Bartimaeus

It's also really annoying that your casters in PoE don't have hardly any magic to protect themselves, and that the oft-annoying (dis)engagement mechanics are basically your only method of actively protecting them. No Stoneskin, no Mirror Image, no Invisibility...get your fighters to intercept every enemy, or enjoy having your casters more or less insta-gibbed. The movement "mechanics" in BG are extremely exploitable, if you so desire. But...I prefer that and exercising restraint as the player so you're not essentially exploiting the game's limitations versus what PoE does. There's probably a better solution in between the two, though.

NWN/2's combat was kinda dodgy in general, though. Thankfully, if you're playing on just core difficulty, you can get away with letting the AI control your party sans the main character probably 95% of the time without too much difficulty. Which is good, because if I actually had to really bother with combat like I do with BG, I probably never would've finished it. IMO, ToB is probably the weakest section of BGT. I do appreciate epic level gameplay, but with almost every enemy in ToB being immune to backstabs or crits it gets a bit boring. *shrug* I've never actually bothered with backstabbing in any of the IE games. There are so many different ways it can be exploited to ridiculous effect that I've never felt comfortable using it as the player. Seriously, if you have Boots of Speed and Cloak of Non-Detection on as a high level thief, you're basically invincible if you feel like it - just keep running out of sight of enemies, hiding in the shadows, backstab. Repeat until you win. I soloed Drizzt in BG1 as like a level 5 thief one time doing this, and promptly remembered why I don't backstab when he was completely and utterly helpless to my attacks.

Yeah, PoE has some serious balance problems that steer the game towards long drawn out encounters and PotD makes it a lot worse. I've considered using console commands to buff the **** out of my characters and slide on through. Now I want to play BGT more, but my need to finish PoE is too strong. I more or less just finished my playthrough of BG2. 50% creature and quest XP reducer made it tough, but I was still able to pull through. I didn't finish ToB, though, because I got to it and a variety of glitches happened (including the world map not being updated for some reason, making myself unable to travel to ToB areas - as well as randomly losing my Bhaalspawn powers INCLUDING the pocket plane ability) and also I don't think ToB is all that fun in general - though I am curious as to how I would handle these end game fights without having hardly any HLAs and such. I fixed all the glitches via a bunch of different utilities, but then I lost interest as I usually do when I hit ToB.

The difference, I felt, between filler battles in Baldur's Gate and filler battles in P:E is that in BG most (outside of stupid trolls, which I usually just CTRL+Y because I seriously get tired of fighting those idiots) took roughly 10-15 seconds to deal with as you have such seriously destructive magic like fireballs and haste and chain lightning and horrid wilting...while it's always an annoying ordeal in P:E pretty much without fail.

I don't know how this can work without the game having a very action-y type of combat. If you're going to get killed in one or two hits, the player is likely going to want that to be mostly within their hands, not in hands of the dice a la BG. I like that kind of combat in shooters like Metro 2033 (on the hardest difficulty) or Stalker, where you die in one or two hits - but so do enemies - but it works because I have actual strategies I can use to make sure I *won't* get hit. With a CRPG like Baldur's Gate...what exactly do I do? Use stealth and hope the gods smile upon me for the first strike and there's never more than one enemy I have to fight at a time? Obviously, there'd be some things you *could* do, but it'd still boil down to mostly luck, and I don't think that'd be much fun. But hey, if a developer wants to make some great combat system where it does work, be my guest!

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mann-Conomy_Update Five years ago: this is when "community-made" content was first introduced and the TF2 store was implemented. I remember this update, because it was after this that I started to hate TF2, and substantially reduced my playing time and eventually quit.

The thing I've always wondered...what does Valve do with most of its money? I mean, seriously, they get a ~30% cut from all games sold on Steam...and control, what over an estimated 50% of the entire industry? Where does all of the money go? And why in the world do they need more? At this point, I'm surprised this isn't the situation:

Indeed. Baldur's Gate also has something similar: TobEx (Throne of Bhaal Extender), except obviously on a smaller scale, since this is BG we're talking about. A few major mods (Item Revisions and Sword Coast Stratagems off the top of my head) use it, though. I don't think modding can work as a legitimate enterprise. A lot of commercial software - modeling and texturing software comes to mind - is used in modding that software companies don't care about because it's not being used for profit - and nevermind straight up re-using other people's assets that is pretty rampant in most modding communities (regardless of whether permission is given or not). I hope any mods that require purchasing are closely scrutinized for legal issues, and dealt with accordingly. I also hope Valve gets its head on straight one of these days, but...I'm not holding my breath, since I can't think of any notable examples of that ever occurring to a large corporation in a truly meaningful manner. Oh well.

The established price for getting money for doing practically nothing is set by Kickstarter I should think. 5%. Eh. It really depends. Steam set the standard for games at ~30%, bandcamp set the standard for music at...uh, 20% or something close to that, kickstarter 5% as you said...it depends on how useful the service is, and how much power it wields. Steam, it would seem, unfortunately wields a bit too much for comfort. Kickstarter is kind of unique, though, given that raising money is the entire focus of the website...I'm surprised it's as high as 5% - I was expecting more like 2 or 3.

Modding has never been very open-source anyway. From what I've seen, most (PC gaming) modders... work alone have huge egos keep their source/work files and tools secret seem allergic to the very concepts of collaboration and sharing I.e. it's the norm for mod authors to forbid other people from even redistributing their mod on other download sites than the one they themselves have chosen. And don't you dare make your own mod even compatible with another person's mod, without personally asking that person for permission first - then all hell will break loose. So yeah, the modding community has a fundamentally different culture and mindset than the open-source community. I always thought it depended on the mod community specifically. Most Infinity Engine mod communities were/are usually pretty good in these regards, whereas...say...Warcraft 3's...well...it's utterly ridiculous the lengths modders (map-makers) went/go to "protect" their assets from anyone else using them for anything - particularly coding techniques, where you had to learn an entirely different coding language if you wanted to read most "protected" map's coding, and you had to learn it after it's been obfuscated and mangled beyond belief.

Valve and Bethesda, it's been said. I read on reddit that Valve actually takes 30% - similar to the cut they take for other sales - but there's no way of confirming it.

Comment retracted (by myself a few seconds after posting). Delete if you desire, o' mods! (P.S. In case it matters, it was just a stupid half-joke comment that I realized may not have been completely on point immediately after hitting post. Sorry!)

Yeah, these speakers already have too much impact for me, so that's probably not a great idea. Thanks for the explanation, haha.

Hah, so it goes, I guess. I bought my speakers not really expecting to like them all that much...but I actually like their sound signature better than the headphones I have (Sennheiser HD595 and Sennheiser HD280), and have been using them almost exclusively since getting them. Too much bass for my tastes, though...which is funny, because I read before purchasing them that people complained about them not having enough, which encouraged me to purchase them. Guess I'm really not a bass-head. In your experience, if you don't want more bass, is it worth getting a subwoofer?

How are the speakers? I once considered purchasing a Logitech set, but then I bought something else - though I'd like to note I paid only about 40% of Amazon's price (still for new, too). Warning: I know absolutely nothing about speakers.

I don't know idea why I have this song downloaded or where it came from. I have literally no idea. I don't know who the artist is, I hadn't even HEARD the track before when I found it in my downloads folder, and I don't know what or who it was related to when I found and downloaded it or whatever. But I kind of like it, so I guess it's staying for now. This has never happened to me before, though.

Pretty sure it does. There are currently post count restrictions. You can also restrict by class. These are things administrators - not moderators - can do. There is, I believe, one administrator on the Obs side. Yeah, but edit time limit isn't one of those that you can edit on a per user or per user group basis, I am almost certainly sure (at least, without custom software / a plugin). Rights for post editing in general, however...

I'd rather just roll my own...which, coincidentally, is exactly what I do.

SCS definitely takes a large amount of time, but Level 1 NPCs? Do you manually re-define each and every character?

I ran into all of those on my first playthrough. Thinking of firing it up again as a BGT-BWP, going to do either a F/M/C or F/M/T(possibly with a kit cuz I'm a cheater). A bit put off by the time it takes to do a BWP install, but perhaps I'll find the time when I'm done with PoE. I still install mods manually. Big World Setup is useful as a guide, though - though I wouldn't use just plain old BWP, since that would add way too much junk I don't want regardless of the settings I use. Also, frustratingly, the BWS is locked to always install Baldur's Gate Trilogy, and while BGT is great, I just don't care for BG1 that much and it's more trouble than it's worth. I'm playing with Item Revisions...any undead hit with it needs to make a plain save vs. death or it does nothing. Vampires are impossible to kill with it, skeleton warriors extremely unlikely, and liches unlikely (yes, liches are the easiest of the three, for some reason - crappy mage save vs death progression table, I guess? ). And since I'm playing with the hardest SCS settings, it means I have to tear down spell defenses regardless, and if the battle makes it that far, it's usually all over for the lich, anyway. It's not as useful as I'd hoped.

Baldur's Gate 2. It amazes me that after...literally, probably 50 playthroughs since I was 5-6 years old, I'm still finding new stuff. Met some rogue named Itona at the northern limits of Trademeet - in all my years playing, I'd never seen the lady - and, to my great surprise, she was not mod-added. She's a shadow thief and gives a little hint on how to find Ihtafeer, the rakshasa the djinn are hunting. She also wears the Gloves of Missile Snaring - a pair of gloves I knew existed from messing around in game and save file editors, but never thought actually appeared anywhere in the game. Little stuff like this astounds me. I also found out that an NPC in the Council of Six building in the government district, a guy named Llarsh, who I'd always thought was just for flavor and never served any useful purpose, actually DOES have a purpose. If you steal Valygar's tax forms from his house in the docks district, you can give them to Llarsh and he'll tell you about his cabin. FURTHERMORE, somehow, I'd ALWAYS missed the fact that Cromwell can upgrade the Mace of Disruption. For some reason, I was under the impression that that was a mod-added thing (and a mod I did not have), but no, that's in the vanilla game, too! If you keep the pure illithium from the Sir Sarles quest (the artisan that the churches want you to secure for them), you can instead give it to Cromwell. Plus, the church you're working for doesn't even care, as long as you bring back the fake illithium - they'll be happy to use that instead. I can't believe I've missed all three of these. I'm playing with all my regular mods (Sword Coast Strategems, Item Revisions, Spell Revisions, etc.), except I'm using a 50% creature and quest XP reducer. The going has been a little tougher at times than I'm used to, I have to admit. The planar prison (Haer'dalis quest) was pretty friggan' hard. Yuan-ti - particularly the mages - are such pains in the butt. I think I have another mod...polytweak, I think...that improves them alongside SCS. Eek.

The entire save, or the current save? Try to use the chapter selection and pick the latest chapter autosave if you can.

No, otherwise I'd never sleep. If it did, on the other hand, I don't think I'd ever be awake.

So...unlike the original, are you trying to say it's actually watchable? (Just kidding - I know that almost certainly means it'll somehow be much worse than the original.)