J.E. Sawyer

Yes, they exist in 3D space (because ultimately the entire game is rendered in 3D space), but all of the area data is stored in 2D images. I go into detail about how the maps are broken down in my GDC talk here (on the sidebar, click on "Making 2D/3D Environments...") http://gdcvault.com/play/1019680/Gathering-Your-Party-with-Project Unfortunately, it would be difficult and time-consuming for modders to generate their own maps. They would absolutely need to be built in 3D and then rendered; you need the depth and normal information for occlusion and dynamic lighting, respectively.

Each type of godlike has its own passive racial benefit. Death godlike have an ability called Death's Usher that increases their damage against enemies with a low percentage of remaining Stamina.

A huge number of our backers are European and traditionally RPGs receive a lot of European attention.

We don't have a final area count but it's pretty high, comfortably in the IE game range.

Even if 100% of fans wanted them, I don't believe we have the time and other resources to implement them well. I am not inherently opposed to romances, but I don't want to spend time implementing something I'm not confident we will be able to execute at a high level of quality.

did you mean can only beaten by a few people on the development team? i was a little unclear. Yes. our problem is - will u save this level of challenge in release version? Yes.

We are planning to have a narrator for the game.

2nd Ed./3.X charms/dominates and summons are incredibly powerful compared to the higher level raw damage spells because the summons give the party 1) disposable hit points 2) an extra action/actions every round 3) an assortment of resistances and abilities often not available to the party -- and they're able to do this all with one spell. Summons should feel very useful and powerful, but they should not become the de facto tactic. If it reaches that level, it's not really a tactic at all; it's just the thing you keep doing in every fight.

Hair and facial hair are separate from head. You can set hair and skin tone within a wide set of preset ranges (it's extremely easy to make that look horrible if you just go straight RGB). The two outfit colors are more open and may be straight RGB.

Our weapons' enchantments are balanced around their handedness and speed.

I demanded all of the the things you listed on F:NV (well, not race, since you were always human) and have pushed for even more on PoE. Eric Fenstermaker is our narrative lead and he's written some of the most reactive quests and characters in our games (e.g. Beyond the Beef, Veronica, and Boone in F:NV). I don't know where you would have gotten the idea that we weren't going to have highly-reactive dialogue.

The difficulty level issue is going to be less about how you manage your resources fight-to-fight and more about figuring out how to get through fights, period. Some of the optional fights we have in right now can only be beaten by a few people on the team, and that's with a mostly-fresh party.

The question is, "How do we pace out a series of fights without requiring a cleric to be in the party and for that cleric to prepare cure x spells every day -- or the binge consumption of a lot of healing items?" As someone who played a ton of 2nd Ed. AD&D clerics, this was a very real question. It's a question that the 3E, 3.5, and Pathfinder designers asked and tried to answer with spontaneous conversion and channel energy. Hit points are the universal constant that tethers the limits of a party. Some classes rely on daily spells, some classes can hack and slash all day long, but when the HP run low, the party needs to stop. And in those pre-3.X games, one bad fight could mean an immediate about-face (assuming you had the option) depending on who was in the party and what they had prepped. 3.X improved things over 2nd Ed. because, while it did still require a healer of some sort to be present, more classes gained access to healing and the good/neutral clerics could spontaneously convert. Evil clerics were still out of luck, as were druids if they were in the unfortunate position of being the "party healer". And if you relied on a bard or paladin... yikes. Pathfinder switched turn undead uses straight over to what 3.X had creeped them into anyway -- raw charges of power, though now reworked as something that healed and damaged undead in the same action. Again, this helped, but good/neutral clerics still had a firm grip on the longevity of a party. A variety of classes could deal damage, hold a line, or produce a dizzying array of magical effects, but when it came to consistent, reliable healing, good/neutral clerics were far and away "the guys" that needed to be in the party. Even 3E rogues don't really "need" to be in a party. If you set off for adventure without a good/neutral cleric, you're either investing a lot of money in healing items and UMD or you're heading down a rough road of druids and evil clerics as prepared healers/short adventures. I know you don't like 4E, and there are plenty of things I don't like about it, but I do think healing surges were an improvement over where things headed with 3.X/Pathfinder. It's clearly another answer to the same question, "How do we pace out a series of fights without requiring a cleric to be in the party and for that cleric to prepare cure x spells every day -- or the binge consumption of a lot of healing items?" Stamina/health is a similar idea using a slightly different mechanic. I understand that you don't like it, but to say that no one asked the question -- clearly D&D's designers have been asking and trying to answer this question for a while now.

Our normal difficulty will not be tuned for casual players at all. It will not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range. Bumping it to Hard should put you into IWD2+ territory.

This is a big thread so I apologize for missing a lot of it. Summoning is tricky business because there are a lot of ways it can become the de facto tactic, especially in a CRPG environment. Casters do not currently have a huge number of summoning spells (chanters more than others), and using summons as hit point bag nose tackles can cause harm to the summoner, but I recognize that people like being able to use them. Additionally, we do plan to have summoning figurines and similar goodies for people to use. Sorry I don't have more details right now, but summoning is something I've only started revising recently.

Changed it to the high Interrupt. A number of weapons had two "best of" damage types and it felt less distinctive.

I think wands (and per-encounter spells) should make wizards more useful in all circumstances, rather than making the player choose between pulling out the big guns (i.e., using the wizard in any practical manner) or having them stand around like dopes. The commonality of modal and per-encounter abilities (and even useful passives) across the board is meant to encourage players to use all party members in every fight instead of treating some of them like glass cannons. Even if you just firehose your wizard's spells, you should still have contributions to make that rank above "do nothing" and "helplessly flail sling stone".

We also have class checks in dialogue but they are used less frequently than skill checks, which in turn are used less frequently than attribute checks. BG/BG2 in general had relatively low reactivity to individual classes/races. Strangely enough, IWD2 had more of that stuff, but still low overall. Internally, we all seem to prefer PS:T's ability score checks as opposed to dedicated social skills or class checks. Outside of conversation, before IWD2, most characters didn't have skills, period. The classes that had access to "thief" skills split their points among them (or a subset of them) and that was pretty much the end of it. Classes were dominantly defined by their combat capabilities (and ability to use gear, which largely tied into combat). It is similar in PoE. I understand both the desire to have a lot of class differentiation and the desire to have things feel as they did in the IE games, but the IE games didn't have much class differentiation outside of combat. There's a lot of work "just" getting 11 classes to feel distinctive and good in combat and to have conversations and quests react to the player's choices (class or otherwise), but we can't be on the hook for creating a lot of differentiation for classes outside of combat. The IE games didn't establish a high bar for that and, more importantly, it would be an enormous amount of work for us. Sorry.

PoE's weapons do have efficiency tradeoffs in RoF (well Rate of Attack) and raw DAM vs. DT. Two-handed melee weapons almost universally attack slower but have higher per-hit damage and, when opposed by moderate DT compared to their damage, are more efficient than single-handed or (especially) single-handed fast weapons. So, let's take somewhat comparable weapons: * Dagger - Fast single-handed * Sword - Single-handed * Greatsword - Two-handed Daggers do the least damage per hit, greatswords do the most damage per hit. However, due to attack rate, daggers do the most damage assuming armor is not an issue. Greatswords do the least damage over time when armor is not an issue. When armor does become an issue, that's where the per-hit damage becomes more important. All that said, the efficiency differences should register somewhere between "noteworthy" and "significant". The more important efficiency issue is often what damage type is being done relative to the defensive properties of the target. E.g. if the target is wearing mail, using a crushing weapon of any type is likely to be more effective than using a slashing weapon of any type. This is a difficult balancing act and I'm going to be monitoring more as we do more playtesting. I don't want it to wind up being a soup of numbers, but if the differences can be clearly and easily communicated, I think it can make interesting choices for players. On top of that stuff, and arguably more interesting overall, all weapon types have an inherent passive bonus property that comes with them. All daggers have an Accuracy bonus. All pikes allow you to attack from farther away. All war hammers use the better of two damage types, pierce or crush, when opposing DT. All morningstars have a brutal Interrupt rating.

No, AFAIK, we've never considered using consumable components. I don't think the combat currently feels like any MMO I've played and I don't think it will feel like it to people playing the game. More importantly, I think the addition of a usage frequency that sits below "all the time"/passive and above "x/day" is good because it gives the player another element to consider when they are selecting abilities to use.

Writing enemy AI to use abilities is somewhat involved but not crazy. It's more important for enemies to use their abilities reliably and to pose a potent offensive threat than it is for them to be incredibly flexible on defense. Ultimately, it's the player's job to be mentally flexible because that's "the fun".

I don't think this is how it worked out. Yes, it was often very smart to leave your wizards/spellcasters back from the fray. A large part of that is because they had no need to get close to the action. They could rain down death at range. Putting them close to the front line was unnecessary for them to be effective and made protecting them more difficult/a distraction. In PoE, the fights are designed for all characters to participate. As always, you should be prudent about how you involve them. In the early game, you will have a smaller party (whether through companions or player-made adventurers) and fights will be balanced around having a smaller party. Even so, whatever the characters' classes are, the fights are balanced for their collective participation.

We don't rely on timers (outside of general animation/recovery time for all actions) to limit spell or ability usage. The only significant difference between non-spell per-encounter abilities in PoE and active use high level abilities in BG2 is that the latter are per-rest/day. As such, they become tactical resources more than strategic resources. There isn't a "timer" involved in any case. If something has a per-encounter use, that use of the ability will not come back until combat ends. If something has a per-rest use, that use of the ability will not come back until you rest.

I can say that class abilities are designed to be a) useful in general and b) varied in tactical propriety/efficiency. The characters' class abilities are one big part of the party's capabilities. In order for them to be useful, they need to be demanded (one way or another) by the enemies' capabilities. I've tried to make a variety of counters available to different classes, and those counters can range from the broadly useful (low power general defensive increases) to more specific (paladins' ability to temporarily suspend negative status effects of all sorts) to powerful and narrowly-applied (e.g. priests' Prayer Against Fear, Prayer Against Infirmity, Prayer Against Restraint, etc.). You are pretty unlikely to use all of your available abilities in any given fight, but over time you should feel like they all get good use in different circumstances. Fighters do have a lot of abilities (as many as other non-spellcaster classes), but the majority of them are passive or modal. Abilities like Constant Recovery, Confident Aim, and Critical Defense are passive, but are important for how fighters work. Players may be less aware of how important those elements are since they aren't directly selecting and using them in combat, but they are still doing the fighter a lot of good. On the other hand, it is important to use a fighters' active and modal abilities shrewdly. Using Defender mode in a situation where fighters are dealing with a small number of enemies is unnecessarily hampering their attack rate. Using Knock Down on an enemy when the fighter is the only one who benefits from it is usually inefficient. And using it on a target with a relatively high Fortitude defense is statistically a bad idea unless the target's Deflection is equally out of range.

That is true. I forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me.