[Deeply disappointed with Obsidian]

I think Thortxu meant more dark rather than less. I can kind of see where he or she is coming from: there are certain aspects of this Kickstarter which were not handled well and while they didn't matter too much to me, for those who did care about them, this would be highly disappointing. In order of severity:

 

1) The handling of physical goods was awful. I have some degree of understanding for this when it happens in a single-person webcomic Kickstarter (the lone artist is good at drawing and story... not so much at the intricacies of international shipment), but Obsidian is a corporation with 100+ employees and Paradox is even bigger than that. I don't see how they screwed this up so badly. I don't really care about still not having my physical box (more than two months after launch!), but if I did, I'd be pretty mad.

 

2) The tone of the game is completely different from the Baldur's Gate series. Baldur's Gate was dark, but it did not take itself seriously and practically every quest and interaction had a comedic element. PoE takes itself extremely seriously and while there is some humor, it is far more rare.

 

3) The awesomeness of items has been sacrificed on the altar of balance. Baldur's Gate gives you better loot at level 1 than PoE has anywhere in the game. I explicitly went back to play Baldur's Gate to see how much of memory was nostalgia and while there is a fair bit of that, the loot is not comprised in it -- PoE's items are utterly mediocre.

 

The second and third are deliberate design decisions and I guess they weren't very surprising given Obsidian's previous work, but the handling of physical goods is just plain incompetence and I didn't expect that.

[Should POE's Final release have been called "Early Access?"]

This is ONE game I have brought on release in a LONG time, I usually dont, but this game triggered my Baldurs Gate nostalgia and I had high hopes becase over the net the actual release of the game was pipped as "relatively bug free". So I brought it at release, played it, experienced bugs, stopped playing it, read about more bugs, then decided to wait for a stable version.

But it was "relatively bug free", with the key word in this phrase being "relatively." Sure, it had (and still has) bugs, but given the complexity of the game and the fact that most of these bugs are not even noticeable for most people, it was in a pretty decent shape at release time (and is even better now). It seems to me that your quarrel is not so much with PoE, but with the industry standard of what constitutes finished. I partly agree with you there, but it is very strange to call PoE on it because it had more constraints that most games and managed to do better than them. It had a relatively small budget (so there's no money to do further development), it had obligations due to the Kickstarter (so they couldn't have done Early Access even if they wanted to without angering a lot of backers who were promised a DRM-free version and now had to either sign up for Steam or sit and wait while other people play) and it was promised to be long and have lots of choices (i.e. there are multiple ways to do many different things which makes any given playthrough effectively unique and impossible to test). Obsidian has also done a decent job at patching the most serious bugs quickly.

[Should POE's Final release have been called "Early Access?"]

Remember I said this poll was not about comparing to other games. It is about POE in its own right. Other games are not a justification for 1000's of bugs (yes 1000's! Quoting the devs here,, at least they are honest.) on release.

It's hard to judge something without comparing it to other things of the same kind. A thousand sounds like a large number, but in fact there is probably well over a million different parameters and branches in the game where things could have possibly gone wrong so if you think about it as a fraction of that, it's actually quite small. The same is true for Baldur's Gate and other games of this kind -- they're just inherently very complex.

 

Personally, I played through the game starting at release time and I only found one bug which was genuinely annoying (though not a showstopper): the map was too dark at night and in dungeons (fixed in 1.03). Sure, there was probably a bunch of others, but they were either promptly fixed (i.e. before I got to them), specific to certain setups (i.e. rare) or relatively harmless.

[Should POE's Final release have been called "Early Access?"]

The question is not "whether POE should have actually been EA"

 

but whether the game that was actually released warranted the title "Early Access" as it was not a completed product.

If that was your question, then answer is clearly no. The number of bugs is comparable to previous games of the same kind. Do you remember how many bugs the Baldur's Gate series had even after all of the official patches? PoE had maybe 3 rare (but not negligibly so) showstopper bugs which were quickly fixed in about a week after release (again, comparable with most games of this genre). The other bugs are minor nuisances -- they have practically no impact on the overall game.

[Romance Packs DLC]

I think this gets to the root of the problem: in a "good" romantic story - Casablanca, Dr Zhivago, the Arthurian myths, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest - romance is a cause of conflict, and the protagonist has to make a choice, either choice leading to tragedy in one form or another.

This is simply not true. It is correct as far as romantic stories requiring conflict, but there need not be a choice and even if there is, it need not end in tragedy. There are certainly tragic love stories like the ones you mentioned (though I'm not sure why you include The Tempest), but there are also classic stories such as Alcestis and Pride and Prejudice, where everything works out well in the end. Not every good story needs to be a tragedy.

 

The Bioware style romance is pure wish fulfilment. The protagonist can save the world AND get the girl/boy. Good storytelling requires they choose to do either one or the other.

This is also not true. I haven't played their latest games, but the Baldur's Gate series and Neverwinter Nights both had at least one romance option that was inevitably tragic and Knights of the Old Republic could be tragic depending on the player's choices.

[Trun Based vs Real Time RPG combat...?]

 Staglands is RtwP and looks really good.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmjZYIndaCA

This does look potentially interesting and I might give it a try, but it's certainly not of the same order as PoE, D:OS, etc. or even comparable to most of the smaller games -- it's a two-person team and their Kickstarter only asked for $10K and only got $28K. It might still be good though; sometimes two brilliant people are better than a team five times the size.

[Trun Based vs Real Time RPG combat...?]

How many Kickstarter (or similar) RTwP games are there anyway? Every game I can think of is turn based:

 

Shadowrun: Returns is turn based as is the sequel (Dragonfall). The combat is not bad, but it's hardly a high point of either game.

Divinity: Original Sin is turn based. I haven't played this one.

Wasteland 2 is turn based. The combat is mediocre at best due a high density of easy encounters (each of which nevertheless takes time to resolve).

Torment: Tides of  Numenera will be turn based. They've promised to cut down on the time-wasting encounters -- we'll see.

Then there's a bunch of other games which I've backed, but are probably not worth mentioning individually since they're either not out yet or nowhere near as good (e.g. Lords of Xulima), but all of them are turn based.

 

The only RTwP game that's out is PoE. Of the ones that are not out, I guess there's also Sword Coast Legends, but that one is aiming for some weird mix of indie and mainstream. So yeah, please keep the PoE sequels RTwP -- it's basically the only game of this kind that there is.

[Trun Based vs Real Time RPG combat...?]

I prefer real time with pause. Turn based is a lot more popular among developers, but it lacks the element of chaos present in RTwP which makes the latter feel a lot more like a real battle.

[Romance Packs DLC]

I play games, read stories and watch shows to hear something meaningful. I like New Vegas because of all of it's philosophical and political insights. I like Binding of Isaac because of it's dual meanings that actually say a lot about the topic of depression and even religion's involvement with it. I like Dark Souls because of it's commentary about human resolve and life as a struggle in general.

I've never seen a game that presents an original philosophical insight or anything of the sort. The ideas games present have been in books for a long time, often for centuries. What games do is take these ideas and extend the concept of a thought experiment: rather than just imagining what the impact of an idea might be, the game builds a simulated world around them.

 

Romance is not a thought, it's an emotion, more or less. It's not something you can learn or experience from a story, nor is it something you can apply a ton of thought-provoking twists to to keep it fresh and unique. No, romance has been done and will continue to be done because for some reason, some people haven't figured out the boy will get the girl every single time. Romance feels like the fast food of stories: it's a guilty pleasure that all of us enjoy off and on, but how much actual substance is it really providing? None at all.

If that was the case, why would it be so common both in popular culture and in works studied by academics? For one thing, it doesn't always end happily, but even if you were guaranteed that it did, the interesting thing about it is how it is done. If you completely ignore the details and strip it to its bare bones, then yes, it's not very interesting, but one can do that to almost anything with the same result.

 

For example, consider games like PoE. Even before you start the game, you know that you will create a protagonist who must necessarily be quite generic, but who will somehow stumble into a massive plot either due to a hidden and dormant component of the protagonist's nature or by simply being in the right place at the right time. You know that there will be various companions of different genders, races and temperaments. You know that there will be an antagonist (or at most several of them, but one is certainly more powerful and important than the rest) and that at the end of the game, the protagonist and the antagonist will meet in a climactic confrontation. You even know that the protagonist will prevail. Does any of this make the game not worth playing?

 

All of that said, I don't think romances would be a good idea in PoE. The overall tone of the game is just wrong for them. They work fine in the much lighter tone of the Baldur's Gate series and in the original Knights of the Old Republic, but PoE is too dark and takes itself too seriously (a serious romance is hard to do well). Also, DLC that one has to pay for is a terrible idea in general -- I greatly prefer expansions.

[things i wish poe had that baldurs gate 2 or other games had]

Creating characters was very much trial and error in those games, unless you had some previous knowledge.

All of the "previous knowledge" you needed was in the manual that came with the game. It had literally every aspect of the rules including a variety of tables that quantified what each stat did for each class. It's true that the in-game tool tip information during character creation was less detailed, but overall, the old games did a much better job of explaining the rules than PoE does.

[things i wish poe had that baldurs gate 2 or other games had]

The BG games were almost my first cRPG games and they had little competition.  They were in my opinion very well done although not perfect.  Nostalgia does kick in but I think PoE has gone beyond them.  

 

Some of the PoE leads were involved in making those IE games and I am looking forward to what they can doe with this series given time and money.

I was also curious how much of the love for the Baldur's Gate series is nostalgia and how much of it is the latter actually doing things better than PoE, so I decided to replay the series starting from the beginning. I made a thread about it in the general gaming forum, but in summary (so far):

 

Documentation (i.e. conveying the rules to the player): BG is better, though PoE does more in-game. In BG, you actually have to read the manual (which was surprisingly fun).

Graphics: PoE is much better, though BG is still tolerable.

Music and Sound: they're about equal, though I'd give a slight edge to BG.

Interface: PoE is better, but not to an extent where it matters much.

Low-level Combat: PoE is much better. BG combat is simply awful until about level 3.

Loot: BG is much better.

Story: BG is more impressive early on.

Characters: PoE ones are much deeper, though BG ones manage to get a lot across given the very limited amount of text.

Tone: I strongly prefer BG. PoE takes itself way too seriously.

 

Basically, it's not as clear cut as PoE having moved beyond BG. There are some areas (like the low-level combat) which were clearly problematic and which PoE did a good job of fixing, but there are others (like the loot) which were fine in BG and PoE made deliberate choices that in my opinion make things worse rather than better.

[Replaying Baldur's Gate after Pillars of Eternity]

Why would you play the enhanced editions?

The version that I had (on disks) did not get along with Windows 7 a few years ago and I'm not sure what I did with those disks in any case. Thus, I needed to either buy a new version from GOG and install a bunch of mods or buy the Enhanced Edition. I chose the latter mostly because it was faster and partly because I wanted to see what they did with the game (not much -- it's basically the same, although the new companions are nice).

[Is it Possible to Mod Pillars of Eternity?]

It's possible, but much more difficult than it was with the IE games. Unless you enjoy hex editing, you will probably need a Unity license and they're not cheap.

[Replaying Baldur's Gate after Pillars of Eternity]

Given the discussion in the PoE forums comparing it to the BG games, I wanted to replay the latter so as to have a comparison of two recent sets of memories rather than one recent memory and nostalgia from over a decade ago. Last time I tried replaying BG, I ran into a show-stopping bug so this time I'm going to use the Enhanced Edition (which hopefully plays nicer with modern operating systems). It's more or less equivalent to playing with mod that implements BG2 rules in both games, fixes a bunch of bugs and introduces a few extra companions as well as a few extra character kits. I'm currently near level 5 and just got to Chapter 3 of BG so this is mostly about the early experience so far.

 

Pre-Game: Documentation and Character Creation

 

BG comes with a fairly comprehensive manual (the Enhanced Edition divides into two PDFs, one that's 144 pages and another with 79 pages) which, while not perfectly accurate, does a pretty good job of conveying the rules. It also has humorous comments by Elminster and Volothamp Geddarm. When I first played these games, I used to read the manuals simply as one would a book. I'll admit that when I backed PoE at the level of the physical box, I was kind of hoping for a manual like that... but of course it turns out that first, the physical box doesn't actually include a paper manual and second, the PoE manual is much smaller and extremely vague. On the other hand, PoE does do a slightly better job at having in-game descriptions of abilities at the relevant points (e.g. the character creation screen). However, even with those, the PoE documentation is missing some pretty fundamental info (good luck figuring out what "Average" or "Fast" actually mean in terms of attack and spell casting times without learning by doing).

 

The main difference in character generation is that BG lets you roll (and reroll and reroll and reroll...) your stats whereas in PoE and practically all other modern games, you get a fixed number of points to distribute. Given the availability of BG2 classes, I decided to go with a Sorcerer. This is probably my favorite class in any game and it's pretty unique in that it is almost completely independent of stats for offensive abilities. 3rd edition Sorcerers depend on Charisma, but the BG2 variety does not. I didn't spend too much time re-rolling and wound up with 12 / 10 / 16 / 17 / 17 / 17 for STR / DEX / CON / INT / WIS / CHA.

 

It's hard to compare across the different rule systems, but my impression is that stats in BG mean more than they do in PoE. This is certainly the case for Constitution which, when maxed out (non-warrior classes derive no benefits from CON > 16) gives my Sorcerer 50% extra Hit Points per level (6 rather than 4). If I was playing on a difficulty higher than the default (which I'm not going to do because I simply don't have time for that degree of masochism anymore), it would actually be more than that: Sorcerers get 1d4 HP which averages to 2.5 per level so the +2 from 16 CON is actually an increase of 80%. In PoE, 18 CON gets you +24% Endurance and Health and +16 Fortitude which is not comparable. PoE is based on a d100 roll whereas BG uses a d20 so the translation between effects depending on such rolls is a factor of 5 and that +16 in PoE is slightly more than +3 to a saving throw in BG.

 

First Impressions: Graphics, Sound and Interface

 

When I started playing PoE, I thought that the style looked a lot like BG. Playing BG makes it rather clear that this was mostly due to nostalgia. The Enhanced Edition made it possible to play it at 1920x1080, but the graphics very clearly show their age: PoE looks much, much better. I don't mean to say that BG is terrible -- unlike many 3D games, it has aged well and still looks decent -- but it's rather obvious that PoE was released 17 years later. The same fact is obvious from the loading times: BG saves, loads and area transitions are practically instantaneous (less than 1 second) whereas in PoE, saves take ~5 seconds while loads and area transitions take around 15 seconds.

 

On the other hand, the music, sounds and voice acting of BG is not dated at all and is very good. PoE is also quite good, but I think I would give BG a slight edge here. The interface is OK -- the PoE one is better, but given that there are not many possible actions in BG until higher levels, it doesn't really matter early on. The path finding is pretty lousy in BG and not significantly better in PoE. One thing that is bizarrely missing from PoE is the ability to add user-made markers to the map (BG has it).

 

First Impressions: Characters, Story and Tone

 

The original characters in BG are mere sketches -- they have very little dialog and no personal quests. However, they are well-drawn sketches: the game manages to convey a considerable amount of personality with just the introductory dialog and the on-click and on-command responses. The PoE characters are much deeper, but it takes a while to fully understand their personalities whereas the BG characters are pretty up-front about it. For this play-through, I'm sticking with Imoen, Jaheira and Khalid.

 

The Enhanced Edition adds Neera (a Wild Mage), Rasaad (a Sun-Soul Monk; one of the new kits) and Dorn (a Blackguard which is another of the new kits and basically an evil Paladin). I took the first two of these; Dorn sounded interesting, but he's too evil for this party. These characters are BG2-style: they each have a personal quest and will occasionally talk to you. I don't think there is a significant difference in quality between them and the PoE ones, the again, the BG characters are more up-front about their personalities.

 

BG does a better job pulling the player into the story early on and its principle antagonist comes off as much more impressive the first time you encounter him. It's tough to discuss this without spoilers, but both games run into a situation where your motivation for progressing is not exactly obvious (i.e. the journal says what to do, but it's only vaguely related to the main story).

 

The tone of BG is completely different and I like it a lot better than PoE. Both games are about some rather dark subject matter, but PoE takes itself very, very seriously whereas BG has a great deal more humor. I'm not saying that PoE has no humor at all -- it has quite a bit -- but it is relatively rare and subtle whereas in BG, the humor is deeply embedded in the overall tone. The on-click and on-command party member responses, dialog of both named and unnamed NPCs, options in what you can say as well as many side quests all have significant comic elements (sometimes breaking the fourth wall, sometimes not).

 

First Impressions: Combat and Loot

 

There's no nice way to say this: 2nd Edition AD&D combat is awful at low levels. At level 1, there are very few options available to the player -- unless you want to be resting constantly, most of your time will be spent auto-attacking with all characters. Your probability of hitting is not particularly great so if you're up against something armored, several rounds of missing will ensue. Furthermore, since base HP ranges from 1d4 (for Mages and Sorcerers) to 1d12 (for Barbarians), chances are that even with the difficulty setting resulting in max HP and the CON bonus, most characters can be killed by around 2 hits. The result of all this is that luck is much more important than any strategy and the outcome of many fights can range from game over to a flawless victory with identical player input. The only real "strategy" (if you can call it that) is to save and load frequently (thank goodness for the short loading times). This gets better at around level 3 which is why practically all subsequent D&D games get you to that level with an introductory sequence and/or non-violent quests. BG has some of the latter, but not nearly enough. PoE's introductory combat is much better -- they clearly addressed the two main concerns (too much auto-attack and low HP resulting in randomness of outcomes).

 

The other main difference is that the combat in BG is built around what on the PoE boards is called "hard counters". That is, there are some really nasty abilities, but you can make yourself immune to them. If you haven't done that and you fail your save, you might as well reload. On the other hand, if you can make yourself immune, some enemies which are worth a lot of XP can be defeated with relative ease. For example, there's a map with a bunch of Basilisks who Petrify with their gaze. Unlike in PoE, BG petrification is an insta-kill ability as far as the protagonist is concerned and nearly the same for most other characters... but there's a level 1 spell that makes you immune for 1 hour (BG buffs are both more powerful and longer lasting than their PoE counterparts). I milked those critters for at least a level and a half this time around (you never stop gaining combat XP in BG).

 

The other notable difference is the loot. PoE has very few items worth noting (and most of the ones that were have been nerfed in the latest patch). BG is very different: you get some very nice stuff even at low levels. For example, the two best ones I've found so far are Ring of Wizardry: Evermemory (found under a tree when the protagonist was still at level 1) and Gauntlets of Dexterity: The Brawling Hands (taken from some Gnolls guarding a bridge when at level 2). The ring literally doubles the number of level 1 spells so my at level 4, my Sorcerer now has 12 of them. The gauntlets set Dexterity to 18 which, for a character with average DEX (I gave them to Jaheira), mean -4 to Armor Class and +2 to Ranged Attack. In PoE, this would correspond to a permanent +20 to Deflection and +10 to Ranged Accuracy both of which would stack with any other bonuses to these quantities. These wouldn't even be endgame items in PoE -- they would simply never have been allowed in the game in the first place.

 

More later once I get further into the game...

[Would PioE have been better with turn-based combat?]

Buggy and mediocre? Yes, perhaps. It was not the total package that PoE or BG2 are. However, did you notice that I was refering to the combat? Did you see me tout its identify spell or any other such nonsense? Nope.

Yes, I understood you -- I was just trying to remember stuff that ToEE did that was unique. There wasn't anything special about the combat; I looked up some reviews and they are consistent with what I remember. It was fairly standard, low-level, turn-based D&D -- serviceable, but not remarkable for anything except the amusing bugs. There's nothing there that would make it a paragon of fantasy combat.

[Would PioE have been better with turn-based combat?]

All the devs have to show for Numenera thus far is some rather hazy examples of dialogue trees. The Numenera system is a rules light system meant to make table top play fluid. That is not necessarily the best fit for a computer game whose only DM is the computer. These two things make me skeptical. I backed it but I have little faith it wont be a wonky text adventure to be honest.

I'd be surprised if it was a text adventure -- combat was not the high point of PS:T, but it was still a part of it. We'll see. 

Frankly, I hope Obsidian does a TB game. Its obvious they want to do it since at their last PAX appearance each one of them stated they want to do a TB game.

I'd be fine with a TB Obsidian game as long as it is not related to PoE. The system they've developed for PoE needs more work, but I'd rather they work on improving it rather than start again with something new.

And, the absolute best fantasy tb combat I have experienced is Tim Cain's own ToEE.

Really? It's been at least a decade since I played this, but I'm pretty sure it was quite buggy and generally mediocre. My best memory of combat in ToEE is of an amusing bug which made a Moondog summoned by one of my characters into a Moongod: the critter was completely impossible to kill and the spell duration never expired. I think the game also had some weird ideas like charging money for each casting of some spells (including, IIRC, Identify, which made the latter worthless since it cost more or less the same as going to a shop). If ToEE is the best TB game you've played, then I'm a bit puzzled about why you are so strongly in favor of TB games -- it's not terrible, but it's significantly worse than, say, PoE and it's not even in the same league as Baldur's Gate 2.

[Would PioE have been better with turn-based combat?]

I agree with Tigranes in that it is not at all obvious how turn based would help either the pathfinding or the AI. As to whether PoE would have been better... it's kind of a moot point given that the entire premise of their proposal was a return to the Infinity Engine games. They would need to drastically redesign the encounter structure -- at the very least, the frequency of encounters would need to be significantly reduced.

 

In principle, I'm fine with both turn based and real time with pause games, but in practice, I find that TB games which I want to replay are rarer than their RTwP counterparts despite outnumbering the latter simply because TB games have a built-in latency to combat which remains regardless of character power or player skill. I haven't played D:OS yet, but, for example, Wasteland 2 is a game that invites multiple playthroughs which I just can't get into simply because I dread plowing through all of the combat again. I think I've managed to replay Shadowrun: Dragonfall, but that's basically it in the past few years.

 

If you are interested in a turn based successor to the Infinity Engine games, there is Torment: Tides of Numenera which is supposed to come out later this year (assuming they don't delay it further). When they announced that it will be turn based, they also said that they will try to keep the number of encounters down so it might be good. We'll see.

[New Real Time With Pause Dungeons & Dragons RPG - SWORD COAST LEGENDS]

 

Not really seeing a familial resemblance (if that's intended by common last name).

 

Maybe that's her husband?

No, they are brother and sister. It looks like this game is going for the Baldur's Gate mechanic of paired companions. In addition to the two halflings, the elven cleric travels with a dwarf rogue.

[Thoughts on Knights of the Old Republic]

I bought Kotor 1 on steam, but of all the old games that I've managed to run on Win 7, this one simply doesn't want to work. It keeps crashing, the videos don't work and I've went through a great deal of trouble to patch this game to no avail. I would love to play it because of all the good things I've heard about it so far. I would also like to play Kotor 2 because, well, it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment. 

Have you tried these tricks from my first post in this thread:

 

 

First, some technical details in case anyone wants to play the Steam version; the game is from 2003 and it did not work well on my Windows 7, Radeon 6770M laptop out-of-the-box. The main problem is with the pre-rendered movies; whenever any of these would end (including the ones during startup), there was about a 50% chance that the game would either minimize itself or disable the mouse or both. The hack I found online was to add AllowWindowedMode=1 to swkotor.ini and then switch to windowed mode whenever a movie came up -- for some reason, they look better in windowed mode anyway -- and then back to full screen once the game returned to standard gameplay. Also, I had to disable the Grass setting since the grass wasn't showing, but some very strange graphical artifacts were.

 

Regarding the game being turn-based: it's not. It has exactly the same real-time-with-pause structure as the Infinity Engine game (i.e. Baldur's Gate et al). There are 6 second rounds, but all of them happen at the same time.

 

And yeah, the combat and interface are both pretty lousy. The saving grace of the first one is that there is not very much of it and because it is so easy, battles end relatively quickly so most of your game time is spend on other activities.

[Are souls atomic?]

There's a book in the game that answers this question; I think it's something about Rymgard. In general, souls stay more or less intact, but not completely -- there is some entropy in the system so they tend to lose (and sometimes gain, but losing is more common) small pieces along the way until there is no longer enough of it at which point it goes to wherever the Pale Elves in the temple were trying to get to. However, there are some souls which stay completely intact, at least for a time. It is implied that the Watcher's soul is one of these.

[PoE - Sales figures STEAM]

It's difficult to estimate the fraction of sales on Steam. It's true that for most games it tends to be quite large, but the audience for PoE is somewhat different from most games. If you look at this poll (which isn't particularly scientific, but does have a fairly large sample), Steam wins, but not by very much at all. It would be an interesting study to see if this is merely due to the bias in this forum or true for the PoE audience in general. Also, keep in mind that for international sales, Steam is almost always more expensive.

[How do you petrify enemies?]

Gaze of the Adragan is a level 6 spell so you can't cast it until character level 11. There's no need to cheat; just select it upon level-up if you really want it. And yes, it can be found in some grimoires too. If you really want to petrify at level 10, use the 5th level Druid spell Embrace of the Earth Talon.

[Does anyone else find exploration tedious in ALL the IE games?]

It is slightly unrealistic, but if everybody had the type of sight radius that we have in the real world, then on open maps, you would be attacked by all enemies at once (including those which are way off screen). This is basically the price you pay for not seeing your characters as tiny dots the entire game.

[PoE - Sales figures STEAM]

Unfortunately, the only retailer not selling Steam copies is GOG, and a disproportionate number of that community probably got their copies during the KickStarter.

I believe EA's Origin is independent of Steam and they're also selling PoE. Not sure how many people use that thing though.

[More nonlethal options]

I agree. There's a confrontation with a bunch of drunks near the very beginning and it was kind of surprising that if you fail to calm them down, the only option is to kill them.