J.E. Sawyer

I don't know what the final image format will be, but the dimensions are 210x330.

Using specialized tools, animancers can detect if a soul has suffered serious damage during previous reincarnation cycles. Most souls fragment slightly from one life to the next, but others can break more dramatically. Marriage is largely similar to "real world" in the Dyrwood and Vailian Republics. There are a few notable exceptions. In the Aedyr Empire, it's not uncommon for humans and elves to take elves or humans, respectively, as secondary spouses for economic or political reasons. These arrangements are called haemnegs and society considers them perfectly acceptable as long as both parties are married to same-race partners and producing children (the imperial family has been doing it for centuries so it has to be okay, right?). It is less common in the Dyrwood, but still happens. In the Vailian Republics, godlike are legally considered to be without sex or gender (because they cannot reproduce) regardless of how they appear or self-identify. Legal constructs that explicitly name (favorably or unfavorably) sexes or genders can cause problems for them. Marriage is a tricky area for godlike in many areas because most societies consider marriage to exist for the purpose of raising children. This also causes problems for mixed-"race" (in the fantasy sense) marriages for the same reason. The item appearance field is to help us describe it. We may use part, none, or all of your text in the final description. Sure, I don't see a problem with there being a connection between the memorial and item.

The forms will scale in power as you level. The reason for choosing one form over another will be for the special ability each one inherently comes with.

We still have more work to do before we show combat in-depth. We're doing regular combat playtests to work out a lot of issues. Specifically, the pacing, which had been too fast before, has been slowed down to a more IE-appropriate speed. Additionally, we have our Interrupt/Concentration system in, so characters will play hit reactions if they fail their concentration check. Our VFX artists and audio guys are also working through a large list of effects for combat (spells, hits, footsteps, etc.).

I don't remember all of the modifiers off the top of my head, but all armors have some sort of damage type weakness to them. Mail's big weakness is crush damage. It may also have a shock modifier, but I don't remember for certain.

Yeah, definitely. I've written this before, but the druid's forms are some of the most expensive class abilities to implement because each one requires its own unique skinned mesh -- it can be time consuming.

I ask all of our designers, area or narrative, to provide responses that they feel would spring to various characters' minds. I encourage them to make heavy use of our personality reputation system, but only to provide specific types of responses when they feel like they would naturally flow from the conversation. This means that when it doesn't seem like the character would naturally say something witty or cruel (for example), we don't try to force that reply into the node. We do try to provide regular "play it straight" replies so the player doesn't feel shoehorned into picking an uncharacteristic response. That said, occasionally those responses are in tense or crazy situations and will earn you a reputation for being stoic. The important thing is to give the player a good range that feels appropriate and entertaining, then work out the gameplay implications as a secondary concern.

PoE's plate's stats don't make you more susceptible to shock damage (no armor makes you more susceptible to any damage type). Plate armor has a modifier that reduces base DT when Shock (electrical) damage is involved. The armor is still absolutely protecting you from damage, but a lesser amount than it does against Slash, Pierce, Crush, Freeze, etc. These are temporary values, but let's say plate armor has a base DT of 16. Its Shock modifier is -50%. Against Shock, the DT is 8. If you later find a suit of Cool Guy Plate Armor with a DT of 20, the Shock DT would be 10. These values are still much higher, even modified, than the base DTs that light armors provide. Shock is just the damage type it doesn't protect against as well. Would it be more accurate to give Shock-based attacks an Accuracy bonus against plate armor or to covert some percentage of Misses to Grazes or Grazes to Hits but leave the base DT alone -- i.e., it's more likely to hit you in the first place, but no more likely to damage you? Sure, I could see that, but I think giving different modifiers to the base armor types mechanically comes close to achieving the same outcome.

All base armor types have different strengths and weakness against different damage types, mostly physical, but some elemental as well. The majority of damage types are 1:1 with the base DT. It's not at all unique to plate armor.

Yes, the game should be beatable without reaching max level. We're unlikely to tune the ending up for higher level characters, but we do have side content that is going to be tuned for characters at the upper limit of advancement and gear.

We're definitely going to start with traditional forms but we plan to expand the roster over time. I like weresharks as much (more?) than anyone, but I wouldn't put a wereshark form ahead of a werewolf or werebear.

Yes.

Each pixel in the depth map indicates its depth from the camera, which is then used for per-pixel occlusion on the effects and objects in the scene.

I don't think it's crazy difficult, but it seems to give IE players more trouble than any of the other (unmodded) IE games.

To clarify, this produces new (scaled) assets. It's not a dynamic adjustment of proportions in real-time. That's a lot more work and beyond the scope of the project. Sorry.

Yes, the slow combat toggle is still in.

One racial group cannot practically double both the assets and gameplay abilities/modifiers of all other races in the game, combined. Godlike are already easily the most expensive racial group for us to model and implement. Even if there were only human-based versions of them, they would still be the most expensive because all of their variants require significant differences in head mesh modeling. In addition to that, each godlike type has its own starting passive ability. They could probably have their own attribute bonuses, but exploding this out into 4 godlike types * 5 base races = 20 different types of attribute bonuses and different racial abilities that progress and unlock as the characters level is untenable. There's no way we could implement and adequately test all of that.

It's true that a grounded suit of metal armor would protect you from electricity. However, it's relatively easy to lose grounding and to still get shocked, especially if you're covered in sweat and hopping around a battlefield. Even a fencing lamé and mask need a mask cord to ensure a constant connection. It's extremely easy to lose contact between the neck of the mask and the lamé and break the circuit. So while I don't dispute that in ideal circumstances a full suit of armor would protect you (possibly entirely) from electricity, combat is not ideal at all and would likely result in a lot of interruptions to grounding, IMO.

On a normal non-completionist playthrough, the characters will not reach 12th level. We need to have a level cap because we can only make so much content (spells, talents, abilities, etc.) for all of the classes. You can hit second level relatively quickly, but the overall leveling rate should feel somewhere between BG and IWD -- sort of to be expected since our cap is between the BG/IWD caps.

You should be able to make it work pretty easily with any class, though classes that focus on damage output will benefit from their Death's Usher ability. Really, any class can (and does) do damage in PoE, so even a Death Godlike priest would benefit.

Poison and disease are tags assigned to various effects (sometimes damage). In addition to the seven damage types listed above, there is a "raw" type that does damage that ignores armor. It is rare and typically does small amounts of damage overall.

No, most people believe she is a godlike of Hylea, who is a goddess of birds and the sky.

It's intentional. Nature godlike are among the more "subtle" and they're not even that subtle (as the portraits should suggest). Even Pallegina really doesn't look particularly normal; her afro is hiding a lot more feathers.

The mega-dungeon (Endless Paths of Od Nua) is already at alpha implementation. Some of the levels will need a secondary art pass as well as a secondary content pass, but don't worry about its inclusion. It's ready for revision and huge.

I would rather not speculate on the numbers yet. Sorry.