Rabain

I have to say I like the Dragon Age Origins system with Stats (Str, Dex etc) you get as you level up, Skills (thieving, traps, poisons, herbalism) and Abilities (class specific like Pummel, Shield Bash, Arcane Blast). Some of the skill and ability tiers requires specific stat levels to acquire, like you can't get max level thieving without X amount of Dexterity, you can't get max Shield ability without high Str etc. A Warrior could get Thievery even though his main focus would be Strength, he just has to put some points in Dex to access later levels of Thievery.

It would only make perfect sense in the context of that particular encounter i.e. sneaking past the guards to get the whatsit was the fastest and easiest way to get the XP from MrX for completing that particular quest. If the entire game rewarded no XP for combat except perhaps Boss combat then every player would feel railroaded into non-combat solutions just as much as you say previous games have railroaded players into combat. Why would anyone waste 5 minutes fighting a group of guards for no XP when the rogue could go get the whatsit in 30seconds or less? You meet a bunch of bandits on the road, you sneak past them, here is 1000 XP...boring. You meet a few assasins in a dark alley, /cast Blind, run away, hide...here is 1000XP...boring. These things would be interesting to me as occasional alternatives but if the entire game was more rewarding and faster to play through by just avoiding everything combat related I think we would have a pretty bad game that felt frustrating to play as anything other than a non-combat focused character.

I think the Dragon Age system is actually the best of them all with regard to party management. The 6 party limit is usually imposed simply because of combat limitations, controlling a much bigger party with become tedious very quickly and the interactions would bog the game down a lot in dialogue. Sending party members to an Inn might make sense if the Inn was your base of operations but just asking some random mage you meet somewhere to wait at an Inn doesn't make sense. The DaO system was a nice mix of both, your party was at camp and when you ventured forth you selected who to bring. It worked out quite well, I'm going into dwarf caves I bring the dwarf with quest material, I'm going to X town I bring npc with main questline material etc. At the end of the game the whole party, all npc's were involved in parts of the battle, I just could only control the ones I'd selected. This made a lot of sense to me as fighting a war while half my team was relaxing at an Inn didn't make sense but seeing them running around the city beating up invaders was pretty good while the ones I'd selected for party duty came with me to the castle to beat the big evil. The guys in the base camp leveled up at a similar rate based on the XP gained by "active" party members, so I could allocate points and skills when I selected them. A very nice system that meant no npc I picked up but didn't use a lot ended up with auto-assigned rubbish skills.

The real question here will be what non-combat abilities you have to trade off against each other. It's all fine to say you want to kill, charm or intimidate when you want to but if everyone can do everything simply by choosing x,y and z then what re-playability will you get except through choosing a melee, ranged or magic character? There needs to be some restriction on what you can be all at once. For example I liked in Dragon Age how high Str gave you better Intimidate but a warrior wouldn't typically put points in the stat Cunning but could still take skillpoints in Coercion which was increased by your Cunning stat. So you could Coerce a shopkeeper or villager but trying to Coerce a noble or warrior didn't work unless you happened to have a really high Cunning stat to boost your Coercion. There really does need to be something that restricts non-combat skills even if it is just the Stat/Skill inter-dependency.

BG2 was fairly restrictive with regards to map travel, of course many people forgave that because the story was a continuation from BG1 and the game itself was so good. Also you had access to a big city right from the early stages of the game so it made travel kind of obsolete with so much content in a few city zones. BG1 has a better map system, it allowed free roaming with limits, for example you couldn't get to certain areas without first completing certain quests. It was pretty much a grid system whereby you had to travel through several areas to reach the limit of the map in any direction but once you had done it once you could speed travel afterwards with a risk of a random encounter. Dragon Age Origins was a system I disliked, it was so restrictive it felt like you were being railroaded. You could not go anywhere without unlocking it with a quest, for example the main city Denerim is inaccessible until after certain events, then you can skip over the entire country to get there and only visit the areas in between when doing other quests.

I'd much rather have a system where weaponry is secondary to our character class skills and abilities. In some games weaponry is so strong that you could ignore all your abilities for half of the game if you picked up the right weapon early enough. Before Tales of the Sword Coast addon BG1 had a decent gear curve, nothing was super strong and spells and abilities won you battles much more than weapons did. Of course the problem is always that as content is added and levels progress eventually access to powerful items becomes easier with players cheesing content at much earlier levels to get the gear. The longer we can stay away from that the better.

The solution for magic users is to have a base attack that works off their equipped weapon that still counts as magic. So you could equip a sword but it would attack as though it was a magic attack rather than simple steel, no reason why it couldn't also be a ranged attack. Similar to what mages do in Dragon Age except in DA they only use a staff.

There is nothing stopping anyone from picking up their self created npc mod for BG2 and porting it manually to PE, if PE was moddable from the start. This is what I meant. An npc is 90% dialogue and sounds and 10% coding to get that into the game. There is absolutely nothing imcompatible about BG2 npcs with PE in this regard, text on a page is text on a page. You only need the tools to get that into PE and the time to do it. This would be a bad thing but I can see people doing it simply because a lot of the work is done already. Interactions between npc and pc, done, interactions with merchants, with other npcs. Only slight modification to dialogue coding and you have it done. Copyright laws have never stopped any modder making changes to existing BG npc's, adding them from BG1 to BG2, writing dialogue for them and adding items and quest content. Why would it stop them adding it to PE? A mod is a player created non-commercial, purely optional addition. Of course I am not saying I want any of this, I am just saying that if PE gives tools to allow this level of modification then it is definitely possible.

Josh already stated that the game can be completed solo. If it can be completed solo then there really isn't a decent argument anyone can give against creating an entire party yourself. If you play solo there are no party interactions, no deep and meaningful exchanges etc etc, just what you get with a player created party.

The tier even states "within reason" for all the content tiers. I really wouldn't be worried about this. What is the difference between Simon the drunk at the bar made up by a developer and Shazz the drunk at the bar named after Shazz the tier purchaser? As for the ChipIn groups, good luck to them, the only way people are going to recognise that content is if they are told about it before playing. The only way I'd see that being useful is if 6 people combine to get the 5k tier and design an enemy party based on themselves, a small bit of gaming immortality. Still a lot of money though.

The time sensitivity thing really can be bad though, just from a logic perspective. So this daughter of the elf king kidnapped by rapists has been waiting for you to appear at her fathers court to accept a quest that turns out is so urgent you just have to do it now or...well you know...but hey its a pity you just spent a week in a dungeon instead of going directly to the Elf Kings Hall from that other town you were in...right? Games like Skyrim annoy me because of the lack of urgency but it isn't just that, it is the lack of plain direction. I am quite fine in games like BG where they tell me I have to explore the Cloakwood mines but I can take 4 weeks before doing that and explore the rest of the Sword Coast because I know I have to be X level to actually get through the mines and out the other side or it just becomes a game of me constantly reloading the QuickSave. There is an element of meta gaming in everything we do in games, regardless of them being rpgs or whatever. I like in BG for example where I can't just travel from Candlekeep to BG city unless I have been through a number of areas between. Dragon Age Origins was worse in that regard in my opinion, I reach X point in the story and I'm allowed to travel across the entire country to some city that previously I wasn't even allowed to try to travel to? Urgency should be left up to the player, you want to chase the Bad Guy down, go ahead. What happens when you just get plain stuck due to being too low level to continue the main story? What do you pretend to yourself to justify levelling up some more in some random dungeon? To me this is why we get games like DaO that are really restrictive on your travel options because the developer didn't want you in some area below a certain level. Urgency should only be general and not on a timer, for example you need to steal X at night from the merchants house. Doesn't matter if it is tonight, tomorrow night or some night next week. The urgency will be felt from the moment you entire the house to the time you lift the goods and exit. You don't really need some dude chasing after you for not going the very same night you got the quest. All that will do is make players feel like they have to do every quest right when they get it before picking up another quest and that just sounds really bad.

I think the PE team have been reluctant to comment on this as yet because of the possibility of so much of the mod content from BG being viable for PE. For example if it is easy enough to add a new npc there would be no reason not to see 50 extra joinable npc's using BG dialogue, as pretty much 99% of an npc is the dialogue. Convert it to PE structures, import, job done. Hell you would probably see a mod within weeks with "Add the BG characters to your PE game!" and you end up with Minsc and Boo and Aerie running around with you, soundsets and portraits included. Likewise quest content would not be to hard to port across to PE, the artwork of course might need to be different if adding new areas but as quests are pretty much encounter and dialogue options it wouldn't be hard to find somewhere to place them in existing PE. I'm not saying I'd like to see this happen but it is something to consider when thinking about making the game mod friendly from Day1. I think this is something that is a good idea for later, maybe a few months after release when players have had their initial buzz and are trying second or third playthroughs.

What would people think of Sweets art style as the basis for the character sprites in PE? That gothic/dark fantasy style armor, hair etc?

One of the main issues going that direction though is that it is easy to be biased towards classes that can do both. For example a rogue could sneak past a combat encounter, get XP for stealing the whatsit and then backstab the enemy to also acquire the combat XP. If XP was only acquired by getting the whatsit for MrX even players who's main character couldn't sneak past might consider sending in the party rogue/invis mage just for expediency sake rather than killing the guards to access the whatsit. I bet it's a tough decision for the Dev's when they discuss XP because it is very easy to create situations that can be abused for XP or biased in favour of one class/skill.

If the people who want it to be realistic for your character to go on a killing spree and kill everything in the world then it should also be possible in game for you not to be able to complete the game due to the whole world agreeing you are an ass and rejecting you from society and prosecuting a war against you on a global scale. In BG for example it is definitely possible to kill the entire world because there are no consequences to breaking the world down into bitesize chunks and defeating it piecemeal. If the Council of Six put a price on your head and contacted all nearby cities and towns it would be almost impossible for you to do anything short of moving to Maztica or something but that isn't a realistic option in a game. I agree killing children, women and dogs should be possible but the consequences should also be realistic. You cannot kill 20+ children in the same city, even if you do it in secret and no one knows who you are without the authorities increasing security in some major way making your attempt at world annihilation short-lived. As powerful as you might be you simply cannot defeat an entire nations resources via stealth and backstab.

There should be an option for: Yes - but there doesn't need to be one.

Everything that is suggested can sound kind of silly when you think about it. For example someone suggested sneaking ahead and picking the potions off the bad guys before you fight them. Well if I was a bad guy standing around waiting for someone to come along I would have one hand on my potion of awesomesauce in anticipation of the fight etc. If I was a merchant and there were two people in my store and 5 minutes after they leave I find something missing I'm going to report both of you to the guards and summon them immediately if either of you set foot in my store again. Realworld pickpockets don't start by pickpocketing babies and then work up to billionaires, they start out as bagmen who get handed the goods when someone with more experience picks it and they hand off to someone else. Some never get further than picking pockets in the street themselves, they never work up to burglary or whatever. Unfortunately in games you very rarely have to worry about the consequences unless they are dramatically over the top (like in BG where the entire town goes hostile). If you are indoors and someone sees you loot, you kill them, take everything anyway and forget about it. This is where systems like Karma can help, they can temper over the top behaviour (killing and looting everything) by providing a negative drawback somewhere else in the game. You kill a merchant and loot his store, you kill a whole row of npcs in their homes and loot them, later you find other merchants have acquired super unlockable locks because you were greedy and they became over protective or civilians have formed a neighbourhood watch and you get beaten up and all your stuff is taken.

Well you can slow down character power development in other ways, such as giving players access to non-combat skills early so they can make use of them. For example if there is a skill like Cunning where you can outsmart someone in a conversation it would seem to me to be less useful to give access to that late in the game because you would miss out on so much dialogue opportunity in the early game. Likewise you could focus on defensive skills early and unlock more powerful offensives later, giving you more survivability but not necessarily the power to roll over opponents without use of some tactics.

I think that will be one of the fundamental questions we will be asking ourselves during development. If souls are eternal, can new souls be generated or is the number fixed somehow, for someone to be born the universe has to have a store of available souls to download. Are souls immortal, can one be destroyed, perhaps this is the "event" we witness at the beginning of the game? Imagine you live in a world where you know for sure your soul continues onwards after you die and it has always been this way and then one day you find out...well your soul is not indestructable.

Considering what they have said about the story so far I'd prefer the Housing to be minimalist, like I rent a room at an Inn on a permanent basis or I invest in an Inn and someone else runs it while I get a permanent room for myself. If it was a ship I'd like it not be "my ship" but just a ship I own or am invested in, so that it doesn't become ridiculous where everywhere I go I have a ship behind me with everything I own on it and 30 sailors...who for some reason won't help me out in fights. The basic idea of the Fortress in BG2 was just to have somewhere to store stuff and flesh out your class choice with a fortress + quests. I don't want some Sims house where I can decorate it etc, in my opinion that is not what this game is about.

I'd prefer to see the long descriptive text the first time I talk to a vendor but the short version subsequently. It depends how it is done, in DaO where the lines were voiceover it was so annoying to go through 3 clicks each time just to open a vendor. "Let me see your wares" is enough, I don't need a conversation about the weather first. I feel there is something missing from your second skill poll, normally in rpgs if you have a skill/stat option you would see it in brackets infront of that option: [bluff] - I could defeat you easily! or [Dexterity] - *quickly reach out and catch his hand replacing the cards he is holding". These are both examples where you see an option you might not usually have (maybe you don't have enough Dexterity to even see the dialog or do a bluff) but if you do see the option you still might not have a 100% chance because you need more Intellect to have a higher Bluff skill (or perhaps there is a bluff ability tree with varying levels of skill to gain as you level up). That would be the best system in my opinion, one where you see the skill option if you have any level of skill but you are still subject to a check on your level of that skill vs the npc you are talking to. It is kind of a mix of choice 2 and 3 in the poll.

If gold has a weight then everything else needs to have a realistic weight. For example full plate armor probably weighs in at 50-80lbs, wearing a set would mean you would have to have superhuman strength to carry another few sets on your back further than a few hundred yards and that is only talking about 2 or 3 extra sets of armor. Sometimes we have to give in to the fact that we are playing a game and being too realistic with everything just detracts from the ability to actually play the game. What would be the point in being able to only carry around 150lbs of gold while not being able to buy anything with it because we can't carry the item we want to buy? Just pretend the gold balance you see on screen is your bank balance and all traders know you have a worthy credit rating because of some banking/trading guild blah blah. That is effectively what 90% of games do anyway even if they don't come out and say it. I'd be more concerned about the value of gold in the game rather than whether it weighs anything. I hate games where you can farm up 10000g doing X and then gold is never an issue once you've done that. The Fallout games always had a nice balance with inventory/gold income, something along those lines would be fine.

I'd rather they didn't do this at all as it would quickly become an all or nothing design decision. If you have 5 party members with you then surely one of them will have the required stat/personality/class/race to open up whichever option you wanted. This dramatically reduces the effectiveness of your own characters stats on dialogue, who cares if you only have 10 Intellect when your party mage has 18, who cares if your Dexterity is 5 when your party rogue has 20 etc. If they are going to allow party members to speak for you then if would need to be in every conversation, everywhere because if it isn't it will detract in an obvious way from your immersion because somewhere else, a short walk across the town someone is willing to listen to PartyMember2 instead of you so why isn't this guy who is standing in front of you. I'd much rather have dialog depend on my Main Characters stats and let partymembers interject if they have something to add to the conversation. If my Intellect isn't high enough to open X dialog option perhaps my partymage could comment on an alternative on occasion. This way the designers can choose when they think it is appropriate. Otherwise I am sure there would be plenty of people telling new players to choose X party combination because it has the best mix of stats/races/gender/whatever to get the best options every conversation.