Luckmann

Except that you can only carry a limited number. Once you run out, you have to trek back to buy more. That's a pretty significant difference. Fair point. I'm not sure I'd call it significant, but it is a difference.

Clipping?

You get a bonus for sleeping at the inns, which is a nice thing, but after a while you have to rest "in the wild" anyway, and past that, you really can rest all you want. Camping supplies are very much like the Injury Kits in Dragon Age: Origins, it's really just a gold tax that is insignificant in the grand scope of things. The whole no-healing thing really doesn't mean jack squat; I can't remember them being really useful in the IE games either, and in the IE games, you could die, so /shrug.

I'd really enjoy a "bleed out"-mechanic. I realize that it's incredibly unlikely that they'll change something at this point in development, so we'll probably have to resign ourselves to just accepting the incredibly immersion-breaking experience of people suddenly passing out and then becoming ignored for no good reason, but in terms of what can be done, I think that; When knocked out upon reaching 0 Endurance, you should lose ½% of your total health per second, giving you a theoretical maximum of 200 seconds to live. When getting up from being knocked out, you reduce your maximum total health and endurance by 10% until the next time you rest, meaning you'll go increasingly fragile for each time you're knocked out. When getting knocked out, you should become Maimed, a status effect that can only be removed with high-level per-day abilities or items of similar price and scarcity to camping supplies. A system largely similar to the one employed in DA:O, but harsher (Injuries in DA:O were never a problem thanks to wide availability and access to cures).

Since I want Talents on creation to help with chiseling out a concept, I think this could be a good idea, but at the same time, it increases the gameist nature of the backgrounds. It'd make certain Backgrounds more or less objectively better or worse for certain classes, rather than giving you freedom on creation to realize a character you want to play. Yeah, there's really no reason to pick Utility talents. Some of them are neat, but honestly, 90% of all picks will be in the Offensive or Class category, 10% in the Defensive, and Utility never. It's too bad, too, because the Utility talents are fun, but they're just not very useful. They really shouldn't have been in the same pool.

Also, as of v392, the Weapon Focus Talent(s) confer +6 Accuracy, not +10. I hope they change that again, and just mark it down that they don't stack. I'd like to see greater diversity in the Weapon Focus Talents, like a Weapon Focus Talent that makes you proficient in all the gunpowder weapons, for example, simply different thematic combinations, really.

Where's the "Very rarely" option? There's "Often", but not "Always", and there's "Never", but not "Rarely". It's extremely uncommon that I actually roll up a gnome or a halfling, but it has happened. I can't vote, but I'm starting with a Godlike (...I can't get over how much I dislike that "name" though).

To this day, NWN2 does not work properly on my computer. CTD:s and even Bluescreens incessantly. So yeah. KotOR2 was unfinished, but at least it worked.

For Talents, I think that the idea is that you get Abilities every other level, and Talents every other level, and that's supposed to add up to something each level. In practice, this becomes incredibly lopsided for (most) casters, because on many levels, they really don't get anything to do at all, except spend Skill Points. At the same time, I'm not sure giving Talents on every level would solve the problem; you'd just add to the effect in that every other level you'd get Abilities, and every other level you'd get "nothing" (because if you get talents every level, it would be just a default levelup thing, like skills). But at the very least, I really think that you should get 1-2 Talents on Creation, to help chisel out a concept. I'd even be fine with it being "forced picks", such as one Class/Offensive Talent and one Defensive/Utility Talent.

It is more to do with scale than anything else. If your party bar takes up X amount of height then especially in your solid ui X amount of height has been used.... the end. There is no reason to then not design the main menu ui to take up that much height even if you could get away with less because you are using it anyway right? Additionally you have to consider how things will look scaled down to low resolutions. You guys don't know, some dude could be playing this at 720, or even 480. I wasn't commenting specifically on the Solid UI, I thought I made that clear. Used space is still used space; just because you take up, say, 50px on the left side of the bottom bar doesn't mean you have to take up 50px on the left side. Scalable UI:s are a thing, and there is no reason my game should be held hostage by someone's toaster, and I'm saying this as someone that's got what pretty much amounts to a toaster by most standards today. I'm not sure I agree with the second point, but the first one makes absolute sense. The IWD/BG1/2 UI was great, and today, we could easily get rid off what was the left-side bar, by relegating it to the bottom, such as an aforementioned radial in one of the corners, or something similar. If you ask me, an L-shape with portraits and effects and so on on a left-side bar would be the best, a radial menu on the lower right (because face it, you won't need it in combat and when you do, it's not a problem eyeing down there) and most of the left-to-middle centre bottom bar taken up by combat/dialogue-log.

Avellone interacts with people in twitter, conventions and other events where he has been promoting and displaying PoE. He also has given lots of interviews to bloggers and fan communities. So from his perspective he has much more interaction with fans than what he has had in previous games that he has worked with, even though he don't interact with them in these forums. You'd think that their own forums intended for Beta and developmental feedback would be more relevant, though. It's not really interaction if there's no inter-. Especially Sawyer is notably absent, sequestered away in his $10 ivory tower of selective feedback, but Avellone's comments are interesting because he mentions discussing design ideas and decisions with the fans, yet I can't say that I've ever seen him on here, the place intended for such. One-lining over Twitter hardly constitutes a discussion and it's odd and jarring to see these people saying these things, yet in reality completely ignore their own forums like the plague.

Could you also chuck +AoE over to Intelligence, because consolidating both the prime caster stats into a single Score is absolutely daft.

What about druids and shapeshifting? I remember reading a long time ago they could find some more "exotic" shapeshifting forms in the world, has it been confirmed or is it unsure too? That sounds cool, but since Druids now choose their 1 wildshape (I forget what it's called) I find it doubtful that it'd work that way at all, sadly.

Pickpocketing is ridiculously useful in the IE games (Or rather, at least in BG2). It is a gateway to such profits that it's borderline broken, once you pump it up to ~240-250 (with potions). Primarily for five-finger discounts at stores, but there are also a lot of loot to be hand from pickpocketing the right targets. Not just specific targets (like Ribald, for his Ring of Regeneration) or for quests (which sadly often ends up with the quest becoming disjointed), but also more "randomized" targets (such as the Amnish Guards, who has a chance of carrying high-level spell scrolls, up to lvl . Pickpocketing is awesome. And if you piss someone off, just fleeing often works, but really, just try to not piss people off. Not very, although not all the goodies are pre-placed, but anyway, the point I was going to make is that the IE games isn't the end-all be-all measuring stick of well-implemented mechanics. Pickpocketing definitely has the potential to be better implemented than in the IE games, and I think that relegating it to "scripted only"-interactions is a sad cop-out.

With different forms of ammunition, of course.

Thematically, I can understand that, though. It solves a whole slew of plot-associated questions that crop up in a high-fantasy setting. No resurrection and no teleportation are pretty much staples of newer settings in order to make them internally consistent. That being said, the whole "Pass out when beaten over the head enough and then be ignored by the enemies"-system is weaksauce. It's been rubbish since the first game I saw with it and it's still rubbish today. It makes it perfectly reasonable to just throw someone away, knowing that they'll die, send your companions on tactical suicide missions, and breaks immersion something fierce when you see everyone dust themselves off afterwards and just keep walking.

Yes, but learning a chant is easily comparable to learning a new combat tactic, I'd say, or learning to focus your whatever. That being said, it'd be cool if you could find (like mentioned earlier) new chants that then show up as pickable Abilities on lvlups.

IWD2 has AOO:s? Because if it does, I literally never noticed. I've played through IWD2 twice and made it about halfway through a few times, and never did I notice anything like AOO:s or Engagement. Do I have a case of the alzheimers?

I didn't even consider that a reasonable possibility; I always thought of the Cipher and Chanter abilities more like the abilities a Ranger, Paladin, Fighter or Berserker learn, not "spells".

And in BG2, she was turned into a useless, whiny, annoying, forced plot device.

Yes, but it wouldn't be chess.

This will probably be the last backer beta that we do. Not sure how long we will keep everything open, though. We still need to talk about the particulars. No chance of a "release candidate" BB build late February/early March?

I've been thinking about the menu bar as well, not just as part of the Solid UI, but rather as a whole. It's absolutely huge. I can't help but to think that the developers are stuck in some kind of console-influenced mindset where everything needs to be oversized so you don't miss it while sitting three metres from the TV, but the current Menu Bar is absolutely enormous and blocky, with a big whirling thingy in it. There is no practical reason it needs to be that big, really; it should be pushed down into a radial in one of the corners, around a quarter-clock-gear-thingy, with most of the centre taken up by the dialogue/combat log.

I will never not accidentally read "polish" as "Polish" when first eyeing through a post, it seems. That was all kinds of confusing, honestly. I am most definitely not expecting a Polish experience either. I had that once, I was lost in Krakow for a full night and woke up near the planty with a kebab in my hand.

Yeah, today it's important that it's all like some Skyrim catch-em-all cannot-possibly-fail everything-works-out-no-matter-what I don't know what I was going with that, honestly, but seriously, screw that form of design. There absolutely should be no-win scenarios or scenarios that are locked out because of choices made.