Luckmann

To be fair though, Petrification wasn't equal to death in the IE games. It was poorly implemented because it could break some questlines (related to romance or companion quests; but so could regular dying) but in most cases, you were simply petrified and it could be cured fairly easily. Implementation was just stuck between "Perfect" and "Holy ****snacks this is ****ty".

He's right. When you essentially roll a d100 for attack resolution, having -15 from crap Perception, or +15 from awesome Perception, makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. 8D! Also, it doesn't matter what buttons you push on your keyboard while playing, or if you even push any at all. You can just sit at your PC with your arms folded the whole time, and the game will beat itself! Bad example, though, since apparently they have removed Accuracy from the Characteristics now, so... yeah.

Why? Don't u think that having lot of EMPTY tables.... People don't sit on tables. Tell that to the lousy youths.

BG was relatively easy to solo as a wizard. Get the Ring of Wizardry and MM everything to death at lower levels. Rely on summons at higher levels. Ironman still sounds like a challenge though. Which class are you playing? I think that BG:EE uses BG2:s version of the Ring of Wizardry, though, which is all kinds of less spectacular than the BG1 kind. I'm not sure, because I still haven't played any of the "Enhanced Editions" on account of them appear to be mostly bad mods that have been glued to the side of a great game, marring it like plastic surgery ravaged Amanda Bynes.

Dear gods, monocles, yes, we need monocles. Otters and monocles.

Wow, I simply assumed it was when the player cast a spell. I have the eerie feeling that someone misread the intention of the option and programmed it wrong, because there's no way I can see how "pause on enemy spellcast" to be an intended functionality.

Yeah, they swing back and forth ever-so-slightly. They should script it so that the first time you reach that place, it'd always be early, early in the morning, with a thick cover of mist...

I would be fine with this.

Seems like a terrible shame to me. She was such a unique character concept. Now, instead of a strong, armored priestess with a blunderbuss, we get a wild-eyed loon in a dirty robe carrying around a stick. In fact, it seems like there's very few female companions right now: just the eskimo dwarf, the feathered paladin and a potentially dead or insane woman. Please bring back Cadegund. Having neither Cadegund or Forton is a disappointment. I really hope they appear in the games as NPCs or perhaps NPCs in the expansion or sequel. As fur Durance, we know he's going to be "insane" and he's being written by Chris Avellone. No doubt he's going to be an interesting character. They should've had Avellone write the entire setting.

That's not enough, your city is too clean; make it live! Dirty it up, add beggars, thieves, birds, an otter in the fountain. I am sure you guys got it. I completely agree with this.

What does number of companions have to do with their memorability? Actually, it's quite the opposite, less on quantity should make it more on quality. Nothing. But if you want to evoke Baldur's Gate as an inspiration for companions, there should be loads more than 8. I wasn't commenting at all on memorability, but the plurality. Planescape: Torment also had very, very few CNPC:s (but they worked them differently, so it was alright) but they were all amazingly memorable, but they chose to sell the CNPC:s using Baldur's Gate as an example.

I never even noticed any anti-communist bias. I never played Dragonfall though. You encounter a orkish Communist policlub calling themselves the Arbeiters. Turns out they're just a bunch of thugs spouting vaguely Marxist dialog lines. You can express sympathy for them but the dialog lines read like whoever wrote them had a manager standing behind their back going "Write them! Write them or you'll never work in this town again!" It's striking how different their portrayal is from the F-state anarchists. It's quite clear where their sympathies lie. Which is perfectly fine of course. But a game based on Iain M. Banks's, China Miéville's or Ken MacLeod's unabashedly Communist ideas would be very cool too, and not only because my politics tilt more that way. Communism is outdated and not needed. Communism we all talk about was a system that was supposed to protect workers from factory owners. Today robots do most of the work and average people need socialism, not communism. Anarchy is often considered very positive only because it was never tested in a bigger and more complex society. Personally I don't see it working as humans are too selfish. Most people wouldn't know the difference between socialism and communism, equating both to marxism; this hilariously also includes most socialists. That said, I don't think that anarchism fails due to selfishness. In fact, most reports have noted that people, when not forced and when the need exists, are in fact very altruistic and unselfish, sometimes almost to the point of absurdity. Most libertarians in fact use that as an argument against socialized welfare, and it's a fairly good argument. Now, I'm not a libertarian, and I think that society in general is too complex (especially at present) in order for that to work - people interestingly often aren't "socialized" enough to take advantage of of that particular dream scenario, although there's an argument in there somewhere that that is in part due to socialized welfare making it possible to be cut off from society and still be alive.. but.. I digress. My point that I was trying to make was that while people have the possibility to be tremendously unselfish, there is also overwhelming evidence that we are fundamentally tribal in more ways than one, meaning we prioritize based on our tribe. This is not conducive to large-scale anarchism, and as the tribe expands, it will naturally develop pronounced hierarchies (rather than implied hierarchies that exists in every single tribe-like population). I would even argue that we constantly live in philosophical anarchy - there is nothing actively preventing me from stealing or murdering, should I so desire - but have already opted out of living in a political anarchy because we as social creatures naturally create hierarchies and authorities. The nature of which are of hot debate. I see the foremost goal of politics to be to create an ideology founded in science and biology, emphasizing the creation of social structures in tune with what humans are (and not necessarily humans as a whole; this could be unique depending on any amount of biological factors individual to population) rather than what we want them to be. We should look at politics as a science rather than a collection of baseless opinions. Big plus if we can do it without ruining the planet. The ideal of collectivism and communism has nothing to do with the 1%. Abolishing the 1%, shooting the bankers and dismantling fractional reserve banking and usery has nothing to do with abolishing private property, redistribute the means of production, or social engineering and (dys)functional egalitarianism. Communism clashes with reality, because it espouses the ideals of the fundamentally surreal, disconnected from reality, and despite it's altruistic propaganda, is ultimately anti-human. It seeks to almost create a mythic perfect human through social engineering and dogma, yet this man eludes the ideologue, taunting him to perform ever-more depraved acts in the interest of social justice. There are far better ways to abolish the 1%, and it's not even that hard to do, under any system. It is just that capitalism as an overall system really has no interest in it, and would only really replace the current fatcats with the next fatcats; much like communism. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Why is this in the PoE General section? PoE isn't even on Origin, is it? Why would I think of getting DA:I? I mean, come on. Why Origin? Just why? Why would anyone do that? So many questions.

I would be surprised if it really would take a month for the first update after release. These days, it's not uncommon to release the first patch within a week. And for many, I think there'll even be a patch waiting on installation (because even after "going gold", they'll probably keep working on things). I wish I could wait. And maybe I'll wait a day or two out of sheer necessity. But honestly speaking, no, I don't foresee myself waiting very long. I want to get into things and I'm going to pick the game apart and critique everything as I always do.

All I'm asking for is a single otter.

The problem with such a thing is that most people are largely ignorant about politics other than at a glance. Trying to explain fascism to a democrat is often comparable to explaining weather to a goldfish. You say "corporativism" and goldfish goes "what". People want a nice place to pin things on their two-dimensional board, and real politics doesn't actually let you do that; propaganda does it for illustrative purposes within democracy, but that's really just part of the problem. A game like that would be amazing, but don't hold your breath for it. Political concepts are abstracted almost by necessity, and if you break the actual ideologies up into the sea of issues, you're really not dealing with ideologies anymore, but individuals and individual issues that you can glue together as you see fit. Regrettably, the most politically interesting game in recent memory has to be Bioshock, which is sad because Bioshock is actually not that good of a game. But it did explore the idea of political objectivism in an interesting (and largely reasonable way; objectivism really is that insane) package; the Bioshock 2 counterpoint of runaway collectivism - as much as I hate it - while not inappropriate, was banal and hamfisted by comparison, likely because it was created as a counterpoint, not because the developers had any deep insight or interest in the concept itself, or a real drive to explore the issues.

At some point, you have to ask yourself why you're even opening up the game. Just read the story right out of the game files while sitting on the porch.

Hahahaha, dear god. Sheeeesh, Obsidian, don't try to undersell it or anything.

This explains so much of arthurian legend to me.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that scene was specially scripted for the trailer. We do have weather in the game, but nothing like rain storms that will appear and disappear in an area. It would be cool to something like that for the future, though. Damn, I really appreciate that you keep us in the loop and come here to clarify stuff like this, but.. damn, I can't help but to think that that bubble shouldn't have existed to begin with. Why create trailers that showcases material that won't actually be in the game? Who thought it was a good idea to specifically script something for the trailer? Things like that is usually thought of as EA-level marketing douchery. It creates not just high expectations, but false expectations, and it's incredibly disingenuous to not just try to portray the game in it's best light (which is to be expected) but in a light that doesn't even exist, by going into it and literally scripting something that didn't previously exist nor is intended to be kept.

Just to highlight variety of opinions here, as much as I love BG1 (not so for BG2) Durlag's Tower from ToTSC expansion was, to put it mildly, thing that should never have happened to the game. Well, maybe with exception of Aec'letec encounter. It'd be nice if PoE wouldn't have dungeons designed like that one. Nice for me, that is. Sorry. Just got turned a little on by that "highlights of the entire series la-la-la" Yeah, I really loved BG1, and I think that Watcher's Keep in BG2 was really well-made, but Durlag's Tower from ToTSC, I always considered terrible.

Seems like a terrible shame to me. She was such a unique character concept. Now, instead of a strong, armored priestess with a blunderbuss, we get a wild-eyed loon in a dirty robe carrying around a stick. In fact, it seems like there's very few female companions right now: just the eskimo dwarf, the feathered paladin and a potentially dead or insane woman. Please bring back Cadegund. Cadegund always seemed awesome, and I can't help but to hope that she's added as a proper CNPC at some point, even though I know it's very unlikely we'll ever get two CNPC:s that share both class, deity, and at least to some extent weaponry. But I can hope.

When he said "patrollers", I do not think he actually meant soldiers on patrol; I believe he was simply referring to NPC:s with patrol patterns, walking around the city "randomly".

Yeah, it ensures that the precious forced plot point wasn't ruined by the player's badwrongfun.

And also, in combat, this really wouldn't be relevant whatsoever - you'd just move around at the lowest speed, either way. The response time would still be immediate, the movement would just be slower and then progressively faster if you keep moving.