Luckmann

Wouldn't the entire party being allowed into stealth make it easier to perform combat-avoiding tasks? Why do you think this would be an obstacle? I don't mind that the entire party is allowed into Stealth, the problem is that the entire party stealths and unstealths together. You can't stealth individually, and when combat starts, everyone is unstealthed together.

Go to SomethingAwful forums, pay $10 and ask rope kid (Sawyer) there.

There is a pretty big relation as a matter of fact, imagine exploring the maps in PoE and doing so for hours, all the while you are fighting trash mobs that are in your way. So after playing for hours you open up you char sheet and see 0 xp, 0 character progression. That would be pretty disheartening. So because you guys are scared to miss out on that precious xp, now we have to suffer for our playstyle. It's almost as if you've got some pretty die-hard reading disability going on here. I said "There's no relation between exploration and the definition of what constitutes quest-related." and you say that there is a relation, and then go on to argue something completely unrelated to what I said. This is the second time you clearly misconstrue an argument in order to avoid the subject. That being said, nothing in goal-oriented experience excludes exploration rewards in any way. If we assume that PoE takes the approach of BG2 (in terms of "virtually everything is a quest area", which is a pretty safe assumption, unfortunately), you will gain experience via quests as you explore, or your exploration/murderhobo tendencies will make it easier to later complete quests as you return to the area. Even if we assume a BG1 approach and the fact that exploration can be it's own reward independent of immediate experience doleout, why should a murderhobo get more experience than any other solution by default? Why should it not be viable to explore via stealth, if the issue here really is "exploration", and not just instant-gratification highs for the cognitively shallow? Goal-oriented experience gives the players the incentive to seek alternative solutions, and the developers the freedom to create rewarding scenarios aside from combat encounters, and discourages the munchkin behaviour of killing people on principle even after finishing a quest a certain way. It allows you to stay in-character without penalizing yourself. In no way does it affect exploration negatively, nor dismiss violence as a possible means to the same end. Murderhobo-oriented experience, however, incentivizes violence - and only violence - as a meaningful solution. For an example of this, look at Deus Ex: Human Revolutions and compare it to Deus Ex. Deus Ex rewards ingenuity and emergent gameplay, allowing the player to find his own solution to problems, sometimes whether it was intended by the developers or not. There are multiple ways to solve any situation, often including just plain fleeing the scene, and a player is rewarded for exploration, solving problems, reaching goals and finding secrets. DE:HR on the other hand, awards experience for every little thing you do, incentivizing you to do every little thing, including doubling back to kill the enemies you left alive (or, to be specific, do a silent melee takedown), it awards you experience for hacking, even when you have the password, and for lockpicking, even when you have the key, meaning that if you have a choice, you'll always do both. Even the BG/2 game(s) suffer from this, albeit in a much-diminished fashion, in that there are actually several quests where you are rewarded better experience for doing the quest to it's conclusion, and then turning on whomever you've been working with in order to kill them, making sure that you get the kill-experience as well. In PoE, however, you get experience based on result, meaning that no matter what you play or the approach you take, it's viable from an experience perspective. Now, if the developers have truly taking this into account, I honestly doubt (you can't even Stealth independently, only as a party), but as long as experience is Goal-oriented, the possibility is there. If it's Murderhobo-oriented, that ideal is dead. Dead and buried and gone forever, and the best way to go through the game is with a big stick and a surly disposition. False, you can 100%, ie. you can go through all choices and all available quest. Also as class restrictions don't exist you can even do all the quest in PoE. First, this is you again trying to reinterpret what someone said and argue over semantics. It is obvious that Hassat Hunter meant that you can't do everything in a game. Instead of arguing against that, you start arguing over the definition of "100%". In fact, no TRUE RPG allow you to go through 100% of all the content in one go, simply because there will be branching paths that are mutually exclusive. That's what Hassat Hunter meant and anyone with the cognitive ability over that of a ferret would've realized it instead of arguing the semantics. Second, what gave you the idea that there are no class restrictions in PoE when it comes to quests or options? There certainly are Cipher-specific dialogue options, and given that each class is what it is, that would also mean that they have class-specific solutions to certain quests. I'm not saying that there *are* class-specific quests or quest solutions, but there is nothing saying there's not. There's no class restrictions on things like gear, but there certainly are class restrictions in terms of dialogue choices, talents, and powers. It's not Skyrim (thank god).

For people who like to explore and 100% the game it's really not semantics. There's no relation between exploration and the definition of what constitutes quest-related. The point was that the vast majority of all enemies in BG2 are quest-related in one way or another (easily 90%). Instead of arguing against this, you started arguing what constitutes "quest-related"; i.e., semantics. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of opponents in BG2 (and IWD/IWD2/PS:T) are quest-related in one way or another, in that you will be facing them while carrying out a quest. Your own definition of "quest-related" has nothing to do with that argument, and the argument can't be deflected by you focusing on the semantics. As I pointed out earlier, in BG1, this does not hold entirely true, because BG1 has a lot of wilderness areas that are largely devoid of quests (or do not have quests that send you there). In the context of PoE, I would argue that the process of exploration has it's own rewards, but just to be clear, you also do get experience for finding new sites, and I think that it's perfectly reasonable to hand out goal-oriented experience based on finding secrets, finding locations you'd otherwise miss, and so on, just like it was in Deus Ex. Anything is better than murderhobo-oriented experience. Murderhobo-oriented experience really achieves nothing, except forcing the gameplay to be kill-oriented, rather than roleplaying-oriented (character development, achieving goals, solving quests/crimes/mysteries, exploring locales, etc).

Showing Dyrford is a big disingenuous to the discussion, though. It's meant to be a (or at least looks like it's meant to be) a small town, and I think it has an appropriate amount of people just hanging around. The one image from PoE that is from one of the major cities shows a very small area that is very zoomed in. I do agree that it seems a bit empty to a degree, but at the same time, they shouldn't place people on principle, and have them congregate or walk around where it makes sense. I'm just hesitant to make a call one way or another, because we've actually seen very little.

If it's anything the past couple of posts have shown me, it's that most people have their preferences already made out, they know how they want the sound to work, and we all need sliders to do it.

That sounds like something a grognard might say. Seriously though, couldn't agree more.

Finding good voice-actors is actually pretty hard, but mostly it's expensive. I've yet to see a single "mod-level" voice-over that wasn't objectively terrible compared to commercial voice-actors. That being said, I think that so far the voices in PoE (that I've seen) have been very meh. It doesn't even come close to the voice acting in Baldur's Gate/2. But it's almost impossible to beat people like Jeff Bennet (Xan) and David Warner (Irenicus). I really hope we've just not seen the good stuff, but at this point, I find it doubtful that we'll see any spectacular voice-acting in PoE. Important names would probably already have been dropped here and there, but I haven't heard anything.

Nah, trash encounters are trash encounters. That they are present in the quest has no bearing on that. An example would be going to the area of the quest, while not taking the quest, and kill all the trash encounters. You can still come back and do the quest. There is a pretty big difference between quest related creatures/npc's and trash mobs. You're trying to defend your argument by semantics - the intent of the argument (that the majority of mobs are quest-related) was never the definition that you assign to it. That you don't agree on the definition as to what constitutes "quest-related" has nothing at all to do with the argument, it's just semantics, like I said.

FFS. I've been mentioning it every build since v257. Having all that tied to just "FX" is fine. Most games don't even do that. Case in point triple AAA bad boy look at my PhysX effects Far Cry 4's volume control looks like this. Music on/off..... music volume slider. That's it. There's a pretty huge difference, though. In action games, there's really not that much need (or want) to adjust different sliders. Me, I invariably end up turning Voice up a lot, and turn Ambience slightly above music, while turning down the FX (combat sounds, etc). As it is in PoE, I'm not going to be able to do that at all, it'll all end up as a cacophonic mess for me. Having Ambience, Combat Sounds and Voice all baked into "Effects" is pretty damn terrible.

What do you think is the issue then? Other than the usual "Josh is mean and just does this as a personal affront to moi" one that is. What do you think is the issue then? Other than the usual "Josh is mean and just does this as a personal affront to moi" one that is. It really doesn't have to be anything other than them wanting to limit the number of actors in an area for the benefit of lower-end computers. I think that's a pretty bad reason, and I say that as one of the users of those lower-end computers. I'd personally have choppy cities that will run well when I get a better computer, then have them forever devoid of life. I sincerely doubt that it's an engine limitation in any way. That being said, I really didn't feel that they seemed that empty or devoid of life. Like Stun and others, I noticed the lack of background ambience, but I really think that that is something that just hasn't made it into the game yet (or haven't been adjusted) similar to how the crickets just made it into the game. Let's not pretend that BG1/BG2 had tons of actors in the cities, they really didn't. However, those cities (at least Athkatla) were more "dirty", and they should work on that if they still can. Bring the scenery more to life with mud, broken cartwheels hanging against the walls, and things like that. It's hard to really judge from the stream, though. We actually saw very little.

For god's sake, the combat log needs to be in the centre.

It won't fix the inherent issues with such a simplistic armour system. Whether it's 10 DT Bypass (...why is this not just called Penetration?) or 5 DT Bypass, it still means that DT can be bypassed, in part or in full, whereas action speed will always help you kill things faster.

Because the community makes unofficial patches that pretty much everyone used and we forget about it. I'm talking about on release. Read some reviews from the major sources, for Bethesda they almost always mention bugs but give the a pass. They don't do so with Obsidian. Compare this review of skyrim with this review of the stick of truth. Kotaku has all the journalistic integrity of a fruit fly, you can't expect them to not chew Skyrim up like pigs at the trough. The way "major sources" voice their criticism, positive or negative, has nothing to do with the game's actual qualities, as much as it's corruption bias. It doesn't benefit Kotaku to be critical of Bethesda and Skyrim, so they're not. Obsidian, however, is an easy target and easy to criticize without Kotaku being reprimanded in one way or another (i.e. internal pressure or external incentives).

No it isn't... In both cases and I don't where you get the idea that it is. BG2 had a crap ton of trash encounters, that were in no way related to the quest except to maybe fill the space in between the encounters that were related. Being related to the quest means that they somehow fit in the story of the quest and not just be there to fill empty space. Which is not to say that filling empty space with trash mobs is bad. You are re-interpreting the intended meaning of quest-related as implied by everyone else that is talking about it. Being "quest-related" was obviously referred to as being encountered as part of carrying out a quest. The vast majority (all?) encounters in Baldur's Gate 2 and something like DA:I (and many other games) fit that bill like a glove. That you do not agree with the semantics of what "quest-related" means does nothing to diminish that point.

By that I take it that you mean that the cursor changes like in the IE games. It does so when it mouses over a hitbox. So.. Yeah. That's pretty much exactly what I want.

LoL, then everything in DA:I is quest related too. It is. What's your point?

I actually prefer "find the hitbox" to accidentally transitioning somewhere. It's not that big of a deal when all it does is bring up the world map, but in some games it means staring at the screen for 5 minutes as it loads back and forth.

Actually, both in the backer beta and in the streams, they can act as meatshields. Not sure if it's a bug though. Like Sonntam said, it's a known bug, and the pet is actually immortal, so it's a pretty serious bug. I think it happens when they can't find anything else to target that they can reach, and then they lock in on the pet. It should probably be pretty high on the bug list, because there's some very cheesy exploits you could pull with it.

Also, I maintain that having Intelligence being such an obvious "dump-or-pump" stat is a bad idea.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines was an amazing what-could-have-been game. It's got some really, really amazing points to it, but on release, it was bugged and unfinished. I wish it would've been finished before release.. the first 1/3 or 1/2 of the game is amazing, and then it just sorta tapers off into a combat game.

I didn't realize it at first, but +Range has been removed from Perception. Overall, I think the changes have made it easier to go for dump/pump stats depending on class. I'd like to see +AoE moved to Resolve, basically switching places for +Duration and +AoE compared to v392. +Duration never made sense on Resolve for me, but Resolve is all about imprinting yourself on others and the world, so the increase in AoE would make more sense there.

Its their military discipline/doctrine to walk in sync (even when underground or half an acre away - they need to be THAT good) Reading this, now I kinda want the Desynch Movement to be optional, because I can totally see a situation where I'd want all my toons to move at the same time, if I, say, make a whole party of soldiers. Try a party of rangers. swords for close range, bows for long. They wipe the floor up with the enemies.quickly too, if you use the daily's Valians with turbans, sabres, cats for pets, blunderbuss for ranged.. yes.. yes, this could work.

Again, like the difference between Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolutions, if someone is talking about Baldur's Gate II, they should note that it's Baldur's Gate II, not Baldur's Gate. In Baldur's Gate II, I'm hard pressed to find any combat experience that isn't in direct relation to a quest. But in Baldur's Gate, there's a lot of optional areas that no quest will lead you to. Either way, it's no argument for combat experience; exploration should be interesting and rewarding (in one way or another) independent on whether you're hunting for experience or not. If you're exploring a map just to kill all the squirrels for their juicy experience, that's the worst kind of motivation to play a game.

I didn't watch the stream, but it's very common that you either turn it down or turn music off for streaming purposes. You don't want the sound interfering with the streaming.