Tale

I would love to see more from it. It's done remarkably well on home release.

Now I have to wonder if they were intentionally testing for feedback. "Okay, lots of people say they dislike boobplate, but how do they really feel?"

It's very good. The story is kinda so-so (it's a side story that doesn't really advance the plot, and it's also not really well-paced) but the gameplay and dungeon design is very very good, art direction and music are also top-notch (you can really feel that being able to design other worlds freed the art team to be *~fabulous~*. Loot curve is somewhat shoddy, forgivable because it's not really a loot game and the other gameplay elements more than make up for it, but the title still could have used a better loot curve (more and better uniques, a few more possessed items, more interesting stat distribution in general). That said, while the itemization isn't perfect, it still allows for quite a few fun builds. Ah, also, despite the fact that it' look that way, the shooting section actually has the shooting as optional, besides a couple of bosses that need you to use the gun to kill. I mostly agree, but I would only call it good. I value the story more than WUE, I guess. This reminds me that Argul's Tomb is available now.

-Anti-technology themes. Lots of fantasy can be roughly interpreted about being the natural world (good) versus the industrial world (evil). That's mostly because a lot of fantasy writers don't pay attention to what they're writing. Or maybe they just have an obsession with rural life. Either way, it's overdone when unintended and simplistic when intended.

I don't need it to be brutal. I'm still debating on just how valuable the feature would be, in general. Even in Fallout and Baldur's Gate, they just turn into a different looking pile of gore. Which wasn't impressive.

I like the Thri-Keen suggestion. :/ Someone whose physiology differs from the default humanoid assumption enough that we can expect significant combat changes. And I don't mean elves with wings. 4 arms! No arms, an entire race that fights using their feet or mouths! Quadrapeds! Sapient blobs! Extra-dimensional energy beings that occupy multiple locations at once!

That's the developers wanting a certain look for characters and losing out on even equipment customization. Here people are wanting the players to be able to find their own looks without losing out on equipment customization. What DA2 did is far from here.

I don't think people want to play dress-up. I do think people like to be able to give their characters a "certain look" when they create them to greater or lesser degrees. That was one of the huge problems DA2 had and a reason why so many people complained. So if you want to do that go and play DA2. As I recall, one of the problems in DA2 was precisely the opposite. The customization, especially for companions, was minimal. Was there something I missed?

They will likely become available sometime after the Kickstarter has ended. How they will be implemented and registered to you, that I don't really know yet. We've had some other discussion over here. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60662-vip-badge/

I think the point was made about easy combat. It's looking less like discussion now and more like a dogpile.

Maybe this is just my bias painting perception, but it sounds like they're reserving these two for their outrageous races. And I'm hoping that means they're aiming towards original, not something off the standard race or encounter list.

I don't know whose decision it was. I should hope Cain understands the decision at least. I am hopeful the answer is more complex than a single note on balance. That seems a valid reason, I just hope they have a deeper interest than that one alone.

It's going to be his weekend update video.

I'll blame the lack of detail. The Dwarven Ranger has environment, setting, acting, she's not just standing there. It's like a part of the character's life. These are poses. And probably didn't take as much time.

Looks like it. I'll join in on the anti-boobplate-but-not-a-deal-breaker crowd. The interview itself is pretty sparse on information, but cute. I didn't know this was Brennecke's pitch. That's cool to know, too.

My prefer is for permanent death for companions to be possible in combat... IF the combat is tight (not too swingy) enough that we don't feel the death is random. This most commonly about the AI. If the AI is so dumb that the fragile companion tries thwacking enemies by rushing ahead of the group all of the time, then not really a fan. This pops up a lot in KOTOR, NWN2, Dragon Age. It didn't pop up as much in Baldur's Gate because, I think, the Isometric design forced more strategy instead of just letting the AI do their own thing.

I'd really prefer if we didn't have multiple poll threads on one subject, especially in the same day, let alone hour. Please try and confine it to one thread.

Even if this thread went somewhere, I'm not sure it would go anywhere positive. Though it seems like a fascinating subject for Way Off-Topic.

The mechanical problem I have when it came up in PnP sessions is that it becomes the go-to strategy. You always use it so you can interrogate the enemy and pump them for information. It slowed the game down and turned into uncomfortable torture sessions. In a computer game, it'll still slow down, but my bigger concern would be it forcing them to create dialogue for generic enemy characters. But it can't be any harder to develop than Arcanum's talk to the dead spell, right? And that was a dang nice spell. So maybe I still dislike it on the "that's not how clubbing someone on the head works," but I can still see it being cool as heck.

I get hung up on little details, for that I have to apologize in advance. Your example using good/neutral/evil is enough for me to dislike the idea. I'm hoping the game is more mature than to start ascribing morality to class builds. Or even in general. Beyond that, I question the purpose. Is this just a hope that you can triple the number of classes? Hey, if they feel that the budget is enough that they can diversify the classes into appreciable sub-classes, then yay. But I doubt that. I'd prefer to have something like a well designed and complex Necromancer class than just cutting up a third of the sole mage class and giving it that title. I mean, some of these concepts are ones I would genuinely like to see. But I'd like to see them be better fleshed out if included.

I asked about classes and multiclassing. Here's to hope.

Crafting is nice, but there should be legendary items which cannot be matched by crafted items, don't you think? Depends on the crafting. If crafting is a heavy investment, it shouldn't just become invalidated at the end for people who loot dungeons (read: everyone). And the cosmetic appearance of legendary items should be part of its tradeoff. It can be part of the item's theme or part of the justification for its status. Like a "Hat of Silly Destruction" which is a jester's cap with a long backstory of use in court to assassinate kings. To be able to turn it into a regular chapeau seems criminal.

I don't really like this idea. I like other ideas that have the same ends. 1) Crafting. A deep crafting option should let people make gear that looks how they want with the bonuses they want. 2) Horizontal gear progression. Gear does not always go up, gear becomes more specialized or otherwise has downsides in progression. Meaning that if you really like a particular piece of gear, you can just stick with that. But overall, for the sake of verisimilitude (that word sounds made up, doesn't it?), gear should look like what it is.

Well, we already had that. I think it's been fairly argued that old games did it well. It's the Bioware style that is primarily objected to. The curmudgeons seem to have a, badly presented, worry that it's not going to be well done. That the main implementation would be the poorly done fapping material version. Because that is the version that's in demand. And if Obsidian wanted to implement it in such a way outside the popular demand, they wouldn't need people asking for it. Maybe the logic ends up being "people asking for it"->"must want the fapping material version." I'm not prepared to deny the logic of it, but I'm not prepared to support it. Okay, I'm done talking about other people's arguments. Let me make an argument. There's no maturity on either aisle. You have kid friendly romance on the left and adult friendly titillation on the right. We have WALL-E here (a movie I love, so I'm not being disparaging) and Fair Game over here. Of the two, I'd probably prefer Wall-E but I'm not prone to calling it mature. I'd sooner call Watchmen mature because it had a point about its own artform. And since I've now diverged into comics, Kingdom Come. Or back to games Planescape. Where the romances were so subtle most people don't even care about them. Because they were too busy focusing on what they wanted to say, they didn't get distracted by it.