuase signing up for one option != signing up for the other -

No problem I am just a bit fixated on how poorly the majority of polls posted on this forum seem to be constructed (to me) - nothing personal - carry on...

Here's the PE Paladin description from the wiki: This sounds quite interesting to me and I suspect I will try this class altho I'll probably recruit one first - I wonder if there will be more than one possible Paladin comapanions...

I'm mostly against this sort of "ease of use" stuff - to me it's the little things like having my character/party physically handling loot and dealing directly with merchants that flesh out the game and put me in the world acting as my character would act - doing what he needs to do - Much like the character in a novel I don't need to eat 3 times a day or take a dump but I do prefer it when I have to rest at regular intervals and when choosing a place to rest may effect whether or not I am interrupted and when NOT resting often enough effects my combat abilities.

I'm curious as to why you would place the Paladin title over the Chaotic Good alignment description - Paladins were always restricted to Lawful Good in the D&D based CRPGs I have played??

I worded it like that becouse I was interested in the number of people who don't care and those who refuse the idea alltogether. And offering the option of "I don't care" didn't occur to you? Or were you perhaps more interested in getting both the "I don't care" vote and the "yes I'd like that" vote lumped together in an effort to make it look like there might be more support for the premise you are promoting?

Frankly I liked the BG1 option of safely caching your excess loot in any container that was handy as long as it was not an area that would change after future events occured . I typically kept a stash in Beregost and Nashkel early on and after opening the gates to BG City spent a half hour or more traveling back and forth moving everything from those stashes to the barrels outside the Elfsong where I arranged them in some sort of working order - perhaps alphabetically... The concept made sense to me (assuming I had the means to magically ward or hide them from pilfering) - and even better it made my inner packrat extremely happy and I suspect the owners of the Elfsong may have eventually found and used the massive amount of stuff that was left over there at the end of the game that I could not be bothered to sell since I doubted the cash would help at all in the final battle! The concept worked in IWD as well and on one memorable occasion when my rogue was the only survivor of a dungeon battle I was able to gather all the loot and the companions gear and stash it in a lizard statues hidey hole while I took the parties bodies and a bit of armor and weapons for each back to town to ressurect them and we then returned to claim them and finish the dungeon. Frankly I am not a fan of the community backpack but I suspect thats what we will be getting but I would be interested in some of the OPs ideas altho I suspect they would have to be done on a very limited scale (programming every NPC to accept items sounds difficult to me but I'm no programmer).

Why would you word your poll question as "would you tolerate" as opposed to "would you like" are you afraid of the results of "would you like" and think "would you tolerate" is going to appear to be more supportive or are you just another political science student learning the ins and outs of skewing poll results to suit your purpose? I voted to explain myself so as not to indicate any support for the mutant ninja turtle concept and to explain that while putting such a race in the game would not keep me from buying it that I mostly disapprove. And no I do not find humans boring or otherwise lacking in any way shape or form in any CRPG I am interested in playing - in fact I actually AM a human and anything you have heard to the contrary is mere speculation.

I suspect one of the reasons people do not like timed stuff is just an ease of use issue - unless a game is incredibly linear there are almost always going to be times when you have multiple options facing you and making some of them "timed" means you have to make some hard decisions about what to do next and that might mean some trade offs or having to choose between A & B instead of just taking your own sweet time and doing A, B, C, and all of the above in any order you choose. The downside to never having any timed quests (IMO) is it takes away an opportunity to introduce some real urgency to the gameplay and often times (BG2 I'm looking at you) it leaves you with a game where every quest giver is screaming about how quickly his needs must be met to avoid certain disaster which you fairly quickly determine are all false thus trivializing the very nature of the quest and slapping you in the face with the reality that there is really nothing urgent about anything you are called upon to do in the game. Another annoying aspect of this sort of "ease of use" programming is the period of time BEFORE it becomes plain that there is no urgency to anything you are faced with the dilemma of not knowing whether or not any of the quests are actually urgent or not making the process of deciding what must be done in what order a total nightmare. Do I think all quests should be timed? No Do I think some timed quests could be good? Yes But what I really want is for the game not to lead me astray by telling me something is urgent when it's not or not telling me it's urgent when it is!

If the game is set up to have companions die on the difficulty level I am playing then I would be very unlikely to circumvent that by reloading for any reason I can think of save a computer glitch (companion stuck and dies as a result). I expect to have many playthroughs and thus anything I "miss" in one just means I have new stuff to see in the next one and I enjoy it when the game forces consequences on me and makes me deal with them as part of the game mechanics as opposed to adding all sorts of "ease of use" functions like instant healing and no companion deaths becuase they are afraid I might not have the patience to deal with them. To the second part I put "other" becuase I am mostly ambivalent to either option - if the devs think it's worth doing I am for it if they don't I don't care enough to try and press them to do so. I am in favor of almost anything that increases the options available to the party especially if it is going to have any effect on what comes later.

Because the poll maker was only interested in responses that agree with his own ideas not in defining what people in general may think.

They're talking about designing and programming a working dungeon-based ecosystem. That sounds pretty significant to me. Unless I'm just looking at this completely the wrong way. I think the question is whether or not a dungeon in a fantasy RPG requires a fully explainable eco-system or whether or not it could just "work in mysterious ways" - ways that perhaps become more clear as you uncover it's secrets - perhaps not. As to whether or not it needs to be clear exactly what the denizens of the dungeons are eating or drinking or where they dispose of their waste or how clean the air they breathe is and how it got that way - frankly I suspect that there are a hell of a lot more gamers that simply do not require these things to be clear in order to enjoy a massive dungeon crawl than there are those who do require it. Most of us just want an engaging and fun experience and if it would be technically impossible for such a dungeon to exist in our world realisticly or in any other world that was like our own world as far as these things go - that just makes me yawn - put me in the "realism is unnecessary in CRPGs" category. Do I want to run into the Mario brothers on level 3 and Peter Pan on level 4? No but neither do I think Obsidian needs my guidance to figure that out or to take the time and effort to make an amazing dungeon that I will enjoy for countless run-throughs.

IIRC you couldn't just rest in the street in either BG game, but it's been a while so my memory could be foggy. Indeed The guards would roust you and tell you to find an inn - same thing happened to me in LA in the 60's!

How about a tome or series of tomes of translation for different cultures - perhaps beginers, intermediate, and masters?

I'm not against time limits in general altho I would prefer not to see them attached directly to the main quest and I'm fairly confident that PE will not be implementing main quest timers just based on the "spirit" of the game as it has been presented to us thus far. For side quests I agree with what some others have suggested that if a timer is present lets not make it a simple succeed or fail timer but instead let it lead to several possible alternate options in how the quest is resolved adding more complexity to the quest and more opportunity for different journeys on replay.

Yet another totally flawed poll - there should be an instruction video that everyone posting a poll has to see and pass a quiz on before being allowed to post one or a committee that checks for validity before the poll is actually posted and if found to be invalid send thugs to visit the offending member and break a small bone or two as they explain his mistakes. Consider this - if your poll has multiple questions - keep in mind there must be answer choices in the additional questions that relate to every choice in the previous questions - because you cannot complete the poll unless you answer ALL the questions!

I don't think I would be a fan of this randomness in questing - I am all about more options for quests but prefer to have them determined by actual interaction between the gamer and the world including but not limited to multiple types of dialoge interactions with one or more individuals (perhaps several more), prior quests or other interactions related in some manner to the new quest and factions or other groups you have had (or not had) relationships with already. Going through a series of choices in getting a quest and then having the nature of the quest dependent on a dice roll totally out of the characters (or players) control doesn't float my boat at all I'm afraid.

And IIRC Josh has also stated that new levels will appear rather slowly but the gains for each level will be significant (worth waiting for) For me the combination of these three factors is just about perfect 1) slow leveling 2)significant gains per level 3) finish in the low teens (leaving room for more in a sequel)

Yet another horribly constructed poll so I saw no point in choosing any of the possible options. I will however express my opinion which I suspect may be in the minority anyway. If the companions are to have any meaningful role to play regarding who they are and what they do at all then at the very least they should be leveled to a range close to my level when I meet them and/or pick them up and I should have no control over changing their current stats at all. Otherwise you may as well just create your own minions as you see fit in the Adventurers hall. The reality is most likely going to be that at the very least once the companions have joined up the player will have direct control over choices from that point onwards (and possibly before as well with or without a toggle) altho frankly I would not be against having them level on their own throughout the game with no player control over it at all as the default option provided the devs put some personal touches on the choices to match their vision of the character. That said I'm relatively certain thats not going to happen so I will be satisfied as long as their is an "auto-level" choice I can use to simulate their leveling as being outside my control. (and hopefully the auto choices for the companions will have been individually selected by the devs as mentioned above and is not just some computer generated choice based on class and previous choices which is most likely what an auto-option will be for the PC.)

I would say YES PLZ with cherries on top. Why should your party members be the only beings clever enough to pack both melee and ranged weapons? Because not every enemy you typically meet in an RPG IS clever and/or fast and I don't see why they should be made to be more clever or fast just becuase some people think kiting should be taken entirely off the table. Thats overkill and totally unnecessary. People may also wish to consider that just because something is annoying in an MMO doesn't mean it should be removed from a single player game where only the PLAYER needs to make the decision about what tactics he chooses to use and it has no impact on anyone else...

As far as kiting is concerned it essentially only works against a foe that is not faster moving than the party members and has no ranged attack in their arsenal - ( and that the party has enough ranged firepower to take it down) Should the game then be designed so that all enemies either have both a ranged and melee attack or else are always faster than a (hasted?) party member just to take kiting off the table? I would vote no on that.

Will the Rangers have the William Tell Overture as background music?

Some of it relates to what the enemy AI is programmed to react to (and how) and I'm not seeing where discovering this and then designing tactics to exploit a weakness is a bad thing. IIRC NWN2 had many enemies reacting by attacking any foe that caused them damage. This lead to scenarios where you could play tag with one by having two different archers attacking from different sides - each time an arrow would hit the enemy it would turn and run towards the archer that hit it but before he got there he would be hit from the other side and change directions and go for the other one until he died without ever reaching either one. Your party members often did the same thing IIRC unless you took control of them and forced them to attack a single foe. Now I'm no programmer but it seems to me that no matter what sort of AI gets programmed for the enemy that as a functional thinking human (well on a good day maybe) I am eventually going to see that enemy A seems to always act in a certain way under certain circumstances which means he may have a weakness to tactic B or C. The question is when I figure this out am I abusing the AI or just paying attention and forming good tactics to counter a weakness I have seen in the way this enemy operates? The AI is never going to be so robust that you can't find a solution but isn't that the whole point of the game - to find solutions to defeat your enemies in order to stay alive and complete the story? Now I get it that finding a corner or something that the enemy can't figure out how to get around and then attacking from that place until he dies is a glitch in the game you are exploiting but just finding weaknesses in the manner in which your enemies operate seems more like good tactics to me - just like choosing to take out your enemies spellcasters first or sending a heavily armored melee fighter to disrupt a group of archers or blocking a doorway.... or kiting a boss with a nimble tough to hit rogue type while the rest of the party focuses ranged attacks on him...

I used to start off BG1 with just PC and Imoen and we would kite the ogre with the belts and/or any other foe that was too strong to take on toe to toe at those low levels - I never considered this cheap - the ogre in particular would break off from our "rabbit" to attack the archer and we would just switch and the archer then became the rabbit and the rabbit became the archer I always thought it was good strategy in taking down a strong single melee oriented foe. The lousy pathfinding may have contributed somewhat to our success but enemy pathfinding was no worse than party pathfinding so I'd consider that an even field of play. I would not want to see all instances of either kiting or pulling removed - nor the option to retreat for that matter when you run across a foe you have no chance to conquer...